A Tale of Two Cities

 

 

 

underbelly

The authors

John Silvester has been a crime reporter in Melbourne since 1978. He worked for
The Sunday Times
Insight team in London in 1990, and has co-authored many crime books, including the
Underbelly
series,
Leadbelly
and
The Silent War
. He is currently senior crime reporter for
The Age
.

Andrew Rule started in journalism in 1975 and has worked in newspapers, television and radio. He wrote
Cuckoo
, the inside story of the ‘Mr Stinky' case, since re-issued in the collection
Sex, Death and Betrayal
, and has co-written, edited and published several other books, including the
Underbelly
series. He is a deputy editor of
The Age
.

underbelly

JOHN SILVESTER AND ANDREW RULE

Published by Floradale Productions Pty Ltd and Sly Ink Pty Ltd
February 2009

Distributed wholesale by Gary Allen Pty Ltd
9 Cooper Street
Smithfield, NSW
Telephone 02-9725 2933

Copyright Floradale Productions and Sly Ink, 2009

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the publishers' permission

Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities
The stories that inspired the Screentime series
for the Nine Network
ISBN 0-9775440-9-5

Cover design, typesetting and layout: R.T.J. Klinkhamer

For Paul Delianis and Carl Mengler, who saw the door was slightly ajar and crashed right through it.

Paul Delianis

Carl Mengler

Foreword

1
Sleeping dogs lie

2
Lady killer

3
Friends in high places

4
Snake in the grass

5
Pre-emptive strike

6
Inside job

7
Shot in the dark

8
The life of Brian

9
A matter of time

10
Cox the fox

11
Hostile takeover

12
Travelling north

13
Code breaker

14
Friendly fire

15
Tommy gun

16
End of the line

17
In the back

18
Rentakilled

Bibliography

Biographies

The cast

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times.

CHARLES DICKENS,
A TALE OF TWO CITIES

 

IN the late 1970s the underworlds of Melbourne and Sydney were changing – violently.

Melbourne was the home of old-style gunmen. Many were from generations of crooks, schooled on the waterfront in matters of theft, intimidation and violence.

In Sydney they were just as hard but they learned early that the only way to make big money was to get the police on side.

There had always been corruption – with police paid to look the other way – but in the 1970s it exploded to the point that a cell of bent detectives actually set up the ‘jobs'. They franchised crime to chosen crooks, who virtually worked for them. Lennie McPherson, a handy safe breaker but no criminal mastermind, became a Mr Big because police gave him the ‘green light'. Neddy Smith was a violent thug who became a big mobster because
he was protected by manipulative police. The smooth George Freeman made millions under police patronage. It was so brazen that Freeman was once photographed at Randwick racecourse with the Chief Magistrate. In Sydney it was just another day at the races.

But there was a small group of honest police in Sydney – and they had to break the law to prove it. They resorted to illegally tapping the telephones of their suspects, people like Freeman and drug syndicate boss ‘Aussie' Bob Trimbole. And what they discovered horrified them. Police, politicians, and legal figures were talking to crime bosses. It confirmed that in Sydney nearly everything was for sale – from knighthoods to ladies of the night.

The crims protected by bent police started to believe they were untouchable. When the Griffith mafia tired of the activities of a local businessman, Donald Mackay, who dared complain about lack of police efforts to deal with the lucrative marijuana industry, they calmly ordered his execution. They thought that by using a Melbourne hit man and ordering that the Italian weapon of choice – the shotgun – not be used, they could get away with murder and that corruption would flourish unchecked.

They were wrong. And while the politicians did little (except for the disgraceful Al Grassby, who actively worked to sabotage the case) the public was outraged.

But still the crooks believed they could do anything, including shooting an undercover policeman, Mick Drury, to stop him giving evidence in a drug case.

Meanwhile, federal police using legal phone taps in their own drug investigations, were stunned to pick up the extent of corruption – but their political masters stayed silent, preferring to do nothing rather than risk the inevitable political fall-out.

Powerful New South Wales political figures from both sides resisted federal overtures to clean up the rot. Police like Peter
Lamb – a federal expert on organised crime – could do little except try to keep his team from being infiltrated by corrupt police.

But the assassination of Mackay in 1977 and the shooting of Drury seven years later proved to be watershed moments. Politicians reluctantly ordered inquiries.

As the Sydney detectives' vice-like grip on crime (committing, not investigating it) began to loosen, the established pecking order collapsed. Ambitious new crooks were prepared to take on older, protected ones. And police were involved in setting up killings to protect their stake in organised crime.

This resulted in a series of murders culminating with that of hit man Christopher Dale Flannery, whose body was never found.

Back in Melbourne, the gunmen were at war and showed such contempt for the system that one was gunned down in the City Court on a busy sitting day. The killer was given inside information and his getaway assisted by someone with an intimate knowledge of the court complex. A small group of police remain the most likely suspects.

Gunmen were so confident of the underworld code of silence that on one occasion they did not bother to wear effective disguises even though witnesses could identify them. They had reasons to be confident. One young witness persuaded to give evidence was silenced with a bullet. Some bodies were found. Many weren't. No-one was convicted.

But while the gunmen fought over personal ‘honour' and to carve up proceeds of big armed robberies, the cold winds of change were coming. They were dinosaurs and the Ice Age had arrived. Well, if not ice (that would come later), at least the Heroin Age. A new order had taken over. Drugs were king and those with access to powders manufactured from poppy seeds in
Asia made more money than the armed robbers and ‘dockies' dreamed of. From then on it would be drug money, not guns, that controlled the underworld.

Terry Clark was a small-time New Zealand police informer who wanted to be a world-class crook and for a short time he got his wish. First through a massive importation of Thai ‘buddha sticks' to New Zealand and then through a $100 million importation of heroin to Australia. He formed his own group, which he called The Organisation, and managed it ruthlessly.

Clark was the first man to establish an international drug empire based in Australia. He would not be the last.

While the crooks in Melbourne and Sydney continued to kill each other over the spoils of their shrinking crime rackets, Clark was quietly making a fortune in the shadows. If they had realised what he was up to, they would have surely moved in on him, removing his fortune or his toes.

Knowing what damage a police informer could do, he killed anyone he thought might give him up to law enforcement agencies. Corrupt police, officials and lawyers told him when any of his team was talking. And then he would silence them permanently.

This ruthlessness and greed would ultimately prove his downfall. When the bodies of two of his couriers, Isabel and Douglas Wilson, were found in the seaside resort of Rye, south-east of Melbourne, it became a full-on homicide investigation.

Enter Paul Delianis, then head of the Victorian homicide squad. Delianis soon realised that the Clark syndicate, known as the Mr Asia gang, had infiltrated the Federal Narcotics Bureau.

The federal government at first denied the problem but a later inquiry resulted in the whole bureau being found to be beyond redemption. It was scrapped.

Delianis' initial investigations, followed by those of the equally dedicated Carl Mengler, who headed a taskforce codenamed Trio, resulted in the syndicate's exposure and finally revealed who murdered the Wilsons and Donald Mackay.

Their investigations succeeded despite widespread corruption, police jealousies and political indifference. It was a long road but the Mr Asia syndicate was finally smashed and Clark died in an English jail.

As Charles Dickens once wrote: ‘There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.'

There are many old men who retired as respected police, judges, lawyers, journalists and politicians who would count themselves fortunate that their telephones were never tapped back in the bad old days.

Or were they?

CONTRACT KILLING FOR THE MAFIA

He told them why they were to die and shot Wilson first, then his wife. But he did not shoot their dog.

 

THE bitch was a stray – part cattle dog, part fox terrier, mostly lucky. When she wandered into the Altona street where a meat inspector called Dennis Brown and his wife lived in the mid-1970s, instead of calling the dog catcher the couple adopted the little black and white mongrel. They called her Mitzy.