Fred, who worked as a sales clerk for four decades before retirement, now spends his time maintaining “wandering routes” in the nearby Teutoburg Forest and doing charity work for his community. You might catch him, more often than not, with his trusty Canon EOS 600D, taking nature pictures. In summer, he likes to cycle, a passion since boyhood, and swim in nearby pools.

Fred is a hopeless devotee of Dortmund Soccer Club, loves the radio and a good book, and heads into Osnabrück once a month to a jazz club for a night of Dixieland classics.

He has been married to Rosie, a librarian, for almost four decades, and they live in a rented apartment on the first floor of a neat white house with five windowboxes full of pink and purple flowers.

Fred is well-known and respected in and around Hagen.

What many of his neighbours could not know is that he spent the formative years of his childhood in Brisbane, Queensland, and that his father, John Geza Komlosy, became embroiled in the state’s most notorious era in its history.

Fifty years ago, on April 10, 1964, Justice Harry Talbot Gibbs, a man considered to be of unimpeachable integrity who had presided over the royal commission into police misconduct at the National Hotel in Brisbane from late 1963 to early 1964, handed down his 190-page report into the scandal that gripped a city and a state.

It was the first ever royal commission into the Queensland police, probing an alleged prostitution ring run out of the infamous hotel at the intersection of Adelaide and Queen streets at Petrie Bight, after-hours drinking by police – including then commissioner Frank Bischof – and all manner of corruption and nefarious deeds.

In the end, the inquiry proved a farce, a whitewash. Gibbs, who went on to become Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, found no police impropriety, despite Bischof’s corruption being known directly by then premier Frank Nicklin and senior cabinet ministers.

As for the National Hotel, it was suggested that even schoolchildren across Brisbane knew what went on behind its doors.

Instead, the men who stood as witnesses before the commission were demonised, their lives destroyed. One of those men was John Komlosy, father of Fred, and he and his family paid a high price for trying to expose police corruption.

After death threats and public abuse, the Komlosys fled the country they had hoped to call home.

For Fred, the pensioner of Hagen, the brutal events of the early 1960s in Brisbane, when he was in his early teens, changed his life.

Half a century later, “hardly a week passes by” when he doesn’t think of Brisbane, and what might have been if his father hadn’t walked into the orbit of a corrupt police commissioner and his sidekicks, and a commission of inquiry that, from the outset, was determined not to expose the truth, but to shoot the messengers.

How could Justice Gibbs have brought down a set of findings that defied logic?

How did he allow his commission to be manipulated by certain police who would go on to cultivate a system of endemic corruption that would, almost 25 years later, bring the state to its knees? How did it all go so badly, for the Komlosys, and for Queensland?

THE KOMLOSY FAMILY ARRIVED IN MELBOURNE on January 22, 1951, aboard converted troop ship the Fairsea, refitted in 1949 for the repatriation of displaced persons and refugees from Europe to Australia after World War II.

The ship had no cabins, just huge spaces with triple-decker bunks, the men and women segregated. The Hungarian-born Komlosy, a former prisoner of war, was looking for a fresh start. With him was wife Else and baby son Fred.

Komlosy secured a job as a signalman with Victorian Railways and spent time working in the remote town of Lubeck, in the state’s west.

Back in those days, a young Komlosy had to scamper up the signal towers with a lamp and physically shift the weighted levers.

Dissatisfied with being away from his family in Melbourne for long stretches as part of his railway work, with his wife and son having to shift houses four times, he worked briefly as a hotel porter in the city. It would be his next decision, however, that would haunt his life.

A restless Komlosy decided to seek better prospects in Queensland, and the family settled in Brisbane. He began work, this time as a conductor with Brisbane City Council tramways department, on May 10, 1955.

At that moment, sub-inspector Frank Bischof was the leading detective in charge of Brisbane CIB, and was mentoring two of his three “trusted boys”, the young officers Terry Lewis and Tony Murphy. (Glen Hallahan would complete the fabled “Rat Pack” trio a few years later.)

Komlosy would find it difficult to secure long-term employment.

He went from tram conductor to mailman to a trainee night officer with Queensland Railways. He won, and lost, dozens of jobs.

He applied for naturalisation but constantly fell foul of the Commonwealth Department of Immigration in Brisbane for not updating his Alien Registration Certificate, to the point that he was threatened with prosecution under the Aliens Act 1947-1952.

Government agencies were also gathering dirt on the “insolent” Komlosy. Commonwealth migration officer T.M. Nulty concluded he had “received confidential information to the effect that he (Komlosy) is at least strongly suspected of communistic activities”.

Komlosy was frustrated. He had had no good news about naturalisation after almost six years in Australia. And his so-called insolence had brought him to the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. A Komlosy file was opened.

Still, the country’s secret agents would have nothing on the likes of Bischof and the Rat Pack, whose lives would intersect with Komlosy’s in just a few years.

By 1960, drawing on his experience in Melbourne, he got a job as the night porter for the National Hotel, between the city and Fortitude Valley.

The old hotel had recently been taken over by entrepreneurs Max, Rolly and Jack Roberts. The National was Max’s baby, while Rolly ran another popular city hotel up in George St.

The Roberts boys had turned around the fortunes of the National, and it became a hub of live shows, steak dinners and cocktails.

It quickly attracted a risqué reputation, and for good reason.

After Bischof, police commissioner since 1958, had padlocked the city’s half-a-dozen sanctioned brothels following a scandal involving Lewis and Hallahan in 1959, Brisbane prostitutes had begun to ply their trade out of the city’s major hotels.

They took a particular liking to the sprawling National, with its bawdy atmosphere, after-hours drinking, and eclectic clientele – from overseas visitors to country cockies to police.

A strong friendship between Bischof and the Roberts men saw it become a “police” hotel, frequented by them constantly and used for official and non-official police functions. Its best customers were Bischof, Murphy, Hallahan and senior officer Norwin Bauer.

From the first evening Komlosy began work as the night porter at the National in May 1960, his wife and now three children reduced to living in little more than a shack in southern suburban Runcorn, he became aware of the hotel’s decadent reputation.

He was “shocked” at the amount of illegal drinking and what he perceived as rampant prostitution.

Shortly afterwards, he encountered two large police detectives late one night who pushed past him to enter the hotel. They were Murphy and Hallahan. “It’s okay, we’re friends of Max,” they told the bemused Hungarian.

There were nude orgies going on in some of the rooms, with police picking up alcohol after hours and driving off and women engaging in what Komlosy thought was sexual congress in the public bars.

Commissioner Bischof regularly drank late into the night and enjoyed the largesse of the Robertses.

As night porter, Komlosy also became acquainted with the regular prostitutes who worked out of the National, including Shirley Margaret Brifman, and was often approached by guests to be set up with women.

Komlosy lasted until December. He was said to have been dismissed by Max Roberts after police, driving past the National late one night, had witnessed Komlosy placing two crates of beer into the boot of a taxi. One of the arresting officers was young Licensing Branch gun Jack Herbert, who would, almost three decades later, enter the annals as one of the most corrupt police ever to wear a uniform in Queensland.

The night porter was accused of theft. Komlosy appealed to police, and later personally to commissioner Bischof, that he had been instructed by Roberts to put the beer in the taxi and have it sent over to a party in a neighbouring suburb that Roberts was attending that night.

When Bischof assured him the prosecution would go ahead regardless, an angry Komlosy threatened that he would go to the newspapers and expose late-night drinking by Bischof, Murphy and others, and the existence of a prostitution racket operating out of the hotel.

To make matters worse for Komlosy, at this time his appeals for naturalisation were hitting bureaucratic dead ends over and over again. He had an unhappy wife and a brood of young children – Fred, Helga and Peter.

He had escaped a totalitarian regime post-war hoping for a brighter future for himself and his family, and began wondering what sort of “democracy” he’d landed in.

He again fell into unemployment courtesy of Bischof, Roberts and the bogus stolen liquor charge.

Komlosy was fed up. Since arriving in Australia he’d had up to 60 jobs. He felt he was constantly unfairly treated due to his Hungarian background and poor language skills.

He’d worked as a stevedore, a truck driver, a television delivery man. He could never seem to gain traction, especially in Brisbane, and often had to rely on the kindness of the few friends he’d made.

By late 1962, he’d had enough. On December 6, a desperate Komlosy featured in The Courier-Mail in a story headlined “Wants to Go Home”.

“A 35-year-old Hungarian refugee has appealed to the United Nations to be shipped back to Europe because, he says, he cannot find work in Brisbane,” the report said.

“He is Mr John Komlosy, of Gowan Road, Runcorn, who migrated to Australia 11 years ago. Mr Komlosy, who is married with two (sic) young children, said yesterday that he had been trying unsuccessfully for two years to find work. Early last month he wrote to the UN refugee headquarters in Geneva asking to be shipped back to Europe. Komlosy said: ‘I am very upset at having to leave Australia but I must find work somewhere to support my family’.”

The story appeared tucked away on page 13. The Brisbane Telegraph followed up the Komlosy story the following week, also quoting the disenchanted immigrant: “Leaving Australia is a desperate solution to the problem,” he said.

“None of the children wants to leave.” He added that his son Fred, 13, had been top of his class at Acacia Ridge State School four years running.

The plan was for the Komlosy family to leave Australia on January 9, 1963. It didn’t eventuate. Unbeknown to Komlosy, Col Bennett, the state member for South Brisbane and a noted barrister, was accumulating information about police corruption, and much of it centred on the National Hotel.

What Komlosy had observed in those six months at the National in 1960 was also being relayed to Bennett.

During a parliamentary debate on supply on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 29, 1963, Bennett stood in the House and railed against Bischof, his force, and rampant corruption.

He also said: “I do not wish to dally on this subject, but I should say that the commissioner and his colleagues who frequent the National Hotel, encouraging and condoning the call-girl service that operates there, would be better occupied in preventing such activities rather than tolerating them.”

It was a scandal. Almost two weeks later – on Monday, November 11 – premier (“Honest”) Frank Nicklin announced a royal commission.

It would be presided over by Justice Harry Gibbs. Komlosy decided to join another former National Hotel employee, David Young, and give evidence.

Fred Komlosy says his frustrated father might have decided to appear before Gibbs to take a swipe at Bischof.

“He had been unemployed for two years and saw no future for himself in Brisbane [but] for the sake of his children wanted to remain,” says Fred. “Should his latest application for naturalisation be rejected, he saw no alternative than to leave the country. In late 1963 … he was informed by the Department of Immigration that his application had been denied. As always, no explanation was given.

“During [his] time at the National Hotel he would undoubtedly have been responsible for providing Bischof with booze, girls and whatever else was required of him during the night. My father thought Bischof was behind his countless applications for naturalisation being refused.

He did not know that he was the victim of ASIO and Department of Immigration paranoia about communist infiltration.

“It was common practice at the time for the police chief to be asked if the applicant had a police record. If not, the commissioner would at least issue a certificate of good conduct.

“He [Komlosy] had also been set up, arrested and fined £10 by the Rat Pack [over the alleged stolen crates of beer] and never got to know why.

“Bischof had him thrown out of his office after my father stormed in there to ask him just that. Perhaps he had seen or heard too much, and this was to warn him. It most probably was the last straw for my father and certainly triggered his decision to appear as a witness before the National Hotel inquiry. He had nothing to lose and probably saw it as a last opportunity to strike back at someone he thought was responsible – [Frank] Bischof.”

Lewis and Murphy immediately set about digging for scuttlebutt on Komlosy, and they found a treasure trove in Komlosy’s confidential files held by the federal Department of Immigration. Here was a suspected communist who had also generated an ASIO file.

Immigration public servants had labelled the Hungarian an incorrigible liar and a difficult man to deal with.

How did Lewis and Murphy get access to the confidential files? In early December 1963, Lewis – who would go on to become commissioner of police, and subsequently be jailed for corruption following the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police misconduct – recorded in his police diary: “With D/S Murphy to Canberra Hotel and saw Mr Toombs re Komlosy employed there about May to July 1957.

To Commonwealth offices, Adelaide St, to see Mr Killen, MHR [federal Member for Moreton], and saw his secretary re Komlosy.”

Fred Komlosy believes it was the relatively newly elected member, Jim Killen (he would later be knighted, and serve as minister for defence in the Malcolm Fraser government from the mid-1970s to the early ’80s), who leaked his father’s files to Bischof’s boys.

The information was used at the commission to destroy Komlosy’s character and the reputation of his family.

In the end, Komlosy received a death threat via letter. It was postmarked Cowra in NSW. “Keep off the police or we will get [you] as they do in Hungary,” it said. “If you value your life, say no more. Don’t show this to anyone. It will not pay.”

Outwardly, Komlosy appeared not to be intimidated. But privately he and his family were terrified. “Murphy did indeed go after my father,” says Fred Komlosy. “As we today know, he was behind the most threatening, anonymous letter sent to him and was the cause of our having to move helter skelter … for the remainder of the time we were in Brisbane, because my mother could no longer stand being alone in the bush [at Runcorn] all day with three kids and only an Alsatian dog for protection.

“My father always said Murphy was prepared to go over bodies to keep the lid on things, and [was] the most dangerous of them all. He often referred to the other three [Bischof, Hallahan and Lewis] as Curly, Larry and Moe, the Three Stooges, and was not afraid of them. Murphy was a liar at the National Hotel inquiry in many ways.”

When his time came to appear before Justice Gibbs, Komlosy was savaged in the witness box, his credibility and reputation in tatters. “If we thought things couldn’t get worse, we were badly mistaken,” says Fred. “Threatening letters started coming in by the sackful. [The letter] … dispatched from [Cowra] … and which we now know came from Murphy brought about my mother’s nervous breakdown.

“The National Hotel inquiry continued when the Rat Pack, with the help of Killen, whom my father had regarded as a friend, supplied them with confidential information from the Department of Immigration … and he was totally destroyed, by them and a crooked judge [Gibbs] who even denied him legal representation.”

ON FEBRUARY 21, 1964, JOHN KOMLOSY and his family fled back to Europe. Justice Gibbs held his final sitting of the inquiry three days later.

The work of Murphy, Bischof et al had had the desired effect. Coincidentally, the Komlosy family sailed – with no money and no idea of their future – aboard the Fairsea, the very ship that had brought John and Elsa Komlosy to Australia from a wartorn Europe in 1951.

Fred Komlosy remembers the moment the ship set sail from Brisbane. “There was no Auld Lang Syne for us and no confetti,” he says.

“We children went to our berths around 11pm and dozed off. I must have awoken some time later, due to the ship’s movement, and looked out of the porthole where I saw some lights that could have been the oil refinery in Moreton Bay, and immediately knew that this would be the last I would see of Australia for a long time, if at all, and cried myself to sleep.”

On April 10, 1964, Justice Gibbs handed his official report to government. It was never tabled in parliament. On page 84, under a chapter headed “J. Komlosy’s Credibility as a Witness”, Gibbs wrote: “It was obvious that Komlosy was quite unreliable as a witness.

His evidence … contained violent inconsistencies, was a curious compound of fact, hearsay, exaggeration, theory and invention, and perhaps even hallucination.”

Appendix D and E of Gibbs’s final report featured lists of police and commissioned officers represented by legal counsel for the duration of the inquiry.

History would prove that many were either corrupt at the time or would become enmeshed in the corruption network later identified as “The Joke” that stretched from the ’60s through to the ’80s.

The rollcall included: Bischof, Bauer, Lewis, Murphy, Hallahan, Sid Currie, Brian Hayes, Don Lane, Alan Barnes and Herbert. (In 1972 Murphy would be charged with having committed perjury at the National Hotel inquiry. The chief witness against him, prostitute Shirley Brifman, would be found dead in her Brisbane flat of a “drug overdose” just weeks before the case reached the courts.)

In the end, Gibbs found no wrongdoing on the part of Bischof, Murphy, Hallahan, and the police in general. His findings concluded: “ … there is no acceptable evidence that any member of the police force was guilty of misconduct, or neglect or violation of duty in relation to the policing of the hotel, the conduct of the business or the operations or the use of the hotel, or the enforcement of the law in respect of any breaches alleged or reported to have been committed in relation thereto.”

LATER IN 1964, ONCE THE HEAT OF THE inquiry had dissipated, Komlosy and his wife – tentatively settled in the then West Germany – began pleading to Australian government officials to be allowed to return. The family, in particular Fred Komlosy, had loved their new country despite their Queensland experience. Also, siblings Helga and Peter had been born in Australia before they were forced to take flight.

“For my mother, it was a great shame to have to return home penniless,” says Fred.

“The German movies of the time always show returning emigrants as rich uncles or aunts. Here we were, back where we started, and poorer than before my parents’ departure to a hoped-for better life.

“She suffered a lot under the jibes and comments she had to take from family members and neighbours. She was never the same woman and remained a stooped and bowed, broken person.”

John Komlosy insisted throughout the rest of his life, however, that while he desired to return to Australia, he would never again set foot in Brisbane.

It was an odyssey that went on for decades. Komlosy wrote to prime ministers Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton and Gough Whitlam. Every request was dismissed. By the early ’80s, at 58, he was working as a signal box operator near Osnabrück.

The teetotaller and father of three grown children was responsible for manning electronic signals on the goods rail line from provincial Osnabrück – about 130km west of Hanover and nestled between Teutoburg Forest and the Wiehen Hills – to Oldenberg and on to the port city of Bremen, about 100km to the north.

Around this time, he ceased sending his pleading letters to Australian leaders, ministers and public servants. It was over. But Komlosy never forgot his Queensland adventure.

His old Brisbane neighbours, the Hallams, visited the family twice in Germany in the early ’80s and filled them in on all the local news. Kerry Hallam had become good friends with young Fred Komlosy in Brisbane. “I recall Fred’s father working at the National Hotel during the years Bischof was police commissioner,” Hallam says. “They were not very well off financially and lived most of the time from what his mother grew in her garden.

Fred’s mother was kept in the dark as to what was going on for her own sake. Our family gave them support, as did a German family who they were friendly with. The family left with just a couple of bags and nothing else – worse off than when they arrived.”

A decade after the National Hotel inquiry, writer Peter James published a scathing analysis of the Gibbs sideshow, called . He concluded: “Whether a similar inquiry would be allowed to proceed as haphazardly and opaquely today, with as much lack of critical journalism, is open to debate … it is up to society whether it accepts suppression of truth and grossly compromised solution in place of justice.” (James today describes Gibbs’s inquiry as “dreadful” and a travesty.)

On the book’s publication in 1974, James received anonymous threats of violence. The 122-page work, published by Shield Press, mysteriously disappeared from bookshops and libraries, and the printing company that produced the volume was burned down weeks after the book’s release.

Writer Evan Whitton went further. He described Gibbs as “a criminal”, and wrote: “Gibbs allowed the disgraceful impugning of witnesses, swallowed as fact a load of guff and perjured testimony, obtusely excluded evidence and was played for a fool by corrupt police.

“There is not the slightest doubt that Gibbs was a criminal. A cover-up of a crime is itself a crime.”

Twenty-three years after the Gibbs saga, Tony Fitzgerald closed the chapter with his commission of inquiry that extended from 1987-89.

Commissioner Lewis and other officers were charged with corruption and imprisoned. Herbert took immunity from prosecution and rolled over. Murphy, long retired, was never called as a witness before the inquiry and never charged as a result of its findings.

There continues to be speculation there never would have been a Fitzgerald Inquiry if Gibbs had done his job.

According to Fred, his father experienced a degree of satisfaction that some of the police who had persecuted him over the National Hotel inquiry had been brought to account before Fitzgerald, despite the passage of time.

John Geza Komlosy died alone on February 8, 2008, aged 84, following a massive stroke. He is buried next to his wife, Else (who died of cancer in 1994), in the Wersen cemetery, just outside Osnabrück.

Fred Komlosy and his siblings never returned to Australia after their childhood ordeal, though for many years Fred kept a map of the country tacked to his bedroom wall. Via the internet, Fred keeps abreast of news out of Australia, particularly Queensland, and has been following with intense interest recent political dramas involving the controversial appointment of Chief Justice Tim Carmody, and in particular the re-emergence late last month of Fitzgerald and his stinging rebuke of the behaviour of the LNP Government led by Premier Campbell Newman.

Fitzgerald said in his assessment of contemporary Queensland governance: “In its brief period in office, [this] government has sacked, stacked and otherwise reduced the effectiveness of parliamentary committees, subverted and weakened the state’s anti-corruption commission, and made unprecedented attacks on the judiciary and judicial independence.

“Both the Premier and the Attorney-General, the ministers most responsible for the government’s predicament, appear to lack knowledge of Queensland’s political history.”

IN AUGUST 2012, THE SUPREME COURT OF Queensland Library opened the doors to the Sir Harry Gibbs Legal Heritage Centre in George St, Brisbane. (Fred is incredulous Gibbs has his own museum: “I doubt any of those whose lives he helped destroy … feel like laughing,” he says.)

The centre’s inaugural exhibition focused on 150 years of law in Queensland, and in particular the “Rule of Law”. The centre’s website, in a sentence that could have been penned specifically for John Komlosy, describes “Rule of Law”:

“This legal maxim requires government and individuals to abide by particular laws and holds that no man can be made to suffer punishment for any conduct not forbidden by law.”