Authors: Matthew Condon
Fresh we come from the academy,
Filled to the brim with alcohol free,
Four little rats from school.
Everything is a source of fun,
Nobody’s safe for we care for none,
Life is a rort that’s just begun,
Four little rats from school.
It ended with the entire cast on stage, singing ‘We all live in Courtroom 29’, to the tune of the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’.
Homilies
The General Instruction of the Roman Missal – the document that guides the celebration of the Catholic Mass – gives several definitions of the ‘homily’ and how it applies to the priest and the congregation. It states: ‘The Homily is part of the liturgy and is strongly recommended, for it is necessary for the nurturing of the Christian life. It should be an exposition of some aspect of the readings from Sacred Scripture or another text … and should take into account both the mystery being celebrated and the particular needs of the listeners.’
During the inquiry hearings, chairman Tony Fitzgerald occasionally opened proceedings with comments or statements of explanation in relation to the hearings. They were dubbed ‘the homilies’ by the media. They appeared in the first few months of the inquiry and popped up throughout the extent of public hearings.
The Fitzgerald homilies were wide-ranging, sometimes clarifying the commission’s stance on various points of law, through to chastising the media for inaccurate reporting. Others were warnings against attempts to derail the inquiry through gossip and criticism aimed at deliberately publicly devaluing the work and importance of the commission. In September 1987, chairman Fitzgerald had some words of observation about the culture of the police ‘brotherhood’.
‘It is impossible to concede how an honest policeman could rationally believe the acceptance of a situation that involves corruption by any of his colleagues benefits either himself or his force or is justified by his shared interest and burdens with any who are corrupt merely because like him they are policemen,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘If honest police officers believe these fictions it is because they are the victims of the propaganda and deceptions of those who benefit by them.’
He corrected the record when it came to public rumours that the inquiry was being deliberately strung out to line the pockets of the lawyers involved. ‘It is necessary to try and understand the enormous amount of work involved, the volume of papers to be assembled and sifted, the investigations to be pursued, the checks to be made, and the physical effort needed in converting information into proofs of evidence, all of which are being attempted at the same time as the public sittings are continuing virtually non-stop,’ proclaimed Fitzgerald.
‘The gossip columnists have already started, and no doubt if there is insufficient scandal otherwise, others will join in, with the innuendo that the inquiry is being prolonged for the benefit of the lawyers, including perhaps especially myself.’
In June 1988, when the inquiry received further media criticism, Fitzgerald cut loose. ‘This inquiry is not a competition between a bunch of lovable rogues and a group of narrow-minded prudes intent on imposing puritanical moral strictures upon a reluctant public,’ he thundered. ‘The commission personnel, including the decent police officers who have risked their careers and the scorn of colleagues, are just ordinary, somewhat tired Queenslanders who temporarily represent the society of which they form a part.
‘The demi-monde with which the inquiry is concerned is not a jolly place peopled by happy-go-lucky fun lovers sampling the pleasures provided for them by generous benefactors. It is a world of greed, violence, corruption and exploitation, where the weak and immature are preyed upon even to the extent of the indescribable evil of the peddling of addictive drugs by which youthful lives are destroyed.
‘The connection between so-called victimless offences and organised crime is well recognised …’
The homilies were feared by some and relished by others. In the end, they provided a unique insight into the thinking of the commission of inquiry as it marched towards Tony Fitzgerald’s final report.
The Hitman
In January 1989, Fitzgerald Inquiry investigators brought in a no-nonsense fraud specialist to probe the finances of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen following the evidence the former premier had given the year before. John Huey had had a problematic relationship with the Lewis administration. Considered a straight-shooter and a superlative investigator, Huey had been an acolyte of former commissioner Ray Whitrod. Through the late 1970s, with Whitrod gone, Lewis grew increasingly suspicious of Huey. He suspected Huey was one of the famous Committee of Eight – honest officers who were trying to remove Lewis and his team.
In 1984 Huey further earned the ire of his boss when he investigated claims that police were involved in cattle duffing around Charters Towers in North Queensland. The inquiry was triggered by a complaint from then Detective Constable Gordon Hurrell, who believed a senior sergeant and a retired superintendent had repeatedly breached the Stock Act. Hurrell was subsequently ordered to transfer to Brisbane.
Huey, then based in Townsville, went about his investigation and believed he had enough evidence to lay 20 charges against the two men allegedly involved in the cattle duffing. Opposition Police Spokesman Wayne Goss tabled Huey’s report in state parliament. When the matter was referred to the Police Complaints Tribunal, presided over by Justice Eric Pratt, the Opposition questioned why Commissioner Lewis had stopped the investigation and ordered that no charges be proffered. Instead, the tribunal investigation had come down against Huey. It recommended that disciplinary charges be laid against him for supposedly failing to adequately supervise Hurrell’s role in the investigation, and for perpetrating ‘fallacious rumours’. He was demoted from Inspector Grade 2 to Inspector Grade 3.
‘He’s the only officer I ever demoted,’ recalls Lewis. ‘I should have sacked the bastard … I was too kind. He went up north and caused a lot of chaos. He refused to do this and do that. But I should have sacked him because naturally he hated me intensely from there on.’
When the Fitzgerald Inquiry started, Huey was serving in Rockhampton while his wife Hilary, also an outstanding detective, remained at their home in Brisbane and worked out of the Fraud Squad. Huey remembered getting a call from Deputy Commissioner Ron Redmond when Terry Lewis was stood down as commissioner. ‘He said he would bring me straight back to Brisbane as he didn’t agree that Hilary and I had been split up,’ Huey later recalled. ‘He said he wanted me back in charge of the Fraud Squad.’
Huey made headway in cleaning up the ‘mess’ the squad had become, then out of the blue got a curious phone call. ‘Suddenly one Friday afternoon I got a message to report to Mr Robert Needham, QC at the Fitzgerald Inquiry straightaway,’ said Huey. ‘I walked down North Quay in the rain to the Fitzgerald Inquiry office and met Mr Needham. He told me the inquiry was concerned about corrupt involvement of police in stolen car rackets and that I was to form and head a task force of initially six detectives to investigate it.’
Huey got to work, and ultimately uncovered a multi-million-dollar operation. His task force recovered more than 250 vehicles, including government and council cars. More than 81 people, 14 of them police officers, were charged for their corrupt involvement.
It was a major success for Huey, and it clearly impressed the Fitzgerald Inquiry staff. He was again called in to meet with Needham and Bob Mulholland, QC, and was asked to look into the former premier’s finances. Huey and his partner, Brian Hay, first jetted to Sydney to interview a business partner of Sir Joh’s – they had been involved in mining kaolin clay near Kingaroy – and to view the company books.
‘Later the books were produced and as far as I knew there was nothing of interest in them,’ said Huey. ‘But it was obvious that Sir Joh knew we were investigating him. Soon after I became aware that a former police prosecutor named Bob Butler had been employed by Sir Joh at a reported $1000 per week to dig up everything they could find on me – obviously to use against the investigation and me.’
Nevertheless, Huey continued with his investigation. He was soon on his way to Singapore. This time, he needed to interview businessman Robert Sng, managing director of the company Historic Holdings, who had controversially been awarded the tender to construct a hotel precinct in the Brisbane CBD after handing over $100,000 during the period when the development decision was being considered by the government. Indeed, Sng had been developing properties in Queensland for a number of years, having also constructed a canal estate at Raby Bay in Cleveland.
A week before Sir Joh’s historic resignation the Premier had phoned Sng seeking future employment. Shortly after being dismissed from the Party, it was Sng who accompanied the former premier on a week’s rest and recreation in Hong Kong.
In Singapore, Sng agreed to talk to Huey. ‘He was quite open in his admissions,’ Huey later recalled. ‘After submitting his tender [for the hotel precinct] he had been approached by a woman named Ann Garms who conducted a theatre restaurant in Brisbane. She told him that if he wanted to win the tender, he would have to give Sir Joh $200,000 cash. Sng didn’t have this amount of ready cash, so he contacted another Singapore Chinese … this chap flew to Brisbane with the cash.
‘They booked a room in the tower block of the Sheraton Hotel where they counted out … $100,000 on the bed.’
Huey said they then wrapped the cash in brown paper and proceeded to the Executive Building on George Street. It was 17 September 1986. It was later reported that Garms was interested in promoting education within the hospitality industry. There had been ovations that Sng might have been able to assist in conjunction with a TAFE college.
‘Ann Garms joined them and they were ushered into Sir Joh’s office,’ Huey continued. ‘They handed the parcel to Sir Joh. I asked Mr Sng what Sir Joh said when he received the brown paper parcel and Sng said, “All he said was, thank you, thank you, thank you.” They left.’
According to Huey, Bjelke-Petersen gave an oral submission in parliament about the building tender the next day and the contract was granted to Sng’s company.
‘Back in Brisbane we interviewed Mrs Ann Garms in the presence of her barrister … [and she] from memory admitted what had happened,’ said Huey. ‘All that remained was to prepare the brief of evidence to charge Sir Joh with perjury and official corruption.’
Bjelke-Petersen had in fact told the Fitzgerald Inquiry earlier that he had never received the cash in person, but that it was handed to a secretary. Both his private secretaries denied they were present.
Huey, the Hitman, had done his job and returned to normal duties, but his role in trying to bring down the National Party’s spiritual father would not be so readily forgotten. A massive anti-Huey media campaign haunted him, playing out in the press and on television news. Sir Joh labelled Huey a ‘Labor hitman’ out to get him. The pressure of this intense media exposure took its toll on the honest Huey, and in the end he resigned from the force. The Joh job was his last as a police officer.
Scoop
For decades the members of the so-called Rat Pack – Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan – had their contacts within the Fourth Estate. Brisbane in the 1950s and 60s was a small town for newspaper reporters, particularly police roundsmen. You either got on with the police and they fed you stories, or you challenged the status quo and were shut out.
Murphy and Hallahan were particularly good at calling in favours with reporters they knew and planting stories that either patted the Queensland Police Force on the back, distorted the truth, or provided a timely, diversionary smoke-screen when the heat was on.
In February 1989, the
Courier-Mail
began publishing an extended exclusive interview with suspended police commissioner Sir Terence Lewis.
It was curious timing.
Firstly, the government was still in limbo about what to do with Lewis. Should he be sacked and his superannuation of about $1 million be denied him? Or should he be allowed to resign and take the money? Fitzgerald’s hearings had ended, and some of the inquiry’s legal eagles were engaged in looking at what charges would be laid against whom. Doug Drummond was looking carefully and closely at what charges could be laid at Lewis’s feet. And it was still five months until the release of Fitzgerald’s final report.
Might a big, sympathetic read on Lewis, away from the drama and turmoil of the Fitzgerald Inquiry’s daily revelations of crime and corruption, cast the Commissioner in a more favourable light?
The deal with Lewis and Queensland Newspapers was brokered by University of Queensland historian and Fitzgerald Inquiry media analyst, Dr Joseph Siracusa. Siracusa had been researching a book called
Queensland on Trial
, and had interviewed many of the major players in the Fitzgerald drama, including Geraldo Bellino and Russell Hinze. And he had become, in some strange way, a literary agent for Lewis.
Siracusa arranged a lunch with Lewis and Ron Richards, the editorial manager of Queensland Newspapers and one of Lewis’s old friends, at a pub in Ferny Grove, north-west of the city. Another Lewis confidant, Barry Maxwell, formerly of the Belfast Hotel in Queen Street, the city, was licensee of the pub.