Underbelly 4 Read online

  The dealer had grown up in Adelaide after arriving from Vietnam in 1981. Then he was known as Kuong Pham, but he changed his name to Tom Scarborough, taking the surname of a girl who had become an obsession to the little man with the big ideas.

  The 163-centimetre Scarborough was attracted to power and control but he lacked the presence to be an authority figure. ‘I wanted to join the police force at eighteen but I was too fat,’ he was to reveal.

  ‘JANE’ was a pretty young woman in the advertising industry who lived in middle Melbourne with her family. But, like too many of her generation, she had a secret, a heroin habit requiring her to buy a thirty-dollar cap every day.

  As a small-time user, she had to take her luck buying on the street, trying to find dealers whenever she wanted to score. In December, 1996, she went to the Richmond railway station and saw a man she instinctively knew was just like her. She went to him and asked if she could wait and buy from his dealer. He had no problem as long as he went first.

  Jane bought from the small Asian man who arrived a few minutes later. She went straight to the toilet to inject. After the rush she walked back to the dealer, who introduced himself as Tom.

  Jane and her new friend went for a drink in a city bar and began a relationship. Years later she is blunt about the mutual attraction: ‘I wanted the heroin and Tom wanted sex.’

  She moved in with him – first at a Brunswick apartment that included maid service. Tom was busy selling heroin to at least thirty people a day, with each deal being between fifty and three hundred dollars.

  In between deals the dealer doted on her, providing her with a gram of heroin a day – although he wanted her to stop. ‘At times he would try and with-hold it from me but eventually he would give it to me. He always had plenty of heroin.’

  He put money in her bank account and made sure she wanted for nothing. ‘At times we would go shopping together and buy clothes. We would spend up to a couple of thousand dollars between us. I would go the hairdressers three times a week, which would cost at least fifty dollars a time. I would go to the solarium at least three times a week, which was twenty dollars each time.

  ‘Money was never a problem because, no matter what the cost was, Tom was always able to cover it.’

  He would leave the apartment and return with a rock of heroin about the size of a golf ball. He would use a credit card to cut it into foils to sell.

  They moved every few weeks through South Yarra and Prahran and St Kilda. If she liked the look of a coat she would pretend to think it was too expensive, knowing he would peel off a roll of notes and buy it for her.

  They rarely went out in the conventional sense, apart from shopping trips. ‘Our life was fairly mundane. We didn’t do a lot. We would go and buy clothes at least once a week and I had had very expensive tastes because Tom was always paying for it. He never told me that I couldn’t have something.’

  Finally Jane decided to get control of her life. She waited until Scarborough was out selling heroin, then flew to Sydney and a pre-booked detox clinic.

  As with most junkies, her first attempt to clean-up failed and she rang her dealer boyfriend, who flew to Sydney to get her. It was then she saw another side to him. ‘Tom said if I ever left him again without telling him he would kill my family.’

  But she did escape a few weeks later and although he hired a private detective to find her, she had finally broken the golden chain. ‘I have not used heroin since I left Tom,’ Jane said.

  If Scarborough was heartbroken, he hid it well and was soon out hunting a replacement. He was a regular at Melbourne strip clubs and was popular with the girls with his cheeky smile and wad of money.

  He would sip Coke or water and tip the waitresses with $100 notes. He then found what he was looking for – a girl he described as a ‘tall, blonde Barbie Doll.’

  She worked at the Men’s Gallery table dancing venue and also managed a clothing store in Richmond. Scarborough believed the quickest way to her heart was through a heroin-filled syringe.

  Twice a week he would go to the shop and give ‘Karen’ free heroin. ‘He would give me eight to ten caps to last me a few days.’

  Strangely, while he would provide her with heroin he would lecture her to give up the drugs. He finally offered her $5000 to give up and booked her into an expensive clinic in March, 1998.

  He would ring her every day, shower her with gifts, pay her rent and cover expensive car repairs. He even paid $7000 cash for her breast implant surgery.

  The young woman claimed they were ‘just friends,’ although she admitted ‘he was totally obsessed by me.’

  The drug dealer who wanted to be a big man didn’t want to be ‘just friends’. He wanted to be feared and his attitude started to change as he began to talk like a gangster. ‘I thought he was pretending to be a bad boy,’ Karen said.

  He started to acquire the tools of the tough guy trade, including a .357 magnum pistol, a .32 revolver and a police extendable baton. He also tried to buy automatic military weapons ‘like the ones used by Julian Knight in Hoddle Street.’

  To complete his crime-boss fantasy he needed a Hollywood-style fast car. He bought a high powered Toyota Lexus SC 4000 sports car for $51,444 on 6 January, 1999. It was his ultimate toy and Scarborough was to brag: ‘Nothing can beat it, except for a F50 Ferrari and a Lamborghini.’

  No-one is sure what made Tom Scarborough unravel, and if anyone does suspect they’re not talking about it. But something tipped the little man with the guns and the fast car over the edge in February, 1999, and for six days he drove around Melbourne shooting at anyone or anything that annoyed him until he was shot in a gun battle with police. But the incident that began it all was so trivial it almost defies description.

  A man on his way to work didn’t bother to move out of the fast lane on a busy Melbourne road. It was enough to drive the little man with the big ego out of his mind.

  It happened at 11.05am, 17 February, on the Nepean Highway in East Brighton.

  LOU PICCININ, a self-employed plumber, was driving his white Toyota van along the busy highway. He was in the far right lane of the four-lane road travelling on the speed limit of 80kmh when he heard the driver behind him repeatedly sounding his horn.

  He glanced in his rear-view mirror to see the driver of a dark green Lexus with tinted windows swerve over two lanes of traffic then swing back to the middle lane, cutting off Reginald Nankervis, a local motor mechanic who was late for an appointment with his solicitor.

  Nankervis was in no mood to tolerate fools on the road and when he was cut off by the sports car he yelled out, ‘You idiot!’

  Unfortunately, the man at the wheel of the Lexus was not one to turn the other cheek. He was armed and unbalanced.

  Nankervis saw the face of the driver in the sports car’s external mirror mouthing words back. Most road rage incidents go no further than that, but this was no normal intolerant driver. If the next set of lights had been green nothing may have happened, but they were red and the traffic stopped.

  Scarborough got out of his car, grabbed an extendable baton, and started towards Nankervis. ‘I thought that I was really in trouble.’ But Scarborough turned to the left and began to attack Piccinin’s van, also pulled up at the lights. He smashed in the rear window with the baton.

  He then asked what appeared to him to be a simple question. ‘Didn’t you hear me beeping for you to get out of the way?’

  Piccinin replied, ‘The speed limit’s 80 kilometres an hour – what do you want me to do?

  ‘He was an imbecile and I couldn’t talk to him,’ Piccinin later told police. He didn’t seem to grasp there was no value in arguing with a man who is beating your van with an iron bar.

  But a large man in a furniture truck managed to break up the confrontation. The driver, Steve, told police ‘I thought he was going to hit him for sure so I yelled out, “get back in your f……car”.’

  The passenger in the furniture truck said of this: ‘I got the fee
ling that he (Scarborough) shit himself … Steve is a big, mean-looking guy.’

  Piccinin had to jump out of the way when Scarborough sped off. The shaken plumber drove straight to the Moorabbin police station to report the incident.

  A policewoman on duty took the details and was quickly able to find Scarborough’s mobile phone number. She rang and left a message and the suspect obligingly rang back a few minutes later.

  Scarborough was surprisingly co-operative – he cheerfully admitted the road rage incident, but claimed Piccinin ‘thought he was king of the road.’

  When the policewoman asked him to come to the station he refused. ‘I can’t be bothered – good luck finding me.’

  He then hung up only to ring back and say, ‘I think you’re a lesbo with a power trip and a gun.’ He was running off the rails.

  February 19, 5.50 pm. Jam Factory, South Yarra: A young cinema worker had just finished work at the Village Centre at the Jam Factory and had walked to the car park to drive home when she saw a man unscrewing the number plates from a car.

  A co-worker, Gino Munari, was also there, having slipped out for a cigarette. He believed the car was owned by a fellow member of staff so he approached the man and asked him what he was doing.

  Tom Scarborough tried to bluff his way out of trouble, claiming the car was owned by a friend. Munari said he didn’t believe him, but Scarborough continued to work on the plates.

  As he walked off with the number plates he said, ‘I hate f…… heroes.’

  He was later to use the plates on his sports car.

  February 21: It was around 6am, a Sunday, when Tom Scarborough went to the Viper Room in Prahran to meet Nicole, a dancer from the Men’s Gallery.

  He told her, ‘I am not going to take this shit any more … If they take me down I’m going to make sure I go down in a blaze of bullets like Julian Knight … They won’t catch me in my car.’

  He said he was carrying a gun and a baton and swore ‘No more Mister Nice Guy.’

  Scarborough said if the bouncer had not let him in he would have attacked him with the baton.

  The girl knew the chubby little man and thought his tough talk was fake. ‘I did not believe what Tom was saying. I thought he was just bragging and trying to impress me.’

  By the next day she knew she was wrong.

  PHONG DUI NGUYEN was a small-time heroin dealer who used to siphon small amounts of drugs from his sales to feed his own habit.

  When Scarborough came to Melbourne in 1996 Nguyen was his supplier but within twelve months the roles had been reversed. Tom started to get bigger and bigger,’ Nguyen was to say later. By early 1999 Nguyen was $1600 in debt to his former customer.

  It was nearly midnight when Nguyen, his girlfriend, May Tran, and another friend, Ha Vu, sat in a car listening to the radio in the driveway of a house in Gray Street, Yarraville.

  The driver’s side window was open because it was a warm night. ‘We just continued to talk, figuring where to go,’ Nguyen said.

  May Tran heard a noise and said, There is someone outside.’ Nguyen opened the car door and put his right foot on the driveway when he spotted Scarborough, who was carrying a handgun. ‘He then fired a shot and it hit me in the chest.’

  He didn’t stop there – hitting the wounded man with a total of six shots from his .357 magnum. ‘I tossed my body around to try to protect myself, but he kept firing the gun into my body.’

  The next thing the injured man saw was his mother crying and he told her ‘I’m dying.’ But he wasn’t, despite being shot in the chest, leg and arm.

  When police later asked Scarborough why he shot Nguyen he said, ‘He’s basically a double crosser.’

  February 22, 1999: Frank Borrello was driving his zippy little soft top along Munro Street, Coburg, around lunchtime when he had to veer around the nose of a big green sports car doing a left hand turn into the same street, just in front of him.

  He could hear the driver of the sports car sounding his horn and flashing his lights behind him. ‘I thought that this person might have known me and recognised my car.’

  He was wrong.

  Borrello stopped at the corner of Munro Street and Sydney Road and the green car pulled up beside him. Scarborough started to abuse the driver. ‘You f…… wanker,’ he said before firing one shot into the car. Borrello thought it was a cap gun. Only later, when he found the neat bullet hole just above the petrol tank, did he realise what a close shave he’d had.

  That night Scarborough went back to Men’s Gallery to meet Nicole. The bouncer on the door told him not to annoy the staff. What the crowd controller didn’t know was that the small, smiling patron was out of control. ‘If he (the bouncer) wasn’t going to let me in I was going to pop him at the front door,’ Scarborough boasted later, and there is no reason to believe he didn’t mean it.

  He was laughing when he said to Nicole, ‘I told you I won’t get walked on again.’

  He started bragging about shooting Nguyen. ‘He deserved it. I emptied the whole gun on him and all he could say was, “sorry mate”.’

  February 23, 1999: Christopher Dunn had dropped his girlfriend off at work in Carlton and was heading to see a friend in Hawthorn when he noticed a driver in a dark sports car wanting to veer right to avoid parked cars.

  Dunn had to stop for a tram in Riversdale Road, Hawthorn, so he tooted his horn to tell the other driver he could slip in front of him. It was a big mistake.

  The driver was Tom Scarborough, who was looking for any excuse to shoot at people. Dunn, twenty six, saw the driver in front of him angrily waving his arms about.

  Dunn pulled up behind the car at a set of lights and noticed the driver ‘flipped him the bird’ – giving him the one-finger salute.

  At the next set of lights Dunn pulled up on the left of the angry driver and made his next mistake. Through the open window he yelled – ‘What’s your problem? Get over it.’ Scarborough pulled out his gun and started blasting Dunn’s car.

  The lights changed but Dunn was caught in heavy traffic and couldn’t escape. ‘He continued to fire the gun at me. I heard the gun “click”.’

  Dunn believed the gun was empty. Then he did something beyond belief. He began to taunt the man who had just tried to kill him. ‘What’s the problem (expletive deleted) – run out of bullets?’ he asked.

  He assumed that the madman next to him only had one gun. It was a mistake, and nearly a fatal one.

  Scarborough might have emptied one gun, but he had another one, a bigger one, the .357 magnum.

  Dunn headed up the driveway of his friend’s home as Scarborough followed, trying to blast him again. Dunn was lucky Scarborough was a bad shot. One bullet just grazed his stomach and arm. He was a few centimetres from death.

  Police were later to establish that Dunn’s car was hit with nine shots – six .32 slugs and three from the magnum.

  Scarborough later told police: ‘We both started arguing and I basically wanted to scare him.’ He said that after he had emptied the gun the man taunted him by saying ‘Run out of bullets have you, dickhead?’

  ‘I took out my .357 and pumped three more rounds into him. I thought this guy had guts so I thought I’ll give him a couple. He was a real road rager, man.’

  LATER that day Scarborough went to Karen’s flat in Hawthorn. He was supposed to take her shopping for a car.

  Karen saw the little drug dealer as a soft touch but the cheerful man with the fat wallet had changed. He turned savage. ‘He was calling me “slut” and told me to shut up.’ He went into the bathroom with his two guns in a black bag and reloaded them. Stupidly, Karen decided to go ahead with the shopping trip with this disturbed, violent and armed drug dealer. ‘He told me it was at my own risk if I get in the car and that I was taking a risk by hopping in the car. He told me if any police pulls him over he was going to shoot them. I didn’t believe him.’

  Nicole Patterson … butchered by a monster.

  Her sister described Nicole as �
��the most beautiful person I have known.’

  Defaced … the cutting police found at Dupas’s home.

  ‘How did you come to be as you are?’

  Nicole scratched her killer’s face when he attacked. LEFT: Nicole’s silver choker … ripped from her by Dupas.

  Pure evil … police photo of Dupas.

  Jason Striegher: shot in the line of duty.

  Striegher shows the entry and exit wounds and surgical scar left by the gun battle in a suburban street.

  Small-time heroin dealer … big-time lucky. He survived six shots from a .357 magnum.

  The end of the road for Tom Scarborough … he won’t need his passport for some years.

  Dead men tell no tales … Raymond Chuck (a.k.a. Bennett), Les Kane (left) and Brian Kane.

  Straight shooter Brian Murphy carries the baby. Inset: An artist’s impression of the courtroom killer.

  Tough cop turned scriptwriter. Gordon Davie rides shotgun after Ray Bennett’s murder.

  Under the pumpie … police looking for the courtroom killer. They didn’t find him.

  RIP … the gunman’s ultimate occupational hazard: his own funeral.

  Outside the Supreme Court two months earlier there was saturation security for Bennett. What happened?

  He went that way … reporter Tony Wright and a much younger author, Andrew Rule, outside the court.

  A hole in the story … the final exit in a dream getaway for the courtroom killer.