The Second Father

‘I don’t know of any illegal gambling. If there’s any going on, well then of course, I don’t know where it is.’

Qld Police Minister Russ Hinze, October 1981

Preface

The characters in this book are real people, although in certain instances names and identifying characteristics have been altered – some for legal reasons, others because I don’t want lives to be endangered by having their associations with me revealed. Some Italians remain bitter, believing I betrayed our community through my detective and undercover work. For many years I slept with a gun under my pillow. Most of my enemies are dead or behind bars, but others are out there still.

I watched as a premier was toppled, former cabinet ministers were locked up and a police commissioner was stripped of his knighthood and imprisoned. All are mentioned without disguise, as are the corrupt police and criminals who went to jail.

Reliving buried memories for this book was traumatic. My hair has fallen out and my health has suffered, but I’d do it all again, just to make an honest quid and fight corruption. As the Sicilian proverb goes: ‘Chi semina vento, raccoglie tempesta’ – those who look for a quarrel find a quarrel.

I have written as best as I can remember, with all the imperfections that come with the passing of time. I have tried not to be unduly wise after the event. For the purposes of flow, not all facts have been included and chronological order has not always been followed; otherwise the stories are as they happened.

This book is a memoir. It is not intended as a definitive account of the corruption in the Queensland Police force that led to the famous Fitzgerald Inquiry; for that you should read the excellent book The Road to Fitzgerald and Beyond by former Courier-Mail journalist Phil Dickie.

This book is dedicated to the wives and families of those dedicated, honest police who suffered in silence.

Domenico Cacciola

Brisbane 2009

Prologue

Go back to Italy, wog!

That’s what the cops loyal to the bagman Jack Herbert used to leave on a page in my typewriter when I started my shifts at Licensing Branch. I suspected that Sergeant First Class Brian MacIntosh was one of them.

MacIntosh, our supervisor, strolled into the interview room late one night before we raided the clubs and massage parlours. He was a huge man with curly black hair and rotten teeth. Moody and erratic, with a reputation for violence, he went by the nickname ‘Jumbo’. Once, he had stolen a boot-load of beer from the Plough Inn Tavern on the south side. When the duty manager tried to stop him he flashed his police badge and laughed. ‘What you gonna do, mate? Call the cops?’ That’s how bad it was getting.

A few of us plain-clothes detectives, shirt sleeves rolled up and ties loosened, were having a drink as we played cards on this typically hot and humid Brisbane night. Cigarette smoke hung thick in the air and safari suit jackets and gun holsters were draped over the backs of our chairs. Everyone stopped as MacIntosh unclipped my .38 calibre pistol and stood in a firing position, the gun aimed at my forehead from across the room.

‘Is this yours, Cacciola?’ asked MacIntosh. ‘How dare you leave it unguarded!’

The other police, including my partner, Senior Constable Bruce Seymour, got up and backed away. I was on my own as MacIntosh wrapped his finger around the trigger, ready to fire. I figured the best form of defence was attack – it had always worked for me growing up on the tough streets of New Farm and Fortitude

Valley – so I walked towards him, lowering my hands, reaching out.

‘Put the gun down, Jumbo,’ I said, my voice shaking. ‘It’s loaded!’

‘I don’t take orders from you, ya fuckin’ wog bastard!’

MacIntosh was acting out what many other cops at Licensing Branch wanted to do to me, what the bagman Jack Herbert had been threatening to do to me since I’d arrived. It was common knowledge that if you took on Sergeant Herbert you might end up swimming with the catfish in the Brisbane River. I had watched him brazenly recruit cops into a web of corruption known as ‘The Joke’. Herbert was a peddler of misery. He loved to play off one cop against another, and he survived by getting his henchmen to do his dirty work. He thought an Italian kid with a young family and a hefty mortgage would be easy to seduce with his filthy money. Had he not heard of vergona – shame? Didn’t he know that I would rather die than bring shame upon my Sicilian name? When I wouldn’t take the bribes, he changed tactics: he mounted a smear campaign that I was tipping off the starting price bookies before raids; there were whispers I was on the take. The bagman made sure I had no friends. There had also been other racist notes left on my typewriter. ‘We don’t want you people in our country!’ was one of them. Well, screw them, I thought, I’ve had enough of this shit.

‘Give me the gun, Jumbo,’ I said again, this time more firmly.

MacIntosh’s eyes were darting this way and that. Confused, dangerous, he was looking for a way out. Finally, he handed me the weapon.

My first instinct, on gaining control, was to choke the gutless turd, although that would have been too easy. Instead I wanted all the men in the room to see what real fear was. Herbert was damn well going to hear what the wog kid was capable of when pushed too far. So I jumped on the table, grabbed MacIntosh by the scalp and lifted up his chin. I put my gun in his gaping mouth, shoving it right down his throat so the handle was scraping against those ugly baked-bean teeth.

‘You ever point a gun at me again and I’ll kill you,’ I shouted, the sweat from my brow dripping into my eyes. I had lots of hair back then and some of it was plastered across my forehead. ‘You got that, you ugly prick? You fucking understand?’

Standing on the table, I felt for a moment like the actor Al Pacino in Serpico, which I’d seen three times down at the old Rex picture theatre on Wickham Street in the Valley, across the road from the entrance to Chinatown Mall. In the film, Pacino’s character is battling rampant police corruption in New York. But this was sleepy Brisbane – the capital of Queensland, although still very much a big country town – and suddenly it wasn’t anything like a Hollywood movie. My stomach was knotted, my mouth dry and my legs had turned to jelly. I battled nausea as the adrenalin washed through me. The other detectives grabbed their coats and gun holsters. As everyone shuffled out of the interview room, down the stairs and onto Upper Roma Street, where Licensing Branch was stationed in Selby House, an uncomfortable silence hung in the air.

MacIntosh remained glued to the spot, dumbfounded, staring into space. The rest of us got into our unmarked Ford Falcon police cars and went about our business that night as if nothing happened. I know it’s hard to believe, but no one said a word about what had just gone down.

That was my life in the Queensland Police force in the early 1970s. Before things got really bad. Before the Fitzgerald Inquiry.

One

I was born in the back room of a stone cottage in the Sicilian town of Calatabiano. My mamma says there was no doctor – just a midwife, some local women, a bowl of hot water and a shawl to wrap me up. The northern spring of 1945, Papa thought, was a good time to be born. The carnage of World War II was over in Europe. Italians were learning to smile again.

There is a special place in the Sicilian family for the first-born son, who is called the ‘secondo padre’, the second father. My earliest memory is Papa telling me to protect my siblings, my mamma and the Cacciola name. ‘There is nothing more important in this life, Domenico.’ Until Papa died he consulted me on all family matters; he treated me like a man.

Growing up I could see the volcano Mount Etna from our backyard. One side of Etna was peaceful, covered in snow; the other moody, forever simmering, spewing steam, threatening to erupt. A blind made from hessian sack hid the entrance to an outside dunny that we entered by walking under a trellis supporting grape vines. I remember the sight of rolling hills covered with vineyards and orchards; and the smell of the olives, prickly pears, oranges and lemons that the villagers picked under the Mediterranean sun.

Pedlars in donkey carts rode the narrow streets of Calatabiano, accompanied by the occasional stray goat or sheep, which we kids chased away with sticks. Once a week, at Mamma’s request, I’d take my canistra down to a wrinkled old farmer to get ricotta, scooped out of a pail by the handful, the syrup dripping through his calloused leathery fingers. Other days I’d get fresh bruschetta and fish, mostly sardines sprinkled with herbs like oregano and swimming in olive oil. When it rained we would go out with tin buckets and pick up the snails that appeared as if by magic out of the rich volcanic soil. We’d put them in a pot, boil them over the fireplace and eat them for dinner.

Giuseppe, my papa, was born north of Calatabiano in the seaside village of Taormina, popular for its white beaches on the Ionian Sea. His father, Domenico, died of wounds received in World War I when Italy had fought with the Allies against the Germans. The doctors had wanted to cut off his arm but he had refused and the gangrene killed him. Papa’s mother, Vicenza, died not long afterwards, allegedly from a heart attack; a broken heart more likely, some in the family have suggested. Over breakfast she told Papa she wasn’t feeling well and when he came home from school she was lying cold and lifeless on the kitchen floor. At the onset of the Great Depression, aged nine, Papa was an orphan.

Sometimes Papa would mutter that he was born unlucky, although he was fortunate enough to be taken in by his widowed godmother, Nella Pappino, who loved him like her own. One of her sons had died at birth and the other, also called Giuseppe like Papa, later became a mathematics professor and the mayor of Calatabiano. Nella’s husband had also been killed in World War I and Papa helped her run the family business – a convenience store selling dry goods and tobacco. Papa’s schooling days were over.

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Italy, ruled by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, invaded Albania. Italy started commandeering merchant ships in preparation for its entry into World War II, and Papa, caught up in the excitement, joined the Italian Navy aged eighteen. This time Italy would be fighting against the Allies after signing a pact with the Germans. In 1941 Papa was wounded in the leg by shrapnel during a fierce battle in the Mediterranean and dropped off at the Sicilian port city of Messina to recuperate in a naval hospital. That afternoon an Allied bomber sank his ship and all aboard were drowned.

Things changed quickly when the Allies invaded Sicily in 1943. Italy’s surrender and subsequent declaration of war on Germany meant the war was over for Papa. To survive he sold flour on the black market, pushing heavy bags from the train into Calatabiano and later, under the cloak of darkness, collecting them on his donkey cart to sell to the locals. That was how he met my mamma, Antonina Lo Giudice, a petite and pretty sixteen-year-old with jet-black eyes and hair. They came upon each other as he drove along the winding back tracks away from the main road. ‘Ah, bella faccia,’ he used to say when talking about her – ‘a beautiful face’.

Mamma’s father, Sebastiano, along with her brother Carmelo, had already migrated to Australia before hostilities with the Allies broke out; the men of the Lo Giudice family were later interned at the infamous prison camp at Cowra in New South Wales. Nonna Maria and Mamma, bags packed for the voyage Down Under, were stranded in Calatabiano when war was declared. Nonna Maria wasn’t too happy about this blossoming romance between her daughter and the dashing young sailor Giuseppe Cacciola, but with her husband away what could she do? Just to be sure, Mamma and Papa eloped. They were married nearly sixty years and had four sons.

Papa was smart enough to know that Australia offered his family greater opportunities than post-World War II Sicily, which had experienced some of the heaviest fighting of the war. Hundreds of thousands of troops from both sides had died in the mountains of the northern provinces. Nonna Maria and Mamma’s sister Francesca migrated to Australia in 1949 and two years later Papa made the trip to Brisbane on a converted battleship with his second son, my brother Sebastiano, aged three. Like most Italian migrants who made the thirty-day voyage, they arrived with little more than the clothes on their back. My other brother Carmelo and I stayed behind with Mamma. As the secondo padre, I was expected to make sure no harm came to them. Mamma never complained, although it must have broken her heart to be left behind a second time.

Papa was drawn to Innisfail, south of Cairns in North Queensland, where Mamma’s parents had settled after reuniting. Her siblings now ran successful cane farms. Zio (uncle) ‘Charlie’, as Carmelo was now known, had married a Sicilian migrant called Nora Carbone, while Zia (aunty) Francesca had fallen in love with a Sicilian Australian called Frank Cardillo. A short and slender man, Papa did the hard slog as a cane cutter until he had saved enough money for our passage to Australia.

I will never forget April 1954 at Messina. Carmelo, with a broken arm just mended after a fall from an orange tree, was excited about sailing on the handsome passenger liner the Surriento, whose blue and black twin funnels, each adorned with a single white star, towered above us into the cloudless sky. I had started Grade Five and didn’t want to leave my school friends to live in a strange faraway land that had once been our enemy. Why couldn’t we all live together in Calatabiano? I remember my altar boy-style school uniform and being fed lumpy porridge for breakfast by the Catholic nuns. If you were lucky and made up a good story about why you were still hungry they would serve you ‘bully beef’ for seconds.

As we boarded the Surriento, the glare off her luxurious white hull made me squint. My teary-eyed Bis Nonna (great-grandmother) Nina, in a plain long frock and a shawl, stood by my Bis Nonno (great-grandfather) Giorgio on the wharf, waving goodbye. He wore a three-piece suit with a fob watch hanging from his vest. We had always loved sharing a plate of pasta with Bis Nonno Giorgio. He’d wash the spaghetti down with red wine, wipe his grey handlebar moustache and pat his belly saying in Italian, ‘Eat with gusto but drink with moderation.’ We never saw them again.

On the Surriento we were listed as passengers 5, 6 and 7 and there were 640 settlers ready to call Australia home. Most were Maltese travelling on British passports, the rest Poles, Italians from Naples and a few Sicilians. My seasickness during the month-long voyage was so horrible I wanted to throw myself over the rails to end the misery. When we passed through the Suez Canal a Moroccan stuck his head through the porthole of our cabin and scared me half to death. I thought he was going to eat me! He was a very persistent salesman, though, and Mamma bought a bag of figs from him to make him go away.

Carmelo ran about the decks, pointing and laughing. When Mamma wasn’t keeping a close eye on him, she held me tightly, sang lullabies and ran her fingers through my hair. When our ship stopped at the Western Australian port of Fremantle, south of Perth, Mamma bought us a fresh bunch of green grapes, and to this day I’ve never tasted anything as sweet and wonderful. ‘Do we have to keep going?’ I said to her while standing on that glorious dry ground that didn’t sway and rock and make me sick. ‘I like it just fine here.’

I thought God had answered my prayers when Carmelo was quarantined for suspected measles. Mamma told the serious-looking Australian doctor that Carmelo was as healthy as an ox. ‘His cheeks, always rosy red,’ she tried to explain in Italian. Unfortunately Mamma was right. Carmelo was given a clean bill of health and I was miserable again from the seasickness.

As the Surriento crossed the Great Australian Bight south of the Nullarbor Plain, a school of dolphins played among the bow waves, jumping high, spinning about. The towering cliff faces along the wild coastline provided a stunning backdrop to their frivolity. All the passengers were clapping and laughing, shouting out encouragement in a multitude of languages. For a moment I forgot my seasickness, peered into the Southern Ocean and joined in the excitement. Those dolphins reminded everyone on board that life wasn’t all about war and hardship; it was still there to be lived.

The Surriento berthed at Newstead Wharf, Brisbane, on 27 May 1954. My first memory of the port is a rusty chain-link fence that separated us at customs from the hundreds of people waving handkerchiefs and throwing streamers and kisses on the other side. ‘Benvenuto a Brisbane!’ some were shouting to welcome us. The huge wooden sleepers of the wharf had gaps wide enough to see the mud flats and the brown river flowing underneath. I wondered why the water was so dirty.

Papa and little brother Sebastiano were waiting for us. I could hardly remember Papa and didn’t quite know what to do when he embraced me. I felt a mixture of fear and joy, but my strongest emotion was confusion. The heat was extreme and of a different kind to what I was used to – moist and draining – and Papa, dressed in a long-sleeved white shirt, was sweating and wiping his brow. Sebastiano, who now wanted to be called ‘Ben’, was hanging on tightly to Papa’s trouser leg, suspicious of these two siblings whom he regarded more as strangers. He’d had Papa to himself for three years and didn’t want to let him go. We felt the same way about Mamma and clutched at her dress, staring back at these ‘strangers’.

Papa and Mamma had no problems displaying their affections. They hugged and cried for ages; try as we might, we couldn’t prise them apart.

*

In Brisbane we shared a house with the Messara family, Sicilian friends who lived on Gregory Terrace in the inner-city suburb of Fortitude