Three Crooked Kings

Matthew Condon

ene 2013 · Univ. of Queensland Press

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Journalist and novelist Matthew Condon has crafted the definitive account--a searing story of greed, crime, and corruption--of an era that changed Queensland society; an impact that reverberates across the country to this day. In 1949, a young Terence Murray Lewis graduated from the police academy, ready to start his career in law enforcement. Over the next four decades, he rose to the pinnacle of power as the knighted Commissioner of Police in Queensland before his spectacular downfall and imprisonment after the Fitzgerald Inquiry in the late 1980s. This book follows Lewis' journey through the ranks, as he becomes part of the so-called Rat Pack with detectives Glenn Hallahan and Tony Murphy under the guiding influence of Commissioner Frank Bischof. The alleged suicide of prostitute and brothel madam Shirley Brifman in the early 1970s provides the turning point for a culture that reigned unchecked for several decades. It was part of a grand narrative teeming with murder, pay-offs, political machinations, drug heists, assisted suicides, police in-fighting, and a complicated system of corruption that ultimately collapsed under its own weight. Based on unprecedented interviews with Terry Lewis and access to his personal papers, this book is the missing piece in the puzzle of the story of Queensland's endemic generational corruption.

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Matthew Condon is an Australian journalist and writer. He was born in 1962 in Brisbane, Australian. He was educated at the University of Queensland and the Goethe Institute, Bremen, Germany. His first book was The Motorcycle Cafe. A Night at the Pink Poodle and The Lulu Magnet both won Steele Rudd Awards for Short Fiction. All Fall Down (book 3 of the Terry Lewis biographies, Three Crooked Kings and Jacks and Jokers) won the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards Small publishers' adult book of the year. His other books include Usher, The Ancient Guild, The Pillow Fight, and The Trout Opera. Currently, he writes for The Courier-Mail.