All Fall Down (4 page)

It was damming evidence, and Saunders was facing a large portion of her future behind bars.

The Escort and the Casanova

It would have been entirely reasonable if Mary Anne Brifman, eldest daughter of the former prostitute and brothel madam Shirley Brifman, had decided to leave Brisbane and start a new life following her mother’s shocking death in the early 1970s. Mary Anne was smart, but hers was no ordinary suburban upbringing. She had been raised in Sydney and witnessed first hand the detritus that comes with being the offspring of a successful big-city brothel madam. Mary Anne had seen things no child should witness. She was at the epicentre of prostitution, drugs, bank heists, bashings, shootings and death. Mary Anne had witnessed her own mother tortured by corrupt police and criminals, and she had been put on the game by her own parents, aged 13.

In 1971, when her mother Shirley Brifman decided to squeal and bring down the corrupt police who had suffocated her life, the entire family fled back to the supposed safe haven of Brisbane. Ironically, it was where Shirley Brifman would meet her death.

As an adult, Mary Anne had a lot of time to reflect on the circumstances surrounding her mother’s supposed suicide. Mary Anne knew her mother had not simply taken her own life. She had seen the visitor at the Clayfield flat the night before Shirley’s body was found. She’d seen a vial of drugs handed over. She’d heard the warnings.

By the early 1980s, Mary Anne was divorced and struggling to raise two small children. Unable to make ends meet, she did what her mother had taught her so well. By her own account, she was excellent at what she did. ‘On the job I was outstanding,’ she says. ‘I had outstanding skills. My mother taught me. She took me into the bedroom [in Sydney] when I was young and taught me.’

While she disliked the escort life, it was all she knew and she only worked just enough shifts to make enough to cover the costs of food and rent for her and the kids. Unfortunately, like her mother, she couldn’t escape getting tangled up with police.

‘I went out on a job – it was usually to private homes or hotels – and this job was at Clayfield,’ says Mary Anne. ‘I did the job. It was good. We had a lot of chemistry. He was nice and polite, but he was a bikie. I was gullible and naive. He saw my green Valiant Charger. He gave me lessons on how to spin around and all those sorts of turns. He was very warm.’

One of the client’s friends, however, had recently been arrested and his bail was posted. ‘They asked me if I could go over and bail their friend out. I asked them, “What do I do?” I went to the Brisbane watch-house. I was innocent, fresh-looking. You could never tell I was an escort; I was glamorous, clean-cut.

‘I went in there and I said to the officer on the desk that I’d like to bail this person out. He was a red-head. He got a shock. He said, “Why would an innocent girl like you be bailing this guy?”

‘He started to flirt with me. He was very charming. This guy liked me a lot. He was so nice to me. He got really friendly with me. He told me he’d left his wife.’

The smitten police constable began phoning Mary Anne incessantly. ‘He pursued me, this constable,’ she says. ‘A romance started happening.’

Something didn’t feel right to Mary Anne and she soon discovered that the policeman was living with a woman. He had left his wife for her. The constable told Mary Anne he was not interested in this new woman and was going to leave her, too. ‘I asked him to leave me alone. I didn’t want to see him again. I asked him very seriously to never call me again. He couldn’t help himself. He kept trying to contact me … it was out of hand.’

Mary Anne warned him that if he continued she would take some action, but still he kept ignoring her pleas. In the end, the wife, the mistress and Mary Anne got together and decided to wait for the constable one evening when he came home from work. ‘I think it just added to the over-inflated ego he had about himself,’ Mary Anne reflects. ‘After that he still pursued me and I told him I was going to report him to the police, even though he was a police officer. In the end I did. He ended up being transferred out west.’

Considering her mother’s experience, Mary Anne should have known what to expect when she crossed a serving Queensland police officer. She was soon getting visits from members of the Licensing Branch. ‘Two detectives came along one Saturday morning and they started insulting me. They called me a whore,’ she says. ‘They didn’t try to arrest me but there was a lot of name-calling and harassment. It was because I put that report in on the constable. It was payback.

‘One of them asked me to pay them money. They didn’t know who I was. They didn’t know I was a Brifman, and I didn’t want them to know. I was going under my married name.’

She refused to pay them graft for a very good reason. ‘A few days before my mother died she called me into the middle room of the flat [in Bonney Avenue, Clayfield] and made me feel a lump in her groin,’ Mary Anne says. ‘She said it was cancer and that she was going to die. It was a lump in her groin – it could have been anything – it could have been a cyst, an infection.

‘She tried to use it, I believe now, to dramatically grab my attention. She was preparing for her death. She knew she had to die in a few days and she wanted to tell me something. She begged me; she pleaded with me to pledge to her that I would never pay graft to police. I promised her I wouldn’t. This was very serious. She had never spoken to me like this before.’

When Mary Anne was asked to pay graft by the two detectives she was in a real quandary. ‘No matter what, I could never, ever pay graft, as it was my mother’s true dying warning … it was so inculcated and entrenched in me, that by saying yes would have led to eventually being murdered. That day I politely, respectfully, meekly and humbly responded that I could not. Over time they wore me down and I moved house.’

It didn’t stop police pursuing the escort who had jeopardised the love life of a local constable. They soon tracked her down. ‘I moved into this other place, a small house, and the police found out where I was,’ she recalls. ‘When I was young I had accrued a lot of driving tickets for speeding and things like that, and I hadn’t paid the fines.’ The fines had turned into warrants.

‘I was in the house and I saw at least six police cars arrive. I thought they were going to arrest me and put me in gaol. I went into the bathroom and hopped into the bathtub. I was shivering and quietly crying. I was very innocent. I couldn’t imagine going to gaol. I was laying in the bath and the police were everywhere around the house. They came up to the frosted glass window of the bathroom but they couldn’t see me. I could hear them all around the whole house. I didn’t know what to do.’

There, alone in the bath, weeping, Mary Anne Brifman resolved that she had to get out of Brisbane. She knew only too well what could happen if you were pursued by the Queensland police. Mary Anne was the same age as her mother had been when she died. It was time to move on.

A Greenhorn in Surfers Paradise

All young Eric Gregory (Greg) Deveney ever wanted to do was become a policeman. He probably had his father to thank for that. Eric Deveney Senior was a respected detective in the drug squad in Brisbane and had worked with the likes of Frank Bischof and Don ‘Buck’ Buchanan from the 1950s. So when Deveney joined the force in June 1970 – he was the first batch of new recruits under the stewardship of former Commissioner Ray Whitrod – he had high hopes for a long and successful career. In those early years he had heard the rumours about Whitrod – that the boss was incompetent, a pen-pusher, a lofty intellectual who didn’t understand the wants and needs of his men at the ground level – but it didn’t dampen his spirits. He couldn’t wait to serve. Deveney hoped to be as good and honest a policeman as his father.

‘I didn’t even know bloody corruption existed in the police force,’ Deveney recalls. ‘You know, I thought it was all honest and fair dinkum and everything else – shining white knights helping people.’

Deveney was posted briefly to Far North Queensland before being consigned to the Gold Coast Criminal Investigation Branch in the early 1980s. He could not have migrated to a more contrasting environment – this jungle was urban.

The Gold Coast had been Brisbane’s pleasure pot certainly since the 1940s and 50s – its famous Pyjama Parties a case in point – but by the early 1980s its allure had been discovered by the nation. The Australian film
Goodbye Paradise
, released in 1983 and starring Ray Barrett, may have given Deveney a preview of what he was in for. Set in Surfers Paradise and in and about the coast, the reviewer Dougal Macdonald described the landscape thus: ‘The Gold Coast, that place where old Australians go to experience the afterlife before they die, is despite its crassness, commercialism, phoniness and kitsch, a marvellous film location.’

Cheap flights were bringing in the hordes. East-West Airlines ran a successful campaign for a $199 seven-day Gold Coast holiday, including first-class accommodation and free in-flight champagne. The coast already had its ‘worlds’. Sea World, the brainchild of entrepreneur Keith Williams, was just about to go up for sale, and Dreamworld opened for Christmas 1981 on the Brisbane to Gold Coast Highway on 80 hectares of bushland at Coomera. Other worlds were on the horizon.

With high-rise apartment buildings rising up across the strip, the high-fliers dined on seafood at Oskars restaurant in Surfers Paradise. Those entrepreneurs like Williams and Mike Gore, men close to Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, were dubbed the White Shoe Brigade. As it became increasingly more popular, the Gold Coast simultaneously attracted vice, and the brothel and gambling kings following the money.

Deveney must have been bug-eyed at the Birdwatchers’ Bar, the leggy meter maids, the tired but legendary Pink Poodle motel and the strip’s not-so-discreet string of massage parlours. When he turned up for work at the CIB offices in downtown Surfers Paradise, home to racy nightclubs, such as The Penthouse and German beer and schnitzel barns, the scales were removed from his eyes. ‘I fell out with everybody on the very first day,’ he recalls. ‘They used to all drink at the Surfers Paradise Hotel [on Cavill Avenue] and they said, “Oh, come on down for drinks after work” … this was about three o’clock and everybody went down. You know we went in the bloody bar and I pulled out my bloody money and put it on the counter. And they said, “Oh, you don’t pay in this place mate, it’s all free.”

‘I said, “If they aren’t prepared to take my money, I’m not prepared to drink their grog.”

‘They said, “Don’t be stupid, it’s all free here, the lot.”

‘I said, “Nothing is free”, and I walked out. That was my first shift. You know, I didn’t need that sort of rubbish. Some of them approached me [afterwards] and said, “What was that all about?” I said, “I don’t drink free piss … as far as I’m concerned there’s no such thing. Anyway, I don’t drink when I’m on duty and I don’t drink drive.”’

His fellow officers didn’t quite know what to make of Deveney. They were no doubt aware of his father by reputation, and would have appreciated that he too was a straight-shooter. The greenhorn was given another chance. He was asked to work in the Gold Coast Consorting Squad, and he was partnered with Detective Patrick (Pat) Glancy.

Glancy had spent the formative years of his career in Brisbane, and had worked closely with his mentor, Tony Murphy. He worked on some of the biggest crimes of the 1970s, including the fatal torching of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Fortitude Valley; it was Glancy who arrested suspect John Andrew Stuart. Glancy had also been a top amateur boxer and had a reputation among fellow police as being not just feared, but ruthless.

Just prior to Terry Lewis being anointed Police Commissioner in November 1976, someone, possibly Murphy, had drawn up a crib sheet of fellow officers under the headings ‘Friends’, ‘Capable’ and ‘Others’. Along with Ron Redmond, Noel Dwyer, Ross Beer and Graham Leadbetter in the ‘Friends’ category, was Pat Glancy.

Detective Glancy’s arrival on the burgeoning Gold Coast – bristling in the early 1980s with massage parlours and brothels, illegal gambling and SP bookmaking, under the control of Syd Atkinson – was quickly noticed by his superiors. He soon took charge of the Consorting Squad. One local businessman, who often drank with police at the Queen’s Hotel in Nerang Street, Southport, said Glancy’s reputation preceded him. ‘I never took to him, [but] certainly of those fellows, regular police and the other fellows, the local boys, when this Glancy came on the scene … they said, “He’s a gun” … He was held in a bit of awe by the local coppers.’

It didn’t take long for Deveney to note that only a fraction of prostitutes working on the Gold Coast were being breached by police. He set about changing that and was soon issuing 60 to 70 breaches a month. Again he earned the ire of his colleagues.

‘The girls came in and I would give them a warning, a caution, telling them what the go was, and if they wanted to stay in that sort of business they could expect to be summonsed for [assisting to keep] premises,’ remembers Deveney. ‘And yeah, we just kept trying to keep it as clean as we possibly could.’

One of the more difficult tasks, too, was keeping police out of the brothels. ‘We chased uniform and branch fellows and visiting police who were taking advantage of the situation,’ he says. ‘We stopped all of that, which didn’t make us very popular … sergeants didn’t like it, especially having a senior constable getting up them in a back alley somewhere.’

Deveney couldn’t have known it then, but he would soon have more things to worry about than his popularity in the office.