A Tale of Two Cities (24 page)

For years he had collected money from illegal gambling in Chinatown and he had a slice of Melbourne's biggest and busiest two-up school and was a regular at various illegal gambling venues in Carlton as well as collecting debts for SP bookmakers.

But there was another steady and more lucrative source of income. For as long as anyone could remember, ‘ghost' payments had been made on the Melbourne waterfront. Workers who did not exist were listed as dockies and wages were paid in their names – effectively as a bribe in return for industrial peace.

Unlike armed robberies and standover rackets, it was a regular, safe stream of cash. Police were too busy dealing with violent crime to worry about the rorts on the docks and the employers didn't complain because a dock strike was more expensive than ghosted wages. It was part of the overhead expenses that made Australian ports among the most notorious in the world.

It took the Costigan Royal Commission into the Painters and Dockers Union to expose the practice as part of a complex, interconnected web of organised crime that included the lucrative bottom-of-the-harbor tax scheme and a string of unsolved murders.

Frank Costigan, QC, listed the murders of the Kanes, Bennett and McLeod as connected to dockland activity without publicly identifying a motive.

He declared Bennett to be a hit man: ‘Bennett was believed to have been a person who murdered on the payment of money.'

According to one investigator from the time, ‘The new breed came in and the bad blood was over the percentage of the ghosting down the wharves. There was always a percentage of wages paid to phantom workers on the wharf and the Kanes controlled it and divvied it out. It was big business and linked to organised crime.'

According to fellow standover man Mark Brandon Read, ‘Brian was a violent, cunning criminal who had the bulk of the criminal world and the waterfront bluffed, beaten and baffled.'

He once sat in a coffee shop with a policeman who had earned a national fearsome reputation. An underworld figure recalls: ‘The copper said, “If you look under the table there is a .38 pointed directly at your guts.” Brian just smiled and said, “There's a .45 pointing at your knackers”.'

So Kane was tough. But a man like Bennett wasn't easily frightened, either. He also had a reputation and, like the Kanes, was well connected in the Painters and Dockers. He was not going to pull off one of Australia's biggest crimes and then hand over the profits.

Brooding dislike had erupted into bloodshed after Kane came off second best in a brawl in a Richmond hotel from one of Bennett's mates, leaving him without part of his left ear.

Brian Kane's brother, Les, vowed revenge. ‘Brian was dangerous but measured. Les was a psychopath,' said a Melbourne underworld figure, voicing a widespread opinion.

Bennett, the man they called ‘The General', reasoned that he couldn't reason with Les Kane and decided to hit first.

When Bennett, Prendergast and Mikkelsen were acquitted of Les's murder, big brother Brian became obsessed with a pay-back.

He saw Mikkelsen's barrister at a nightclub after the acquittal and told him he was ‘going to cut your client's head off and leave it on your front door step.'

Another time when he found the lawyer in a bar he pulled a gun on him as a reminder that not all was forgiven. One of Kane's best friends, Graham ‘The Munster' Kinniburgh, knocked the gun out of his hand. After Brian's death ‘The Munster' began to associate with colourful characters such as Alphonse Gangitano
(shot dead in 1998) and Mick Gatto. Gangitano had hero-worshipped Brian Kane and did his best to take over his mantle as Melbourne's premier standover man.

It was said that Kinniburgh, a master safebreaker and professional burglar among other interests, had business as well as social links with Gatto.

Kinniburgh was to excel in his role as underworld peacemaker until he was shot dead in December 2003. But that was half a lifetime later.

Kane's moment of vengeance came in November 1979 when Ray Bennett was shot dead in the City Court while being escorted by police to an armed robbery committal hearing.

Brian Kane was the man who killed Bennett, although it has become part of underworld folklore that he had a little unofficial assistance along the way from rogue police with their own reasons to side with him.

While Kane was desperate to avenge his brother's death he remained a reluctant gunman. According to one notable underworld source, Brian Kane hated firing guns. He usually carried one and was known to have pistol-whipped a man into a coma, and would insert the barrel into a victim's ear and twist it, but he wasn't a great one for pulling the trigger. Kane kept a low profile after Bennett was murdered but Ray had been popular in some circles and Kane knew he was living dangerously.

The harsh economic fact of life was that Kane could not afford to disappear for long. A close woman friend of his has told the authors that he and his younger brother, Ray ‘Muscles' Kane, flew to Perth to cool off straight after the Bennett hit. But he was Melbourne bred – and that's where the bread was. Standover men can't work by sending stern letters of demand: they have to turn up in person sooner or later.

Men like Kane made a living by appearing to be bulletproof even when they knew they weren't.

Kane was a professional, so he suspected it was only a matter of time. The Painters and Dockers motto, ‘We catch and kill our own', meant that enemies would wait years before they grabbed their moment.

But Kane was not without friends – and some of them were in influential positions in the CIB. In fact, when the gangland war broke out a core of experienced detectives decided to back the Kanes against the new breed led by Bennett.

As one detective, now retired, explained, ‘The centre of the older style criminals was in the streets of Richmond before it became trendy and the Kanes were entrenched in the area.

‘These people who came along lived in the spacious newer developments around Keilor.

‘In those days Bennett's house was one of the first to have video surveillance. The older crims didn't have that sort of thing because they knew that enemies wouldn't come to your home. When Les Kane was gunned down in the bathroom of his own home with his wife and kids there it changed everything. It was a horrific event to kill a man in front of his wife and kids and then take him away and deprive the family the right to bury their own. That man and his car have never been found to this day.

‘There was a massive division among the criminals. The older crooks took the side of the Kanes and the young dashing criminals took the side of the Bennett group. People in nightclubs were challenged to take a side. At times people were declaring their loyalty to both sides.

‘We felt that it was about to get fully out of control with shootings in the streets. If they were prepared to machine gun a bloke in front of his family we thought that all the rules were out the window.

‘We decided to stick with the Kanes, not because we liked them but because the established older style criminals were
predictable. They had rules – they caught and killed their own; they looked after their own.

‘I had many dealings with Brian Kane. He was an enormous source of intelligence to me; not that he was informing, he was feeding me intelligence he wanted me to know and I was feeding him information to try and keep him alive.

‘After the death of his brother he kept very much to himself and trusted no-one. I was told that I had to do whatever I could, within reason, to keep that man alive.

‘He would say when he had been followed by a car and I would have it checked to see if it was a police surveillance unit. If it was, he wasn't worried.

‘Brian was only concerned with staying alive and avenging the murder of his brother.

‘After he killed Bennett – Kane kept on the move. Brian never kept appointments, he was very elusive,' the former policeman said.

He could have moved interstate, or he could have used his waterside connections to disappear overseas. But the former amateur boxer did not build his fearsome reputation by running away.

He did, however, use all the lessons he'd learned in the ring: to avoid being hit was as important as landing a punch. More so when guns came into play.

Brian's widowed sister-in-law, Judi, was one of the few people he trusted after Les's murder in 1978. But proof of how close he played to his chest was that even she was not told everything, just in case. She knew it was not so much to protect him but his estranged wife Robyn and his three children.

Robyn had finally kicked Brian out of their Camberwell home – near St Dominic's Catholic Church – after Les's murder. It was too nerve-wracking to live with a man who was, it stood to reason, next on the hit list.

‘None of us knew where Brian lived,' Judi told the authors. ‘He was very paranoid for good reason. He used to visit me and the kids in Balwyn, maybe once a week after Les was killed.'

Once, when Brian had been living away from the family home in Camberwell to draw the heat away, his wife Robyn invited Judi and her children to visit her on the quiet – that is, without Brian knowing. Before that Judi's two kids had often asked about visiting their Aunty Robyn and their cousins and he'd joked: ‘No, you can't because there's a moat with crocodiles in it!' But after visiting their cousins' house, the kids knew better. So next time Brian came to visit the kids said, ‘There is not a moat with crocodiles,' and Judi had to admit they'd been there.

It was a humorous take on a deadly serious situation. Kane was engaged in a war of nerves with men who wanted to kill him before he killed them.

After he left home, he struck up a close relationship with an attractive divorcee called Fran Kear, who was later able to give the authors an insight into the soft side and secret fears of the hard man.

Another policeman remembers seeing him in The Galaxy nightclub. ‘He gave me a false name and when I said I knew he was Brian Kane he wanted a fight. I told him to settle down. In the end, I could talk to him but if you asked the wrong question he would just stare through you and say nothing.

‘Les was more volatile but Brian was more respected. He would help out local football clubs and loved Father Brosnan. He would always give him some cash because the old Father loved a punt.'

Brian Kane was more cunning than his volatile brother, Les, but just as dangerous. While Les was often before the courts for crimes of violence, Brian's criminal record was modest. In 1972 he was fined $30 for hindering police and he had a few early convictions for stealing and assaults.

He was considered one of the most influential men in Melbourne's underworld for years – but he wasn't the only crook with a gun and a ruthless streak.

He knew someone would be coming for him eventually. Three years later, they did.

FOR Brian Kane it was a day like any other. He had his worries but one of them was not having to do regular work. On Friday 26 November 1982, he was looking forward to a long lunch.

At 40 the former boxer might have been beginning to slow down a bit. But photographs taken of him only a few days before show that he was in good shape – and still a man to be reckoned with.

He met a mate, Sandra Walsh, at a coffee shop in Grattan Street, Carlton, and then they went for lunch in nearby Lygon Street.

Around 4.15 pm the pair left the restaurant for some fresh air and some shopping. Kane liked to make sure he was seen in the Lygon Street strip. It was good for business to be spotted there regularly, as his standover beat included the illegal gambling spots hidden above the popular restaurants and cafes.

Brian became bored and stopped off for a quick haircut before the couple headed to the Tramway Hotel in Fitzroy for a few gin and tonics.

Around 8.30 pm they moved on to the Quarry Hotel in the northern stretch of Lygon Street, in Brunswick. It was a semi-regular drinking spot for Kane, who was popular at the pub. He was the first to chat to anyone in the hotel and the first to put his hand in his pocket for a raffle. He could afford to.

‘He was really well liked and made the effort to portray an image as a good guy gangster,' one detective said.

He spoke to an older woman in the lounge, asking how the television he had bought her was working. Then he bought a round of half gin and tonics before settling in next to the jukebox.

Police believe the gunmen knew they would find Kane at the Quarry. Whether they were tipped off that day where he would be or whether they had been told the hotel was one of his regulars is not known.

Earlier, a mutual friend had borrowed Sandra's distinctive V12 Jaguar and Brian told him to drop it back at the Quarry after 8pm.

Anyone looking for Kane would have been able to spot the big Jag outside the pub. And the people hunting him were experts at picking their moment.

As Kane sat down with Sandra and another associate, Trevor Russell, two men wearing balaclavas burst in and began firing from .38 snub-nosed revolvers – the same type of weapon Kane used to kill Bennett in the City Court three years earlier.

Kane leapt to his feet, tipping over the table and pushing Sandra Walsh down as he did so.

Legend has it that as the first shot hit Kane, he was diving for his gun hidden in Sandra's handbag. (Because he could be jailed for carrying an illegal pistol, he regularly used women to ‘carry' for him.)

He didn't make it. He was shot in the head and chest at point blank range.

Sandra Walsh told friends later that the table was obscuring her vision when the two shots went off next to her. She thought to herself, ‘That's Brian and that's Trevor – I'm next.' But she was wrong. Both shots were meant for Kane. She cradled the dying man while Russell bolted through the hotel kitchen.

Police said that when they arrived Sandra was yelling: ‘He's been shot, he's been shot. Do you know who he is? Do you? It's
Brian Kane.' Asked what had happened she said, ‘He was shot and that's all I'm saying.'