A Tale of Two Cities (20 page)

Police weren't the only ones looking for the bookie robbers. One crew made contact with the insurance company wanting a reward for ‘shopping' the bandits. And the bookie robbers reputedly received the undivided attention of the Sydney ‘Toecutters', so named because they would torture fellow criminals until they gave up their stash of cash. And police believe that the Kanes wanted a share, although this is disputed in some quarters.

As part of his planning, the canny Bennett had instructed his men to keep a low profile and not to splash cash around after the robbery in a way that would attract attention. But a chance remark during the robbery put them in the frame – and under the gun. When the masked men ordered all 31 present in the club to lie face down, one masked gunman said to the then well-known boxing trainer Ambrose Palmer, ‘You too, Ambrose.'

The robber instantly regretted his half-friendly throwaway line. He had once trained at Palmer's gymnasium (as did world champion Johnny Famechon) and knew the old man might recognise his voice. Palmer naturally forgot to mention this to police, the story goes, but accidentally let slip the robber's identity
to people connected with the Kane brothers and other painters and dockers, who were well known in boxing circles. Word soon got around, and members of Bennett's gang became targets for opportunists who wanted a share of the bookies' cash.

It was an ideal scenario for gang warfare. And that war was declared in a Richmond hotel in mid-1978, when Vincent Mikkelsen – a friend of Bennett's and once a friend of Les Kane – refused a drink from Brian Kane and tossed out an insult about not drinking with ‘old men'. That was bad enough, but Mikkelsen committed an even graver social indiscretion by biting off part of Brian Kane's ear in the resulting fight.

Both men were so injured in the brawl they needed hospital treatment but the damage to Brian Kane's ear was a daily reminder that he had been successfully challenged as the toughest man on the block.

Musing much later about Kane's reaction to his humiliating disfigurement, Bennett's lawyer Joe Gullaci (later a respected judge) said: ‘It's hard to be the number one standover man in town when you've got a piece bitten out of your ear.'

That mouthful of ear was eventually to give Melbourne's underworld heartburn and put the wind up the police force. But all Brian Kane knew then was that it was bad for his reputation – and that wasn't good for business, let alone his ego.

Mikkelsen came to expect massive retaliation. Bennett suggested Mikkelsen's life be spared, and was warned: ‘If you stick your head in, it will be blown off.' If war had not been formally declared before that, now it was on. And there was no Geneva Convention.

JUST four years earlier, when Les had been in jail at Beechworth for shooting the off-duty policeman in the foot at the Croxton Park Hotel, Vinnie Mikkelsen and his wife Flossie had lived in the same neighbourhood – ‘just around the corner in Broady', as Judi
Kane remembered it. If the Mikkelsens weren't close friends with Les and Judi then they were close to it. Judi was heavily pregnant with her second child, and when her waters broke she rang Vinnie Mikkelsen to help. ‘And he drove me to the Royal Women's' where she gave birth to her son. Les's parents, Reg and Alice Kane, who had moved in while Les was ‘away', stayed home to look after Judi's two-year-old daughter.

‘Four years later it had all turned nasty,' she says. She thinks the notorious fight in Richmond that led to the feud was orchestrated by Ray Bennett and his supporters to bring festering resentments to a head.

‘The night Brian had a fight at PA's, the pub in Church Street near the river, they'd been following Brian. I reckon it was a set up,' she told the authors.

‘Les and Chuck were both street fighters, and had been friends in the old days. The trouble started at a barrel behind St Ignatius in Richmond. Brian was there. He thought Chuck was arrogant – he'd been knocking people off – and Brian might have said something like, “Don't think you're going to do that to us.” Of course, he had to take up the challenge, and that's how it started, really.

‘Chuck was deep and dark, don't worry about that. Smart at what he did. We think he stewed on it. Got Vinnie on his posse, sort of thing.'

Specifically, Chuck had knocked off ‘Wingy', a painter and docker with a withered arm and what some contemporaries unsympathetically called a big mouth. Whatever the reason, it had caused him to go on the missing list – and heightened the tensions between the two camps.

AFTER most of Brian Kane's left ear went missing the threats flew on both sides. And each side knew such threats were neither
idle nor boastful. It was a case of who would get in first. Blink and you were brown bread.

Les Kane was an inner-suburban boy, well-known in Collingwood, Richmond and Port Melbourne and later moving to Broadmeadows and, ultimately, to the distant eastern suburbs to avoid his enemies.

By 1978 it was clear the Kanes and their allies – including Graham ‘The Munster' Kinniburgh, Wally Russian and the Morans – were worried about the brothers' safety. Les tried to make himself a less obvious target – moving Judi and their two young children to a nondescript unit in Wantirna in the outer eastern suburbs.

Les and Judi had lived together in a de facto relationship for years because Les, although separated, did not finalise his divorce from his first wife, Pat, until three months before marrying Judi in 1977.

Judi was widely regarded as a good woman who fell for the wrong man. She was too loyal ever to say so, but the man she loved often treated her violently. Police were told that he beat her, once hitting her so hard she needed plastic surgery to repair the smashed cheekbone.

The surgeon wrote on her cheek in large letters – ‘DO NOT TOUCH.'

It may have been a message for the nursing staff or, perhaps, a stronger one for the guilty husband with the terrible temper.

Another time he put a noose around her neck, tying the rope over a door to leave her hanging with her toes just touching the ground for an agonising ten minutes.

Finally she had enough and shortly after their marriage she took the kids and fled to Sydney. She returned a few weeks later to give the marriage another chance – ‘for the sake of the children'. It was a decision that represented the triumph of hope
over experience. As it turned out, it wasn't a wise one. They were in too deep to have any chance of living happily ever after.

THERE were two sides to Les Kane. The cunning, careful streak in him prompted him to drive to work at the docks in his overalls in a Morris mini van, so humble and unpretentious and cheap it was almost an in-joke, because anyone that mattered knew that he could (and did) afford much better wheels.

But the other side of Kane – the narcissistic big noter who wanted to be noticed and admired, with his double-header pay packets plus whatever ‘good earns' he could pick up from standover, smuggling, robbery, thieving and gambling – meant he could not and would not stay under the radar the way more prudent operators might. The Collingwood streetfighting ‘lair' in him made him a sucker for the status symbols coveted by young men who know no better.

So, despite moving swiftly and secretly one night from the western suburbs to the foreign territory of Wantirna, and trying to ‘go into smoke', Kane would not part with his loud pink Ford Futura or the purple Monaro that Judi drove. Keeping the distinctive pink Futura was probably a fatal mistake.

Although the move was for their own safety, Judi couldn't help resenting it. An accomplished netballer, she'd had to give up playing A-grade with her own team in the western suburbs. Her brother-in-law had said not to worry because she could play with a local team at Wantirna but it wasn't the same for Judi, playing with a second rate side after playing at the top level.

Life went on. Until 19 October 1978, a Thursday, when Les took his family to dinner at his sister Valetta's house about 5pm, driving the pink Ford.

When they returned just over four hours later, he backed the Ford into the driveway next to their rented three-bedroom unit on Mountain Highway.

When they got there, the family's miniature long-haired dachshund, Simon, which Les had bought for Judi in Beaudesert in Queensland, was sitting on a seat on the porch.

Judi would later say everything seemed normal – but it wasn't quite, as she would realise too late.

After Les opened the door and dropped the keys on the kitchen table, Judi picked up the dachshund and carried him down the hall. If she had put the little dog down inside, she would later tell herself, perhaps it might have ended differently. But she had no reason to, and didn't. She went to the back door and put the dog in the back yard, where he had a kennel, and never gave him a thought until later.

Judi put Justin, who was four, into bed in his room, near the front door. Les put their six-year-old daughter Martine to bed in her room and turned off the heater and lights. As Judi walked past to fetch some ironing from the hall table, Les was tucking Martine into bed.

As Judi returned with the ironing – fresh sheets to make the bed in the main bedroom – she saw Les in the bathroom, with the door open. He was using her eyebrow tweezers to pluck stray grey whiskers from his Zapata moustache. ‘So vain,' she would recall, allowing herself to relive the worst moments of her life.

She went into the main bedroom with the sheets. She turned on the light and they were there, waiting: three men, each armed with a long-barrelled firearm, silencers attached. She immediately recognised Bennett and Mikkelsen and screamed, ‘Les, look out!' She would later recall that the third man was wearing a ski-mask but it did not disguise him very well. She would later describe him in court as having blond, shoulder length hair and a fair complexion. In fact, she knew him. It was Laurie Prendergast. He grabbed her by the throat and pushed her back into her daughter's room. She instinctively lay over the little girl to protect her.

She heard her husband cry out, ‘Oh, no!' as the two gunmen forced their way into the bathroom. He knew what was coming. So did they.

The man in the bedroom was telling Judi, ‘Sh, Sh,' but she heard the barrage of muffled shots. Judi leapt up, her mother's instincts roused, forcing Prendergast back and yelling for her little boy: ‘My son!'

Ray Chuck grabbed the toddler from his room and thrust him at Judi and shut the door. Exactly 30 years later, by now a father himself, Justin would recall being carried upside down by the strange man, remember his mother's anguish on that terrible night.

‘What have you done to my dad?' six-year-old Martine yelled. The masked man Judi later identified as Prendergast, left the room and she was able to look out the door, down the hall. She saw Les's body lying on the mat near the front door. He made a groaning sound but it wasn't speech, just air escaping from his lungs.

‘I called out, “Les!” twice … As I approached his body I saw blood all over his face and hair and a pool of blood on the carpet under his head. He moaned as I called his name and this seemed to be his last breath and he was still after that.'

She saw the front door was open and hoped the killers had gone. But they returned and one of them menaced her with a gun and ordered her back into the bedroom. She tried to calm the children.

She heard the Ford's motor start, the boot slam and then … silence.

When she came out Les's body was gone and so was his car. Neither would ever be found.

The killers had torn the telephone from the wall. She didn't go to the neighbours. Why, she couldn't say later. Except maybe that Les had drummed into her that if anything happened to him
– and he often said he wouldn't make old bones – then she should go to Brian and do what Brian said. So she stuck to the staunch criminal code of the family she had married into.

She grabbed the kids and jumped into her car and drove to a telephone box. She called Les's parents and stammered her awful story and her father-in-law, Reg Kane, asked: ‘Are you being tailed?' He thought the killers might follow her to get at Brian and Ray, the surviving brothers.

Brian came to her. He was crying. He went into the house and saw the scene and came out white and shaking.

He was so sorry, he said. He didn't go to the police and neither did Judi. Not yet.

She stayed with her in-laws. Next day she returned with her brother-in-law, Valetta Kane's husband.

‘He and I cleaned the bathroom together,' she would tell the authors. ‘Well, I started to and broke down, so he had to do most of it on his own. There were brain particles and blood which covered the whole floor.

‘I saw tissue like sinews where Les's head had been lying near the front entrance.

‘I sopped or picked them up with a towel.' She used a mop and a bucket to try and clean the blood from the carpet but the stains were too hard to move.

After a few days, when it was clear that the killers had ‘gone into smoke', Brian hinted he wouldn't stand in Judi's way if she talked to the law. His reason was at least, that way, he would ‘know where they were'. The advantage of this was twofold: while the killers were in custody or attending court, they would not be hunting him. And if he knew where they would be at a given time and place, he might get the chance to ‘back up'. Honor, if not survival, demanded revenge. In the meantime, once police knew Les Kane was dead, the case was handed to the homicide squad.

It was only afterwards, when the shock and the adrenalin wore off, that a niggling detail pushed to the surface of Judi's mind: she recalled that she had left Simon the dachshund in the unit when they'd gone out for dinner that night. That meant that when they found the dog outside on their return, it was a sign that someone must have let him out. And that the intruders had put him in the deck chair, because his legs were too short for him to jump up, she thought. It was an incongruously gentle act to an animal by a man intent on murderous violence towards a former friend. But she has no doubt that's what happened.