Underbelly 4 Page 20

  He took to the road with the band but got the message that lucrative recording contracts, lubricious groupies and world tours were unlikely to be part of his future when the police at Pyramid Hill suggested the musicians move on, out of town. ‘Everyone’s a critic,’ he says without rancour.

  ‘They felt we were not the right type to be in their country oasis. It then began to dawn on me that my musical career was unlikely to blossom.’

  The band broke up – ‘artistic differences’ – to pursue solo projects. Watson’s first ‘project’ was a mutually unsatisfying stint in the public service. He didn’t fancy the service and it didn’t fancy him. Then, like many young people, he decided to travel.

  But, characteristically, he chose his own path.

  For three years, he wandered through South America, the West Indies and the US. It was during this period that he tasted the criminal justice system from different perspectives.

  He was robbed in Jamaica, locked up in Argentina and worked as a store detective in San Francisco. He said he ended up in a South American jail for being ‘a known smart-arse in a public place.’ He was also to find there were internationally recognised police methods for dealing with young men with bad attitudes.

  ’They put me in a cage on the back of a Jeep, it was like an open divvy van, and they took me around the town, stopping and starting, to bounce me around a little.’

  It worked. He returned to Australia in 1972 determined to be a policeman.

  ‘I suppose I had a bit of a Boy’s Own attitude to being a copper. I always wanted to be a detective and chase the bad guys.’

  He graduated sixth out of twenty four in squad five of 1973. He breezed through the exams but received the most demerit points for rowdy and disruptive behaviour during the five-month course.

  Watson’s squad mate and now homicide crew leader, Detective Senior Sergeant Charlie Bezzina, said Watson has not changed.

  ‘He was self-assured and prepared to speak his mind even back then. He was always prepared to laugh off any dramas that came his way. We looked up to him. What you saw was what you got with Ray.’

  It was as well that Watson wanted to be a detective because at times he was to prove to be a menace when in uniform.

  While still a trainee he was assigned to traffic duty at the corner of Russell and Exhibition Streets. Within minutes he had directed two cars into a collision and created a hopeless traffic jam.

  ‘Five of my class mates were offering full support by falling over laughing. The instructor had to stand behind me, waving my arms around like I was a muppet.

  ‘Senior police and myself were in full agreement; traffic was not for me.’

  He was involved in various areas of policing, from Ascot Vale to Broadmeadows. In 1985 he was appointed the head of a taskforce set up to blitz Melbourne because of violent gang activity. ‘We had a zero tolerance policy. Anyone seen committing a crime was arrested. The word spread as we knew it would and the results were outstanding. Even when they were thinking of committing a crime we would lock them up. We were very intuitive – it was a bit spooky how we could read their minds.’

  But in 1986 the underworld was changing and there was a new violent edge between police and criminals. Watson, the wisecracking, guitar-playing detective, was to be caught up in it. He was to become a leading player in what was to be an undeclared war between a group of armed robbers and the squad paid to arrest them.

  Watson was on leave when an armed robbery squad detective, Mark Wylie, was shot on Anzac Day, 1986, by one of the gang who had exploded a car bomb outside the Russell Street police building.

  Watson was told he would be reporting for duty at the squad on Monday. T was happy with what I was doing but I was given no choice. But within two weeks I knew this was for me.’

  He said the bandits they chased were professional armed robbers. They were violent and well researched. They were the big names of crime. In those days there were about three bank armed robberies a week compared with about three a month now.’

  The armed robbery squad was conducting raids at least four times a week, always with guns drawn. A group of criminals began to believe that some detectives in the squad were just as keen to kill a crook as catch one.

  The police were of the belief the bandits were prepared to shoot detectives to avoid arrest. As the tension built between the two armed groups the likelihood of killings increased.

  On Christmas Eve, 1986, Watson was driving home – and, like everyone, else he was looking forward to a break from guns and robberies. He was not to get one.

  He was diverted to an armed robbery at the National Bank in South Melbourne. Eventually police were able to conclude that a group of criminals in the North Melbourne-Kensington area were responsible for a series of nine armed robberies.

  Police hired a flat opposite one of the gang members and started to gather intelligence. They found that one of the crew – Mark Militano – was planning an armed robbery the next day.

  Police expected that Militano would leave the block of flats and head home. The Special Operations Group was assigned to arrest him on March 25, 1987.

  But Militano went the other way, in the direction of the armed robbery squad. Watson made a split-second decision to arrest the suspect. Militano was shot dead in the ensuing confrontation.

  If he had not raised his gun at me he would have been apprehended in the normal fashion. I shot at him before he shot at me,’ Watson explained later.

  He said the Coroner found that he had acted lawfully, but the taking of a human life weighed heavily on him.

  ‘For the next year you have doubts. I was doing about one raid a week then and I had these thoughts. What if it happens again, will I put my colleagues at risk?’

  That June a convicted armed robber, Frank Valastro, was shot dead by the Special Operations Group during a police search.

  A group of criminals believed the armed robbery squad was out of control and trying to kill them. Police intelligence indicated the criminals planned to follow an armed robbery squad detective home and shoot him in his driveway.

  Then the gang hatched a two for one plot. If the armed robbery squad killed another mate they would kill two police.

  On October 11, 1988, members of the armed robbery squad shot a suspect, Graeme Jensen, when they went to arrest him at Narre Warren.

  Thirteen hours later, two police, Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, were shot dead in Walsh Street, South Yarra, in an alleged payback for the death of Jensen.

  The deaths didn’t stop. The armed robbery squad tried to catch suspects in the act so the evidence they would present in court would be beyond dispute. It didn’t always go according to plan.

  On July 28, 1992, police shot dead a bandit, Normie Lee, when he and others grabbed a million dollars at Melbourne Airport. The Special Operations Group was waiting and Lee was shot dead after threatening police with a gun.

  The Coroner criticised the armed robbery squad in its planning for the arrest of Lee and the other two bandits – criticism that Watson still refuses to accept as valid.

  ‘We believed there was only one way to handle it. People forget that it is the armed robbers who terrorise innocent people, who go armed to rob businesses. We just responded to the level of threat.’

  In May, 1994, police shot dead another two bandits, Paul Skews and Stephen Crome, when they attempted to rob a real estate agent in Hampton Park. On the same day two guards and a man were shot during an armed payroll robbery at Chadstone.

  ‘We didn’t have a plan to eliminate criminals. We planned to eradicate the jackals who were preying on society by putting them in jail.

  There was never a conspiracy. After the Russell Street bombing we all knew we were vulnerable and we developed the attitude that it was not going to be us.’

  Watson points out that the gangs of robbers who set up the big stick-ups in the 1980s and 1990s have all been convicted. These were the crews who often had inside information on security an
d payroll deliveries, who flew around the country to pull off massive armed robberies and planned their raids with military precision.

  They had access to high-powered weapons and would sometimes franchise out jobs, providing plans, guns, disguises and even medical kits with antibiotics and pain killers for other criminal groups.

  ‘Some of the main men were locked up and caught again years later, after their release, doing more jobs. I believe we destroyed an arm of the underworld. The armed robberies today are committed by junkies in the main, rather than by organised criminal groups.’

  RAY WATSON was directly or indirectly connected in the death of four police and eight criminals. He lived on the edge, working in a squad that was always close to controversy.

  Finally, senior police decided that Big Ray had gone too far and needed to be pulled up.

  The order came down that Detective Senior Sergeant Ray Watson needed to be disciplined for a heinous internal crime.

  He told a bad joke during a speech. Watson is an acknowledged master after dinner speaker, where his outgoing personality, sharp wit and great experience are seen to their full effect.

  During the armed robbery squad’s 25th anniversary celebrations on Friday, October 31, 1997, Watson was in full flight during his speech at the Hilton Hotel in front of 160 police and former squad members. He mentioned that at the time the Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition and the internal police Ethical Standards Department were housed in the one complex.

  ‘I went there the other day. I saw all these pale, lifeless dummies … then I went into Madame Tussaud’s.’

  It brought the house down and nearly took Watson’s career with it, there and then. While most of those in the room laughed, one table of senior officers remained poker-faced.

  By the following Monday Watson was being dragged over the coals. He was forced to stand and apologise to all ethical standards police in their office and then was transferred to the missing persons bureau for six months.

  ‘I enjoyed the experience of working at missing persons. Not necessarily the way I got there,’ he reflects.

  Watson didn’t fit the stereotype of a typical armed robbery squad detective – he preferred Chardonnay to beer and living on his small country property to life in the suburbs. But even now he still wears the short-sleeved white shirts of a 1980s detective. The armed robbery squad motif of crossed guns tattooed on his right shoulder is visible through the thin shirt.

  In an era when police who are colourful can be viewed with suspicion within their own organisation, Watson refused to change. At a time when police were discovering healthy lifestyles, Watson remained a heavy smoker.

  As a concession to fitness he joined an informal armed robbery squad walking group – known as the ‘Fat Boys Club’ – whose members would power around Albert Park every day. It collapsed after some of the members insisted on stopping for a gasper half-way through the walk.

  When the St Kilda Road crime department building was declared smoke free Watson’s office remained suspiciously nicotine friendly. He would plead ignorance. ‘We couldn’t see the no smoking signs for the smoke,’ he explained.

  Strange things have happened in the armed robbery squad in Watson’s time.

  One of the detectives had become an expert in explosives in the army and used his skills in a series of dangerous practical jokes. He booby trapped other detectives’ desks and seats, literally blowing them up. A reporter was once enjoying a drink in the armed robbery squad office – until he put out his cigarette in an ashtray filled with gunpowder.

  The unfortunate reporter was set on fire in the small explosion and quick thinking detectives put him out with beer – ‘and one glass of Chardonnay’ adds Watson.

  Thank God he was surrounded by trained investigators who were able to save his life. He should have thanked us. We had often mused on the best way to extinguish a reporter who was on fire and beer was never considered the first option.’

  The explosions stopped after the main perpetrator was blown up in a retaliation bombing that blew his desk to bits.

  The squad was known for its hard-headed attitude but sometimes armed robbery squad detectives employed subtle tactics to get a confession.

  In one case the suspect knew the evidence against him was compelling and he decided to make a deal with the investigators. He told them he was prepared to confess if they would do him a favour. He was going away for a long time so he asked if he could see his wife, for one best ‘romantic’ engagement.

  The suspect and his wife were ushered into an interview room for some private time. After the meeting the man confessed and was later convicted.

  When police were hunting the so-called ‘Beanie Bandit’, the veteran criminal Aubrey Broughill, the armed robbery squad believed he would turn up to his mother’s funeral at Box Hill.

  Surveillance police mingled with mourners, looking for the wanted man. One policeman, known as ‘The Gnome’, muttered into his concealed microphone that he had identified the suspect – wearing a dress.

  Watson, sitting in a car with his team armed with shotguns, asked for confirmation of the old crook’s apparently masterful disguise. Which was just as well, because when the trained observer had another look he realised the suspect actually was an elderly woman with a slight facial hair problem. In late 1999 the armed robbery squad was absorbed into the new armed offenders squad. After twenty-seven years in the force and a record fourteen years with the ‘Robbers’, Watson, at fifty, started to think of his future. The fuel that kept me going was genuine outrage for the victims, but after so many years and so many cases I felt it was beginning to diminish.’

  The nature of policing was changing. There was more accountability and, for Ray Watson, less fun. ‘The job has changed and for me the novelty had worn off. There is more emphasis on supervision and less on initiative.’

  He could have moved into an administrative position but he was restless. ‘I always said I would rather retire from the firsts than go back to the reserves.’

  So it was that Ray Watson quit the ‘Robbers’, the CIB and the police force. He could have stayed a few more years to get a bigger superannuation cheque but argues that is not what it is about. ‘I think when your enthusiasm starts to wane it is time to look for a new challenge.’

  He has moved into private enterprise with a firm called Advent Security, where he will combine his great loves, public speaking and crime prevention – lecturing companies on how not to become armed robbery targets.

  He gave a speech in a country town, in a district that had not suffered an armed robbery in years. He left to a standing ovation.

  The local bank was robbed three days later.

  As Ray was always the first to admit, nobody’s perfect.

  CHAPTER 14

  Goldfinger

  What sort of man runs a strip joint and finds himself in this sort of mess?

  RAYMOND Bertram Bartlett is a big man but, as that other Raymond (Chandler, that is) once wrote about another colorful character, he’s ‘no taller than a two-storey building and no wider than a beer truck.’

  Raymond Bartlett’s office matches the man himself. It covers most of the upstairs floor of a renovated warehouse and has enough room to park a beer truck. If it’s not the biggest office in Melbourne, it runs a close second.

  Here, surrounded by a bank of closed circuit television screens, a hidden tape recorder and an intercom, Bartlett is master of his chosen business.

  That business is running the sort of place God-fearing people used to call ‘a den of iniquity’ and is vulgarly known as a strip joint: a place that stays open until dawn where men drink and pay young women to shed flimsy costumes and dance naked.

  But that all happens below decks, where the money changes hands. Up here, where it’s counted, the office has been set up to look like someone’s guess at how the library of a gentleman’s club might be. Sort of.

  The oval antique boardroom table is big enough for a Little League football
team to play on, with a heavy soda siphon where the centre square would be.

  The walls are lined with french-polished bookcases loaded with Encyclopedia and other heavy-duty examples of the bookbinder’s craft, all in mint condition.

  The desk is as big as the man behind it, its shiny surface as spotlessly tidy as everything else is in a place that would put some hospitals and most offices to shame. Some might say the business is sordid, but no-one can say it’s grubby.

  Bartlett is the proprietor of what is, after a recent court case, probably one of Australia’s best-known tabletop dancing establishments. It is called Goldfingers and it’s the sort of place where, you might think, illegal drugs would be easily obtained and often used, probably in conjunction with prostitution.

  Not so, says Bartlett. The Olympics might have a drug problem but Melbourne’s tabletop dancing venues do not, he insists. Nor do they condone any sexual contact on their premises. At least, his doesn’t, and he’s proud of it.

  The fact is, there’s a practical reason for such strictness, he says. If anyone is caught offering sex for sale or dealing in drugs Goldfingers stands to lose a licence to print money … its liquor licence.

  But, for the thousands of ordinary citizens who go past such places and wonder what goes on inside, it might come as a surprise to hear the big man’s solemn opposition to drugs and sex for sale.

  This is just one of the surprising things about the former truckie who has become, by default, the public face of what is formally known as the ‘sexually explicit entertainment’ industry in Melbourne. Another surprise is that he doesn’t emerge as the violent ‘pimp’ figure many might have assumed he was after he was charged with assaulting one of his dancers. The case, which took more than two years to get to trial, ended in the county court in early 2000. He was fined $1000 – but had no conviction recorded against him.

  For a man of his means, a $1000 fine seems little more than token punishment for a technical breach of the law. As he sees it, it’s vindication: proof that a judge and jury believed his version of events above that of the dancer who made allegations against him after an ugly scene in his club in late 1997.