All Fall Down (31 page)

The next evening, Commissioner Lewis and his wife Hazel entered the stately grounds of Government House, just across the way from Garfield Drive, and joined Governor Wally Campbell and Lady Campbell for dinner. There, in that old white mansion on the ridge, the Governor had a personal discussion with Commissioner Lewis. ‘Sir Walter Campbell asked me if I would accept a Knight bachelor from the Queen in the N.Y. Honours List [and] of course I said yes.’

Of course the boy from Ipswich said yes.

On Thursday 14 November, Lewis agreed to be interviewed by
Courier-Mail
journalist Ken Blanch for a story to appear the following day. The article would be published on the anniversary of Inspector Lewis of Charleville’s promotion to assistant commissioner under Ray Whitrod, with the headline: LEWIS STILL FIRMLY IN CONTROL.

Queensland Police Commissioner Terence Murray Lewis is just four months short of his 58th birthday. But yesterday, with a wry grin, he confessed that he sometimes felt 80. The events of the past year or so are a fair indication of why Terry Lewis is paid $1260 a week – only a round or two of drinks short of the $1338 a week his boss, Lands and Police Minister Bill Glasson, gets.

In that time, Mr Lewis’s detectives managed to arrest the wrong man for a particularly sordid Gold Coast murder [Barry Mannix]; his police raided a 300-strong bikers’ party at Dayboro in which a complainant policeman was later alleged to have participated; and a senior North Queensland investigator [Ross Dickson] left the force amid a welter of stories about suppressed investigations.

Mr Lewis’s predecessor, Mr Ray Whitrod, threw in the towel after six years in the top chair; his predecessor, Mr Norm Bauer, held the office only briefly; and the Commissioner before him, Mr Frank Bischof, was there for 11 years. But with nine years behind him, Mr Lewis still has seven to go to reach retirement at 65.

Commissioner Lewis told Blanch that he was not daunted. He had drafted the ‘purpose and aims’ of the Queensland Police Department and ensured they were incorporated in the Police Manual. He said the purpose was ‘to contribute to the well-being of persons in Queensland by protecting life and property, preserving order, preventing and detecting crime, and the apprehending and bringing to justice of offenders’.

In 1985, Lewis saw breaking and entering as ‘the most prevalent and worrying offence’ facing police. (This, despite ABCI officer Peter Vassallo briefing police and Cabinet on a burgeoning drug industry involving murder and generating millions of dollars in profits from huge marihuana plantations.)

The Commissioner also nominated other worrying crimes – credit card and cheque fraud, robbery, stealing and unlawful use of cars, and homicide. Lewis quoted house-breaking statistics – up 7.5 per cent from 30,000 to 32,000 in a year. Thankfully the clean-up rate had increased nearly 275 per cent from 2235 to 6119 cases.

Queensland’s top cop said the break-ins were linked to drugs. ‘Householders could help immensely by locking up when they go out,’ he said. ‘And when they are going away for an extended time, they should tell a neighbour and notify the local police. We have a special form just for that purpose now.’

It was a domestic warning that harked back to those issued by Lewis’s former mentor, Commissioner Frank Bischof, in the late 1950s and 60s. With murder, violent crime and bank robberies on the Queensland crime plate, Bischof would make solemn proclamations about making sure you didn’t leave your milk money outside as a temptation to thieves.

Blanch and Lewis went on to discuss the strength of the police force. ‘Mr Lewis says penalty rates and overtime are a cost problem in his department, but he doesn’t think his 4720 men and women police are misdeployed because of that,’ the article stated. ‘He denies Police Union suggestions that the State is seriously underpoliced at weekends because large numbers of police are rostered off, but says there are some areas – the rapidly-growing ones north and south of metropolitan Brisbane, for instance – where the demand for police service is very high “and we don’t always have sufficient people to give immediate response”.’

Lewis added that the force was always on the lookout for ways to improve the use of resources. Despite this, Commissioner Lewis said ‘there will never be enough police to do all the work that has to be done’.

The practised Lewis ended the interview on a practical note. ‘Police are there to help the public,’ he said. ‘But the more help they get from the public, the more useful they will be.’ This was Lewis the public servant – the dry collector of facts and figures. But somewhere beyond that epaulette facade, there must have been an itch of excitement and satisfaction over his impending knighthood.

What very few people knew at that point was that the Commissioner had, according to future friend and academic at the University of Queensland, Joseph Siracusa, filled in the application for his knighthood himself, and simply passed it on to the Premier. Who better to do it than the man himself? Lewis was nothing if not thorough.

Meanwhile, the Director of Prosecutions, Des Sturgess, released his report into child sexual abuse, prostitution and pornography. Perhaps it was the impending silly season. Perhaps the subject matter of the report was something people didn’t want to acknowledge existed. Whatever it was, the report sank like a stone.

A Hairline Fracture

On Sunday 22 December, Commissioner Lewis, ever the workaholic, popped into the office at headquarters at 10 a.m., checked his correspondence and made a few phone calls before heading back up the hill to Garfield Drive. In the afternoon he treated himself to the September issue of
Police Chief
magazine.

That day, however, an article appeared on page one of the
Sunday Mail
, underneath a picture story about an intolerable heatwave that had descended upon Brisbane. The headline read: WARBURTON ASKS NEW QUESTIONS ON FUNDS TRANSFER.

The Queensland Day Committee affair was not going away, though much of the angst over the possible fraud was being played out behind closed doors.

The audit had been formally reported to the Premier’s Department on Tuesday 3 December. That morning, Commissioner Lewis saw Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen ‘and thanked him for loyalty and support’. They also discussed that Lewis would ‘stay until at least his [the Premier’s] retirement; overseas travel, leave due 145 days; ministerial changes; travel State in 1986; see Sir Robert Sparkes; firm men needed in Mag. Courts re demonstration cases; E. Pratt for Supreme Court and my family occupying space on the 11th floor [of police headquarters] next year [during the building of his new house at 12 Garfield Drive, Bardon]’.

Lewis then saw Coordinator General Sir Sydney Schubert ‘re investigation by Aud-Gen. of possible misuse of Qld Day C’tee funds by Judith Callaghan’. The next day, Schubert arrived at Commissioner Lewis’s office and met the two officers appointed to the Judith Callaghan case – Detective Inspector D. Plint and Detective Sergeant 1st Class J. Moczynacki.

The Callaghan affair was quietly unfolding alongside one of the highlights of Lewis’s life – his knighthood. On Monday 9 December, Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘… letter arrived from Governor advising that Her Majesty the Queen has conferred on me the dignity of Knighthood’.

Bjelke-Petersen dismissed Judith Callaghan from the Queensland Day Committee on 19 December. In the
Sunday Mail
, however, Warburton demanded answers from the Premier with regards to the fraud case. He asked if Allen Callaghan was the head of the government agency under investigation into the dubious transfer of funds. ‘Is Mr Callaghan the husband of Mrs Judith Callaghan, who was the coordinator of the Queensland Day Committee?’ Warburton asked. ‘Is the agency headed by Mr Callaghan the same agency which transferred funds totalling $35,000 in 1984–85 to the Queensland Day Committee? Did that $35,000 fall within the legislative guidelines of the agency involved?’

Bjelke-Petersen, at home on the family property in Bethany, Kingaroy, confirmed that ‘a departmental head and his wife’ were being investigated by the Auditor-General. He did not name names. ‘He [Warburton] can shout to high heaven but I’m not going to muck it up to please him,’ Sir Joh said. ‘It’s in the hands of the Auditor-General and the police. The auditors are looking for anything they can find.’ The Premier reassured the public that there would be no government cover-up.

This was a major scandal that went to the very heart of the Premier’s Department. It also involved a man who was intimately acquainted with the Premier, and had been for years. The matter was on its way to becoming emblematic of the public’s growing perception of the government itself – that there was corruption at extremely high levels.

Lewis says he remembers Callaghan as a smart operator. ‘I give him great credit,’ he says. ‘And what he was pinched for, unfortunately or fortunately – I think a lot of politicians and bloody senior public servants were doing exactly the same thing, taking their wife for bloody dinner and every bastard for dinner – I think he was a bit, he must have fallen out with somebody because … I got a phone call [from] … the Auditor-General. I’m not sure if it was Doyle, but whoever it was … Syd [Schubert] said, “I want to come and see you urgently. Joh has told me, directed me or whatever, told me …”

‘So they both rolled up and said: “Oh, the Premier knows we’re here and this is it, we want … Callaghan has been touching the funds … we want something done now. So I got in touch with, I don’t know, whoever the assistant commissioner was for Crime, and I said, “Get a couple of men from the CIB and get onto it.” That was my part in it.’

Lewis says he never received any direction to go lightly on Callaghan. ‘It wasn’t to let him go, it was to check whether all the transactions were false … but it wasn’t so you can’t do anything. He felt sorry for them obviously,’ Lewis recalls. ‘Yeah, I think he [Sir Joh] asked me to double check that … all of the, well, not that all of the charges were right, but that he wasn’t being charged with anything he shouldn’t have been charged with, if you like.

‘He [Bjelke-Petersen] wouldn’t have been happy to see him [Callaghan] in trouble, put it that way.’

Lewis says Callaghan had enormous power when it came to the government. He had been a strong advisor to the Premier. ‘I would be surprised if he [Sir Joh] didn’t accept most of it [Callaghan’s advice],’ Lewis recalls. ‘Particularly dealings with the public. He would have been a very powerful man in his time there.’

Warburton continued his attack on Bjelke-Petersen over the scandal. On Monday 23 December, the
Courier-Mail
published even more demands from the Leader of the Opposition. He asked if the Auditor-General was investigating the Queensland Film Corporation. ‘I’m simply asking the Premier and Treasurer of this State straightforward questions which he should be able to answer regardless of any investigations that are being carried out,’ Warburton said. He also asked Tourism, National Parks, Sport and Arts Minister Peter McKechnie – who cut short his holiday and rushed back to Brisbane to attend to the crisis – if he had fulfilled his ministerial responsibilities with regard to the Queensland Film Corporation.

McKechnie confirmed that the corporation was being investigated. He unsuccessfully tried to hose down the gathering drama. ‘It is normal for the Auditor-General to have officers in government departments from time to time throughout the year,’ he said. ‘There is an auditor in my department at the moment.’

Warburton went for the Premier, too, saying that in his role as Treasurer, Sir Joh was responsible for the debacle. ‘We’re not asking him to act as judge and jury,’ Warburton added. ‘We’re merely asking him to disclose certain basic information. The allegations involve public funds – taxpayers’ funds.’

The House Shaped Like a Piano

By late 1985 Jack Herbert and his wife Peggy had moved from their East Brisbane apartment, with its splendid views of the Brisbane River, first to a flat at South Bank, just across the river from the CBD near West End, and then to an extraordinary property at 29 Jordan Terrace, Bowen Hills, north of Fortitude Valley.

The new Herbert house was set back from the street and, unusually, its architecture was inspired by the curved housing of a grand piano. The two-storey house had a grand foyer and a sweeping internal staircase. The rooms were generous and the lounge and dining rooms were graced by a huge red-brick fireplace with a timber mantel. The upstairs bedrooms had French doors that opened onto a curved marble balcony, the black cast-iron railing intermittently decorated with circles. The shadow of the circles and railings looked like whole notes on sheets of music. Out back was an in-ground swimming pool.

The house sat on the prime hillock that is Bowen Hills, facing north, in the shadow of the Spanish-style landmark Our Lady of Victories Church. The church had a famous blue illuminated cross on its bell tower – a sort of eternal flame in memory of those who had fallen in World War I. (Because of the small parish, the church itself was handed over to Brisbane’s Polish community in 1955.) Indeed, the church was so close to the Herberts’ new mansion the blue crucifix shone on the swimming pool water at night.

Just as Commissioner Lewis was planning for his Robin Gibson designed home at 12 Garfield Drive that would comfortably see him and wife Hazel through to retirement and beyond, so too Herbert and wife Peggy seemed to be eyeing the permanence of stone and tiles for their final big home. In fact, Herbert had bought the home off two old mates – Geraldo Bellino and his associate Vic Conte.