Underbelly 4 Read online

  By the time Bennett was pronounced dead an hour later, the rumor mill was humming. Frantic reporters with deadlines for the year’s biggest crime story quoted unnamed police sources suggesting an ‘outside’ hitman was paid big money – the mooted sum was $50,000 – to do the killing.

  But before the last edition of The Herald had hit the streets a different story was circulating inside Russell Street. At 2pm the head of the consorting squad, Angus Ritchie, took a call from an informer claiming the hit had been organised inside his own squad.

  Some squad members jokingly encouraged the rumors in the police club that night. ‘We couldn’t buy a drink for a week,’ recalls a retired detective who still doesn’t fancy being named over the incident. ‘Half the force thought we did it.’

  Within days, the squad members would regret feeding the rumors because one detective was told there was a contract on his life to avenge Bennett’s death. He carried a gun for two years.

  Detectives, unable to protect Bennett when he was alive, were given orders to guard his corpse. They were instructed to go to the North Melbourne funeral home where the body was lying after police heard his enemies planned to break-in, cut his hands off and send them to his wife.

  Meanwhile, the public was still being fed the company line of a contract killer. Details of the more sinister theory, involving police, were not made public until the inquest finally began in March, 1981. But that was later.

  TO his friends, Ray Bennett was tough, loyal, and good company. His lawyer, Joe Gullaci, liked him – though he admits Bennett and his mates were ‘big kids with guns’, professional armed robbers who terrified people and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot rivals.

  These blokes were pretty good at their trade – in and out quickly (on robberies) and no shots fired and no drugs – unlike the current crop running around using their own product. It seemed to me they were thieves with some honor,’ the hard-bitten Gullaci recalls. It was this ‘honour’ that eventually got Bennett killed. There were other reasons, too.

  One was the ‘Great Bookie Robbery’ of 21 April, 1976. It later became well-known – and the subject of a television mini-series – that Bennett planned it, flying secretly to Australia for a few days while on pre-release leave from a prison on the Isle of Wight. He and his friend, Brian O’Callaghan, had led the ‘Kangaroo Gang,’ robbing jewellery shops all over Europe.

  Six of Bennett’s team robbed bookmakers on settling day at the Victorian Club, then in Queen Street. A seventh man, in Pentridge at the time, received his share of a haul that was somewhat greater than the official figure of $1.4 million, because of undeclared cash bets.

  The robbery earned Bennett and his crew the unwanted attention of people who wanted to redistribute their wealth, some of them willing to use boltcutters and blowtorches. There was even a plot by former friends to sell out the gang to the insurance underwriters saddled with the massive loss.

  Police, bookmakers, and other criminals suddenly had several million reasons to resent Bennett. Tension rose between Bennett’s crew and a group of painters and dockers led by the Kane brothers, Brian, Les and Ray. Certain members of the consorting squad backed the Kanes, standover men who had controlled ‘ghosting’ rackets on the wharves for years.

  Those who took part deny this was the corrupt alliance it appears. As one longtime underworld observer notes: ‘The squarehead world sees only the blue water on top, not the sharks underneath.’ From the viewpoint of some consorting squad detectives, whose job was to swim with the sharks, it was necessary to keep one group of man-eaters where they could see them.

  The ‘consorters’ were feared in the 1970s. Squad members called themselves the ‘Fletcher Jones’ boys – because, the joke went, like the clothing store of that name, they could ‘fit anybody.’ Before DNA testing, target profiling and flow charts, they gathered intelligence in pubs, nightclubs and race tracks.

  Their brief was to know what heavy criminals were up to, and to act first to prevent crimes. Their tool-of-trade – apart from sledgehammers, planted ‘throwaway’ guns, unsigned statements and illegal telephone taps – was the draconian consorting law (now no longer regularly used) that meant that if a known criminal was caught consorting with another known criminal both could be charged and jailed.

  Squad members worked unsupervised, in small groups. Many socialised with criminals and had their own favourites. They were used as trouble shooters by some senior police who turned a blind eye to methods used. Some of them found the people they thought were the villains and then either massaged or fabricated evidence to suit their conclusions. Sometimes they were right.

  One offender who’d been shot while being arrested – the kidnapper Edwin John Eastwood – had his wounded leg stretched in hospital to force him to talk.

  It was an era when some of the heavy squads made their own rules and exacted severe punishment for any outsider who broke them. When one of the Kane brothers pulled up at the lights, and noticed an off-duty detective with his heavily pregnant wife in car next to him, he made a mistake that was to cost him several months in jail. Kane wound his window down and threatened the policeman, using a string of profanities. The detective quietly told him he was going too far, but the hyped-up Kane did not see the danger signs.

  It was late December when the detective’s squad mates caught up with Kane. They presented the career criminal with several sticks of gelignite, neatly wrapped in Christmas paper. As soon as he saw the gift he knew the evidence against him would be overwhelming. He didn’t need a forensic report to know his fingerprints would be all over the package … they had taken the paper from a drawer in Kane’s flat and gift wrapped it in front of him.

  After he was charged he told a senior policeman, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have shot my mouth off.’ The policeman responded, ‘You take one of this squad on, you take all of us on.’

  It was around the same time that a known hitman had accepted a contract, but police didn’t know who was the target or when the murder would take place. To stop the shooting a detective simply walked up to the hitman, gave him an unloaded gun and said, ‘this is yours, Ron.’ The contract killer was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. The hit was never carried out.

  In the interview room a suspect who answered a question with the expression ‘no comment’ could soon find that it was more an opening statement in protracted negotiations than a concluding remark.

  One detective, annoyed that his suspect refused to make a statement, removed his size fourteen boot, claiming it was his shoe phone. He put it to his ear – then turned to the suspect and said – ‘It’s for you’ – before beating the man around the head with the boot. The suspect then began to answer questions. Every time the answers weren’t correct the detective would again remove his boot, claiming he was taking another call. The suspect would then begin to answer questions again.

  In another interview an armed robber refused to talk. Finally, a naked detective ran into the room and hit him around the head. The suspect, possibly more frightened of being confronted by a naked, overweight detective than the beating, confessed readily.

  While most squads at the time bent the rules to suit themselves the consorting squad had made it an art-form. Consorters, whose job it was to go to places where criminals hung out, combined business and pleasure for fun and profit. Some race clubs were so grateful to have them on course that they slung them payments paid in plain envelopes … written off as security payments which, of course, they were. The money was put in a slush fund largely used to entertain interstate detectives who would always arrive thirsty and hungry.

  The consorters didn’t like critics. When a former criminal and prison activist, Joey Hamilton, publicly complained about some of their methods, two squad members went to his house in Carlton and blew it up with explosives, a retired detective told the authors. When Hamilton said he believed the police were responsible for the attack, few believed him – but he was right.

  ‘It was a di
fferent time,’ the retired detective says nostalgically, before offering the opinion that the Walsh Street murders – and the consequent mayhem – would have been prevented if consorters had still been working.

  This was the consorting squad before the police hierarchy decided that its dogs of war were out of control and disbanded it. Some consorters acted as judge and jury. The question is: were they also prepared to be executioners?

  The circumstantial evidence is intriguing rather than damning. One grievance the consorters had against Ray Bennett came from the fact that they provided unofficial security for bookmakers on settling days at the Victorian Club. But, on the day the Bennett gang struck, the usual crew of armed detectives were not there – they had been sent at the last minute on an errand to Frankston, a coincidence that led some to suspect Bennett had connived with a corrupt senior officer to set up the robbery.

  One slip during the robbery probably sowed the seeds of the gang’s destruction. When the masked men ordered all present to lie face down, one said to the then well-known boxing trainer Ambrose Palmer, ‘You too, Ambrose.’

  The robber instantly regretted his half-friendly warning. He had once trained at Palmer’s gymnasium and knew the old man would recognise his voice. Palmer naturally forgot to mention this to police, the story goes, but accidentally let slip the robber’s identity to people connected with the Kane brothers. Word got around, and members of Bennett’s gang became targets for opportunists who wanted a share of the bookies’ cash.

  It was an ideal scenario for gang warfare. War was declared in a Richmond hotel in mid-1978, when Vincent Mikkelsen – a friend of Bennett’s – refused a drink from Brian Kane. Mikkelsen committed an even graver social indiscretion by winning the resulting fight – and biting off part of Kane’s ear in the process.

  Musing much later about Kane’s reaction to this humiliating disfigurement, Joe Gullaci said: ‘It’s hard to be the number one standover man in town when you’ve got a piece bitten out of your ear.’

  That mouthful of ear was eventually to give Melbourne’s underworld heartburn and put the wind up the police force. But all Brian Kane knew then was that it was bad for his reputation – and that wasn’t good for business.

  Mikkelsen came to expect massive retaliation. Bennett suggested Mikkelsen’s life be spared, and was warned: ‘If you stick your head in, it will be blown off.’

  From there, the story unfolds with brutal inevitability. Fearing a pre-emptive strike, Brian Kane’s brother Les – regarded as the most dangerous brother – moved his second wife, Judy, and their family from the western suburbs to a unit in Wantirna, in the far outer-eastern suburbs.

  It was a long way from their normal stamping grounds, but not far enough. On 19 October, 1978, a Thursday night, Les and Judy Kane got home to find three masked men waiting. They shoved Judy Kane into a bedroom and her husband into the bathroom, where they shot him with silenced ‘machine guns’ that, the story goes, had originally been specially modified for the dreaded ‘toecutter’ Linus Driscoll. This was ironic, considering persistent unsourced suggestions later that Driscoll took the contract to kill Bennett.

  The killers threw Kane’s body in the boot of his distinctive pink Ford Futura sedan and drove off. Neither the body nor the car were ever found. They had a head start because Judy Kane observed painter and docker protocol by not speaking to police until they heard about her husband’s ‘disappearance’ and contacted her first. Bennett told police, straight-faced, that he’d taken a call on the night of Les Kane’s death to say that Kane had ‘gone off’ and he’d immediately gone into hiding, fearing reprisals.

  He wasn’t the only one to fear reprisals. When the case went to trial at the Supreme Court in September, 1979, court security measures were extraordinary. There were armed police, marksmen posted outside, and stringent identity and weapon checks on everyone who entered court. Even a prison chaplain, Peter Alexander, was not allowed to visit Bennett.

  The three were acquitted, mainly because of the absence of a body. Though pleased with the result, they suspected not everyone was convinced of their innocence. Mikkelsen and Prendergast left Melbourne immediately for distant destinations. (Prendergast was later to make the mistake of returning. He drove a Volvo, but it didn’t keep him safe. His body, like Les Kane’s, was never found.) And Bennett, still to face charges on the payroll robbery, chose to stay in custody.

  Seven weeks later, he was sent to the Magistrates Court for committal. This time, oddly enough, there was no security at all.

  So who killed him? And how did he get away with it so easily?

  The brief inquest that was theoretically supposed to answer that when it finally sat, raised more questions than answers.

  Despite the public interest, and the time available to prepare the brief, it was a slight document – barely a morsel for the eminent legal talent gathered around the bar table.

  Joe Gullaci could not represent Gail Bennett and her family because he had been called as a witness. Instead, she hired a prominent criminal barrister, Jack Lazarus.

  Lazarus was aggressive but, on instructions, was not out to lay blame in ways that might fan hostilities and make life hard for the widow and her schoolboy son, Danny. Peter Alexander, the knockabout priest who buried Bennett, told the authors that Lazarus’s brief was to defend Bennett’s reputation for the sake of his son – not to lead a murder investigation.

  With Lazarus choosing his punches carefully, no-one else was swinging wildly, either. The result was a predictably thin account of facts already run in the media – except for one thing.

  The brilliant advocate representing the police – John Phillips, QC, later to become Chief Justice – was forced to air rumours claiming that two detectives were implicated in the murder. Given that Lazarus didn’t directly accuse anyone, it was the only way that Phillips could try to put such rumours to rest.

  The men Phillips named, albeit gently, were Paul John Strang and Brian Francis Murphy.

  Strang, a popular consorting squad detective later dismissed over a minor matter, was one of the three detectives supposed to be escorting Bennett, but happened not to be standing near him when the shots were fired.

  Murphy, then with the new Metropolitan Regional Crime squad – nicknamed ‘Murphy’s Marauders’ – had no official reason to be at the magistrates court the day Bennett was killed. He arrived from his North Fitzroy office after the shooting, and said later he’d thought the activity outside the court was a demonstration. Extraordinarily, although named at the inquest as a rumoured suspect, Murphy was never interviewed nor called to give evidence. It was that sort of inquiry. Underworld murders are rarely solved, and this never looked like being the exception.

  Even the counsel assisting the Coroner submitted there was no evidence the police knew of threats to Bennett beforehand, and blamed the media for airing matters ‘improperly put in court and never substantiated.’ So solicitous was he about the perception of unfairness to the police involved that the police’s own QC was scarcely able to lay it on any thicker. He claimed it had been a bumper week for rubbishing the police, and called on the media to give full coverage if the Coroner found that Murphy and Strang were not involved in the shooting.

  Which, of course, is what the Coroner did. But not even he, a policeman’s son, could swallow his own assisting counsel’s preposterous suggestions that the police didn’t know beforehand of any threats to Bennett’s safety.

  While the Coroner found who didn’t do it, he didn’t get close to naming who did. But time has loosened tongues. Several detectives involved in the case suggest independently that they’ve always believed the gunman was Brian Kane, who killed not for money but to avenge the death of his brother, Les. But, they say, it would be extremely unlikely that a criminal as well-known as Kane was, could prowl the court precinct to set up his escape route.

  One former detective says matter-of-factly that two former colleagues removed four roofing nails and levered open the tin fence e
scape route days earlier. Interestingly, an RMIT gardener recalled seeing a man dressed in new overalls and digging with a new garden trowel next to the fence at 6.45am the week before the murder – possibly on the morning of the Melbourne Cup public holiday when the area would have been almost deserted.

  The truth, perhaps, went to the grave with Brian Kane, who was shot dead in the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick in November, 1982, almost three years to the day after Bennett’s death.

  Twenty years on, Brian Murphy was on a short motoring holiday with his wife in Tasmania when contacted by the authors. He said he remembered distinctly the events of late 1979.

  So who was the bearded hitman?

  ‘It was Brian,’ he said. ‘But not this one.’

  The strange thing, he added, was that he’d seen a man who looked very like Brian Kane in Lygon Street the night before, and noticed he had grown a beard.

  CHAPTER 3

  Little Big Man

  ‘What’s the problem – run out of bullets?’

  DRUG dealing was good to Tom Scarborough. It gave him money, shares, a luxury car and ‘Barbie Doll’ girlfriends, but it couldn’t give him what he craved most … respect.

  He arrived in Melbourne in 1996 and soon became a prodigious heroin distributor, working his way up from street dealer to influential middleman.

  When he first started selling heroin in Melbourne he concentrated on servicing street junkies around the Spencer Street railway station and became known as a dealer who was never short of drugs. ‘He seemed to have an endless supply,’ a girlfriend and sometime customer would later recall.

  In the beginning he lived in a modest city hotel but as he climbed the drug dealing ladder he moved to luxury serviced apartments and five star hotels. Money was not a problem and he bragged to friends he was making $7000 a week.