Underbelly 11 Read online

  The lawyer knew Hudson well. That’s because Hudson had been involved in a vicious public gun battle in Queensland the previous year between the Finks and Hell’s Angels gangs – but that time he was a victim.

  He was shot in the jaw and back in the riot between bikies in the crowd at a kickboxing show at the Royal Pines Resort at Southport in March.

  Three people were shot and two stabbed. Four were bikies, and the fifth was a teenager caught in the crossfire.

  The fight was allegedly sparked by Hudson’s defection from the Finks to the Hells Hell’s Angels and by him encouraging others to follow.

  The Angels recruited Hudson because of his links to local nightspots. He later moved to Sydney where he established new connections in the nightclub industry before he landed in Melbourne.

  He had strong connections with bikie chapters in Queensland, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne but after the CBD shootings those links were severed.

  Less than 48 hours after the shootings police were told the Hell’s Angels had persuaded the suspect to give up. Whether the decision was a moral one based on what he was alleged to have done – or a practical one because the gang knew that while the suspect was at large they could expect to be the focus of an intense investigation – is largely irrelevant.

  It was the right result.

  Just after 4.30pm on June 20, Hudson was driven to the police station at Wallan, in Melbourne’s north, from a safe house where he had been hiding.

  He was unarmed and had suffered a badly damaged left wrist courtesy of a self-inflicted wound that would require plastic surgery.

  Turning himself in means Hudson’s fate will be decided under due process. Due process means an accused’s guilt or innocence is decided by a jury selected from the broader community.

  This suspect is perhaps lucky to have avoided judgement by his peers in the bikie world.

  But the story of Christopher Wayne Hudson and his involvement in Melbourne nightclubs began six days before the CBD shooting, due to a meeting with a Collingwood footballer who was looking for adventure.

  THE luckiest drunken footballer in Australia is not Alan Didak, whose close encounter with the Hell’s Angels could have been life-threatening as well as career-ending, but his day-time opponent and night-time drinking mate, Melbourne’s Colin Sylvia.

  Even the sight of naked women dancing in the King Street strip club Spearmint Rhino was not enough to keep Sylvia awake.

  Fatigued from a hard game of football on June 11, 2007, and a harder night of drinking, he slowly descended into alcohol-induced unconsciousness.

  Drunk and asleep, Sylvia was gently evicted by bouncers without incident. (A few days later he was quoted without a hint of irony as saying the mid-season break was an ideal opportunity to relax his mind and body.)

  Without his football mate, Didak accepted a lift from Christopher Wayne Hudson, the man who would later stand accused of the Melbourne CBD shootings.

  Didak’s decision, the subsequent police investigation and the football club’s initial farcical response, left many holes in the story that began as a drunken adventure and ended in allegations of gunfire.

  For Melbourne and Collingwood, the Queen’s Birthday match that day was the perfect punctuation mark for the mid-season break.

  With no game scheduled the following week, the players had one of their few in-season opportunities to slip the AFL’s tight lifestyle leash and head out on the town. But the idea of a few beers soon turned into a binge of mixed drinks and straight spirits as a group of players headed from nightclubs to strip clubs.

  Eleven years earlier the previous Collingwood coach, Tony Shaw, banned his players from King Street bars, but that rule, like many others, had been quietly shelved.

  After drinking at several venues, Melbourne and Collingwood stayers, including Didak and Sylvia, descended to the Bar 20 strip club.

  While the other footballers drifted off, Didak and Sylvia tottered up King Street to Spearmint Rhino.

  Drinking vodka, lime and sodas and straight shooters, they were flying by the early hours of Tuesday.

  The last thing Didak needed was another drink but unwisely he accepted one – this time a bourbon and cola – from a heavy-set man with burning eyes who said he was a fan of the Collingwood forward.

  With Sylvia having lost interest and heading for the comfort of his bed, Didak chatted with the fan, who had recently moved from interstate.

  The supporter, Christopher Hudson, followed two clubs. One was Collingwood and the second was the Hell’s Angels.

  But Didak’s ability to judge the situation was severely affected by hours of drinking and he apparently saw no signs of danger from the man he had just met.

  Some time after 3am, the two left, Didak slipping into the passenger side and Hudson behind the wheel of the bikie’s powerful black Mercedes-Benz.

  Didak would later tell police he had accepted an offer of a lift home to Kew when it all went horribly wrong. It is a version of events that detectives found harder to swallow than a free bourbon and Coke.

  The football club’s spin initially suggested Didak was a victim who wanted to head home but was virtually abducted and driven to the Hell’s Angels East County headquarters in Campbellfield.

  Supposedly terrified, he asked to be driven home, only to be embroiled in a shooting incident and a dangerous high-speed trip before being dropped in the city shaken – but not stirred enough to contact police.

  ‘While in the car the person insisted that Alan accompany him to a bikie gang clubhouse. Alan felt he had no choice but to comply,’ a poker-faced Collingwood chief executive Gary Pert told the media when the story finally broke after the CBD tragedy and Hudson’s subsequent arrest.

  Police suspect, but can’t prove, that Hudson, 29, bragged that he was a Hell’s Angel and invited Didak to the headquarters.

  The footballer, curious to see inside the heavily fortified premises, accepted, an act that, while foolhardy, was not illegal.

  It was only minutes after they left the strip club that Didak realised his night was going off the rails. Police allege that as the Mercedes sped over the Bolte Bridge, a high-powered handgun was produced and several shots were fired from the window.

  Speeding along the Tullamarine Freeway, they arrived at the bikie headquarters around 4am.

  Didak, 24, was greeted by at least one other member of the chapter. (Bikies rarely leave their headquarters vacant at any time to deter other gangs from raiding the property and police from breaking in to hide bugs.)

  If Didak was terrified, he hid it well. When he was offered yet another drink, he accepted and stayed for up to 45 minutes before hopping back in the car, this time in the back seat of the coupe.

  Two men sat in the front.

  They sped off, flying through a red light across the Hume Highway just as a local police divisional van cruised past.

  The police followed, but the Mercedes slipped into the Scania trucking industrial estate, out of sight, where it might have stayed if not spotted by an early-morning worker. It then cruised slowly out of the factory complex and stopped in Northbourne Road.

  The police, having spotted the car, pulled up about 50 metres behind. Several shots allegedly were fired from the driver’s side window of the Mercedes before it sped off again.

  Police did not give chase. If they had, Didak might well have been permanently delisted, courtesy of a police bullet or a high-speed car crash.

  Later police would find ten spent shells and one live one on the ground in two separate places on Northbourne Road – meaning someone in the car fired a volley of shots before slipping into the estate and a second set when the police pulled up behind.

  Because of the pressing danger of a gunman on Melbourne streets who was prepared to fire shots at police to avoid arrest, the investigation was immediately handed to the experts, the armed crime task force.

  A police appeal that morning brought an immediate response through Crime Stoppers.


  One caller reported a black Mercedes speeding wildly down the Tullamarine Freeway to Melbourne with one man in the back leaning forward and talking to the driver.

  Detectives traced the Mercedes to a luxury vehicle dealer who at first denied any connection with Hudson. But detectives found the name of a Sydney woman who was alleged to have bought the car. She had once worked at Spearmint Rhino and knew Hudson.

  Within 48 hours of the shooting police were looking for Hudson but they did not know where he was living and still did not have enough evidence to make an arrest.

  Six days after the alleged shooting spree, Hudson is alleged to have opened fire in the city with tragic consequences.

  The first police knew of a link between the footballer and the suspect was when they went to Hudson’s apartment and found a handwritten note with Alan Didak’s name and phone number.

  A homicide detective and another from the armed task force quietly visited Didak away from the club to ask him some informal questions.

  They gave him a few days to think deeply before he was to be formally interviewed.

  But as rumours of Didak’s involvement started to circulate in football-mad Melbourne, the interview was pushed forward, to be held discreetly at the Boroondara police station rather than at the St Kilda Road crime headquarters on June 28 – 10 days after the CBD shooting.

  But the media were waiting. It was the lead item on TV news and made page one the following day. Didak gave police a version of events.

  In some parts it was clear and in other parts strangely vague. He can remember the events at the strip club, the drive to the clubhouse, shots on the Bolte Bridge, drinks with the Hell’s Angels and the dangerous trip back to the city. He can even remember leaning forward asking the driver to slow down on the freeway (an act independently corroborated by the Crime Stoppers call).

  He was lucid enough when dropped at Flinders Street to even ask police in a passing van if they could give him a lift.

  In the brief discussion he failed to mention his close encounter with the bikies.

  The police declined the opportunity to act as an AFL shuttle service and Didak grabbed a cab.

  Yet, when finally interviewed by detectives, Didak suffered a memory lapse that blanked out the crucial ten minutes when the shots were allegedly fired in the vicinity of police.

  Perhaps he passed out – a convenient but entirely possible scenario considering the amount he had drunk.

  No-one would really know whether Didak was asleep as Hudson isn’t talking and the other passenger in the Mercedes is yet to be identified.

  But what Didak did not know was there was another witness – not a person with a faulty memory, but a video camera.

  When the driver of the Mercedes slipped into the Northbourne Road industrial estate to avoid police, a security camera filmed three men in the car, with the rear passenger conscious and clearly animated.

  There is no doubt that after the event Didak was terrified. He feared the Hell’s Angels, a group with a reputation of hunting down and silencing potential witnesses.

  But Didak was safe. The Angels had turned on Hudson. He was on his own, whereas Didak had Collingwood.

  Police briefed senior Collingwood officials on their investigation but were staggered when they saw how the player was initially portrayed as an innocent victim.

  ‘He is not a suspect, he is not a victim, he is a witness and not a very good one,’ a senior policeman said.

  At the same time, police say suggestions that if Didak had come forward the CBD shooting may never have happened are unfair to the footballer, who on the known evidence was guilty only of being a fool and then remaining silent on the grounds of self-preservation.

  But how silent? Police believe he did tell some team-mates, including those he was drinking with that night, what had happened after they had left.

  Just hours after the Campbellfield incident he was on a plane to Queensland with the team. Collingwood staff hastily briefed club president Eddie McGuire as he was about to fly back to Australia from Europe.

  But when he returned he quickly saw the club’s position as untenable. Increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw as a less-than-comprehensive briefing, he shifted the position from victim Didak to last-chance Didak.

  Far from Didak being an innocent caught up in events as first portrayed, McGuire now says, ‘he was out too late, met bad people and it was just stupid’.

  Later McGuire said Didak would have faced the sack if he had not shown remorse and that the footballer would only remain at the club if he accepted a nightclub and alcohol ban and a lam curfew.

  Meanwhile, Chief Commissioner Nixon provided some unlikely support for Didak. ‘I think it has been quite amazing to watch how he has been treated in the media. I think, as a young man, he’s under enormous pressure and in some ways he’s been damned without people really understanding what might be the circumstances,’ she told 3AW.

  Of course, the young police who were stopped in their tracks when shots were allegedly fired at them in Campbellfield would have also felt a touch of pressure before the Mercedes sped off.

  At yet another Collingwood press conference, the slant that Didak was a victim was finally dumped.

  With Eddie McGuire now in the driving seat, the player fronted the media to say his actions were ‘reckless, embarrassing and stupid’ and had damaged his reputation.

  ‘I understand if I don’t comply (with the restrictions) that is’ the end of my career at Collingwood,’ he said.

  Collingwood was worried its brand was being damaged. Its first Didak news conference was held with sponsors’ logos visible. They were removed for subsequent briefings.

  The Hell’s Angels had a similar worry earlier in 2007 when they expelled a senior member. They solved the brand issue by removing the former member’s Hell’s Angels tattoos – with a steam iron.

  AFTER he fired the shots that killed Brendan Keilar and wounded two others, the gunman placed the pistol barrel under his chin. For a moment, he seemed set to kill himself, but he lost his nerve and ran.

  If he had pulled the trigger, it would have blown his head off. It’s that sort of gun.

  A court will formally decide who carried out the shootings but the handgun is already guilty. It is illegal in Australia on two counts: It combines a brutally heavy calibre with a short barrel that makes it easy to hide, a recipe for carnage in criminal hands, and it is a product of a sinister black market that, like the drug trade, ran out of control while authorities concentrated on easier targets.

  ‘A highly concealable heavy hitter’ is how one disgusted licensed gun dealer describes the weapon used to kill the heroic Melbourne lawyer, wound the equally brave Dutch backpacker and then injure an exotic dancer.

  Overseas, such a pistol is used by ‘narcotics agents, undercover cops and bodyguards’, the dealer says. And gangsters, of course.

  In Australia only an underworld enforcer or the dangerously deluded – or both – would carry such a man killer, more powerful than Victoria Police service revolvers. The pistol that blighted so many lives was found at a city building site soon after the shootings.

  It was a .40 calibre Llama Minimax. It is small, relatively light and yet, with its hefty calibre, all too deadly.

  Its stubby barrel is not made for accuracy – to hit targets or hunt – but to blow a hole in humans at murderously close range.

  A few years ago, a handgun like that, or its Chinese equivalent, would have brought between $1000 and $2000. But the black market is so turbocharged by drugs, money and paranoia that it could bring much more now.

  The word on the underworld rumour mill is that the city gunman paid $5000 for the murder weapon less than two weeks earlier.

  For something that can destroy a life with such awful efficiency, the Llama is a relatively crude tool.

  Not quite, perhaps, the ‘gangster junk’ that purists might label it, but so poorly thought of by legitimate target shooters that no dealership sel
ls Llamas in Australia, and few were ever imported in the past.

  The murder weapon almost certainly reached Australia through an underground network as pernicious as the drug trade – and inextricably entwined with it.

  In the dog-eat-dog underworld, drug money and gun violence go together. Melbourne’s underworld war proved that.

  The path that ended with death in William Street began at a factory in northern Spain, the Basque region that has produced terrorism for decades and cheap pistols for much longer. For most of the twentieth century the area boasted three pistol-making plants, mostly making copies of American brands Colt and Smith & Wesson.

  One factory, run by the Gabilondo Y Cia company, made pistols at Vitoria until 2003, when it moved to Legutiano under a new name, Fabrinor.

  Arms dealers sell to whoever buys. In 1943, the firm supplied’ the Nazis in German-occupied territories with thousands of specially badged pistols.

  After the war it found new markets, including a niche for a two-shot ‘pistol’ disguised as an office stapler, which authorities feared would be used by terrorists.

  From the mid-1990s until it closed in 2005 the firm was making 20, 000 pistols a year, with 17, 000 a year going to the gun-hungry US.

  It is almost certainly one of these that shot Brendan Keilar and the other two victims in Melbourne.

  So how did it get here? While it’s possible the pistol was exported to the Philippines and then smuggled here by light plane or small boats through Papua New Guinea, Timor or the Pacific Islands, it is far more likely it came via America.

  It was probably bought there as part of a job lot for as little as $US400 ($A470) new or even $US200 second-hand. And it’s likely the buyer was fronting for an outlaw bikie gang with a proven smuggling route all fixed.

  Don Hancock: Former Western Australia police crime chief, killed in bikie bombing after a mystery shooting on the goldfields.