Last Man Standing: Condemned former state police commissioner Terence Lewis decides it's time to tell his side of the story

CONDEMNED by the courts and the Fitzgerald Inquiry, former state police commissioner Terry Lewis tells his side of the story.

Terry and Hazel Lewis

Condemned by the courts and the Fitzgerald Inquiry, former state police commissioner Terence Lewis decides it's time to tell his side of the story to Courier-Mail writer Matthew Condon.

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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 that had 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 drunk 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 Murray Lewis, for a comment. I wanted to avoid Lewis's protective buffer of media advisers, in particular police media chief Ian Hatcher, so I decided to ambush the commissioner with my questions about the breath-testing brouhaha at a public function.

On Tuesday, August 12, 1986, he was opening three new squash courts at the police college in Chelmer, in Brisbane's west. That would be my moment.

I remember waiting for the formal ceremony to conclude in a shaded undercroft area at the college. Before long Lewis, in full regalia - the cap, the epaulettes - came striding in my direction, his minders and other senior officers in tow.

I approached Lewis and identified myself. For a moment he appeared a little shocked that someone, let alone a member of the press, had infiltrated his cordon. I remember his facial expression as nervous and confused. He declined to comment and, with a faint smile, walked off.

It was the first time I'd ever met 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, August 17, 1986. The headline read: "Give Us 'Open Go', Say B-test Police".

The following Tuesday, according to his commissioner's diary, Lewis met with his Police Minister, Bill Gunn, to discuss "Police Union survey on RBT and Bureau of Stat's figures ... " That week I received a telephone call from Traffic Superintendent Cal Farrah. 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. Farrah, who would later admit to corruption at the Fitzgerald inquiry, continued to call me at the office to the point that I had to ignore the phone. The police intimidation, though minor, played a small part in my decision to leave Queensland just months later and try my luck 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 writing 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.

I initially hesitated at the prospect. I would never agree to ghost-write a memoir. And while I might be interested in getting Lewis's side of this epic story - that of Queensland corruption going back decades - and then putting together a narrative that hopefully revealed the birth of that corruption and what allowed it to flourish, culminating in the Fitzgerald inquiry, experience told me it would be a monumental job and consume years of my life.

Out of curiosity, I agreed to meet him. That morning - February 1, 2010 - Lewis, the nervous man from the undercroft shadows of all those years ago, 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, been charged, tried and found guilty of official corruption, served almost seven years in jail and was stripped of his knighthood, his social status, his house and his police pension.

At the time I had keenly followed this extraordinary drama from Sydney, and would have liked to have been there when the corrupt system known as The Joke imploded, its players scattering and ducking for cover. I wish I'd been in The Courier-Mail newsroom in Bowen Hills when journalist Phil Dickie was preparing his series of stories on corruption. And I would have loved to have been in town when the ABC's Chris Masters and his Four Corners crew were filming that extraordinary 1987 episode, "The Moonlight State". But I'd missed all that. Now I was back and set to sit down with the old ex-commissioner.

I have never kept a diary, but on meeting Lewis, himself a fanatical diarist, I decided to scribble some notes. Why? Why keep a diary on the diarist?

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.

He still keeps a detailed diary to this day.

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. Of that first meeting I wrote in my diary: "(Lewis) wearing grey polo shirt with dark trim on the collar; tracksuit pants and grey polyester socks. Neat and impeccable. Freshly shaved. He has aged well. Still clearly recognisable from his days as commissioner more than 20 years before. Hair still parted the same way. He is 82. Has a firm handshake.

"The house is clean but cluttered with all sorts of nick-nacks. It is over-decorated in ways that people do when they don't know when to stop illustrating or prettifying their lives. There are bottles of mustard and barbecue sauce still on the dining room table.

"Lewis appears nervous. Perhaps not nervous but shy. It is precisely the feeling I had about him as a young reporter in Brisbane when I approached him for a quote on a story after he had performed at some official function. He is wary, almost jumpy."

During our initial hour together he spoke of appeals against his conviction - he still believed he could be exonerated - and a lack of money to mount any sort of legal challenge. He talked about sorting out his wife Hazel's clothes after her death in late 2009.

As I noted in my Lewis diary, he was sharp and had an ability to expertly self-edit as he spoke.

"His dialogue is largely emotionless, except when it comes to the 'miscarriage of justice' against him. A couple of times he slips out of character and there is an anger there, a temper beyond the facade. Then he pulls it back in. It is the working-class scrapper peering out from behind the knight."

As I left that day, Lewis saw me to the front gate. He had let out of a back room his dog Prince, a nine-year-old black and white terrier with a gunmetal-grey muzzle. He said the dog used to kiss Hazel goodnight in the last years of her life.

I got in my car and drove off. Looking back, I saw Lewis standing there behind the bars of the gate, his hand raised in farewell. Would I see him again? It would have been so easy to put down our meeting for the second time, albeit years apart, as an interesting future dinner party anecdote, and just get on with my life. But Lewis's was such an incredible story; the opportunity to speak with him face to face would most probably never come again.

Three weeks later we were sitting opposite each other in Lewis's lounge room, a tape recorder on the coffee table, discussing his childhood in Ipswich.

The Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption, triggered by the work of Dickie and Masters, commenced its public hearings in July 1987. The commission's terms of reference, twice expanded, reached back only to January 1, 1977 (although Fitzgerald was given carte blanche to explore "any other matter or thing" in the public interest). Lewis had been commissioner for just over a month by that date.

Yet Tony Fitzgerald, QC, clearly had an interest in the pre-history of corruption in Queensland. Barrister Andrew Philp and others, working for the commission, were instructed to interview police officers, politicians and public servants who were pivotal figures during the 1950s and '60s.

In Fitzgerald's final report, 16 pages are devoted to events that occurred prior to 1977.

We learn of former corrupt commissioner Frank Bischof and the so-called Rat Pack of officers favoured by Bischof and said to be his bagmen - Terry Lewis, Tony Murphy and Glendon Patrick Hallahan. We meet Licensing Branch officer Jack Herbert, organiser of The Joke that consolidated in the 1960s. There is honest commissioner Ray Whitrod in 1970 and his futile attempts to modernise and clean up the Queensland police force - an anti-Whitrod faction fired up before he was even officially sworn in.

In Phil Dickie's book, The Road to Fitzgerald and Beyond, just 48 pages of that 337-page volume cover the same period. This prehistory was exactly the territory I wanted to explore in depth with Lewis. What was Bischof really like and was he as corrupt as the rumours suggested?

Precisely when did the Rat Pack come together for the first time? What really happened on the night Lewis and Hallahan disarmed "crazed gunman" Gunther Bahnemann at a house near Wynnum in 1959, leading to their being awarded the George Medal for Bravery, the force's highest honour?

Why were Brisbane's well-known brothels suddenly shut down by police and padlocked in that same year, sending the city's prostitutes onto the streets and into the hotel bars and saloons from which they plied their trade, ultimately leading to the National Hotel Inquiry in 1963-64? Why was that inquiry - headed by Justice Harry Gibbs - an ultimate whitewash and a victory for corrupt police?

Who was prostitute Shirley Brifman and what was her relationship with the Rat Pack? And how and why did she die of a drug overdose in 1972 just weeks before appearing as chief witness at a perjury trial involving detective Tony Murphy?

What of a cast of other prostitutes who died of "drug overdoses" after making allegations against police?

How was Whitrod's commissionership destroyed? How, against unfathomable odds, did Lewis go from being an inspector in Charleville to Queensland police commissioner in late 1976?

What I wanted to know, in essence, was how the culture of corruption began, how it was perpetuated and who was responsible.

By the time I sat down to interview Lewis, Hallahan was dead. Herbert was dead. So, too, many prominent police of the era - Charlie Corner, Norm Gulbransen, Don "Buck" Buchanan, Arthur Pitts, Merv "Hoppy" Hopgood, Basil "the Hound" Hicks, Alec Jeppesen, Jim Slade, Norm Bauer, Bischof and Whitrod.

Murphy was alive on the Gold Coast but suffering poor health. Lewis, in effect, was one of the last men standing.

Once, Lewis had dined with royalty. He knew the state and many of the nation's leading political figures. He met with celebrities. The boy who left school aged 12, this son of a railway storeman, had come a long, long way. Now in old age, he lived in a small granny flat underneath one of his children's homes with Prince the dog. He maintained profound bitterness towards Fitzgerald, many former politicians, some police, lawyers and the media.

As I recorded in an early entry in my Lewis diary, he was as vehement about his innocence as he had ever been: "They didn't want to give me parole. They told me I had refused to address my offending behaviour. I said - what do you mean?

I've always done what you've asked me. I've always said I'm not guilty. There's no way in the world I'd say I was guilty. I'll stay here until I die, I said."

Throughout this odyssey, Lewis assured me that "if I tell a word of a lie then you can tell me to get stuffed".

I went ahead and did what I had to do as a writer. I needed to measure Lewis's assertions against other witnesses or documentary evidence.

I fanned out my queries and began interviewing as many living cast members of this drama as I could find. In the end, hundreds of people - former police, premiers, federal narcotics agents, lawyers, the children of suicide victims and whistleblowers and politicians, club bouncers, barmen, restaurateurs, nightclub singers, even a convicted murderer - offered their recollections about the era on and off the record.

An invaluable documentary resource was Lewis himself. After our second formal interview, during which the old copper couldn't help himself, Lewis asked me a set of questions, including: what is your religion, your politics, your background, your wife's name? - and took his own notes - he showed me into the double garage behind his granny flat.

There were no cars in there, just cardboard boxes full of documents and stacked to the roof.

They quite literally spanned his entire career.

Would these be of any use? Lewis asked. He offered the complete set of his police diaries beginning in the late 1940s.

Why had he kept all of this paperwork? For his memoir? For an appeal against his conviction, and if successful, a claim for compensation? As mementos for his children and grandchildren? The boxes contained diaries, notes, conference papers, 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.

But beyond this wall of paperwork and rusting paperclips, would we be able to get to the honest heart of this story, this great drama of crime and corruption that changed Queensland history?

After all this time, would Terence Murray Lewis tell me the truth?

We would ultimately meet about once every few weeks for almost three years, and in Lewis's crowded study adjoining his narrow bedroom under that house in north Brisbane, we would travel back in time. As he said to me after just a few meetings: "It gets very lonely talking to yourself." My visits followed a familiar pattern. I would arrive about 9am and we would engage in the usual welcome banter, then take a seat in the study, the walls lined with numerous family photographs and pictures of Lewis as commissioner. He would proceed to interview me first, taking his questions from a pre-prepared list he'd written on a pad.

The questions ranged from the politics of the day, newspaper and magazine articles he'd clipped and saved, to the progress of our interviews, who I'd contacted for quotes for the book, and 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.) Or the questions would be personal: "Does your wife work, or is she at home all the time?" He was polite, pleasant and often good-humoured about a life he would describe in one of his diaries as "this whole macabre tragedy".

When I first asked him about his relationships with Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan, he said flatly: "Maybe later." 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.

Over such a long period speaking with Lewis and studying the transcripts of those interviews, a pattern began to appear. With contentious issues such as the real reason for the shutting of the brothels in 1959 - a pivotal event - Lewis's responses would became slightly indistinct, like he had moved to the shadowed edges of the firelight.

With non-contentious questions he was crystal clear, his recall phenomenal. Often, with difficult subject matter, he would give an answer he had heard "second hand", removing himself as an eye witness or participant. He was adamant that he did not wish to deal in scuttlebutt and unsubstantiated allegations.

He would, in the end, give his opinions on his friends Murphy and Hallahan and whether they were corrupt. It would take Murphy's death in December 2010 to unlock those judgements.

Lewis would tell me of people in his life he would like to have "shot" dead. He would mourn his wife. He would bemoan what happened to the Queensland police force, thanks to the Fitzgerald inquiry and his sacking. He would come up with reams of off-the-record gossip, often sexual, about the police and politicians who wronged him.

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. He was always given the right of reply, no matter how uncomfortable the subject matter.

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. That he could do this for history: for his family; for trusted friends; for the many thousands of people impacted by the actions of former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and he as commissioner of police for 11 years; for the state of Queensland.

This was our story, I told him, one that still reverberated more than 25 years after the Fitzgerald inquiry. 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.

I felt two powerful things over time: that 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); and that I had a personal obligation as a Queenslander to tell this tale as best I could.

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 certain things he'd witnessed, that he would be killed by corrupt police.

I knew, then, how powerful and alive this story still was. Many aspects of it surprised me, but others shocked and angered me. The corrupt machinations of certain police and their entanglement with the justice system, the government and indeed the media, was mindboggling.

That young police reporter on The Sunday Mail knew next to nothing.

Was Lewis corrupt? A jury of his peers found him so. Still, there are those who continue to believe he wasn't, and that he was set up by the notoriously corrupt Jack Herbert. If Lewis is innocent as he claims, it amounts to a shocking miscarriage of justice. If he's not, it would, psychologically, be an astonishing feat of self-delusion bordering on tragic.

What is interesting is that the matter is still up for debate; that it's still a sensitive nerve end.

Three Crooked Kings, the first of two volumes, begins with Lewis's induction as a police officer in January 1949, and finishes with his informal discussion with Bjelke-Petersen on the airfield at Cunnamulla in western Queensland just months before Lewis was vaulted into the commissioner's chair. (The sequel - All Fall Down - will extend from 1976 to the present day.)

The book is an attempt to logically set down that pre-history of police and political corruption, and to shed light on how that corruption intersected with life in Queensland, and particularly Brisbane city, through the 1950s, '60s and '70s. You couldn't have made up the extraordinary cast of characters I came across during the writing of the story.

At the centre of it all, of course, is Terry Lewis, pensioner, of north Brisbane.

At one point I asked him 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."

* Three Crooked Kings by Matthew Condon (UQP, $29.95) is available now. Its sequel, All Fall Down, will be published in October.