All Fall Down (65 page)

‘Now I challenge other states and the Federal Government to bite the bullet on corruption as we have done.’

Ahern says, however, there was much jostling behind closed doors within the National Party at the time of the report’s release. ‘[Party president Bob] Sparkes had said to me, “Don’t give an undertaking to implement any of this because we’ll have to have a good look at it”,’ says Ahern. ‘So they were rounding up the numbers [against me], they were making no secret of it, I knew it was all happening.

‘And so I went out and said “lock, stock and barrel” and that sort of locked everyone in. You know in life I think you get … things to do. I think you’re born with things to do. You may not like them and you have other plans but … at the end of the day, summarily, you look back and say “Well, maybe that was what I was born to do. To do that.”’

He quotes the seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick: ‘Thus times do shift, each thing his turn does hold; New things succeed, as former things grow old.’

Deputy Premier Bill Gunn said on the day of the report’s release that it had been ‘full of praise for the National Party’.

‘Certainly, I did well out of it,’ Gunn said. ‘It has well and truly acknowledged right through that we did what we said we would do.’

After journalists had laboured through the freshly printed report, queues gathered outside the state government printer’s office before the public release that afternoon. The report had a first print run of 2000 copies. It sold for $20.

That evening out at the University of Queensland campus in St Lucia in the city’s inner south-west, the former police commissioner, Sir Terence Lewis, sat in the office of historian and academic Dr Joseph Siracusa. Siracusa had acted as a media analyst during the inquiry and earlier arranged a series of interviews for Lewis with the
Courier-Mail
. He sat with Lewis reviewing several sections of the Fitzgerald Report and labelling them with post-it notes.

Lewis was in a gruff and dismissive mood when interviewed by journalists Phil Dickie and Peter Charlton that day. He declared once more that he was not corrupt and that his relationship with former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen had never been ‘improper’. Lewis reiterated he had not been an incompetent commissioner despite Fitzgerald’s assessment. ‘I can’t go into this chapter and verse,’ he told the journalists. ‘I’ve had no time to read it.’

Lewis also disagreed with Fitzgerald’s conclusions about police culture. ‘What is police culture?’ he asked. ‘Tell me one profession that does not have an interest in itself.’ Lewis said he should not be charged with anything, and said that if he were, he could not get a fair trial.

‘Each question we put to Sir Terence was greeted with either anger, a blunt no or a rejection of an argument advanced by Fitzgerald,’ Dickie and Charlton wrote.

Twelve days after the Fitzgerald Report hit the streets, so too did thousands of Queenslanders. Between 5000 and 12,000 citizens marched in a ‘democracy rally’ up George Street and into the Roma Street forum. They carried banners that read: THE FITZ REPORT IS DEMOCRACY; PEOPLE FIRST; RELEASE DOCUMENTS; and WAYNE GOSS & LABOR WILL ABOLISH ELECTORAL CORRUPTION.

The marchers were reportedly given a police escort. At the forum, Goss led a chant of ‘Change, change, change …’

There were no arrests.

Dear Sir Terence

Just eighteen days after the release of Fitzgerald’s much-anticipated report, another letter was hand-delivered to 12 Garfield Drive, this time from the office of the Special Prosecutor, Doug Drummond, QC.

‘Dear Sir Terence,’ the letter opened, ‘I anticipate I will take out two summonses in the near future, one charging you with 16 offences of official corruption and another charging you with two offences of perjury. Copies of the draft summonses which I expect to issue are enclosed.’

The perjury offences related to evidence Lewis gave before Fitzgerald, and alleged that Lewis falsely swore he had no idea what certain items in two small pocketbooks for 1980 and 1981 related to and what he had in mind when he wrote the items, and that he swore that he had never met Sydney businessman Jack Rooklyn in a private room at the Crest Hotel in Brisbane.

The corruption charges alleged that Lewis had corruptly agreed to receive monthly payments from Herbert for the protection of various people and their associates in relation to racing, gaming and prostitution between 1978 and 1987.

Drummond wrote: ‘Should I receive no response to this correspondence by the time indicated, I will proceed on the basis that you decline the opportunity to be interviewed. Having regard to the material available to me, I have come to the view that there is a clear case for you to answer on these charges.’

Lewis returned fire with a letter from his solicitor Quentin George, declining the interview. George said the charges appeared to be based entirely on the evidence of Jack Herbert.

‘Mr Herbert is under an indemnity from the Crown and it is widely reported that to guarantee his continued cooperation, an indemnity has not been offered to his wife, who was a party to his nefarious activities,’ George wrote. ‘Mr Herbert has a certain notoriety as a witness and has admitted under oath the commission of serious criminal offences, particularly fabricating evidence and perjury, which would be material to his veracity as a witness.’ George said Herbert’s evidence and that of his wife had to be ‘fatally tarnished’. He said the perjury summonses against Lewis amounted to charges of having a defective memory.

Lewis said there was nothing more he could reveal and did not fear any ‘new’ evidence against him that hadn’t come out in the Fitzgerald Inquiry. ‘Unless they have found another liar as good as him [Herbert] I cannot imagine there being reason to fear,’ he said. ‘I have done everything that I can and I feel that it should be over.’ Lewis offered that the commission was looking for ‘someone or something’ to justify the $26 million inquiry. ‘I don’t see how you could find me guilty of anything,’ he added.

Just over a week later, Drummond unloaded a post-Fitzgerald fusillade. He issued summonses on 20 people who were either mentioned or gave evidence at the inquiry, including Lewis, Sydney identity Jack Rooklyn, Hector Hapeta, Anne Marie Tilley, Geraldo Bellino, Vittorio Conte, several police including Allen Bulger, and bookmakers Bruce Bowd, Paddy McIntyre, Stan Saunders and others. They collectively faced 92 charges and were expected to appear before Magistrate Brian Connors at the Brisbane Magistrates Court on 10 August. All of them appeared that morning in court except for McIntyre (a warrant was immediately issued for his arrest), and the gathering resembled a sort of abridged Fitzgerald Inquiry moment.

Journalist Joe Budd for the
Courier-Mail
witnessed the event. ‘There were a few eligible faces missing from this reunion, none more so than Jack Herbert, the alleged common link between this most diverse of groups.’

The Special Prosecutor, Doug Drummond, QC, told the court that he expected the combined committal hearings to take three months. Lewis expressed visible frustration at hearing this news. He had spent the best part of two years sitting in courts and no doubt he might have wondered if the nightmare would ever end.

The defence lawyers didn’t believe such a massive task would take just three months. Lewis’s lawyer, Quentin George, remarked: ‘We now look like we’re facing a cost that would exceed the national debt and a time frame that could be two years.’ He would prove to be remarkably prescient.

As for Lewis, he had few options but to bide his time and build a case for his defence.

Meanwhile, as the months ticked by, the state again faced an election. It would be a moment that drew a line in history and marked the end of the excessive 1980s. Having dumped Mike Ahern, the Nationals went into the campaign headed by Russell Cooper, the cattle-breeding member for Roma, and Premier of Queensland since late September. He faced off with Angus Innes, leader of the Liberals, and the ALP’s formidable Wayne Goss, a thorn in the side of the government for years, especially when it came to matters of policing and corruption.

The Nationals, not heeding mistrals of change in Queensland, sailed their familiar course and campaigned on law and order and the sort of social conservatism that had served Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen so well. On the back of a combination of Bjelke-Petersen’s misguided bid to become Australian Prime Minister through 1987, the Fitzgerald Inquiry hearings and Fitzgerald’s devastating report in mid-1989, nothing could save the government.

The election, held on 2 December 1989, was a landslide win for the Australian Labor Party, and it was Premier Wayne Goss who carried the torch for a fairer, more modern Queensland into the 1990s.

Silent No More

As the washout from the Fitzgerald Inquiry and its official report continued to ebb and flow into the New Year, one man kept shouting for justice. It was a voice that carried to the present from the 1950s. Glen Patrick Hallahan, member of the so-called Rat Pack, had been embroiled in allegations of police corruption since the last days of the 1950s, when he briefly partnered a young Terry Lewis, bringing law and order to the streets of Brisbane.

It was Hallahan, known to his peers as ‘Silent’ for his habit of speaking softly, who had been briefly stood down for allegedly demanding a kickback pay rise from a prostitute in 1959, an incident that led to then commissioner Frank ‘Big Fella’ Bischof padlocking the city’s brothels.

Again, Hallahan was named extensively by whistleblowing prostitute Shirley Brifman as not only one of her lovers and the recipient of her financial largesse, but as being involved in all sorts of illegal schemes, from counterfeit money to taking a cut in the proceeds from bank robberies sanctioned by Hallahan himself. And it was Hallahan who left the force after he was caught taking money from a prostitute.

Later, he would feature in police interviews with drug dealer John Edward Milligan, who alleged that Hallahan was a silent partner in major heroin importation in the 1970s. Now, as a chief fraud investigator for the Suncorp insurance company, the physically ailing Hallahan was aggrieved enough to take his anger to the press.

In February 1990, he told the
Sunday Mail
’s police reporter Peter Hansen that he wanted to fight to clear the ‘smears’ from his name. He said his reputation had been crucified by lies and rumours that emanated out of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. ‘Initially, all the suspicion against me was predicated by a provable false story that I was a member of the so-called Rat Pack,’ Hallahan said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, 1989 was the Year of the Smear. Two months ago I received a letter from [Special Prosecutor] Mr [Doug] Drummond clearing me.

‘It is now my intention to take action against certain people for the way they have wronged me. They will have to substantiate their smears in a proper court of law.

‘I will get to have my say.’

Hallahan was terminally ill, and his attempt to cleanse his reputation may have been related to some form of ‘legacy’ he might leave behind. Although he left the force under a cloud in the early 1970s, his legend had lived on, his name popping up in various Royal Commissions in connection to drugs, especially in relation to his former associate John Edward Milligan. As Hallahan slipped towards death, he must have felt it was worth one last shot to remind the Queensland public of his stellar record as a detective, and his passion for locking up bad guys.

But those days were long gone. Before his resignation from the force, Hallahan had, according to Brifman, ‘hit the pot’, namely marihuana. Another witness often saw Hallahan smoking joints with his criminal informant Billy Phillips. After the incident which prompted Hallahan’s resignation – taking graft from a prostitute in Brisbane’s New Farm Park – his taste for drugs appeared to increase.

Jack Herbert told biographer Tom Gilling: ‘[Hallahan] wanted something to knock him out because he was in a bad state, you know. It was when he got pinched [in the park] and he was really upset about it. I went down and saw him with Tony Murphy, to his little flat at Kangaroo Point. [I] Tried to calm him down. I was amazed because I thought he’d be a stronger character … I really did.

‘I felt sorry for the poor bastard, you know? Because he was a good style of fellow … it’s a bloody shame … he was an utter vegetable when we went there to see him, truly.’

Hallahan’s attempt to correct history was never going to make it into a courtroom. As for Herbert, following the Fitzgerald Inquiry, virtually all of his friendships with police ended. He later told his biographer that he was aggrieved that he no longer saw or spoke with Tony Murphy and Alan Barnes. He missed the comaraderie. He missed the company of men and the five o’clock beers. ‘I wouldn’t mind if they came round, some of them,’ Herbert reflected. ‘Burgess and those fellows … if they knocked on the door I’d say hello.’