All Fall Down (40 page)

A further report appeared on Saturday 18 April, this time targeting the Hapeta and Tilley empire. ‘Queensland’s second largest organised crime syndicate has grown from nothing in the past eight years,’ Dickie wrote. ‘In the process it has changed the face of prostitution in Queensland, tipping the balance of returns away from prostitutes to brothel and escort agency operators.’

Dickie revealed that the
Courier-Mail
had put two questions to the Queensland police through its media section. Had any action been taken against Hapeta and Tilley in the past two years? (Assistant Commissioner (Crime) answered ‘no’.) What did the department have to say about allegations of this police inactivity?

‘Assistant Commissioner Parker … asked for information on who was making the allegations,’ Dickie wrote. ‘When told this information could not be given, he responded … “no comment”.’

The pincer movement of Dickie and Chris Masters of
Four Corners
had started to have an impact. Commissioner Lewis’s assistant Greg Early recorded in his diary for Monday 20 April: ‘Senior Sergeant Ron Pickering Holland Park rang re 4 Corners programme. Said that main informant was Nigel Powell an ex Licensing Branch man. He said his information was that the programme hosted by Chris Masters was aimed at a Royal Commission with Detective Senior Sergeant Burgess and Assistant Commissioner Parker in mind.’

Two days later Early wrote: ‘Senior Sergeant Freestone rang from Rockhampton after COP [Commissioner of Police] had spoken to Minister re 4 Corners. Minister said would be stupid to talk to them.’

Vice madam Anne Marie Tilley wasn’t overly concerned about
Four Corners
. She believed, erroneously, that the program’s targets were Geraldo Bellino and Vittorio Conte. ‘When they were sniffing around the casino, I was wrapped – [I thought] they’re not looking at us,’ she says. ‘I thought they were just picking on the casinos.’

While rumours of police corruption had been floating around for decades, the culprits had always managed to evade the noose. This time, Dickie believed, he just might be able to nail them on an accumulation of facts. ‘I think this was a system that was ripe to fall, it was supremely arrogant and over-confident. You know they’d weathered everything … [the Sturgess Report] had blown over them … that was inconvenient but it wasn’t a catastrophe.

‘I didn’t want to … go back to the same game of, you know, here is someone telling what they know about corruption. And then getting crucified … you know?’

Dickie says Powell was a huge help with the second volley of stories in April. ‘He also stopped me doing stupid stuff like, you know, parking across the road from places,’ he says.

As his research progressed, Dickie admits he did sense danger. ‘There was one night when I was feeling a bit sort of surrounded in the Valley, when I … rang my father in a bit of a state and dictated a will,’ he says. There was a string of incidents. ‘At that point in late April … you could palpably feel the tension on the streets rising.’

He says at one point he gave
Four Corners
producer Shaun Hoyt a quick tour of some of Brisbane’s vice hot spots. ‘I sort of showed them the lay of the land,’ he says. ‘I didn’t see it as a rivalry from them. I was glad of a bit of intelligent company.’

Similarly, Peter Vassallo of the ABCI was more than cognisant of the dangers involved on the ground in Brisbane at the time. ‘I mean these people [corrupt police] were preventing things from getting done,’ he says. ‘They were protecting an institutionalised situation. They were trying to discredit Jim [Slade], they were trying to discredit me, they were trying to discredit the [Alpha] report.

‘Remember this is a group of people who, for years, issued writs and discredited. They either prevented a story from being told or … you make them a laughing stock, you ridicule, it’s … [a] political tactic more than a law enforcement tactic. However, you have to understand that … the law enforcement people who were trying to protect the situation clearly were the corrupt police. Only they knew how it could bite them on the arse. There was no politics in it at that point …’

Vassallo, too, began to worry that Masters’ story might never get to air. ‘I had the great fear, I’ll tell you personally now,’ he says. ‘Chris, Jim and I separately knew different parts of the story. And it was important from my perspective that that remained.’

Masters’ work had by necessity gone from covert to overt, given that the
Four Corners
crew needed to film various clubs in Brisbane at night. They had become conspicuous, and the police were watching. ‘I remember him [Masters] telling me he felt he was being followed. He had put on … he had protective services … hired private investigators to look after him while he slept and all that sort of shit. And I knew it wasn’t paranoia, it was fucking real,’ says Vassallo.

What nobody knew was that the head of the powerful Queensland Police Union, John ‘Bluey’ O’Gorman, brother to lawyer Terry O’Gorman and an old-style, no nonsense copper, was also helping Masters during the compilation of ‘The Moonlight State’. O’Gorman provided Masters with a mud map of the characters involved in the story, namely, who knew who in and outside the police force. He felt his involvement was important, a way of providing ‘balance’ to the story. He had no doubts that what Masters was compiling was going to be explosive.

Meanwhile, The Bagman Jack Herbert had first become aware of the
Four Corners
investigative crew snooping around Brisbane in the first quarter of 1987. He and his wife Peggy were at home in their splendid two-storey, piano-shaped house in Jordan Terrace, Bowen Hills, when they noticed a camera crew outside, chatting to their neighbours.

A month later, his good friend and contact Allen Bulger was transferred out of the Licensing Branch. Herbert later said that it was this precise period when he felt ‘we were all in danger’. He was gauging a lot of panic within The Joke. He claimed he hadn’t seen Commissioner Lewis since February. (Lewis’s diary would record that the Commissioner and his wife had drinks with the Herberts on Saturday 7 February.)

Herbert said he met Vic Conte near the New Farm library, and again at the Toombul Shopping Centre just north of the CBD, to discuss the
Four Corners
threat. The Bagman also had to get in touch with Hapeta and Tilley, ‘… but with camera crews snooping around I couldn’t risk meeting Hapeta in person’. In the end he met up with Tilley and told her he didn’t want Hapeta coming anywhere near him for a while.

Then Harry Burgess came around to Herbert’s place in Jordan Terrace. ‘He said he had $45,000 in a safe deposit box and wanted to know if he should close it down,’ recalled Herbert. ‘I could tell that Harry was starting to panic. He was up in Wynnum but I was still giving him money every month.

‘He wanted to know if I’d heard anything from the Commissioner. I dare say he thought Terry must know more than the rest of us.’

Still in a state of agitation, Herbert then alleged he met Graeme Parker in the car park of the Alderley Arms Hotel in Samford Road in the city’s inner north-west. ‘It was dark and I’d just given him some money when we saw a yellow car drive past,’ Herbert wrote in his memoir. ‘Except for us, the car park was deserted. Parker said, “That’s a
Four Corners
car. Let’s go.” He wanted to get away as quickly as possible.’

Herbert then met Allen Bulger in the car park of the Brothers Rugby Union Club at Albion just north of the CBD. He remembered that Bulger was ‘scared out of his wits’.

With all the self-imposed radio silence, it was difficult to relay messages. Herbert said: ‘None of us knew what was going on. We were all just hoping for the best. I met [police officer] Noel Kelly at a hardware store in Mount Gravatt and asked him to tell Graeme Parker about the camera crew filming my house so that Parker could tell the Commissioner and he could get a message back to me.’

As for journalist Chris Masters, he wasn’t quite sure what sort of ‘mess’ he’d let himself in for with this Queensland story. He met with an official attached to the National Crime Authority. He was told to be careful. Later, an Australian Federal Police officer was attached to Masters. ‘They formally put somebody on the case to look out for me,’ he recalls. ‘They were giving me real-time evidence of the Queensland police surveilling me. There was this plot to set me up.’

In the meantime, he and his colleagues had dug up an extraordinary piece of documentary evidence. The title deeds for Herbert’s house in Jordan Terrace, Bowen Hills, revealed that in late 1985, Herbert had purchased the house from the two former owners – Geraldo Bellino and Vittorio Conte. The document proved a direct line between Bellino and his men and a former police officer who also happened to be good friends with the current Commissioner of Police, Sir Terence Lewis.

It was the bridge Masters had been looking for. ‘Someone in the underworld told me about it,’ Masters says. ‘I asked Deb Whitmont to do a title search. At the time it took about two weeks. When it finally appeared in our hands, there was no greater joy than holding the smoking gun. We had a bit more evidence, but this was the key piece of evidence. It was indisputable.’

The Man Who Had Everything

High-profile public servant Allen Lindsay Callaghan, born and educated on the Gold Coast, and known as a history, political science and opera fan, railway buff and purveyor of fine clothes, went to trial for misappropriating public funds in early 1987. He appeared in the Brisbane District Court on Wednesday 22 April, the same law precinct that had seen his wife Judith sentenced to gaol for similarly stealing money as head of the Queensland Day Committee. He pleaded guilty to taking $43,574.06 for his own personal use between 1979 and 1985.

Callaghan, 46, of Siemon Street, Toowong, was accompanied in the court by his wife Judith (who had served only three months of her two-and-a-half-year sentence). She sat in the public gallery behind him.

The court heard that Callaghan had racked up $8860.11 in restaurant expenses which he claimed were for legitimate business. There was a bill for $800.70 from the Fountain Room restaurant for Art Gallery trustees, one from Stephanie’s Restaurant in Melbourne, another for Cavills on the Gold Coast. The Crown said the meals were had, but not with the people listed on the expense claims. Callaghan also recorded $2898 worth of entries for Melbourne tailor Hendon. He purchased jewellery, antiques in Bahrain, and hired luxury vehicles for the wedding of one of his daughters. All were marked as Queensland Film Corporation expenses, according to the court. Crown Prosecutor David Bullock said it all added up to what ‘could only be described as extravagance, luxury and self-indulgence’.

Callaghan’s counsel, Bob Mulholland, QC, disagreed, saying Callaghan had a very demanding job and worked day and night. He said it couldn’t be suggested that Callaghan accumulated such enormous restaurant expenses on his own, nor that it wasn’t necessary for a man of his position to dress well.

Mulholland said Callaghan took full responsibility for the misappropriating of funds. He wished to blame nobody else. On 28 April, Callaghan was sentenced to four years’ gaol with hard labour by Judge McCracken. There was no recommendation for early parole. The judge said he had found it difficult to arrive at an adequate sentence. ‘Such conduct by an employee in a business or undertaking, when it amounts to the misappropriation of funds of the magnitude revealed here, would call for a significant penalty to be imposed,’ Judge McCracken said. ‘However, you were not just any employee when you embarked on your course of dishonesty. The members of the community expect that such office-holders will exhibit the highest standards of personal and professional probity in the administration of the affairs of such an office.’

Callaghan didn’t flinch when the sentence was handed down. He simply nodded his head. Judith trembled in the public gallery. As he was about to be led away she grabbed his hand and kissed it, then stood crying.

Callaghan arrived by prison van at Boggo Road Gaol in a dazed state. His head and beard were shaved and he was issued prison clothing. He was initially housed in the gaol’s old section. Prisoners soon recognised him from television news reports. He was the man who had everything. But now, inside his prison cell, all of his achievements, his reputation as a quick wit, his widely admired skill as a press officer and his contribution to Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s long tenure as Queensland Premier, came to nothing.

Three days later, the Premier was the star guest at a Christian Outreach Centre ‘businessmen’s breakfast’ at Brisbane’s Royal on the Park hotel, facing the Botanic Gardens on Alice Street. He received a framed quote that read: ‘With God Anything is Possible’.

Bjelke-Petersen, in turn, offered his own little commandment. ‘We’re all sinners,’ he told the crowd.

Eleventh Hour

At the eleventh hour the Queensland Police Department was still trying to pre-empt the upcoming
Four Corners
investigation and construct some sort of defensive narrative.

On Wednesday 6 May the
Courier-Mail
ran a suite of stories about the local vice scene, offering supposedly official police statistics on how the force had not just contained prostitution in Brisbane, but reduced it. As for illegal gambling, the head of the gaming squad, Detective Inspector Ross Beer – who had been named years before in state parliament by the late Kev Hooper as a man who frequented illegal games and drank there – declared that police had not found any evidence of it despite having suspect establishments under surveillance for the fortnight.