All Fall Down (77 page)

Yet, each morning over in Winton Street, Lewis got up early, took his tea, and went to work at his downstairs desk, checking his diary, preparing for his day, mapping out who he had to see, what he needed to read, what files he had to check.

It was as if the old police commissioner had never left his office at Makerston Street.

It was a grey and wet Friday afternoon when they arrived to pay their respects. On Christmas Eve, 2010, clouds were scudding above the spire of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church at 50 Fairway Drive, Clear Island Waters, on the Gold Coast, the seat of the Surfers Paradise parish.

About an hour before the funeral, and the arrival of the coffin in a grey hearse, a lone police piper practised his bagpipe in preparation for the service. The mournful sound echoed across the bitumen and rifled through the exterior church pillars and up into the crowns of the nearby pale-skinned camphor laurels. ‘It wasn’t a bright, happy day,’ says one journalist who was outside the church. ‘It was rain, clouds, greyness. People were shuffling quickly to get inside.’

The occasion was the funeral service for the former assistant commissioner (crime) of the Queensland Police Force, Anthony ‘Tony’ Murphy, once the state’s most famous detective. Murphy had gone from being a telegram boy at the Amberley Air Force Base south-west of Ipswich during the early years of World War II, joining the police and serving initially in the Photographic Section before rising to fame in the Consorting Squad in the 1950s. It was there he met and befriended two young policemen, Terence Murray Lewis and Glendon Patrick Hallahan. All three would become the favoured boys of Police Commissioner Frank ‘Big Fella’ Bischof in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The triumvirate would be whispered about down at the headquarters of the CIB at the corner of Elizabeth and George streets, up at the police depot on Petrie Terrace, in the lawyers’ canteen at the Inns of Court at North Quay, and in the bordellos of South Brisbane, as the Rat Pack. They were three young kings, and they were going all the way to the top.

Throughout his career, there was talk of Murphy as an ‘active’ policeman, tenacious, unstoppable, with a brilliant memory and tactical mind. He inspired younger detectives, and he had a reputation for always securing evidence – the foundation stone of criminal convictions. It was always said – you never, ever wanted Tony Murphy on your tail.

Still, the talk was not always praise. It was rumoured he was one of Bischof’s bagmen. That he had gone on the take and become a part of The Joke when he served in the Licensing Branch with Jack Reginald Herbert in the late 1960s. Then there were the perjury charges laid against him over his evidence before the National Hotel inquiry in 1963 and 1964. The murmurs that he was corrupt continued through to his retirement in late 1982, and were in part responsible for him leaving the force at just 55 years of age.

He settled with his family away from everything and virtually everyone, at Amity Point on North Stradbroke Island, to grow flowers. This was a place for the elderly, for recluses, for people who wanted to fall off the map. And yet still they talked about him, as if he were a myth, a legend.

Journalists would later analyse the systemic corruption discovered in the Queensland Police, and would allude to a central figure behind it. They talked about The Boss. They called him the Grey Ghost or the Grey Eminence.

More than 100 family, friends and former police colleagues attended Murphy’s funeral service that miserable day. Former commissioner Terry Lewis was not among them.

During the service, then Assistant Commissioner of Police Paul Wilson said a few words. Outside, a handful of uniformed officers ensured that the ceremony was kept private. Afterwards, nobody commented to the media.

Murphy, 83, had passed away on Tuesday 21 December 2010, following a long illness. For several months he had been confined to his home after periodic visits to hospitals and nursing homes. Suffering from early signs of dementia he was attended to by part-time carers in the house he shared with his wife Maureen at Robina, the relatively new satellite suburb at the back of the Gold Coast.

Just weeks before he died, he was at home reminiscing about his years as one of Queensland’s most recognisable policemen. Frail and thin, he would, on occasion, go through some of his old newspaper clippings and police photographs and documents that he’d salvaged from the past. To the end, he’d hosted a regular lunch with some of his retired colleagues who also lived on the Gold Coast.

Those who met Murphy at his peak from the 1950s through to the 1970s didn’t fail to mention the man’s sheer physical presence. He could instil fear without opening his mouth. Even much later, as an old man in a singlet and chequered pyjama pants, he still had steel in his voice that connected to the big, bullish, no-nonsense detective he had once been.

Murphy had always loathed the media, but on this day, he agreed to speak in what proved to be his final interview.

‘How are you, Tony?’

‘I’m just hanging in.’

‘How old are you now?’

‘Buggered if I know,’ Murphy said. ‘Born in 1927. I was sworn up in ’48. I was a police cadet from 1944. A long while ago.’

‘Former police commissioner Frank Bischof. What was he like?’

‘A good fella, old Frank,’ he replies. ‘You could talk to him. I always thought highly of Frank Bischof. He treated us young kids alright. He was a snappy dresser. I can’t remember much about him at all. Anyway, it was so long ago.’

‘What about Glendon Patrick Hallahan?’

‘We got on good together, as friends,’ Murphy says.

‘You were part of what was known as the Rat Pack?’

‘That’s right, yeah,’ he recalls. ‘He was good old Glen Patrick. A very interesting bloke. He never had any bloody flies on him at all.’

‘Then along came former police commissioner Ray Whitrod, who sent you out to Longreach and Terry Lewis to Charleville.’

‘I don’t know whether it was Whitrod who did that, it could’ve been,’ says Murphy. ‘I didn’t like him, but others did. I never got terribly wrapped up in Whitrod, but at the same time he never hurt me so I can’t really complain about him. It’s all ancient bloody history now.’

‘Then Terry Lewis became Commissioner in 1976.’

‘It’s all in the past.’

‘Do you remember the prostitute Shirley Margaret Brifman?’

‘She was quite good, quite a reasonable sort of female, bit of a knockabout … she kicked around the bloody town.’

‘Do you remember how she died?’

‘Did she? I’d forgotten that. It’s all water under the bridge.’

‘She died of a suspected overdose of drugs in 1972.’

‘I can’t recall.’

‘In a flat in Bonney Avenue, Clayfield.’

‘I don’t remember that. Anyway, it’s all bloody history now, well and truly.’

‘Did you like Terry Lewis?’

‘Yes, my word,’ he says. ‘Found him a real good bloke. That was so many bloody years ago now, I can’t remember the ins and outs …’

‘What big cases did you work on, Tony?’

‘It’s so many years ago now, I don’t remember those sorts of things.’

‘Were you a powerful man in the force?’

‘Buggered if I know.’

‘Were you intimidating?’

‘Maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t,’ he says. ‘Hallahan and I and old Lewis too, we combined [to a] degree … we locked up quite a few of the nasties. It’s all bloody water under the bridge.’

‘Was the term “The Rat Pack” a friendly description of you, Hallahan and Lewis?’

‘I don’t think there was anything friendly about it,’ he recalls. ‘The bloody media put the boot in, that’s my recollection. Friendly or not, I’m buggered if I know. I should contact him [Lewis] more often. I haven’t contacted him for years and years. I haven’t been in touch with old Terence Murray for bloody years.’

‘Was he a good commissioner?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Murphy. ‘None better. None better than Terence Murray Lewis. I got along well with old Jack Herbert.’

‘Was he a rogue?’

‘No, I think he’s alright. He found his way around the town. I wouldn’t say he was a rogue, old Jack, old Jack Reginald Herbert.’

‘Do you have good memories of your police career?’

‘No, I haven’t,’ he says. ‘I haven’t got good memories. I’ve got very poor memories. It’s all in the past. It’s long, long gone. It’s ancient history that went out with the wind, I think.’

‘You grew Geraldton Wax flowers over on North Stradbroke Island when you retired from the police force?’

‘I never made any money out of them,’ he says. ‘It was something to occupy myself. It worked for a while. I don’t know how many years ago that was. Yonks and yonks and yonks. That’s many, many years ago, long forgotten …’

‘Was Frank Bischof corrupt?’

‘No, old Frank was alright. I never found him corrupt. Everybody was aware Frank Bischof wasn’t to be messed around with. My mind’s gone on the whole lot of them now …’

‘Jack Herbert, what did you think of him rolling over at the Fitzgerald Inquiry?’

‘I can’t recall that. You been talking to Terry? He never mentioned that to me.’

‘What did you think of the Fitzgerald Inquiry itself?’

‘I wasn’t very rapt,’ he says. ‘It’s so long ago now … I can’t remember bloody much about the Fitzgerald Inquiry.’

‘You were never called to give evidence before the inquiry?’

‘I can’t say if I was or wasn’t. I might have been.’

‘Terry went to gaol for 14 years.’

‘I can’t recall that.’

‘He was found guilty of corruption.’

‘Was he? My memory is gone,’ Murphy says. ‘My mind is absolutely bloody gone. My memory is long gone. I don’t remember anything about myself let alone somebody else.’

‘Do you remember perjury charges in relation to the National Hotel inquiry being laid against you after Shirley Brifman blew the whistle on corrupt police before she died? She was due to be a witness at your court case, but she died.’

‘I don’t remember that. No recollection whatever about her dying before or after, no recollection of that at all. I don’t recall ever going to Shirley Brifman’s house … I don’t recall.’

‘What did you think of Police Minister Max Hodges, during the Whitrod era?’

‘I never had time for Max Hodges. Ah yes, it’s so long ago. It’s remarkable how you come to find me. What are you doing a bloody book on? Who? Good luck to you. He [Terry Lewis] wouldn’t be very happy about that would he, about his time in prison and all the rest of it? He never discussed anything with me about it. I’ve always thought the world of old Terry.’

‘Who was corrupt in your time in the Queensland Police Force?’

‘I can’t bloody think of anyone.’

‘Was the police life a good life?’

‘It was certainly a busy life, it kept me occupied,’ says Murphy. ‘Oh, there’d be dozens of others I pinched … dozens of others … long, long gone out of my memory now.’

‘Do you remember the Mr Asia drug syndicate in the late 1970s?’

‘No, I do not. Do not. Mr Asia drug syndicate? No. I’m not saying it never happened, but I don’t remember it.’

‘You told journalist Brian Bolton that police had recordings relating to a big drug syndicate. Interviews with drug couriers Doug and Isabel Wilson. They were murdered after Bolton’s story was published.’

‘I don’t remember that. I don’t deny it happened. I knew Brian Bolton reasonably well.’

‘Do you remember the National Hotel inquiry?’

‘Not very well. It’s all water under the bridge to me. It’s all gone. I wouldn’t know the time of day.’

‘They say you were known as the Grey Ghost, the Grey Eminence.’

‘The Grey Eminence?’ he says. ‘I never knew that. The Grey Eminence. That’s news to me.’

*

It’s all in the past.

It’s all water under the bridge.

It’s ancient bloody history.

Acknowledgements

The publication of the final volume of the Lewis trilogy marks the end of a five and a half year journey that has attracted the kindness and encouragement of many hundreds of people.

I would like to thank Terence Lewis for his contribution to the books. I have made every effort to present a balanced version of events in the trilogy, and as with the first two volumes –
Three Crooked Kings
and
Jacks and Jokers
– Lewis was offered a right of reply to all the major issues canvassed in
All Fall Down
.