Underbelly 4 Read online

  Monique Meenks, then nineteen, had just started work at the club, which is housed in an extension of the historic Kilkenny Hotel on the corner of King and Lonsdale Streets in the city.

  The prim Edwardian surrounds of the Kilkenny’s corner bar and dining room contrasts sharply with the dimly-lit luxury of Goldfingers, built in a converted store next door.

  It was in here, shortly before midnight on 11 November, 1997, that there was a confrontation between the nightclub boss and the dancer that was to hit the headlines. About the only point both parties agree on is that Meenks had no idea that the 51-year-old man with the gold-rimmed glasses, the Falstaff figure and the cowboy boots, was her boss.

  ‘He was just another dollar bill walking around the club,’ she was to tell a court much later. Make that a fifty dollar bill, which was what Bartlett slipped her to dance for him – a deliberate overpayment, he was to say later, to test whether the new girl was breaking the rules by offering sexual favours, or trying to charge patrons more than the standard rate of ten dollars a song.

  What happened next is still in dispute, although the jury made up its mind. Monique Meenks was to testify that Bartlett was drunk and that he groped her, then kicked her and spat on her. Bartlett was to deny this vehemently, insisting he had been forced to restrain the dancer by pinning her down when she had gone berserk, screaming and kicking him after he had accused her of trying to ‘rip off patrons, one of whom had complained earlier.

  There was medical evidence – the dancer had bruises behind the knees and had sore ribs – injuries in keeping with Mr Bartlett’s version of events, the court was to hear later.

  After being removed from the club and put in a taxi by security staff, the dancer went to the police. Her injuries were not serious enough for police to send her to a police surgeon for assessment. Instead, she went to a private doctor, who confirmed the sore ribs and bruises. The injuries did not prevent her dancing next night – and ever since – at the nearby Men’s Gallery, Goldfingers’ closest competition.

  Police didn’t interview Raymond Bartlett until a fortnight later. In that interview, taped and later played in court, he stated firmly that he didn’t need a lawyer, he answered every question in detail and he never wavered from his story. And the jury of six women and six men, mostly middle-aged, appeared to agree largely with the defence portrayal of Meenks as an opportunist out for a cash settlement.

  Which, of course, poses a parallel question: what sort of a man runs a strip joint and finds himself in this sort of mess? An opportunist out for cash, a cynic might say.

  In the 1960s James Bond film, Goldfinger is a stock villain in the Teutonic mould – all buttoned-up menace, fake accent and Nazi war criminal overtones, worthy inspiration for an Austin Powers satire. Raymond Bartlett is also a creature of the 1960s, but Goldfinger he isn’t, bar a larger-than-life aura that comes with being a self-made millionaire whose belt buckle comes in the door a couple of seconds before he does.

  The blue singlet was long ago replaced by the (open-necked) business shirt, but there’s still a lot of truck in the man whose ‘university’ was driving interstate rigs. And he can talk like the insurance salesman he was until he took on the hotel game.

  The language is salty, the accent as broad as his shoulders, there’s a tattoo on his bicep and a temptation to say the two heavy gold rings he wears would pack a punch in a truckstop blue. But he’s more businessman than bruiser – always was. It’s true he left Prahran Tech at fourteen years old, but his father owned a bolt factory in Richmond and the young Bartlett grew up in the relative comfort of Armadale. But it didn’t stop him wanting to drive trucks.

  Much to his father’s disgust, he worked in a service station and a factory for a while, then went to Adelaide when he turned sixteen so he could get a driver’s licence two years early.

  He got the licence, then a job delivering cakes in a truck. At eighteen, he returned to Melbourne, inherited enough from his grandmother to buy a car, then sold it and bought his own truck – ‘an old International 180 semi-trailer’ – for five thousand dollars.

  It was 1966. The truck was slow and Bartlett had never driven beyond the tram tracks. He went to a transport depot in Footscray and lied about his interstate driving experience. He got the job – and took twenty-four hours to drive to Sydney.

  ‘I was so tired I had a sleep at Seymour, the truck was so slow it would go backwards as soon as it saw a hill, and I was so nervous I stopped before I went down them. At Wodonga, I stopped at the Caltex roadhouse and asked how far Sydney was, and the waitress laughed and said I was only half way.’

  After fifteen years at the wheel, he owned three trucks and employed two drivers, but he was no transport tycoon. Even then, he says, he hated drugs – refusing to take the ‘pep pills’ that others did to handle the endless hours on the road.

  But he was articulate, and a shrewd negotiator. He became president of the Australian Transport Association and was a key figure – with the colorful Ted ‘Greendog’ Stevens – in setting up an interstate truck blockade in April 1979 to protest against the road tax that crippled owner-drivers.

  The blockade took Bartlett on a week of living dangerously during which he flew from highway blockades to Parliament House by helicopter to negotiate a settlement with the then Premier, Rupert Hamer.

  In one tense scene, he stood beside then Transport Minister, Rob Maclellan, in a Dynon Road truck depot and stared down a threat by angry fruit and vegetable market identities to blow up the place with high explosive if the trucks didn’t roll. ‘Maclellan’s not a bad bloke,’ he says warmly of a most unlikely ally, the refined Melbourne Grammar old boy and longtime Liberal politician.

  As he reminisces, the big man slides a scrapbook across the desk. In it is every press clipping – and the original letter of agreement drafted and signed by the exasperated Premier after eight hours of argument.

  The blockade was lifted, and road tax was repealed in every state. Soon after, Raymond Bartlett switched from driving trucks to insuring them, and got rich.

  Along the way, in the early 1980s, he took a share in a Gold Coast nightclub and restaurant called Eliza’s. It was the start of his involvement with hotels. He borrowed $2 million to take over the Toorak Hotel – the famous ‘Tok H’ – in 1985, and borrowed twice that for the Sentimental Bloke hotel in Bulleen. He also took over Silvers nightclub in Toorak, then the Hampton Hotel.

  What he doesn’t add, but others do, is that while at the Tok H, he donated use of the hotel to the police for a day to raise money for the families of Damien Eyre and Steve Tynan, the two young constables murdered in Walsh Street, South Yarra. Around three thousand police arrived and raised $53,000.

  He sold all his hotel interests in 1991, and took a year off before taking over a big hotel in Dandenong for four years.

  ‘It was like running a war zone,’ he grimaces, and it made him want a quiet, respectable city hotel for a change. Enter the Kilkenny, which in late 1996 had been empty for months.

  In theory, it would be a classy late-night venue for Crown Casino staff after they finished work. In practice, King Street’s nightclub image meant a conventional pub wouldn’t work. After losing money for months, the new publican on the block knew he had to compete with the Men’s Gallery and Bar 20 with strippers, or go out of business. Sex sells.

  He enlisted Annette White, who runs the Miss Nude Australia contest, to organise the entertainment. Ms White and Helen Farrell, the club’s general manager, recruited the dancers, and still handle the day-to-day running of the club. No men are involved in recruiting or managing the ‘girls’, he says.

  ‘Any chick with half a brain can make it into a good business,’ he enthuses.

  ‘Of course, you get your scallywags, hence the vetting procedures. We don’t want junkies. We don’t want young kids just walking in off the street saying they want to be strippers. They’ve got to be eighteen, and we want contact numbers for next of kin to check that their parents kno
w what they’re doing. We do proper ID checks and we ask about drugs, and if they are professional dancers we get a reference from other clubs.

  ’The general public would assume we’re exploiting the girls. The truth is we’re their accountants, drug counsellors and their psychologists. ‘Middle-class Australia would have no idea how it really is … it could be their own daughters working here. There are five thousand dancers in Australia and thousands around the world.

  ‘Most of them (Melbourne dancers) live in South Yarra, not shit suburbs, and they live well. I’ve got one here who’s training to be a doctor, and another that speaks five languages. There’s some brainy sheilas here.’

  As he talks, the first shift of dancers files past the open office door from their dressing room – in their case, the undressing room – where they change from street clothes into very little. They wave and smile brightly and chorus ‘Hi Ray’ as they descend to where money waits to be made below.

  Providing, of course, they stick to the ground rules for sanitising a dirty business: no touching by patrons, nothing closer than thirty centimetres to face or groin, one foot to be touching the floor at all times.

  One young woman, wearing bleached blonde hair and a zebra-striped outfit, wiggles into the office pointing to a picture spread in a women’s magazine and chirping ‘I’m famous.’

  She’s nineteen, looks younger, and is excited about the publicity, though not about the magazine’s statement that she earns $2000 a week. ‘I just said some dancers can make up to that much,’ she pouts.

  The image the club wants, Bartlett says earnestly, is the ‘girl next door’. Upmarket, he says, not sleazy. ‘No sex,’ he says firmly. ‘We don’t want to step on the brothel toes. You’ve got the (brothels) Top of the Town, and the Boardroom – they’re all there.’ The message is that the brothels don’t serve alcohol, and Goldfingers and other tabletop venues don’t serve sex.

  That way, everyone gets a fair share of the sex industry dollar. It’s called orderly marketing.

  There’s a risk, he concedes, that if strippers are desperate for more money than they get from dancing, they might be tempted to offer sex. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate that the main motive for wanting extra money would be a drug habit.

  That’s why the clubs don’t like hiring drug users, and why dancers with bruises from injecting themselves are ‘counselled’. As in, if you’re bruised, you don’t work.

  He produces another exhibit from his files: a heartwarming before and after picture story of a pretty teenager whom the good folks at Goldfingers helped kick heroin addiction.

  Time for delicate questions. What about the underworld?

  Bartlett talks about the ‘Melbourne Safe City Accord’, a committee chaired by a senior policeman to hose down potential trouble spots. The bottom line, he says, is that Melbourne’s different.

  Try to open a strip club in Brisbane and you’d get your legs shot off, he says. Sydney – you wouldn’t even try because it’s sewn up. In Perth, they’d kill you. Adelaide? Touch and go. Only in Melbourne is the ‘industry’ controlled so well, he says. No sir, there’s no crooks in tabletop dancing here.

  On the computer screen next to him the screen-saver flickers past. It is not, as one might imagine, soft porn images of the sort being enacted in the flesh below. The pictures on the screen are of athletic young women, but they are tennis players, with their clothes on. No doubt it makes a change from work.

  One more question. Did the assault charges affect you?

  ‘Look,’ he sighs, ‘that case cost the taxpayers probably $100,000 when it should have been solved in five minutes. I reckon it was only taken to court because it was me, because it was the sex industry. Now I go to joints and people who don’t know me say: ‘Aw, be careful of him, or he’ll have you offed.’ It’s fantasy. If I was such a big, bad crim what do you reckon would have happened to that Monique?’

  One effect, he says, is that he’s now wary of being set up. He points to the closed circuit video monitors and opens a cupboard door to reveal sophisticated tape-recording gear.

  And the club? Did the court case keep people away? ‘Nah,’ he grins, ‘the takings went up the week I was charged. Good publicity.’

  CHAPTER 15

  Lady’s Day

  It is a peaceful scene but the Magills are not at peace. They are at a Melbourne cemetery and the daughter they have come to visit is dead – murdered by two men who have never been found

  JOHN and Helen Magill packed the boot of the family car with two fold-up chairs, a portable wooden table, a thermos and a some fresh Christmas lilies picked that day from their neat suburban garden. They were off to see their youngest daughter. It was her birthday.

  John didn’t look at a map. Every week they travelled the same way, in the 1982 white Ford Fairlane that had taken their girl to church on her wedding day fourteen years earlier.

  It was a beautiful autumn day for a birthday picnic – cloudless, sunny and almost still. They parked and set up their picnic gear on the manicured grass in the shade of a tall claret ash.

  They sat, listening to the wrens that had been missing in recent visits, and could hear the rustle of the leaves directly above them. They could have been in the middle of the country but for the noise of a lone motor mower in the middle distance.

  It is a peaceful scene but the Magills are not at peace. They are at a Melbourne cemetery and the daughter they have come to visit is dead – murdered by two men who have never been found. Their daughter is, or was, Jane Thurgood-Dove. She was shot dead in the driveway of her Niddrie home in front of her three children on Oaks Day, 1997.

  In racing, they call it Ladies’ Day, when thousands of women turn out in their finest clothes to see the best thoroughbred fillies in the land battle for supremacy at Flemington. But for the Magills, it will always be Lady’s Day. Their sweet Jane’s day, the saddest one on their calendar.

  They sit, as they always do, next to the bronze memorial plaque in the Garden of Eternal Memories and ask why.

  THURSDAY, 6 NOVEMBER, 1997* (OAKS DAY): It would have to be the worst day in the life of this family. Around 3.45 in the afternoon I was watering the back garden and as I often do at that time, thinking of Jane picking the children up from school to bring home. Jane was a very caring mother, the mum who stayed home and took care of the kids and the house.

  Being Thursday and pay day they would wait for Mark to come home from work and then as a family would do the weekly shopping at the supermarket and get fish and chips on the way home. They all looked forward to that.

  Helen and I ate an early dinner and around 5.45pm there was a knock at the front door. There were two men in dark suits who identified themselves as homicide detectives.

  The police asked to come into the house as they had some bad news to tell us. Sitting in the sunroom waiting to hear what the police had to say seemed to take an eternity but, in reality, only seconds passed.

  It was Sergeant Michael Baade who said: ‘Your daughter Jane has been shot and is now dead.’

  Helen and I looked at each other, stunned. Why Jane? The outpouring of emotion and grief seemed endless.

  With the terrible shock we had just suffered our first thoughts were for Mark at work and most of all, for the children.

  * From John Magill’s Diary.

  SOCIETY is becoming increasingly conditioned to acts of senseless violence, but the murder of Jane Thurgood-Dove seemed to touch the broader community the way many don’t.

  Here was a young mother who was stalked for days by two men in a stolen car as she went about her daily routine of taking her children to school, shopping and living a normal, productive life.

  The then Premier, Jeff Kennett, was personally moved by the case and intervened to double the $50,000 reward requested by police for information.

  Two men in a silver-blue VL Commodore sedan had been spotted in the area in the days before the shooting and detectives believed Jane was followed on h
er way to drop two of her children at the nearby Essendon North Primary School.

  As she pulled into the driveway of her Niddrie home the stolen Commodore pulled up, blocking in her four-wheel-drive. A man, aged in his forties, and with a pot belly, chased her around her car before shooting her three times in the head with a heavy calibre handgun.

  Her children were left cowering in the car as the killer sped off in the stolen Commodore, driven by a younger, thin-faced man.

  The stolen car was burnt a few streets away. The men have not been identified, nor has a motive.

  Police now think the killers were waiting for the perfect moment to kill her and may have been thwarted on several previous occasions by the presence of possible witnesses.

  What they don’t know is why two killers, possibly paid hitmen, were so determined to kill this suburban mum.

  SATURDAY, 8 NOVEMBER: The phone today never stopped ringing, with calls from well-wishers for sympathy and support, and also throughout the day friends and relatives coming and going.

  Ron Iddles (the Homicide Squad Senior Sergeant in charge of the investigation) called early, around 7.30am, had a cup of tea and told us how hard the investigation was going, being short of information. I don’t know what it was but this hard nosed cop did appear to be emotionally upset with what he saw in this family.

  THERE was nothing special about the Magills’ family barbecue on Easter Sunday, 1997, except that it was a chance to catch up with the kids and the grandchildren.

  It was the sort of get-together held in backyards around Australia every weekend – often fun but mostly forgettable.

  John Magill took the opportunity to practice with his new toy – a video camera. He and Helen planned to head to Europe for the overseas trip they had promised themselves as a retirement present and he thought it was better to make mistakes with the video in the backyard than during a once-in-a-lifetime holiday.