All Fall Down (67 page)

Shut Down

By the end of 1990, specialist officer Kym Goldup of the Paedophile Task Force, and her colleague Garnett Dickson, had amassed an enormous amount of material relating to a local paedophile ring. They had managed to embed an undercover police officer into the local outfit – probably a first in Australian policing – and their investigations had included secretly taping paedophiles in conversation.

On one occasion, two local paedophiles identified by Goldup and Dickson went on a day trip to the Sunshine Coast. One of the men was a senior public servant attached to the Police Complaints Tribunal. Transcripts were made of their discussion in the car.

The small task force had also, at one point, performed surveillance on the home of a Supreme Court judge. Goldup’s work had revealed extensive paedophile activity on the Gold Coast, where celebrities and senior business people were linked to a paedophile ‘facilitator’. It was time to make some arrests.

‘We tell the bosses just a couple of days before,’ Goldup recalls. ‘We’ve got the transcripts from the Sunshine Coast trip. We’ve got the original and one copy. One was Garney’s [Dickson], one was mine. The bosses said they needed copies, and one for the Commissioner.

‘Garney and I made the copies. It was quite a lengthy document … I said to Garney, “I’m going to code these.” I put a little code in every single one of the copies. If any more copies turned up, I could go to the page where I’d put the code, and I’d know who’s copy was copied.

‘And a copy did turn up … it got into the hands of [the Police Complaints Tribunal staffer].’

Incredibly, news of the assigned police raid on the paedophile network was also leaked to the media. Goldup and Dickson discovered the story would break on the 6 p.m. television news. The raid had been organised to take place at 5 a.m. the following day. It was potentially disastrous for the task force, and could have meant the loss of two years’ hard work.

‘So, Garney and I pulled the raids [forward] and conducted them at 6 p.m. that night,’ Goldup recalls. ‘We executed the raids that we could … but there was a lot of stuff already gone.’

Goldup later learned that the leak came out of Parliament House, and the copy of the transcript was one that had been designated to the Police Commissioner’s office.

‘And then everything went to shit,’ she says. ‘It was awful. We were pretty much bastardised by the rest of the Sex Offenders Squad. We were labelled as lazy, that we didn’t know what we were doing. A lot of people didn’t know what we were doing. We couldn’t tell them. [After that] we were just given … shitty jobs.’

Goldup was summoned to the office of a superior and told the police force was setting up a new child exploitation unit. She would not be joining its ranks, she was told.

The next day, she was ordered to surrender the Paedophile Task Force’s file safe containing all of the unit’s confidential data. ‘They picked up the file safe and moved it to another office,’ she recalled. ‘It was always locked. The keys were hidden in my desk. They were in such a hurry to get that file safe out of there they forgot to ask me for the keys. It was moved to a little sort of internal back office in the Fraud Squad. Everything that we’d gathered was in there.

‘There were certain things [files with well-known names] that were so sensitive they were never even held in that office. They were held at a place unknown.

‘I felt really incompetent. It made me feel really incompetent, like I had done something wrong. It also said to me we had come just a little too close. I’ve always maintained that the only thing I am guilty of is probably doing my job too well.’

Goldup fell ill, and during a stay in hospital she was told she was to be transferred to North Queensland. In the end, she was shunted off to Bowen, 1130 kilometres north of Brisbane. She reflects: ‘I’d gone from [being] one of Australia’s leading paedophile investigators, to uniform in a little country town … all in the space of five months.’

Despite the rigours of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, the relentless publicity about the need for a clean and accountable police force, and the insistence on both police and government transparency and accountability, some basic tenets of police operations – flowing beneath everything like old subterranean tank streams – continued unblemished. For decades, investigations into paedophilia had remained firmly problematic – surrounded by rumours of deliberate police obfuscation – and that didn’t change into the 1990s.

At Last, the Trial

On Monday 18 March 1991, Sir Terence Murray Lewis, 63, made his way from his rented two-bedroom apartment in Kelvin Grove, in the city’s inner north-west, to the District Court complex in George Street. Most times Lewis caught the bus. On rare occasions, a friend dropped him into town.

Three and a half years after he was suspended as Queensland Police Commissioner courtesy of allegations made before the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police misconduct, and following an initial aborted trial the previous year, Lewis was finally having his day in court. Lewis says he had gone with a law firm that quoted him a ‘global fee’ of $250,000 for the trial and appeals. That figure later crept up to $450,000.

Former director of prosecutions, Des Sturgess, reflected: ‘Nobody ever came to trial with a greater handicap than Lewis. The [Fitzgerald] Inquiry, in which he’d remained the central figure, had attracted enormous media coverage. For nearly two years the papers remained full of it.

‘His sacking and disgrace received the warmest applause. It would have been difficult to find a single adult not a member of his family who continued to believe in his innocence. His goose was all but cooked and, however earnest the intentions of those busily preparing for the court proceedings, it would be less than honest to pretend that they were likely to produce anything other than a show trial.’

On the first day, the court, before Judge Healy, heard that at least 110 witnesses were expected to be called to give evidence, including Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert, his wife Peggy Herbert, former Queensland Treasurer Sir Llew Edwards, and former police officers Ron Redmond and Noel Kelly. Kelly had spent the early years of his police career in Mackay before shifting to Brisbane in the late 1970s, serving under Senior Sergeant Allen Bulger at the Wynnum CIB, where he began taking regular corrupt payments. He at first denied corruption and perjury before the Fitzgerald Inquiry, then gave evidence under indemnity about corruption. He was subsequently sentenced to five years gaol for perjury.

Lewis faced 15 counts of corruption. He pleaded not guilty.

On Monday 8 April Crown Prosecutor Bob Mulholland told the court that Lewis had confessed to Jack Herbert that corruption payments had been all that made being police commissioner worthwhile. Mulholland said Herbert would give evidence that Lewis often spoke of the job’s long hours, and had told Herbert that the ‘protection’ payments he received virtually kept him in the position.

The jury was told Herbert was Lewis’s accomplice and ‘on his own admission a villain’. The
Courier-Mail
reported of day two of the trial: ‘Herbert would say he received up to $23,000 a month from the Hapeta/Tilley organisation and up to $17,000 a month from the Bellino/Conte empire. Lewis, Herbert and corrupt Licensing Branch officers all allegedly received a cut of the money. Payments from Hapeta and Tilley were to ensure the protection of more than 20 brothels in Brisbane and five Brisbane and Gold Coast sex shops.’

Mulholland went on to say that Lewis promoted corrupt or corruptible police to key positions within the department. He also pointed out to the jurors that much of the evidence against Lewis was circumstantial.

Herbert went into the witness box on 15 April. He would tell the court that Lewis had been one of many recipients of graft payments that came out of the corruption system known as ‘The Joke’. He said he paid Lewis $1500 a month from 1978 to protect in-line machines, and that the payments were often made to the commissioner at the famous Lennons Hotel.

Lewis’s lawyer John Jerrard quizzed Herbert about these ‘scarcely discreet’ public meetings.

Jerrard: He [Lewis] had a very high recognition factor and you say you met in public in the foyer of a hotel?

Herbert: That’s correct. I could hand him money and look around to see if anybody was looking at the same time and if they were, we would go on with some chit-chat.

Jerrard: You met this well-known man in a crowded place in probably the most crowded street in Brisbane at probably the most popular hotel in Brisbane?

Herbert: It would have happened, sir, that’s all I can say.

Jerrard suggested the notion was an absurdity, which Herbert rejected. Lewis’s counsel also questioned Herbert’s highly dubious record as a court witness.

Jerrard: You agree that in the past you have picked up the Bible in your right hand and sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Herbert: Yes.

Jerrard: And you have sat in the witness box and said you were telling the truth in the past when you were not?

Herbert: Yes.

Jerrard: Do you agree that the oath you took [in this trial] does not bind your conscience now?

Herbert: Well, it does now but on the occasions you mentioned before it did not. In the position I am in now, I’m telling the truth.

Herbert denied he had been an ‘informant’ for Lewis. He told the court they had been friends from the word go and there was no necessity for him to cultivate Lewis to make use of his position as commissioner.

When Jack Herbert finally left the box after 12 days of evidence, his wife Peggy filled the breach. She recounted that she had handed an envelope of cash to Lewis on one occasion at Lennons when her husband couldn’t make the appointment, and recalled meeting Lady Hazel Lewis twice in early 1987 and handing over large sums of money. She told the court she did not remember the payment to Sir Terence until after she had discussed an indemnity deal with the Fitzgerald commission.

The trial heard details from corrupt police and brothel madams about the vast network of protection payments in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Cairns in Far North Queensland. One of Lewis’s charges related to him allegedly accepting a one-off payment of $25,000 from Rooklyn to assist in an adverse report on the introduction of poker machines in Queensland being submitted to state Cabinet. A former head waiter of the Crest Hotel told the court he had witnessed a meeting between Rooklyn and Lewis in the penthouse suite.

Harry Burgess gave evidence. So too did self-confessed corrupt cop Cal Farrah, former traffic superintendent for North Queensland. Farrah admitted to the Fitzgerald Inquiry that he had received corrupt payments from Vittorio Conte to protect an illegal casino in Cairns. Jim Slade offered his own recollections, as did Allen Bulger.

As the trial wore on, Lewis’s penchant for diarising his life again featured heavily, as it had during the Fitzgerald hearings. Mulholland, in his epic nine-day final address in July, zeroed in on the cryptic codes in the two small pocketbooks. He said they were ‘like a fingerprint on a weapon in a homicide case, pointing … to the guilt of the accused’.

The Crown alleged that the pocketbooks contained abbreviations for cities where SP bookies operated, illegal casinos in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast, the names of vice figures and corrupt police and meeting places. ‘But this is not a case where the Crown relies on one fingerprint to prove its case – rather, Lewis’s fingerprints cover the room,’ Mulholland continued. ‘The Crown case is unanswered and indeed, unanswerable.’

Lewis says of the pocketbooks: ‘… that was a great weapon for them, a great weapon … Mulholland used that relentlessly, [implying] that there was a code between Herbert and me. And I woke up later, going through my diaries about Herbert, when he raised it … [he] was going to be an informant, if you like, for want of a better word.’

Mulholland told the jury it was doubtful they could make a more important civic decision than the one to find Lewis guilty or not guilty. He reminded them that Lewis’s diaries ‘time and time again’ supported Jack Herbert’s evidence.

‘There is a saying,’ said Mulholland in his final address, ‘the truth has a strength of its own no matter from what sullied source it emanates.’

John Jerrard, for Lewis, argued that the Herberts were living ‘the life of Riley’ in exchange for testifying against Terry Lewis. ‘The whole horrible, stinking thing at the centre of this case is that Jack Herbert goes free because he accuses Terry Lewis,’ said Jerrard. Herbert had been the middle-man throughout years of graft and corruption, yet had not suffered a stretch in prison. Jerrard criticised the Crown case for not calling the only other man who was in a position to tell whether Lewis was corrupt or not – Graeme Parker. Why had it not done so, instead boring jurors with irrelevant evidence and ‘trash’, when Parker had also been granted an indemnity?

Jerrard also denied that the lists in Lewis’s pocketbooks were codes, likening them more to the Dead Sea Scrolls, ‘surrounded in mystery’. If they were so important, also, why was the code never used on Herbert’s evidence, and why did Herbert not have a copy of the lists?

On 30 July, while continuing his final address, Jerrard appeared to choke up with tears as he listed the achievements of his client. He apologised to the jury claiming it was the result of a ‘very long trial’.