A mob figure billed as Brisbane’s Tony Soprano has died at the age of 80.
Gerardo Bellino, who was jailed after the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police crime and corruption, ran a multi-million dollar network of illegal brothels and gambling dens.
Known as Gerry, he was a member of the immigrant Bellino family who came to Australia from Sicily in the 1940s when he was nine years old.
The colorful businessman ended up owning several strip clubs, a coffin-making business, and worked as a real estate speculator.
Along with his business partner Vittorio ‘Vic’ Conte, he was jailed for nearly seven years after being found guilty of paying bribes worth $17,000 a month to police officers.
Bellino paid for the protection of his Valley vice rackets to crooked cops who pocketed hundreds from ‘Uncle Gerry’.
He was also linked to the cultivation of giant cannabis crops.
Bellino died on March 1 of cancer and will be fired at a service at Holy Spirit Church, New Farm next week.
Gerry Bellino, who ran a multi-million dollar network of illegal brothels and gambling dens in Brisbane’s seedy Fortitude Valley, has died aged 80.
One of the illegal brothels operating in the then seedy suburb of Valle. which included Bellino’s Bubbles Bath House and other places of prostitution
Gerry Bellino (left), who once ran illegal casinos, brothels and strip clubs (right) in Brisbane’s seedy neighborhood of The Valley, has died of cancer aged 80.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Bellino operated some of Fortitude Valley’s best-known venues, including World by Night, a famous strip club with a brothel upstairs, The Beat, and Bubbles Bath House, which operated a parlor of illegal games.
Bubbles has since reopened in the same location as a legitimate business, Les Bubbles Steakhouse, complete with a basement bar to mark its “seedy history.”
Bellino earned large amounts of cash from prostitution and gambling.
Fortitude Valley was a hotbed of illegal gambling, prostitution, and crime that became the subject of Fitzgerald’s investigation into police corruption.
Illegal brothels and casinos clustered in the valley along a vice-strip controlled by the mob and protected by corrupt police officers.
He was the brother of the most prominent Tony Bellino, a casino operator who denied knowing anything about illegal prostitution before his death last year.
Tony Bellino, who opened the iconic The Roxy nightclub in Fortitude Valley in the 1980s, was named in the Fitzgerald Inquiry’s terms of reference but was never charged and denied wrongdoing.
The investigation was sparked by reporter Phil Dickie’s investigation into high-level police corruption, illegal prostitution and gambling in Brisbane in the late 1980s, and was followed by Chris Masters’ Four Corners show The Moonlight State.
Gerry Bellino openly admitted in the investigation that he owned buildings in which illegal gambling dens and Bubbles Bath House operated, but denied that he was involved in prostitution.
The Fitzgerald investigation, which began when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was Queensland’s premier, awarded damages to witnesses, resulting in allegations of corruption against state police commissioner Terry Lewis.
Significant political damage caused Bjelke-Petersen to resign as prime minister, and when Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald submitted his report in 1989, high-profile politicians were charged with offences.
Bjelke-Petersen himself was tried for corruption and perjury, but the jury failed to agree on the verdict.
Sir Terence Lewis was accused of corruption, convicted and stripped of his knighthood.
In December 1989, the ALP won its first Queensland election since 1957, with Wayne Goss elected as leader.
