All Fall Down (35 page)

The Slush Fund

Despite intimations that there had been a government conspiracy surrounding the highly damaging public funds affair involving the Premier’s former press secretary and advisor Allen Callaghan and his wife Judith, or Mrs X as she became known, the latter’s trial didn’t get to court until August 1986.

In effect, the whole sorry affair had been lingering since December the previous year. And although allegations of corruption had been thrown against Bjelke-Petersen, the National Party and the Queensland police year after year, the Callaghan matter seemed to have finally united the public in their perception that there was something foul about the long-standing government.

Here was one of the government’s most powerful officials, along with his wife, misappropriating public money for personal pleasure. And the court would hear that this was practically done with relative ease, given that the affected government committees had not been audited for many years. This was a story not just about personal greed, but also about government accountability. In this instance, the rumours were made solid with fact.

‘It didn’t do the government any good,’ Allen Callaghan admits. ‘I had a poverty-stricken upbringing. The cookie jar was too attractive.’

On Friday 22 August, Judith Callaghan arrived at the Brisbane District Court in George Street with her husband. They passed the bronze statue of Themis, Greek Goddess of justice, and the waiting media, and proceeded upstairs to Court Seven.

The court heard that Judith had opened a Commonwealth Savings Bank Account on 25 May 1981, and called it the Queensland Day Dinner Account. She was its sole signatory. Subscriptions for the lavish annual Queensland Day Dinner were paid into that account, deposited by Judith’s secretary Lisa Bryan. Bryan said Callaghan referred to that account as the ‘slush fund’.

Another account – the Queensland Day Sponsorship Account – was opened on 13 August 1984. Again, Judith was the sole signatory. The Crown said Judith used the account to conceal sponsorships given to the Queensland Day Committee, one of which was from the Queensland Film Corporation, run by her husband Allen.

The court heard that Judith said records in relation to the sponsorships were contained in files that had been removed by Hank Coblens, the auditor found dead of a shotgun wound in October 1985. Coblens had begun auditing the Queensland Day Committee before his death. She told the court that she had given Coblens the documents as he was leaving her office after an interview on Thursday 3 October. (Judith Callaghan’s office was a beautifully appointed space in the old Treasury Building. It had a marble fireplace and a large balcony that overlooked the Brisbane River. She had a keen interest in bronze sculptures.)

Coblens went missing the next day, his body found in his car in Victoria Point on Saturday 5 October. Judith said she did not work on that Friday, but returned to her office on Monday 7 October, and found a note from Coblens saying he had taken information required by him. She said she had given Coblens a transaction file – the only record relating to the sponsorship account.

Crown Prosecutor David Bullock said that that file had never been found. He told the court the maximum gaol sentence for Judith Callaghan’s offence was ten years. She pleaded guilty.

On Wednesday 27 August Judith Callaghan was sentenced to 30 months in prison, with a recommendation she be paroled after three months. Judge McGuire ordered she be detained in the prison hospital for the duration of her sentence in Boggo Road Gaol; she suffered severe asthma.

The Judge gave her credit for pleading guilty and vowing to pay back the stolen money, but added: ‘If offences of this sort are treated lightly by the court public confidence in the administration of the criminal justice system could be shaken.’ He said her actions had, by association, smeared the names of fine men like Sir David Longland and Leo Hielscher. ‘They have been betrayed by your perfidy,’ he said.

Her husband Allen reportedly said outside the court after Judith’s sentencing: ‘She’s been through hell in the last year.’

The
Courier-Mail
reported on Judith Callaghan’s decline and fall. It wrote that a prison hospital bed in Boggo Road was a long way from ‘the Fountain Room Restaurant, the most elegant and priciest of the Cultural Centre eateries where Callaghan, despite her salary of only $27,000 a year, lunched frequently’.

The newspaper described her office as ‘a kind of salon, replete with fine paintings, huge bowls of flowers and polished antique tables; the kind of place attuned to the acquired tastes of an up-market personality with, it is said, a sense of history. Here Judith Callaghan could be at her often imperious best, besieged by the well-heeled or the well-connected.’

With Allen Callaghan’s charges yet to be heard before the courts, there was an unusual by-product to the scandal. Quentin Dempster reported that the government appeared to have lost the loyalty of the public service in the wake of the affair, to the extent where ‘confidential and highly damaging information is being posted, hand-delivered and telephoned to the Opposition and sections of the media’.

The Callaghan fiasco had opened a portal to disgruntled public servants. They also happened to be the keepers of government business – and secrets. ‘What started as a trickle of information has turned into a steady flow,’ wrote Dempster. ‘The latest revelations included the intervention by the Primary Industries Minister, Mr Neil Turner, to order a $145,000 carry-on loan to drought-stricken grazier and National Party officer Mr Michael Behan against expert financial advice. And last week the Sports Minister, Mr McKechnie, was caught off-guard when Mr Warburton revealed through question time that a fraud inquiry was underway in his Sports Department. Apparently no one had told the Minister of this.’

An insider also leaked the size of the Bond Corporation’s defamation settlement with the Premier over a 1983 television current affairs report. The sum looked like being about $400,000.

With an election looming, the Bjelke-Petersen regime had an image problem it had to fix, and fix quickly. For the ALP, they had been gifted a theme for their campaign – government corruption.

Meanwhile, stories started filtering out that Judith Callaghan was leading a privileged life in Boggo Road. The government immediately denied a newspaper report that two sick female prisoners had to be moved out of the hospital because Callaghan had allegedly demanded a ward to herself. The Brisbane
Telegraph
wrote: ‘Jail sources said Callaghan’s request for her own silk pyjamas to be brought to the jail was rejected and she was issued with prison night attire.’ Furthermore, ‘a transsexual prisoner delivering Callaghan’s breakfast on her first morning in jail threw an orange at her when Callaghan demanded she be given juice in a tumbler’.

The Marble Man

In Far North Queensland, a local business was seeking state government assistance to take their dream one step further. The Vince Bellinos, both senior and junior, requested funding to help build a processing plant for their marble mine at Chillagoe, 200 kilometres west of Cairns.

Global Marble had, in just two years, exported quality marble around the world. The company’s mine had been officially opened by Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. ‘We have invested about $5 million to date,’ Vince Junior told the
Courier-Mail
newspaper. ‘Now we are seeking State Government help to set up a factory in the north or south of Queensland to get the marble to the final, finished stage.’

He said the processing factory would be located in either nearby Mareeba or in the Brisbane area. He projected that the plant would employ more than 150 people. Vince said: ‘… until this point we have only been discussing it over the phone with government officers.’ He revealed that the Chillagoe marble had, in fact, been found by accident. In their spare time the Vince Bellinos, who ran the House on the Hill nightclub in Cairns, loved fossicking for stones. Italian relatives visiting them asked about some samples of white and pink crystallised rocks in their collection. Where had they found them?

The article read: ‘The Bellinos retraced their steps to scrub country just outside Chillagoe … Today, that rock-dotted scrub is the site of a mine which is producing thousands of tonnes of top-quality marble for export.’

The family hobby soon developed into a company, and within two years Vince Bellino, with his wife Raelene, had exported $1.5 million worth of marble to Italy for processing. Vince Senior, 53, who had worked with marble as a young builder in Italy, was the company’s marketing manager. They claimed Chillagoe marble had been ranked some of the best in the world, and they had colloquially named a number of coloured marbles Pink Coral, Coral Rosa, Yellow Mango and White Koala.

‘Different veins run into the quarry and we follow the veins,’ Vince said. ‘In Carrara [Italy] for 2000 years they have gone down hundreds of metres. We will keep following the marble and keep going down.

‘We have had a lot of heartaches at this stage,’ he added. ‘We are still struggling as a small company, but we will make it. We keep together as a family and we stick it out.’

The Bluff

Down in Canberra, intelligence analyst Peter Vassallo, author of the Alpha Report, was still concerned for the safety of his mate Jim Slade, who had been shunted off to the ‘punishment’ station, Beenleigh, south of the Brisbane CBD. Slade was performing his duties, but his Operation Trek – an intensive investigation into the North Queensland drug trade – had proved to be almost too thorough, and had been shelved. It had also become clear, since the release of Vassallo’s Alpha Report, that the two men were exchanging information.

This was anathema to the Queensland police hierarchy who would not tolerate outsiders sniffing around the Sunshine State.

Vassallo decided to test the waters. After his briefing of Bjelke-Petersen’s Cabinet the year before, he had returned home to Canberra and verified within the bureau that there were no records of any criminal offences against any of the Bellino family. There were also no photographs.

Vassallo decided to ask one of the ABCI’s Queensland representatives to contact the Queensland Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and ask for background material and photographs on Antonio, Geraldo and Vincenzo Bellino. It was a standard query. The ABCI wanted to update its records. It was something that was done all the time.

‘So, I went to my mate – a lovely fellow and no question about him being straight up and down – and I just simply said to him, “Mate, will you do me a favour? Could you ring the [Queensland] BCI and let them know that we haven’t got any criminal records on the Bellino brothers?”’ Vassallo recalls.

His colleague in the Canberra office made the call. No less than 15 minutes later he called Vassallo into his office.

‘What have you fucking done to me?’ he asked Vassallo.

‘Why?’ Vassallo was curious.

‘[The] Bellino brothers … do you know who just rang me?’

‘No.’

‘Graeme Parker.’

Parker wanted to know who had been asking for the records and photographs of the Bellinos. The young officer replied it was Peter Vassallo of the Alpha project. Parker further allegedly said that if Vassallo needed any information like that, he should notify Parker directly.

Vassallo’s co-worker was concerned by the response he had received from the top levels of the force. He asked his friend what was going on. ‘I don’t need this shit,’ Vassallo recalls him saying.

The Big White House

By the mid-1980s Terry and Hazel Lewis were well underway with the construction of their new house in Garfield Drive. ‘I was getting older and we thought, we really do love it here, what about we try and get a decent house built here?’ Lewis recalls. ‘It was an old wooden house and it always worried me with the kids. You think, you know, is it going to ever catch fire or anything?

‘Anyway, I knew [architect] Robin Gibson very well, he was a lovely fellow … and he said “Oh, I’ll draw up a plan”, so he did. We used to meet each other. He didn’t even charge anything for it.’ (Gibson, before his death in March 2014, said he had indeed designed the property at 12 Garfield Drive for the Lewises, but would have had to ‘check my records’ to see if he did or didn’t receive any remuneration for the job.)

It was a substantial project. The old timber house was removed from the steep property site and the work started from scratch. Lewis managed to convince the government to allow him and Hazel to live in police headquarters in Makerston Street for the duration of the construction of the three-level house with heated pool and spa.

‘I was [working] on the tenth floor and above that on the eleventh floor was an area set aside for a minister, which they never occupied,’ remembers Lewis. ‘I spoke to [Deputy Premier Bill] Gunn about it, and the Premier, too, I think. I said look, this place is empty upstairs, would there be any objection to Hazel and I living there for a little while because the kids were all doing other things, you know?

‘I used to get a rent allowance … about bloody five dollars a week or ten dollars a week … and I said, no, stop that, which I suppose no other bugger would bother about. And Hazel and I moved in there. It was a little bit inconvenient but it was good.’

Those close to the workaholic Lewis quipped that he would now spend even more hours at his desk, given its proximity to his new living quarters. ‘I said when I retire, we’ll have enough money to buy a little unit down the coast, and if we rebuild on this site we’ll have a house we can be safe in,’ Lewis recalls. ‘That was a time when the Premier started getting bodyguards. I said I didn’t want a bodyguard … even my driver, I didn’t ask him to carry a firearm, although we did have a firearm in the glove box in case we ran across an armed robbery.’