Jacks and Jokers (23 page)

The Crown at one point sent over to Fitzgerald a large brief seeking his advice on evidence along with the fee he was expected to accept. Fitzgerald agreed that it was the sort of work that he specialised in, but he rejected the fee. They never briefed him again.

What was common knowledge throughout the old Inns of Court, the MLC chambers and others in the Ansett Building on Turbot Street, however, was the endemic police verballing that had become a virtual fixture of the Queensland courts system. The constant scuttlebutt that began in the era of Police Commissioner Frank Bischof continued apace with Terence Lewis in the big chair. There was verballing and police misconduct, and for whatever reason it was understood by the city’s legal practitioners that this behaviour was to some extent condoned by the courts.

The judges, as everyone knew, were pillars of the establishment. They were members of the Queensland Club.

It was how Queensland worked.

The Boxer

Little red-headed Ian Thomas (Tommy) Hamilton grew up in a Housing Commission home in Nielson Street, Chermside, and was a likeable, rouseabout sort of kid who loved to talk. Tommy could talk all day long.

He went to Wavell Heights Primary School with his mate Peter Hall. Two classes up from him was a boy called John Wayne Ryan. Ryan’s family lived a block and a half away from the Hamiltons, at 43 Unmack Street. ‘Tommy was a real nice kid,’ remembers Ryan.

Ryan used to train for judo at the Railway Institute in the city, and soon Tommy was in there. He’d taken an interest in boxing. ‘He’d be training five or six days a week, he was fanatical,’ remembers Ryan. ‘And he was a pretty good fighter. He was just a little naive.’

As children in late 1950s Brisbane, both Ryan and Hamilton were acquainted with an older teenager, John Andrew Stuart. He in turn knew a man called William (Billy) Stokes from their days in the Westbrook Home for Boys up on the Darling Downs.

By the early 1970s, Hamilton, who had been involved in petty crime as a juvenile, decided to turn his life around. He wanted to go straight, and he saw boxing as a means to that end. So he devised a punishing fitness and traning regime. ‘He would get up early and go for a five-mile run, from Kedron to Aspley and back,’ recalls his sister, Carolyn Scully. ‘He had a job as a builder’s labourer, mainly working as a plasterer, and he’d go to that all day. Then he’d head over to Jack Kelso’s gym and train. He had to train. He had to get fit. He didn’t even smoke, though he might have had some pot on occasion.’

He boxed under the name Ian Thomas, though professionally he was making little headway.

It was Hamilton who had torched the Torino nightclub in the Valley in February 1973 on the orders of Billy ‘The Mouse’ McCulkin. The latter – who had the image of a mouse tattooed on his penis and was an informer to former corrupt detective Glen Hallahan – promised all the perpetrators $1000 for the job. The gang apparently only got half of what was pledged.

‘Tommy boasted to me that he’d done Torino’s,’ says John Wayne Ryan. ‘He told me straight to my face in Kelso’s gym. He wouldn’t shut up about it. I don’t know what he was doing hanging out with a lot of those guys. He was out of his depth. He was smoking a bit of dope and might have been introduced to a bit of heroin.’

Carolyn Scully admits her brother, along with Peter Hall, Gary Dubois and Keith Meredith, did bomb the Torino nightclub at the behest of Billy McCulkin. It was an insurance job, she said.

‘Tommy did blow up Torino’s,’ she says. ‘I bought the gelignite that they used on Torino’s. I walked into Compression Hire Service in Geebung and bought it – four or five sticks. It was done from the inside. They also turned a gas tap on. They knew there would be nobody inside at the time.

‘They got the idea from the movie
The Mechanic
(the action thriller about a professional hitman starring Charles Bronson and released in 1972. The film’s publicity went: ‘In this box are the tools of his trade. He has more than a dozen ways to kill and they all work. They call him the mechanic.’)

‘The boys got carried away. But they all knew each other – John Andrew Stuart, Billy Stokes, Billy McCulkin.’

John Wayne Ryan says Hamilton’s boxing career suddenly improved. ‘After Torino’s his career started to take off, if you know what I mean,’ says Ryan. ‘The fights were done, fixed. He was winning them clean but they were fixed. I think it was done to divert his attention, to get him to stop talking about bloody Torino’s. That’s what went on down at Festival Hall.’

Hamilton’s boxing statistics only partially bear this out. He had two bouts prior to the Torino bombing in February 1973. On 26 March of that year, less than two months after Torino’s went up and just 18 days after the tragedy at the Whiskey Au Go Go, he won by technical knockout against Glen Mackay at Festival Hall. Tommy went on to win four of his next six fights, the last being his Queensland Welterweight championship against the talented, hyper-kinetic boxer Ian Looker on 25 October 1974. He stopped Looker in the fifth round. It would be Tommy’s last fight.

A month earlier, Hamilton’s house at 210 Turner Road, Kedron, directly opposite the Lutwyche Cemetery, had been blasted with a shotgun and the bullet had narrowly missed the boxer. He was showered with timber debris and glass when the shot was fired at his bedroom window.

Police believe the shooting was linked to Hamilton refusing to throw a fight. A syndicate lost $1800 in bets on the fight that Hamilton refused to throw. Tommy had last won against Lyle Law by knockout three months earlier on 14 June.

Then around 10 p.m. on Friday 10 January 1975, Hamilton was drinking with a new girlfriend in a house at Hamilton, not far from the CBD, when an armed intruder marched him outside and drove off.

The man, with a stocking over his head, burst into the lounge room at Hamilton as Tommy and his 17-year-old girlfriend sat listening to records. The couple had dined at the nearby Coral Trout Restaurant before buying a bottle of tequila at the Breakfast Creek Hotel and returning to the house in Atkinson Street. They sat at the dining room table, cut up lemons and drank the tequila. ‘We were both expecting Tommy’s friend [Gary Dubois] to come and pick him up,’ the girl later said. ‘I saw a person walk into the lounge room and that’s who I thought it was. As the figure got closer I realised it wasn’t Gary Dubois. It was someone else.

‘Tommy turned around to see what I was looking at. At that point this person told Tommy to stand up and Tommy did.’ Hamilton dropped the knife he’d been using to cut up the lemons.

The girlfriend later said the man was wearing a flesh-coloured stocking pulled tight over his head and had a pistol strapped with plaster to his right hand and a rifle in his left. ‘I recognised the man as Billy Stokes,’ she said. ‘Stokes whispered to Hamilton and they walked outside to a blue car.’

She followed them out and saw them standing beside the car. ‘Stay out of it. This has nothing to do with you,’ Hamilton supposedly shouted to her. She identified Stokes by his voice, facial features and build.

When the abduction hit the press, Tommy’s mother, Mrs Margaret Hamilton, warned the perpetrators: ‘Unless you tell us what you have done with Tommy it will be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ She said there would be ‘war’ if the abductor didn’t show his hand. ‘He’d better give some indication soon as to what he has done with Tommy. If he doesn’t I will see that he remembers us. You won’t have to print any more. He’ll get the message. And to show just how much I mean it, tell him this: I drove around in a car for five hours on Friday night just looking for one house. He’ll figure it out from there.

‘I am challenging him to come out in the open. If he doesn’t, let him know I mean business.’

Mrs Hamilton and her daughter Carolyn both believed Tommy had been murdered. They and the police also believed they knew who had abducted Hamilton.

After Hamilton vanished, Stokes, who was editor of the
Port News
magazine, started writing about Hamilton and his friends as being part of something dubbed the Clockwork Orange Gang, after the popular and shocking Stanley Kubrick film of 1971 –
A Clockwork Orange
.

Hamilton allegedly walked around wearing a bowler hat and swinging a cane, fashioning himself after the film’s ruthless main protagonist, the teenager Alex. His sister Carolyn Scully denies this was Hamilton’s regular garb. She said he returned from a trip to Sydney and dressed up in black jeans, a grey, purple and green tank top, and a bowler hat. ‘He liked to dress up,’ she says.

Stokes wrote in
Port News
about Hamilton:

As a youth, well before the LSD scene, he was attracted by the bizzare, and the unusual. He was in fact once caught by Brisbane police in the act of driving stolen property away from a break and enter offence by using an ambulance.

Some years ago Clockwork Orange entered the boxing ring, initially as a means of keeping fit – he wasn’t a good fighter but he was always a trier. However, in the past year, in Brisbane’s Festival Hall, Clockwork Orange has surprised all by winning fight after fight.

At present, Clockwork Orange is reported missing, is said to have been abducted at gunpoint from a residence at Breakfast Creek recently. The matter is being treated by Brisbane police as a suspected murder.

In a subsequent issue, Stokes wrote that the most interesting ‘effect’ of his series of stories in
Port News
about the Clockwork Orange Gang and who really bombed the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub was that police made it known to the media they wanted to interview him about Hamilton’s disappearance.

‘Earlier, in Sydney, police had arrested me on a charge of vagrancy regardless of the fact that I was staying at a motel, had $250 in my pocket, was neatly dressed, and had been in full employment for years,’ Stokes wrote. ‘Later, when the charge of vagrancy came up for hearing before a magistrate the police simply withdrew prosecution.

‘Meanwhile, in Brisbane the local police had contacted my landlady and told her that they wanted to search my residence. A search warrant wasn’t necessary. The voice of authority was sufficient and she let them do so when I wasn’t there.’

The coronial inquest into Hamilton’s disappearance and presumed murder was held in Brisbane on 22 January 1978, before Coroner W.J. McKay. At the inquest, a Sydney builder, Thomas ‘Con’ Tziolos, 34, of Coogee, said not long after Hamilton’s disappearance his friend Billy Stokes had turned up in Sydney and asked him if he knew anyone who could repair his car.

Stokes had told him vandals had damaged the vehicle. The car’s front seat had been slashed and according to Tziolos, smelled of human excrement. He noticed the front floor mats had been removed. The court heard Stokes told him he had just cleaned the car.

Tziolos approached his neighbour, motor mechanic John Smith, and said to him: ‘Billy’s got a bit of trouble with his car. Someone’s got in and ripped it up a bit.’ He asked Smith if he knew a good trimmer. ‘It smelled as if someone had been to the toilet in it,’ Smith told the court. ‘It was all hosed out but there seemed to be that smell in the air. Inside, the floor had nothing on it. Even the underfelt was ripped out.’

The inquest was adjourned shortly after it began because major witness William Anthony Stokes had not had a chance to organise legal representation.

Mrs Margaret Hamilton told the court she went looking for her son night after night following his disappearance. She said after her son went missing she received a phone call from a female: ‘Billy Stokes has done to your son what they did in the film
A Clockwork Orange
.’

Stokes had been friends with Hamilton and members of the so-called Clockwork Orange Gang until an incident in 1973. Hamilton and some of his mates had been charged over cannabis possession in Caboolture, and Stokes had allegedly refused to help Hamilton with the bail and fines in excess of $2000.

‘A week after that Billy came around to talk to Tommy,’ says Scully, who lived with her brother in the Turner Road house. ‘They had a fight. Tommy told him to leave.’

Stokes had a telelphone answering machine and recording equipment rigged up in his flat in New Farm. Hamilton and others decided to harass him, leaving obscene messages. ‘Tommy was trying to get him to admit something; I don’t know what that was,’ says Scully. ‘It would have been annoying. It was a bit stupid of Tommy to do it.’

One message said: ‘… listen, Bill. The boys are after you for a while. You are nothing but a common 20 cent slut.’ And another: ‘Hello, could I speak to Bill? This is a recording. You mongrel … I’ll cut your throat and tear your rotten arms out. You bastard. You mongrel.’

Mrs Hamilton supposedly wore her son’s bowler hat to the home of Meredith and Peter Hall at 1 a.m. on the day after Tommy disappeared. She said her former husband had always treated Tommy badly, and had once hit him on the head with a hammer. (His sister confirms that Tommy was treated poorly by his father.)

Mrs Hamilton told the coroner’s court she wrote over 40 poems and sketches concerning her son’s murder and sent them to Stokes who was the editor of
Port News
. Many were published.

Another witness, the mother of Gary Dubois, Mrs Hilma Noonan, said Stokes had made false allegations about her son Gary, Tommy Hamilton, Peter Hall and a man called Keith Meredith having formed this Clockwork Orange Gang.