Jacks and Jokers (30 page)

Less than three weeks later Lewis had a meeting with the Premier about the general running of the force and other matters. They also talked about Lorelle Saunders: ‘… Hannigan and 3 P/W seeing R. Sparkes; and P/W L. Saunders being member of the Nat. Party. Premier said to transfer her.’

Lewis didn’t, though. He may have thought back to when Whitrod had transferred him and Tony Murphy to Charleville and Longreach respectively, and how, in the end, it was a tactical error by the former commissioner, giving both men an opportunity to campaign out of sight against Whitrod.

Still, Lewis was concerned about this mythical Committee of Eight and he saw Saunders as a potential problem.

Good Fun at the Belfast

So long as Barry Maxwell was behind the beer taps at the Belfast Hotel, he was assured of an enthusiastic police patronage, especially now that his old friend Terry Lewis was the big boss.

Indeed, the Belfast had many years earlier usurped the former police pub – the National Hotel – since the royal commission into police conduct at the National in 1963–64, and the retirement of former commissioner Frank Bischof.

The shadows that extended from the National Hotel inquiry were long. For some senior police who were involved, it might almost prove a jinx to grace its doorways again. But that didn’t stop the National owners, the Roberts brothers, from drinking at their rival – the Belfast.

‘I met old Rolly Roberts on a couple of occasions,’ says a former manager at the Belfast. ‘He used to come down and see how our business was going. Maxwell didn’t like Rolly.

‘I think I might have seen Herbert and Hallahan in the early days … Murphy and Lewis … I might have seen all four of them up in the old cocktail bar before we renovated.

‘Tony [Murphy] would come in while he was on duty. He’d say hello to Barry and have a couple of drinks. He never discussed police work. Maxwell was always trying to get something out of him; he liked the mystery and excitement of it all.’

There was serious talk, and there was plenty of hijinks too. ‘I’ll never forget one night, Lewis was there and he would have been Commissioner,’ the manager remembers. ‘He had another copper with him. They were walking into the Moon Bar; it had a big round doorway, something you’d see on a spaceship. There were plastic chairs, the latest from Sweden or somewhere. Lewis and this poor copper were standing there [when suddenly] Maxwell went, “Is this real?”, and pulled his [the policeman’s] gun out, full of piss.

‘The copper said, “Mr Maxwell, I’ll have to ask you to give me my gun back.”

‘Tony would stay and I think I might have seen Tony a bit pissed but I don’t think I saw Terry pissed. Maxwell just drank five-ounce beers.

‘I used to appreciate the police coming in. All the detectives used to come there. I’d shout them tea. I said, “You buy the wine and I’ll buy the tea.” I used to pick the most expensive bottle of wine to get some money out of them. I think probably Barry used to shout all the coppers. His father was a policeman in his day. He always used to think he would be a good cop.’

The manager didn’t see much of Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert. He and his wife, Peggy, would sometimes drop by. ‘Peggy always came across as a lady to me, but they told me she was red-headed and fiery,’ the manager recalled. ‘I saw her at a couple of functions they had at the pub.’

While Murphy might not have shared stories of his fascinating life as a top-rate detective with Maxwell, he did with the manager. ‘He showed me this new drug – LSD. It was in a matchbox … looked like bits of blotting paper. He sat and talked to me and told me about different things,’ the manager says.

‘Down on Wharf Street there were the old doss houses full of derros living in there. He told me that they raided one of the houses and found a girl there laying on a mattress naked, with blokes hitting her with drugs and other blokes paying two dollars to have sex with her.

‘There was another case. A murder. A lady, a cockie’s wife, they found her dead and she’d been raped. They shot her eyes out. It was a really bad crime. It might have been out west, out Toowoomba way.

‘Well we were standing in the bar one night – this was shortly after the murder – and Tony was there and he hadn’t slept in two days or two nights. He got a phone call and I always let them come into the office at the pub. He still had half a beer there but he said to his mate, “Let’s get out of here.”

‘They got this guy, the murderer, at Coober Pedy. He was brought back to Brisbane. They charged him with the murder.

‘Tony Murphy said, “We questioned him all the way back and the poor prick kept falling out of the Jeep on the way back.” They must have beat him to get a confession.

‘Tony Murphy was a good cop, he would not let anything rest.’

Lewis has fond memories of Maxwell and the Belfast.

‘Barry Maxwell – we’d met over the years. He’d worked in hotels, he ended up being the licensee down there,’ says Lewis. ‘The police used to go upstairs usually. You could get into, not a corner, but one area of it. When I became Commissioner I used to go down there. Barry would call me to come down to lunch. Sheilagh was a lovely woman. They were nice people.’

Lewis remembers that when he was in the Consorting Squad in the 1950s they’d call into the Transcontinental and have two beers, and then might drop into the Sportsmen and have a couple more there, then go on to dinner. But in the 1970s they remained loyal to Maxwell and the Belfast. ‘A lot of well-to-do businessmen drank there. You wouldn’t have struck any wharfies or painters and dockers,’ says Lewis.

The Belfast and its reputation as home away from home to the Rat Pack was not just confined to police gossip. Word had gone further afield. Licensing Branch head Alec Jeppesen had started taping confidential interviews with SP bookmakers into 1978 and a pattern of police graft and corruption was beginning to materialise. One informant told Jeppesen that Tony Murphy and Jack Herbert were ‘ruthless bastards’ who stressed that bookies ‘pay up or fucking else’.

The informant confirmed that ‘Terry’ and ‘Tony’ drank with Herbert at the Belfast. ‘They all get down there drinking with Terry and Tony and all the boys down at the Belfast,’ the informant said on the tapes. ‘It’s all the same bloody clique, you know.’

One informant talked of bribe money being paid to Brian Hayes, who was promoted to Assistant Commissioner in mid-1978. ‘Brian would take an empty bottle. Take anything,’ the informant said. ‘Well apparently Terry – well I don’t know whether it’s Terry or whether it’s Tony – but they are pushing to get him [Hayes] up. Tony’s a rather ruthless bastard. He’d just cut anyone’s feet from under them.

‘But Terry Lewis, he’s got plenty of principles. He’s not like Tony.’

Hicks Goes to Gaol

On Thursday 21 September 1978, Commissioner Terry Lewis was facing a day of relatively light duties. As was his custom, he was in his office around 7.15 a.m. and first up had a quick phone chat with the parliamentarian Dr Llew Edwards.

He then proceeded to the Greenbank Military Range, the Australian Defence Force’s 4500-hectare live training facility near Logan, 25 kilometres south-west of the Brisbane CBD. There he delighted in a ‘display of The American 180 Weapon System’. Then he enjoyed lunch with friends at the Queensland Cricketers’ Club over at the Gabba grounds in South Brisbane.

As Lewis socialised, Basil Hicks and Detective Saunders drove out to the Brisbane Prison, signed the Prison Visitors Book, were issued passes and then met the prostitute Katherine James near one of the prison dormitories. Hicks and Saunders were finally at the epicentre of the attempt to destroy The Hound’s reputation and his police career.

Hicks had known that Saunders was a good operator and could be trusted from their days working together in Whitrod’s Crime Intelligence Unit.

‘I considered that she was a mature policewoman,’ Hicks later said. ‘There were some young ones there at the depot. I knew that she’d been in the army before she came into the police … I knew that I was exposing her to very, very grave consequences.

‘One, because she was coming over to the gaol with me and she was going to witness something that – well, at that time I didn’t know what she was going to witness. And two, I was going to expose her to a lot of danger, because she was going over there to the gaol.’

Hicks introduced Saunders to James. ‘At first she did not want to talk and after a short while Inspector Hicks left us alone,’ said Saunders. ‘I recall that Inspector Hicks had a tape recorder in his hand but I cannot say whether it was going or not. He did leave me with the tape recorder while I had a conversation with James.’

Saunders told James about the allegation that she [James] had been told by police to say that there were photographs in existence of her and Hicks having sex. ‘I told her he was a happily married man and that this could wreck his family life and that she had better tell us now if it was not true. James told me that the photographs did not exist,’ said Saunders. ‘She told me that she had been approached by [Tony] Murphy … to say that they did exist.

‘James told me that Basil Hicks was too honest and was causing problems and had to be stopped because he arrested people who were being looked after. She told me that she had to do it or they would put more charges on her and this would affect her parole.’

James admitted to Saunders that in the past photographs had been taken of her in a compromising position with a male. That person was not Basil Hicks.

‘Saunders had a conversation with her in which she [James] told Saunders that the whole thing was a set-up and that she’d never had anything to do with Hicks,’ says journalist Ken Blanch. ‘By the time they got back to the city one of the prison officers had phoned Tony Murphy and told them what they’d done at the gaol.’

Saunders returned to the offices of the Regional Task Force, to which she had recently been seconded, and Hicks went back to Mobile Patrols. Hicks may have been satisfied that he had obtained vindication from Katherine James, but their brief visit to Boggo Road would set in motion a sequence of events that would destroy both of their careers in a way so extreme and calculating, and in such abject disregard to human civility and the sanctity of law, that it made the Rat Pack’s previous forays into discrediting people’s reputations look harmless in comparison.

The moment Saunders returned to her office she was confronted by her boss, Inspector Lobegeiger. ‘What the hell do you think you are doing, antagonising them, going out there with Hicks?’ he asked.

Lobegeiger told her she was not to leave the area of the Task Force without his ‘express approval’.

He said all hell had broken loose over the visit to Boggo Road to see James. ‘He then instructed me to inform him of the full details of the visit to the prison,’ Saunders later said. ‘I refused. I told him I was acting under the direct orders of a senior officer and if they wanted to know they could ask Inspector Hicks. I refused to discuss the matter with him any further.

‘He again demanded the names of the so-called “Committee of Eight”. At this point rational discourse ceased and we had a bitter argument over police corruption.’

Word of the prison visit had indeed gotten back to headquarters. The next day Commissioner Lewis recorded in his diary: ‘Mr R[on] Borinetti, H.M.Prison, phoned re Insp B. Hicks and a P/Woman seeing Mrs [James] on 21st and inquiring as to who had visited her.’

On the following Monday, Tony Murphy phoned Lewis to discuss the Hicks and Saunders matter.

Around this time, Hicks bumped into Murphy in the street. ‘He [Murphy] was coming from the CIB building, I presume, downtown, I was going back up to the depot, and we were approaching each other,’ Hicks later recalled. ‘We could see each other from some distance away, and he had a big grin on his face, and I admit I was very angry at that time.

‘He came down the street and … we just about met, and he walked towards me and said something.’

Hicks didn’t quite catch Murphy’s quip. It may have been about the prison visit, but he was so enraged with Murphy he didn’t respond and kept walking.

‘I went back up to the depot, and about … a quarter of an hour to half an hour later I got a phone call,’ said Hicks. ‘[They] didn’t say who they were … but the voice, I’d say that it was Murphy rang me up, and he asked me what was I doing taking the policewoman over to the gaol. Why did I take the policewoman over to the gaol?

‘I said, “I’m minding my own business.” And then he said – I can’t remember the exact words, but [he] asked about her [Saunders]. And he said, “I’ll deal with her later.” That was the end of the conversation.’

And it was the end of Hicks and Saunders.

One Shot to the Head

On Sunday 15 October 1978, Senior Constable Desmond John Connor, stationed in Mareeba, a small town on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland, was enjoying a day off. Connor, 36, had a lot of things on his mind, most particularly the outfall from allegations that he and fellow officers on the Tablelands were involved in the illicit drug trade.

Mareeba, just over 400 metres above sea level and situated where the Barron River meets Granite and Emerald creeks, was garnering a reputation as a drug capital to rival Griffith in New South Wales.

The allegations against Connor and others stemmed from the arrest in April 1976 of Roland Lawrence Magro and Enea Cardelli. Later that year both were convicted of the cultivation and possession of large quantities of cannabis. Magro got five and a half years in prison; Cardelli copped four. Out of that successful prosecution came rumours that there was police involvement. Namely, that police at one time had taken pay-offs from Magro.