Dorothy Knight's Sting Operation Against Corrupt Cop Hallahan

This park looks peaceful now, with the jacaranda leaves and the river, but 50 years ago this was the spot for a police sting. It was set up to catch a corrupt Queensland police detective named Glendon Patrick Hallahan.

Dorothy Edith Knight was here then, a young sex worker. She wore a wire for the first time anyone had done that in Queensland. Undercover police were all around, some dressed as gardeners, others hiding in vans, watching her every move. The city in those days was full of crooked cops, and Dorothy put herself in danger here to bring down one of them. She told the Dig: Sirens Are Coming podcast that the stress of the operation was so much that she fainted when the undercover police took him away.

Dorothy is 80 now. She's a small-framed pensioner who lives with her husband in an apartment north of the Brisbane CBD. She was back here recently, for the first time in exactly 50 years. She said the fallout from that day changed the rest of her life.

This was during a time in the 1950s and 60s when police corruption in Queensland was widespread under Commissioner Frank Bischof. Bischof, who was known as the Big Fella, became Police Commissioner in 1958. He had a group of officers, including Hallahan, Tony Murphy, and Terry Lewis, who were called the Rat Pack. They investigated threats to their system of kickbacks, which they called The Joke.

One of the ways they made money was by taking weekly bribes from sex workers in the city, since sex work was illegal then. Dorothy Knight worked at the National Hotel, which was a favorite place for the police. She'd get ready in her room with a special makeup light, wearing high heels and with long hair. She'd drink scotch and take half a Purple Heart before meeting clients. Shirley Brifman, another sex worker who worked in brothels and hotels like the National, gave large sums of money to detectives like Tony Murphy and Hallahan. She said Hallahan would have received a lot of money from her.