Jacks and Jokers (44 page)

Powell, though, was considered a misfit by the older Queensland officers in Licensing. One gnarled detective asked him: ‘Are you nationalised yet?’ To which Powell replied: ‘Don’t you mean naturalised?’ The young man was instantly labelled a smartarse.

One of his first jobs in the branch was an unusual situation at the Cloudland ballroom at Bowen Hills. On the night of 24 December 1979, Jimmy and the Boys, a shock-rock band headed by outrageous singer Ignatius Jones, described by one music journalist as a ‘high voltage package of filth, glorious filth’, were performing. Word had gotten out that the band planned to burn on stage an effigy of baby Jesus.

‘I was put on the balcony to signal to the guys below when it was about to happen,’ remembers Powell. ‘The marihuana smoke was drifting up to where I was. I was the lookout with the radio.

‘It was bizarre. Almost the entire Licensing Branch was there. It never happened, the burning of the effigy. What were we going to charge them with anyway if it did?’

Still, his outsider status – not just within the branch but to the city’s criminal milieu – would prove to be an advantage. It was decided Nigel Powell would be sent undercover.

He quickly grew a beard, suited up in civilian clothes, and began infiltrating clubs, gambling dens and health studios of Brisbane by night.

‘Corruption is about the great unsaid to me,’ says Powell. ‘The only time these things break down is when those involved get a bit confident. They don’t think twice that there might be a mole.’

Powell burrowed into the underworld, not knowing that his work and his observations, his keen ear and the joining of a few elementary dots would, in the end, loosen the foundation of a monstrous edifice of institutionalised corruption that had been in full swing before Powell had ever even heard of Queensland.

A Working Holiday

Just prior to the start of the new decade, Commissioner Terence Murray Lewis gave an interview to the
Courier-Mail
to mark the third anniversary of his being in the top job. Lewis, at 51, told the reporter Jim Crawford that he wanted to remain Commissioner – ‘God willing’ – until he was 65 years old. That would keep him in the chair until late February 1993.

On 1 January 1980, Commissioner Terry Lewis was back at his desk at 7.20 a.m. If he was anticipating a slow silly season, he would soon be disappointed.

The pressure was on, particularly following the Milligan revelations and with the Williams Royal Commission of Inquiry into drugs set to reconvene. Both Lewis and Tony Murphy were required to give evidence. It would be Murphy’s first appearance before a royal commission since the National Hotel inquiry in 1963. The farmer Hallahan was also due down from Obi Obi to give evidence in the District Court.

On 2 January, Lewis recorded in his diary: ‘Supt Murphy called re Royal Commission on Drugs.’

Three days later, Lewis paid a visit to Frank Bischof’s wife at The Gap ‘and collected medals and uniform from Mrs Bischof’.

On Monday 7 January, the day he was set to commence his recreation leave, Lewis was ‘interviewed by Messrs T. Wakefield and Bird from … Royal Commission on Drugs re my knowledge of Hon. Lickiss; G. Hallahan; W. [Sic] Milligan; A. Murphy; resignation of Mr Whitrod; Poker machines; National Royal Comm; and drug increase in Queensland. Off at 10 a.m. With Hazel and [son] John to Faraway Lodge [Gold Coast] on holidays.’

There he socialised with John Meskell, Brian Hayes, Syd Atkinson and other policemen and their wives, all the while conducting police business by phone before returning to Brisbane six days later, then heading back to the coast for another week.

During his break, Lewis read Justice Woodward’s 2080-page Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking report.

Then on Monday 4 February, Commissioner Lewis gave evidence before Justice Williams in the District Court. Lewis said of Hallahan: ‘He resigned from our force, I understand, in 1972 and I have not seen him or spoken to him or communicated with him in any way since 1972.’

Murphy, in evidence, said he knew of Milligan but didn’t know him. Hallahan said he had known Milligan since 1965. He was asked about the $26,000 that Milligan put into his account: ‘That was for a small section of my property that I sold to Milligan,’ Hallahan said. ‘I left it to him to take care of the paperwork.’

Hallahan, one of the state’s most feted detectives in his younger days, said he didn’t have any idea that Milligan was a drug dealer. Their dealings were purely business. (Shobbrook had already been to the Queensland Land Titles Office and proved there was no deed of sale for the land Milligan supposedly purchased. The Williams Royal Commission made no such investigation and Hallahan’s story was accepted.)

Shobbrook was in the court to observe Hallahan take the stand. ‘The day that Hallahan gave this evidence to the royal commission was the first time that I had physically laid eyes upon him,’ Shobbrook recorded in his memoir. ‘The name was so familiar, the face from several black and white photographs was familiar, and there he was – so near and yet so far. Little did I realise at the time that I’d never get closer to him.

‘As far as I was concerned I was still compiling a brief of evidence against Hallahan. I had submitted that incomplete brief of evidence to the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor’s office … for an unofficial opinion as to whether a prima facie case existed against Hallahan.

‘I was informed that there was already sufficient evidence to lead to a conviction.

‘But in spite of the encouragement that I had been given by the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor’s office, the case that I had put together against Milligan and Hallahan was being swamped by a torrent of cover-ups, lies and false accusations by my own senior Australian Federal Police officers, by Royal Commissioner Justice Edward Williams … by Terry Lewis and naturally by Glen Patrick Hallahan.’

Retired assistant commissioner Abe Duncan telephoned Lewis to offer him his knowledge of Milligan that harked back to 1971 when Duncan was interviewing the late prostitute and brothel madam Shirley Brifman. Duncan remembered Hallahan bringing Milligan into the offices of the Crime Intelligence Unit to meet him and Norm Gulbransen.

Murphy again telephoned Lewis: ‘re aspects of connection by Milligan and Peter Monaghan in Royal Commission Inquiry’. A nervous Police Minister Ron Camm rang, ‘re Milligan’s history’.

Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook, who had chased down Milligan and uncovered what he believed was a massive network of corrupt police in Queensland, was called to give evidence before Justice Williams.

To his shock, Williams was aggressive towards Shobbrook and accused him of making up Milligan’s allegations to harm the good name of the Queensland Police Force, and fine officers like Lewis and Murphy. He told Shobbrook: ‘If I can prove that you have perjured yourself before this commission then you will be going to gaol.’

‘I informed Justice Williams of the reel-to-reel tapes [of the Milligan interviews] but to my knowledge Williams neither subpoenaed the tapes, nor did the Narcotics Bureau Central Office in Canberra, who held the original tapes, offer them to the [commission] to clear the smear of misconduct that Williams was implying against me,’ Shobbrook says.

He later bumped into Detective Sergeant Barry O’Brien, one of the Queensland state police seconded to work with the commission, who said to him: ‘You are ratshit with the Queensland Police Force.’

Shobbrook desperately sought support from head office in Canberra and his union, the Customs Officers Association. Shobbrook soon realised he’d been hung out to dry.

How could one of the most important investigations into heroin trafficking in Australia to date, allegedly involving senior Queensland police, be cursorily dismissed by Justice Williams, and the investigator himself be accused of making up evidence so he and the Narcotics Bureau would look good?

Shobbrook was an honest officer. He had pieced together the Operation Jungle saga with the utmost diligence and professionalism. How could this be happening?

He more than suspected that dark forces had been at work behind the scenes to, once again, diffuse and derail evidence against the corrupt practices of members of the Rat Pack. His thoughts echoed the suspicions of undercover expert Jim Slade, who suspected his boss Tony Murphy, and Justice Williams, had possibly joined forces in overblowing a Sunshine Coast drug raid in order to make the Federal narcs look inept.

As for Hallahan, Justice Williams made no adverse findings against him and the allegations he was dealing in drugs with John Milligan. ‘The Commission merely records that evidence presently available to it falls short of establishing as even a reasonable possibility, that Hallahan has ever been involved in wrong-doing in connection with illegal drugs,’ Williams found.

Hallahan was off the hook. Again.

He told the
Telegraph
: ‘I had no doubt in my mind the Commission would come out unilaterally, publicly and absolutely absolving me … the suggestion I am still under investigation is wrong … if there was any evidence connecting me with any wrongdoing of any sort, someone would have done something about it by now.’

Somebody did. His name was Douglas John Shobbrook.

But nobody, not even a royal commissioner, wanted to know.

Looking for the McCulkin Girls

Six long years after Barbara McCulkin, wife of local gangster Billy McCulkin, and her two daughters – Vicky Maree and Barbara Leanne – vanished without a trace from their Highgate Hill home in the mid-summer of 1974, the public were finally going to learn the truth about one of the city’s most enduring mysteries.

Police said the McCulkin vanishing rivalled the case of the Beaumont children in Adelaide who disappeared in 1966.

In fact, police had a theory about the McCulkins that revealed something far more sinister. They were of the opinion that the McCulkin girls and their mother, along with the missing prostitute Margaret Ward, who vanished in 1973, and Vincent Raymond Allen, a Warwick railway yard worker who disappeared in 1964, were all in fact murdered by the one killer.

All vicitms had dealings with a man who had a ‘heavy’ reputation in the Brisbane underworld. CIB Chief Superintendent Tony Murphy confirmed that they had a ‘very strong suspect’.

Police wanted a joint inquest and were granted their wish. It opened on Monday 11 February 1980, at the Holland Park Magistrates’ Court before Coroner Bob Bougoure, SM. It would prove to be one of the most riveting coronial inquests the city had seen in years. The courtroom was heavily guarded by riot police, including an inspector and three detectives.

One of the first witnesses was well-known criminal identity Vincent O’Dempsey. He was on remand for another unrelated matter and was handcuffed to the dock, deemed a ‘security risk’. He replied ‘no comment’ to the questions put to him.

Later, Detective Sergeant Trevor Menary told the court that in 1964 Vincent Raymond Allen went on a trip to Sydney with O’Dempsey, and he told police in an interview about the robbery of a jewellery store in Toowoomba.

O’Dempsey was later charged with breaking and entering over the jewellery and granted bail. Allen was set to give evidence against O’Dempsey over the case but disappeared before the matter came to court.

Menary then gave evidence about Margaret Ward, saying she had worked as a prostitute at the Polonia massage parlour in Lutwyche. It was operated by Cheryl Diane Prichard, the de facto wife of Vince O’Dempsey.

In 1973 Ward and Prichard had been charged with prostitution. Both women went to see a solicitor and Ward vanished after the meeting.

Menary, in an interview with O’Dempsey in 1979, had put to him that he had murdered Ward to prevent her giving evidence against Prichard.

As for the McCulkins, Menary would allege that O’Dempsey was seen leaving the McCulkin home in Dorchester Street, Highgate Hill, on the evening of 16 January 1974, in company with a criminal named Gary ‘Shorty’ Dubois.

Billy Stokes, serving time after being found guilty of the murder of boxer Tommy Hamilton, got a mention early in the inquest. Stokes, in his former publication
Port News
, had accused O’Dempsey and Dubois of murdering the McCulkins.

Billy ‘The Mouse’ McCulkin – former husband to Barbara – told the Coroner’s Court that after his family had gone missing he had warned O’Dempsey that he would blow the heads off anyone who harmed them.