All Fall Down by Matthew Condon

Author:Matthew Condon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2015-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

Eleventh Hour

At the eleventh hour the Queensland Police Department was still trying to pre-empt the upcoming Four Corners investigation and construct some sort of defensive narrative.

On Wednesday 6 May the Courier-Mail ran a suite of stories about the local vice scene, offering supposedly official police statistics on how the force had not just contained prostitution in Brisbane, but reduced it. As for illegal gambling, the head of the gaming squad, Detective Inspector Ross Beer – who had been named years before in state parliament by the late Kev Hooper as a man who frequented illegal games and drank there – declared that police had not found any evidence of it despite having suspect establishments under surveillance for the fortnight.

Beer, who would have to have been granted permission by Commissioner Lewis to speak with the media, said police had only witnessed legal card games. ‘I’ve been in the job for a couple of weeks and before then I’ve had nothing to do with gambling,’ Beer reportedly said. ‘I can only say I’ve seen nothing in that time that you could call an illegal casino.’

Beer used the opportunity to defend himself against Hooper’s old allegations, which included that he had once taken a meal up to Gerry Bellino when the latter was being treated in the Wesley Hospital. ‘The allegations that I’m some sort of a friend to criminals is absolutely rubbish,’ Beer said. ‘Why would I have been interested in going to any of these alleged casinos? I’m not even a gambler.’

Another story in the newspaper that day denied that the Brisbane vice scene was run by two organised crime syndicates, as had been reported by journalist Phil Dickie. A week or so earlier the Courier-Mail team had organised for a series of questions to be sent to Police Minister Bill Gunn. Upon receiving them Gunn had been so disturbed that he demanded the Commissioner of Police answer them.

‘Gunn didn’t want the police to give the answers to us but he wanted the answers for himself,’ Phil Dickie recalls. ‘He didn’t have a great relationship with Lewis then.’

When the answers to the questions were finally provided, on 5 May, some of them were clearly evasive. In the end, the Courier-Mail received a writ from Assistant Commissioner Graeme Parker. In its belated response the statement said dismissively that the term ‘organised crime syndicate’ was ‘something of a modern catch phrase’. It said police had identified the names and addresses of the owners of 12 Brisbane massage parlours. ‘There is some recurrence of two groups of names involved in the different parlours but the names are not limited to these two groups,’ the statement continued. ‘Police priority has been to contain the prostitution industry and an example of success in this aim is that, in 1977, 24 massage parlours were operating, now there are 12.’

The Courier-Mail article continued: ‘The department … did not respond specifically about why police had not used a 1980 precedent [of the successful conviction of an uninvolved real estate

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