All Fall Down (7 page)

A Rendezvous in Montague Road

In early 1983 Geoff Crocker and his wife Julie were running a number of successful escort agencies across the city when the pattern of business suddenly changed – someone was telephoning him and warning him of police raids on his girls. Crocker suspected the calls were coming from Licensing Branch officer ‘Dirty Harry’ Burgess. He also got a feeling he was about to be hit up for protection payments.

He was right.

Burgess phoned once more and asked Crocker and his wife to meet him at the south-western end of Montague Road in West End, where the Brisbane River takes a dramatic sweep around Toowong towards St Lucia. Burgess said he’d rendezvous with them ‘under a big fig tree with a table and chair sitting under it’.

‘Julie and I went down there and Harry Burgess was already sitting at that table, so we got out of the car,’ Crocker would later tell investigators. ‘He had another officer with him … I didn’t know him.’

Burgess came to the point. ‘Things are going to change,’ he supposedly told Crocker. ‘You’ve been getting phone calls telling you about busts and that.’

‘That’s right. I thought that might have been you.’

‘It was,’ Burgess said.

‘Why? What’s going on?’

‘From now on you’ve got to pay somebody,’ said Burgess.

‘What, you?’

‘No,’ he clarified. ‘You won’t be paying any police.’

‘I won’t pay police, I never have and I never will.’

‘Well, I’m telling you now what’s got to be done,’ Burgess went on. ‘After this discussion today, you’ll get a phone call and you’ll be told how much money to leave at a certain spot, each time of the month, and if it’s not there I’ll bust you and put you in gaol. If you don’t cooperate, Julie, your wife …’

Crocker arced up. ‘Don’t you frighten Julie because there’s no need to …’

Crocker saw that his wife was shaking.

‘No need to be, if you just do what you’re told, it’ll be alright. It’ll be a lot better. I guarantee you, you won’t go to gaol … but if you don’t cooperate and you do anything silly, you could easily be found face down.’

Crocker asked if this was ‘heavy, big-time stuff’.

‘Yes, it is,’ Burgess warned him.

‘Julie and I can’t end up dead out of this,’ he said.

‘Well, if you don’t do as you’re told, you can, by all means.’

Crocker and his wife took a moment to digest the threat. He told his wife in front of the two officers that she wasn’t to go back to the escort agency. ‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘I’m there … what’s the difference, if you’re dead, I might as well be dead anyhow. We’re together. That’s it.’

For the next two weeks after the meeting with Burgess under the ancient Moreton Bay fig, Crocker’s business ran smoothly – it attracted no attention from police. None of the Crocker girls were busted. Then he got another phone call. He was told he owed $7560 in kickbacks for the month.

‘That’s a lot of money,’ Crocker exclaimed.

The voice at the other end of the line said: ‘That covers as many escort agencies as you wish to have.’

Crocker asked if the fee covered him starting up some OP or ‘on premises’ agencies.

‘So long as the boys don’t find out that you’re doing jobs on the premises, you don’t advertise as a massage, it will be classed as escort and comes under the $7560,’ the anonymous caller said.

‘Who am I talking to?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You need never know.’

‘Are you a police officer?’

‘No, I’m not.’

Crocker was given instructions about where to drop off the money. ‘He told me there was a toilet block at Davies Park South(s) Football Club, just inside the fence,’ recalled Crocker. ‘I was to take it into there, put it in the actual pedestal cubicle behind the pedestal, wrapped up in a brown paper pack. There was just a urine trough and a cubicle. Six o’clock in the evening on the dot … don’t be late, don’t be early …’

Crocker was short of cash come the day the money was due. The following day his places were raided by Harry Burgess.

Ante Up

In February and March of 1983 the Bjelke-Petersen Cabinet gave approval to build the Gold Coast’s Jupiters Casino and parliament discussed the Jupiters Agreement Bill. The casino tender had been awarded to Jennings Industries Ltd on behalf of Jupiters Hotel Ltd. The huge Jennings construction company had been founded by Sir Albert Jennings, father to Doug Jennings, the National Party member for Southport. One of Jennings’ brothers also worked for the company. The family connection had forced Jennings to make a personal explanation to parliament the year before.

‘When I left school I joined AVJennings construction company,’ he told the House. ‘My father founded the company 50 years ago in 1932. I worked for the company for 13 years before deciding to go out on my own … My brother is a director of Jennings Industries, but I make it clear once again that I have no physical or financial involvement with that Australian-owned public company, although I am certainly proud of its achievements.’

During the debates over the Bill, Jennings would clash with the Treasurer and minister responsible for the casino, Dr Llew Edwards. Edwards accused Jennings of attacking the Casino Control Bill.

In turn, Jennings did not agree with aspects of the Bill, nor with Edwards’ ‘dictatorial powers’ in relation to safeguarding the casino against corruption, something Jennings felt would ‘create the reverse situation and provide a perfect recipe for graft and corruption and frighten off investors’. The argument underlined the now open warfare between the coalition partners.

As for Edwards, his zealotry in ensuring the new casino remain corruption-free may have been linked to what he was observing behind closed doors. He noticed that the issue of ‘political donations’ to the National Party was getting out of hand. Word was rife, too, that ministers were being asked favours in exchange for money.

Other members, such as Nev Hewitt (NP, Mackenzie), Ron Camm (NP, Whitsunday) and Fred Campbell (Lib, Aspley) were also concerned. The National Party system, Edwards believed, was severely flawed. ‘I think they were very loose in the way they ran that side,’ says Edwards. ‘In the Liberal Party, we have a … and it wasn’t me who did this, it was Tom [Hiley, former Queensland Treasurer] did this years before – that if a minister received … an offer of funds … they expected their resignation, and we all adhered to that view.

‘The moment we were offered some money for something, you would have to report it to your leader, and I had a couple of very nasty, or very attractive offers, which I declared very, very quickly and we excluded them on the casino decision.

‘There were, you know, a large number of people who had applied for the casino licence in Queensland, and that was one of my worst periods ever.’

Edwards also recalls being approached by police who were concerned about corruption in the force, but none would commit anything to paper. Edwards says that time and again he went to successive police ministers with concerns he’d picked up in the course of his work, and consistently hit dead ends.

‘In the police force it seemed as if … something went in, [and] it never sort of came out, and so our job, I guess, was to, you know if we did hear a bad story, to please let our colleagues know and they’d say, “They tell me it’s fixed up anyway. It was a bit of a misunderstanding.” I probably feel that perhaps a lot of us had too much confidence in the integrity of the police.

‘People feared that if they did go public they’d be victimised. I am certain in retrospect that quite a bit of that did go on, and so a knowledge of some query, call it corruption, just didn’t go very far.’

All That Glitters

Nigel Powell had been hitting a brick wall with much of his investigative work for the Licensing Branch. Many of the reports he was submitting to his boss, Graeme Parker, had been ignored. In late May 1983 he was telephoned at home before his shift. It was work. They needed him to ‘dress up’ appropriately for a job on the Gold Coast. It was a strange request, but Powell did as he was told and put on a three-piece suit. Powell was wary of the Gold Coast. He had working girls as informants down there, and they would tell him of police getting ‘freebies’ and on occasion giving the prostitutes ‘back-handers’.

The job on this occasion, along with the Gold Coast CIB, was to take a look around a penthouse suite that had been turned into a bar and strip club.

Powell and three other Brisbane Licensing Branch men drove down to Surfers Paradise. ‘With another officer, I go in there, it’s 9.30 p.m.,’ says Powell. ‘We’re standing out like dogs’ balls. We’ve had a few drinks. We get up to this place, knock on the door, [but] it’s still way too early. A woman comes to the door. They’re still setting up behind her.’

Powell told the woman he would come back later, but she asked him to wait. ‘Then the guy who’s running it [the club] comes to the door. He says, come in. He looks at the three-piece suit. I haven’t got a story worked out or anything.’

A topless waitress approached Powell’s group and asked them if they’d like a drink. They observed a ‘bit of gaming, bit of porn, a sex show, but no evidence of prostitution’.

Nevertheless, Powell believed he had enough to lay some charges and made his excuses so he could go directly to the nearby Gold Coast CIB offices to obtain the necessary warrants. Before he left, he asked: ‘That blonde in the show, does she do anything else?’

‘She’ll be waiting for you when you get back,’ he was told.

‘How much?’ he asked.

‘I’ll find out.’

Powell returned with the warrants and men from both the local CIB and the Brisbane Licensing Branch. There was a ruckus at the door as they entered the club. Everyone was asked to keep calm.

Powell later said in evidence to the Fitzgerald Inquiry: ‘While the investigation was proceeding and the penthouse was still full of customers and potential defendants, Detective Pat Glancy of the Gold Coast CIB stood in the middle of the penthouse and abused me savagely, calling me a fucking cunt and accusing me of “giving up my mates”.

‘I was allowed … to go downstairs and look after the liquor exhibits. As I was checking the truck with the liquor exhibits in it, I saw members of the Gold Coast CIB exit through another door towards their vehicles, which were on the other side of the building.’ Powell says, ‘the scales are falling from my eyes at this point’.

He later learned that a cash box from the club containing up to $2000 had vanished. ‘It was apparent to me that [Glancy] was extremely agitated at the thought that Licensing Branch detectives were on the Gold Coast,’ Powell said in the statement.

Powell returned to Brisbane and mentally filed away the penthouse experience. Not long after, he received a phone call at home from his boss, Graeme Parker. ‘He told me I was transferred to Woolloongabba,’ Powell said. ‘I asked him if there was any particular reason for the transfer and he said that there was not.’

Parker explained to Powell later that one of the Lucas Royal Commission recommendations from the 1970s was that Licensing Branch officers should stay only two years in the branch to avoid any possibility of institutionalised corruption. Powell knew that Parker himself and colleagues Bulger and ‘Dirty Harry’ Burgess had all been in the branch longer than two years.

Despite this, before his transfer took effect, Powell continued his investigations into Hector Hapeta’s growing empire. He typed up yet another report on Hapeta’s plans to set up a club without a liquor licence called Pharaoh’s.

‘In that information sheet I identified a person whom I believed worked in the Hapeta/Tilley organisation who may be a “weak link” who could eventually provide evidence sufficient to prosecute Hapeta for his illegal activities,’ said Powell. ‘I put the information sheet in an envelope and put it under Inspector Parker’s door.

‘The next day I was working day shift and I went to see him. Inspector Parker threw the information sheet back at me. Parker’s attitude to my report was dismissive.’

Just days after this incident, Powell went on sick leave. When he returned to work the next month, he was ordered to report for duty at Woolloongabba. He’d been sent back to uniform.

Flying Lessons

By 1983, Joh Bjelke-Petersen had been Premier for close to 15 years, and while he was still immensely popular with the public, and seen on a national level as something of a country bumpkin, an eccentric who could be counted on for a laugh, there were those closer to home who felt the job of running Queensland did not always attract the former peanut farmer’s full attention.

Dr Llew Edwards remembers the Premier being missing in action from annual budget preparation meetings. ‘Joh wouldn’t even turn up, you know, and if he did turn up he’d be there for five minutes and get bored and leave,’ Edwards says. ‘He’d never read any of the pre-preparation papers and there was a senior group of Ron Camm, me and Joh, and I don’t ever remember Joh attending those budget preparation meetings, or budget profiling meetings.’

In essence, Edwards was left to run Queensland as Bjelke-Petersen went off on his flights of fancy. ‘He trusted me and I had a good relationship with him, and we had some very nasty differences, but we never let it go beyond that difference,’ Edwards recalls.