Authors: Matthew Condon
He says Walter contacted him years later and wanted to retrieve the documents. ‘I said, “Oh Walter I’ve got something awful to tell you … they’ve been thrown out”,’ McLucas recalls. ‘And I think he had a sigh of relief over that.’
If the missing documents were as rumoured – evidence implicating a serving National Party MP in a male brothel scandal – then another crisis had been averted. But in a corrupt system as vast as The Joke, and one that had been running for decades, rumour and innuendo appeared and disappeared like phantoms. What was true? What was deliberate skulduggery? Corruption had so saturated the society in which it thrived, that everything was under suspicion.
Tilley Nabbed
Anne Marie Tilley, described as the Fitzgerald Inquiry’s ‘most wanted woman’, had been on the run since the commission had been formed a year earlier. She had once presided over – with de facto partner Hector Hapeta – an empire worth $15 million, their portfolio studded with dozens of properties.
While she was on the run she had given birth to her daughter Rachel. The pair had spent most of their time in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Then Tilley decided it was time to show Hector their little girl. The baby was six weeks old when Tilley risked sneaking back to Brisbane. ‘I went to see him, but then he had a mistress, and that got a bit … he had many, but that was okay too,’ recalls Tilley. ‘His missus got a bit dirty because I turned up on the doorstep. I went somewhere else to stay, then at another aunty’s place. I moved around bit by bit.
‘I used to ring Hec up from phone boxes. Everything was bugged – we found one bug in the baby monitor … I heard his other mistress out in one bedroom, and I’ve got the baby in another bedroom. We were in a little house in Holland Park. I’m sitting there and I hear her talking through the monitor. I asked, are you in the baby’s room? She said, no. We found the bugs underneath the house – the monitor picked it up.’
Tilley was finally caught at Indooroopilly Shoppingtown, a mall in Brisbane’s inner south-west. She says Hapeta’s health insurance, in Tilley’s name, had run out. So she went into the MBF office at Indooroopilly to rectify the problem. ‘My name came up on their computers. Keep her there and ring police,’ Tilley recalls. ‘These two young coppers walked in with their little walkie-talkies. My brother-in-law was with me and I said, “Run away, run away now.”
‘The coppers said, “You’ve got to stay here.”
‘I said, “I don’t think I have to. I don’t think you can hold me”.’
In the confusion, Tilley broke into a ‘fast trot’. She remembers: ‘Suddenly they were everywhere, headed by that little skinny fella, one of the guys in the inquiry. He was as happy as Larry. I was on the phone to my solicitor. I said, “Do I have to go with them?”
‘He said, “Yep, you’re fucked.”
‘“Tell us the story,” they said.
‘I thought, who else has given themselves up? They were after Lewis, I think. I said, “I can’t actually say anything about Lewis,” which I couldn’t. I thought, I’m stuffed here.’
Lock, Stock and Barrel
In early July, just weeks away from the inquiry’s first anniversary, Tony Fitzgerald announced that public sittings would officially end on 1 December, and that the Queensland government would receive his final report by 27 May 1989. He said the timing would enable the commission to report to the government within two years of its appointment.
The news was probably met with a measure of relief in some quarters. It had been an exhaustive, some might say almost interminable, year that had torn down the picture Queensland had of itself and rendered it in limbo. The inquiry’s revelations had been so damaging to certain individuals and institutions that there was no time or space during the process to consider the inevitable big-picture questions that would have to be addressed.
What should be done about a government that, over decades, failed to address the rampant police corruption occurring within its view, an act that over time became recognised by corrupt police as a virtual sanction of illegal activities?
How would the government and the community address a police culture of corruption that had flowed through to the 1980s but still carried all the tenets of a brutish and myopic cabal straight from the 1950s?
How much repair was needed to the infinite arms of government that this behaviour ultimately infected? And what safeguards needed to be enshrined in law to prevent this from happening in the future? Given the vastness of the corruption, was that even reasonably possible?
Fitzgerald said he accepted the commission may have tried to do too much. ‘The time has come to ignore much of the information which the commission has received and to draw just some of the threads together in a narrower pattern,’ he said. ‘The commission did not create the problems and given their nature and size and the aspects of public administration involved, it is scarcely surprising that they are difficult to resolve.’
On the same day that Fitzgerald pondered the future, Premier Mike Ahern boldly declared that the state government would implement the inquiry recommendations ‘lock, stock and barrel’.
Ahern says there was constant and vigorous debate within Cabinet about the inquiry and its future. He made a conscious decision to steer a straight course, come what may. ‘There was an overwhelming conviction, which I had talked [about] with my wife – I said to her, “I think if I get thrust into this I’ve just got to see it through. And I think we should [allow] the Commission … to do what [it] feels it should do and live with the consequences.”
‘I had discussions in Cabinet on that basis. I said if you do that I think the people will probably support you. But the issue then became fine-tuned when it looked as though ministers were going to go to gaol and even Bjelke[-Petersen] was under threat.’
As for Fitzgerald and his family, an officer assigned to guard them during that period says they ‘had a very tough time’. ‘You could tell he was exhausted … I think he saw the whole thing as his duty, and there were varying expectations of him, not just in Queensland but across Australia. It was all down to him.’
One of Fitzgerald’s only outlets for relaxation was playing tennis at home with close friends, journalists Adrian McGregor and Hugh Lunn. ‘He enjoyed that because he didn’t have any hearings on the Friday. But apart from that, the whole family just suffered.’
A virtual police station was set up in the garage of the Fitzgerald family home. They had to be driven in police vehicles to go shopping. The children were taken to school by police. There were repeated bomb scares where neighbours were ordered to gather out the back of their homes until the threat was cleared. On many occasions local residents had to get to their homes through police barricades.
In a tradition that went back to the 1950s, the Fitzgeralds received threatening midnight phone calls. In addition, Fitzgerald had up to 200 staff working under him. In his work, he enjoyed the thrill of discovery, the thrill of the hunt, but was constantly cognisant that what was being revealed was potentially damaging to other lives. Also, the technology of the day couldn’t keep up with the input of material. In the end, the commission staff relied on an old-fashioned, manually drawn ‘spaghetti’ A-to-B-to-C, diagram, a sort of join-the-dots representation of who knew whom.
There were also threats beyond the physical. Fitzgerald, as he progressed through the evidence, found subterranean forces constantly pushing and pulling at the inquiry. Politicians tried to shift the tide one way, civil libertarians the other – it was a maelstrom of competing forces – the press were in there, as was the Police Union.
Keeping this in mind, Fitzgerald also had to be aware that some evidence could put people’s lives and reputations at risk.
‘That was, in a sense, the most challenging part about it [the inquiry], that there was a constant awareness that at any given moment there were a number, nearly always more than one, trying to unsettle some part of what you were doing,’ a commission source says. ‘It was impossible to switch off, just literally impossible to switch off. And they’re very bad habits for your mind to get into of course. Because what you do … in that sort of role, what tends to happen is you tend to play the tape over and over to see if you can find the flaw this time that you missed last time. And that was challenging [for everyone within the commission].’
Herbert in Hiding, with a Beach View
Meanwhile, the inquiry’s yet to be sighted supergrass, Jack Herbert, was being moved around south-east Queensland and interviewed by commission staff in preparation for his star appearance. Officers tasked with protecting him were on a two weeks on, two weeks off roster. Herbert was kept mainly in units on the Gold Coast, between Burleigh Heads and Main Beach.
One officer charged with guarding Herbert during this time recalls: ‘We’d find something with only two units per floor so we could alarm the area. He only ever saw Peggy on Saturdays and Sundays. We’d pick her up and she’d spend the weekend with him. She was staying in New Farm.’
He says while Herbert was in hiding, lawyers for the inquiry gave police questions to ask the supergrass. The aim was to illicit information from Herbert, to build a narrative and get him to trust his security detail. They, however, didn’t see it as their job to interrogate Herbert – they were tasked with keeping him and his wife Peggy alive so they could make their appointment before the inquiry. ‘We had a list of questions,’ the source says. ‘We agreed we’d come back and say – we got nothing out of him, he wouldn’t say a thing.’
Herbert told biographer Tom Gilling about his time in witness protection. It had its comic moments. ‘I had four chaps used to go out with us all the time, two cars,’ he said. ‘And we’d park and the other car would sit behind so nobody could interfere with that car. And these fellows were gung-ho, they’d do the job. They’d go over little culverts and come to you and they’d get their guns and look underneath the boot … and they’d say to Peggy and me in the back [seat], “Get out, get down, that’s how people get murdered over in South America, a motor bike is coming by.’’’
As had been the case in his civilian life, Herbert loved his daily beer at precisely 5 p.m. ‘Clearly he was a manipulator,’ Herbert’s guarding officer says. ‘He was very proud. He used to visit a family over at Burbank. It was a friend, another Englishman. They’d beat their chests and say what self-made men they were. He had impeccable manners. He knew how to present. He said, “No matter how much I have to drink, when I get home I always hang up my pants and my jacket and line up my shoes”.’
Herbert fed his captors fantastic stories about his exotic past. ‘He reckons he was a quarter master in the RAF and that he stole parachutes to sell to the Italians during World War II,’ the officer recalls. ‘He told me there was nothing he could add to his evidence to the inquiry about Tony Murphy. He said he gave Murphy 20 pounds a month in the 1960s because he was a mate.’
The objective for the nearly six months he was in witness protection was to keep Herbert ‘happy’. While he waited to make his big appearance in front of Fitzgerald, Herbert took photos and developed them himself. ‘He also had a typewriter and did a bit of writing. We used to give him a fair bit of time to himself. But Jack would do what it took to look after Jack.
‘He used to get upset. He hated Catholics. One of our officers was taken off the job because of it. We were walking on the Southport Spit [on the Gold Coast] when Jack just sat down. He said, “I’m not going any further. I’m not getting into the car. I don’t want you near me.” This other officer was a Catholic. We told him he was old enough to grow up. [But] that was the officer’s last week on the job.’
He says everyone was a little frayed leading up to Herbert’s appearance in Courtroom 29, not the least Herbert himself. ‘Jack was a weak person, psychologically and physically,’ the officer adds. ‘I didn’t mind old Peg. She struck me as a harmless lady.
‘Jack often said to me, “If she wasn’t so nice I’d divorce the bitch.”’
The Vice Queen
For Anne Marie Tilley, the savvy girl from Sydney who had migrated north to Queensland seeking a life in the sun, and who’d struck gold with an empire of brothels, the dreary machinations of court proceedings were anathema to her.
Her stepfather had once been a driver for the legendary Sydney madam Tilly Devine, and filled her early childhood not with nursery rhymes, but tales of the mean streets of Sydney – the sly grog, the razor gangs, the murders. But court?
Her life, before the establishment of the inquiry and her flight south, had been a nocturnal miasma of booze and drugs and sex. Her day-to-day routine was more about paying off crooked coppers and sometimes playing cat and mouse with them, just for sport. Court bored Tilley witless.
She appeared in Courtroom 29 in late July. The hours in the witness box were, to her, relentless and dull. ‘While you’re sitting there in the inquiry, you say, “Yeah, alright”, to get it over and done with,’ she remembers. ‘Every frickin day you had to be there. I knew I was going to get prison, so I just agreed with everything.’
To the surprise of many in the court, Tilley said she had been told by a senior Queensland police officer not to worry about the Fitzgerald Inquiry because ‘Joh will stop it all’. Bjelke-Petersen repeatedly denied he had threatened to shut down Fitzgerald. Yet, despite her loathing for proceedings, Tilley revealed the dimensions of her and Hector’s empire, which began with the Top Hat brothel in Brunswick Street in 1978, and grew to four massage parlours, 14 escort agencies, four sex shops and a nightclub, all within nine years.