Authors: Matthew Condon
On the morning of 9 February, the Herberts were up early. They intended to take a bus into Australia House in London to read the newspapers from back home. While Peggy cooked breakfast, Herbert was preparing a defence against the allegations of Graeme Parker and Harry Burgess. He was gazing out the kitchen window that overlooked Manor Gate Road when he noticed two men on the footpath. Suspicious, he hurried to the bedroom window that overlooked a rear courtyard. He observed two more men staring up at the Herberts’ flat.
‘They’re wallopers,’ he said to Peggy.
Herbert recalled in his memoir,
The Bagman
, that the next minute there was some heavy rapping on the flat door. ‘Open the door or we’ll break it down!’ a voice said. ‘At the same moment the only door to the flat burst open,’ Herbert wrote. ‘Four male detectives and a plain-clothes policewoman rushed up the narrow staircase.
‘One of the men was shouting at us not to move. They had brought several large plastic bags which they started filling with anything they could lay their hands on: books, slips of paper and numerous documents which had been sent over from Australia.’
Officer in charge, Detective Chief Inspector Philip Connolly, told the pair they were to be arrested. It didn’t occur to Herbert that they might also want to take Peggy into custody. Herbert alleged that Connolly said both would be released on bail, and he apologised for his actions ‘to a fellow policeman’.
The Herberts were driven in separate vehicles to Cannon Row police station in Whitehall. Four decades earlier, Herbert had worked out of that very same station. The couple were fingerprinted and photographed, then locked in facing cells. That night, Herbert jotted notes in preparation for their bail application. As for Peggy, she wrote a letter to their daughter Anne, admitting that they both felt like ‘stunned mullets’ but were ‘keeping their chins up’.
Early the next morning, the pair was taken to the Bow Street Magistrates Court. Herbert was introduced to his legal counsel, solicitor Michael Fisher, and gave him his notes from the night before. The notes explained that he was willing to return to Australia of his own free will and that court extradition proceedings were not necessary.
When they were taken to the court, police opposed bail. The Herberts were charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice and both entered no pleas.
One of the arresting police, Detective Chief Inspector Connolly, told the magistrate that the charges were serious and could attract severe gaol time, and that he understood that Herbert was wanted for questioning before the current Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in Brisbane, Queensland. ‘They travelled to this country and since arriving have lived under a false identity,’ Connolly stressed. ‘When arrested at their Kingston home they had on them 1000 pounds and American and Japanese currency.’ He urged their remand in custody given the possibility they might interfere with Fitzgerald Inquiry witnesses.
Defence solicitor Fisher told the court that upon arrest Jack Herbert had offered to go directly to the airport and return voluntarily to Australia. He said Jack and Peggy had ‘nothing to hide’. There was also a touching note to Fisher’s plea for bail. If the magistrate decided to remand them in custody, he hypothesised, the couple would be potentially separated for months. ‘They have been married for 38 years and they love each other dearly,’ Fisher noted.
To the incredulity of officials back in Australia, bail was granted at $150,000 with a $12,000 surety to be lodged with their solicitor. The surety was provided by Herbert’s brother Bill.
In the court, the Herberts, both 63, appeared delighted when bail was granted. Magistrate William Robins ruled that they could remain in their small flat in Kingston upon Thames on the condition that they report daily to the Kingston police station. They were also required to surrender their passports and travel documents.
Queensland Police Minister Bill Gunn was aghast, saying he could not dismiss the reality that the Herberts might skip bail. The Herberts were ordered to return to court on 23 March, to begin extradition proceedings. The extradition would then be in the hands of the Australian Federal Police. Soon after, a squad of senior Queensland police flew to London to expedite the extradition.
A close friend of Herbert’s was in London ‘when all hell broke loose’. ‘I saw him in London,’ he says. ‘I used to send him all the stuff here in the mail. I was over there when they were locked up. They could never force them to come back.
‘Jack was asking – what do I do? Live in exile or face the music and go back? They couldn’t get Peggy either, she was married to a British resident. [But they had] two boys and a girl and grandchildren here [in Australia] – he came back because of that.’
Herbert said after their release the couple returned to their flat ‘and spent a few miserable hours contemplating our predicament’.
The Past is Never Dead
For nine months Queenslanders had been both thrilled and horrified by the revelations coming out of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. It had it all – sex, drugs, a criminal underworld, late-night meetings in car parks, graft, murder, pay-offs, booze and gambling. Its cast of players included corrupt police, brothel owners, prostitutes, drug addicts and thugs.
In early March 1988, however, a whole new ensemble was about to enter the witness box – men who could potentially lay down a breadcrumb trail back to the 1950s and 60s to the source of Queensland’s generational police corruption.
The history lesson was opened by retired Scotland Yard commander Terence John O’Connell. He had been brought to Brisbane in 1975 with a fellow officer to conduct an independent investigation into police corruption. O’Connell had interviewed hundreds of police, prostitutes and members of the public ‘alleging corruption’, and collected an enormous amount of data, all carefully notated on index cards.
By the time Whitrod had been overthrown as commissioner in late 1976, O’Connell’s report had not been completed. He ultimately delivered it to Police Minister Tom Newbery in 1977, in the early weeks of Terry Lewis’s commissionership. O’Connell learned that ‘corruption and sectarianism’ was rife in the force, but omitted these findings from his report. At the inquiry, he was asked why he had failed to include those conclusions in his report.
‘I thought it incumbent on me to assist the new Queensland Police Commissioner, Terry Lewis, and the Queensland Government and not rock the boat,’ he told Fitzgerald. ‘If I mentioned corruption, it would have destroyed the new commissioner who was trying to put the police force back on its feet. I may have been wrong in hindsight. I could have put a lot of things in the report but I didn’t.’
O’Connell socialised with Lewis when he was in Brisbane handing over his report in 1977, and subsequently caught up with Commissioner Lewis when the latter travelled to the United Kingdom on business. On one visit they went to a show together in London’s West End.
During his 1975 sojourn in Brisbane, O’Connell said he was approached by detective Tony Murphy at a party, and that Murphy aggressively asked: ‘What’s all this razzamatazz? Why are you interviewing all these officers?’
O’Connell replied that he was ‘doing his job’.
Another former police officer took the stand and carried the court all the way back to the 1950s and his memories of the Rat Pack. Louis James (Jim) Voight, who had joined the force in 1943, said he always suspected that Frank Bischof [police commissioner from 1958 to 1969] was corrupt and that he got some of his young men to do his ‘legwork’.
Gary Crooke, QC, asked for the identity of the men. ‘A. Murphy, Lewis, Hallahan – people like that,’ Voight responded. He explained that before 1957 an inspector in charge of a district would collect corrupt payments in exchange for turning a blind eye to SP betting and illegal hotel trading. He said some of the money found its way into ‘the Premier’s fund’, or the serving Labor Party at the time. Voight said he believed there was little he could do about corruption, because there was nobody he could offer suspicions or even evidence to, without being ‘ridiculed’.
Former Police Union president and detective, Ron Edington, offered a contrary view. He said Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan were victims of ‘corridor assassins’ because of their commitment to excellence in police work. Others, he said, were simply jealous of the hard-working trio.
As observers had hoped, Ray Whitrod finally returned to Brisbane – the landscape of the worst years of his professional and personal life – to give evidence. Before making his appearance in Courtroom 29 Whitrod had spoken out, saying the inquiry terms of reference should go back further, beyond 1 January 1977, to retrieve in their net some crimes that still haunted Queensland and to beat a trail back to the source of the endemic corruption that was now being uncovered. He told the media the inquiry should at the very least take on the atrocious Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub fire at St Paul’s Terrace, Fortitude Valley, in early 1973, in which 15 people perished. It still stood as Australia’s worst mass murder.
Whitrod said that while he believed John Andrew Stuart and James Finch were not innocent of the crime, he believed there were unexplained stories surrounding the case that warranted investigation. ‘When they first set up the inquiry, they must have thought that 1977 was a clear point to start because that was when Terry Lewis became Commissioner,’ Whitrod had earlier told the
Courier-Mail
. ‘But things do not occur overnight in the Queensland justice system. There are historical roots to the problems being seen now. The seeds of some of the practices by police were already well in operation well before 1977. Some of them go back 30 years.’
Now Whitrod had returned to Brisbane to appear before the Fitzgerald Inquiry. The frail 72-year-old reiterated that Bjelke-Petersen’s Cabinet knew of allegations that Terry Lewis had been a ‘bagman’ for Frank Bischof when they promoted him in late 1976. Whitrod had famously resigned when Lewis was elevated to assistant commissioner. He recalled his clashes with Premier Bjelke-Petersen over inquiries into the bashing of a female street march protestor in Brisbane, and a raid on a commune of hippies in Cedar Bay, Far North Queensland, both during 1976.
‘I was ordered by the Premier not to make inquiries into police activities north of Cairns,’ he told Fitzgerald. ‘It seemed to strike directly at my authority to run the police force.’ Whitrod explained that his situation was untenable. ‘The Premier had effectively taken away control of the police force from me by that [Lewis’s] appointment,’ Whitrod continued. ‘He could communicate directly with assistant commissioner Lewis and countermand any instructions I might give. And so I could remain as a sort of “front man” for any sort of activities which might develop … my reputation could be a shield for whatever might develop and in fact did develop later on.’
Both Whitrod and Voight admitted in evidence that they had no proof that Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan were corrupt. Whitrod did recall, however, that in his almost seven years as Police Commissioner he dealt personally with Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen on just three occasions. By contrast, Lewis would have more than ten times that contact within his first year in the top job. When Whitrod left the witness box, he offered suspended commissioner Lewis a cheery wave, then walked out of the courtroom. Lewis himself smiled at the gesture.
In the same week that Whitrod and many figures from the past offered their recollections to the inquiry, Tony Fitzgerald made a gesture of openness and transparency that was, in its truest sense, Whitrodian – he began releasing extracts from the fastidious diaries of suspended commissioner Lewis.
Dear Diary
The previous October, having been suspended for less than a fortnight, Commissioner Lewis gave yet another exclusive story to
Sunday Mail
reporter Ric Allen. Sir Terence assured the people of Queensland that he had been fully cooperative with the Fitzgerald commission of inquiry and had nothing to hide. ‘I have given all of my official diaries as well as my personal diaries to Fitzgerald,’ he said.
Allen reported that government sources close to Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen were ‘furious’ that Lewis had allowed the diaries to be studied by the commission. He, and many hundreds of other people, may have shared the same reaction when the Fitzgerald Inquiry began making public Lewis’s handwritten diaries, noting his years as Commissioner and the innumerable meetings he had with ministers, businessmen and women, celebrities, friends, royalty, charities and family.
As the diaries became public property, and on the eve of the Ahern government deciding whether to allow Lewis to take his superannuation payout of more than $1 million, Lewis decided to give an ‘exclusive interview’, once again, to the Brisbane
Sunday Mail
.
The bold headline read: LEWIS TELLS: MY FAMILY ANGUISH. Lewis said the trauma of the inquiry ‘was taking its toll’. He said of the potential of Cabinet to block ‘the golden handshake’: ‘It’s in the hands of Cabinet but I must say that I’ve been suspended now for nearly six months and no one knows how long this inquiry will continue.
‘Let’s face facts: I could be dead before it finishes so I do have to think about Hazel and the family.’
Both Sir Terence and Lady Lewis said they were suffering deep depression. ‘Please tell of the long hours and hard work Terry has put in during his 39 years in the force,’ pleaded Lady Hazel. ‘He did so many good things during his service and many other people have collected their superannuation.’