All Fall Down (39 page)

The Stradbroke police station came under the authority of the Wynnum police district, and the head of the Wynnum CIB was Detective Sergeant Harry Burgess. In the end, Stopford was convinced to head to Sydney and talk with
Four Corners
. It was all expenses paid. He leapt at the chance of a couple of days in Sydney, and took his son.

‘They paid for the limo to pick us up … paid for the flights, motel room for two nights, $40 spending money a day,’ recalls Stopford. ‘They took me out to ABC headquarters. I met David Hill [the ABC’s then managing director]. They took Jay and showed him the clock in the studio. He was rapt – they took us to Taronga Park Zoo.’

Masters had an unpleasant duty to perform at the zoo as he strolled around the animal enclosures with Stopford. It concerned the original tapes that reporter Peter Cassuben had made of his conversations with Stopford. Cassuben had passed them onto Masters, then Masters had passed them on to a friend in the Australian Federal Police. Somehow, news of the tapes’ existence had gotten out, and the head of the AFP office in Brisbane then passed them on to the Queensland police, where they ended up in the possession of Assistant Commissioner Graeme Parker.

‘He told me … that the tapes had been passed on to somebody and now they were in the hands of the Queensland police,’ says Stopford. ‘I was very apprehensive from then on … an uneasiness started to come to me.’

Stopford and son Jay returned to Amity Point. He said it was a difficult decision – to agree to appear on camera. He was still smarting over the tapes leak. ‘I tend to remember Chris virtually begging me and saying, “I know we’ve done the wrong thing with these tapes, but would you like me to get in touch with Nigel [Powell],” or something like that …’ Stopford recalls.

‘We hadn’t found a location safe enough at this stage to do the filming. I told him, “I don’t think I can go through with this, mate.”

‘I did believe him. If I didn’t believe in Chris Masters I would have pulled it then … I was in tears. “You’ve put me between a rock and a hard spot here.” I had no one to talk to about it. I agreed [to be interviewed on camera] in the end. I’d come to realise that it was probably my only way out of this.’

Stopford wasn’t used to telling all before a camera, and in turn to hundreds of thousands of viewers. ‘They didn’t want me to gloss over words,’ says Stopford. ‘They needed the truth. I said to them all along, I reckon Harry Burgess is your link, I think he is the weak pin. I think he’s the one who will buckle first.’

Stopford says nerves set in between the time he was interviewed for the report, which would become known as ‘The Moonlight State’, and its public broadcasting. ‘I was looking over my shoulder,’ he says. ‘I never stopped looking over my shoulder from the time in Sydney I was told that those tapes had gone [missing]. I knew that was like waving a red flag to a bull.’

Stopford was growing increasingly anxious. He decided to ring the officer he’d once informed to, and they met in a car park in front of the old Scurr Brothers hardware store at the Mount Gravatt Central shopping strip on Logan Road. Stopford told the officer he’d been speaking to the ABC in Sydney.

‘At first he appeared disinterested in my problems, but once he learned I had spoken to the ABC … he began to take new interest,’ Stopford recalled.

‘He raised with me, not I with him, whether there had been any discussion with the ABC about a detective called Slade.’

A Constable Retires

Not only was the Commissioner, Sir Terence Lewis, contending with rumours that a
Four Corners
investigative crew was sniffing around North Queensland and the state’s south-east, he also had some nasty leaks emanating from within his own department. A month earlier, on 9 February, one of Lewis’s daughters, Laureen Ireland, 25, a police constable, was found medically unfit to continue serving in the force. As he recorded in his diary for that day: ‘Laureen appeared before the Police Medical Board. Certified permanently unfit for any further duty in the Police Force.’

Laureen had been in the force for a total of six years and five months, including her probationary period. She was first posted to the Mitchelton police station in February 1981, had a stint in the Traffic Branch in Brisbane, joined Gold Coast Mobile Patrols in 1984, and had a year in the Gold Coast Juvenile Aid Bureau before serving in uniform at Southport. Between 1985 and 1986 she performed 101 arrests and issued 239 cautions. She had married Constable M.W. Ireland on 30 January 1982.

The Police Medical Board concluded that Constable Ireland suffered ‘anxiety depression of such chronicity and severity that she is permanently unfit for any duties in the Police Force’. She was discharged from the force on 10 February, the release signed by her father. Laureen had dinner with her parents that night. Her superannuation payout totalled $142,199.64 after tax.

In early March, someone in the force released details of the payout to ALP parliamentary firebrand Tom Burns, and he rose in the House on Tuesday 10 March to probe Deputy Premier and Police Minister Bill Gunn on what appeared to be a generous payout for someone with less than seven years in the job.

While it must have been aggravating to Lewis that his own daughter’s illness, and the superannuation figure, had been put under media scrutiny, it was also a headache out of the blue for Gunn. He had been forced to defend the police department over the
Courier-Mail
story on brothels and illegal gambling dens in January, and now this.

Burns revealed that many police officers told him they were ‘outraged’ at the size of the payout. ‘It would seem to be far above what the ordinary working man would receive in similar circumstances,’ Burns said.

Lewis was forced to comment, and he gave selective interviews to journalists about depression and its impact on everyday police officers. He refused to talk specifically about his daughter. Sir Terence said he would not talk about the matter as it was being ‘canvassed in the political arena’. Similarly, the Queensland Police Union made itself unavailable for comment.

The
Courier-Mail
reported: ‘The issue has divided police throughout Queensland.’

Lewis had always been a lightning rod for media stories by virtue of the nature of his position, but the tenor of the stories now circulating around the Commissioner had changed. There was a slipping of niceties. He was now fair game on matters big and small. Was the Ireland superannuation fiasco a case of nepotism? Or was the young woman simply entitled by law to her payout? Once upon a time, the questions wouldn’t have even been raised. Had Dickie’s front-page story in January made a slight tear in the age-old fabric of the police force and the trust in which it was held by the general community? Had there been an infinitesimal shift in this perception?

It was clear that the Queensland Police Force, at this point, was under siege. But as some police knew only too well, attack was always the best mode of defence. In early March, lawyers Robertson O’Gorman representing Lewis and Murphy in their defamation action against the ABC, issued a warning to the ABC’s lawyers.

Dear Sirs,

We have been informed that your client through its ‘Four Corners’ programme may be screening a programme in the near future, the content of which in part may touch on the material published in the
Nationwide
programmes the subject of our clients’ actions.

This letter is to give you notice that in the event that there is any further publication by your client of any material defamatory of our clients or either of them, then our clients will seek leave of the Court of the trial to introduce this letter on the issue of damages.

Yours faithfully, Robertson O’Gorman [lawyers]

Only the Opinion of One Man

It had been just over two months since
Courier-Mail
journalist Phil Dickie had published his story on Brisbane’s tawdry vice scene and who was behind the mutli-million-dollar local industry, and still there had been nothing but denial from the Bjelke-Petersen government. In the interim, Dickie had sat down for talks with former Licensing Branch officer Nigel Powell, and Chris Masters had concluded much of his research for his
Four Corners
investigation into Queensland crime and corruption.

In parliament, the member for Logan and Opposition Police Spokesman, Wayne Goss, was not going to let the issue fade away. On Tuesday 31 March, he let fly during debate over a second reading of the National Crime Authority (State Provisions) Act Amendment Bill. The Bill sought to remove the Attorney-General from the Inter-Governmental Committee of the National Crime Authority (NCA) and replace him with the Police Minister. The amendment was introduced by Deputy Premier and Police Minister Bill Gunn.

‘My concern and suspicion about this government move arises from the fact that … the government has not given any reason for the change,’ Goss said. ‘The Minister has already shown his lack of commitment to fighting organised crime by his refusal just this year either to act on the findings of the Sturgess Report or to even acknowledge the validity of those findings.

‘I refer in particular to … two organised criminal groups [who] control prostitution in Brisbane in Queensland. Even more serious is the finding by Mr Sturgess that the main offenders have for years enjoyed immunity from prosecution.’

Goss was at pains to point out that these findings were not just allegations being made by the Opposition under the protection of parliamentary privilege. Sturgess was the government’s own Director of Prosecutions whose inquiry had taken over a year to complete.

‘However, Mr Gunn, the Police Minister, dismissed his own Government’s report and the report of his Director of Prosecutions without any hesitation as “only the opinion of one man”,’ Goss continued. ‘I ask honourable members: How can such a Minister be given responsibility for assisting the National Crime Authority in investigating organised crime anywhere, much less in Queensland?’

Goss said his ‘sources’ told him that the problem initially rested with the previous Attorney-General, Neville Harper, who declined to cooperate with the NCA on a specific issue but was persuaded that there was a need for the NCA to ‘come into Queensland on a particular matter’.

Goss noted that ‘the quite proper decision to cooperate, made by the previous Attorney-General, upset certain senior sections of the Queensland Police Force and they are determined to see that it does not happen again … I believe that the attitude of the Government is exposed by its refusal to allow the Commissioner of Police to cooperate with, or to brief a joint committee of, the National Crime Authority.’

It was intriguing stuff from Goss who, in the wake of the Dickie article, was trying to hypothesise a conspiracy. His questions were simple enough: Exactly why did the Queensland Government want to keep the powerful NCA outside the gate? What did they have to hide?

Goss quoted directly from a report of the joint committee: ‘… the Committee was disappointed that it was unable to receive a briefing from the Queensland Commissioner of Police. As Queensland is an important link, such a meeting would have been valuable in completing the Committee’s overview of matters relating to the fight against organised crime throughout Australia.’

Goss read further from the report: ‘One theme which has been stressed by many of the representatives of the law enforcement agencies who have appeared before the Committee is the crucial need for a high level of coordination and cooperation between all agencies involved in the fight against organised crime.’

He said the government’s refusal to allow Commissioner Lewis to appear before the committee was ‘a shame and a disgrace’. ‘The role of the police and, for that matter, that of the Police Minister, have become highly politicised,’ said Goss.

It was a drum that the Opposition had been beating for years. In Queensland, the separation of powers was a myth. And since the late 1970s, Premier Bjelke-Petersen had increasingly used the services of his police force to enable his political will. The closeness between Bjelke-Petersen and Police Commissioner Lewis, too, had been raising eyebrows since Lewis’s famous speech at the induction of new constables at the Queensland Police Academy in 1983. ‘The people of Queensland and the police force owe the Premier a very deep gratitude,’ Lewis had told the congregation. ‘The free enterprise policy of the Bjelke-Petersen government has been responsible for Queensland’s tremendous growth.

‘Irrespective of whether some people agree with the politics, statements or stands, there is a universal respect, even admiration, for the total loyalty he and his colleagues show for what they believe is in the best interest of Queensland.’

To some, the Premier and the police had become indivisible.

Tick, Tick

After a hiatus of several weeks since Phil Dickie’s first report on vice and corruption, the
Courier-Mail
– now under the new editorship of Greg Chamberlin – forged ahead with its investigation into Brisbane’s seedy underworld. On Monday 13 April, the newspaper published another Dickie piece that this time looked into the city’s illegal ‘casinos’. He suggested that as many as six illegal casinos were operating in the city. ‘The owners of both the former and present casinos are Geraldo Bellino, of St Lucia, and Vittorio Conte, of Bowen Hills,’ the article said.