Authors: Matthew Condon
Incredibly, Deveney was then put in charge of the squad on the recommendation of Glancy. Deveney asked if there was anyone he could trust to partner him in Consorting. He requested Detective Constable Murray Verrell.
Glancy, meanwhile, continued working on the Gold Coast. ‘Glancy just did his normal pub scenes and everything else that they all did down there,’ he says. ‘We were having a rash of armed hold-ups at that time, too, and set up all these special patrols. The only two people doing special patrols were Murray and myself. The others were all in the pub.’
The Mater Miracle
He was known, for reasons he never initially understood, as the Mater Miracle.
John Stopford, born in Brisbane’s Mater Hospital in the city’s inner-south in 1956, arrived with club feet and also suffered spina bifida. He had died and been brought back to life. But he was a fighter. His parents couldn’t care for him. They were fighting, too, but in the way of domestic disharmony; his father was a heavy drinker. So, Stopford was sent to the Xavier Home for Crippled Children in Cavendish Road, Coorparoo. It was here, in the converted 1890 mansion ‘Erica’, designed by architect John Jacob Cohen, where Stopford spent the first eight years of life. He slept in a steel cot and came under the watchful and caring eye of a particular Catholic nun at the home. The order of nuns became known as ‘The White Sisters’.
The nun that took a shine to Stopford had a brother who ran a Marist Brothers home for boys in Sydney. Stopford was sent there when he was almost nine – his parents’ marriage having disintegrated – and returned to Brisbane a few years later to live with relatives at Sunnybank. By his mid-teens, however, he was suffering with chronic pain from years of operations for his condition, and ended up in the Lowson House psychiatric clinic at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. He had repeatedly tried to self-harm by slashing his arms and legs, and was depressed.
At Lowson House, he met a young girl, Joanne, and when both were released they married. A short time later, in the mid-1970s, Joanne got a job as a receptionist at the Polynesian Playground massage parlour on Logan Road in Woolloongabba. The place was run by the legendary brothel madam Kerry Kent. Stopford was asked if he’d like to do some maintenance work around the place, and he agreed. He would fix windows, paint and patch leaks in the roof of the old Queenslander. The job became virtually full-time, and Stopford was working happily until one day the Licensing Branch paid a visit.
The naive Stopford had broken an unwritten code – the only males to be found on the grounds of a massage parlour were to be customers. A senior Licensing officer approached the maintenance man and put his service revolver to his head. ‘This is the kind of thing that happens to people who want to muscle in on things that are bigger than they can handle,’ the cop said. He added that if he found him there again, the gun would be loaded.
When Stopford’s own marriage broke down, and with his back pain relentless, he was put in touch with criminal Roland Short on the Gold Coast. By the late 1970s, Short was steadily building a vice empire that involved swingers clubs in Brisbane, such as the Matador. He also dabbled in various business ventures on the side. One of those was a small, illegal card game he set up in a house in Leonard Avenue, Surfers Paradise. Another was Gold’s Gym in the heart of Surfers, not far from the famous Pink Elephant Bar. Stopford was asked to manage the gym. In addition, he became the card dealer at the exclusive games in Leonard Avenue on a Friday and Saturday night. He had no idea this was the beginning of him being drawn into Queensland’s underworld.
One day Short said he had a meeting not far from the gym. He asked Stopford to come look for him if he hadn’t phoned in an hour and a half. The meeting was between escort agent king Geoff Crocker and leading massage parlour heavy Hector Hapeta. ‘They were trying to sort out advertising jurisdictions,’ says Stopford. ‘Who could advertise in what booklet and publication. And of course some of the other minor trouble happening at the time, but Roland was never forthcoming on that. Hapeta at that stage had the Gold Coast sewn up.’
For a variety of reasons Stopford left the Gold Coast and was offered a job as a driver in Geoff Crocker’s organisation in Brisbane. He shifted into a sprawling old Queenslander at 27 Sankey Street, Highgate Hill, out of which Crocker ran his girls. ‘I found him alright, man on man,’ says Stopford. ‘As a person generally he’d just bully females, including his own wife Julie.
‘He [Crocker] looked like a two-bob gangster. The gold chain. A pair of shorts that I’d wear to the beach. And he loved the Italian mesh shirts, the ones where you can see skin through the holes, he thought the white and gold looked good together.’
Stopford drove the girls to their jobs in the company car. The business catered for every walk of life, from legal silks to labourers. The women were delivered right across Brisbane. ‘Geoff wasn’t happy unless it was 30 jobs a day,’ recalls Stopford. ‘Probably eight girls for those jobs. Girls in town, if they were lucky, were only getting 40 per cent of the money. I think an hour was $100, and I think a half-hour was $60 or $70. An all-nighter was $150. At least $3000 a day. His best girls were earning $1500 a week. They’d be getting one day off.
‘I was enjoying life. My wage was $5 a drive. I was earning say, $350 to $500 per week – cash. I was on call 24 hours a day. You could only relax if you were lucky enough to have to drive Geoff somewhere.’
In time, through the early 1980s, Stopford would end up with his own escort agency, working with his new partner Wendy. ‘Geoff didn’t like the idea that Wendy and I had got together and by this time he had pretty big faith in me,’ says Stopford. ‘He wasn’t coming in to the parlours as regularly. So I think he could see the writing on the wall and he offered to Wendy and I that we open a new escort service over at Crosby Road, Albion. It was on top of a TV repair shop [Robin White’s Rentals].’
Despite all of their hard work, Stopford alleges Crocker took the bulk of the profits. He pulled out of the deal. ‘I do remember when I pulled the plug,’ Stopford says. ‘Crocker rang my Mum and made threats to her. “He won’t get away with this, and if he tries to start up by himself …”
‘We were killing it, me and Wendy. We were pulling, on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, we were pulling in 35 jobs a day. [But] we were working outside the arranged payment plan; outside Hapeta, Bellino, Crocker, the police. It made me very vulnerable. That’s when the retribution began.’
Stopford would find all of his telephone lines into the brothels ripped out. ‘And they were sending [the] Licensing [Branch] my way. I learnt from Geoff that we could go past the Licensing building in those days and find out who the hell was on that night. So we knew if we were in for a rough one or the usual courtesy call.
‘I tried to pay them graft. I had to. They didn’t accept, openly. But cash found its way into certain hands. We were raided. Sometimes I was tipped off, sometimes not.’
Stopford was not only being harassed by the Licensing Branch, and in particular Sergeant Harry Burgess, but he was copping ‘heat’ from Hector Hapeta. ‘Burgess said to me that his boss could tell them – if they didn’t stop the rubbish they should drop off or they would get the heat,’ Stopford later recalled. ‘He explained that Hapeta and Crocker are the big men in Brisbane but they still take orders from the Licensing Branch.’
When Burgess was moved out of escort agencies and onto massage parlours, Stopford was told to deal with Sergeant Neville Ross. One evening, Ross, accompanied by two detectives, visited Stopford at his home in Laurier Street, Annerley. Ross asked him how he was going to ‘survive’. Stopford thought Ross meant survive the onslaught from Hapeta. Ross corrected him. How was he going to survive with the Licensing Branch?
‘You may as well give us money,’ Ross supposedly said.
‘What sort of money?’
‘It is normally $400 to $500 per month per house … it has to be ready at the end of every month and picked up then or at the start of the new month. Police hierarchy are not impressed with you starting a new agency without permission.’
Stopford later remarked: ‘If you’re getting $500 off every house you must be making a lot of money.’
‘Of course,’ Ross replied, ‘it’s about $100,000 a month.’
By now, Stopford and Wendy had had a child – Jay. But Stopford, in part due to his chronic pain, was addicted to heroin. So was Wendy. They moved to 35 Green Terrace, Windsor. By 1983, with Jay less than a year old, they were forced to start up an escort agency out of their home to finance the heroin. It didn’t work. The cost of the addiction was outstripping the business income.
On 7 June Stopford was sent to prison for bankcard fraud. His life, thanks to drugs, had reached a dead end. He had tried to play with the big boys and lost.
In gaol he thought a lot about his infant son, and his own difficult early years of life, a reject in the crippled home for children. He made a vow to make a better life for his son once he got out.
Fate would also make this pimp and junkie a vital figure in the collapse of the corrupt regime known as The Joke.
Whitrod Reflects
Former assistant commissioner, ace detective, union agitator and now flower farmer, Tony Murphy, was enjoying his retirement in the fishing village of Amity Point on North Stradbroke Island, spending hours on the back of his tractor and clearing native forest on his leased land, when a ghost from the past triggered his temper.
It was former Queensland police commissioner Raymond Wells Whitrod who shattered Murphy’s idyll. In early July 1983, newspapers published an interview with Whitrod, who had returned home to Adelaide after working as an academic in Canberra. The picture accompanying the story showed an obviously older, but svelte, Whitrod. He had taken up marathon running.
Meanwhile, the report said, Whitrod had taken to reflecting on his ‘Queensland Years’. He said bluntly his career ambitions had ended on his resignation from the Queensland force in November 1976. He also said he had been ‘forced to resign’.
Whitrod did not spare the rod. ‘It was a strain in Queensland,’ Whitrod said. ‘It’s a turbulent state. That’s the nature of the society. It’s still very much a developing, pioneering state. The other states, with the exception of Western Australia, are more mature. [Queensland is] not an intellectual state. People are engaged busily in making a very good income in farming, cane, cattle, mining etc. There isn’t much time left for reflection.’
As for his opinion of the state’s police department, his estimate went to rock bottom. He advised young men and women not to join the Queensland police force. ‘I would advocate they join another Australian force,’ he said bluntly. ‘From the three state forces I know well – South Australian, Victorian and Queensland – I think Queensland must rate the lowest.’
Integrity was essential in the force, he added. ‘Police corruption is not a matter of a few rotten apples,’ said Whitrod. ‘What you really have in any police force is a case full of susceptible apples. For many years now, there has been an east coast network of corrupt police officers in key positions who have run operations worth a lot of money to them and their associates.’
It was a clear swipe at the Rat Pack. Murphy, the flower farmer of Amity Point, was outraged. The
Sunday Mail
of 3 July 1983, re-ran the Whitrod article, and in its front news pages offered a strident rebuttal by former assistant police commissioner Murphy. The article, by journalist Peter Hansen, quoted Murphy as saying that Whitrod was talking ‘hogwash’, and that his old boss was guilty of ‘geriatric griping’ and ‘never-ending sniping’.
‘Mr Whitrod’s seven years in the Queensland Police is insignificant compared with my own 38 years’ service,’ Murphy trumpeted.
Incredibly, after so many years, Murphy continued to spruik the line that Whitrod himself had been ‘used’ by a very small group of ambitious and ‘devious police’ within the force. Murphy was referring to Whitrod’s trusted team, all of whom had either been forced to resign, had their characters assassinated or were exiled across the state during the early years of the Lewis regime. Murphy believed Whitrod had resigned because he was ‘embarrassed’ over incidents such as the Southport Betting Case, in distant 1974, and the student demonstrations in the winter of 1976, when a female undergraduate was clubbed over the head by a police officer.
The article then offered a dot point list of great achievements by the Queensland Police Force since the demise of Whitrod, it being the only force to ‘physically arrest’ Mr Asia, Terrance (Terry) John Clark. Here, more than two decades after they started the practice, a member of the so-called Rat Pack was using the local press to distort history and disparage their enemies. Murphy’s rant was ludicrous. It failed to mention Premier Bjelke-Petersen’s involvement in the resignation of Whitrod and elevation of Lewis. Nor did it take into account the true story of the Clark arrest and its outfall, courtesy of another poorly judged release of bogus information to a local newspaper reporter by Murphy himself. It had been Murphy’s leaking of confidential information about police interviews with Douglas and Isabel Wilson that directly led to their murders by Clark in the late 1970s.
Commissioner Lewis failed to mention the little press spat in his official diaries, but equally incredibly, Ray Whitrod was never far from his mind. In the week leading up to Murphy’s brain snap, Lewis received information from a police officer that Bjelke-Petersen had ordered that the leader of the opposition, Keith Wright, was ‘not to view [his] file in Special Branch’. That same day: ‘To Belfast Hotel, luncheon with B. Maxwell, R[eg]. Tegg, A[nthony] Murphy and H[orrie] Robertson.’