Underbelly 6 Read online

  They arranged for Collin’s body to be returned to Queensland for the funeral, which was held at Helensvale near the Gold Coast. People came from all over Australia for the service.

  The dreams Erik Dragsbaek had shared with his son were buried with him. They had set up the Queensland Stunt Company together and they’d had plans to found an institute to train stunt actors, develop new stunts and refine old ones; a place where engineers and stunt professionals could advise scriptwriters and film directors on how far scripts could safely go.

  All that was gone. But Erik wanted to make sure that Collin’s life – and death – had meant something. ‘Collin used to say that if you learned from your mistakes it’s not all wasted,’ he mused.

  So, early in 1996, he and Kerry drove back to Robinvale to run their own inquiry. They placed an advertisement in the local paper and knocked on doors. They spoke to a lot of people and heard things they didn’t know. Locals told them they’d seen Collin hit the bag, yet some film people had told them he’d missed it. ‘We thought: Collin miss a bag? That’s a bit crazy. He hit it all right, but he went right through it.’

  They met Matthew and Lisa McWilliam and Joe and Renay Heeps, and copied the photographs the women had taken. It seemed to Erik and Kerry the pictures proved that Collin had manoeuvred himself perfectly into the upside down, spreadeagled position needed to land safely.

  Why, then, were people associated with the film saying he’d landed feet first? And why were there no injuries to his feet, only to his head?

  They went back to Queensland with more questions than answers. Erik wouldn’t give up. He checked with the weather bureau, and was told that wind gusts on the Tuesday that Collin died had been stronger than the previous day. The RAAF base at Amberley told him that at the time of the stunt the setting sun would have been directly in his eyes.

  Each aspect, he said, ‘added to the degree of difficulty’ of a stunt already made tougher by last-minute changes that no one connected with the film was now talking about.

  Then something else happened. Another stuntman was killed. His name was Trevor Welsh, he was doing a practice fall near Melbourne … and using a bag almost identical to the one at Robinvale. The coincidence was too much to ignore.

  KERRY Ah-Quay and Collin were more like brothers than in-laws. Kerry has a photograph on the wall of the office in his Brisbane service station of himself and Collin doing stunts together and, almost three years afterwards, he glances at it wistfully as he talks. He tells how Collin took him aside when Kerry and Michelle were engaged and asked him not to be a stuntman, because he wanted him to look after his little sister. Kerry gave his word.

  He kept his promise, and more. He has helped Erik Dragsbaek’s search for the truth for more than three years. In mid-1996, Erik and Kerry set out on a third trip south. They had already ensured the inquest would not be a formality, and had pushed to have the air bag tested. Now they had to make it happen.

  ‘The problem was the Victorian police couldn’t go over and get the bag, which had been taken to South Australia,’ Ah-Quay was to recall. Dragsbaek said he’d get it if the police telephoned and smoothed the way. Which is why the two headed south a third time, driving a van from Brisbane to the Adelaide hills.

  They were heading for the home of Glenn Boswell and Bernadette Van Geyen, who had supplied the air bag for the film Love Serenade. When they got there, Van Geyen showed them to a shed. Inside was the bag. It might have been worth $30,000, but there hadn’t been much call for it in six months; when they pulled it out, they could still see the dried blood on the parachute material. Proof, Dragsbaek thought bitterly, that his son had hit the bag, but that the bag hadn’t stopped him hitting the ground.

  He was surprised at how small the bag was. From high in the sky even big bags look tiny – and this wasn’t big. He recalled that when Collin had done a 14-storey fall for Mission Impossible, playing a hallucinating man who thinks he’s on fire and ‘running’ in the air, the air bag used was at least nine metres square. But this was only a third that area, about six by 4.5 metres – a small target from 27 metres up, even if it functioned perfectly. And lack of size, he decided later, wasn’t its only shortcoming.

  The bag was divided into two horizontal chambers. The top chamber, theoretically for deceleration, had large air vents on each side, loosely sealed with velcro flaps. Below this was the safety chamber, a sealed compartment designed as a cushion.

  The coroner’s assistant, Senior Sergeant Stewart Harrison, went from Melbourne to Brisbane to supervise a series of tests devised by an engineer, and recorded on video.

  They parked a forklift next to the bag and Ah-Quay and three stuntmen jumped from the forks, just a metre above the bag. Each time, the velcro flaps blew out on the top chamber, effectively making it useless, and forcing the lower chamber to take all the force of the fall.

  ‘You’d expect the top compartment to stay inflated from a jump of two feet,’ Dragsbaek was to say. ‘It seems the vents are too big. When they’re open, it means more than half the bag is open to the atmosphere. The top cell might as well not be there.’

  One stuntman fell on to the bag from seven metres, while another sealed himself inside the safety cell and filmed the effect. According to Dragsbaek, the top cell did not work at all, with the impact pushing into the bottom cell about 45 centimetres of a total 130.

  In other words, hit it just three times as hard as the seven metre experimental fall, and you’d hit the ground beneath. The crudest grasp of physics leads to a chilling conclusion: from the silo’s height of 27 metres, rather than the test height of seven metres, the impact would be deadly.

  It looked like a fundamental design fault. But even if the vents hadn’t blown out as they had in the test falls, the airbag still had to be hit dead centre to be safe. Given the conditions imposed by the film-makers, this would have been difficult, even for a performer of Collin Dragsbaek’s skill.

  Eventually, Erik saw a video of the fall – not the missing one that includes the impact – but another, sanitised version. What he saw disturbed him, and not just because it captured his son’s last moments of life.

  The film people had assured him, rather too often, that Collin was ‘happy’ (one witness at the inquest later went so far as to repeat it eight times), yet Dragsbaek could see he was anything but. On the video, he looked worried. The wind was whipping his clothing, including a jacket that wasn’t zipped, and blowing up around his face. This broke a cardinal rule Collin had drummed into his pupils: never wear flapping clothes on a fall, because they can blind or tangle you. Erik knew he wouldn’t have worn the jacket unzipped by choice. He must have been asked to.

  That wasn’t all. Some time between the rehearsal, which had been video-taped, and the take, somebody had changed their mind.

  At rehearsal, Collin had slid down the roof and rolled over the railing, which allowed him to sight the bag below. But, for the take, he stood back from the rail and jumped it.

  This meant jumping blind, without sighting the bag: something no stunt actor likes to do. And no stunt actor would alter the scene without specific direction to do so. In fact, the wonder is that Dragsbaek agreed to change the fall he’d rehearsed.

  Why did he?

  That question haunts Erik and Julie Dragsbaek. They’ll never know the answer for sure, but they think about it a lot. Collin was equal to the best, but even the best have to stay in work. There is always unspoken pressure to prove your ability and your nerve. All his career Collin had resisted the pressure to take a chance. Just this once, perhaps, he ignored the whisper of his own better judgment.

  MAURIE Leeke hasn’t done a stunt since Collin Dragsbaek was killed. He lost heart for the industry, and bought a pawn shop in Brisbane.

  A lot of Collin’s former colleagues and pupils are still on the books of the Queensland Stunt Company, but business is slack. Not necessarily because they don’t want to work, says Leeke thoughtfully, but because they’re not being hired.


  The Australian film industry is a small pond, and he wonders sometimes if Erik Dragsbaek is being punished for making waves by insisting that the inquest on his son’s death question the industry’s safety standards.

  After many sitting days and many thousands of words in the coroner’s court some things are clear and some aren’t. One question still hasn’t been answered to the Dragsbaeks’ satisfaction. Did their son make a fatal mistake – or was he the fall guy for someone else’s?

  VICTORIA’S State Coroner, Graeme Johnstone, found that Collin Dragsbaek and Trevor Welsh were using the same type of air bags when their stunts went wrong. ‘Both air bags had two air safety compartments, neither of which were sealed,’ he wrote in a finding that posed some uncomfortable questions for the local film industry.

  Johnstone noted that during his inquest into the death of Collin Dragsbaek and Trevor Welsh, another stuntman had been killed in similar circumstances in Queensland on November 18, 1998. ‘It is understood that the manufacturer of the air bag being used to break the fall on that occasion was the same as for the two deaths in Victoria.

  ‘Mr Dragsbaek received his injuries when the air bag failed to adequately cushion the fall and he struck the ground.’

  Johnstone said there had been no scientific testing of air bags in Australia. ‘It was only following the deaths that two scientifically controlled performance tests were conducted on the air bags. Both reports are critical of the current design of air bags as safety systems.’

  The coroner praised the efforts of Collin’s father Erik to investigate his son’s death. But he found there was no ‘direct evidence that an additional video was in fact taken of the incident’. He said it was not possible to establish why Collin agreed to the changes to the original stunt, even though it meant he would have to dive blind from behind the rail, and would not see the air bag until he had descended at least six metres.

  ‘Mr Erik Dragsbaek, by pursuing all aspects of the investigation of his son’s death, has raised a number of significant safety issues associated with the stunt and entertainment industries. He has also raised issues associated with the investigation of work-related death.

  ‘Without Mr Dragsbaek’s invaluable work many issues would not have been discovered.’ Johnstone found that too much responsibility was placed on the performer to judge whether a stunt was safe: ‘A proper assessment, following the logic expressed in the Victorian Workcover submission, would have shown that the activity was too risky and ought not have been conducted.

  ‘In conclusion, it is likely that Mr Dragsbaek made an error in the performance of the fall over the rail on the silo. He did not have the centre of the air bag in his line of sight when he commenced the fall sequence from behind the rail and dived too far, landing on the edge of the air bag. The bag rapidly collapsed, resulting in head injuries. At some point his body also struck the boxes about half-way between the top and the ground.

  ‘The safety systems in place at the Robinvale silo at the time of Mr Dragsbaek’s fall were totally inadequate in view of the high risk of injury/death in the event of a minor human error. The production company, director, stunt co-ordinator, safety officer and finally, Mr Dragsbaek, all had a role to play in the management of the stunt fall. The manufacturer of the air bag did not perform any testing of the bag to ascertain its performance limits. This was inappropriate in view of its knowledge of the high nature of risk and purpose for which the equipment was to be used.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Greedy is not good

  He could get you a Queensland driver’s licence, an Asian bride, a cheap air ticket or a hot credit card …

  MOST average criminals learn during their apprenticeship that keeping a low profile is good for business – but Dennis ‘Greedy’ Smith is no average criminal.

  Only Greedy would deal drugs out of the driver’s window of his Rolls Royce in one of Melbourne’s main streets during the afternoon lull.

  And only Greedy would run a major drug syndicate from a Carlton hotel and still find time to sell an undercover policeman a shoplifted shirt for $30.

  There isn’t an old-style criminal in Victoria who doesn’t know Greedy Smith, also known by the less subtle moniker of ‘Fatty’ and a string of more conservative aliases.

  Dennis William Smith, who was at one time supposed to be dying of cancer, finally pleaded guilty in the County Court to a series of drug charges in which he was described as being at the ‘highest level of the hierarchy’ in a sophisticated amphetamines syndicate.

  The court was told he was battling melanoma, the disease that claimed his brother, diabetes and the after-effects of two strokes.

  But Smith won’t die in prison – at least not this time. In March 2002, he was sentenced to three years jail, with all but six months suspended. That meant Smith wintered in prison but was free for the football finals and the Spring Racing Carnival. It may not have matched a Pacific cruise but the wily old crook could do a few months in jail on the bit.

  Smith, 57 when sentenced, has dealt drugs and guns, moved stolen property, pretended to be the son of a war hero to get free air travel, smuggled prostitutes and once made three giant industrial diesel motors disappear for the insurance money.

  He could get you a Queensland driver’s licence, an Asian bride, a cheap air ticket or a hot credit card.

  He has been an AFL football club sponsor, company director, hotel owner, gambling identity, railway worker, boner and butcher.

  When asked his occupation in court he paused, as if momentarily confused, before replying ‘labourer’. Few men who earn their living with a pick and shovel get to motor around in a Rolls Royce.

  For a man called Greedy, he could be generous and has been known to hand over cash to people who were struggling. He has also been known to take some from those who are not.

  Smith is rumoured to have laundered some of the proceeds from the 1976 Great Bookie Robbery where six bandits, armed with sub-machine guns, grabbed 118 calico bags filled with cash, officially listed as containing $1.4 million but believed to have been filled with much more ‘black’ money because of unrecorded wagers, known in the game as ‘betting on the nod’.

  It was after the bookie robbery that Smith bought a sex bar in Manila that became an established offshore oasis for Australian criminals. He was beyond the reach of Australian police who could not trust Filipino officials to investigate his syndicate, and could not believe the reports they received from international intelligence sources.

  Smith was one of the first Australian criminals to learn that by setting up his business offshore, he could operate outside the influence of Australian law enforcement.

  When National Crime Authority officers secretly flew to Manila to gather evidence against Smith’s syndicate, he had local investigators follow them.

  Surrounded by under-age bar dancers and prostitutes, Smith was untouchable.

  He organised international credit card frauds from Australia to Hong Kong. He protected criminals on the run from Australia – such as the notorious Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox, the only man to escape from NSW’s maximum-security Katingal Division in Long Bay jail.

  Smith was a crime promoter. He could provide a woman for sex, drugs for profit, or guns for armed robberies and murder.

  In 1983, Smith was the major target of a joint Victoria-Australian Police and Customs investigation, code-named ‘Spider’.

  He was the prime target in three federal police investigations and figured in eight references from the Costigan Royal Commission to the National Crime Authority.

  In 1985, his cousin, Morris James Smith, was arrested in Melbourne for the importation of 580 kilograms of cannabis and was sentenced to 17 years’ jail.

  Police believed Dennis Smith organised the importation from his bar in Manila. He recruited ship crewmen, who visited his bar to smuggle drugs into Australia.

  A bosun on one Australian ship was identified as regularly smuggling a kilogram of heroin inside containers for Smith
.

  The sailor was later arrested with 24 kilograms of marijuana while driving a hire car from Sydney to Melbourne. For some reason, police did not believe it was for personal use.

  Even though Smith was a known criminal, there was a large advertising hoarding for the Aussie Bar in a prominent position at the North Melbourne Football Club’s home ground, Arden Street, in Melbourne.

  Smith is rumoured to have helped a well-known player by paying out his gaming debts.

  While still living in the Philippines, Smith owned 10 harness horses in Victoria, including the aptly-named Holster.

  When Holster was gelded the veterinary surgeon who did the operation inquired about payment. The trainer broke the news about who owned the horse and owed the money. The vet was advised he was welcome to take up the matter with Smith but that perhaps it would be easier to write off the debt unless he wanted to risk the same surgical procedure as had been performed on the horse. The vet did not pursue the matter.

  Smith was listed as a director of Kerden Enterprises and when police raided the head office in Puckle Street, Moonee Ponds, sniffer dogs reacted to a section of the carpet there. Although no drugs were found, detectives believe the drugs in the office had been moved just before the raid.

  Police intelligence reports show that Smith had a feud with a painter and docker but the docker lost interest after he was beaten with a lead-filled glove.

  At his peak, Smith was seriously rich and made no effort to hide his fortune. He bought everything he wanted – except class.

  He owned chunky gold jewellery – gaudy chains and big rings valued at $320,000 – and insisted on wearing them all at the same time, with jeans and an open neck shirt.

  Underworld folklore was that one of his rings was taken from a criminal murdered over a debt. The body was said to have been fed into an industrial meat mincer.

  Smith and his partner, Kerry Joseph Ashford, had every reason to feel secure in the Philippines. After all, they paid their dues … they had almost 50 officials on the payroll, including six immigration officials and 30 police.