Housewife madam Shirley Brifman too risky for cops

DID a prostitute's whistleblowing on police corruption cost her life?

Mary Anne Brifman

SHIRLEY Brifman was a petite mother and wife with a comely smile. For two decades she consorted with criminals and paid off corrupt police, keeping several as lovers and playing the role of gangster's moll to perfection.

The detectives in her coterie protected Brifman, her husband, Sonny, their children and the burgeoning family brothels in Sydney and Brisbane from raids and gangster reprisal. They were a lucrative and tight-knit franchise. They also changed the course of Queensland history.

Matthew Condon, a leading Brisbane journalist and author of new true-crime book Three Crooked Kings, sees the remarkable life -- and suspicious death -- of Shirley Brifman as fundamental to understanding the tawdry and tangled story of Queensland corruption. His book is a powerful treatment of an inelegant past that still smoulders.

In her short life, Brifman intersected with and influenced dangerous fault lines in a rough and unsophisticated police force and gangland. The police she befriended would shape the state's political future and hasten the fall, years later, of the disgraced National Party leadership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen in a cesspit of sleaze and graft in the late 1980s.

But before any of this happened, Brifman, the vivacious prostitute who had pimped her own daughter, Mary Anne, at just 13, dramatically changed sides to expose the police corruption that had been a feature of her success.

Condon, who studied Brifman's life for his book, believes that if she had survived to testify in criminal trials, the impact of her evidence would have been profound. He ventures that the early growth of what became systemic corruption would have been uprooted or stunted, negating the need for the landmark Fitzgerald inquiry 25 years ago.

"The story of Shirley Brifman has never gone away. It has haunted this state for 40 years and there is a good reason for that: it is a very dark part of Queensland's history that has never been resolved," Condon, a prolific writer and assistant editor at Brisbane's The Courier-Mail, tells Inquirer. "I think Shirley was an extremely brave woman. She had started blowing the whistle on corrupt police and was a nervous wreck. She had fled Sydney to return to Brisbane and she was receiving death threats. She was in fear of her life when she died, apparently from a drug overdose.

"Shirley was one of a handful who changed sides to take on corruption. I believe she paid for it with her life."

An athletic brunette from a country town near Cairns, Brifman ran away from home as a teenager to be a prostitute in Cairns and, later, a popular brothel madam. She had a voluminous contact book and a knack for business. Captains of industry, gangland leaders, petty thieves and lonely, harmless men strove for her attention.

Brifman would become a household name, a nationally notorious pin-up girl. After secret coaching from the cops on her payroll, she perjured herself in 1964 to ensure the National Hotel inquiry, chaired by Harry Gibbs before he was knighted and became Australia's chief justice, was a whitewash that failed to substantiate allegations against corrupt police in Brisbane.

By snowing the inquiry, Brifman shielded her two main protectors, leading detectives Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan, both of whom were adept at media control and given an easy ride by mates in the local press.

Emboldened at having beaten the system, again, the corruption flourished. The third crooked king of what became known as the Rat Pack, Terry Lewis, would go on to be appointed commissioner of police.

But Brifman's loyalty was not set in stone. After being charged in Sydney with procuring her daughter, Mary Anne, for prostitution, she very publicly turned on her allies, accusing them of serious crimes. She detailed her corruption and theirs in an extraordinary interview with the ABC's This Day Tonight program in June 1971, and in multiple formal statements to police in Sydney and Brisbane over the ensuing months of investigations.

"My father brought me up the right way. He always told me to do the right thing and so, for the first time in my life, I'm doing it. Sometimes you've got to tell the truth," Brifman said.

Her feckless life was doomed to unravel when she made the fateful decision to betray many bent police, particularly Murphy, Hallahan and Lewis.

In detailed and lengthy transcripts, Brifman explained how the system worked under the corrupt chief of police, Frank Bischof, who relied heavily on his three ace detectives.

"The collect boys were Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan. That (money) went to Bischof. They were his trusted boys," Brifman told police in a September 1971 statement, one of many she signed. She recounted visiting Hallahan when he had a suitcase stuffed with forged cash. "He said: 'With blokes I can't pinch, I'll load them with it. What I cannot use that way, I will use myself.' He was my friend. He would have got a terrific amount. If he wanted money any time he was short, I would give it to him."

Brifman complained there was always something more to pay for with Murphy, whose hand was constantly in her pocket. His car needed repairs, the children needed tutoring, the house needed painting. The pay-offs were an "everyday occurrence".

In early February 1972, Murphy told police: "I find myself charged because of the untrue, malicious statements of Shirley Brifman, a drug addict, a self-confessed perjurer, prostitute and police informer, who so obviously has fabricated certain statements about me, hoping somehow to evade the consequences of the law with respect to her in NSW introducing her 13-year-old daughter to the sordid life of a prostitute."

Murphy's solicitor told the senior magistrate who heard the perjury charge: "He is probably one of the best-known police officers in Queensland as a result of his police work. He believes the charge to be the result of a political vendetta."

Before Brifman died on March 4, 1972 -- of "barbiturate intoxication" in the flat in which she was hiding out with her children and Sonny -- the police she had protected for so long and then betrayed were scheming her demise. A dead prostitute could not bring them down. Her death meant those detectives and the criminal sidekicks she accused of sponsoring and carrying out serious crimes, from armed hold-ups to unlawful killings, were soon back on the job, their innocence asserted.

But Ray Whitrod, who succeeded Bischof as police commissioner and relentlessly pursued the corrupt cops in his force, always suspected Brifman met with foul play.

One of his most senior investigators, Crime Intelligence Unit head Norm Gulbransen, who had debriefed Brifman and worked up a case against the cops she named, believed at the time it was probably murder. His colleague Basil "The Hound" Hicks favoured suicide. Remarkably, despite the suspicious circumstances, death threats, visits by gangsters who came looking for her and earlier attempts on her life, there was no coronial inquiry.

Undeniably, Brifman's mental state was extremely fragile. She was terrified of Murphy, Hallahan, their Sydney counterpart Fred Krahe, and hit man Johnny "Shotgun" Regan, all of whom were in trouble because of her disclosures. Brifman had overdosed before, accidentally or on purpose, without anyone's help.

Condon tells me: "She was tired. Her nerves were shot. She was sick of looking over her shoulder. She would say, 'I have to get them before they get me.' "

Brifman's daughter, Mary Anne, a prostitute and brothel madam for most of her 56 years, claims a fatal overdose was given to her mother by a close associate of Murphy who came to see her at the flat hours earlier.

Mary Anne Brifman recalls a row that night as her father tried to force Shirley to surrender what she had been handed by the associate. She believes her mother faced a terrible choice: kill herself, or her children and siblings would not be spared. "I welcome any renewed interest after more than 40 years in how my mother died; it's something I have longed for all my life," she told Inquirer yesterday. "My mother introduced me to prostitution. But she was a victim herself. She did the best that she could with the limited skills and knowledge that she had. But my mother was very naive. The police used my mother and she used them. She saw a lot of crimes that they did. She saw people tortured.

"But when she died they quickly wrote it off as suicide. For my mother's sake, and for history, I would like to know the truth."

Condon writes in Three Crooked Kings: "It was about 8.15am on Saturday 4 March, 1972. In the bed in that cramped, airless room was the late Shirley Margaret Brifman, 35, former prostitute and brothel madam, and informant and lover to senior corrupt police in Queensland and New South Wales.

"She knew it was coming and that she had to die. She knew too much, and had said too much. Her official 'suicide' file would vanish into police headquarters' archives. But her death, and her name, would continue to haunt those men who destroyed her."

The Fitzgerald inquiry's final, 400-page report in 1989 reserved a handful of paragraphs for the Brifman case, finding: "There is no evidence to suggest Murphy was involved in any way in Brifman's death, which was caused by a drug overdose, a fatal occurrence which has since been associated with a number of other informers who have been drug users. Although he is entitled to the presumption of innocence in respect of any charge on which he was not convicted, Brifman's untimely death meant not that Murphy was tried and acquitted but that the allegations against him remained unresolved."