Des Houghton: Jim O’Sullivan remembered for service to Qld

Queensland’s fight against corruption has a long history – and former commissioner Jim O’Sullivan has been remembered as one of its finest warriors, writes Des Houghton.

I was editor of this paper in 1992 when my secretary burst in to say there were two Japanese men at the front desk asking to see me.

It turned out they were reporters on an undercover assignment from the Yomiuri Shimbun, the respected Tokyo newspaper that still prints more than 10 million copies a day.

They were en route to the Gold Coast to investigate visits there by the boryokudan, the name they gave to the violent mobsters we knew as the yakuza.

Were the Japanese gangsters simply holidaying here, or did they have a darker purpose, they wondered? They wanted to trade information. We didn’t have much.

Realising I was going to be of little help, they nodded politely and stood up to leave. Then the older man pulled out a scroll which I was half expecting to be one of those lovely cherry blossom calendars, perhaps featuring a crane with black and white plumage strutting its magnificence across January.

Queensland Police Commissioner Steve Gollschewski at the funeral of former commissioner Jim O’Sullivan. Picture: Qld Police Media

However, the scroll turned out to be a chart listing a dozen yakuza syndicates with the names of crime bosses and the families who ran them.

It was handwritten in black ink in small kanji script, with English translations alongside. I agreed we would let them know if any of the names turned up in the news from Surfers Paradise.

They were happy for me to share the names with the police.

The Courier-Mail didn’t have a happy relationship with the Crime and Corruption Commission (the boss didn’t return calls) so I rang Wayne Goss, who agreed the list may be valuable.

The Premier rang me back a week later to say it was welcomed by the CCC, who would share it with the Feds and probably the National Crime Commission.

Goss said the list had been given to a young copper named Steve “Golly” Gollschewski who had been seconded to the CCC with a brief to monitor organised crime. He was one of the brightest of the new contingent of cops restoring confidence in the force.

Goss said Gollschewski was going places. Indeed.

There was Golly last week in his full Commissioner of Police regalia at the funeral of Jim O’Sullivan, a former commissioner and Fitzgerald inquiry task force chief.

Tony Koch, the outstanding Courier-Mail reporter of his time, once told me O’Sullivan slept on a mattress in the garage of Fitzgerald’s Indooroopilly home with a shotgun by his side after security fears for Fitz during the inquiry.

O’Sullivan’s eulogy, delivered by Archbishop Mark Coleridge during a requiem mass at Our Lady of Victories Catholic Church at Bowen Hills, was one of the finest pieces of oratory I have ever heard.

A portrait of former police commissioner Jim O’Sullivan at his funeral service last month. Picture: Qld Police Media

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man: well, the hour certainly came for Queensland, and the man of the hour was James Patrick O’Sullivan,” he began.

“But Jim didn’t come from nowhere, nor did his strong moral compass, without which public life … becomes a brutal free-for-all.”

Coleridge said O’Sullivan was a man of faith who was born in Kingaroy and grew up at Murphy’s Creek in the Lockyer Valley.

O’Sullivan, who died aged 85, was the product of a rural Irish Catholic culture “where courage matters more than cowardice, truth matters more than lies, virtue more than vice, service more than power, self-sacrifice more than self-promotion, compassion more than exploitation, integrity more than corruption …”

Up front, close to his old boss’s coffin, Gollschewski listened intensely. There was a message there for him.

There were hymns and prayers and a welcome passage of contemplative silence. Then came the melancholic music from the police bagpipers.

Gollschewski and other senior police formed the guard of honour.