By Joel Christie From: The Daily Telegraph

December 02, 2011 7:02AM

Source: The Daily Telegraph

Source: The Daily Telegraph

Former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke Petersen will be the focus of the new Underbelly series. Picture Courier Mail Source: The Courier-Mail

And don't you worry about that ... former Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen / Pic: David Caird Source: The Daily Telegraph

ILLEGAL casinos and government kickbacks are set to replace barber razors and John Ibrahim in the next instalment of Australian crime saga Underbelly.

TV insiders have revealed a script detailing the Fitzgerald inquiry, held in Queensland and covering much of the 1980s, is well under way. It traces the involvement of top policemen and their political bosses in the running of brothels and gambling dens that brought down Queensland's longest-serving premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Heading up the plot as the requisite baddie will be colourful Sunshine State figure Gerry Bellino, whose multi-million dollar sex and poker empire came undone when he was convicted for paying bribes to police and jailed for almost seven years.

Sources said the fifth season of the popular Channel 9 series would start early in the dodgy decade with honest cop Ray Whitrod who, like many in the force at the time, was exiled for investigating the network of graft that incriminated Terrence "Terry" Lewis, who went on to become police commissioner and received a knighthood.

It is also expected to feature Walkley award-winning journalist Phil Dickie, whose exposes of the owners of illegal brothels in The Courier Mail eventually instigated the landmark inquiry, which finished in 1989 with the removal of Lewis, who was stripped of his knighthood and jailed for more than 10 years.

While the Bjelke-Petersen trial resulted in a hung jury, former health minister Leisha Harvey and former transport minister Don Lane were found guilty and did time. High-profile Queensland politician Russ Hinze - referred to as "the father of the modern Gold Coast" and grandfather of model Kristy Hinze - was found to have accepted bribes but died before charges could be laid.

Dickie, whose girlfriend's house was shot up at the time his stories were published, now lives in Switzerland but said he was aware his book The Road To Fitzgerald had been part of the research process for the show.

"I know it has been in the pipeline for a while (but) I am not attached to it," he said.

"Knowing Underbelly, they will want to focus a lot on the crims in the street."

Filming is expected to take place primarily in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley.

Actor Peter O'Brien, who played bookmaker George Freeman in Underbelly: A Tale Of Two Cities, previously said he would be interested in playing a Brisbane identity from the Fitzgerald era, most notably Dickie. "There's a couple of journalists from that period who creamed it, and also a couple of blokes who ran a couple of brothels (so) that would be interesting," O'Brien said.

A Channel 9 spokeswoman said the network was not yet ready to announce the Underbelly format for 2012.

"The Fitzgerald inquiry is one of the contenders but there are at least two other Australian crime stories being considered as well," she said.

Queensland's Fitzgerald inquiry to be the subject of the next Underbelly | News.com.au