A Tale of Two Cities (19 page)

‘I can remember he came home and said we had to get out of town for a while. We went to Queensland to cool off and then sneaked back to Melbourne. But Brian Murphy (a well-known police identity) found us at Oak Park and kicked in the door. Frank Galbally got Les off, but there was an appeal and the second time he was sent to Beechworth prison.'

In another incident, Les was stabbed in a vicious hotel fight. Judi recalls it this way: ‘A bloke stabbed Les in a pub in Port Melbourne. Les turned around and the bloke stabbed him three times, once in the bottom of the heart.

‘“I went to throw a punch,” he told me later, “and collapsed.” Les's mates drove him to St Vincent's, to the emergency, and he told them to leave him outside on the footpath. They (hospital
staff) came out and got him. Brian Murphy (the detective) went and saw him in hospital but Les wouldn't say who'd stabbed him. That was the code. But Brian (Kane) went around to the bloke's house later with a shotgun. The bloke came to the door with his wife in front of him and said there were kids in the house. Brian let a few shots go and left. But I think they caught up with him later.'

The stabber was Cornelius Robert Irwin, but the police didn't know that for some time. Les was in no mood to tell them. Not only had he been stabbed but he was also on the run, having failed to attend court on earlier serious assault charges. When Brian Murphy arrived, Kane's father allegedly offered him $5000 to look the other way. But ‘Skull' Murphy declined the offer, identified the glowering victim as Les Kane and the assault warrant was served on him in his hospital bed. Being stabbed in the chest three times can slow you down – but in Kane's case, not for long.

The starkest example of Les Kane's violent streak was the brutal bashing of a young sailor and his mate after a ‘road rage' incident.

It happened 5 July 1975, when Kane was in the passenger seat of a car driven by another painter and docker, Peter Aloysius Howard, and they were cut off in Flemington Road by a car driven by a naval rating.

The official story is that Kane and his mate gave chase along the Tullamarine freeway, side-swiping the sailor's car and forcing it off the road near the Glenroy exit.

Not in dispute is that Kane used a panel-beating hammer to inflict fifteen separate fractures to the man's skull, leaving him more dead than alive. His fellow painter and docker, meanwhile, took to the passenger, a clerk from Broadmeadows, punching him to the ground and then kicking him.

By coincidence, the beaten clerk's surname was Prendergast – a name that would later feature heavily in Kane's life and death.

One of the arresting police from the road rage incident said later: ‘Les was the most feared man in the underworld and the most violent bloke I have ever come across. He was smooth and charming and then he would snap.'

He said that at the line-up Kane stood passively – until he was identified. ‘Then he jumped from the line and physically threatened the witness. He was surrounded by police but he just didn't care.'

Later, when Kane had calmed down, a detective told him he was an idiot. ‘I said, “You make a fortune from standing over crooks and from ghosted wages and you never got caught. Then you get involved in this sort of shit. It just doesn't make sense”.

‘He just smiled. He knew I was right but he was never going to change.

‘If he could have controlled his violent streak he would have ended up a rich man. But leopards don't change their spots and the Kanes couldn't change their mean streaks.'

A lifetime later, Judi Kane would probably agree with the thrust of the policeman's thoughts, but she tells the version of the story that the painters and dockers' favourite lawyer, the legendary ‘Mr Frank' Galbally, used to fight the charge in court.

‘Les and his workmate Peter were coming home after work after having a beer at the Ivanhoe Hotel in Collingwood. Peter was a lovely bloke and never in any trouble. His wife was a nurse and they had five kids. He drove an old FC Holden wagon, which was slow. Peter was older than Les, and wearing his glasses. It was about 8 o'clock at night, and the seats in the old car were worn-out and low so Peter and Les looked small and old. Along come these hoons in a car and start yelling at them to “Get off the road, you old bloke!” They supposedly threw a can at the FC. Les
got Peter to roll down the window and he spoke to them. Then they stopped ahead and waited. Les said ‘pull over' to Peter. He grabbed a hammer and battered two of them unconscious. He nearly killed them. I saw the (police) photographs later.

‘Peter had put his glasses in their case on the roof of the car. When they drove off, the case fell on the road. It had Peter's name and address on it. That's how the coppers knew who to look for. Next night the police came for Les.'

The case was beyond even Galbally's powers of persuasion. On 1 November 1976, Kane was sentenced to five years prison with a minimum of three and a half for wounding with intent. His mate Howard got six months for assault.

The constant threat of violence eventually became too much for Judi. Once, Les fired shots over her head, trying to ‘ping' some new enemy he'd made in yet another pub in Port Melbourne. It got so she didn't want to go out with him because he had too many fights that would end in bashings or shootings.

‘I was living with the most violent man in Australia,' she admits. ‘All his convictions were for assault … He'd done a total of seven years for assault before I met him. He'd say to me he was the skinny bloke on the beach and that there was always someone who wanted to kick sand in his face.'

Those who followed in the Kanes' violent footsteps years later failed to learn the lessons of history.

Another gangster with a short fuse who liked to show how tough he was by terrorising weaker people was Jason Moran – who would be gunned down in June 2003.

In the late 1990s, Moran was cut off while driving along Punt Road. In the car with him was Russell Warren Smith, who later described how Moran had grabbed a wheel brace, smashed the other motorist's windscreen, dragged him from the car and beat him severely. No one stopped to help.

‘Jason got back in the car and was laughing,' Smith said later.

Moran's actions were so similar to Les Kane's you would think they were related by blood. Close – but no cigar. Moran was Les Kane's son-in-law: he married Trish, Kane's daughter by his first wife, Pat.

In between court appearances, jail and the docks, Kane built a reputation as an underworld hard man. He wasn't the only one.

Raymond Patrick Bennett, also known to many by his boyhood name of Ray Chuck, was tough, cool and violent. ‘He was more professional than Kane. He was less likely to fly off the handle and better with a gun. You could talk to him and you knew he meant what he said,' one policeman recalled of Bennett.

While the Kanes liked to take a percentage of other gangsters' work, according to police, Bennett was the independent type who preferred to set up his own jobs.

The Kanes and Bennett's crew had known each other for years and had co-existed well enough until there was a fatal clash of greed, power and ego.

As Judi Kane was to recall: ‘Brian and Les would kill you. They got sick of it in the end but unfortunately they reaped what they sowed.'

TRAVEL broadens the mind. Ray Chuck, later known as Bennett, the kid from Chiltern in north-east Victoria, had moved to Collingwood as a teenager. By the time he was a fully-grown bank robber and gunman, his horizons had broadened.

While the remorseless Kane brothers dominated their hometown, the restless Bennett moved on. In the mid-1970s he went to Europe for a working holiday. Like many ‘good crooks' from Sydney and Melbourne, Bennett and his great mate Brian O'Callaghan joined the notorious, ‘Kangaroo Gang' that robbed jewellery stores and other ripe targets in the UK and on the Continent.

For Bennett, his criminal ventures overseas were like a finishing school: he learned new techniques to try back in Australia. By the time he was ready to fly home he had virtually completed a master's degree in world's best practice stick-ups. It was as if he had compiled a ‘robber's rulebook' – a how-to guide for what the English called armed ‘blags'.

He was particularly impressed with the Wembley Mob – a gang of East London crooks who carried out at least a dozen major armed robberies over four years. Their methods involved meticulous planning, gathering intelligence through cultivating insiders, specialised training, recruiting a close-knit team that wouldn't break ranks and devising schemes to launder funds. (Ironically, they were brought down when a key member turned into a ‘supergrass'.)

No one knew it at the time but the first clue that Bennett was planning a triumphant return to the armed robbery business in Melbourne was when he was spied by an alert policeman in the Moonee Ponds area one day in late 1975. It turned out that he was on a flying visit – literally. He had flown in for a few days to scout the scene while on pre-release leave from prison on the Isle of Wight. He then flew back to finish his sentence – and plot his big move.

When Bennett returned again he was ready to execute the job that other armed robbers, including James Edward ‘Jockey' Smith, had reputedly considered but decided was too risky.

Bennett recruited a team of nine for the Bookie Robbery and all of them had specific jobs, including organising stolen cars, checking the escape route, setting up laundering methods, organising guns and cultivating an inside source.

The team was said to include Vincent Mikkelsen, Laurie Prendergast, Ian Revell Carroll, Anthony Paul McNamara, Dennis William Smith, Normie Lee and two brothers who had done plenty of stick-ups.

Bennett also consulted an outsider, a time and motion expert with no criminal record who had helped plan armed robberies in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth.

The team was broken into an assault group of six with a backup unit of three.

Bennett took the crew on a mini commando course in the bush in central Victoria, ruling that there would be no drinking and no women. To the team that was more a guideline than a rule and, as footballers and soldiers have done in similar situations, they broke out of boot camp to ‘play up' at a nearby town.

The target was the Victorian Club, then in Queen Street, where bookies settled after race day. Bennett chose the date – 21 April 1976 – the first settling day after Easter. He knew the bookies would be settling not for one, but three race meetings. Some suggest that an old bookmaker had pointed out this tempting target, later described by a senior policeman as ‘an over-ripe plum waiting to be picked.'

Police were later told the team had a dry run in the deserted building during the Easter break. When the time came for the real thing, the gang, armed with sub-machine guns, made their move on the bookies. All went to plan – or nearly. One security guard bravely but unwisely went for his .38 revolver and was smashed to the floor with a gun butt.

Normally, three members of the police Consorting Squad would turn up at lunchtime on settling day to act as extra security. But on the day of the robbery, the ‘consorters' were ordered to Frankston by a senior officer on what would turn out to be a wild goose chase. Some in the squad still believe that Ray Bennett had the senior officer in his pocket and that he had deliberately nobbled the squad with the bogus Frankston job to make it easy for the robbery team to pull off the robbery unopposed. In any case, it probably prevented a gun battle that could have ended in a bloodbath.

After the money was delivered to settle for 116 bookmakers, the gang took just eleven minutes to commit the robbery.

They grabbed 118 calico bags filled with cash. The total stolen will never be known. The official amount was declared at $1.4 million, although wild guesses that it might have been more than $10 million have been thrown around because of unrecorded cash bets made ‘on the nod' with trusted punters. Those most likely to know, bookies in the building that day, privately suggest the total was perhaps up to $2 million, still a staggering sum at a time when a house (now worth $2 million) could be bought then for $50,000.

There are two theories on what happened to the money. One was that the gang had rented an office in the same building and hid the cash there for weeks. The other, accepted by the police, was that the money was put in a stolen laundry van and driven away by Dennis ‘Greedy' Smith.

The van was well-chosen, as the cash was delivered to people who laundered it as part of the master plan. Some was laundered through a female real estate agent in Sydney who bought property in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Some was sent to Manila via Canada and was used there to set up Smith's vice club, the Aussie Bar, later used as an offshore safe house by gangsters from Melbourne and Sydney. More of the cash was laundered through bent lawyers' trust accounts.

Shortly after the robbery, Bennett's mother collapsed in a lawyer's office with a fatal heart attack. When ambulance officers removed her outer clothes in a frantic effort to revive her, they found $90,000 cash in her undergarments. She had discovered that you can have too much of a good thing – that while thermal underwear is one thing, several kilograms of hot banknotes is not what the doctor ordered.

Normie Lee, one of the conspirators, was like a brother to Ray Bennett and he promised him he would never talk to police. He
was as good as his word. One of the key money men, Lee once took $60,000 to his lawyers in a plastic garbage bag, which was more comfortable than trying to hide it in his jocks and socks. But though police had good reasons to suspect the inscrutable Lee, they could never get him to say anything.

Lee was eventually charged with receiving $110,000 of the proceeds of the bookie robbery. Police claimed he used his share to buy new equipment for his dim sim factory.

Detectives seized his office safe but he refused to give them the keys to open it. Even when they took the safe to the Russell Street police quadrangle and hired a safe expert to cut it open, he stayed silent. So the expert fired up the ‘oxy' torch and destroyed the safe to get it open. It was empty. But Lee had not said a word or offered a key to save it.