Authors: Matthew Condon
Stewart flew to Brisbane with some of his staff and met Ahern in his office in the Executive Building on George Street. They spoke in private; Stewart came armed with a large stack of files, bound in red legal ribbon. ‘In those days there was a requirement for NCA matters under investigation, specifically in the state where arrests and warrants were required, for the state to give approval and to share some of the costs,’ Ahern recalls.
‘He [Stewart] said he was aware of … a major drug and money laundering situation on the Gold Coast and he said, “All the information is in here [in the files] … I’m asking you officially, as Chairman of the National Crime Authority and you as Premier of Queensland, for you to give me authority to proceed.”’ The two men then discussed a ‘cost sharing agreement’ in relation to any potential future operations.
‘So he sat there and I picked up the file and I handed it back to him, unopened, and I said, “Well, I agree … You will have your authority and I will instruct my secretary what’s required to issue you with the necessary authorities, and as Premier of the state, to enable you to get on with the job which you think you should do. The National Crime Authority is a respected institution and if you say this needs to be done then you will see that due process is all carried through and people will be charged and they will have their day in court.”’
Ahern told Justice Stewart that he didn’t want to look at the files because he might recognise some names, and if there was any sort of ‘leak’ in the future, it could never be traced back to him or anyone else in the government.
‘He [Stewart] was gobsmacked, he was absolutely gobsmacked,’ says Ahern. ‘He said, “Well, the last time I came here for this project it was very different, your predecessor [Bjelke-Petersen] was sitting there and … I had to endure at least a half an hour of abuse as to why he would never, ever issue any powers to the Commonwealth to do anything in his state. I pleaded with him. I pointed out that this was a very serious criminal matter.”’
Stewart told Ahern on that occasion that Joh had rung Terry Lewis and organised for a senior police officer to accompany NCA officials on business in Queensland. In the end a sergeant was assigned to accompany the NCA operatives to the Gold Coast.
During the investigation, figures linked to illegal activities were either not home or had fled overseas. Persons of interest had disappeared. Someone had already leaked confidential data and thwarted the NCA investigation. ‘So the sergeant said [to the NCA agents], “Look I’m sorry about this, there appears to have been a leak”, says Ahern, “why don’t you come round to my place and I’ll have Mum make you a nice cup of tea?”
‘So, they went around onto the Isle of Capri and the sergeant introduced his wife in this beautiful home … the car in the yard was the biggest four-wheel-drive you’d ever thought to buy, and then there was this huge boat. And it wasn’t really the boat [that upset the visiting NCA agents], it was the name of the boat.
‘
Corruption
.’
Dogs
Police officer Greg Deveney, the ‘greenhorn’ who found himself on transfer to the Gold Coast in the early 1980s and was appalled at the corruption he witnessed, took the stand at the Fitzgerald Inquiry on 26 April.
At the time of the inquiry he was a Detective Sergeant Second Class attached to the Juvenile Aid Bureau’s Child Abuse Unit. He told the court how, when he reported the corrupt actions of various colleagues in Surfers Paradise, and refused to take or sanction graft, his fellow officers turned on him. They would bark when he walked through a room – ‘woof, woof’ – implying he was a dog, an officer who ‘ran to the bosses’. He arrived at work one day to find dog excrement on his desk.
Deveney told Fitzgerald that the stress contributed to him catching pneumonia, and that he feared for the safety of his family. Deveney broke down on the stand and wept. He said for several months he ‘camped’ on the front landing of his home with a loaded weapon. He was terrified his enemies would burn down his house.
Deveney was being persecuted even before he made the decision to give evidence before the commission of inquiry. ‘I’d been fighting these bastards my own way for ten years,’ he says. ‘I’d been vilified and attacked, pushed against the urinal, I couldn’t even go and use the urinals at CIB headquarters unless I got pushed or bloody pissed on. I used to go down to [the] City Hall [toilets], yeah.’
After giving evidence on that day, an emotional Deveney took the short walk from the Law Courts, west along George Street, to the offices of the Juvenile Aid Bureau in police headquarters. ‘You know, the day [I] gave evidence, now this is how quick it was. I walked out of the witness box, out of the courtroom, I walked straight back to the Juvenile Aid Bureau,’ recalls Deveney. ‘When I opened up the door of the CIB headquarters there was no one on the counter, it was like church. The next minute [an officer] was on the stairway. [He said,] “You fucking cunt!” and … gave me a spray.
‘I shouted back to him, “If you don’t think I told the truth, go down and give your version.” They said, “You’re like your old man [who was an honest cop] you fucking …”, and they gave me a big gob full.
‘I got up the lift and got out on the floor of the JAB and it was just quiet, you could hear a mouse. Anyway, I walked in, sat down at my desk and everybody … was pretending to be working. The next minute a sergeant came out and he gave me a mouthful and he told everybody who was in that bloody office – if bloody anybody was ever bloody friendly with me, that they’d be scabs and bloody everything else.
‘They’d be dogs.’
The Rattled Pack
On the same day that Greg Deveney gave his evidence in Courtroom 29, a curious alignment of the stars occurred.
With suspended commissioner Terry Lewis in the public gallery, two of his great old mates arrived to deny allegations of corruption levelled against them. They were former assistant commissioner Tony Murphy, and former deputy commissioner Syd ‘Sippy’ Atkinson. The day they chose to address the inquiry was also the first day of sittings before Deputy Commissioner Patsy Wolfe, whose appointment allowed Tony Fitzgerald time to work on his overall response to the inquiry’s findings. It was day number 96 of the corruption hearings.
Atkinson, 60, was up first. Bald, wearing glasses and dressed in a grey suit, he was reportedly nervous in the witness box. He sought leave to cross-examine witnesses. ‘I am guilty of no wrongdoing,’ he said, his voice trembling, ‘except for trusting those officers who entirely let me down, and I am astounded.’
Atkinson had joined the Queensland Police in 1945, and later as a senior detective was involved in cases like the Whiskey Au Go Go fire massacre and the infamous Cedar Bay raids in Far North Queensland in 1976, just prior to Ray Whitrod’s resignation. In the late 1970s he was superintendent on the Gold Coast before returning to Brisbane and rising to Deputy Commissioner. He was awarded an OBE, and retired from the force in 1985.
Murphy, 59, was Murphy. As the
Courier-Mail
reported: ‘A strongly-built man, with a shock of grey hair contrasting sharply with dark bushy eyebrows, he oozed confidence as he walked through the doors of the courtroom. There were no signs of nerves from Murphy, who strode to the front of the court and addressed Mrs Wolfe as “Madam Commissioner”.’
Murphy claimed he could not afford to be legally represented or personally appear again at the inquiry because his current financial situation dictated that he had to still earn a living. Using a somewhat arcane, yet technically precise language, he told the inquiry: ‘Certain evidence of a hearsay nature has already been given to this commission alleging or suggesting that I have in the past been involved in corruption and/or improper practices within the terms of reference of this inquiry. I wish to place on record that such allegations are not only untrue but can be demonstrably proved to be untrue.’
Murphy had weathered the National Hotel inquiry in 1963, the allegations of dead prostitute Shirley Brifman and perjury charges against him that stemmed from that in the early 1970s, and criticism of his work during the Costigan Royal Commission in the early 1980s prior to his retirement in late 1982. He wasn’t going to have his name trashed in the latest commission.
Two of the three members of the infamous Rat Pack were present in court that day. The only one missing was Glen Patrick Hallahan. Barrister and former director of prosecutions, Des Sturgess, who had on occasion represented Hallahan in court cases in the past, as he did Lewis and Murphy, said he ended up ‘feeling sympathy’ for the notorious Hallahan. ‘His name came up in the Fitzgerald Inquiry,’ recalls Sturgess. ‘One day he came to see me … he was very upset and he wasn’t well either, he’d contracted cancer. He wanted to ask me if I could use any influence to get him called as a witness at Fitzgerald, to respond to these allegations.
‘I said I’d speak to … I think Gary Crooke was still running the show then … I rang him up, whoever it was, and said Hallahan wants to give evidence. That’s all I did.
‘He [Hallahan] never gave evidence. He was never called.
‘I think he telephoned me once after that, to say nothing had happened. I do recall I received a telephone call from him at home one day … I recall him being upset and he did tell me his cancer was at a very advanced state. It was obvious he was dying. That was the last I heard from Glen Hallahan.
‘Fitzgerald never bothered to hear his side.’ (In fact, the inquiry tendered a written submission from Hallahan on 7 February 1989.)
Journalist Phil Dickie recalls loitering outside Courtroom 29 one sitting day and seeing Lewis and Murphy talking at the end of a corridor. ‘Murphy was poking his finger into Lewis’s chest,’ Dickie says. He had no idea what they might have been discussing.
Death Bed
In April, the former police chief of the Cairns region, Kevin Dorries, 56, was dying of cancer. The year before, Dorries had appeared before Fitzgerald and denied any involvement in corruption, although he was later named as having received corrupt payments. A decade earlier, Dorries had also appeared before the Williams’ Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs and been forced to deny then that he had accepted corrupt money from drug dealers.
Suffering increasingly poor health, Dorries tried to retire from the police force and take advantage of a $275,000 superannuation payout. State Cabinet blocked Dorries’ application. The government said it would decide on how to handle retirement applications from officers named in the inquiry. A short time before he died in late April, he supposedly had a meeting with Deputy Premier Bill Gunn, according to one of Gunn’s relatives.
Dorries, by way of confession, wanted to share some documents with the man who had called the historic inquiry in the first place. He possessed some information so powerful it could almost instantly bring down the government. ‘Bill went and spoke to Dorries in a motel room,’ the family member says. ‘He [Dorries] wanted to give up [intelligence he had] on a paedophile ring. Bill promised he would go after this. He was really keen on this. But Dorries died of cancer before Bill got around to it.’
There was a rumour, however, that former Anglican police chaplain Walter Ogle had been passed the documents on Dorries’ death bed. Ogle was a well-known and highly regarded chaplain who did not shrink from making his views public. If he felt impelled to criticise the government of the day on a particular topic, he’d go out with both guns blazing. As police chaplain, however, he became privy to a lot of confidential information, and in the course of his work befriended many officers in a variety of different departments.
One of those departments was the Paedophile Task Force, headed up by Kym Goldup and Garnett Dickson. In a later commission of inquiry, evidence was given that Ogle ‘was a frequent visitor to the small office occupied by the Paedophile Task Force and members of the task force shared confidences with him’.
As Dorries lay dying in hospital, it was appropriate that Ogle attend to his comfort. Prior to hearing Dorries’ confession, the chaplain would later say that he was handed a series of manila envelopes which were part of a larger bundle of documents.
The envelopes, it transpired, contained a series of credit card vouchers retrieved from the Brett’s Boys male brothel in Kelvin Grove, which was raided by police in late 1984 during the crisis over Constable Dave Moore. Some of the credit card vouchers were supposedly in the name of a serving National Party MP.
Later, claiming to have never opened the envelopes, Ogle entrusted the documents with friend and Brisbane gay identity and hotel proprietor, Neil McLucas. Ogle and McLucas were long-time friends.
‘The story behind it is … Walter had these documents and he was too afraid to leave them at home because he would have been raided,’ recalls McLucas. ‘I would have been a friend of Walter’s for quite a number of years, and he said would you like to take these documents; he said they’re rather important. He said if you keep them up at the hotel [The Sportsman Hotel, in Spring Hill] … one day I’ll pick them up from you, you know? And I said okay, fair enough.
‘All I was told was they [the documents] could bring down the government. Now I don’t know whether that was really true or not.’
McLucas did as requested, and stored the documents downstairs on a shelf. He says he never read them. They remained there for years. ‘Well I did look after them, and in the end they were inadvertently thrown away. We had some metal shelves downstairs and boxes … they were put in the boxes downstairs. And when it was cleaned out down there, because we wanted to do some renovations, the boxes were thrown out.’