Jacks and Jokers (53 page)

‘Well I did put it in for a while … my wife was always … shaky … and she said, look, I’d sooner have it in the Credit Union where we know it’s safe. We may have left it there [with Rothwell’s] about 12 months.

‘… and the only other time, he said … gold copper would be a good thing for investment … which I did do … and the shares were 30 cents each and they’re worth five cents each now …’

The Bikie Bandits

In the early spring of 1981 Brisbane was held both shocked and gripped by a spate of daring armed hold-ups across the city and on the Gold Coast. The strikes on banks began in July. By the third week of September the culprits had hit seven, and absconded with tens of thousands of dollars. Because the robberies all involved two men on a motorcycle they were dubbed by the press the Bikie Bandit Hold-ups.

In a raid on the Commonwealth Bank in Alderley on 11 September, an elderly customer nearly collapsed during the robbery. ‘I was just putting my pension cheque in the bank,’ Robert Drew, 69, of Bald Hills, reportedly said. ‘Then this bloke with a gun said, “Get over to the wall.”

‘I went over and heard him say, “Fill the bag up.” Then I had one of my spells and had to sit down. I reckon my old heart was beating 100 a minute.’

The Bikie Bandits – on a high-powered motorcycle – continued the spree into October, robbing the National Bank at both Newmarket and West End and the Commonwealth Bank in Paddington in the inner-west of the city. They variously used pistols and sawn-off shotguns.

Police expressed a fear that someone could be shot in future hold-ups. As for the banks, they held unilateral meetings to discuss new security measures in the wake of the Bikie Bandits. Crime Prevention Bureau head, Detective Senior Constable John Hopgood said ‘public apathy’ was assisting the bandits in eluding arrest. ‘When an armed robbery occurs it is just impossible in most cases for bystanders to see nothing,’ he told the press. ‘Any police force needs information to function. An apathetic public makes our job so much harder.’

In the early hours of Thursday 19 November, detectives perpetrated a series of coordinated dawn raids on houses across Brisbane. Two suspects fled in a car and following a high-speed chase through the streets of genteel Ashgrove were arrested at gunpoint. They were Alfred Thompson, 21, unemployed, of Spring Hill, and Steve Kossaris, also 21 and unemployed, of Ashgrove.

The men were taken to the watchhouse and put in separate cells. According to both men, that night they were allegedly taken into a room in the watchhouse where they would make statements to police.

‘You both look pretty sick,’ a detective told the two heroin addicts. ‘I can give you something to fix you up.’ The officer then allegedly directed another detective to go and get some heroin for the two defendants.

The senior detective then allegedly told both men: ‘You will have to snort the horse’ – inhaling, as opposed to injecting. They refused and a syringe was retrieved.

Thompson alleged a detective ‘… then held my arm while I injected. The heroin was a very good quality. Kossaris then injected himself.’

Meanwhile, the public defender’s office sent down two young lawyers to interview Thompson and Kassaris. On completion of the interviews with their clients the lawyers met up again. One said to the other: ‘I’ve just heard the most extraordinary story I’ve ever heard.’

The lawyer said his client had told him that police had given him a fix of heroin before he wrote down his formal statement as dictated by police. The other lawyer, incredulous, replied: ‘I’ve just had the same experience.’

If true, it gave new meaning to the word ‘verbal’. Both men faced a total of 26 charges.

The allegations that police provided heroin and needles to the two men in order to facilitate a confession would not surface until Thompson and Kassaris’s trial in the spring of the following year, but it would ignite yet another crisis for Commissioner Lewis and his boys in blue.

Our Bent Friend

On the morning of 18 December, another letter from the ‘crazed gunman’ of 1959, Gunther Bahnemann, appeared in Commissioner Lewis’s in-tray.

Bahnemann, it transpired, had been to see Tony Murphy in his office in Cairns and had shared some intelligence on the drug scene in Far North Queensland.

Gunther told his former foe that he had recently turned 61 and was as fit as a fiddle. He said whenever he saw Commissioner Lewis on television, he couldn’t help but notice that the top cop never seemed to age.

‘You know, Terry, our “bent” friend Glen [Hallahan] would have sprouted wings had he been in your seat, in fact, he would have been TV’s crowning star with a “Kill Sheet” of endless dimensions,’ Bahnemann quipped.

He detailed his meeting with Murphy. ‘A couple of months ago I had a session and my wife as well with Tony Murphy in his office, subject marihuana plantations and Cape York in general,’ he wrote. ‘It so happens that up here I am known as an authority on Cape York – offshore, inshore, and interior-wise of this last bit of wilderness.

‘Ten years of pearling along the cape coast, croc shooting in the off-season and in 1950 guiding the American Archibald Expedition from the top to Cooktown, having been wrecked twice on its shores left its mark. A professional navigator, its geographical ramifications stay fixed in my mind to day [sic].’

Bahnemann shared his opinions on likely locations of drug plantations with Murphy. He identified the Portland Road area, the Pascoe River, Packers Creek, Lloyds Bay and Cape Grenville. ‘I feel Princes [sic] Charlotte Bay is the southern trading post provided by trawlers,’ Bahnemann added.

It was an extraordinary supposition on the former German war hero’s part. Princess Charlotte Bay was close to Jane Table Mountain, the precise location where drug importer John Edward Milligan had scrambled about in the wilderness searching for two large packages of heroin dropped from a light aircraft in the 1970s.

Bahnemann couldn’t have known that their ‘bent’ friend, Glen Patrick Hallahan – the man Bahnemann had been convicted of attempting to murder in late 1959 – was Milligan’s partner in the drug shipment.

‘Tony Murphy thinks along my lines, however, geographically and environment-wise he is not too informed, there is a vast difference viewing it from a helicopter or traversing it on the ground,’ Bahnemann added.

He ended the letter cheerily. ‘All the best for now, Terry, write if the subject is of interest to you. Best of luck. Gunther.’

The Full Fowl

At around 2 a.m. on Friday 18 December 1981, the phone rang up at Garfield Drive. It was Sir Edward Lyons, chairman of the TAB and trustee of the National Party. He was in the city watchhouse having been detained for suspected drink driving.

Earlier the previous night, Commissioner Lewis and his wife, Hazel, had attended a variety of Christmas functions, one being a cocktail party at TAB headquarters at 240 Sandgate Road in Albion, just north of the CBD. Lewis went on to a Police Union dinner, but ‘Top Level’ Ted had cocktailed on.

Lyons left the party around 1.20 a.m. in his Rolls-Royce and headed across the Story Bridge and onto the South East Freeway heading for his home in Holland Park, just south-east of the CBD.

Sergeant Lennie Bracken and Constable First Class Carmichael were travelling on the freeway in a squad car and noticed the Roller being driven erratically. Lyons was pulled over. When he refused to take a breath test, he was driven back to the watchhouse. Once there, Kathleen Rynders of the Breath Analysis Section certified that Lyons had a blood alcohol content of .12, just under twice the legal limit. His breathalyser ticket number was D57106. Carmichael started writing out a regulation Bench Charge Sheet.

Lyons, 67, asked officer in charge, Inspector Dante Squassoni, if he could make a telephone call. The phone soon started ringing in Lewis’s home.

Lewis asked for Squassoni to get on the line. According to Squassoni, Lewis told him: ‘You know he’s Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s right-hand man … surely you can do something.’

Squassoni got the impression Lewis wanted the charge dropped. Then Bracken got on the phone, and Lewis said: ‘Other than my mother, Lyons is the only bloke I’d like to do something for … take him home.’

Lewis’s diary recorded: ‘At 2am Sir Edward Lyons phoned re detention for suspected UIL. Spoke to Const. Carmichael, Insp. D. Squassoni and Sgt. L. Bracken.’

Carmichael later claimed either Squassoni or Bracken told him to forget about the incident, and he threw the Bench Charge Sheet and breath analysis certificate in a waste paper bin. Bracken wasn’t happy with the result, and told Lyons to drive himself home, he and Carmichael following the Roller to Holland Park. Lyons asked them in for a cup of tea. They declined.

A young constable, Brian Cook, retrieved the documents from the bin and handed them to Senior Constable Bob Campbell, who then passed them on to the tearaway MP Kev Hooper. Hooper, in turn, immediately leaked them to Ric Allen at the
Sunday Mail
newspaper.

That Friday Lewis recorded nothing in his diary about Lyons’ predicament even though he had several conversations with his Minister, Russ Hinze. But on the Saturday, he got in touch with Hinze and Bracken again, probably following queries from the journalist Allen.

The
Sunday Mail
ran its extraordinary scoop on page one the next day: KNIGHT FACES DRIVE CHARGE.

Ric Allen wrote that Lyons had been detained by police over suspected drink driving ‘but was not charged or arrested’. ‘The Police Commissioner confirmed this yesterday, but denied any “cover-up”.’

Lewis, through a spokesman, said: ‘Sir Edward had to fly to Sydney on urgent business but he will appear in court on the drink driving charge offence.’

The newspaper pointed out that Lyons had not appeared in the Magistrates’ Court on Friday and that no record of the incident could be found in the Brisbane watchhouse log book. Lewis said Lyons would be charged by summons.

On the day the newspaper story appeared, Inspector Squassoni was told by Lewis: ‘Make sure Carmichael takes out a summons and make sure he is aware this was the intended action all along.’

A report in the Brisbane
Sun
carried the headline: TOP LEVEL TED – FULL AS A FOWL.

The Attorney-General and Justice Minister Sam Doumany immediately ordered an investigation. Hinze said he would have nothing to do with an inquiry into the Lyons matter. Lewis ordered a separate investigation into how the Lyons documents found their way to the media. Constable Cook, who had originally plucked them from the trash, was transferred to Longreach.

Lewis recalls that the issue was blown out of all proportion: ‘I’d been to two functions and I think I got home about 11 o’clock or something, again I’d have it written up. Two o’clock in the morning I think it was I got a phone call and I’d had the two functions, I’d had one or two drinks.

‘It was the watchhouse, saying he [Lyons] was there, [he’d] been pinched. Little shithouse, too, of a sergeant, the police officer.

‘Ted Lyons must have spoken to me too, so they both spoke to me to say that he’d have to be in Sydney that morning for his … somebody sponsored him. Katies or something that sponsored some art award [the Archibald Prize], and he had to be down there to present it and he had booked on the six o’clock flight or something.

‘So I said to this young fellow, which was permissible, “Can you arrange for him to be released?” But they released him without charging him, which is again okay, I mean you can summons a person.

‘But why would I tell them to blood test him or whatever it was … to take his reading before releasing him? I would have said let him out, but they took whatever his alcohol content was, made a note of it, then released him to go and then some policewoman, she came in after that and found out that morning or the next day that they had released him.

‘They made a great big story of it, and of course he was summoned to appear before the court later but it appeared that I had said, “Let the bastard, let the fellow go.” And you can’t do that. I mean if they’re at the watchhouse and every bugger and his dog knows it. So they made a great song and dance about that.’

The story quietly fizzled, but it resonated with Senior Constable Bob Campbell. He was fed up with what he perceived was rampant corruption in the force.

On Wednesday 23 December Lewis noted in his diary: ‘… saw Const R.J. Campbell re transfer and resign. from 28.2.82.’

Had Lewis and others discovered that he had passed on the incriminating Lyons documents to Kev Hooper?

Campbell himself prepared a confidential 11-page statement, witnessed and signed by a Justice of the Peace, to protect himself.

The next Sunday, Commissioner Lewis and Hazel were down at Hinze’s Waverley Park horse stud at Pimpama, on the Pacific Highway 30 kilometres north of Surfers Paradise, for lunch. The stud was Hinze’s crown jewel – 24.28 hectares of training tracks, stables, squash courts, pool and staff quarters. The Hinzes lived in a two-storey mansion on the property, guarded by two trained Rottweilers.

Lewis’s diary revealed: ‘… spoke to him [Hinze] re Campbell preparing report to Chief Justice re Abuse of Office …’

Lewis had some time off in the New Year, taking lunch at Eddie Kornhauser’s Paradise Centre in the heart of Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. Kornhauser was a close friend of Russ Hinze, and at the time was being interviewed as a prospective applicant to build Queensland’s first legal casino on the coast.