Gangland Robbers (19 page)

Ironically or coincidentally, or both, it is likely Blewitt was buried on an industrial site once used by a Kinniburgh associate, Jeffrey Reading, who had been fined $45 000 after using the site for illegal dumping between 2002 and 2006. Former drug boss Reading died in a car crash in August 2009.

Some of the biggest robberies worldwide have caused the greatest falling-outs and, consequently, deaths of gang members, their relations and friends. The 1978 US$5.8 million Lufthansa robbery at New York's JFK Airport, organised by Jimmy ‘The Gent' Burke, produced a death toll of a dozen or more. The £26 million Brink's-Mat robbery in London in 1983 led to at least ten deaths, the most recent in 2015, and the total may still be rising. In Melbourne, Ray ‘Chuck' Bennett's 21 April 1976 raid on the Victorian Club, at 141 Queen Street, led to a long–running gangland feud.

Some criminals have allure, some have talent, some pay great attention to detail; some had, or did, all of those things. Like Bruce Reynolds, the leader of Britain's Great Train Robbery, Bennett had the brains to organise and the charisma to lead a team that would obey him. Chopper Read, himself no slouch, regarded him as not only a top gang tactician but also ‘one of the Australian underworld's foremost bank robbers'. Apparently Bennett, once a member of the so-called Kangaroo Gang, was serving a sentence in Parkhurst, a high-security prison on the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England, when he devised the Great Bookie Robbery.

Built in 1880, the Victorian Club was where bookmakers would meet to settle up on the first day after a weekend's racing. By some accounts, in 1975 towards the end of his sentence, Bennett obtained a period of home leave and, amazing as it may seem, flew to Australia on a false passport to case the premises, before returning to complete his sentence.

Although security was incredibly lax for the amount of money floating around—some moonlighting detectives would look in to see things were all right and they invariably were—over the years, a number of individuals and teams had examined the club and decided it was too much like hard work. They included the highly talented James ‘Jockey' Smith and Leslie Woon. If Woon had decided against it, it must really have seemed too much like hard work.

Bennett, another who had acted as a minder for Billy Longley in Melbourne's waterfront war of the early 1970s, put together a team and took them out of the city for a period of training away from their wives and girlfriends. His second-in-command was another nominal Painter and Docker, Ian Revell ‘Fingers' Carroll. Other members included Norman Leung Lee, who ran a dim sum restaurant, Bennett's cousin Vinnie Mikkelsen, Anthony Paul McNamara and, while he denied it to his death, Dennis William ‘Greedy' Smith who was always suspected to have been the getaway driver. Although they had worked with him before, neither one of standover brothers Les and Brian Kane was part of Bennett's team. Neither—and, in particular, Brian—was thought to be willing to accept the discipline required. They were said not to have minded their omission but it must have grated. Another who missed out was Bennett's great mate armed robber Brian O'Callaghan, but that was because he was in Long Bay at the time. Bennett is said to have given him $100 000 of the takings.

After a weekend dress rehearsal when the club was empty, Bennett chose the Wednesday after the three-day Easter weekend's racing, when more than a hundred bookmakers were to meet to settle up there. An armoured car delivered the money at midday and, within minutes, at least six men armed with machine guns burst into the settling room, tackled the armed guards and ordered the bookmakers to lie on the floor. The team cut open the metal cash boxes, filled with more than a hundred calico bags containing untraceable notes. Just how much money was taken has never been established, but not less than $1.5 million and possibly up to $15 million are the parameters. The raid was over by 12.15 p.m., when most of the robbers had gone into the office block next door and then into the Queen Street traffic. Curiously, the robbery had happened on a day when the moonlighting detectives were not on their unofficial duty. A reward of $70 000 was promptly offered.

The immediate problem Bennett faced was disposing of the money. In 1998 Philip Dunn QC, who had represented Norman Leung Lee, said
his client had told him that the money did not leave the premises for a month. The robbers had rented offices upstairs from the Victorian Club and they removed it at their leisure over the next four to five weeks.
‘When you think about it
, that's very smart, verging on genius almost,' he said.

If robbers are to avoid getting caught, what they must not do immediately after a touch is spend money like drunken sailors, and this requires communal discipline. Laundering requires care, and on this occasion the racetrack, one of the traditional avenues, was hardly open to the crims in question. The Great Train Robbers had been caught because they splashed out on cars in an endeavour to launder the money, instead of changing it through a trusted solicitor. When Peter Macari ‘Mr Brown' took $500 000 from Qantas airlines in 1971, he bought a flat and fast cars, which he could not possibly explain satisfactorily.

Bennett was far too astute to allow anything like that to happen. Some of the money went into property. Some money went to Manila with Greedy Smith, who opened the Aussie Bar, which was advertised on a hoarding at the North Melbourne footy ground in Arden Street.
Some of the profits went into the purchase
of brothels and bars throughout Asia, as well as into racehorses, and to pay off up to fifty corrupt police officers in Manila. Some of the money went to Canada. But Bennett had a nasty scare when, while visiting a solicitor, his mother collapsed and the paramedics found some $90 000 in cash in her clothing. Amazingly, no questions seem to have been asked.

It was not until 1977 that Norman Leung Lee was arrested and charged with the robbery. He was the one man who had been spending conspicuously, having bought $60 000 of dim sum equipment. He was also trying to launder money through a solicitor's trust account. On 19 August he took $60 000 in a plastic bag to this solicitor, saying he wanted to invest it on behalf of a friend. But Lee remained as staunch as Bennett had expected, and the magistrate ruled that there was no evidence to link the unmarked money to the robbery and refused to commit Lee for trial. Lee was the only one of the team who was ever charged and his acquittal really spelled the end of the investigating squad.

But, just as there were few, if any, continuing success stories among Britain's Great Train Robbers, so over the years the Great Bookie Robbers had more than their fair share of bad luck. Most of them in fact died early, often violent, deaths. Even before this, there was, however, the
danger of other gangs, including the Sydney-based Toecutters, wanting a share of the proceeds; and it spoke enormously well of the regard in which Bennett was held that they decided to leave him personally alone. Another story that floated around after the robbery was that Les and Brian Kane might decide they wanted a slice of the takings, and that Bennett would therefore make a pre-emptive strike against them.

It was in the winter of 1978 that Les Kane first thought he was going to be knocked—or, at least, that was when he told his second wife, Judi, of his fears. Apart from doing standovers, he had a good income from the Geelong docks, picking up several pay packets a week. Brother Brian, also a nominal docker, was a debt collector and enforcer, and few were brave enough to resist his invitations to settle a debt.

By August Les Kane was seriously looking over his shoulder and he, Judi and their two children rented a unit at Mountain Highway, Wantirna, around 24 kilometres east of Melbourne's CBD. At around 9.15 p.m. on 19 October, when the family returned from visiting relations, three men were waiting in the house. Judi and the children were bundled into a bedroom, and Kane taken into the bathroom and shot. His body was dumped in the boot of his pink Ford Futura, which the men drove away. What was odd was that the three men, two of whom Judi had known for years, did not attempt to mask up. She said one was Chuck Bennett and the second was Vinnie Mikkelsen. The third was Laurie Prendergast, the offsider of all-purpose hitman Chris Flannery.

Kane's body was never found and it was thought he quite possibly became dim sim in Norman Lee's restaurant. But there were sure to be reprisals, and at the end of November Mikkelsen's house, in Nathalia Street, Broadmeadows, was burned out. In the meantime, Brian Kane went against all known gangland rules and decided Judi Kane should go to the police. His reasoning appears to have been that they would find Bennett and he, Kane, would kill him once they had done so. The others could wait.

On 1 December Prendergast was arrested and, that evening, Judi Kane picked him out on an identification parade. Bennett and Mikkelsen were arrested later. The trial started on 3 September 1979, but by then, Bennett had been charged with a $69 000 armed payroll heist at Yarraville a month earlier and was in custody. Despite an attempt being made to force her car off the road, Judi Kane stuck to her guns, identifying all three men.
But, says one lawyer who watched
the trial, ‘What was obvious
was that the Crown case had very serious issues, and the defence challenged every bit of it.' There was no doubt that Kane was a wife beater, Judi Kane having had plastic surgery on two occasions after his ministrations. It was suggested at the trial that she had either killed her husband herself or, more probably, had arranged for his disappearance.

Then there was the lack of forensic evidence. According to Judi Kane, her husband had been machine-gunned, yet there was no chipped paint and no cracked mirror in the bathroom, let alone a bullet hole in the wall where he was shot. Surely not every bullet had hit him. The only evidence that her husband had been alive on the day he was supposedly killed came from her. Many thought that while Kane was certainly missing, it hadn't come about quite how the jury was being told it had. Some believed he might have been killed up to a week earlier. All the men called alibis and, unusually in a major criminal trial, Bennett actually gave evidence. Norman Lee came to court to say Bennett had spent the evening with him and his family.
Prendergast had a brother, Billy Lewis
, who closely resembled him and there were suggestions it could have been Lewis who Judi Kane had seen.

In the pre-DNA 1970s, juries liked ‘no body' cases even less than they do today and some states still did not prosecute in those circumstances. Kane hadn't been gone all that long and, given his lifestyle, there was always the chance he was still in smoke. Part of the defence case was two people giving evidence they had seen him after the alleged shooting and abduction.
On 21 September, after retiring
for only two-and-a-half hours, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. After the acquittals, Prendergast went straight into hiding and Mikkelsen flew out of Melbourne the next day. Norman Lee went to Singapore.

Brian Kane could never accept his brother's death or the verdict. ‘There wasn't going to be a life for Brian after Les's death, ever,' says a family friend. ‘He just wanted Chuck's head on a platter.' From after his arrest on the robbery charge, Bennett was in Pentridge although he declined to go into segregation. He knew reprisals were likely and was said to have taken out fresh life insurance, and his 13-year-old son was sent out of the country.

There had been strict security at the Les Kane murder trial but there was none on 12 November 1979 when Bennett was taken to the first floor of the old Melbourne Magistrates' Court on La Trobe Street to answer the robbery charges. Bennett was waiting without handcuffs
and with an unarmed guard outside Court 10. Also on the landing was a man wearing a dark suit and apparently carrying a small briefcase, sitting on a bench at the head of the stairs, making no effort to hide himself. He shot Bennett three times in the chest with a .38. Bennett died within the hour at St Vincent's Hospital.

The gunman escaped, possibly via the rear stairway leading to the court's car park; from there, it would have been easy enough to go into any of Swanston, La Trobe or Franklin Streets. Other accounts, however, have him walking down the front stairs of the court building and into a waiting car that Greedy Smith was driving.

Unsurprisingly, the underworld buzzed with rumours, one of which was that Brian Kane and his brother Raymond had imported an interstate hitman and paid him $50 000. Both brothers gave statements that they were not involved. Ray gave his lawyer, Frank Galbally, the names of the people he had been with, adding that he would make himself available for an interview. Brian Kane's statement was shorter and more combative:

 

I do not believe there can be any evidence whatsoever connecting me with this killing. Therefore I will say nothing further about this matter as there is no way in which I can assist the police.

 

Forty years on, it is now generally accepted the killer was Brian Kane. After Bennett's acquittal, he had become more and more secretive, calling friends and family at odd hours, arriving in the dead of night, never giving his name over the telephone. Kane had also been getting into the courthouse night after night, around midnight, pacing out the distances. His escape route after the shooting has also become apparent. He was taken straight to Essendon and put on a light plane to Adelaide, where he boarded a commercial flight to Perth. And there he stayed for the next three months. Eventually, Kane was told he was no longer hot—at least as far as the police were concerned—and he returned from the west coast.

The day after Bennett's death, his old mate Brian O'Callaghan, then serving his 13-year sentence for the armed robbery, escaped from a prison van taking him to work at the Long Bay Prison bakery. With O'Callaghan temporarily on the loose and possibly making his way to Melbourne, the press and police predicted immediate trouble, and possibly an all-out gang war but, for the time being, that did not
materialise. O'Callaghan stayed out for two years, until he was dobbed in and caught in a house in Carlton, but does not seem to have busied himself on his former offsider's behalf.
Regarded as one of the great robbers
of his era, he died in October 2010 at the age of sixty-two. He had been a cocaine addict for some years.