Little Fish Are Sweet

By Matthew Condon

"I recall meeting Lewis on a number of occasions in company with Tony Murphy. I recall conversation getting around to payments of money with Murphy and Lewis. Lewis thanked me on several occasions and said 'Little fish are sweet." —Jack 'The Bagman' Herbert in evidence to the Fitzgerald Inquiry 1988. Little Fish Are Sweet is Matthew Condon's extraordinary personal account of writing the Three Crooked Kings trilogy. When Condon first interviewed disgraced former police commissioner Terry Lewis, he had no idea that it would be the start of a turbulent six-year journey. As hundreds of people came forward to share their powerful and sometimes shocking stories, decades of crime and corruption were revealed in a new light.  Risking threats and intimidation, Condon tirelessly pursued his investigations into a web of cold murder cases and past conspiracies. What he discovered is much more sinister than anyone could have imagined. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9780702257360

Book preview

Matthew Condon is a prize-winning Australian novelist and journalist. He is currently on staff with the Courier-Mail’s Qweekend magazine. He began his journalism career with the Gold Coast Bulletin in 1984 and subsequently worked for leading newspapers and journals including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald and Melbourne’s Sunday Age. He has written ten books of fiction, most recently The Trout Opera (Random House, 2007) and is the author of the best-selling true-crime trilogy about Queensland crime and corruption – Three Crooked Kings (2013), Jacks and Jokers (2014) and All Fall Down (2015).

for Nigel Powell

We had a meeting and agreed that we would pay [Terry] Lewis. I paid [Tony] Murphy, who was then a sergeant and senior to me, on a monthly basis and extra for Lewis. I recall meeting Lewis on a number of occasions in company with Tony Murphy. I recall conversation getting around to payments of money with Murphy and Lewis. Lewis thanked me on several occasions and said, ‘Little fish are sweet’. — Evidence of Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert to the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption, 31 August 1988, Brisbane, Queensland.

Prologue

In the winter of 1986, as a young police reporter on the Sunday Mail newspaper in Brisbane, I received a tantalising tip-off from a source in the Traffic Branch. The new police drink-driving offensive involving so-called ‘booze buses’ and breath testing, the source said, was not only failing but department heads were falsifying statistics. The initiative was nowhere near as successful as it was being made out to be.

In addition, the results of a Queensland Police Union questionnaire, yet to be publicly released, revealed that the majority of members wanted the powers to conduct ‘random’ breath testing, or the ability to pull over a suspected drink-driver at any time. The source was quoted as saying, ‘We have got to do something [about the road toll and drink-driving] that the government hasn’t got the guts to do.’

It was a good story. I needed to contact the Police Commissioner, Sir Terence (Terry) Murray Lewis, for a comment. I wanted to avoid Lewis’s protective buffer of media advisors and decided to ambush the Commissioner with my questions about the breath testing brouhaha at a public function. On Tuesday 12 August 1986 Lewis would be opening three new squash courts at the police college in Chelmer, a suburb in Brisbane’s west. This would be my moment.

I waited patiently in a shaded undercroft at the college for the formal ceremony to conclude. Before long, Lewis came striding in my direction in full regalia – collar and tie, cap and epaulettes – his minders and other senior officers in tow.

I approached the Commissioner and identified myself. For a moment he appeared shocked that someone, let alone a member of the press, had infiltrated his cordon. He soon masked his initial confusion, declining to comment on my question about the breath testing, and with a faint smile he walked off. This would be my first ever dealing with Lewis, although I did have his home telephone number in my reporter’s contact book.

The subsequent story was published on page one on Sunday 17 August under the headline: GIVE US ‘OPEN GO’ SAY B-TEST POLICE. The following Tuesday, according to his Commissioner’s diary, Lewis met his Police Minister, Bill Gunn, to discuss ‘Police Union survey on RBT and Bureau of Stat’s figures …’

A few days later I received a telephone call from a traffic superintendent. He was not pleased with the leaked page one story. ‘I thought we were friends,’ he said on the telephone, despite the fact that we’d never met.

The following week, I awoke in my small rented house in the western suburb of Taringa to find all four tyres of my car had been let down overnight. During the next fortnight, I was repeatedly pulled over by police for vehicle defects that didn’t exist. The traffic superintendent continued to call me at the office so frequently that I stopped answering the phone. The police intimidation, though minor, played a small part in my decision to leave Queensland just months later and try my luck as a journalist in Sydney.

Almost a quarter of a century on, I would find myself back in Brisbane, knocking on the flyscreen door of a modest house in the city’s north to meet Terry Lewis for the second time. Through a mutual acquaintance, the famously hermit-like Lewis arranged to see me to discuss a potential book project. He was thinking of finally breaking his long-held silence and publishing a memoir. He had the memories, but he needed someone else to put them into book form.

Lewis claimed he wanted to ‘tell the truth about what really happened’ in his life, from his childhood in Ipswich and his service as a police officer to his tenure as Commissioner from late 1976 to 1987. He also wanted to outline the ‘travesty’ of his subsequent corruption trial and his time as a prisoner.

Initially I was hesitant at the prospect. I was not interested in ghost-writing a memoir. And while I was keen to hear Lewis’s side of this epic story – in essence the view from the top of Queensland police corruption, going back decades and culminating in the Fitzgerald Inquiry – experience told me it would be a monumental job. Out of curiosity, I agreed to meet him.

That morning – 1 February 2010 – Lewis, the nervous man from the undercroft shadows of all those years before, came to the flyscreen and invited me inside. Now in his early eighties, he had in my time away from the city been stood down, then sacked as Police Commissioner in the turmoil of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. He’d been charged, tried and found guilty of official corruption, served almost seven years in gaol and had been stripped of his knighthood, his social status, his house and his police pension.

That first interview set me off on an odyssey that would span six years and three books. I cast the net wide and started to unearth the shocking truth behind the history of police corruption in Queensland. I could not have foreseen that this story would come to include, literally, a cast of thousands. A range of people – former police, premiers, federal narcotics agents, lawyers, the children of suicide victims, whistleblowers and politicians, club bouncers, barmen, restaurateurs, nightclub singers, even convicted murderers – offered their recollections about the era on and off the record.

Over time, I traversed regional Queensland chasing false leads and dead ends. I travelled hundreds of kilometres interstate trying to locate key sources and confirm critical information, pursuing any glimmer or morsel that might help to expose the truth. I realised I was in a unique position, as a storyteller, to try to get to the heart of this drama before even more people passed away and their memories were lost (several did die during the period of our interviews). As a Queenslander, I had a personal obligation to tell this tale as best I could.

As the book trilogy evolved, I also became embroiled in the tangled web of lies and deception. Many players in the drama attempted to either skew the narrative in their favour or stop my story from being published. I faced many challenges, including legal threats, and there were times where I became so disturbed by the information I was gathering, so overwhelmed by the sordid subject matter itself, that I questioned if I wanted to keep going with the project. Writing the books became a journey in, and of, itself. Even when I thought I had finally finished the trilogy still more people made contact to offer fresh insights and new perspectives of those years that refused to fade into history.

The narratives I collected along the way came in like schools of small fish – anecdotes, asides, observations, personal testimony – hundreds of them, adding bright flashes of understanding to a very dark story.

Did You Ever Take a Penny?

One of the first things that became immediately obvious during my early meetings with Terry Lewis, was that he seemed to genuinely believe that a miscarriage of justice had taken place following the state’s most publicised and controversial royal commission. Despite the volume of evidence against him during the Fitzgerald Inquiry into organised crime and police corruption, Lewis was adamant that he was a scapegoat. He insisted he was a wronged man. He repeatedly spoke of his desire to appeal his conviction of corruption – over 20 years later he still believed he could be exonerated – and bemoaned a lack of money to mount any sort of legal challenge.

The Fitzgerald Inquiry had commenced its public hearings in July 1987 and exposed corrupt former commissioner Frank Bischof and the so-called Rat Pack of officers he favoured. His alleged ‘bagmen’ – Terry Lewis, Tony Murphy and Glendon (Glen) Patrick Hallahan – had consolidated ‘The Joke’ with Licensing Branch officer Jack Herbert as early as the 1960s. The Joke was an elaborate system of graft and protection payments from illegal gambling, SP bookmakers, brothels and escort services that over time yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars to corrupt police. In testifying at the hearing, Herbert had been granted an indemnity from prosecution and walked away a free man. Murphy and Hallahan had by this time retired from the force and evaded prosecution. Lewis was one of a handful of police and prominent politicians to do gaol time.

The royal commission’s terms of reference, twice expanded, had only reached back to 1 January 1977, at which point Lewis had been Commissioner for just over a month. But Tony Fitzgerald, QC, clearly had an interest in the pre-history of corruption in Queensland. He was given carte blanche to explore ‘any other matter or thing’ in the public interest. Barrister Andrew Philp and others working for the commission were instructed to interview police officers, politicians and public servants who were pivotal figures as far back as the 1950s and 60s. Yet in Fitzgerald’s findings, just 16 pages of his 630-page report were devoted to events that occurred prior to 1977.

In the beginning, a big part of my motivation to interview Lewis was to explore this pre-history. In essence, I wanted to know how the culture of corruption began, how it was perpetuated and who was responsible. But I faced a few hurdles, perhaps the biggest being that time was not on my side. When I first sat down to interview Lewis, Hallahan was dead. Herbert was dead. So, too, many prominent police of the era. Tony Murphy was alive on the Gold Coast but suffering poor health. Lewis, in effect, was one of the last men standing.

It was Lewis himself who offered some of the most invaluable documentary resources for my research. ‘Would these be of any use?’ he asked, offering the complete set of his police diaries, which he had kept from as far back as the late 1940s. At one of our early meetings, he escorted me to the garage behind his granny flat. It was full of cardboard boxes, stacked to the roof. The boxes contained an extraordinary volume of records and documents from that time. They quite literally spanned his entire career.

As our interviews progressed he would give me various items to review – he had drawn up a list of where everything was located – and I would find useful the many notes, letters, confidential police reports, criminal case files, Christmas cards, photographs, personal ephemera, annual reports and items pertaining to almost every major event in his career. That suburban garage held millions of words, many of them written by the compulsive Lewis himself.

It was a gift for me to have access to this material but I couldn’t help wonder, beyond this wall of paperwork and rusting paperclips, would I be able to get to the honest heart of this story? Within these personal archives would I find an insight into the great drama of crime and corruption that changed Queensland history? After all this time, would Terence Murray Lewis tell me the truth?

It was Lewis’s obsession with notating every small or large incident in his life that contributed to his downfall at both the inquiry and at his trial. I had never kept a diary, but during our first interview I decided to scribble some notes. Perhaps I instinctively knew he would be taking notes on me (which he did) if I went ahead with the book project and that my own fresh observations would act as a counterbalance or foil if required.

We would ultimately meet about once every few weeks, and in Lewis’s crowded study adjoining his narrow bedroom under the house in north Brisbane we would travel back in time. These visits would soon follow a predictable pattern. I would arrive at his house early and we would engage in the usual welcome banter before the formal interview would begin. The old copper often couldn’t help himself, and would proceed to interrogate me first, often asking a number of questions. Initially he wanted to know: What was my religion? My politics? My background? My wife’s name?

Later, his questions ranged from the politics of the day, newspaper and magazine articles he’d clipped and saved, to the progress of our interviews. He enquired about who I’d been in touch with for quotes for the book, and talked about the people he’d spoken to since we last met. (Through his network of contacts, he often knew who I’d talked to before I informed him myself.)

He was polite, pleasant and often good-humoured about a life he would describe in one of his diaries as ‘this whole macabre tragedy’. He hinted there was ‘a single figure’ behind ‘all the corruption’ but wanted to wait and see if over time I drew the same conclusion.

As the project progressed and I began to study the interview transcripts, a pattern began to emerge. With orthodox questions Lewis’s answers were crystal clear, his recall phenomenal. When I raised contentious issues, such as the real reason for the shutting of the brothels in 1959 – a pivotal event that led to the National Hotel inquiry of 1963–64 – Lewis’s responses would became slightly indistinct, like he had moved to the shadowy edges of the firelight. Often, with difficult subject matter, he would give an answer he had heard ‘second hand’, distancing himself as an eye witness or participant. He was adamant that he did not wish to deal in scuttlebutt and unsubstantiated allegations.

As I continued to interview many people outside of Lewis’s ambit, I would bring back information or allegations to that meeting room and seek his reaction. I will never forget speaking with a former police officer in his late eighties who shared his recollections on the condition of strict anonymity. He begged me never to reveal his identity because he still feared, a half century after witnessing certain events, that he would be killed by corrupt police. It was only then that I started to understand how powerful and alive this story still was.

As I wrote and gathered my research I repeatedly told Lewis that as a major figure in this drama, right or wrong, he could finally set the record straight – if, indeed, there was anything left to straighten out. I reiterated that this would probably be the last chance to tell the world what he knew. He replied, sometimes testily, that he had nothing of substance to offer off the record.

At one point I asked Lewis straight out: ‘Did you ever, at any moment in your long career, take a single penny of corrupt monies?’

He replied swiftly and with a single word: ‘No.’

Meet with Lewis in Winton Street at 8.50 a.m. As I approach the gate I can hear a dog barking from inside. Lewis answers the door in a polo shirt, socks and leather sandals.

I go to sit in a chair closer to his usual chair (I’m told later it was his ‘wife’s chair’ that his dog, Prince, now regularly occupies) but he suggests I sit on the couch opposite. He has some sheets of paper ready and a notebook. He says he has questions he needs to ask me before we get going. ‘I’ll write up the answers in this notebook tonight,’ he says.

‘I know where you live because it’s in the phone book,’ he says, brandishing a pen. He adds he tried to phone me a couple of times on my home number; something to do with concern regarding the flash floods in Brisbane.

He starts talking about his childhood in Ipswich and Brisbane and moves around to sit in the spare seat on the couch beside me. He drops down and shows me some hand-written documents he started writing when he was in prison. ‘I was going to write a book,’ he says.

I have to twist awkwardly to look at him as he speaks. There is nowhere to safely secure the tape recorder, and it keeps slipping down the couch cushion. I wonder if he has decided to sit beside me so I can’t look at his face or in his eyes as he answers my questions.

Close up, it’s possible to see the old-fashioned barber’s cut with the kick of hair at the back, a style from the 1940s and 50s.

The room is a museum to his wife. It’s how she left it after her death in 2009. The framed photographs of family on a low table near the television set. On a shelf under the table a crowd of creamy coloured seashells. The plastic flowers. The antimacassars on the backs of the lounge chairs. The ridiculous and obstructive cluster of albums from his police years held upright and together by two house bricks wrapped in plastic.

He tells me of his quiet father, and his mother who sought the bright lights of the city and the glamour of the racetrack. He has no fond memories of his mother. He tells me something ‘I’ve never told anyone’ – that he finds it ‘difficult to love people’. He talks of no friends when he was growing up, no girlfriends before his wife. Says he’s a loner and seeks out being alone.

He tells me he has had little contact with his sister but then, near the end of our conversation, she literally rings the house. He talks convivially with her.

What is the truth here?

Before I leave we talk briefly of his former boss, Commissioner Frank Bischof. Lewis continues to call him ‘Mr Bischof’, although he’s been dead for years and left the force in 1969. He calls former Labor premier Ned Hanlon, ‘Mr Hanlon’, and former Country Party premier Frank Nicklin, ‘Mr Nicklin’.

Lewis sees me to the front gate. He has let out his dog, a nine-year-old black and white terrier with a gunmetal-grey muzzle. He tells me the dog used to kiss his wife, Hazel, goodnight in the last years of her life. As I bid him goodbye and walk to my car he says, ‘It gets very lonely talking to yourself.’

A Tangled Matrimonial Skein

When I first sat down to talk with Terry Lewis in early 2010 in his cream brick house at Winton Street, Stafford Heights, the loose plan was to begin with his birth and early childhood in Ipswich, and move forward through the chronology of his life. He had essentially been a Depression child, and I was looking forward to hearing about his earliest memories. About his mother, Mona Ellen Lewis, nee Hanlon, and his father George Murry Lewis, a storeman at the local railway workshop.

Immediately, Lewis painted a dour picture of formative years affected by the times – little money, the struggle to put food on the table, no toys, the long walk to and from school. It was no different from the experience of many thousands of other Australians during the 1930s, although Lewis’s history had its own unique colour.

He said his mother – born and raised in a horseracing family, and always close to the track – found Ipswich too parochial. According to Lewis she had agitated for George and their two children, Terry and Lanna, to move closer to Brisbane. The Hanlon family were littered with horse owners, trainers and jockeys, and Mona loved nothing more than going to the races.

Ultimately, the Lewises settled in Corinda, in the city’s south-west. George Lewis was forced to commute daily to work in Ipswich. Lewis claimed that when he was about ten years old, he came home from school one day to find that his mother and only sister had packed up and left the humble family home. He proceeded to offer a story that cast his mother as the architect of this family upheaval, and his father as a gentle parent who seemed unable to provide the marital excitement to keep Mona at home. In essence, Lewis had been abandoned as a child by his own mother.

‘When we moved to Corinda it was a real burden on my father because they were … well nearly everyone had to work really early in those days, he had to catch the train from Corinda to Ipswich and then over to the workshop and the same back,’ Lewis told me. He said that his mother could have jumped on a train to ‘visit her folks and go to the races much easier’.

‘I can’t remember any arguments; I think she [Mona] just did her thing and he was pretty accepting.’

‘So, when did they separate?’ I asked Lewis.

‘1938.’

‘Who was the disciplinarian in the home, was it your mother?’

‘Yeah, it would have been my mother … our father was more kindly disposed, if that’s the word, more kindly, well not kindly … was much more gentle a person than my mother.’

‘Do you remember those as happy years?’ I asked him in the first hour of our formal interviews.

‘Not really, no,’ Lewis said. ‘My mother left one day, she took my sister with her and I don’t even remember her saying … I think I was at school and when I came home she was not there, and ah … I don’t think my father probably would have known either. It was very, very hurried, I know that. I’m sure at ten years of age I would have remembered if she had come and said I’m going …’

‘So you went to school one morning and got home and …’

‘She wasn’t there,’ said Lewis.

‘How did your father explain what was happening, do you remember that?’

‘No. I think he was just terribly shocked and no I don’t remember him trying to explain that.’

‘Was it not a glamorous enough life, do you think, for your mother?’ I asked.

‘I think the bright lights of Brisbane were much more attractive,’ Lewis said. ‘I think over the years, I felt that we were … that I was sort of abandoned. Not abandoned, that might be too strong a word.’

‘Rejected?’

‘Yeah, well that’s a better word … my dad was a very caring sort of a bloke.’

Lewis said after his mother left the family home his father returned to Ipswich and took his son with him. They lived in George’s mother’s house with four of Lewis’s uncles.

‘One of them was a fella called Jimmy and he was a very, very hard man. He had a bicycle and nobody could touch the bike, but of course being a boy I thought I could and I got a real good belting off him,’ Lewis said. ‘I never got one off my father but I used to get it from Jimmy.’

Lewis soon decided he didn’t like his new living arrangements. ‘Not long after, I can’t tell you exactly, I decided I didn’t like it there so I packed a suitcase and got on a train and came down to Brisbane,’ Lewis recalled. ‘I knew where my grandparents were so I went to them and they must have put me in touch with my mother. At that stage she had