A Tale of Two Cities (25 page)

Kane was taken to the Royal Melbourne Hospital but died on the operating table.

Typically, the homicide squad was confronted with the usual blank looks and silence from those who could have helped solve the murder. Those who didn't know, speculated. Those who did, said nothing.

There was a short list of suspects. Some were obvious while some were less so. Top of the pops were the obvious two – Vinnie Mikkelsen and Laurie Prendergast. After all, they had been charged with Bennett over the murder of Brian's brother Les and, although acquitted, no one on either side of the law thought there were other suspects for Les Kane's death. In a direct sense, Mikkelsen and Prendergast had most to gain from Brian's death. For if Brian had killed Bennett in the City Court to avenge his brother's death, it would be a fair bet he would eventually try for the hat trick by nailing the other two.

But, despite the theories, there was nothing directly linking the pair to the Quarry Hotel hit.

The head of the case was Victoria's then most experienced homicide investigator, Detective Senior Sergeant Jim Fry.

He said the obvious motive for the murder was a payback for the Bennett killing. ‘Whoever did it was either very professional or very lucky because they got away with it.'

But there were other suspects. One was hit man Christopher Dale Flannery, who was living in Sydney at the time but was a local boy, and a close friend of Prendergast so was seen as an enemy of the Kanes.

Later, when there was an attempt on Flannery's life he wrongly blamed the last of the Kane brothers, Ray, for the attack.

Certainly Flannery was responsible for killing a Kane ally, Les Cole, just two weeks before the Quarry attack but it was unlikely
that Kane's enemies would have needed to sub-contract the deal and Chris Flannery wasn't into contra deals. He was more a cash man.

The smart money has always been on two other killers. Both were calculating loners who would occasionally team up with others for a few jobs before moving on.

One was a man known as ‘The Duke', a ruthless gunman later implicated in paid hits during Melbourne's underworld war between Carl Williams and the Moran clan. He was an armed robber and rumoured contract killer. Even the hardest of underworld hard men feared The Duke.

The other was Russell Cox, who had escaped from New South Wales' maximum security Katingal Division in Sydney's Long Bay prison five years earlier.

Cox was living with Ray Bennett's wife's sister and had a vested interest in backing-up for the Magistrates' Court killing.

Bennett and Cox had teamed up to commit armed robberies in Victoria and Queensland and were loyal to each other.

Cox and The Duke were close associates in the early 1980s and were both friends of armed robber Santo Mercuri. Just three months after the Quarry Hotel hit, police received intelligence that The Duke had committed another shooting – this time in Reservoir. The report said The Duke was, ‘An associate of Sam Mercuri and believed running with Russell Cox.'

Certainly Cox and The Duke were seen chatting and having coffee in Hawthorn in the months preceding the hit.

For a major player in the underworld, Kane's estate was surprisingly modest. But that was before illegal drugs became the currency of crime.

Kane was respected, not because he was rich, but because he was tough. He was one of the last suburban gangsters – the next generation would be national and international.

Brian Kane and his generation of gunmen were fighting and killing over a dying world – dinosaurs battling at the start of the Ice Age.

They didn't know that the armed robbery and illegal gambling were rackets well past their best. Pills and powders were where the real money would be made in the future.

Gunmen would become a penny a truckload while self taught chemists who could brew a batch of speed were prized recruits.

According to Father Brosnan, Kane knew that in his line of work his enemies would eventually find him.

‘I don't think he knew he was going to die like this but he was a realistic man; he knew what was possible. The best thing about him was that he wasn't a hypocrite.'

Father Brosnan taught the three Kane boys at St John's School 25 years earlier. ‘I taught them how to fight. I didn't do a bad job, did I?'

Well, two were dead and the other would be jailed for many years so the Father's record was not up there with Angelo Dundee. One policeman said after Kane was murdered that he would ‘be no great loss.' He was wrong. There were 169 death notices placed in
The Sun
– including a handful from star footballers – in the week after his death.

Many were from women. Brian was a ladies' man as well as a man's man – once having a torrid affair with another underworld identity's wife.

Some of the death notices were placed by the men who would fill the power vacuum left by the Kane murders. Mick Gatto and Alphonse Gangitano were to pay their respects, while one notice to ‘Uncle Brian' was signed by ‘Your little mate, Jason Moran.'

ANOTHER BOOKIE ROBBER BITES THE DUST

‘Prendergast is no doubt
one of Australia's most
notorious criminals.'

 

AS a professional punter and career gunman, Laurence Joseph Prendergast must have known the odds of him living to normal retirement age were slim to none. He was right: the closest he came to a gold watch was scoring a ‘hot' one from another thief.

Police have at least three strong theories why he was murdered. But what they haven't got is a body, or a suspect, or a murder scene, or an informer, or a lead. Apart from those small problems the investigation is proceeding well – and has been for more than twenty years.

Even as a child Prendergast was bad news – and age didn't improve him. He first came to the notice of police at twelve years old when he became an apprentice housebreaker and thief working with his older brother.

Laurie was the second of nine children from a dysfunctional family that included another two stepchildren. In desperation, authorities placed him in the St Augustine orphanage for two years to try to straighten him out.

It didn't work. It was already too late.

While the young Prendergast had a good relationship with his father he said once that his alcoholic mother had beaten him for as long as he could remember.

It left him with a chip on his shoulder and a desire to square the ledger. As is often the case, those who are bullied look to bully others and young Laurie progressed quickly from fists to rocks (he was charged with throwing missiles to endanger persons when he was a child) and then to guns. He was charged with discharging a firearm from a car when still a teenager.

He went to four schools, leaving in year eight with a reputation as an average student with an above average temper.

A schoolmate remembers, ‘He was really cool and stand-offish. He only had about five or six close friends and they all ended up gangsters. He was a tough bastard and he could fight.'

Prendergast became an apprentice butcher, a storeman and a labourer and while he had held twenty jobs, few lasted more than two weeks.

His love was sport, the more violent the better. He was a good footballer, won two amateur wrestling titles and was a handy amateur boxer. But it was his expertise at using violence outside the ring that gave him his fearsome reputation.

His criminal record shows that he soon moved to sex crimes with violence. As a teenager he broke into a house where he sexually assaulted a 26-year-old woman. He was sentenced to twelve months in a youth detention centre for buggery and burglary.

But while recovering from a car accident he escaped from hospital and was on the run for another year. The accident left him with a fractured skull. The injury did not help his anger management problems.

In 1968 he was sentenced to an adult jail for rape and other offences. His partner in crime was his childhood friend, Christopher
Dale Flannery. They would live similar violent lives and would disappear in remarkably similar circumstances.

In 1974 Prendergast was sentenced in the county court to five years jail over an attempt to rob the Bank of New South Wales in Pascoe Vale. Again his partner was Flannery, who was also sentenced to jail.

By the mid-1970s Prendergast was uncontrollable. He was convicted of assaulting a prison officer and later of assaulting a policeman.

In the case where he attacked police he chose a strange place to try and get even. He was in the criminal dock as Senior Detective Kim West was giving evidence on a charge of possession of a pistol. West was a Falstaffian figure and his testimony was always entertaining – Shakespeare meets
The Bill
.

But on this occasion the detective's recollections seemed to disturb Prendergast. When the experienced policeman gave sworn evidence that Prendergast had confessed in the back of a police car, it became all too much for the highly-strung Laurie.

‘He jumped out of the dock and ran along the bar table yelling, “You are a liar. You are telling lies”,' West recalled.

Senior Detective Ian ‘Twiggy' Thomas had to tackle him. He grabbed him in a bear-hug and wrestled him from the bar table. Although he was smaller, Prendergast used his wrestling experience to swivel to face Thomas. Then he head butted and bit the startled detective on the left cheek, leaving a wound that required three stitches. It became infected; leaving a permanent reminder that dental hygiene was not high on Prendergast's lists of priorities.

As he was bundled back into his cell, Prendergast lashed out with a kick trying to make contact with West's groin. In the confusion the cell door was smashed into Prendergast's right leg – the same thigh that was still tender from where he had been shot during a failed armed robbery.

The pistol charges were dismissed but he was sentenced to four months for the assault. Clearly he had bitten off more than he could chew.

On release from jail he teamed up with the gang of armed robbers led by Ray Bennett. Police say he was one of the team that carried out the Great Bookie Robbery.

And when Bennett fell out with the Kane brothers, Laurie was quick to back up. He, Bennett and Vinnie Mikkelsen were alleged to have machine-gunned Les Kane to death in late 1978.

Prendergast knew the consequences of taking on the Kanes. Two months before the murder, he obtained a false passport after stealing the identity of an associate named Noel Robert Herity.

He was charged in December with the murder and acquitted nine months later.

His police record states that following the acquittal, ‘Prendergast has done everything he can to hide his current whereabouts. He lives in constant fear of being shot by the sole remaining brother Ray Kane or one of his associates.'

When arrested for carrying a gun he told police he needed a weapon because of the ‘vendetta with the Kane family.'

His police record states, ‘Prendergast is no doubt one of Australia's most notorious criminals.

‘(He is) considered to be a determined, persistent and cunning criminal with an intense hatred for the police or any kind of authority'.

In 1980 he was spotted in Brunswick, probably doing surveillance on a payroll delivery. He was found to be in possession of a pistol that he said he needed for protection.

When he was taken back to an interview room in the Russell Street police station he turned around and shaped up to the lone detective. Laurie's judgment was slightly flawed as he had decided to take on a policeman training for an upcoming boxing
competition. The policeman hit him twice and Laurie wanted to make friends.

‘I asked him why he wanted a fight and he said, “I just wanted to test your reflexes, no hard feelings”.'

Two months after he was acquitted of the Bennett murder he met the woman he would marry. They were an odd couple, proving that opposites attract. She worked in banks. He robbed them. Perhaps they could have driven to work together.

In May 1981 he married Ursula and they had a child, Lauren – whose godfather, police say, was Russell Cox, the notorious New South Wales escapee and gunman.

In 1982 the young family moved to the outer Melbourne suburb of Warrandyte, where they were building a new house. Even then he tried to make it difficult for enemies to find him. He chose to buy the land in the name of David Carter – one of his many aliases.

‘Once Laurie met me we stayed close as a family and tried to keep to ourselves. Laurie didn't really want me to associate with my old friends,' Ursula would tell police later.

In 1985 – seven years after Les Kane was killed, and three years after Brian Kane's murder – Prendergast remained wary. He used disguises, refused to trust strangers and stuck with an old crew of contacts he had known for years. As police said, ‘Laurence Prendergast lived in constant fear of being murdered.' It was the only way he knew to survive.

For the moment.

One of his oldest friends, Christopher Dale Flannery, was in his own underworld war in Sydney and had just become a casualty.

Flannery went missing on 9 May 1985. Some suggest Prendergast started to make noises that he would try to avenge Flannery's death.

The theory goes that Prendergast (rightly) blamed George Freeman for Flannery's death and planned to hit the Sydney crime boss.

One theory is that Freeman, a renowned race fixer, decided to fix the situation by getting in first and organising for Prendergast to go missing the way his mate Flannery had.

Certainly, many believed that Prendergast had worked with Flannery in Sydney. Former Sydney detective Roger Rogerson went as far as to claim it was Prendergast who shot undercover policeman Mick Drury in his Chatswood home on 6 June 1984.

About a week before Prendergast went missing in August 1985 his wife borrowed $6000 from a credit company and gave him the money.

She told police that although they were not financially stable, Prendergast acquired a passport in July for an overseas trip.