Morgan Ryan meets his maker … Missing parliamentary silverware a matter of integrity … Croatian Six miscarriage … Greenfields marketing for lawyers … Theodora reports 

Morgan made a major contribution to unravelling the life and career of Lionel Murphy.

For reasons that have never been adequately explained, Murphy is alleged to have approached several judges in an attempt to get Ryan off charges relating to a Korean immigration racket. 

Among Lionel’s targets were NSW Chief Magistrate Clarrie Briese, Judge Paul Flannery of the District Court, and former senator (Diamond) Jim McClelland who he pressed to approach another judge, Jim Staunton. 

Sydney University academic emeritus professor Rod Tiffen described Ryan as a “solicitor-cum-Mr-Fix-It to organised crime”. 

Murphy was acquitted of attempting to pervert the course of justice at his second trial in 1986, yet rumours and allegations continued to swirl around the High Court judge. Even though there had already been two senate committees in 1984, with findings largely along party lines, the Hawke government set up the parliamentary commission of inquiry in May 1986, with commissioners Sir George Lush, Sir Richard Blackburn and Andrew Wells inquiring into whether Murphy’s conduct amounted to “proved misbehaviour”. 

The commission sat for three months before it was wound up after the judge had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Thousands of pages from the commission’s work were released in September 2017 – a year after the 30 year embargo expired. 

The allegations were hair-raising but none were proved. Half of the 40 accusations had been rejected after a preliminary examination by the parliamentary commission and the balance were yet to be investigated at the time its work was terminated. 

Among the claims were that Murphy had tried to bribe a commonwealth police officer who was involved in the Greek social security conspiracy case and that he agreed to a scheme for crime figure Abe Saffron to intimidate solicitor Danny Sankey who had brought a case against former Whitlam government ministers over the Khemlani loans affair. 

Allegedly, he had tried to lobby NSW premier Neville Wran to secure a lease of Luna Park for Saffron. He was accused of having a Swiss bank account and Swiss shares. 

The material also showed that there was a bizarre plot by senior Liberals, including Billy Wentworth and Ivor Greenwood, to raid the home of Junie Morosi to look for documents that might incriminate the judge. 

Murphy also apparently asked a former member of the staff of Labor frontbencher John Brown to investigate whether Clarrie Briese, the whistleblower, had paid Mutual Pools $20,000 in cash for the construction of a swimming pool at his home on the North Shore. 

All we were left with was a lot of swirling, unproved allegations and, as it turned out, the judge need not have tried to look after Ryan. His little mate was convicted on the conspiracy charge in 1983, sentenced to be of good behaviour for five years and fined $400.  

The Court of Criminal Appeal overturned the conviction because of a misdirection by Judge Paul Flannery and the new trial was no billed. 

We last heard about Morgan Ryan in 2015 when at the age of 95 he was suing Random House over the publication of Kate McClymont and Lynton Besser’s book He Who Must be Obeid. Among the imputations pleaded was that he has “a lot of fingers in very grubby pies”. See also, Judge Judith Gibson on the pleadings. 

The Trials of Justice Murphy, a well-researched book by Stephen Walmsley, Flannery’s son-in-law, was published in 2017. 

Now it’s Clarrie Briese’s turn and his book is a work in progress. Even though Clarrie is a Creationist he was badly treated during the various inquiries and trials. With Neville Wran and Morgan Ryan dead and gone, he has a free hand to point the bone without fear of defamation actions. 

One of Clarrie’s claims is that Wran was seen near the Central Court at lunchtime on the day of the committal of Kevin Humphries, the head of the Australian Rugby League, who faced charges of filching money from the Balmain Leagues Club. The then chief magistrate Murray Farquhar had told magistrate Kevin Waller that the premier had been on the phone and he doesn’t want Humphries committed. 

Hence we got the Lorenzo Street royal commission into Nifty Neville. 

Earlier this month Hobart lawyer Jim Wilkinson bowed out as a member and as president of the Tasmanian Legislative Council. 

Among other contributions to the polity of Van Diemen’s Land, Jim chaired a committee inquiring into whether Tasmania needed an Integrity Commission. 

The finding was that indeed the state should have such a body which came into being over nine years ago.  

Among the arduous tasks performed by Jim was a visit to the Queensland parliament on a mission to explore the workings of the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission, which got going in 2001. 

It emerged that the explorations in Brisbane were eventful. 

Wilkinson was accompanied by Greg Hall MLC on the northern expedition and they were treated to a magnificent lunch by political Banana Benders. 

Just before leaving Parliament House in Brisbane, Wilkinson ducked out to the mens’ room, then picked up his bag and was on his way out the front door when the parliamentary security apparatus sprang into action. 

The guards had detected an amount of Queensland parliamentary silverware, cutlery and items of crockery stashed the Tasmanian MLC’s bag. 

We can only assume that this might have been the doing of the disruptive Mr Hall MLC.

Following his retirement, the electors replaced the conservative Wilkinson in the seat of Nelson, centred on Sandy Bay, with Meg Webb, a long time social justice campaigner who held senior jobs at TasCOSS and Anglicare. She campaigned on a social justice and anti-pokies platform and swept in. 

Hall left the parliament in May last year. Wilkinson observed that Hall had been a past member for Western Tiers, Rowallan and McIntyre-West. “They kept changing the electorate name because they couldn’t change the member.” 

As for the knives, forks and crockery, you’d have thought that most of it would have been purloined long ago by some of the rum One Nation types and other ne’er-do-wells that infested the Queensland parliament and had only recently been introduced to knives and forks. 

Journalist Hamish McDonald has painstakingly pieced together the case that resulted in six Croatian-Australians being fitted up for terrorism-related offences in 1979, in what amounted to a brazen miscarriage of justice. 

McDonald is a former foreign editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and more recently The Saturday Paper. 

In Reasonable Doubt – Spies, Police and the Croatian Six he says this miscarriage in NSW is on a dimension akin to the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four cases in the UK.  

Much of McDonald’s information comes from recently declassified ASIO files revealing that for six months before the accused were arrested, the Australian spy service was monitoring contact between a character called Vico Virkez and an intelligence officer at the Yugoslav consulate in Sydney. 

The historical setting is the fragmentation of Yugoslavia as the Communist dictatorship of Josip Broz Tito started to crumble, accompanied by strong breakaway sentiments among Balkan states, including Croatia. 

Virkez, a Bosnian Serb masquerading as a Croatian national, tipped off the NSW police that the Croatians were up to no good, planning terrorist attacks against Yugoslavs in Sydney and beyond. Virkez was the main crown witness at the trial of the six. 

Following the arrest of the alleged terrorists in 1979, ASIO revealed to a high-level committee in Canberra that it knew about the role of Vico Virkez and that he was really a stooge of the Yugoslav state. 

The minutes of the Canberra meeting were sent to NSW police assistant commissioner Roy Whitelaw whose response was, “if the opposition [defence lawyers] became aware of this information it would blow a hole right through the police case”. 

A deal was hatched whereby ASIO permitted Whitelaw to tell the heads of the CIB and the police prosecution branch of the “import” of the information about Virkez’s activities, as long and the source or the information remained confidential. 

The trial of the six commenced in May 1980 with a jury, presided over by Justice Victor Maxwell. The information about Virkez as a Yugoslav agent remained hidden and certainly was not in the brief of evidence provided to the defence. 

The crown prosecutor David Shillington QC assured the jury there was “not a skerrick of evidence” that Virkez was a Yugoslav intelligence agent. 

The accused pleaded not guilty, but the verbals carried the day and they each got 15 years jail. It was the longest trial in Australian and Commonwealth legal history. Years later Virkez told Four Corners investigative reporter Chris Masters that he had fabricated most of his evidence. 

The convictions still stand. You’d think that if Kathleen Folbigg can get a special inquiry into her conviction the same might apply to the Croatian Six where the justice system was corrupted by shifty coppers wanting convictions at any cost.

Reg Blanch, who is reviewing the Folbigg convictions, was NSW crown counsel in the High Court special leave application by the six in 1986. He admitted to Justice William Deane that if knowledge about Virkez had been withheld from the defence there would be “an almost automatic miscarriage of justice”. 

We’re always on the lookout for innovations in law firm marketing so it’s a thrill to stumble on the inspirational work of Sydney law shop Green & Associates led by Dominic Green. 

Maybe the judge had something to do with it. 

There’s skiting about beating a much larger firm in a skirmish and 10 tips on how to get out of jail, free. 

Let’s hope we hear more about the amazing triumphs of these legal magicians.