Authors: Matthew Condon
The next day, Judge Healy, in summing up, told the jury it would be dangerous to convict Lewis on the evidence of Herbert. He said the Crown had not produced any evidence which corroborated that of Jack and Peggy Herbert. Theirs was the only direct evidence that Lewis was corrupt. He added that Herbert had the ‘strongest motive imaginable’ to implicate Lewis.
He said to the jury: ‘I direct you as a matter of law that there is no evidence which is capable of corroboration, that is, confirming or supporting Jack Herbert’s evidence that the accused entered into the corrupt agreements in the indictment.’ He said the same applied to Peggy Herbert. ‘You may convict on the uncorroborated evidence of the Herberts but it would be dangerous to do so,’ he concluded. ‘You may find yourself in the position where you think Herbert may be telling the truth: that is not enough, it is only if you are satisfied of the guilt of the accused beyond reasonable doubt that you are entitled to consider a verdict of guilty.’
The jury deliberated for several days and nights. They returned with a verdict on Monday 5 August 1991.
Guilty on all counts.
Judge Healy sentenced Lewis, 63, to 14 years’ prison and set no parole date. Lewis says upon hearing the verdict he felt ‘absolute bloody despair’.
‘To stand up and hear them say “guilty” on all charges and then … in almost any trial of any consequence the judge will adjourn before sentencing,’ says Lewis. ‘It’s to give you or your counsel … a chance to say, “Oh, he wasn’t a bad bloke, he did some good in his lifetime”, or some bloody thing … [but at my trial the jury] brought in the decision, Jerrard said a little bit, [and] the judge sentenced me forthwith … within half an hour.’
Lewis says he felt his life and career had been for nought. ‘You feel you’ve worked your whole life and what for? What’s the use?’ he says. ‘You feel you’d be much better if you, firstly, had never been born, and secondly, if you could just get out of it now without damaging your family that you’d be better off dead. But you’ve got to keep fighting.’
Lewis says he accepted instructions not to give evidence himself, as the trial would be prolonged further and after sitting for nearly five months already it may have put the judge and jury offside.
An editorial in the
Courier-Mail
the next morning stated: ‘Twelve good citizens and true were sternly warned by the trial judge, Judge Healy, that they were considering evidence from a discredited and highly suspect source in The Bagman, Jack Reginald Herbert, and that they could not safely return a verdict of guilty unless they were convinced of the authenticity of this evidence despite its unsavoury source. They chose to convict even in the light of this cautionary advice.
‘With that verdict, a sterilising lance has cleaned out yet another boil on the body politick … The corpse now laid out for public inspection is not his, but that of politicised policing.’
Directly after the trial, Justice Healy was criticised by some members of the press, including
Sydney Morning Herald
journalist Evan Whitton, for ‘concealing’ evidence from the jury by not including crucial facts. But the trial transcript showed that Healy actually ruled very little evidence as inadmissible. Presiding over one of the most unenviable trials in Queensland legal history, Healy made demonstrable efforts to ensure Lewis got a fair trial in impossible circumstances.
One thing was certain. The jury had spoken.
As He Smiled, He Died
On Monday 17 June 1991 – two-thirds of the way through the trial of former commissioner of police Terry Lewis – a former Rat Packer went to his grave. Glendon Patrick Hallahan, just 59, passed away in the Wesley Hospital in Auchenflower in inner-western Brisbane, following decades of health problems.
Tony Murphy regularly visited Hallahan in the weeks up to his death. So too did former head of the Queensland Police Union, Ron Edington.
‘Oh, he was frightened of death, he was trying to say the rosary,’ says Edington. ‘Tony Murphy told me this … this might be an exaggeration on Tony’s part, but he reckons that when Glen got to the part in the rosary [that mentions death], he knew he was dying [and] he smiled.’ (The end of the Hail Mary goes: ‘Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.’)
Incredibly, the former lawyer, political firebrand and anti-corruption fighter, Col Bennett, was also in the Wesley around that time, visiting his ill wife Helen. It was Bennett, as the member for South Brisbane, who had kicked off the National Hotel inquiry all those years before, and earned the wrath of men like Murphy and Hallahan.
Edington had at one point been a secret informant of Bennett’s and knew him and his family well. Murphy, on the other hand, detested the former politician. The feeling was mutual. Edington recalls they met in a corridor and Bennett asked Murphy what he was doing in the hospital. Murphy replied, ‘Poor old Glen, he’s on his last.’
Bennett said, ‘That’s terrible, I’ll say a prayer for him, Tony.’
Murphy reportedly turned to Edington and said, ‘Wasn’t that beautiful of Col to say a prayer for him [Glen]?’
Edington replied, ‘You know the prayer he’s going to say? He’s going to say prayers that he fucking dies … that’s human nature … he [Bennett] would have gone home and … been real happy to think that the cunt was dying because of what he tried to do to Col Bennett.’ (It was rumoured that Hallahan wanted to hire a hitman to kill Bennett during the 1960s.)
Edington says he spent a lot of quiet time with Hallahan during his last days. He says Hallahan told him that Murphy got more money than anyone, he was the top man. Hallahan allegedly told Edington: ‘Tony always protected himself, because he thought if any of these allegations are going to be made against me [Hallahan], this is what I’m gonna say.’
The
Sunday Mail’
s Peter Hansen wrote a huge story on the death of Hallahan. ‘Glen Hallahan left the Police Force in 1972, but never ceased being a detective at heart,’ the article said. ‘He died a bitter man, still under clouds of suspicion and controversy that dogged him all his working life.’
The article went on to say that Hallahan was an ‘ace crime catcher’. Hansen wondered whether his record of catching criminals and underworld personalities may have sown the seeds of his destruction as a policeman. ‘How close was he to his underworld friends, his enemies in the Police Force asked? And did he go over the line?’
The article posed the question to Hallahan: Why had such a fine young detective attracted so much negative attention and criticism?
‘Envy,’ Hallahan had previously told the reporter.
Hallahan’s wife, Heather, told the newspaper: ‘I would like to say my husband did more that was constructive for Queensland than all his persecutors put together. One cannot be successful in this country and not be a target for the unsuccessful. I am of the opinion, money is not the root of all evil, envy is.’
An unnamed police colleague said that Hallahan ‘had more integrity in his little finger than those who accused him have in their whole bodies … altar boys don’t solve major crimes’.
Hallahan was buried in Grave 75, Section LO5 of the Beenleigh Cemetery at Brigade Drive, Eagleby, on Wednesday 19 June.
Edington reflects: ‘Hallahan’s death was terrible … I’m starting to believe in it [karma] because when you see these fellows that are dying, the way they die, is there a punishment?’
To Boggo Road
When Terry Lewis was found guilty and sentenced, his wife Hazel was not in the court. Nor were any of his family. They had no idea he was about to be convicted. ‘I was hoping I wouldn’t be convicted, that’s your hope against hope, I suppose,’ he remembers. ‘But I thought, well, if worse comes to worst I’ll probably have a week or something to tidy up at home [but] … no, there was nobody there [in court that day]. Nobody.’
Lewis was immediately handcuffed and taken downstairs in the court building where he was strip-searched then placed in a cell. His counsel, John Jerrard, and another lawyer, Rick Whitton, visited him shortly after and assured him they would appeal. Nobody had contacted Lady Hazel Lewis about the conviction and sentencing. Lewis says she heard about it for the first time on the radio news.
‘Then, of course, I was handcuffed again and put in the van with the media waiting outside to try and get photos,’ says Lewis. ‘I was then taken over to the prison and as I was told, well that night, even though the prisoners had heard on the radio that I’d been convicted … when the van went into the courtyard of the old Boggo Road, there was cheers and clapping and oh … a real bloody uproar in the prison.
‘The head of the prison … he just got me inside, and again you get stripped and searched and showered and put in a shocking old bloody tracksuit of some sort, and they didn’t even have sandshoes to fit. They put me into … a little medical centre … not that they had doctors and that, but they put me in isolation, for want of a better word.’
According to Lewis he slept little that night, and found it hard to believe the jury’s decision.
The next day, he recorded in his diary – the compulsive diarist initially kept random secret notes of his experiences, then was later officially granted use of a conventional diary – that he had been interviewed by a prison intelligence officer and was told, ‘it would be a great achievement for some prisoners to get me; need to take care re attack at all times; putting glass in food a popular thing; also put glass in or slash clothing if sent to Prison laundry … try to retain sanity until after appeal’.
Lewis says he must have been visited by wife Hazel and the children in the first couple of days of his incarceration. ‘Every time that anybody came to visit you, you had to go in in front of … any other prisoners that happened to be there … and drop your pants and let them look up your backside,’ Lewis recalls. ‘You know, I was 60 years of bloody age or more … I don’t think they should have necessarily feared I was going to be bringing drugs into the prison. I think some of the warders enjoyed the fact that they had … this high-profile prisoner.’
The prison arranged, through chaplain Father Walter Ogle, for members of Lewis’s family to see him. ‘Really, the main thought was for your family,’ Lewis says. ‘I thought what a … after working all your life that you finished [up] here through the bloody lies of one person, helped by [a] completely manipulated system … and Hazel would have nothing and the family would be sort of maligned for the rest of their lives.’
On 14 August Lewis learned that he had lost his police long service leave and annual recreational entitlements. He wrote in his prison diary: ‘… hard to imagine the feelings of disbelief, dismay, shock, depression and horror when you constantly realise that it is not a nightmare, that it is real.’
Wacol
Ten days after landing in Boggo Road, Lewis was transferred to Wacol medium-security prison. That day, Thursday 15 August, he arrived at his new lodgings in a prison van at 4.20 p.m. and was immediately taken to a secure six-bed hospital ward. ‘Warned to be careful as there was a lot of mouthing off by prisoners whilst on pill-run as to what they would do to me,’ he recorded in his diary.
Lewis remembers: ‘They put me in what wasn’t really a hospital but … an area with about five or six beds in it and a little dispensary, I suppose you’d call it, in the front. And [the manager] did say that I could stay there indefinitely because it wasn’t used as a hospital. If anybody got … ill they were immediately sent up to the 24-hour place at either Moreton [Correctional Centre] or David Longman [Correctional Centre] or sent into the Princess Alexandra Hospital.
‘Well, I really was almost, if you like, in … solitary confinement … that was my home but they did give me a job in the store, which was maybe a hundred yards away from where I was domiciled. And in a very short space of time I was given a … which some of the warders didn’t like … [a] key to get into the store, and they didn’t think that was right. So, I’d have my cereal breakfast and then I’d go up to the store immediately and spend the day there.’
Lewis encountered a variety of cell mates in his early days at Wacol. There were corrupt former Federal police gaoled for drug offences, and a young man who later hanged himself in prison.
Given his extraordinary organisational skills, Lewis was soon running the little store single-handedly. ‘Well, you’d get abused by one or two every now and then,’ Lewis remembers. ‘I didn’t do any exercise for ages and they let me go out in a little enclosed area between the store and where I was staying, and adjoining that was the detention units. Eventually they let me go outside to exercise and then some smartarse warder after a while said … that wasn’t allowed, and then that was stopped for about two months until I managed to get it reinstated.’
In his first month at Wacol, Lewis was shown some kindness by a prison official who brought him a radio. He bumped into Toowoomba SP bookmaker Bruce Bowd, gaoled for corruption courtesy of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, who told him that perjury charges against Lewis had been dropped in the District Court that morning. ‘Bruce B. said that he had lost a $1000 bet when I was convicted,’ Lewis wrote in his prison diary. ‘[He said] that I was convicted by the media and that Jack Herbert is the greatest liar he has ever met.’
On Friday 6 September, Lewis received a phone call from his old friend Tony Murphy who ‘said that he heard that the Forewoman on my Jury was in the Sales Tax Dept. and was determined to get me’.