Jacks and Jokers (16 page)

Says Early: ‘I wouldn’t have heard it until the real early 1970s.’ Early adds he believed Walker ‘took his own life but I never heard by what means’.

Later, Tony Murphy would peddle the standard lies about Bob Walker. ‘The Rat Pack expression was never, ever used until a certain police officer, a gentleman called Bob Walker – he used to do ballet as a young constable while he was in the police force – nothing wrong with that, of course,’ Murphy said.

‘Bob Walker was a member of the art student faculty at the university. The Springboks tour came. There were violent scenes between the police and protestors. Walker got up a few days after the clash at the Tower Mill, got up on campus before about 600 university students, and he denigrated the police force for what he called arrogant behaviour, unruliness, brutality, at the Tower Mill.’

Murphy said the allegations were given widespread coverage in the press. ‘I was on the Executive of the Queensland Police Union,’ recalled Murphy. ‘I received complaints from all over the state, to do something about Walker. I then put a motion through to the executive to call on Walker to show cause why he should not be dealt with.

‘Walker resigned rather than appear before the union Executive, and then he was the one that kicked off this Rat Pack term. It had no connection – no relevance to alleged corruption, whatever.’

Ironically, Walker had been destroyed by the Rat Pack, the moniker of which he had supposedly authored. He joined a long queue of honest police and civilians who’d had their lives upended, in many cases destroyed, for trying to tell the truth about corrupt police going all the way back to the National Hotel inquiry in 1963.

Robert Thomas Walker was buried in the Pinnaroo Cemetery at Bridgeman Downs on the city’s northside. His wife Elaine remained on the sprawling Upper Brookfield property. She never spoke to her children or anyone about Walker’s troubles with the police.

Her son Robert says: ‘She was still fearful that something might happen [to her].’

Ride for Democracy

When it came to the National Party gerrymander, Tom Burns and the Labor Party didn’t leave well enough alone on the floor of the parliamentary chamber. They wanted to get the message out to all Queenslanders. But how could they spread word of Bjelke-Petersen’s disfiguring of the parliamentary system throughout dyed in the wool National Party electorates?

They could take the message by horseback.

In April, the party launched its epic ‘Ride for Democracy’ campaign. It was the brainchild of the ‘Bank on Burns’ policy unit, staffed ad hoc with University of Queensland academics and supporters and run by Burns staffer Malcolm McMillan.

A solo horseman, ALP supporter Pat Comben, would ride from Cairns through to Innisfail, Ayr, Mackay, Clermont, Emerald, Bundaberg, Toowoomba, Ipswich and finally onto Brisbane, carrying a ‘mammoth petition’ in protest at the gerrymander.

A promotional leaflet for the ride said the ‘petition protests the gerrymander in Queensland which gives disproportionate representation to small pockets of National Party support within a few hundred kilometres of Brisbane at the expense of the vast part of the Queensland country and the provincial cities’. It intended to ‘challenge the Premier to face the Queensland people in honest elections’.

The plan was that Comben would make the 2200 kilometre trek collecting signatures and arrive at Parliament House in George Street, Brisbane, to deliver the petition by late July. Comben himself would later become a Labor parliamentarian, and the legend of his long ride would raise its head to the great delight of the sitting National Party members.

In an Estimates debate on crops and soil management, Agriculture Minister Neil Turner, Lewis’s old friend from his days in Charleville, would have this to say about the horse-riding member for Windsor. ‘The lack of knowledge of [Comben] about primary industries is perhaps understandable when it is realised that he first ventured off the footpath on his so-called horse ride for democracy some years ago and got lost on the outskirts of Aspley! Riding for democracy would be a difficult task for any ALP horseman, because democracy is completely foreign to Labor philosophy. My advice to the honourable member for Windsor is that next time he goes riding he should wear a bell; it will make him easier to find.’

According to a confidential Cabinet Minute dated 7 April 1977, Premier Bjelke-Petersen, incredibly, given the importance of the issue, gave an oral submission regarding the appointment of Electoral Commissioners who would handle the controversial redistribution.

It was recommended that Sir Douglas Fraser, former chairman of the State Public Service Board, Archie Archer, grazier and senior figure at the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland (RNA) and K.W. Redman, Principal Electoral Officer, be appointed.

Tom Burns’ private secretary, Malcolm McMillan, recalls: ‘A member of the 1977 State Redistribution Commission was an old Country Party type called Archie Archer.

‘Tom used to go out to the Ekka [Brisbane’s annual agricultural show held in August] each year and put in countless hours as a ring steward in the main arena. Archie, who was Senior Vice President of the RNA, thought Tom was a good bloke for doing this. Apparently, the Nats wanted to do as much damage to Tom’s then seat of Lytton as was possible in that redistribution.

‘Archie and Tom hardly knew each other, but Archie came up to Tom in the ring [in 1977] and mentioned the issue. He said something along the lines – “That won’t be happening”. Tom thought nothing more of it.

‘When the boundaries came out only two seats in South-east Queensland had absolutely no change to their boundaries. One was Aspley, then held by Industrial Affairs Minister Fred Campbell, and the other was Lytton, held by Tom Burns.’

Milligan and the Corn Farmer

In July 1977, Ian Barron, an assistant manager for Sharp Electronics, based in Sydney, took a flight to Cairns in Far North Queensland. He had a meeting with Charles Du Toit, a sales agent who owned Cairns Aerial Services.

Barron was interested in purchasing two Piper Comanche twin engine light aircraft on behalf of Sharp. The company was opening an office in New Guinea, Barron said, and needed some personnel transporters. Du Toit agreed to let Barron take a test flight to New Guinea hoping to close the sale.

Meanwhile, in Brisbane, John Edward Milligan, one-time informant to former policeman Glen Patrick Hallahan and business associate of gunman and gangster Johnny Regan (shot dead in a laneway in Marrickville, Sydney, in September 1974; three weapons were left at the scene – one supposedly a police-issue revolver), was packing his bags for his own flight to Port Moresby.

Before he left, he put in a call to Hallahan at his home in Obi Obi, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, where the former famous detective and friend of Milligan was now growing corn on his small acreage. (Hallahan’s phone number was Obi Obi 25.)

Milligan arrived in Port Moresby on 13 July and checked into the Papua Hotel. The next day, Barron flew in aboard one of the Piper Comanches and that night the two men shared a drink at the Port Morseby Aero Club.

A couple of days later Barron returned to Cairns, then back to Sydney. On 17 July, Milligan took a commercial flight to Sydney and was back in Brisbane the following day. After settling into his New Farm flat, he phoned his mate Hallahan twice.

Barron and Milligan’s activities pointed to one thing – not an aircraft purchase, but a dummy run for heroin trafficking. Milligan – in the years since his arrest for possession of hashish in bolts of cloth at Eagle Farm airport by Federal Narcotics Agent Brian Bennett – had graduated to full-scale heroin importation.

Matters Big and Small

Around the first anniversary of Terry Lewis’s private audience with Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen on the airstrip in Cunnamulla, western Queensland, the boss was dealing with myriad matters in the lead-up to his first overseas Interpol conference as Queensland Commissioner of Police.

That winter, Bjelke-Petersen was a regular telephone caller to Lewis. Indeed, the Commissioner had slotted seamlessly into the rarefied landscape that was government and power. ‘To Parliament House re: art exhibition for Mrs Bjelke-Petersen,’ he noted in his diary.

Lewis dined with the relatively new Governor of Queensland, Sir James Ramsay, up at Government House, just a quick stroll from his own family home in Garfield Drive. He attended lunches and dinners at the Queensland Club. He met a visiting Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr and his wife at the Terrace Motel on Wickham Street. In Longreach on a fleeting visit, he ate at the table of the legendary cattleman and staunch Royalist, Sir James Walker. Back in Brisbane he met with the president and committee of the prestigious Tattersall’s Club. He had lunch with Judge Eddie Broad.

Yet his parallel life as the state’s top-ranked policeman, away from knights and private clubs, continued apace. Lewis had reason to talk with Detective Neal Freier, he of the Southport Betting Case corruption trial, ‘re: alleged comments by him of having direct contact with me’. Lewis saw Inspector Vern MacDonald in relation to the trials stemming out of the Cedar Bay incident the previous year. He had a beer with his good friends Tony Murphy and Barry Maxwell of the Belfast Hotel in Queen Street, in company with journalist Brian ‘The Eagle’ Bolton. He had discussions with Murphy about police transfers.

And he saw in person a man called Eric Nixon, public relations officer for Queensland Government Railways, regarding some scuttlebutt Nixon had allegedly been spreading, defaming Lewis. ‘… said he had been told by Messrs Whitrod and Gulbransen that I had been involved in counterfeit money,’ Lewis recorded in his diary.

On the same day the member for Merthyr, Don Lane, called his old friend, ‘re: site for new Clayfield police station’. He also got a call from Murphy about the mysterious theft of a light aircraft in Cairns.

Murphy and the Plane Thieves

In an extraordinary coincidence, at the time Milligan was executing his dummy run for a heroin importation from Papua New Guinea and repeatedly contacting Glen Hallahan, Tony Murphy was alerted to the theft of a plane in far-off Cairns.

At 4.30 a.m. on 22 July 1977, a Beechcroft Baron twin engine aircraft, the property of the New Era Sewing Machine Company of Brisbane, took off for the Solomon Islands. Just half an hour earlier, an explosive device had been detonated behind the Cairns Showgrounds. This unusual event tied up the majority of local police on duty.

Back at the airport, employees witnessed the suspect plane taxi and take flight without lights, then turn and head towards the Pacific Ocean. The control tower was not manned that early in the day.

Police later learned that the plane had been stolen, and the culprits had siphoned fuel from four planes parked near the Beechcroft. Seven hours later, villagers on Mono Island noticed an aircraft preparing to land on the airstrip, built by the Americans in World War II, on the nearby uninhabited Sterling Island.

The villagers paddled over to greet the visitors and were told in no uncertain terms by the plane’s occupants to keep away. The locals managed to convince two of the thieves to join them on Mono Island for a tour. In the meantime, another villager paddled to a neighbouring island that had radio communications with the capital, Honiara, to the south, and reported the presence of the strangers.

That afternoon, word reached Tony Murphy in Brisbane that a plane had turned up on Sterling Island, and that it could be the missing aircraft out of Cairns. He arranged with Solomon Islands police to gather more specific identification of the aircraft.

Just hours later, perhaps smelling a rat, the plane thieves attempted yet another night flight in the Beechcraft, but crashed into the jungle at the end of the airstrip. Local police arrived at dawn the next morning and arrested the trio.

On 24 July, Murphy along with Detectives Barry O’Brien and Pat Glancy flew to Honiara, and the following day inspected firsthand the crashed plane on Sterling Island. It was astonishing to think that the theft of a light aircraft in far-off Cairns was deemed so urgent that it delivered the Brisbane-based Murphy to a remote Pacific Island less than 72 hours after it had been committed. The defendants alleged they had taken the plane to airlift a cache of jewels recovered from a shipwreck in the region.

The men were brought back to Brisbane and installed in the city watchhouse. In there they found a scruffy ‘bikie’ they chatted with. It was in fact a disguised Peter Le Gros from the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence. All three were later convicted and sentenced to prison.

Murphy surmised that the object of the daring heist was to have been $1.4 million in Australian currency held at the time in the Bank of Nauru – the annual phosphate bounty owed to Nauru islanders. The bank itself was described by Murphy as being housed in a structure as something ‘similar to a western Queensland galvanised-iron bank structure of 50 years ago’.

It was another triumph for Murphy and his boys. Indeed, years later Murphy would write an expansive two-part feature story on the extraordinary ‘Operation Honiara’ for the
Police Union Review
.

A few years later, John Edward Milligan would tell Federal Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook: ‘Tony Murphy had gone to the Solomon Islands to check out the Solomon Islands – to see how feasible it was to use these places as halfway houses smuggling drugs into Australia. Tony had gone over there on official business … somebody stole an aeroplane … and flew it to the Solomon Islands and crashed it … while Tony was there Tony had a mind to looking at what the set-up was like.