Authors: Matthew Condon
Lewis says he probably telephoned his wife Hazel with the dramatic news. ‘And then I got Gordon to drive me home that evening and of course the media were outside my place as you can imagine,’ Lewis says. ‘To wake up in the morning and not to have to go to work and the media sat outside the place for days and days and days … and even my family coming to visit, they’d want to try and interview them and we got phone calls from Sydney you know they [the journalists] were bloody drunk …’
Lewis says he was in a state of shock. ‘And it was later, much later that Joh … gave me that statement saying that Gunn had come to him and obviously told him an untruth because Parker hadn’t given them any indisputable evidence that I was corrupt,’ Lewis says.
‘Well, Gunn bluffed the Premier. He did bluff him that’s for sure, Gunn did. I mean, Gunn was doing anything and everything prior to that to become the Premier.’
Lewis claims Gunn was trying to get rid of him. He believed that in his role as Police Commissioner he was seen as protecting the Premier, ‘… in the sense that if the Premier wanted anything from our files, or if the Minister did, they got them. But if Lewis wasn’t there well the Premier wouldn’t be getting them, only Gunn would be getting them.’
That night, Lewis spoke to the media outside his home on Garfield Drive. He said he had no comment to make, then added: ‘It’s a decision that’s been made, my friends. Naturally we will abide by that decision.’
The
Courier-Mail
reported that Lewis was accompanied by several men, and that police media advisor Ian Hatcher had ‘arrived with a blue overnight bag … minutes before the Commissioner and entered the house with him’.
The next day, Tuesday 22 September, Early commenced duty at 7.25 a.m.: ‘Seen by Act Com Redmond. Told we must run things as previously and that he would like my complete loyalty in exchange for his. I assured him of this and also from my staff. When all staff came in … he repeated most of his prev. remarks to us all …’
It was reported that Lewis would have to be replaced as current chairman of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence in Canberra – a position rotated annually among the nation’s police commissioners. This had become a national story, given that Graeme Parker had been Queensland’s liaison officer with the National Crime Authority. What data had Parker had access to?
The crucial issue of the day, however, would be the contents of Sir Terence’s files, and in particular those in his office safe. Early says he was called into Redmond’s office at around 12.15 p.m. and asked by Detective Inspector Jim O’Sullivan of the Commission of Inquiry staff, ‘What was in the Commr’s safe?’
Early replied the safe contained ‘some folders and confidential papers’.
O’Sullivan then asked to see the files, and directed Early to make an inventory before transferring the contents into Redmond’s safe.
‘He asked specifically for a report on what was there yesterday, what was taken yesterday and what is left. I went with Act Com and O’Sullivan to the safe in my office, got the GM key and went into COP’s room; put on the lights and opened the COP’s safe with the combination kept in my identification card wallet.
‘I took out the contents and placed them on the table … I showed Dep Com Redmond that the safe and box at the bottom were empty and left the door open.’ The inventory was completed and Lewis’s papers bundled and tied with a white ribbon.
Early had an afternoon appointment at the Police College. ‘Before leaving the Det Insp asked me re a private filing system the COP had in his office,’ Early writes. ‘I assured him I had no knowledge of this system nor of any inventory to the contents of the Com’s safe. I said I felt he had no files whatsoever apart from the papers he had taken.’
O’Sullivan asked Early to report on the question: ‘Does the Commr have a private filing system – files of correspondence – where is it and what does it contain?’
It was obviously a major blow for Lewis. In less than two months since the start of the inquiry’s substantive hearings, the force had lost an assistant commissioner, dozens of other officers had resigned, and now Lewis had been temporarily locked out of the game, courtesy of this ‘special leave’.
Just as his friend, former detective Tony Murphy, found life outside of the rigid strictures of the force difficult on his retirement in late 1982, so too would Lewis resent the abrupt change. He could still maintain his almost monastic dedication to his diary, and mount detailed arguments against his being stood aside, in his office in Garfield Drive, but gone was the ambassadorial side of the job, the meeting and greeting of officials, the endless lazy Susan of lunches and dinners, theatre and community events.
While he was still on full pay, he remained, by the nature of suspension itself, implicated in wrongdoing. And he was there in full view in his large, white, three-storey house on the hill, in the shadow of the old Paddington water tower.
Protecting Garfield Drive
The day after Lewis was suspended he reportedly moved to transfer the joint ownership of 12 Garfield Drive solely into the name of Lady Hazel Lewis.
The
Courier-Mail
reported that the application to release his name from the mortgage was received at the Queensland Titles Office at 11.39 a.m. on Tuesday 22 September. ‘News of the move was leaked from the office an hour later,’ the report stated. The documents were shown on the ABC’s
7.30 Report
that night.
The report added: ‘Sir Terence was not available for comment later. But his wife, Hazel, said the public display of the documents was an infringement on her family’s private life.’
‘That’s private family business they’re delving into,’ she reportedly said. ‘It isn’t right.’
Lady Lewis said her husband had had a quiet first day of his special leave, and that he ‘hosed the garden and played with our grand-daughter’. She quipped: ‘Goodness gracious. I wonder what they’ll want to know about us next.’
Lewis says the idea for transferring full ownership of the house to his wife had been suggested by his son, Tony. ‘I don’t know what I was feeling really,’ he says. ‘We’d worked all our bloody life for the house, all of our life, it was in both names and I think … [I] went out with one of our sons … Tony said, “Oh, why not just put it in Mum’s name?”
‘And I thought … it’s alright to say you knew the criminal law, I mean, but civil law is another story. And I thought with this inquiry the way it started to go, I’d be better off putting the house in Hazel’s name and the legal people can’t get it. But that was a … silly move really.’
He says he believed at the time that it was a way of protecting the home for his wife and children. ‘It gave an impression that – “What’s Lewis worried about?”’ he says. ‘And I hadn’t been, you know … I wasn’t, I suppose, seriously ill, but I did have a problem with this bloody thing that I ended up getting operated on. It had annoyed me for twenty [years], and it was a worrying thing because you go in and you lose your breath. And I thought, oh yeah, I might have a heart attack or something and the pressure of this inquiry might bring it on.’
As the media continued to keep their vigil outside Garfield Drive, down in Courtroom 29, Tony Fitzgerald issued a firm statement about the suspended commissioner. He neither confirmed nor denied that inquiry staff had searched Lewis’s office at police headquarters. ‘However, you may take it that I propose to perform the task for which I have been appointed and for that purpose to exercise as necessary the powers invested in me, irrespective of who is involved,’ Fitzgerald declared.
He added that as long as he was inquiry chairman Lewis would not be prejudged or unfairly treated by the inquiry. ‘However, I doubt whether he would expect favoured treatment and he will not receive it,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘He certainly will not be exempted from investigation in the course of the inquiry to whatever extent is appropriate.’
Lewis says the whole situation was tough on his family, especially Lady Lewis.
‘Oh … she went from being somebody, if you like … Hazel was just fantastic,’ Lewis says. ‘Like she’d, when she was able to do so she used to come around the state with me and every function she’d go to relating to police. And [she] would go and talk to all the groups at the Academy all for free. They never got, none of them got paid for it, they did it off their own bat.
‘And to go from that and us having a car and a driver, working really hard but enjoying doing that, she became … it’s hard to comprehend or understand how heartbreaking it was … what happened to our family.’
The Shark
Noel Francis Dwyer, former head of the Licensing Branch and named by Harry Burgess as corrupt, appeared as an indemnified witness before the inquiry in early November. He had initially expressed shock and dismay when named at the inquiry by Burgess, and denied the allegations. Like Graeme Parker, however, he had a dramatic change of heart. His evidence was wholly damning to Commissioner Lewis.
He told the inquiry he had received up to $30,000 in bribes during his time in the Licensing Branch between January 1980 and September 1982. He hid the cash in the wall of his garage at home, and used some of the money to build a wooden boat.
Dwyer alleged that in late 1979 Lewis had personally told him that he was to be promoted to inspector and that the commissioner had ‘a place in mind for me’. Two days later, Dwyer was visited by Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert who said he had heard about the promotion. ‘Herbert said he and the Commissioner were “great mates”,’ Dwyer said in evidence. ‘The Commissioner wanted to know if I’d take on the Licensing Branch. I said to him [Herbert] – why didn’t the Commissioner tell me?
‘Herbert said, “I’m supposed to see you first.”
‘I asked him why and he said, “There’s a couple of Jokes going on in the Valley”.’
Dwyer began accepting cash bribes from Herbert as soon as he took on the Licensing Branch job. Dwyer in turn paid sums to Burgess and Parker. On one occasion, according to Dwyer, Herbert slipped him $800 and said: ‘Sorry it’s not more. The Commissioner is like a shark, he takes the big bite.’ (Herbert would later deny he ever said this.) Dwyer said Herbert often referred to Lewis as ‘the shark’.
‘Herbert was more or less his [Lewis’s] emissary,’ Dwyer told the commission. ‘He [Herbert] did say on one occasion he’d “fix the Commissioner up” – or pay him – and they’d meet later at a function and greet each other as though they hadn’t met for a long time. I was confident, sure in my own mind that the Commissioner was being paid by Herbert. I believed Herbert fully.’
In a record of interview with his biographer Tom Gilling, Herbert would later say: ‘Noel Dwyer, he was a fellow we got appointed. So I used to see the Commissioner and say we need so and so in this section, we need so and so in that section. So he used to just put them in where I wanted him to. He’d do anything because I was giving him ten grand a month. Anything at all …’
Herbert alleged that Lewis regularly dropped around to his various homes to pick up the money. ‘He used to come round home every month and sat at the bar,’ said Herbert. ‘I used to say to Peggy – take Hazel into the kitchen – and I’d go to the bar and give it [the money] to him and he’d put it away … and you know, have a drink.’
Dwyer’s unwritten instruction was to protect certain SP bookmakers and ‘not to go heavy’ on massage parlours and escort agencies run by Hector Hapeta and Vic Conte. They met often at Herbert’s home and in car parks. Dwyer said Peggy Herbert would telephone him at the office using the code ‘Mrs Eaton’.
‘I succumbed to the temptation because I was weak and greedy,’ Dwyer admitted. He said he had served in the force for 30 years before he took his first bribe. Back in the 1960s when he was serving in Mackay, he said he had heard the term ‘Rat Pack’, and that its alleged members were believed to be Lewis, Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan. ‘It was a derogatory term,’ Dwyer told the inquiry, ‘I didn’t think much of it at the time at all.’
Parker Gives Evidence
The ailing Graeme Parker, 54, immediately followed Noel Dwyer in the witness box.
Lewis recalls: ‘They brought him over in an ambulance, on a stretcher … in the court he was terrible, I mean he’d go for a short time and was gasping for breath …’
As the
Courier-Mail
reported: ‘He left his sickbed to appear at the inquiry and looked pale and drawn. He fondled a small silver crucifix and at first mumbled his replies. His voice grew stronger as he progressed.’
Dwyer admitted he’d taken more than $100,000 in bribes when he took over as inspector in charge of Licensing in September 1982, and the payments continued from there. Prior to his appointment as head of Licensing, Parker said he had had a conversation with then detective sergeant Harry Burgess. ‘He [Burgess] said that “shortly you’ll get a call from a friend of yours you haven’t seen for a long time.”
‘I get a phone call from Jack Herbert. I hadn’t seen him for many years. He introduced himself. He said he wanted to see me. He told me where he lived and I went and saw him. He went on to tell me that a system had been in place for quite a long time and that there was some pocket money in it for me.
‘He gave me $2000. He told me that it related to areas of not over-policing gambling and prostitution and that there were six big SP bookies wanting protection.’