Jacks and Jokers (2 page)

Quaintly, staff of the Temple of Isis were charged in 1971 with breaching the
Physiotherapists Act
by misleadingly calling themselves qualified masseurs or masseuses.

Police from the Licensing Branch, Drug Squad, Consorting Squad, the Valley Crime Intelligence Unit and even Commonwealth Police regularly visited the parlours, trying to catch prostitutes in the act of sexual congress. On some occasions officers confiscated parlour towels.

If prostitution was detected, the girls were immediately breached. There were no tip-offs about raids, no protection money payments, no charging on rotation. But by 1976, the entire parlour scene had changed.

As Lewis toiled in Charleville, and Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen jetted out on an overseas trade mission, hoping to convince both the British and the Japanese to invest in Queensland’s limitless reserves of coal, and state Cabinet debated sand mining on Moreton Island, gentlemen were being invited to explore the pleasures of female ‘masseuses’ across Brisbane city.

There was the Penthouse Health Studio at 141 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley. There was the Kontiki at 91 Gympie Road, Kedron. ‘Have you met our pretty and talented girls at Kontiki? Well they’re just longing to entertain you the way you enjoy the best.’

There was the Fantasia Health Spa at 187 Barry Parade, Fortitude Valley. And the Golden Hands Health Salon at 1145 Ipswich Road, Moorooka. ‘Come and meet our lovely talented girls …’

In the Year of the Dragon, a lot of money was changing hands in Brisbane after dark, and men like corrupt former Licensing Branch officer Jack Reginald Herbert picked up the scent.

The luck of the Dragon would touch Lewis not once, but twice, in just a matter of months. Coming events – an act of police brutality in far-off Brisbane, and a bungled drug raid in even remoter Far North Queensland – would trigger Commissioner Ray Whitrod’s demise. They would also, as if by magic, open a clear path for Lewis to the summit of the Queensland Police Service.

A Lemonade in Blackall

Just as Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod and Police Minister Max Hodges had paid a visit to Inspector Terry Lewis in Charleville in the winter of 1976, taking morning tea in the station and keeping tabs on the banished Rat Packer, they continued their tour 300 kilometres north to remote Blackall.

A grazing town perched on the Barcoo River and home to the historic Blackall Woolscour, the township evolved mainly as a service centre to surrounding properties. On one of those – Alice Station – in 1892, shearer Jack (Jackie) Howe broke colony records when he shore with hand shears 321 sheep in seven hours and 40 minutes and catapulted himself into folklore.

As was the custom, Whitrod and Hodges’ visit necessitated a function in one of the local hotels, which was attended by 30 to 40 dignitaries, graziers and of course the local police. The Blackall police station was operated by sergeant in charge Les Lewis and four other officers. At the event, Les Lewis was sipping a glass of lemonade when he was approached by Minister Hodges.

‘What are you drinking, sergeant?’ Hodges asked him.

‘Lemonade,’ Sergeant Lewis replied.

‘What would you usually drink?’

‘Beer,’ he replied. ‘But I never drink [alcohol] in uniform.’

Hodges pointed out that even the Commissioner of Police was drinking a glass of wine in full uniform, and said to the barman: ‘Give the sergeant a beer.’

As the two men engaged in conversation, the Minister immediately expressed his dislike of the inspector in charge of the Longreach district (which took in Blackall, 213 kilometres away), Tony Murphy.

‘Murphy’s got a chip on his shoulder,’ Hodges remarked. ‘So has [Terry] Lewis.’ Hodges went on to tell him that Whitrod planned to transfer Terry Lewis from Charleville to Innisfail in Far North Queensland, ‘to keep him as far away as possible from Brisbane and the Commissioner’, and that Murphy would be staying put in Longreach ‘until he learned to smile’.

Sergeant Les Lewis, who worked well with Murphy and believed the famous detective from Brisbane had done a good job in Longreach, told Hodges that Murphy was expecting a transfer to Toowoomba where his wife and children had settled.

Hodges said it wasn’t going to happen. ‘Hodges was very firm,’ recalls Lewis. ‘He was the boss.’

A few days later, Murphy’s car pulled into the police yard in Blackall. He was on his way down to Toowoomba to see his wife, Maureen, and the kids. The drive – over 1200 kilometres – also took him en route through Charleville.

Sergeant Les Lewis felt compelled to relay to his boss details of the meeting with Hodges and Whitrod. ‘I’ve got something to tell you if you promise not to take it further,’ he said. He told of Hodges’ refusal to move Murphy out of Longreach until he ‘learned how to smile’.

Murphy immediately got out of the car in a rage and repeatedly kicked the tyres of the vehicle. ‘Those bloody bastards,’ he shouted.

Murphy then ‘took off out of the yard’ and headed for Terry Lewis in Charleville. In Murphy’s mind, Hodges’ remarks about himself and Terry Lewis constituted the persecution of senior officers in the Queensland Police Force.

He would most certainly be taking the matter forward.

Love in the Lido

Down in the mean streets of Kings Cross, Sydney, once plied so successfully by former Brisbane madam Shirley Margaret Brifman, another young prostitute, Anne Marie Tilley, was working the lanes and backstreets.

Tilley, even before she hit her teenage years, was steeped in the business of prostitution. Her foster father had once been a driver for the legendary Sydney madam Matilda (Tilly) Devine of the Razor Gang era in the 1920s and 1930s. He told her many stories through her girlhood. At the age of 11, Tilley was entranced by the popular 1963 Billy Wilder film,
Irma La Douce
, a musical comedy about a policeman who falls for a prostitute in Paris. In the movie, honest gendarme Nestor Patou (Jack Lemmon) unwittingly begins arresting call girls who are favoured by corrupt senior police and is thrown out of the force. By fate he becomes close friends with prostitute Irma (Shirley MacLaine) and eventually declares his love. Tilley adored the luxuriant lifestyle of the on-screen prostitutes. She adored Irma’s fluffy white dog. She knew this was the life for her.

At the age of 16, in a Kings Cross nightclub – the Lido in Roslyn Street, a notorious haunt for gangsters and callgirls – Tilley met her very own Nestor Patou. His name was Hector (Hec) Hapeta, not an honest policeman, but a retailer of pet meat based in the distant suburbs of western Sydney.

Hapeta was hanging out with a prostitute ‘keeper’ called Bob. Tilley and a girlfriend wanted to get on the game. Bob threw some money on the table and asked young Tilley to go buy him and Hec a drink at the bar. She refused – ladies didn’t go to the bar – and Hapeta, dressed as he habitually was in a three-piece suit, told Bob to leave her alone. Hec would get the drinks.

Hapeta was a ‘smiler’; he had a happy demeanour and a cheeky sense of humour. Tilley thought he was a gentleman. They would soon move in together in a flat in Liverpool, and Tilley would begin her notorious career as a prostitute and brothel madam.

It would have been inconceivable to both Hapeta and Tilley that by the late 1970s they would find themselves drifting north to the sun and warmth of Queensland. There, with astonishing speed, they would build a vice empire of gargantuan proportions that would make them wealthy.

It could have been a plot from one of the film-loving Tilley’s matinees, but this time a western. Two savvy operators ride into a hick town, take over the saloons and the houses of ill-repute, and laugh all the way to the bank. And they wouldn’t need to worry about the sheriff. Because very quickly, the sheriff would be handsomely remunerated to turn a blind eye.

A Stellar Career

Meanwhile, in the Queensland capital, Gerald (Tony) Fitzgerald, QC, aged 34 (and born in the Year of the Snake), was not only one of the busiest and most respected lawyers in town but was also juggling a young family – three children under the age of five. The Fitzgeralds lived on the Brisbane River in Rosebery Terrace, Chelmer, just across the Walter Taylor Bridge from Indooroopilly.

Having taken silk the year before – one of the youngest to do so in the state – Fitzgerald had carved a lucrative niche for himself in commercial law. A Catholic, and son to a senior public servant, he had been something of a prodigy. He was called to the Bar in 1964 and for a time worked out of chambers above Cassells’ frock shop in Queen Street, dubbed the ‘Outs of Court’ (as opposed to the official home of Brisbane’s legal fraternity, the Inns of Court up on North Quay.)

By the mid-1960s he was being mentored by the legendary lawyer Gerard Brennan and moved up to the Inns, on the same floor as knockabout barrister and South Brisbane MP Colin Bennett. Brennan was the epitome of ethics and fairness in the law. A Catholic himself, he was also a champion of gentlemanly distance between the courts and government. The son of Justice Frank Brennan, he, like Bennett, believed strongly in social justice for all. He had a profound impact on Tony Fitzgerald. Brennan’s father had died when he was just 21. Fitzgerald had lost his mother, Doris, to a kidney ailment when he was six years old. Both had risen out of humble financial circumstances.

Fitzgerald, like many of his young contemporaries, had heard of the police practice of ‘verballing’ or fabrication of evidence. And like the rest of Brisbane, knew the gossip that former police commissioner Frank Bischof was corrupt and that his bagmen in the 1960s were known as the Rat Pack.

Fitzgerald most likely heard much of the local tittle-tattle in the rooms of the Johnsonian Club in Adelaide Street. A beacon for barristers and journalists, the place was often packed with members for weekday lunch. It served a mean steak and offered the hottest English mustard in town. There, Fitzgerald rubbed shoulders with some of Brisbane’s most colourful legal practitioners, including the cigar-smoking Jack Aboud. The old barrister would often leave a burning cigar on a stairwell outside court and pick it up again on his way out. Aboud, his taste buds dead from smoking, adored lashings of the Johnsonian mustard.

Fitzgerald also got to know the best legal minds of the day – Eddie Broad, Wally Campbell, Des Sturgess, John Macrossan, Bill Pincus and Paul de Jersey. Within such a small pool of lawyers, it was hard not to notice that those who allied themselves with Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s government and its legal work found themselves on the path to a successful career.

Fitzgerald, however, had little interest in day-to-day politics, though his attitude to police corruption may have been a little different. His grandfather, Casey, had been a Queensland police officer. Fitzgerald was, by choice, a lawyer who kept a low profile and treasured his privacy. He might have a regular game of tennis with a few close and trusted mates, but he did not court the social set nor did he have any interest in seeing his name in the newspapers.

Ironically, his future included a couple of years where he would become perhaps the best known legal practitioner in Australia and would embed his name in Queensland history.

The Key Club

Across town, some enterprising entrepreneurs like the petty criminal Roland Short were starting some new business ventures in the skin trade.

The city had a few illegal gambling dens and some fledgling massage parlours and ‘health studios’, but Short was taking things to a whole new level. Short already had the Penthouse Health Studio in Brunswick Street, and another parlour in suburban Indooroopilly, west of the CBD. His centrepiece, though, was the new Key Club at 584 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba, within sight of the Brisbane Cricket Ground.

Short had asked his friend, barman and parlour manager Geoff Crocker, to pop around and take a look in mid-1976: ‘I’d never seen anything like it before in my life, lovely ladies there and everything,’ Crocker said later.

Crocker checked out the club. There was gambling in two gaming rooms, pornographic movies being screened in a bar, separate areas with spa tubs and women coming out of the saunas with ‘their boobs hanging out of the towels’. It was a scene from a Roman orgy.

Short told Crocker that if he looked after the parlour for him and did a good job, he would eventually end up running the place. ‘So that was a bit of incentive for me, I liked the place, it looked good, you know?’

Uniquely, Short had instituted a special membership subscription to the Key Club. It cost $500 to be a member, and you put another $500 on an account card. Cash changed hands only in the gaming rooms. As a member, you were identified by your Key Club number and your birthdate. It cost $100 an hour to be with a girl.

Crocker observed that the club was ‘a class above’ anything else he’d seen in Brisbane. ‘[There were] no rough-spoken ones,’ he said of the women employed at the Key Club. ‘No tattoos, we couldn’t employ a girl if she had a tattoo, it was Roland’s orders … if their hair wasn’t right or their dress wasn’t up to standard, I’d say go home and get changed or do something with your hair and come back … if you do it again I won’t let you in.’

The gaming side of the operation was run by a man called Luciano Scognamiglio, who had games going right across the city. The thin, sickly-looking ‘Luci’ was also known to punters as ‘Louis’. Crocker estimated that Short was making $25,000 to $30,000 each week off the illegal games at the Key Club.