Every time Katherine James sees a police car, fear flashes through her.
It has been 35 years since she took the stand to testify against corrupt police at Queensland's famous 1987 Fitzgerald Inquiry. Still, the whistleblower says she has lingering trauma.
"I can control it," she tells herself, whenever she imagines she's seen something in the shadows.
Katherine James is not her real name. This pseudonym was used to protect her in 1987, and she has not spoken publicly ever since.
After giving evidence at the inquiry, she went into witness protection, and eventually left Brisbane all together.
When she took the stand, she already had 35 criminal convictions, including 12 charges of false pretences.
She was criticised and had her testimony challenged throughout the inquiry. Fitzgerald himself said she was a complex and self-motivated person.
But she gave detailed evidence about the greed and corruption she'd witnessed firsthand – cops demanding weekly bribes from sex workers, threats, intimidation, sordid parties.
Her testimony played a vital role in bringing down the system of kickbacks and corruption that had plagued Queensland policing for three decades.
In June this year, Katherine decided to speak to the ABC after hearing parts of her story told in the ABC podcast, Dig: Sirens Are Coming.
"I wanted to put my side of it across," she told Matthew Condon, host of Sirens Are Coming.
"And to be perfectly honest, I'm not that well."
After weeks of negotiation and planning, Katherine and Matthew agreed to meet on neutral ground in Toowoomba.
Katherine was ready to reveal what she saw as a central player in Queensland's sex work industry when police corruption had a hold on the state and the lives of those around her.
Where it all began
It's hard to imagine Katherine could have ever anticipated the impact she would have on the vice game, and police corruption.
When she got her foot in the door she was just a teenager, still making up excuses to her parents to explain where all her money came from. By 17, she says she was running a massage parlour called Top of The Valley, and soon a second: Kon-Tiki.
But when heroin swept the streets of Brisbane in the mid-70s, she became addicted and began selling drugs. In 1975, she was charged with possessing heroin with the intent to sell it.
She knew she was going to prison, so she absconded, hoping to postpone the inevitable to spend time with her new daughter.
As her baby became a toddler, Katherine and her husband realised she would have to confront the drug charges sooner or later.
"We wanted to get it over and done with before my daughter could remember it," she says.
So in 1978, she returned to Brisbane, steeling herself.
"I didn't know for sure that I would go to jail. I was hoping I wouldn't."
She was sentenced to five years prison.
Being introduced to the vice world
While she was in prison, corrupt cops used Katherine to take down a rival: the straight-dealing Detective Basil Hicks, who was pegged to replace the corrupt Tony Murphy as head of the Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU) – a squad of honest officers tasked with cleaning up the force.
Officers took Katherine from her Boggo Road cell to police headquarters, where it was demanded she give a statement detailing an affair with Hicks.
Police had heard a rumour Katherine paid a photographer to secretly capture her having sex with Hicks, so she would have blackmail material to stop Hicks "harassing" her.
"I was asked about [the photographs] and I was told that I was coming up for parole soon. And if I wanted to get it, I had to cooperate.
"And I thought, I'm between a rock and a hard place here. So I just pretended that they were destroyed."
Nevertheless, a statement was signed. Katherine denies it was her signature on it.
That statement was tendered to premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen by Murphy's close associate, the corrupt Police Commissioner, Terry Lewis.
Hicks was not promoted to head of the police integrity squad and instead transferred to a regional position.
Later, at the Fitzgerald Inquiry, Hicks insisted that he had never been intimate with Katherine, and she gave inconsistent evidence under cross-examination.
Fitzgerald concluded it was "quite possible that she pretended that she had useful information [on Hicks]. In any event, she was undoubtedly correctly identified by those who used her to discredit Hicks as an enormously complex person who would act, maliciously if needed, to suit her own ends."
Today, Katherine maintains the photos were real and says the inquiry "discredited her a bit".
After serving around 18 months of her five-year sentence, Katherine was released on parole.
Witness to corruption
After her release in 1979, Katherine started her life again in Brisbane, working in a jewellery factory initially. But the massage parlours had a certain lure she could not resist: "The money."
In 1981, Katherine re-entered sex work in Brisbane, and found the "New Joke" in full swing.
The New Joke was a more ingrained and organised evolution of the original kickbacks system, known as "the Joke", which started in the 60s under the "Rat Pack" -- corrupt officers Terry Lewis, Tony Murphy, and Glen Hallahan.
By the early 80s, the two consortiums that dominated Brisbane's parlours and brothels were paying police 20 per cent of revenue in kickbacks, by Katherine's estimates.
Police were also offered free booze and sex with the workers during their patrols, Katherine told the inquiry.
She worked for both consortiums, but what Katherine really wanted was to return to her roots as an independent parlour manager.
She approached one of her police contacts, Nev Ross, and sought a green light to start her own parlour. She said she paid him $10,000 up-front and agreed to a weekly kickback to seal the deal.
Her new parlour was called Xanadu, and it sat only a few blocks from the Hapeta/Tilley consortium's boutique brothel, Fantasia.
Xanadu created competition in a market dominated by two major players.
"The minute the door was opened, I was being raided every minute," Katherine said.
Her arrangement with Nev Ross seemed forgotten, and he wouldn't return her calls. She said she'd spent $35,000 on renovations alone, but her new business was forced to close within a year.
Operating in this new era was unsustainable, Katherine felt. The scene was so different to her experiences in the 1970s, and she found herself constantly shocked by what she saw.
"The police just went to the extreme. It went from the point of just management and the police knowing what was going on, to everyone," she said.
"The police were coming in [to sex work premises], having sex with the girls. They just lost control and just were just so greedy and so confident and arrogant that they could do anything."
She described one incident that epitomised the greed and recklessness of the era: a notorious "Gangsters and Molls" themed party that the Bellino consortium threw at their Kangaroo Point parlour, Pinky's.
"It was going to be one of the sweeteners to get [the police] to rein it in a bit," Katherine said.
"The licensing branch and a few detectives got invited, and certain girls were picked out for that night.
"They had the police cars out front, outside. They were all so drunk it wasn't even amusing.
"There were lounges and then you went up to five huge rooms, all beautifully done, all in shades of pink."
The girls were hand-picked for the occasion, and paid to give sexual favours to the guests, including several police, Katherine said.
The disrespect for women in her profession, the greediness, and the cheapness of it all fuelled Katherine's distaste for police.
"I felt like I was in a B-grade movie," she said.
Turning whistleblower
This greed and corruption was finally exposed in Chris Masters' groundbreaking Four Corners expose, Moonlight State, in 1987.
It immediately prompted a commission of inquiry.
Katherine's involvement in the scene would come under the inquiry's terms of reference. She might have seen the writing on the wall, or it might have been the opportunity she was looking for to blow the whistle.
One thing was for sure: she was not going back to prison.
She took indemnity and prepared to testify at the commission. At least this way she could have some control over the way her daughter learned the truth about her career.
"It was at a stage where I didn't want her hearing that her mother had been a prostitute. Or a madam. And if she did hear it, I wanted her to hear it in the right context," she said.
"I wanted her to know why I did it. And I think that she does … but we just don't talk about it."
Katherine certainly was taking charge of the situation she was in. So much so she said she had the commission arrange new outfits for her every day – from Carla Zampatti, no less.
She was aware her parents could be watching, and even though she was hidden from view by a privacy screen, she was conscious of how she would come across.
Journalist Margaret Simons, who was also one of the authors of the Fitzgerald Report, told Sirens Are Coming that Katherine was a composed witness, who spoke with a refined voice.
In naming and shaming officers who engaged in corruption, she helped create a domino effect of officers speaking out to seek indemnity from prosecution.
As each rolled over, another came forward.
The ripples quickly reached Commissioner Terry Lewis and he was stood down, later to be imprisoned for corruption and forgery.
Witness protection
After the inquiry, Katherine was placed in Queensland's witness protection program.
But she said she and her young daughter felt cramped by the witness protection officers following their every move. School drop-offs and pick-ups were cumbersome, and her home was never without four officers on guard, she said.
And the officers didn't really make her feel safe anyway.
"They were like children. You could hear them at night taking their guns apart and putting them back together. And they really thought they were Starsky and Hutch," she said.
As the dust settled, Katherine felt the program was no longer worth the imposition on her privacy. Two years after the inquiry, she voluntarily signed herself out of the witness protection program, she said. She eventually moved to the country and transitioned to farm life, far from the lure of Brisbane's vice scene.
It might have been a risk, but she believed if she stayed out of the vice game, she could safely leave that part of her life behind, along with the officers who were a constant reminder of it.
"I could never enter that world again. Whether it be drugs or any form of prostitution. I knew if I did that, that I would be found overdosed somewhere," she said.
"I knew that I would have to change my life almost completely."
What happened to Simone Vogel?
There was one thing the Fitzgerald Inquiry didn't cover that was on Katherine's mind at the time: the disappearance of fellow brothel madam, Simone Vogel.
Katherine said she sold her parlour, Kon-Tiki, to Vogel, and continued working under her for a time.
"She was a beautiful woman. She had a real presence," Katherine said.
"Very attractive lady. Very good to staff. Hated drugs."
The presumed murder of Simone Vogel remains unsolved, but it's something that has haunted Katherine all these years.
Vogel may have been on the cusp of exiting the vice scene — or possibly even becoming a whistleblower — before she disappeared.
She had started to give information to certain trusted police, who believed Vogel would soon start naming names and talking about the protection payments she'd been paying to the Licensing Branch.
"[The police] had never taken money off me at Kon-Tiki, but [Vogel] was telling me that it was just getting worse and worse and worse, the amount of money that she had to pay them," says Katherine.
"I think she was just about ready to get out."
A former detective, Keith Smith, told the ABC's Sirens Are Coming podcast he investigated Vogel's links to the Rat Pack and their possible involvement in her disappearance, but his investigation was shut down under the orders of Rat Packer Tony Murphy.
Smith said he gave a copy of his confidential report to an officer who reported directly to Police Commissioner Terry Lewis. The officer later told him that he had shredded the report after discussing it with Murphy and Lewis.
If Lewis knows anything about Vogel's disappearance, or if she lingers on his mind, he hasn't revealed that over the years that Matthew Condon spent interviewing him. Having served his time, Lewis lives quietly in a Brisbane nursing home, the last surviving member of the Rat Pack.
Katherine said she'd always heard the same rumour in conjunction with Vogel's death: that Rat Packer Glen Hallahan was responsible.
"I wasn't there, so I really don't know. But I was told that she was put on a boat. Taken out into Moreton Bay and put through an industrial mincer," she said.
"She was never going to be found. There could never be any trace of her."
Hallahan always denied he had anything to do with Vogel's death, and there was no evidence linking him to her disappearance. A coronial investigation found Simone Vogel was met with foul play, but no-one has been charged with her murder.
Looking back
Simone's death came after at least two other sex workers had tried to expose police corruption.
Six years earlier, in 1971, the brothel madam Shirley Brifman had gone on national TV to tell Australia what she had witnessed in the vice game. Several months later, while Brifman was providing detailed statements to Queensland police, and weeks before she was set to testify at the perjury trial of Rat Packer Tony Murphy, she was found dead in her police safe house. Cause of death: barbiturate overdose.
Then, in 1972, Dorothy Edith Knight became the first to perform a sting operation with a wire, aimed at entrapping Rat Packer Glen Hallahan in the act of receiving bribes. The evidence was ruled inadmissible though, and Hallahan slipped through the cracks.
"It's like a relay," said Katherine. "If I didn't have those two come before me, I would have been extremely worried.
"I think they paved the way for me."
Katherine has made peace with her past and is content with her new life, far from Brisbane. She says that if you told her 35 years ago she'd be living on a farm in a remote part of Australia, she would have laughed in your face.
"But I love it. Fresh air … I'd never move".
It may have come at a cost, but she said she has no regrets about coming forward through the Fitzgerald Inquiry.
"I remember thinking [Simone Vogel] would be proud of this," she said.
Sirens Are Coming is the latest season of the Dig podcast — a fresh take on the iconic stories you thought you knew about Australia's most notorious and influential characters. Listen for free on the ABC listen app.
