Authors: Matthew Condon
In hindsight, Lewis says the gesture of offering his diaries to the commission was regrettable. ‘I’ve made a number of mistakes … and one of them was giving them my diaries … I never thought they would … I had a considerable respect for the legal profession … never ever thinking the rotten bastards would … never return them to me, but more importantly would release them publicly.’
Lewis says as Commissioner he was not legislatively required to keep official diaries, but following the habit of a lifetime he continued diarising his life anyway. ‘So I got these old ones and used them, but they weren’t just an official diary about my work, I put my family things in it,’ Lewis reflects. ‘I wasn’t going to keep two lots of diaries and if Hazel was sick or something that was in, all that stuff was in my diaries.
‘Of course, what did Fitzgerald do? Release my diaries, told me the day before he was going to release my diaries to the media and the public the next day. And I objected, of course, and said they were diaries that had my own, a lot of my personal … oh, he said, if overnight you want to go through them all and … it was impossible. Absolutely physically and mentally impossible. And point out to them you know what it was that was so sensitive that they couldn’t release it.’
Lewis believes the content of the diaries, too, was used in part to ‘build up a story’ for Jack Herbert. ‘See, I used to put in the diaries that, you know, I saw Herbert and had a drink with him,’ says Lewis. ‘He used to ring up quite often and say … he only lived over at those big units … so it was only a stone’s throw away and I couldn’t go over all the … but I’d go over about every three months or four months or six months and have a drink with him. And … I’m sure he invited us to his place for dinner once and we invited him over to our place once. And they would be in my diary.
‘They really, really, really you know it’s … it’s annoyed me greatly the way that I was railroaded by Fitzgerald.’
Lewis says he also gave the commission the ‘little notebooks’ he kept at his bedside at 12 Garfield Drive, and numerous appointment books. He says his assistant Greg Early’s shorthand notebooks were also turned over to be transcribed.
‘That’s hurt me ever since that one, still does, still does,’ says Lewis. ‘I don’t know how many, there could have been a number of people putting them [the diaries] on computers, everything in the computer, so they could backtrack and check everything. And it helped them a little bit, well, a lot, for them to be able to say, oh, Lewis saw Herbert on so and so.
‘I mean, if I was getting a quid, well, I wouldn’t be here, I would have been … [if] trouble had raised its head, I knew all the countries that didn’t have extradition … [I] would have got the family and pissed off with my millions of dollars and lived happily ever after.’
Lewis’s former loyal assistant, Greg Early, says: ‘He wrote his private life into his diaries. He should have thrown them in the river.’
If the exclusive interview with the
Sunday Mail
was to elicit sympathy, or sway the Ahern government on the matter of Lewis’s superannuation, it didn’t work. A week earlier, on 29 February – the occasion of Lewis’s sixtieth birthday – he had lodged his resignation as Police Commissioner.
On Monday 7 March Cabinet rejected it, refusing Lewis access to his monster super payout. The government said it wanted to hold the money until the conclusion of the inquiry. If Lewis attempted legal action to recover it, Premier Ahern made it clear that it would pass special legislation to freeze the funds.
Lewis refused to comment on the decision.
The Watcher
One of the commission of inquiry’s permanent fixtures was former Licensing Branch officer Nigel Powell. He sat daily during the hearings in Courtroom 29 of the District Court and watched and listened attentively, gauging the mood of the room, assessing witnesses and lawyers. ‘Initially the atmosphere was like a disturbed sea,’ Powell recalls. ‘You couldn’t work out what was going to happen. Some lawyers avoided other lawyers. In the early days I bumped into [corrupt Licensing Branch head] Noel Dwyer. He just sidled up to me in his fatherly way and said, “What’s all this about, Nigel? I don’t understand this.”
‘Everything changed when news came through that Harry Burgess had rolled over.’ Powell, who had appeared on ‘The Moonlight State’, says that until then he constantly asked himself – what if I got this all wrong? Other corrupt police followed, leading up to the appearance of Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert. ‘At that stage, it was a case of – how far can this go?’ says Powell. ‘Was Lewis a total incompetent or was he in on it?’
Powell says he was astonished at Fitzgerald’s stewardship of the inquiry. ‘I watched him one day; he had two separate files in front of him, both about a foot and a half tall,’ he says. ‘At the same time there was some cross-examination going on. He was listening to what was going on and going through the first lot of files. He would then pop in with a question. He finished the first file, still asking incisive questions, and finished the second file as well. This was the level of his intellect.’
Powell says he was also astonished at the length and breadth of the corruption. ‘I had no idea how big it was, no idea,’ he reflects. ‘When I was a police officer I was working with facts. You don’t get the relationships if you don’t have that background of the humanity of the situation. You don’t understand.’
As the inquiry progressed, Powell suffered some health problems including several bouts of pneumonia. His blood pressure was high. He was stressed. A former fanatical runner, Powell, who had moved into a flat in Dunmore Terrace, Auchenflower, had taken up cycling after suffering an ankle injury during a run in the Gold Coast hinterland. He often pedalled along Coronation Drive and out to the University of Queensland campus where he was studying.
He felt compelled, however, to embed himself at the inquiry for as long as it took. His study took a backseat. ‘I took the view through the inquiry that if I could be of some use, I couldn’t later turn around, if the whole thing went pear-shaped, and say I didn’t do my best,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself.’
Out of the Cold, Into the Fire
In the bitter London winter, cooped up in his single-bedroom flat south-west of the capital, Jack Herbert feared that he had missed the Fitzgerald commission of inquiry’s deadline for indemnity from prosecution. He made a phone call to his lawyer in Brisbane, Tony Bailey, who promised to check. Several days later, Bailey called and asked if Herbert was prepared to meet with barrister Bob Needham, who was assisting the inquiry. Within days, he was in discussion with Needham in person at the Kingston police station. Needham had brought with him an application for immunity for both Jack and Peggy. They signed the document.
As preparations were made to return the Herberts to Australia, Jack claimed he got a phone call from Geraldo Bellino. Bellino allegedly told Herbert he was mounting a ‘big propaganda campaign’ to discredit the evidence of Harry Burgess and others, and asked if he would talk to a University of Queensland academic called Joseph Siracusa.
Siracusa had been attached to some of Brisbane’s commercial television stations to provide nightly analysis for revelations that were coming out of Courtroom 29. The American had also conducted several interviews with the main players in the drama, including the Bellinos, for a book he was writing called
Queensland on Trial
. Bellino allegedly told Herbert that Siracusa would pay him $30,000 for an interview. Herbert took careful notes of the telephone conversation.
Within days, the Herberts were taken in separate chauffeur-driven vehicles by Australian Federal Police to Oxford, 90 kilometres west of London. Initially Herbert couldn’t understand why they weren’t heading for Heathrow, but preparing to leave from RAF Abingdon, an airfield initially used as a training station for RAF Bomber Command, and later a major training hub during World War II. Herbert claimed he had been stationed there briefly during the war.
As it transpired, the problem of how to get the Herberts back to Brisbane had vexed Premier Mike Ahern. There were rumours that Jack Herbert might be a prime target for a hitman, either in Europe or on his return to Australia, so a commercial flight would have been potentially dangerous to the public. Ahern had a meeting with Prime Minister Bob Hawke in the lead-up to World Expo 88 in Brisbane, which was set to open its doors on 30 April. ‘You know … the community had I think come to accept that … there’s always a bit of police corruption around, what can you do?’ Ahern reflects. ‘But when this thing got more audacious and drugs became involved, there’d be no doubt that that fellow Herbert knew that. Because the stakes were getting higher and higher …
‘Hawke said, “Well I’ve heard all about it,” and he said, “Let’s say we’ll do it [fly him home in a Federal Government aircraft]. We can’t put people on board a Qantas aircraft at risk in case there’s a contract out on his life.”’
Hawke told the Premier that there was an RAAF aircraft that did the rounds visiting Australian troops abroard and delivering supplies. Hawke suggested – let’s put him on that. ‘He said, “I’ll send you a bill for $140,000”,’ remembers Ahern. ‘He didn’t.’
The Herberts landed at Amberley Air Force Base near Ipswich and police whisked him away to a safe house. A source says they were way down the back of the short-range jet airliner, a BAC 1-11, ‘in the cheap seats’.
Herbert recorded that they arrived in Queensland around 7.30 a.m. on Thursday 17 March 1988. It was St Patrick’s Day. For some reason he assumed he and his wife could return to their luxury unit in New Farm, not far from the Sydney Street Wharf. Instead, they were rushed to a safe house in a high-rise unit building on Lower River Terrace, South Brisbane.
It was soon leaked to the local press that Herbert was set to give evidence at the inquiry and turn Crown witness on the condition his wife Peggy be granted immunity from prosecution. ‘Herbert has knowledge that could reveal the full picture of corruption in Queensland, going back to his first days in the Licensing Branch in 1959,’
Courier-Mail
commentator Nick Maher wrote. ‘It is also understood that Herbert has handed over important documents to the inquiry which contain the names of several well-known Queenslanders.’
Suspended commissioner Terry Lewis didn’t seem fazed, arguing in a television interview that he would fight to be reinstated given he had been stood down on ‘flimsy’ grounds.
With Herbert back in town, though, the level of intrigue surrounding the Fitzgerald Inquiry ramped up even further, if that was possible. The day after the Herberts landed on home soil, police raided the private homes of Geraldo Bellino and Vic Conte. While both men had admitted to running illegal casinos, they had denied any involvement in prostitution or paying off police for protection.
Bellino was disgusted at the police swoop on his home in St Lucia. ‘I have tried to co-operate,’ Bellino told the press. ‘Then they come on this standover business like you wouldn’t believe. They left without giving any receipts. I spoke to Vic Conte and the same thing happened to him.’
Rumours about what Herbert ‘knew’ reached fever pitch. The
Courier-Mail
speculated that The Bagman had already offered a 100-page statement, and that he had gifted the police thousands of sensitive documents from his personal files.
The frenzy continued. Deputy Opposition Leader Tom Burns demanded that the Suncorp insurance company’s chief investigator, Glen Hallahan – he of the so-called Rat Pack – be stood down. He said Hallahan should be suspended until the conclusion of the inquiry.
Then came the numerous ‘sightings’ of the notorious Jack Herbert. One minute he was in Brisbane. The next, he popped up on the Sunshine Coast. A close friend of the Herberts says of that period: ‘The witness protection stories would rock you to your foundations. We used to have to accidentally bump into each other to see each other, you know. He’d ring me up and say, “We’ll be at the Balmoral Pub tomorrow night at 6 o’clock, can you run into us?”
‘They had him out on a farm in Thornlands one night and the house belonged to one of the senior coppers. And the farmer started up his tractor at four o’clock in morning, and they all hit the floor.’
He said he once met the Herberts at a clandestine picnic ‘and the guys guarding him left their guns behind so we had to go back and get their guns … on a picnic table. Oh look, honestly, it was hysterical.’
The big question was: When was Herbert going to appear as a witness at the inquiry?
Everyone, it seemed, was waiting for Jack.
A Boat Called Corruption
Premier Mike Ahern was on a steep learning curve, deposing Bjelke-Petersen and becoming Premier of Queensland in the midst of the state’s most far-reaching Royal Commission into corrupt police and the past actions of government. He stood tall and fully supported the inquiry, and worked with its commissioner Tony Fitzgerald to ensure the inquiry juggernaut stayed on track.
As the evidence poured forth, Fitzgerald expressed his discomfort about the role of drugs in the saga. He told Ahern that prostitution and illegal gambling was just the shopfront for the bigger drug operations happening behind the scenes. Subsequently, the chairman of the National Crime Authority, Justice Stewart, requested a meeting with Ahern.
‘Justice Stewart seemed to be a very, very outstanding individual to me,’ says Ahern. ‘And of course, if the chairman of the National Crime Authority wants to see the Premier of Queensland, that’s what you do.’