Fitzgerald Inquiry Queensland: Where it all began

THIRTY years ago this week a story was published that exposed Brisbane’s seedy underbelly - prompting a former cop to blow the whistle and setting in motion a chain of events that would bring down a government.

Former Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Picture: Ted Holliday

• ‘I was a Fitzgerald Inquiry whistleblower’
• Fitzgerald Inquiry: What the brothels report really exposed
• Opinion: Tackling the strong arm of the law

IN THE newspaper game, and elsewhere, it has always been known as the “silly season” – those listless, languorous weeks of January each year, with the nation’s workforce largely off on summer leave.

But a populace in slow motion is of little help to a daily newspaper cycle. Stories have to be written and published, silly or not.

In the week leading up to the epochal publication of Courier-Mail journalist Phil Dickie’s first report on the Brisbane sex trade and Queensland police corruption in January 1987, serious news was thin on the ground.

A lightning bolt had punched a series of holes in the tarmac out at Brisbane Airport, forcing the diversion of flights. Premier Joh ­Bjelke-Petersen was railing about taking the federal government away from the “socialists in Canberra”.

A man at Tweed Heads murdered his wife a week ­before Christmas and buried her under a drain.

Ivan Lendl was out at the Milton tennis courts sharpening his game in preparation for the Australian Open, and actor Paul Hogan was in London promoting his film Crocodile Dundee. Then on Monday, January 12, Dickie (pictured, below left) and his editors rolled out that first story in a series under the headline – “A year after Sturgess, sex-for-sale business thrives unchallenged.”

Journalist Phil Dickie.

The meticulous front-page scoop, which did not carry a byline, identified two groups in control of the trade in southeast Queensland. The biggest syndicate was run by a man named Hector Hapeta, 44. His principal associate was his 31-year-old de facto, Anne Marie Tilley. The second group had six brothels and controlled the World By Night strip club. It was also linked to an illegal casino at 142 Wickham St in Fortitude Valley. The rumours of ­illegal casinos and brothels, along with corrupt police prepared to turn a blind eye for regular “kickback” payments in cash or kind, had swirled around Brisbane for decades. Newspapers had been sporadically exposing vice and allegations of police misconduct since the “moral vacuum” of World War II, when American troops had poured into the city with a great thirst for alcohol and ladies of the night.

But those accusations came and went, as did a succession of police commissioners and their attendant police ministers. Nothing ever gained traction.

As for Dickie’s attempt to resurrect allegations that had been as good as public knowledge in Queensland for a long time, deputy premier and police minister Bill Gunn railed against the report, saying there were only “13 or 14” massage parlours operating right across the state and not the dozens that the ­article ­alleged.

Ironically, The Courier-Mail carried, in the same issue as the page one Dickie story, classified advertisements for local brothels, including Hapeta and Tilley’s Top of the Town.

Former Queensland police commissioner Terry Lewis. Picture: Eric Donnelly

The article didn’t seem to perturb police commissioner Sir Terence Lewis. His diary recorded nothing of the story. It wasn’t until Thursday, January 15, that Lewis recorded: “Phoned Hon. Gunn re media articles on prostitution.”

What did Lewis have to worry about? The force, going back to the dark days of corrupt police commissioner Frank “The Big Fella” Bischof (commissioner from 1958-1969), had stared down this sort of press coverage since the 1950s. In more than three decades, nothing had made a dent in the corrupt system known as “The Joke”.

Unbeknown to anybody – probably journalist Dickie ­included – that first page one story would quietly trigger what would amount to, in hindsight, a perfect storm.

Over in the suburb of Highgate Hill, in Brisbane’s inner south, on the morning of January 12, the former Licensing Branch undercover agent and police prosecutor, Nigel Powell, also read the Dickie report. Powell had resigned from a police force he had observed as manifestly corrupt. He had abandoned his treasured police career after being harassed and labelled a “dog” or informant.

Now Dickie’s report riled him, so Powell sat down at a typewriter and wrote what he knew about police corruption and the Brisbane’s vice scene when he served as a Queensland police officer in the early to mid-1980s.

His plan was to hand his manifesto to the journalist who wrote the anonymous story in the newspaper.

Meanwhile, investigative journalist Chris Masters from the ABC’s Four Corners program had been sniffing about the same story for months.

For the next few months Dickie continued to publish a string of stories. He spoke to Powell, as did Masters. And with Bjelke-Petersen literally out of the country, the famous Four Corners report The Moonlight State went to air on May 11, 1987. Masters’ great achievement was linking, through documentary evidence, former Licensing Branch officer Jack “The Bagman” Herbert, to Brisbane’s criminal underworld.

The following morning, acting premier and police minister Bill Gunn announced a royal commission.

Soon after, the final devastating element of the storm was put into place – the assignation of Tony Fitzgerald, QC, as commissioner of the inquiry. For two long years Fitzgerald brought to bear on his job an unwavering focus, immense intelligence and a will of steel that saw the state’s entrenched and endemic systems of police and political corruption fall apart.

And Queensland was changed forever.