Authors: Matthew Condon
He never got to find out how his close mates – Murphy, Lewis and others – felt about him ratting on them and airing dirty laundry that had accumulated for decades. He didn’t think about it. Herbert was a survivor.
Farewell to Garfield Drive
For a child who grew up in the Depression and had known austerity, it must have been a difficult decision for Lewis to sell the family home at 12 Garfield Drive. Lewis had been raised in humble houses in Ipswich and then Hawthorne just east of the Brisbane CBD. He and Hazel had lived in modest homes early in their marriage, and had finally built a place that was not only safe for their family, but was a reflection of their status in the community. The new home on Garfield Drive had been extremely important to Lewis. He had worked all his life towards it.
Now, just a few years years after moving into the Robin Gibson designed house, they were selling to meet Lewis’s hefty legal fees. In late April, the doors of their home were opened for public inspection. Despite Lewis’s hope that the sale might go off quietly, there was intense interest in the sacked police commissioner’s residence. Security was posted at the front door and interested buyers had to sign a register and record their personal details – all cameras were confiscated.
The
Courier-Mail
described the mansion: ‘[Lewis’s] … collection of police hats from around the world was proudly displayed in a glass cabinet in the lavish downstairs entertaining and bar area which opens onto a pool at the back of the house.’
The furniture was described as a mix of antique and modern, and the report claimed it was good quality but not extravagantly expensive. ‘A marble entry foyer leads to the dining and lounge areas on the middle level. The upper level has three bedrooms and Sir Terence’s study.’ The family’s personal effects were left in the home during the inspection, ‘and visitors were invited to look over the couple’s bedroom and ensuite’.
The house was expected to fetch $1.25 million. The auction itself was slated in for 19 May, six days after the beginning of Lewis’s trial on corruption charges. The house would, ultimately, be passed in at $500,000.
The Misgivings of Jim Slade
In the years after police officer Jim Slade was offered a bribe, when he went on to assist journalist Chris Masters in putting together the extraordinary
Four Corners
investigation, ‘The Moonlight State’, Slade felt torn. By cooperating with Masters, and by giving evidence before the Fitzgerald Inquiry, he had turned his back on the police force’s iron-clad code of mateship.
Slade had loved being a copper, had loved working in intelligence, and everything evaporated when they tried to recruit him into The Joke. ‘I just take people as being fair dinkum, and then I got my job as a police officer and I didn’t even know about corruption, for Christ’s sake,’ he says. ‘You see, there’re two sides to me as well. I love the police culture, if the police culture could be rid of that [other] side. It hurt me no end to bloody give evidence at the Fitzgerald Inquiry. It fucking hurt, and even I think my passing comment, I think which showed my whole feeling, I said to Fitzgerald, “You know … I really regret what I’ve done.”’
At the same time he acknowledges someone needed to take a stand against corruption. ‘It’s destroyed [wife] Chris and my life. But look, we’re very, very strong people. We’ve got on with it, we’re happy now, we’ve been married 40 … something years. Same wife, same husband.
‘We’re not bloody madly rich, but we get by. But I tell you I’m bloody pleased [about] what we did, and that was with Chris’s permission that I did that. It was against every single thing that I wanted to do as a police officer. Even now … I get really emotional about it, I can’t fucking believe it, and I’m no fucking angel.’ He says he curses himself for not having seen the corrupt system earlier and done something about it.
His wife Chris begs to differ, and says her husband had ‘a bit of an idea’ that something was going on. ‘When Barnsey gave you that bribe and you didn’t know what to do. Well, I mean, you knew you … weren’t going to keep it [the money], but you didn’t know how to handle the situation, and you said that you couldn’t trust [Graeme] Parker,’ Chris remembers. ‘You knew … Parker was not okay, and you knew that Col Thompson probably wouldn’t side with you, but probably wasn’t corrupt. So you did know some stuff, didn’t you? You knew some people were corrupt and knew it wasn’t safe just to go and blab.’
Jim Slade says he was asked by Graeme Parker, the head of the Queensland Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, if he had spoken to journalist Chris Masters. He simply told the truth and said yes. ‘I just came straight out with it,’ Slade recalls. ‘I thought if I tell him that I talked to him … they might think twice if they pull the trigger, and I might be able to pull the trigger first.’
Slade remembers, early in his career, being in several meetings in the presence of former assistant commissioner Tony Murphy and former commissioner Terry Lewis. ‘Do you know how, if you’re in a meeting or a group, it doesn’t take long for you, in your mind, to get [an idea of] the pecking order?’ he says. ‘I would have had to have been at, you know, at least ten or 15 of those [meetings] with Murphy and Lewis … and every single time I was left in no doubt that the person making the rules and the final plan and the instruction was [coming from] Murphy.
‘At no time did the commissioner of police, well that person with the title, commissioner of police, have anything to do with what Tony Murphy had in mind.’
Still, Slade regretted having to inform on his colleagues. ‘After those guys [Barnes, Parker etc.] came into the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, we lost our innocence,’ Slade says. ‘You know, like we were a squad … we would get a bone and we wouldn’t let the bloody thing go. But after they came in, the bones were selective, and some bones we had a bite at and the bones were taken away.’
And some bones, says Slade, were simply obstructions to the corrupt system.
Legal Argument
Lewis’s trial opened on 13 May in the Brisbane District Court before Justice Anthony Healy, and if the punters were expecting the pyrotechnics of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, they were to be sorely disappointed. The previous October, Lewis had waived his right to a committal hearing, concerned that adverse publicity might impact on the trial jury. He was represented by the brilliant legal mind, John Jerrard, considered one of the best barristers practising in Brisbane. However, after nearly three weeks, lawyers were still tangled in a complicated legal argument that would mire proceedings from the outset. Lewis was not required to enter a plea.
The deadlock had not been broken by 30 June, and the trial was abandoned so points of law could be referred to a higher court. Crown Prosecutor Bob Mulholland, QC, was granted a nolle prosequi
in order to seek a second ruling on eight blocks of evidence deemed inadmissible by Judge Healy. Mulholland said the Crown’s case had been ‘greatly truncated’ because of Healy’s ruling, whereas Jerrard, for Lewis, told Judge Healy: ‘Your control of the trial is being removed from you and eventually the prosecution must win if only because they have the greater financial resources.’
The Criminal Law Association said the decision to test Healy’s ruling was unfair to Lewis and a ‘monstrous advantage to the Crown’. Special prosecutor Doug Drummond defended the move, saying the Crown had only two choices: either go on with the case against Lewis without being able to present important evidence to the jury; or take the issue to the Court of Criminal Appeal, which is what was decided.
Lewis’s lawyers argued the trial had never really begun because the charges had not been read out in open court and Lewis had not entered a plea. It wasn’t until late August that the Court of Criminal Appeal refused to even consider the appeal. One judge described it as ‘incompetent’.
Still, it meant Lewis’s trial proper would probably not get underway until well into 1991. The former commissioner was, once again, stuck in painful limbo.
The Fate of Deveney
Juvenile Aid Bureau officer Greg Deveney was labelled a ‘dog’ by his colleagues after he gave evidence at the Fitzgerald Inquiry. He had told of police taking protection money from Gold Coast brothel keepers and described the antics of some of his fellow detectives with prostitutes. No one wanted to come near him. So, when he was transferred to Goondiwindi, 358 kilometres south-west of Brisbane, he saw it as a potential break from the pressures of the city. He could make a fresh start. He could get on with the career he’d always wanted – being a police officer.
The reality, however, was quite different. As soon as Deveney arrived at his new post, his senior officer gave him a hard time. ‘When I worked late shift, no one was allowed to work with me,’ Deveney remembers. ‘I was told the reason being that none of the other officers had any trust in me because of my statements at the Fitzgerald Inquiry and everything.’
His senior officer also had something else to say to Deveney. ‘He said, “I’ve had 50 phone calls from officers in charge of stations [and] no one wants you in this place”,’ Deveney recalls. ‘And he said, “Are you aware of the fact that as soon as I’ve had my share of you, you’ll be transferred to somewhere else and they’ll have their share of you, and you’ll be transferred to somewhere else and they’ll have their share of you, until you go.”’
Deveney persevered, but matters only got worse. ‘When things [were] going really bad I received a phone call from someone claiming to be from the Commissioner’s office, and he said, “Greg, you don’t know me … but they are out to get you. And by that I mean they intend getting you in gaol”,’ recalls Deveney.
‘Well … I was on a late shift on the Saturday night and three-quarters of the way through my shift my knees started to shake and I couldn’t stop them. And the next morning when I went home I sat up all night drinking. Shrelle [his wife] took me to my doctor and I went on sick leave the very next day. I was off work for 18 months … and, you know, during that whole time we never got a visit from one person. I was hidden in our bedroom for 18 months, and every two weeks Shrelle went up to get my pay. Not once in that whole period was she given the cheque on her first visit. They’d say [to her], “Oh, the senior sergeant’s not in.” Shrelle said she could see the senior sergeant looking through the venetian blinds as she walked up the steps. Yeah, we had a shit of a time, eh.’
When Deveney eventually returned to work, he lasted only two shifts. ‘I couldn’t handle putting my uniform on, I was ashamed of the uniform,’ he recalls. ‘I had no respect for it, you know, I had completely lost it and I was lucky that at that time the department had started employing social workers. A woman from Brisbane had read a lot about me and saw what I was going through … no one had offered me any assistance whatsoever. She grabbed my file and she came out to Goondiwindi and she spent a day with us and she said, “I’m leaving this shit organisation as soon as I can but I’m getting you out medically unfit before I go.”
‘And she got me out.’
Deveney was warned, too, that he would never secure a government-related job outside of the police force for the rest of his working life.
That’s precisely what happened.
The Non-Person
Historian Dr Joseph Siracusa continued to act as a sort of proxy agent for Lewis – he says he had stitched up Lewis’s exclusivity for a proposed book for three years – and remained one of his greatest public champions. On 28 October, he published a feature on Lewis in the
Sunday Mail
, updating the public on where Lewis’s mind might be at after his trial was delayed.
The headline read: LEWIS AS A NON-PERSON. It was at times a melancholy read that weighed heavily in favour of Lewis and his wife Hazel and alleged that Lewis, while awaiting trial had ‘reluctantly mastered the art of becoming a non-person’.
Siracusa wrote that for a former workaholic who would normally have started work by 7 a.m., ‘Sir Terence, 62 and tanned, now rolls out of bed between 7 and 7.30 a.m. with nowhere to go. He has a leisurely breakfast of eggs, one piece of toast and weak mugs of tea, followed by a read of the morning newspapers.’
Siracusa, in the kind of detail Lewis would have identified with, went on to list Sir Terence’s luncheon and dinner menus. ‘His wife Hazel admits his greatest difficulty is filling in the time,’ the article continued. ‘The problem is that in Sir Terence’s two-bedroom apartment [a rental in Kelvin Grove; Garfield Drive had sold a few months earlier for $600,000], comfortable and cosy by most standards, there is not much to do.’
When asked point-blank what he was doing with his life, Lewis smiled and said: ‘Keeping from going nutty.’
Siracusa asked if Lewis – a Catholic who attended weekly his favourite church, the giant red-brick edifice of St Brigid’s at Red Hill – had forgiven his accusers. ‘Well the majority of them I don’t know,’ Lewis replied. ‘I haven’t met them or seen them before in my life until they appeared in the inquiry.’
Siracusa wrote it was doubtful that Lewis would ever be able to forgive the state government for ‘the way in which it hurled him into oblivion’. Lewis had become the ‘forgotten man’, he added. ‘The police medals, Orders of the British Empire and Father of the Year titles mean nothing to a man facing trial,’ Siracusa further opined.
Siracusa now says: ‘He’s a tragic character. He’s an operator; I knew he [Lewis] was trying to play me, in the nicest sense of the word.’