LAST MAN STANDING: Condemned by the courts and the Fitzgerald Inquiry, former Queensland Police Commissioner Terence Lewis decides it's time to tell his side of the story. Source: The Courier-Mail
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 epaulets - 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 though 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 a 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 project. 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...
*** Read Matthew Condon's full story "Last Man Standing", spread across three more pages of today's QWeekend magazine - inserted in every copy of The Courier-Mail print edition and available electronically in our iPad app (https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/the-courier-mail-the-sunday/id399165869?mt=8).
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