Authors: Matthew Condon
Lewis: Obviously I’ve left a little bit out there.
Fitzgerald: Herbert’s association with you is of the most vital and utmost importance to this inquiry.
Lewis: He’s not the top of the list of the names given to me by Mr Crooke.
Two of Lewis’s little pocketbooks, for 1980 and 1981, were tendered to the inquiry. In those pocketbooks were code systems using numbers to identify people and places. Lewis said as an informant, Herbert gave him information which he then passed on to ‘whoever [police officers] was working in that area’. He said the information covered SP bookmaking and illegal gaming.
‘Why did you need a code?’ Fitzgerald asked.
‘It seemed the way to go,’ Lewis replied.
The first three codes in the lists were locations: A and E for the corner of Albert and Elizabeth streets in the city; P.R. for Park Royal Hotel; and C for the Crest Hotel. Lewis agreed with Fitzgerald that ‘Your H.’ And ‘My H.’ referred to his home at Garfield Drive and the other participant in the code. Other entries in the code included ‘Toowoomba’, ‘Kingaroy’, ‘Jack R.’, ‘Tony R.’ and ‘Syd’.
Doug Drummond, QC, put it to Lewis that his explanation for the codes was ‘simply untrue’ and that he was clutching at straws.
Lewis denied the assertion.
Drummond: The first ever suggestion that Herbert has this new role of informant to you comes this afternoon after you had had that list that you wrote out in your own hand in 1980 and again in 1981 put before you for some hours.
Lewis: Yes.
Drummond: And you have been trying to think of some possible innocent explanation for why you would have a code like that for communicating about the matters listed on it with Herbert. Is that right?
Lewis: I looked for the explanation. I never – I had forgotten all about this matter and to try and bring it back to mind was not particularly easy.
Drummond: You had forgotten Herbert was your informant?
Lewis: No, no. I had forgotten about this code.
Lewis was later quizzed about the urgent transfer of half his ownership of the house up on Garfield Drive to his wife Hazel. It was put to him that he made the move with the knowledge that Graeme Parker had rolled over and he might lose the house if, in the end, he was declared bankrupt.
No. Lewis feared he might die. He said he had a sore neck. He felt it best to have the house just in the name of his wife, Lady Lewis.
‘Oh, come on, Sir Terence,’ said an exasperated Drummond. ‘Are you really suggesting that a neck problem necessitated all that urgency?’
Lewis added that he had a sore shoulder and chest, too.
Journalist Don Petersen assessed Lewis’s performance in the witness stand. The story was headlined: A FORGETTABLE DAY. ‘Never has an Australian police chief been subjected to such a well-documented examination of his affairs,’ Petersen wrote. ‘And it is doubtful if one ever existed who could remember so little about those affairs.’
As Lewis continued to be dissected before the Fitzgerald Inquiry, the former Queensland policeman and children’s television star, Dave Moore, was serving time at Numinbah prison farm at the back of the Gold Coast. Moore, 33, was serving two and a half years in gaol following his re-trial in June 1987 over sex offences against a boy.
In late 1984, Moore had been the trigger for one of the biggest scandals in Lewis’s commissionership. Inquiry investigators had already been out to Numinbah Correctional Centre and questioned him. Lewis was once again asked why he had done nothing about Moore, who senior police had known was engaging in questionable behaviour as early as 1982. Lewis was accused of attempting to ‘cover up’ the scandal.
Former police minister Bill Glasson said in a statutory declaration to the commission that he grew to mistrust Lewis and his staff after being fed information on Moore at the time that was ‘untrue’. ‘I recall the commissioner scoffed at the idea that senior constable Moore was involved with [ABC radio announcer Bill] Hurrey,’ said Glasson. (On 5 July 1986 Hurrey was found guilty of numerous charges, including permitting sodomy on himself and of indecent dealing with boys under 17 years of age, and sentenced to five years in prison. He was released having served less than half of his sentence.)
Doug ‘Bulldog’ Drummond had another go at Lewis at the inquiry. Drummond said Glasson had written to Lewis in November 1984 asking him why Moore had not been transferred after revelations about his sex life had emerged.
Lewis blamed Opposition Police Spokesman Wayne Goss for peddling misinformation. Lewis said there was no truth to the allegations against Moore.
Drummond: I would suggest your answers are quite untrue.
Lewis: They would not have been as far as I was aware at the time. There is no way in the world I would go and try and tell Mr Glasson a heap of rubbish about a thing like this.
Drummond: Isn’t that just what you were doing?
Lewis: No, it is not.
Drummond: Weren’t you trying to cover up the whole matter as best you could?
Lewis: Absolutely not. Why would I bother covering up for a senior constable?
Drummond: Because there had been complaints afoot about this man who you kept in a high-profile position for many years.
Drummond suggested that Moore meant a whole lot more to Lewis than ‘just an anonymous face in the 5000 in the police force’.
Lewis said Moore did have more access to him as Commissioner than many other young police officers. He said he had visited the Channel Seven television station on Mount Coot-tha to watch Moore at work. How could Lewis not recall complaints about Moore?
‘I certainly would not have allowed him to roam around free if there was any possibility that he got involved with offences with children,’ Lewis said.
As a witness before the inquiry, Terry Lewis refused to crack. Despite some fierce cross-examination, the suspended commissioner didn’t give an inch, and it frustrated Tony Fitzgerald, the barristers and the public gallery. It also jabbed at journalists observing the inquiry.
It had seemed that the entire sordid tale of the Rat Pack and bagman Jack Herbert had been thrust, at last, into sunlight. And still Lewis kept his nerve and contributed little, if anything, to the grand narrative. They may have pursued Lewis and Herbert with vigour, but had they missed the man who cast the biggest shadow over three decades of police corruption – Tony Murphy?
Journalist Quentin Dempster reflected the mood of the public in an acerbic column after Lewis’s second stint as witness. For all the inquiry’s triumphs – and some would prove to be epochal – had the big fish got away?
‘Tony Murphy …’ Dempster wrote in early November, just a few weeks before Fitzgerald’s proposed deadline for official witnesses to appear before the inquiry. ‘His name appears like a drum beat through the thousands of pages of transcript of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. In almost every phase of Queensland police history over the past 35 years, the name of Anthony Murphy is there like a mysterious presence.
‘By all accounts Murphy was a police mastermind, who knew everything and everybody on his patch. The mention of his name seems to have struck fear into the hearts of petty and big time criminals. The word around the corridors of the Fitzgerald Inquiry is that although evidence adverse to Murphy has been given it remains doubtful that his role in events over the past 35 years will ever be fully known.’
The 30-Year Shot
In late October, a forgotten face in the great panorama of Queensland police history and corruption popped up in a story in the
Sunday Mail
.
It was Gunther Bahnemann, the one-time ‘crazed gunman’ who had wreaked havoc in the Brisbane bayside suburb of Lota in 1959 and attempted to kill Detective Glen Patrick Hallahan, before being subdued and handcuffed by Hallahan and his partner Terry Lewis. While both police officers would receive the force’s highest honour – the George Medal for bravery – Bahnemann had been charged with the attempted murder of Hallahan and imprisoned in Boggo Road Gaol.
For years, Bahnemann received a Christmas card from Lewis, even when he became Police Commissioner. And Bahnemann wasn’t averse to writing to Lewis from his home in Far North Queensland, seeking help and advice on his fluctuating financial fortunes through the 1970s and into the 1980s.
The
Sunday Mail
revealed that Bahnemann received his last Yuletide card from Lewis at the end of 1986.
It also portrayed a very angry Gunther Bahnemann who was determined to set the record straight. ‘I hope to see the day they strip him [Lewis] and Hallahan and the others of their medals,’ he said.
Bahnemann was adamant they did not deserve the honours. ‘I won my medals in the war,’ he said, referring to the Iron Cross First Class and Iron Cross Second Class he was awarded when he fought for the German army in World War II. ‘They gave Hallahan and Lewis civilian versions of the Victoria Cross – for what? What was I supposed to be – a bloody Tiger tank?’
Bahnemann stressed that ‘the police version of their heroics was false’, and that he had been verballed. He said in prison he learned that former police commissioner Frank Bischof had a stake in brothels.
Referring to the incident with Lewis and Hallahan that resulted in his arrest he said: ‘I was in Belgium and France, Poland, Norway, Holland and Luxembourg and when we cleaned up Europe we fought in Africa. If I wanted to kill anyone, in that small room, I couldn’t have missed,’ he said.
Bahnemann recalled that Lewis visited him in prison not long after he had published his first novel,
Hoodlum
– a story about bodgies running amok on the streets of Brisbane. ‘One day in gaol, Terry Lewis came to visit me,’ he said. ‘I asked him why, and he said it was a social visit. I found that astonishing. This was after my book was such a success. I think even then he was worried about the pen being sharper than the sword.’
Bahnemann said, in light of the Fitzgerald Inquiry revelations, he was seeking ways to have his conviction quashed.
It never happened.
The Joh Show
With Expo 88 having left town, and with many Queenslanders actually suffering from depression since the world exposition evaporated, the appearance of former premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen as a witness before the Fitzgerald Inquiry would perhaps provide the perfect salve.
It was, in the end, more a curious cameo appearance, but it did come with its fair share of interesting statistics. Joh entered the witness box on 1 December, precisely one year since he’d been dumped as premier by his beloved National Party. The day had also been deemed by Fitzgerald as the last for witness evidence, though it was clear ‘The Citizen Joh Show’, as the
Courier-Mail
dubbed it, would blow out that deadline.
Just as Terry Lewis was the first witness, Sir Joh would be one of the very last. It was fascinating how the fates of these two men were so entwined over decades. Lewis, for example, was in training as a police cadet up in the old red-brick police depot on Petrie Terrace in late 1948 when a young peanut farmer called Johannes Bjelke-Petersen from Kingaroy was first elected to the Queensland parliament. Both men had married within weeks of each other in the early 1950s. Both had risen to the top of their professions, and indeed Lewis had indicated to Bjelke-Petersen over the years that he would serve as Commissioner of Police until the Premier retired, when he too would leave the force and enjoy the spoils of a long and successful career. And, as it turned out, Lewis was stood aside as commissioner during the early months of the inquiry, while Bjelke-Petersen was ousted just months later. Their lives had been tethered to each other for almost 40 years.
As for Joh, he arrived in Courtroom 29 looking fit and tanned, and was flanked by a large group of bodyguards, possibly more than those who watched the back of supergrass Jack Herbert. Straight off the bat, Bjelke-Petersen said he had had suspicions there was corruption in the police force, but he never had any actual evidence.
Allegations of corruption, he told the inquiry, were the responsibility of his police ministers. They then relied on the police commissioner. For 11 years, that commissioner was Sir Terence Lewis. The former premier said he always believed Lewis and thought the police chief wouldn’t dare lie to his ministers. ‘If you’re not prepared to take the word of your top officials, who do you go to?’
Doug Drummond, QC, asked Bjelke-Petersen about the notorious
Nationwide
television program in March 1982, when whistleblowers and former police officers Kingsley Fancourt and Bob Campbell risked their lives and alleged corruption at the highest levels of the Queensland Police Force. He reminded Joh of then Police Minister Russ Hinze’s attack on Fancourt and Campbell, and his rejection of their allegations. Drummond said in view of history, the allegations now appeared ‘not too far astray’.
Bjelke-Petersen politely replied: ‘You place your faith and confidence in your top men [Lewis] and that is why [Hinze] came out strongly against the two men.