Jacks and Jokers (3 page)

Private investigator John Wayne Ryan was called in to fit out the club’s security. ‘Roland always had the latest technology,’ he recalls. ‘If he wanted closed-circuit television, he’d order the latest from the United States.

‘Roland was a bit of a heavy. He had a reputation. And he was fairly well connected. He had something to do with a couple of coppers and he’d help them out on stuff. Because of the people who were coming into his clubs – magistrates, parliamentarians, lawyers – he had a lot of potential blackmail material. He also had a lot of things on a lot of cops.’

According to Ryan, Short was an associate of both Tony Murphy and former detective Glen Hallahan. He claimed that when Hallahan had been facing corruption charges in October 1972, Short had compiled damaging material on the judge set to hear Hallahan’s case – Eddie Broad. In the end the Crown offered no evidence against Hallahan and the case was dismissed. Hallahan resigned from the force shortly after.

Still, the incident highlighted that Short – though he had a well-known detestation of police – worked with them when required. As for the Key Club, Ryan befriended some of the girls working there and they called on him on several occasions to help them with personal security.

‘I did a couple of favours for the girls,’ Ryan says. ‘They were receiving threats for money. One of the threats came from Glen Hallahan, though he was no longer in the police force. The cops at the Gabba were weighing in too, asking for favours and money.

‘The girls were under a lot of pressure. They were working the parlours by day and then coming into the Key Club at night. Most of the time they were carrying huge sums of money and I’d escort them to their cars. Or I’d grab their money and put it in the night safe. Then when the cops pressed them, they could say to them they were running a bit short on money that night.’

Ryan, who had been intimately connected with Brisbane’s club and vice scene since the 1960s, was walking a fine line. And Brisbane city was more volatile than anyone in the suburbs could have imagined.

Following the supposed suicide by drug overdose of the prostitute Shirley Brifman in her flat in Clayfield, the murder of Jack Cooper, manager of the National Hotel in Queen Street, and the Whiskey Au Go Go bombings that killed 15 people, it emerged that Brisbane had a dangerous underworld.

‘I was walking around with two guns,’ Ryan reflected. ‘I was in the middle of everybody. Billy Phillips [tattooist, petty gangster, stolen goods fence and former informant or ‘dog’ to Hallahan] would give me a hug like I was his brother, but I was keeping an eye out for him pinning my arms and being stabbed by someone.

‘When I helped some of my police contacts, I’d be thanked personally for the work I’d done and wait for my arms to be grabbed and another copper to shoot me. That’s what it was like.’

Detective Saunders

The face of the future of the Queensland Police Force, Lorelle Anne Saunders, a former army sergeant, had joined the force just weeks after the death of brothel madam Shirley Margaret Brifman in 1972. Less than three years later she was appointed by Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod as Queensland’s first female detective. She was just 26.

In a profession dominated by men, the Saunders appointment was big news. SHE BEAT MEN FOR DETECTIVE VACANCY, said one newspaper headline. And another: GENTLEMEN WHEN LAW IS A LADY.

‘Even hardened criminals have been known to melt when arrested by Detective Constable Lorrelle [sic] Saunders,’ a local Brisbane newspaper reported. ‘It’s amazing – they can be really polite,’ Saunders was quoted in the article. ‘You get a hard, rough crim yet he will talk to you, open doors and pull out chairs for you.’

Detective Constable Saunders could also stand on her record. She had a prodigious work ethic, effecting more than 650 arrests and her bravery in the line of duty was evident. In July 1974 a man threatened to blow up a building in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley if he wasn’t paid $10,000. Saunders was used as a decoy. (The extortionist was apprehended before any rendezvous with Saunders.)

Saunders was the embodiment of modern Whitrod reform. He wanted more women in the force and he wanted them in senior positions. It was a measure that he hoped would go a long way towards tempering an old-fashioned, ill-educated and misogynist police force. She was not an ornament but a bona fide detective.

Yet soon after her historic appointment Saunders would upset the Rat Pack, and in particular the legendary detective Tony Murphy. Coupled with her powerful advocacy for women’s rights in the force, a sense of justice and a knowledge of entrenched police corruption, she would soon suffer the same games exercised by corrupt members of the force against perceived enemies – public and professional humiliation, intimidation, direct death threats, concocted evidence, verballing and, incredibly, time in prison courtesy of a fabricated charge that she attempted to secure a hitman to kill a fellow police officer.

Dozens of promising police careers had been destroyed by the Rat Pack and its supporters, but nothing approached the venom directed at Saunders. ‘As long as I can remember I have wanted to be in the force,’ she told a newspaper following her elevation to detective.

As long as she could remember, too, she had had an acquaintance with Terence Murray Lewis. Interestingly, in the first week of his duties as head of the new Juvenile Aid Bureau back in the winter of 1963, Lewis had paid a visit to 25 Alamine Street, Holland Park, the home of a Mrs Lindall Rose Saunders and her daughter, Lorelle, then 15.

Lorelle had been in some minor trouble involving some undesirable young local boys and a teacher at her school, Cavendish Road State High, when the head of the JAB and his sidekick, policewoman Yvonne Weier, turned up to help set the girl on the straight and narrow.

Just over a decade later Saunders would be one of Whitrod’s bright young hopefuls. A decade after that she would be in solitary confinement in prison, wondering where it all went wrong, suspended from duty and awaiting a charge of attempted murder.

Keeping an eye on every movement of her case was her boss, the kindly officer who had come to the door of her family home all those years before, Inspector Terry Lewis.

Politicking

Out west, the campaign against Commissioner Whitrod continued unabated.

Labor Opposition leader Tom Burns was touring western Queensland towns with his private secretary Malcolm McMillan when they turned up in Charleville. Burns, a popular working-class knockabout who had been elected to the Brisbane bayside seat of Lytton in 1972, loved to get among the people. An ALP powerbroker, he had been quickly elevated to leader of the Opposition and in a short time had had some memorable stoushes with Premier Bjelke-Petersen and his National Party cronies in Parliament House. He was quick on his feet and cunning of mind.

In Charleville, they of course made the acquaintance of Inspector Lewis.

‘He came to see Burns,’ remembers McMillan. ‘The essence of the discussion was that [Police Minister Max] Hodges was no good and had to go, and Whitrod was no good and had to go. Lewis was discreet, polite, deferring, diplomatic. Lewis quite clearly understood the make-up of government and opposition.’

The next day Burns and McMillan continued on to Longreach. That night, both men were working late in Burns’ motel room when there was a knock at the door.

‘It was Tony Murphy,’ says McMillan. ‘He apologised for arriving unannounced. He repeated verbatim what Terry Lewis had told us the day before. This was clearly a concerted campaign [against Whitrod] going on right around the state.’

While it was not unusual for members of parliament to meet civic leaders and law enforcement officials while touring rural areas, Murphy’s tete-a-tete was memorable. How did he know precisely where Burns and McMillan were staying that night in Longreach? And what was so urgent that a police inspector felt impelled to track down the leader of a state opposition political party late at night and share his opinions about a minister of the Crown and the number one police officer in Queensland?

The war against Ray Whitrod had become brazen.

In Brisbane, some strange machinations were also at play. Edgar Bourke, a career public servant and staff clerk to the Commissioner of Police, had seen and heard a lot of things since becoming attached to the police department as a young man in 1948.

As Lewis and Murphy were trying to sway politicians in the bush, Bourke was in a meeting with several other colleagues at headquarters when the phone rang. ‘It was Stan Wilcox from the Premier’s Department,’ Bourke recalls. ‘He wanted to know what sort of bloke Terry Lewis was, and would we ask around.’

Bourke says the staff remembered Lewis well from his lengthy secondment to the JAB under former commissioner Frank Bischof. But the call from Wilcox was a bolt out of the blue. ‘We thought Terry was quite good but we had no idea where all of this was leading,’ Bourke remembers.

Incredibly, Premier Bjelke-Petersen was also making secret enquiries about how Whitrod might be legally removed for breach of contract. He ordered his press secretary Allen Callaghan to seek advice on the possibility of terminating Whitrod’s tenure. A memo came back offering Bjelke-Petersen a number of options on how to eject the Commissioner.

Meanwhile, Lewis, on leave in the city several days after meeting with Bjelke-Petersen in Cunnamulla, dropped into the Premier’s Department and added to his private file (# 246) a sheaf of documents. Among other things, the file contained rumour and innuendo about Whitrod that had been gathered from six years earlier: ‘31 August, 1970. Mr G. [Gough] Whitlam visited Mr Whitrod at police headquarters.’ And: ‘On 22/12/70. Inspector Ron Eddington [sic] said the ALP not only liked Mr Whitrod, they love him.’

In the dossier Lewis also included a list of people who could provide glowing character testimonies on his behalf. The list starred two Supreme Court judges, six District Court judges and five members of parliament. Lewis then noted to the Premier: ‘If Mr Whitrod hears I have spoken to you he will immediately engage in the character assassination that he learned so well from his ALP friends in Canberra.’

The irony that Lewis himself was assassinating Whitrod’s character with his secret missives to the Premier seems to have escaped the inspector.

Without Whitrod’s knowledge, and coming from several quarters, the grooming of Lewis for higher rank had begun in earnest.

The Shooter

James (Jim) Slade, from the small town of Kyogle in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, and not far south of the Queensland border, was seemingly born for intelligence work. His great-grandfather emigrated from Ireland and became a New South Wales police officer, one of many who hunted the notorious bushranger Ben Hall in the 1860s. His father, Edward, had worked undercover in Occupied Greece during World War II.

Bearing the laconic traits of a rural upbringing as part of a large Catholic family, Slade moved to Canberra in 1971 and joined the Commonwealth Police before heading to the Document Examination Bureau based at North Head in Manly, Sydney. Over the next three years he became an expert in forensic document examination. He then specialised in photographic intelligence gathering.

When Cyclone Tracy hit on Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day in 1974, police from across Australia were mobilised. The catastrophic storm killed 71 people. Terry Lewis was there as part of the Queensland contingent. So too was Jim Slade, who landed in Darwin on Boxing Day.

‘It was my job to photograph everything that normal police would have done in relation to dead bodies and forensic work,’ Slade remembers. ‘It was also to provide a good visual photographic record of what happened up there. I was up there for a few months. I had a Bolex [camera] and hundred-foot rolls of 16 mm film coming out my arse.’

After Tracy, the ambitious, perhaps impetuous, Slade wanted to move forward with his career. ‘I had a very big interest in intelligence and I really wanted to pursue that,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t interested in political intelligence like ASIO, I was very interested in crime intelligence.’

At the same time he was also raising a growing family with wife Chris; their three children – Tanya, Paul and Mark – all suffered from asthma. A family doctor suggested they move north to the sub-tropical climes of Queensland.

Jim Slade was sworn in as a constable of the Queensland Police Force in late July 1976. He had unwittingly joined a force rife with political in-fighting and low on morale. In addition, the war between the Police Union and Commissioner Ray Whitrod was about to hit fever pitch. Premier Bjelke-Petersen was secretly trying to remove Whitrod, and Inspector Terry Lewis of Charleville was lobbying the Premier and politicians against the Whitrod regime.

Slade, the forensic shooter, had no interest in politics. He was just itching to gather intelligence on crooks, to get out into the field, to work undercover and bring some substantial kills to the table. He was initially posted to the working-class suburb of Woodridge and it was there that he rode out, from a distance, the great battle of Whitrod.

Within months, he would be hand-picked to work in a squad in headquarters that would bring him face to face, many times over, with some of the biggest criminal cases of the 1970s. He would go on to be anointed by none other than one of Queensland’s finest ever detectives, and later one of its most notorious – Tony Murphy.

Town and City