Jacks and Jokers (50 page)

He said ‘the card games witnessed by members of the Branch have not been of an unlawful nature, and no evidence has been obtained that any percentage was being taken by the house’.

He said attempts to have agents ‘penetrate unlawful games on these premises’ had been unsuccessful.

The Branch raided 142 Wickham three times between June 1980 and July 1981. Those arrested were charged with the lesser charge of ‘playing an unlawful game’ under the
Vagrants, Gaming and Other Offences Act
because of lack of evidence, as opposed to being charged under the Gaming Act. All of those charged failed to appear in court and bail was forfeited.

In Dwyer’s opinion, he considered the incidence of unlawful gaming at 142 Wickham as ‘not very high’.

‘It is inaccurate for anyone to suggest that a blind eye has been turned to this matter by the police, as the premises have received considerable attention from members of the Licensing Branch during the period I have been in charge.’

In conclusion, Dwyer reported to his Commissioner that ‘unlawful gaming is well contained, not only in the Valley but in other areas of Brisbane’. He also boasted that Brisbane now had only 12 massage parlours, whereas it had peaked at 56 just a few years earlier.

Meanwhile, Nigel Powell, who had taken a short sabbatical in the United Kingdom before returning to the Licensing Branch when Dwyer was in charge, re-entered his work with gusto.

‘The big games weren’t going on at that stage,’ says Powell. ‘But there were a lot of games down the Gold Coast. You only went down there if you were “invited” [by Gold Coast police].’

Anne Marie Tilley and partner Hector Hapeta were building their massage parlour empire, while the Bellino and Conte crew controlled gaming. According to Powell’s police diaries, and by his calculation, there were 16 massage parlours operating in Brisbane at the time of Dwyer’s report. But the young officer observed a turning point in the local prostitution landscape when branch officer Ron Lewis organised a major raid on the Tilley–Hapeta consortium in 1981.

The raid was pencilled in for April of that year. As usual, branch officers were told virtually nothing of the mechanics of a raid until they were physically in the vicinity of the target. In this instance, the men gathered at the branch at 7 p.m. At the same time, Tilley, who had been tipped off, closed her brothels in advance and partied with her employees.

Tilley was summoned to see Dwyer. She was unexpectedly breached and jailed for eight weeks. Meanwhile, Hapeta took off to Melbourne.

Later that year Hapeta came back to Queensland. ‘Tilley copped the charge; somebody had to go,’ says Powell. ‘There was a deal that was done. I am convinced I saw Hapeta come in and see Dwyer [near the end of 1981]. I happened to be there on that night and I saw Hector Hapeta go straight into Noel Dwyer’s office.’

After that, Powell says, he sensed a change. Tilley and Hapeta’s empire took off spectacularly. He was right.

A week after Tilley was released from prison on 5 June 1981, she went in to see Noel Dwyer at headquarters. A deal was struck.

Tilley remembers meeting Dwyer: ‘Ron Feeney and his wife Jenny were coming to Brisbane from Melbourne to see Noel Dwyer about opening a club. This encouraged Hector to do the same. Dwyer said it was okay.

‘I went and saw Dwyer and said, “How come Jenny Feeney can have a [massage] parlour and I can’t?’’

‘ “I’ll send someone to see you,” Dwyer said.’

Dwyer told Tilley that the man he would send would have a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. A couple of days later Tilley was in the lounge room at home in Spring Hill when someone came to the door. It was Vic Conte.

‘I’m not going to work with these Italians,’ Hapeta later told her. Until then Tilley thought Conte and the Bellinos were just nightclub owners in Brisbane and in northern Queensland.

In the meantime, Dwyer made contact with ‘The Bagman’, Jack Herbert. According to Herbert, Dwyer took him aside and asked him if he wanted to make a ‘red shilling’, or kickbacks from prostitution. ‘Dwyer told me Tilley would pay me $5000 a month. He said I shouldn’t worry about the details; he’d look after everything. All I had to do was make arrangements to collect the money,’ Herbert recalled.

Tilley went back to see Noel Dwyer and told him she didn’t want to work with people like Conte and the Bellinos. Dwyer told her he’d send somebody else ‘called Tom’. Tilley was told to wait for a phone call.

When ‘Tom’ eventually made contact they arranged to meet at the Coca Cola factory (a bottling plant in James Street, New Farm) in the Valley. He had a little van.

‘It was Jack Herbert. I always called him Tom. I didn’t know who he was. He spoke with an accent that I had to listen really hard to,’ recalls Tilley.

‘Okay, we will have to do some business here,’ Herbert said. ‘You can open up your places again – and you pay me so much a month.’ Tilley recalls the amount was about $4000 a month.

Herbert said to her: ‘You either pay this and you go and open your businesses and you can stay in Queensland and you won’t go to gaol. Just bring me the little bag.’

They made plans to meet once a month at the same time and place. ‘He would ring and arrange to meet,’ Tilley says. ‘We paid in cash. He had the same sort of humour as me. That’s what it was. They called it The Joke. We never did. But our life was like a joke.’

Tilley was immediately resigned to paying Herbert for protection. She called it the ‘funny money’. ‘It was a shitload amount of money,’ she recalls. ‘Sometimes we made no money. You’d sort of offset it.

‘The nightclub [Pharaoh’s] was making very good money, maybe $5000 to $10,000 a night. One of the parlours might have gone broke. We’d offset it. I had this accountant who reckoned … when I think back, it was absurd. He reckoned that in one year we paid $40,000 in taxation. I just gave that to him in a cheque – there’s $40,000.

‘None of it ever went to taxation. I thought I was sweet, that I’d paid tax. That was it.’

Herbert later alleged: ‘I gathered that Dwyer had been doing business with Tilley for some time and that the reason I was invited into the prostitution side was to pay the commissioner. I had a feeling Dwyer was trying to cover himself – that he was worried we’d find out if he didn’t include us in the system.

‘I took it for granted that Terry would be interested in the money. I told him it came from a respectable businessman who’d just started running escort services and massage parlours. Terry was quite happy about that. I didn’t give him a name and he didn’t ask for one.’

If Herbert was telling the truth, he was proposing, without realising it, a curious historical parallel. In the late 1950s and through the 1960s, Commissioner Frank Bischof had had his alleged bagmen in the Rat Pack. Now, two decades later, this construct was mirrored with Lewis, who having been a supposed bagman to Bischof, now had his own in ex-cop Jack Herbert.

Were corrupt police simply in parity with the Bjelke-Petersen government and, in particular, the mood engendered around the Bjelke-Petersen Foundation and the supposition that it existed to buy favours from government? Wasn’t that another form of The Joke, where favours were bought for cash? Were Herbert, Lewis and company, simply reflecting the zeitgeist?

In Bischof’s day it had been common knowledge that the police, going right to the apex of the pyramid, were corrupt, and a passive Queensland community accepted it and went about its business. After the departure of former commissioner Ray Whitrod, the return of Tony Murphy to take charge of the CIB, the character assassinations of honest police, the apathy towards the Lucas Inquiry and the unending allegations of police and government corruption in parliament by Kevin Hooper, the public remained unmoved. Why?

The Woolloongabba Worrier

Bob Campbell, still stuck in the Woolloongabba CIB after his study leave had been cancelled, was inching towards completing his university degrees and his resignation from the force. The heavy-handedness of the treatment towards him had rightly ignited a level of vindictiveness towards his superiors.

So, in an act of pique and undergraduate rebellion that may have been inspired by his years on the University of Queensland campus, he helped produce a comedic ‘underground’ news sheet that lampooned government and police hierarchies. It was called
The Woolloongabba Worrier
– a small, four-page publication printed on both sides of an A3 sheet of paper and folded in half.

Beneath the masthead it stated: ‘The official organ of the honest Police Officers attached to the Woolloongabba Police Station.’

The Worrier
– which extended to just three editions – was irreverent and cutting. A caption beneath a photograph of the Commissioner, for example, read: ‘The Hon. T.M.Lewis, G.M., O.B.E., B.O., D.I.C.K.H.E.A.D., B.A., Dip. Pub. Admin.’

In one issue there is a small article titled ‘Racing Guide for Doomben’, one of Brisbane’s two racecourses.

Some of the horses in a fictional race included Pee in Ashtray ridden by ‘Big Russ’ [Hinze, the Police Minister], and Graft and Corruption ridden by Tony M[urphy]. In notes on the horses and riders, ‘Big Russ prefers Pee in Ashtray due to its convincing win over Chunda in [the] parliamentary annexe last week’, and ‘Tony M. is convinced that Graft and Corruption is the best bet. Years of experience are behind Tony in his selection.’

Another article spoofs the department’s policing priorities:

In his first statement to
The
Worrier
, the Commissioner, Mr Bjelke-Petersen, stated today that thanks to the sterling efforts of members of the C.I.Branch, there was now a 100 percent clean-up rate on all criminal activity.

The Commissioner, however, denied that the figures only pertained to breaches of the Liquor and Gaming Acts, which are well policed by members of the C.I. Branch.

The Commissioner said: ‘We have not included the figures for minor unimportant activity, which we consider undeserving of Police attention, such as rape, murder, break and enter etc. but certainly include such blatant crime as shoplifting.’

Outside … only minor crime, such as bank hold-ups, balaclava killings and multiple murders are being committed.
The Worrier
praise all these competent detectives for the manner in which they pursue the pensioner shoplifters. Without their competence, our society would not be safe.

The little hand-produced publication caused enough consternation for Lewis to discuss it with the Premier.

An anonymous note sent to Lewis, accompanied by a few editions of
The Worrier
, made a suggestion about what to do with the editors and authors of the newspapers once they were uncovered. ‘The writers need a flogging,’ the note said. ‘Surely some detectives will oblige.’

Campbell’s agitation was working. And he had more to come.

Trisha Traffic is Born

Following Constable Dave Moore’s successful appearances on children’s television, the rest of the city’s media began to take notice. Moore was quick, off-the-cuff and had a disarming style. He was funny and not threatening. There was chatter in the city that Moore was in fact a trained actor and not a policeman at all.

Commissioner Lewis and his team also grasped Moore’s value. He was generating vast and valuable quantities of positive public relations for the police department. Radio 4BC subsequently approached Moore and offered him a slot doing live traffic reports.

‘We had permission to build a little radio studio in police headquarters and we would broadcast live from there,’ a colleague of Moore’s says. ‘He’d put in his two cents worth, he’d talk about issues and things, about police. Police were now getting publicity on TV and on radio every day of the week.’

Soon Moore was asked to appear on the children’s national television program,
Wombat
. Fan mail for Moore started turning up. The show, produced by BTQ 7 out of Brisbane, aired every weekday afternoon, and later on weekend mornings. Moore found his quest for stardom at Channel 7.

‘Seven were good at promoting,’ the friend and colleague remembers. ‘They took him to the Tamworth Music Festival. He presented on stage. There were the huge Christmas programs there. He was a personality.’

Perhaps Brisbane’s biggest radio star at the time was Bill Hurrey, over at the ABC. Hurrey grew up by the Murray River in the little northern Victorian town of Cobram, before the family moved to Papua New Guinea in 1965. By 1969 – just as Ray Whitrod was considering relinquishing his position as PNG Police Commissioner and heading to Queensland to take the top job – Hurrey had begun his radio career with the ABC in Port Morseby.

Hurrey moved to Brisbane in 1972 to study law, working in radio part-time, but dropped out and began regularly reading the ABC television and radio news. He was then in his early thirties.

By the early 1980s he was a fully-fledged star as Brisbane’s most popular breakfast radio host. His knowledge of music was encyclopaedic and his record collection unparalleled. He was also wealthy. He lived in an apartment at New Farm, not far from Fortitude Valley, and he was conspicuous around town in his 450SL Mercedes Benz convertible.