A Tale of Two Cities (29 page)

They were on the move.

As Denning took off an armed robbery squad car, driven by Paul Mullet, drove straight at the station wagon then stopped, just kissing the front bumper. But to be kissed by this Fish did not involve a quick release.

His passenger, Ken Ashworth, later to win a Churchill Fellowship, jumped on the bonnet of Denning's car and pointed a loaded shotgun at the driver. The escapee quickly realised that the gig – and his hands – was up.

But Cox had spent more than a decade on the run because he could slip through doors just before they shut.

He drove straight at detectives while brandishing a dark-coloured revolver. Police opened fire, yelling, ‘He's got a gun!'.

Members of the armed robbery squad in the 1980s were famous for many things, such as bravery and the capacity for marathon lunches. One detective even had the ability to sing the
Robin Hood
theme song backwards. But subtlety was not among their many talents.

What occurred next was more fitting to a John Wayne movie than a staid suburban shopping centre.

Police on foot and in cars chased the suspect, who continued to wave a gun. He drove to the edge of the carpark until he saw there was no exit, then threw a U-turn and drove straight back into what must have appeared to be the Guns of Navarone.

The ‘robbers' and local police began to fire – sending more than 80 slugs from handguns and shotguns in his direction and peppering the car. The handgun shots bounced off the wind-screen until Cox drove directly at them – then Ashworth blasted it out with a shotgun.

Cox's car hit another vehicle and smashed head-on into a wall. But Cox was still armed and ready to chance his luck until Ashworth fired another shot into the passenger door. Only then did Cox concede his eleven years on the run was over.

Miraculously, despite the hail of lead, Cox was left with just a slight nick to an eyebrow caused by a glass fragment. All the shots had missed him.

Over the following few days, police were to receive reports from people whose cars had been parked in the shopping centre inquiring how their vehicles ended up with ‘shrapnel' damage.

Dave Brodie was one of the armed robbery squad that day. He joined the police force in 1977, around the time Cox became Australia's most wanted man. ‘I always thought it would be fantastic to catch him one day.'

But when the man in the black hat was arrested, no-one knew who he was. ‘He just said, “You blokes will jump through hoops when you know who I am.”'.

When they checked the cars, police knew they were dealing with a serious crew. In the Ford they found gloves, binoculars, beanies, three sawn-off semi-automatic rifles and shotgun cartridges.

In the wagon they found maps, bullets and a motor vehicle lock pick, a revolver, hair dye and a manual for a hand-held police scanner.

It would have appeared the visitors weren't there for the Myer winter sale.

Detectives took the mystery man back and it was only fingerprints that established they had arrested Russell Cox.

Cox remained staunch and refused to answer questions but he sportingly posed with members of the armed robbery squad for a team snap. The big-game hunters wanted a record of catching the biggest name in Australian crime.

But most of the pictures were stolen when the police photographer's car was burgled the same night.

While Cox refused to talk, Denning – who had escaped while serving a life sentence for escape, malicious wounding and armed robbery – opened up.

‘He said they were following the van “for fun” and had no intention of robbing it – at least not then.' Brodie said.

Denning was a cult figure in New South Wales and was seen as a latter day bushranger. So it was a surprise when he became a police informer.

When Denning gave evidence in New South Wales, a man in the gallery threw a bone towards him yelling: ‘You forgot your lunch, Denning – here it is.'

Cox and Denning fell out after another armed robber, Graeme Jensen, was killed by police in October 1988. Jensen was killed when police botched an attempt to arrest him over the murder of security guard Dominic Hefti in a robbery. The trouble was, Jensen didn't do it.

According to Denning, Cox was happy that Jensen was killed, believing the Hefti murder would be wrongly pinned on the dead man.

Denning then decided to talk and he had plenty to say. He listed armed robberies and other crimes he knew Cox had committed.

‘Russell Cox told me that this murder and armed robbery committed on Dominic Hefti had been done so by himself with Sam Mercuri and a person named Mark Moran.'

He said that after Mercuri was wounded, Cox planned to kidnap a doctor to tend to his mate. ‘Mark then said that wasn't a very good idea and Russell was dirty on him for that.'

According to Denning, Cox acted as a crime mentor to Mark and Jason Moran. He said Cox showed them how to build secret compartments after he went to Jason's flat and saw two kilos of speed sitting in a normal drawer. ‘Russell told me that he has given Mark and Jason advice in relation to drugs, money, guns and all that in secret compartments.'

Denning said one of the reasons Cox's mail on armed robberies was always right was that he had inherited a security guard contact from Ray Bennett. He paid the guard ten percent for information and once gave him a video player as a bonus.

But the close connection with Bennett was obviously a problem as the Morans were linked to the Kanes through friendship, business and marriage. The tension would have been somewhat greater because it was suspected that Cox almost certainly killed Brian Kane in the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick in 1982.

‘Mark's father wasn't to know that Mark was working with Russell because Mark's father had been close to the Kanes over the years,' Denning told police.

According to Denning, Mercuri and Moran turned on Helen Deane when Cox was jailed. ‘Sam Mercuri and Mark terrorised
her and drugged her, trying to find out information as to where he had money buried.'

He finished his statement saying, ‘I realise that I am in great danger of being killed by any number of persons through what I have informed to the police.'

He was right.

Denning received a shortened jail term in exchange for his cooperation but died of a drug overdose in 1999 that many believe was a hotshot. He died only days before he was to give evidence against Cox.

After Cox was arrested, police found a card for a lawn mowing service and through it tracked the gardener's client list to a property in Bowen Road, East Doncaster.

In January 1988 Cox rented the house directly from the owner under the name Peter John Roberts.

Police found a false cupboard in the laundry, disguises, dustcoats with pens in the pockets, notes on movements of armoured car deliveries, a fake plaster cast for an arm and a list of coded phone numbers. The list was given to ASIO but its experts could not crack the Cox code.

Cox had even cut off the tags on his clothes so that if he had to abandon his safe house police would not be able to work out where he shopped.

Police also found a grappling hook with a rope attached and a rowing machine.

But it took police ten days to find his house and the secret storage cupboard was empty.

But the most sinister find was a single page from a telephone book with one name underlined. It was the name of a woman who had inadvertently been involved in the armed robbery in which the security guard Dominic Hefti had been killed.

Just eleven days before Cox's arrest he had led the team of bandits who jumped two armed guards carrying a cash tin from a Coles Warehouse in Barkly Square, Brunswick.

In the struggle, Hefti was shot in the chest and the leg. He died two days later at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

But Hefti had managed to fire a shot, hitting one of the bandits, Santo Mercuri, in the hand. Cox and his team, including Mark Moran, fled with $33,000.

The bleeding Mercuri commandeered a car from a woman and drove away, eventually making his way to Cox's East Doncaster home, where Helen Deane tended his wound.

The phone book address found at the house was for the woman whose car Mercuri had stolen. Denning later told police, ‘It was decided … that they try to find her home address and knock her because she was the only one that Sam believed had identified him.'

When Cox was caught Deane and Mercuri saw the police helicopter above the shopping centre and fled. A policeman's mother, who lived across the road, later identified both suspects as having been tenants in the house.

Hefti's murder sparked a spate of killings. Police wrongly believed that armed robber Graeme Jensen was responsible and he was shot during a seemingly clumsy attempt to arrest him on 11 October 1988.

The following day two young uniformed police, Constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, were murdered in Walsh Street, South Yarra, as a payback by criminals who believed the armed robbery squad was shooting to kill.

Much later, Ken Ashworth would be assigned to investigate the Hefti murder and he used groundbreaking DNA technology to link Mercuri to the crime. Mercuri, 47, pleaded not guilty to murder and armed robbery but the DNA and X-ray material was
overwhelming. He was sentenced to 25 years with a minimum of twenty. He died in jail in 2000.

Before he became a robber, Mercuri was an outstanding sausage maker. Perhaps he would have been better sticking to small-goods than small arms.

In September 1982, Helen Deane and Russell Cox were invited to a family wedding by Mercuri. A photo taken at the reception shows a smiling Mercuri and Deane. But between them is an empty chair. Even at weddings Cox preferred to be invisible.

After his arrest Cox was charged with a number of offences, including the murder of Carroll but he beat that charge on grounds of self-defence.

At one of his first hearings, police noticed a demure looking woman in the public gallery. It was Helen Deane. They later found out she was armed with a pen pistol.

Cox was never convicted over the many armed robberies he pulled in Queensland (six between 1978 and 1983), the jobs he organised in Victoria nor the three murders he was said to have committed. He was extradited to New South Wales, where a judge found that Katingal was not a gazetted prison and so he beat the escape charge. His initial life sentence for an earlier escape bid and shooting at guards was reduced to a 29-year minimum but the 11 years on the run were included.

Ashworth went to visit him in the hope he would finally talk. ‘He just put one hand up and said, “I've got nothing to say,” and then he walked away.'

While in prison he was a polite loner who was popular with inmates and prison guards.

He studied at Grafton TAFE and passed courses in computer studies, numeracy, literacy and youth work and first aid. He was awarded a certificate in hospitality and studied food and nutrition. He became a qualified fitness trainer and boxing coach.

The circle was completed when prison guards pushed for his release, believing him to be fully reformed.

Cox had been a ruthless gunman and a violent man. He terrorised payroll and bank staff and was a killer. But ultimately his coolness, his professionalism and his refusal to turn on others won him the respect of police, prison officers and the underworld.

When he was released from prison in 2004, the loyal Helen Deane was waiting. The crook had finally made her an honest woman and they had married while he was still inside jail.

They refused offers of interviews, turned their backs on celebrity gangster status and disappeared to Northern Queensland.

Police believe they are living a quiet life near the beach – probably on what was left of the money dug up from Mt Martha that had been hidden inside a home-brew barrel.

Who says crime doesn't pay?

FLANNERY APPEARS, ROGER WILSON DISAPPEARS

The career criminals could have been mistaken for detectives in their work suits, which is exactly what they wanted.

 

THEY called him ‘Rentakill' and he loved it. Christopher Dale Flannery was always one to believe in the value of advertising. For a while, it worked. But ultimately his reputation would get him killed in a business where publicity is a double-edged sword.

Well before it was fashionable, Flannery began to work from home, involved his wife in their growing cottage industry and grasped niche marketing by adapting the snappy brand name that stuck in people's heads – sometimes along with a bullet or a baseball bat.

For $10,000 he would bash a stranger badly enough that the victim needed hospitalisation. For $50,000 (sometimes less) he would kill – and as part of the deal – dispose of the body.

Flannery was born in Melbourne's Queen Victoria Hospital on 15 March 1949, the youngest of three children of Edward and Noelle Mary Flannery. But Edward senior walked out when Chris was still in nappies. Noelle divorced him on the grounds he beat
her. The youngster vowed he would never see his father again and he kept his word. But he loved the rest of his family and even after he became a paid killer he would ring his mum every fortnight and send her a card on Mother's Day. He apparently couldn't see the irony that he left many mothers without their loved ones. He did once say if the price was right he would kill his own mother, but he was joking – probably.

As a schoolboy, Flannery was a champion swimmer who made under-age Victorian finals. Thirty years later his swimming ability couldn't help him when his body was allegedly dumped into the sea.

It would be just one theory. There would be many but they all shared one element: that he died violently at the hands of men he knew.

He went to five schools before leaving at the earliest opportunity at age fourteen. What young Chris wanted to learn they didn't teach in class. His elder brother, Ed, became a successful lawyer and his sister became a schoolteacher. Ed died in Melbourne at a young age from cancer. Chris also died relatively young, but more suddenly.