Jacks and Jokers (38 page)

‘They went underground,’ Ron Lewis says, ‘and formed these escort services.’

That was precisely the direction in which Geoff Crocker headed after being evicted from one of the properties housing one of his brothels, and he’d had enough. ‘After all the landlords evicted me and closed them all down I then rented a flat [at 453] Montague Road [West End],’ said Crocker. ‘One of the girls who was managing one of the parlours for me was pregnant, right, and the parlours had been closed down and she had saved no money and she said to me, “Geoff, can you help me out with a flat?” ’

He thought of the possibility of running escorts out of the flat in the three-storey brick block not far from Hill End Terrace and the sharp sweep of the Brisbane River. Crocker installed a couple of phones and Global Girls Escorts was born.

Business grew rapidly. From two girls working, it built to five or six. Crocker drove the girls to their jobs. ‘The police used to come in and visit and in them days … we were [under] the impression we couldn’t be busted for escort, like the receptionist couldn’t be,’ said Crocker.

‘I mean, the working girl? She solicited someone in a motel room. I got sort of pretty busy there and people were starting to complain in the other units about the cars coming and going at three or four o’clock in the morning so we moved out of there into a private residence.’

Next up was 27 Sankey Street, Highgate Hill, a large Queenslander on the corner of Dudley Street and opposite a children’s playground. Across the park was Paradise Street and the home of the former corruption fighter and fearless parliamentarian, the member for South Brisbane, Colin Bennett. In another era, Bennett had relentlessly pursued the corrupt former police commissioner Frank Bischof and his so-called Rat Pack of bagmen and acolytes – Terry Lewis, Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan.

It was to the house in Paradise Street that Bennett and his large Catholic family had retreated on 27 December 1959, when little Colin junior had drowned in the Davies Park public swimming pool.

In Sankey Street, Crocker installed up to eight phones, such was the demand for his Global Girls.

Crocker had an aversion to drugs. If any of his girls used, they were sacked on the spot. Besides, he had made a promise to his mother that he wouldn’t get involved in that side of the business.

At Sankey Street, Crocker came in contact with an enthusiastic young constable, Sam Di Carlo. Di Carlo had only joined the force in 1975 but had gone to work under Alec Jeppesen at the Licensing Branch and had shown an aptitude for undercover work. Jeppesen encouraged him, describing his charge as ‘honest, loyal and dedicated’.

On one of Di Carlo’s visits to the premises he got Crocker out in the kitchen on his own. ‘Geoff, things are going to get really hot in this business now, we’ve found holes in the law that we can plug up and you’re going to be busted and probably put in gaol,’ Di Carlo allegedly told him.

‘Oh well, that’s how it goes, you know,’ Crocker responded. ‘You know, there is not much I can do about that, Sam.’

He said he expected Di Carlo to offer him a bribe. The constable didn’t. Instead Di Carlo told Crocker his boss said to ask him could ‘you guys’ look after the branch with information on drugs and SP bookmakers in exchange for some leniency from Licensing?

‘Yes, no problem,’ said Crocker. ‘I hate druggies anyhow so if I can give you a dealer, or even a user, I will.’

He said he offered up to Di Carlo a druggie at a nearby hotel then ‘strung him on’ for months. ‘He came back to being a fair copper,’ said Crocker of Di Carlo, ‘and not the heavy dude he originally started off to be.’

After Licensing Branch head Alec Jeppesen was transferred, Rigney took his place. He was followed by Noel Dwyer, Ron Lewis’s superior.

‘Noel Dwyer was a fine family man. That’s the way I saw the man,’ recalls Ron Lewis. ‘Alec Jeppesen was a totally and completely honest man. There was never any suggestion I shouldn’t do something [about going after the owners].

‘When I went to Dwyer and I tried to get the owners, he didn’t think it would do any good but he didn’t dissuade me in any way, shape or form.’

Ron Lewis was a tradesman before he joined the police force. He applied the same principles to his Licensing Branch cases – be honest, fair, transparent and work hard. ‘One day I was in the office and there was a woman there,’ he recalls.

‘I was told she worked for a massage parlour. She said, “We always knew where we stood with you, Mr Lewis.” I treated them like ladies. I wouldn’t take a thing from them. Not even a glass of water. It became a bit of a joke. Sometimes my troops thought I was a bit of an old lady.’

Even so, his dedicated work in the branch didn’t necessarily do the diligent officer any favours. Ron Lewis was encouraged to take a job in administration. It was a good position and a sensible step, although he never knew if this encouragement was for the good of his career, or because someone didn’t want him to continue working in Licensing.

As for the energetic Italian, Di Carlo, he had admired Jeppesen and felt that Jeppesen had been badly treated. He made no secret of his feelings that Jeppesen had been destroyed by Tony Murphy and Syd Atkinson on the orders of Commissioner Terry Lewis. He aired his theory in the canteen, the Police Union office, and to whichever officers he happened to be with at any given time, irrespective of rank. Jeppesen had been done over.

His self-admitted big mouth would soon land him in the office of the Commissioner of Police. Like Robert Walker, Bob Campbell, Kingsley Fancourt and so many honest officers before him, Di Carlo’s commitment to an honest day’s work would see him suffer the same time-worn fate – he would be driven from the force in spectacular circumstances.

Goodbye to the Big Fella

In the last week of August 1979 former commissioner Frank Bischof, 74, seeing out his days in his humble home at The Gap, was admitted to the Mater Hospital in South Brisbane having been seriously ill for several weeks.

He died at 8 p.m. on Tuesday 28 August. At 10 p.m. Commissioner Lewis got a phone call at home from one of his inspectors to inform him of Bischof’s passing.

The newspapers the next day lauded the Big Fella as a ‘good tough cop’. ‘Francis Erich Bischof died yesterday and with him died an era of the Queensland Police Force that will be talked of for many years to come,’ one said. ‘He was outspoken – some thought too much so – and his name was always before the public.’

Bischof was praised for standing up to be counted when it mattered, and for his tireless dedication to the welfare of the state’s children. His creation of the Juvenile Aid Bureau – ‘virtually a world first and copied by many countries’ – was singled out as his lasting memorial. It was noted that the JAB had been the nursery for the current Commissioner of Police.

There was no mention of the closing of the brothels in the late 1950s, his disastrous affair with Mary Margaret Fels, the National Hotel inquiry or his shoplifting charge.

The day after Bischof’s death, his protégé Commissioner Lewis addressed members of the 63rd Advanced Training Course at the Police Academy. He no doubt imparted knowledge that the Big Fella had passed on to him.

On Friday 31 August, Lewis and senior officers attended Bischof’s funeral service at St John’s Cathedral, a few minutes’ walk up Clark Lane from the Roberts brothers’ National Hotel in the city, where Bischof spent so much of his time in the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Lewis and his officers then proceeded to the Mount Thompson Memorial Gardens in Nursery Road, Holland Park.

After farewelling his old mentor, Lewis went with wife, Hazel, to the Police Academy for lunch with Justice Lucas, then oversaw the induction of 36 fresh constables – the new generation.

Empty Rooms

While Federal Narcotics Bureau Agent John Shobbrook was making huge headway in his pursuit of drug dealer John Edward Milligan, his colleagues in the Brisbane office were running into brick walls all over the place.

Geoff Pambroke had been in the bureau since 1975 and he was getting increasingly frustrated at what he perceived as Commissioner Lewis’s men intentionally thwarting the Federal Bureau’s cases.

Pambroke, an investigative agent, noticed the same thing when Mr Asia, Terry Clark, and his couriers, Doug and Isabel Wilson, were brought in for questioning by the state police in 1978.

‘If anything, the State police tried to keep us away from them,’ Pambroke remembers. ‘The hierarchies of the Narcos and the Queensland police were playing games with each other. Lewis didn’t like a lot of our blokes. They were worried about what we could do and how well we could do it.

‘I remember when the local police were discussing Terry Lewis becoming Commissioner. They said, “This is going to be great. We’re all going to be looked after now”.’

Pambroke was proud of the work the Federal Narcotics Bureau did, despite the staff being spread thin. With Shobbrook, he would modify vehicles for surveillance work, rigging out Kombi vans for long stretches of undercover work. Both often used their own money to acquit the mechanical changes.

But increasingly that work was all for nought – they went on raid after raid following the exacting gathering of evidence, only to find that the suspects had been tipped off. ‘We’d organise a raid on the Gold Coast and there’d be nothing there,’ he says. ‘Someone had phoned them up. In one case we went into a place and there on a piece of paper were the number plate details of our vehicles.

‘If you went through the main street of Surfers Paradise in those days [within view of the offices of Gold Coast state drug squad detectives], then that was the end of it. We had to go in through the back blocks. We did not pull off one successful raid on the Gold Coast.’

The same failure rate was being experienced by the state Licensing Branch. Former Licensing Branch officer Bruce Wilby remembers: ‘Everybody knew what the rumours were. In those days … I had no idea it was as organised as it was. [Syd] Atkinson on the Gold Coast tried to override us all the time. You’d get the message – we’d like you to stay away from this person.’

Similarly, undercover detective Jim Slade faced similar frustrations. He was working on a case involving the Bellino family and their associates when the unthinkable happened. ‘I think I did a job with Fred Maynard, we had an undercover officer in there, and the Bellinos just came up to me and said, “We know you’re a copper because we’ve got inside information.”

‘I was so fucking wild. Here I was, having worked undercover for years, I’d worked with undercover agents, we were so successful with all of our operations, and here was some fucking mongrel, my workmate – someone dobbed us in. That really affected me. I had no time for those bastards.’

Slade would soon be heading to North Queensland to do some serious investigations into the drug trade. He would not forget the Bellino incident. And if the name Bellino came up, he would not hesitate to push the investigation to its very limit.

Wives and Mothers

Despite an emotionally cold childhood, his mother, Mona, having left the family home in Ipswich for the bright lights of Brisbane and its horse racing tracks when he was a boy, and despite prohibitive work hours as Commissioner of Police, Terry Lewis and his wife, Hazel, had established a warm and loving family environment up on Garfield Drive.

Lewis still heard from his mother – an habitué of the Doomben and Eagle Farm tracks – and says he relied on her for racing tips.

‘I know, as I worked my tail off and got up another notch, she used to use my name a lot, particularly in the racing fraternity,’ says Lewis. ‘But Hazel, she was such a gentle, friendly bugger, she’d go and kiss a blackfella if she felt like it.’

Aware of her husband’s own upbringing, she encouraged him to be affectionate with his children and would urge Lewis to kiss the children more. ‘I’d kiss the two daughters reluctantly for a while there … only in fairly recent years I kissed the boys when I met them,’ he recalls.

‘I’d never known it … I love the kids and I’m sorry I never showed them … I think my five kids realised what I thought of them.’

In the Lewis household, the children were taught to be frugal. Certainly Hazel and Lewis watched their pennies. At Christmas time, the family arrangement was that no present could exceed $10 in value. For birthdays, Lewis usually got socks, pyjamas, belts or aftershave. With Hazel, it was perfume or nightdresses.

Meals at Garfield Drive were simple and prepared with an eye on the budget. Hazel would prepare ox-tongue, or make pies out of chuck or skirt steak. Chops were braised in gravy and served with carrots, onions and turnips. There were mince-meat rissoles and meatloaf. Hazel always baked her own cakes and biscuits, and occasionally made a tomato relish.

The fresh produce that came into the house was sourced from friends and relatives. The Lewis’s received tomatoes, butternut pumpkins, rockmelons and mangoes from a relative’s farm. Friends sent pineapples from Gympie, cabbages, lettuces, potatoes, pumpkins, onions and beetroots from Gatton, apples and oranges from Stanthorpe. Fish was plentiful courtesy of two sons-in-law in the family who liked to throw in a line.

As for household cleaning products, including soaps and deodorants, they were at some point supplied free of charge to Garfield Drive because they were damaged goods and unsaleable. So too cooking oil and margarines.