REMEMBER WHEN

GOLD COAST BULLETIN Thursday April 29, 1982

THE opening of Conrad Jupiters Hotel and Casino was still three years away in 1982 when there were fears of criminal elements being involved in the project.

Liberal MP for McPherson, Peter White, warned the casino, which was under construction at the time, would draw in “undesirables”. It came after NSW deputy police commissioner Bill Allen was linked to a bribery scandal and the collapse of Australian-based merchant bank Nugan Hand.

The bank came under investigation over questionable accounting practices, coinciding with the suicide of one of its founders, while the other, an exspecial forces soldier, disappeared never to be seen again.

Mr White warned that both national and state-based police would have to redouble efforts to prevent the casino from becoming a hotbed of organised crime. “All the signs show we have these major problems here now,” he said. “There must be closer links between the Commonwealth and states, state, and federal police and all other law enforcement.”

Federal Cabinet earlier discussed setting up a crime commission with powers to mount large-scale investigations into organised crime, drug trafficking, gun running and corruption.

However police minister Russ Hinze denied the need for a federal crime commission to look into criminal matters in the state, saying probes into police corruption were unnecessary.

Hinze was later forced to resign from parliament in 1988 when he was linked to longrunning and institutionalised police corruption by the Fitzgerald Inquiry.