All Fall Down (54 page)

In 1987, she would have a year that would define the rest of her career. To begin with, a close friend, Senior Constable Ashley Paul Anderson, 29, died from horrific injuries in a motor vehicle accident at around 5.30 a.m. on Friday 26 June. Anderson, grandson to former deputy commissioner Fred Palethorpe, was driving a patrol car along the Nerang–Broadbeach Road when it collided head-on with a Toyota four-wheel-drive. Anderson’s passenger, Constable Ewan Findlater, 20, survived, as did the driver of the other vehicle.

Just one month later, Goldup was the only female officer on a Tactical Response Group raid on a house in Walter Street, Virginia, in Brisbane’s northern suburbs. Police were hunting Paul James Mullin, a criminal wanted for a string of armed robberies, and it was suspected he was holed up in the house. Senior Constable Peter Kidd and Detective Constable Stephen Grant, both 29, stormed the back entrance to the house, hoping to catch Mullin asleep. They reached a bedroom near the front of the house when gunfire rang out. Mullin fired through the bedroom door with a .233 calibre Ruger Mini-14 firearm, striking Kidd. The police officer continued forward, and was hit with four more bullets that penetrated his bullet-proof vest. Grant was also hit.

Another police officer killed Mullin instantly with a blast from a shotgun. Kidd later died in hospital. The murder of Kidd and the death of Mullin had a huge psychological impact on Goldup.

Nevertheless, in late 1987, after Commissioner Lewis had been officially stood down following revelations at the Fitzgerald Inquiry, Goldup was transferred to the Sex Offenders unit. There, she teamed up with Garnett Dickson, brother of former police officer Ross Dickson, who had proved such a headache for Lewis through the mid-1980s.

In Brisbane, despite the almost daily allegations of a vastly corrupt police force coming out of Tony Fitzgerald’s commission of inquiry, over on the south side of the river excitement was building for the impending World Exposition. It was due to open its doors on the last day of April, and wash the city with a modern cosmopolitanism.

The event would attract dignitaries and tourists from around the world, but it was also set to lure predators. ‘Expo 88 was coming around and we got some information from somebody in Juvenile Aid, I forget who it was,’ says Goldup. ‘They called us up and said they had received some information that a group of paedophiles were moving up [to Brisbane], or had moved up, for Expo, and that they were all street performers in the lunch and night-time parades. We decided to go about our business.’

It was, in fact, this specific investigation by Goldup and Dickson, and undercover operative Bob Sawtell, that formed the Paedophile Unit within the Sexual Offenders Squad. ‘Because of the information that was received, something had to be done,’ recalls Goldup. ‘At this stage, when we received this information, we were still working in the old [police] building on the corner of Makerston Street and North Quay, and they said there was not enough room in the Sex Offenders office for us to conduct this paedophile work, so they were going to move us into another office … we thought that was fantastic. But [then] they actually moved us into the stationery closet of the Major Crime Squad.’

Without resources, not even a computer, the unit went to work in earnest on the paedophile allegations. The primary target was a group that went under the name of BLAZE (Boy Lovers And Zucchini Eaters). BLAZE was begun in 1980 by ‘paedophile identity’ Emu Nugent, and was originally called ‘The Australian Paedophile Support Group’. It published a newsletter and had members throughout Australia and overseas. Nugent had been a primary school teacher in Western Australia in the late 1960s and then moved on to become Activities Director for the Children’s Activities Time Society, then a coordinator and storyteller for the Jolly Jumbuck Story Caravan, a community arts project. He changed his name to ‘Emu’ so he would have ‘a talking point with children’, according to a confidential police report.

Nugent was also editor of Australia’s first paedophile newsletter – ‘Rockspider’, prison slang for child molester. The mailing address for BLAZE was in Strawberry Hills, Sydney. ‘It was a group of them who came up to work at Expo, and they were trying to open a chapter [of BLAZE] here in Queensland,’ says Goldup. ‘That’s why we called it Operation Firefighter, because we were trying to put out the blaze.’

The police unit began to make serious headway. For the first time in history, they managed to embed an informant – Sawtell – in a paedophile ring. He lived and mixed with paedophiles, and confidentially recorded conversations. One of the men who crossed the police radar was a public servant who worked, of all places, for the Police Complaints Tribunal. They discovered this man had access to the personal information of every police officer in the force. ‘One of the things that came out with the undercover operation was that they had people in pretty much every area of government and society, so that if anything went wrong they could easily stop it,’ reflects Goldup. ‘They had all of these plants, these people who were involved in it.’

Intelligence was coming through, too, of the involvement of extremely senior figures in the Queensland judicial system. Goldup noted, however, that her superiors were not showing any level of enthusiasm for the unit’s groundbreaking work. All the unit’s data and investigation notes – given no computer was provided – were kept in a four-drawer file safe. Goldup was nonplussed at the indifference of her superiors to the unit’s work. ‘They weren’t taking us seriously,’ she says. The closer she, Dickson and the rest of the unit got to high-profile targets, the colder the place became.

The issue of paedophilia had for decades been a burr for the Queensland Police. It was an activity that the public largely didn’t want to acknowledge existed. And for investigators, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction. Rumours of subterranean paedophile networks comprising high-profile people – judges, lawyers, politicians, media and sports celebrities – were not simply confined to a city like Brisbane or a state like Queensland.

Still, the paedophile Clarence Osborne and his death in the late 1970s had opened a window into this crime that stretched back to the 1950s. The huge volume of files, paperwork and photographs found in his possession would have, at the very least, been fertile material for investigators serious about understanding paedophilia in Brisbane and potentially the people associated with it.

Curiously, no major investigation was ordered into the Osborne case. And it became clear in the early 1980s that the upper end of the police hierarchy were aware of the activities of one of their own officers, Dave Moore, and the likes of radio personality Bill Hurrey and businessman Paul Breslin had come across their radar.

Yet the question always lingered – for a crime as abhorrent as this, why didn’t police and the government take the issue more seriously?

Big Daddy

Just prior to the reopening of the Fitzgerald Inquiry on 1 February 1988, after a Christmas and New Year recess, it was reported that former premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, would be summoned to appear in Courtroom 29. The topic he would be quizzed over would be the appointment of Inspector Terence Lewis of Charleville to Assistant Commissioner, then Commissioner, in late 1976. Similarly, the disgraced public servant and Joh confidant, Allen Callaghan, was also expected to be interrogated about the subject.

It was fact that businessman and Bjelke-Petersen advisor, ‘Top Level’ Ted Lyons, had already been subpoenaed to appear before Fitzgerald. And with suspended Police Commissioner Lewis also due for a second round in the witness box, it seemed that Bjelke-Petersen’s old ‘kitchen cabinet’ was being rounded up to offer what they knew about police, and possibly political, corruption. The New Year hearings of the inquiry disappointed nobody.

On 2 February, just weeks before Lewis’s sixtieth birthday, the bodyguard of Brisbane Chinatown identity and kung-fu master, Malcolm Sue, gave evidence that Commissioner Lewis had been given a ‘Christmas present’ of cash in an envelope by his boss. The bodyguard, who had been granted an indemnity from prosecution, went by the name of ‘Mr Brown’ at the hearings. The exchange of money, he said, happened at a dinner in 1982.

‘I saw Sue putting money into an envelope prior to the dinner,’ Brown told the inquiry. ‘I could see the colour of the money through the envelope. He [Sue] said, “Merry Christmas, Terry.” There was not a lot of surprise, just subdued laughter.’ Brown said Sue referred to Lewis as ‘Big Daddy’. He also named Sue as the head of a criminal network that engaged in everything from drugs, gambling and prostitution to extortion, arson and even murder.

Brown told the inquiry that he had seen both former National Party ministers Russ Hinze and Don Lane at a brothel owned by Sue in Brunswick Street, New Farm, in inner-Brisbane, with a Mr Liu. ‘Mr Liu pointed out the girls inside and said take your pick,’ Brown said in evidence. ‘He [Mr Liu] said he was friendly with the [former] premier [Joh Bjelke-Petersen].’ Brown added that he had seen former racing and police minister Russ Hinze at illegal gambling joints.

Sir James Killen, the former Federal minister, was in Courtroom 29 as legal representative for Hinze. It was an interesting act of symmetry for Killen. As a young lawyer and freshly elected politician in the early 1960s, Killen – who had been friends for years with former detective Tony Murphy and with Lewis going right back to the 1950s – was responsible for leaking confidential immigration documents on former National Hotel doorman John Komlosy to Murphy in the lead-up to the National Hotel inquiry in 1963 and 64. That action had resulted in Komlosy’s credibility as a witness at the inquiry being savaged and ultimately dismissed.

Thanks to Killen, Komlosy’s life was destroyed and his family threatened. He fled back to Europe, penniless, before Justice Harry Gibbs brought down his findings. (In short, there was no evidence of police misconduct.) Now, here Killen was again, in the biggest probe into police corruption since the National Hotel whitewash, defending a National Party minister rumoured to have been manifestly corrupt.

Killen – described as being in a ‘black mood’ – savaged Brown during the hearings. The questioning was so heated that at one point Fitzgerald invited Killen into his office for a private discussion ‘behind closed doors’.

The new Premier, Mike Ahern, was disturbed enough to announce that he was seeking legal advice on the naming of public figures at the inquiry based on ‘hearsay evidence’. ‘The Government is loath to interfere in any way with the proceedings of the commission, but this is a very difficult issue and one which I will take advice from Mr [Ian] Callinan [legal representative for the government at the inquiry].’

The allegations of Brown naturally incensed Russ Hinze. He immediately wrote to 48 National Party members of parliament requesting they discuss the Fitzgerald Inquiry and appealing for ‘justice’. Hinze also wrote to the Party’s management committee seeking their support.

My name has been smeared in the media right across Australia as the result of totally false allegations made in the Fitzgerald Inquiry … I am confident that my legal representatives will do what has to be done to disprove those allegations in the inquiry.

But, I am equally concerned about the political side of what has been happening. It is now 60 days since I was stood down as a minister and I do not want it to continue. What I am seeking is reinstatement to my former position on the basis that I have not, in fact, done anything wrong.

Hinze implied that Mr Brown’s evidence was part of a larger conspiracy to politically damage him. He said he knew the name of the figure behind the ‘set-up’, and was prepared to name him in parliament.

While Hinze may have been aggrieved at the slurring of his good name, and sought the support of political partners, Tony Fitzgerald read Hinze’s move in an entirely different way. On 4 February he attacked both Hinze and Killen, asserting that Mr Brown’s evidence was not hearsay, but direct evidence of identification. Fitzgerald said of Hinze’s statements: ‘It appears to imply that the present witness [Brown] is part of a conspiracy to damage him [Hinze] by perjured evidence … at least, that seems the least scandalous of the possible implications.’

Fitzgerald warned that the inquiry would not be subject to political interference. Deputy Premier and Police Minister Bill Gunn said he was ‘disturbed’ by Hinze’s attempts to have inquiry deliberations debated in state parliament. ‘It’s just not on,’ he said. ‘Quite clearly it’s been ruled in previous sittings that the matter is sub judice until the final Fitzgerald report, and I recall Mr Hinze himself supported this stand, but evidently now wants the rule changed.’

Meanwhile, Premier Ahern finally decided to cease funding the suspended commissioner Lewis’s legal representation. Opposition Leader Nev Warburton said it was ‘about time’.

Up on Garfield Drive, Sir Terence again did not respond to media requests for a comment, and had his wife, Lady Hazel, do the talking. ‘All I can tell you is that if this is true and we are told he will have to pay his own legal expenses Terry will be very disappointed. I suppose we’ll have to work something out.’

The Bagman Bagged

The very sociable Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert was feeling confined and homesick in his bolthole at Kingston upon Thames, south-west of central London. The ancient market town, where several Saxon kings were crowned, was by February 1988 experiencing the full thrust of winter. Herbert and his wife Peggy, stuck in a one-bedroom flat, pined for sunny Queensland.

The couple had been living in the Kingston flat for over six months under the names of Mr and Mrs Niven. To other residents in the five-flat converted home, they were just Jack and Peggy, the friendly Australians on an extended holiday.