"I was set up and people tried to shoot me."
In February 1970 one of Hallahan’s colleagues, Detective Constable Terry Edwards, was having his hair cut in suburban Mount Gravatt when he recognised the barber as John Creamer, a small time thief who had served time in jail for theft. He was now 25, married, had a one-year-old child and had found this job as a hairdresser.
This was the story Creamer told courts.
Edwards returned to the salon and asked to have a few words with him. There was still a warrant out for his arrest, Edwards told him. They arranged to meet at the Mount Gravatt Hotel that evening. Creamer took his
wife and uncle with him to the meeting as witnesses. Edwards said: “For $200 I can get this fixed.”
Creamer was aghast. "I only get $50 a week and $15 of that I give to my mother for board. You can have the other $35." Edwards said he wouldn’t take his last $35.
Two or three days after the haircut Edwards rang him and kept pestering and pressuring him.
After further meetings Edwards said he would deal with the warrant if Creamer broke into an electrical goods shop. He knew there was no alarm fitted because police had been involved in a stakeout there after a tip off that there was to be a burglary. Edwards gave him a walkie talkie that he said belonged to a colleague called Glen Hallahan but on the night of the planned burglary Edwards called off the raid because, he said, he had noticed an alarm had been fitted.
Instead, Edwards started pressing him to raid a bank at Red Hill at which both he and Glen Hallahan had a contact.
“He said his boss, or a fellow he was working for, was Glen Hallahan and he said that he would prefer that he was brought into the operation because he would carry a lot of weight, he was a smooth operator and would be tremendous for protection,” said Creamer.
The fact that the reformist and implacably honest Ray Whitrod had just been appointed police commissioner did not seem to have any effect on what Creamer alleged happened next.
Edwards arranged for Creamer to burgle three shops. Creamer obtained a flat where the stolen goods could be kept while awaiting disposal and took Edwards there before committing the burglaries on May 18 and 19. On the evening of the 19th Creamer was turning the key in the door of the flat when a voice told him to hold it right there. It was a police ambush. Creamer had been betrayed. Or as the prosecution put it in the magistrates court: “As a result of confidential information…”
Creamer knew the tricks used by detectives in falsifying statements and so for each of the three charges he wrote a separate statement. Each statement, in his own writing, was fairly similar: “I will not at any time disclose who was with me and this is the only statement I have made regarding this matter. At this stage I do not wish to disclose why I committed this offence.” This did not stop one detective from telling a court later: “The defendant said ‘It would be no use my denying it – you’ve got me with the goods’.”
Creamer was released on bail on May 28. A detective of Hallahan’s intellect would not have needed to read between the lines to understand that at some future point, probably in court, Creamer was going to tell the story of how he had been coerced into the crimes.
On the evening of Saturday June 13 Creamer was a passenger in a sports car being driven along Logan Road, a busy arterial road lined with shops in Mount Gravatt, when another car pulled alongside. Hallahan leaned out of the window with a gun in his hand and fired two shots towards the car. The police car then forced the sports car into the kerb. Hallahan and three other detectives piled into the two men. And just in case Creamer hadn’t received the message, Hallahan fired another shot at close range. He had the power. He had a gun.
This time Creamer was charged with possessing gelignite and housebreaking implements, including walkie talkies. And this time he was kept in Boggo Road Jail to await his trials.
Barrister Col Bennett, the long-time highly-vocal critic of Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan, appeared for Creamer at the committal proceedings arising from his arrest following the Hallahan gunfire. Hallahan gave his usual polished performance in the witness box, presenting the police evidence. The neat, slim, bespectacled Bennett rose from his chair at the bar table. It was his turn to conduct an ambush. "I put it to you that you are in the breaking and entering business with my client?"
The normally smooth, calm, unflappable Hallahan just about leaped out of the witness box to attack Bennett
in his denial of the suggestion.
Creamer was either very brave or very foolish. When he appeared at the District Court at the end of August for his
trial on the charges of breaking, entering and stealing from three shops. he pleaded guilty to theft but alleged he had been recruited as a thief by Consorting Squad detective constable Edwards who had told him he worked in close co-operation with Hallahan.
As news that Creamer was telling his story spread, the public gallery filled up with about two dozen 'top' detectives, some of them being forced to stand at the back of the court because all seating was taken.
It was a show of united strength to demonstrate to the court that the cream of the force (sour and curdled as it
was) stood with Edwards and Hallahan.
Creamer told how Edwards had “suggested a bank at Red Hill and asked me what I thought of having a gun in my hand."
Finally, said Creamer: "I was set up and people tried to shoot me." Hallahan was the detective he feared most, he said.
Hallahan and Edwards took the stand, swore their oaths and said Creamer's story was pure invention.
The judge told the man who had been trying to go straight until he fell into the clutches of Edwards and Hallahan that his story was highly improbable - and jailed him for three years.
What the judge could not have known, of course, was that according to small-time criminal Donald Ross-Kelly, just three weeks earlier Hallahan had arranged for him to rob the Bank of New South Wales at Kedron.
Recently John Creamer contacted me and we met for a chat over coffee.
A tall, well-weathered man with silver hair and blue eyes, he told me how he realised when serving his sentence how many old lags had wasted their lives by constantly re-offending and being thrown back into jail. He decided to start his life afresh.
Of the night he was attacked by Hallahan he says: "They shot through the window of the car twice. Then, they pushed me against a fence and put the gun next to my ear and it went off. My ear was screaming for three or four days. The bullet went into a ceiling in the house."
He says Hallahan "had stuff on everybody. There were gay judges that he had stuff on."
John had grown up in the company of notorious criminals Billy Stokes and Tommy Hamilton who was best man at his first wedding (he's been married five times). But other schoolmates had been some of Col Bennett's children. John remembers some nuns at St Francis Catholic Primary School slamming steel edged rulers on to the hands of miscreants. It became too much for John, then aged 10, who grabbed the ruler from the Nun, broke it, threw it at her and walked out of school. He was expelled.
He told me how he has at various stages of his life run a gallery in Brisbane's Elizabeth Arcade, been a painter and decorator, owned a ceiling tile factory, farmed alpacas, been an antiques dealer, managed a health retreat and written a musical.
Detective Edwards was found guilty by a jury of extorting money from a criminal in 1980 and sentenced to three and a half years' imprisonment but freed on appeal three months later. A second jury convicted him but once again he was freed on appeal.
This was the story Creamer told courts.
Edwards returned to the salon and asked to have a few words with him. There was still a warrant out for his arrest, Edwards told him. They arranged to meet at the Mount Gravatt Hotel that evening. Creamer took his
wife and uncle with him to the meeting as witnesses. Edwards said: “For $200 I can get this fixed.”
Creamer was aghast. "I only get $50 a week and $15 of that I give to my mother for board. You can have the other $35." Edwards said he wouldn’t take his last $35.
Two or three days after the haircut Edwards rang him and kept pestering and pressuring him.
After further meetings Edwards said he would deal with the warrant if Creamer broke into an electrical goods shop. He knew there was no alarm fitted because police had been involved in a stakeout there after a tip off that there was to be a burglary. Edwards gave him a walkie talkie that he said belonged to a colleague called Glen Hallahan but on the night of the planned burglary Edwards called off the raid because, he said, he had noticed an alarm had been fitted.
Instead, Edwards started pressing him to raid a bank at Red Hill at which both he and Glen Hallahan had a contact.
“He said his boss, or a fellow he was working for, was Glen Hallahan and he said that he would prefer that he was brought into the operation because he would carry a lot of weight, he was a smooth operator and would be tremendous for protection,” said Creamer.
The fact that the reformist and implacably honest Ray Whitrod had just been appointed police commissioner did not seem to have any effect on what Creamer alleged happened next.
Edwards arranged for Creamer to burgle three shops. Creamer obtained a flat where the stolen goods could be kept while awaiting disposal and took Edwards there before committing the burglaries on May 18 and 19. On the evening of the 19th Creamer was turning the key in the door of the flat when a voice told him to hold it right there. It was a police ambush. Creamer had been betrayed. Or as the prosecution put it in the magistrates court: “As a result of confidential information…”
Creamer knew the tricks used by detectives in falsifying statements and so for each of the three charges he wrote a separate statement. Each statement, in his own writing, was fairly similar: “I will not at any time disclose who was with me and this is the only statement I have made regarding this matter. At this stage I do not wish to disclose why I committed this offence.” This did not stop one detective from telling a court later: “The defendant said ‘It would be no use my denying it – you’ve got me with the goods’.”
Creamer was released on bail on May 28. A detective of Hallahan’s intellect would not have needed to read between the lines to understand that at some future point, probably in court, Creamer was going to tell the story of how he had been coerced into the crimes.
On the evening of Saturday June 13 Creamer was a passenger in a sports car being driven along Logan Road, a busy arterial road lined with shops in Mount Gravatt, when another car pulled alongside. Hallahan leaned out of the window with a gun in his hand and fired two shots towards the car. The police car then forced the sports car into the kerb. Hallahan and three other detectives piled into the two men. And just in case Creamer hadn’t received the message, Hallahan fired another shot at close range. He had the power. He had a gun.
This time Creamer was charged with possessing gelignite and housebreaking implements, including walkie talkies. And this time he was kept in Boggo Road Jail to await his trials.
Barrister Col Bennett, the long-time highly-vocal critic of Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan, appeared for Creamer at the committal proceedings arising from his arrest following the Hallahan gunfire. Hallahan gave his usual polished performance in the witness box, presenting the police evidence. The neat, slim, bespectacled Bennett rose from his chair at the bar table. It was his turn to conduct an ambush. "I put it to you that you are in the breaking and entering business with my client?"
The normally smooth, calm, unflappable Hallahan just about leaped out of the witness box to attack Bennett
in his denial of the suggestion.
Creamer was either very brave or very foolish. When he appeared at the District Court at the end of August for his
trial on the charges of breaking, entering and stealing from three shops. he pleaded guilty to theft but alleged he had been recruited as a thief by Consorting Squad detective constable Edwards who had told him he worked in close co-operation with Hallahan.
As news that Creamer was telling his story spread, the public gallery filled up with about two dozen 'top' detectives, some of them being forced to stand at the back of the court because all seating was taken.
It was a show of united strength to demonstrate to the court that the cream of the force (sour and curdled as it
was) stood with Edwards and Hallahan.
Creamer told how Edwards had “suggested a bank at Red Hill and asked me what I thought of having a gun in my hand."
Finally, said Creamer: "I was set up and people tried to shoot me." Hallahan was the detective he feared most, he said.
Hallahan and Edwards took the stand, swore their oaths and said Creamer's story was pure invention.
The judge told the man who had been trying to go straight until he fell into the clutches of Edwards and Hallahan that his story was highly improbable - and jailed him for three years.
What the judge could not have known, of course, was that according to small-time criminal Donald Ross-Kelly, just three weeks earlier Hallahan had arranged for him to rob the Bank of New South Wales at Kedron.
Recently John Creamer contacted me and we met for a chat over coffee.
A tall, well-weathered man with silver hair and blue eyes, he told me how he realised when serving his sentence how many old lags had wasted their lives by constantly re-offending and being thrown back into jail. He decided to start his life afresh.
Of the night he was attacked by Hallahan he says: "They shot through the window of the car twice. Then, they pushed me against a fence and put the gun next to my ear and it went off. My ear was screaming for three or four days. The bullet went into a ceiling in the house."
He says Hallahan "had stuff on everybody. There were gay judges that he had stuff on."
John had grown up in the company of notorious criminals Billy Stokes and Tommy Hamilton who was best man at his first wedding (he's been married five times). But other schoolmates had been some of Col Bennett's children. John remembers some nuns at St Francis Catholic Primary School slamming steel edged rulers on to the hands of miscreants. It became too much for John, then aged 10, who grabbed the ruler from the Nun, broke it, threw it at her and walked out of school. He was expelled.
He told me how he has at various stages of his life run a gallery in Brisbane's Elizabeth Arcade, been a painter and decorator, owned a ceiling tile factory, farmed alpacas, been an antiques dealer, managed a health retreat and written a musical.
Detective Edwards was found guilty by a jury of extorting money from a criminal in 1980 and sentenced to three and a half years' imprisonment but freed on appeal three months later. A second jury convicted him but once again he was freed on appeal.
