All Fall Down (41 page)

Beer, who would have to have been granted permission by Commissioner Lewis to speak with the media, said police had only witnessed legal card games. ‘I’ve been in the job for a couple of weeks and before then I’ve had nothing to do with gambling,’ Beer reportedly said. ‘I can only say I’ve seen nothing in that time that you could call an illegal casino.’

Beer used the opportunity to defend himself against Hooper’s old allegations, which included that he had once taken a meal up to Gerry Bellino when the latter was being treated in the Wesley Hospital. ‘The allegations that I’m some sort of a friend to criminals is absolutely rubbish,’ Beer said. ‘Why would I have been interested in going to any of these alleged casinos? I’m not even a gambler.’

Another story in the newspaper that day denied that the Brisbane vice scene was run by two organised crime syndicates, as had been reported by journalist Phil Dickie. A week or so earlier the
Courier-Mail
team had organised for a series of questions to be sent to Police Minister Bill Gunn. Upon receiving them Gunn had been so disturbed that he demanded the Commissioner of Police answer them.

‘Gunn didn’t want the police to give the answers to us but he wanted the answers for himself,’ Phil Dickie recalls. ‘He didn’t have a great relationship with Lewis then.’

When the answers to the questions were finally provided, on 5 May, some of them were clearly evasive. In the end, the
Courier-Mail
received a writ from Assistant Commissioner Graeme Parker. In its belated response the statement said dismissively that the term ‘organised crime syndicate’ was ‘something of a modern catch phrase’. It said police had identified the names and addresses of the owners of 12 Brisbane massage parlours. ‘There is some recurrence of two groups of names involved in the different parlours but the names are not limited to these two groups,’ the statement continued. ‘Police priority has been to contain the prostitution industry and an example of success in this aim is that, in 1977, 24 massage parlours were operating, now there are 12.’

The
Courier-Mail
article continued: ‘The department … did not respond specifically about why police had not used a 1980 precedent [of the successful conviction of an uninvolved real estate company for owning premises used for prostitution] against four syndicate leaders who owned and operated multiple prostitution outlets.’

The day before the
Four Corners
program was to go to air, the
Sunday Mail
ran a major front-page story pre-empting ‘The Moonlight State’ and what it contained. It said the program would examine the assets of ‘some wealthy senior Queensland police and former officers’.

‘[Chris] Masters yesterday said part of the Queensland investigation involved digging into company and Valuer-General’s Office records in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and an attempt to find reasons why suspiciously large sums of cash were paid into certain bank accounts.’

Masters himself added: ‘We concentrated on the system, rather than on individual police. We probably will air only five per cent of what we have. That might bring enormous relief to some.’

On the day the show was to go to air, Des Partridge featured a little quip in his popular ‘Day by Day’ column in the
Courier-Mail
. ‘ABC-TV will be guaranteed at least one viewer for tonight’s
Four Corners
program highlighting alleged police links with illegal prostitution and gambling rackets in sunny Queensland,’ he wrote. Partridge wondered if the Police Commissioner, Sir Terence Lewis, would be tuning in.

A police media spokesman answered: ‘You can put a week’s pay on that one.’

A Moonlit Night

At 9 p.m. on Monday 11 May 1987, the ABC’s
Four Corners
program went to air with its usual introduction of a stylised map of the world followed by a cavalcade of what appeared to be official-type documents before dissolving to reveal the show’s host, journalist Andrew Olle.

The program opened with the image of a setting sun before moving indoors, to a strip club, where a topless dancer poured oil over her semi-naked body before a baying crowd of enthusiastic males. It was a fitting opening to Chris Masters’ report, where he alluded to the fact that, despite some ‘wholesome attempts to pretend otherwise’ the Queensland Government had not managed to stop ‘the devil’ at the border.

Wide-ranging in its scope, the hour-long report featured Nigel Powell, John Stopford, and police and prostitutes willing to speak on the condition their words were spoken by actors. Masters told the nation of the workings of the two major Brisbane vice syndicates, of Hector Hapeta, Anne Marie Tilley, Geraldo Bellino and Vic Conte. He even went into history, showing footage of former police commissioner Frank Bischof, a clip from former commissioner Ray Whitrod’s final press conference following his resignation in November 1976, and another conference with the newly crowned Commissioner Terry Lewis.

Stopford went on the record saying he had paid protection money to a serving Queensland policeman. Others said the vice industry could not exist without the involvement of corrupt police. Footage included a
Four Corners
camera crew drawn into a scuffle outside The Roxy nightclub in Fortitude Valley, and the camera being struck to the street.

The crucial evidence, the epicentre of ‘The Moonlight State’, was the link Masters had made between Bellino and Conte, and former Licensing Branch officer Jack Herbert. Bellino and Conte had sold their piano-shaped Bowen Hills property to Herbert. It was on the title deeds in black and white. In doing so, Masters had connected Brisbane’s so-called underworld to the police.

On the night of the broadcast, Commissioner Sir Terence Lewis was up in Garfield Drive, Bardon. He says he has no recollection of watching ‘The Moonlight State’.

‘I made some mistakes,’ says Lewis. ‘Masters … wanted to interview me and I said to him … I said, “Look, Ian [Hatcher from the police media unit], find out … what he wants to talk to me about.” It’s a bit awkward if you go there as Commissioner and they want to talk to you about the rate of crime … and you haven’t got it. But he [Masters] wouldn’t … send us a few questions … then they [Hatcher’s unit] said, “Oh well, all you’ll do is give his program … not validity … give his program air, or whatever, if you go on it, it will attract some attention,” and then I said, “Oh, don’t bother.”

‘But then about one day before it came on they said, “Oh, [it] might be a good idea to go on.” I said, “Look, it’s a bit late now,” but I should have gone on. I should have gone on.’

Lewis says he would have answered Masters’ questions. ‘They were obviously aimed at gambling, prostitution or the Bellinos or that, and I didn’t know any of them,’ he says. ‘Never heard their names … never met Hapeta, never met Bellino, never met Conte, and I think we could have at least given answers.’

(Lewis’s personal assistant, Greg Early, would record in his diary for that night: ‘Saw 4 Corners programme 9 – 10 pm. COP [Commissioner of Police] rang after 10 p.m. re programme.’)

Over at Taringa in the city’s inner west, Tony Fitzgerald, QC, viewed ‘The Moonlight State’. His view of the program probably would have been similar to those of the bulk of the city’s legal community. This had been tried before. Similar issues in the past had bubbled up to the surface and then dissipated. Queensland resembled a dictatorship; it was a one-party state. How could the curtain be torn back?

Still, ‘The Moonlight State’ was a powerful report. In Spring Hill, on the edge of the Brisbane CBD and a short walk to Fortitude Valley, both Anne Marie Tilley and Hector Hapeta were settling back with a drink, watching
Four Corners
. ‘I was already drunk,’ says Tilley. ‘I was told about it the day before, the week before … We were a little bit dumb in certain ways, people saying we’d be right. I saw [Commissioner] Lewis in an interview. I thought, shit, you’re my boss? I thought, this is going to get very bad. Hec was the same when it all came to a shovelling halt.’

Former Licensing Branch officer Nigel Powell, who had been interviewed by Masters for the program, watched the show alone in his bungalow off Prospect Terrace, Highgate Hill. Powell, by coincidence, lived just three streets up the rise from the home of notorious tattooist, criminal and police informant Billy Phillips. It was also two streets away from the house in Dorchester Terrace where, in 1974, Barbara McCulkin, wife to criminal Billy ‘The Mouse’ McCulkin, and her two daughters vanished without a trace and were presumably murdered.

Powell was more than a little concerned. He had no idea what Masters had put in his investigative report. He studied the program on his tiny box television in his kitchenette. ‘I didn’t realise how good it was going to be,’ says Powell. ‘I’d made my decision to talk to Masters. I figured I’d be safer if I went public. If they went for me now I thought I’d be protected by the publicity. I didn’t know if they knew where I lived. I watched it and waited.’

Courier-Mail
journalist Phil Dickie had been covering a flood in Lismore in northern New South Wales, and returned to Brisbane in a Channel Nine News helicopter late that Monday. He made it down from the television station at Mount Coot-tha to the Bowen Hills office of Queensland Newspapers just in time to catch Masters’ report.

‘Oh, I thought it was a magnificent bit of, you know … current affairs,’ says Dickie. He wrote later that its impact was ‘devastating’, particularly the Herbert connection.

‘I’d looked at all their properties,’ says Dickie. ‘Because I wasn’t immersed in Queensland police history it [the Herbert connection] didn’t mean anything to me. So, you know, that’s something that
Four Corners
uniquely brought into it, you know, there is this additional character … I didn’t have that.’

John Stopford, the former escort agency operator and driver for escort king Geoff Crocker, was at home that night in Amity Point on North Stradbroke Island, rugged up in the town’s former old post office that he was renting as a residence. ‘I watched it alone,’ Stopford recalls. ‘I didn’t sleep that well.’

His young son Jay was fast asleep. ‘I had an intuition something was coming, but I suspected it in the way of the local sergeant,’ Stopford says. ‘I got a phone call from Brisbane, I’d like you to come down, or some crap like that.’

When ‘The Moonlight State’ finally went to air, Jack and Peggy Herbert, over in Jordan Terrace, Bowen Hills, were not particularly concerned about Masters’ report. They of course knew it was coming. Herbert had received a telegram from
Four Corners
a few days earlier, telling him about the program and informing him that he would be featured in it. The telegram referenced his house purchase off Bellino and Conte. It also asked him of his relationship with Commissioner Sir Terence Lewis.

‘There was a reference to an anonymous policeman collecting $500 from a massage parlour,’ Herbert recalled in his memoir. ‘I felt that [reporter Chris] Masters was fishing. He didn’t have enough to hurt us.

‘When the program was over I told Peggy not to worry. “It’ll blow over,” I said. “It always does.”’

ABCI intelligence officer Peter Vassallo was at home with his wife Kerrie in their townhouse in the Canberra suburb of Cook, just north-west of the heart of the capital. That afternoon, Vassallo had told key staff at the ABCI that the program going to air was imminent, and ensured that it was taped. But at home, leading up to the broadcast, he was uneasy. So was his wife. ‘I watched it and kept going, “Fuck, fuck”,’ says Vassallo. ‘Chris had put it together so well. I was beside myself with excitement.’

In Sydney, Masters went to producer Shaun Hoyt’s house for dinner, and they watched the program together. His diary recorded that he was back at his home on Sydney’s North Shore by 12.15 a.m.

Masters, however, was up at 5.45 a.m. the next day. ‘Woken by my own blood pressure,’ he recorded in his diary.

Manhunt

By the break of dawn the following day, single father John Stopford had been identified as a whistleblower. His target had been corrupt Queensland police, and he’d cleared his conscience on a national television program.

In the small, close-knit township of Amity Point, the locals didn’t stick their noses into your business. Live and let live. But when there was a problem, they all pitched in together. Now one of their own, Stopford, had aired the dirty linen of some very dangerous people, and he was vulnerable in the old fibro post office in the heart of Amity, opposite a clutch of holiday cabins known collectively as the ‘Fishing Village’.

On the morning of 12 May, in the wake of ‘The Moonlight State’, the caretaker of the ‘Fishing Village’, Ralph, took the short drive to Dunwich for supplies. He headed for ‘The Chook House’, a small building in Ballow Road that housed the ‘Dunwich Buffalo Memorial Club’, the only place you could buy takeaway alcohol in the area. Ralph hit Dunwich at about 10.30 a.m., just in time to see a police helicopter coming in to land on a local football oval. The chopper was greeted by the local sergeant in his four-wheel-drive police vehicle.

‘Obviously, he [Ralph] saw “The Moonlight State” and as he’s got into Dunwich he sees this helicopter coming in to land,’ says Stopford. ‘So Ralph rings his [teenage] daughter [at the Fishing Village]. I didn’t have a phone. He told her, “Go and get John, hurry up. Go and get John.”’