A Tale of Two Cities (40 page)

Later, Domican was alleged to have told an underworld heavy he saw Flannery's team parked at Bexley North Railway Station near his home and dispatched Theobold and Camilleri to try and ambush them.

Domican then went by foot and hid in some long grass. He was able to fire first, but he missed. Flannery returned fire, shooting out the back window, and began firing at the orange Ford, hitting Camilleri. When Flannery's Valiant was recovered there were bloodstains in the back seat that were never identified.

Of all those involved most won't talk because they are not so inclined or can't talk because they are dead. Except for Kath Flannery, that is. Her recollections were clear.

‘He (Chris) was looking for Domican to kill him. I think Domican was also searching for Chris to kill him … I don't think he intended to kill Domican that day because he didn't take gloves or a mask with him, as he would usually do in those circumstances, so that he wouldn't be recognised or leave fingerprints. All of a sudden, he came face to face with Domican and his group, which forced the situation on for which he hadn't planned.

‘Domican fired one shot at the car, then Chris opened fire on the orange car and that was it.

‘He was forced to act in self-defence. He thought the shots were coming from another car. The last thing he would be involved in would be shooting people in broad daylight unless forced to.'

After the shooting Flannery came home, she said.

‘Chris told me to go to the airport and hire a car because after Camilleri was shot he had to get rid of the car, the Valiant I am talking about.

‘What happened was Chris came running home and he was bleeding from the hand and he said that he had been shot and that he had shot at another car.'

After they had dumped the car, the gun and the clothes they drove back to the crime scene for a look. ‘I think the police had been there and gone by then although there were still people about.'

Flannery was determined. Little more than a week later, he had another go.

On 12 April Domican went to the Kingsgrove police station to be questioned but yet again someone let the cat out of the bag, or in this case the crook out of the boob. On his way home, a motorbike went past with two people on it. Domican recognised Flannery as the passenger. According to Neddy Smith, the other rider was Flannery's Melbourne mate, Laurie Prendergast.

In his book
Neddy
, Smith wrote, ‘They had the bike running and Chris had a .357 magnum revolver ready in his hand. They spotted Domican and moved off. They made a pass to make sure it was him. Silly move, as Tom saw them straight away. They turned around for another run and Chris started shooting, missing with every shot. Tom grabbed a gun and started shooting back at the two escaping on the motorbike. He, too, missed.

‘Chris fucked up badly with his cowboy tactics and the fact that he had missed was the beginning of his demise. He lost any respect that he had had.'

Certainly Coroner Glass was sure there had been a second attempt to kill Domican. ‘I concluded from the evidence that this was an attempt on the life of Domican and the probabilities are that the person responsible was Flannery and an unknown companion.'

So both sides had thrown what they had hoped would be the knockout blow and missed.

Now it was time for round two.

MICK SAYERS' SHORT CUT TO THE MORGUE

But in New South Wales
some police just weren't
that curious.

 

TO the second hand car dealer he looked like another tyre kicker. He tried to hide his boredom when the rough-looking punter asked the price of the Mercedes coupe sitting in the busy Parramatta Road lot. Then he tried to hide his look of surprise when the customer produced the required $36,500 – in cash – from a paper bag.

But the customer wasn't finished. He wanted the car to be fitted with the personalised number plate MARIAN because he was buying the Merc for his girlfriend, Marian Ware.

It was 20 December 1983 and Michael Sayers was buying the car as a last-minute Christmas present.

That was the sort of guy he was. But then again, prodigious drug dealers can afford to be impulsive and generous when the mood strikes.

It had been a good year and better was to come. Just over twelve months later he bought himself his own present – a new Mercedes. A snip at $77,000.

Business was good and Mick was flying – for the moment.

Sayers was an old-school Melbourne armed robber who saw drugs as the short cut to wealth and Sydney as the land of opportunity.

But, unfortunately for Mick, he was also seen as a friend of Chris Flannery and that was a short cut to the morgue.

His first major conviction had been in 1969 for an armed robbery in Melbourne where he was sentenced to a minimum of six years.

When he was released Sayers moved to Sydney, where he became a burglar before graduating to drug trafficking – selling cocaine, cannabis and heroin. He wasn't fussy, or maybe he was just multi-skilled.

Even though he was 38 and had been charged 25 times in Victoria and New South Wales he had no plans to reform any time soon.

And why would he? In just two years the Melbourne battler had turned himself into a millionaire.

He owned two adjacent houses in Kean Street, Caulfield. He bought the second one for $95,000 in 1984 just weeks before he was finally busted for drug trafficking.

His Sydney house in Bronte was worth $250,000 when he bought it in September 1983 and he had no hesitation pouring in another $100,000 for renovations. He also had an assortment of investment properties scattered around Sydney.

In July 1984 he was charged with drug trafficking, but after four months was finally granted bail. As it turned out he would have been better off if he had stayed inside.

The man who put-up the $20,000 bail was a registered bookmaker who wouldn't have tipped that his mate was soon to be shot.

Saturday 16 February 1985 had been a typical day for the drug dealer, horse owner, SP bookmaker, mad punter and man about town.

Sayers had been to the Canterbury races during the day with Marian Ware and his bookie mate. Following the races they picked up the bookie's wife and went out to a Pitt Street restaurant.

After dropping off the couple, Sayers and Ware returned to their Hewlett Street home (just a few hundred metres from the iconic Bondi Beach) around 9.55pm. He pulled into the driveway, left the motor running and hopped out to open the garage door.

According to Ware, there were several pops similar to a car backfiring. Sayers continued walking, then stopped and looked as if he were trying to determine the direction of the noise.

As shots started to hit the garage door, Sayers realised he was under attack. He moved from the garage and crouched behind the front mudguard of his Mercedes. He then moved to the back of the car and bolted towards Bondi Beach.

Ware watched him run before seeing him stumble to the ground at precisely the wrong moment. Then, as if in slow motion, a masked gunman walked over and fired into the helpless victim.

Sayers was shot twice in the back, with one bullet passing through both lungs and nicking the aorta.

Ware would swear the man she saw fire the shot was armed with a rifle. The New South Wales murder taskforce, set up to investigate the gangland killings, believed she had to be mistaken.

Investigating police would establish the hit team had planned to shoot him from a distance but missed. They then had to chase him to finish the job.

Police found fragments from three .22 bullets in the garage and believed from the angle of the entry points they had been fired from two locations.

As no spent cartridges were recovered, police wrongly concluded the guns were revolvers that would not spit out the spent cartridges.

‘The bullet taken from the body of Sayers is probably of .38 or .357 Magnum calibre … the fact that no fired cartridge cases were found at the scene is indicative that the firearms were revolvers.' This would be in conflict with Marian Ware's description of a rifle but there does not appear to be any other explanation given the number of shots fired.

Unless of course the hit men picked up the spent shells or police simply didn't look hard enough.

So who was Mick Sayers?

He was rumoured to be one of the biggest SP bookmakers in Sydney until he moved into the drug business.

He owned five racehorses valued at $45,000, including the prophetically named Final Episode. While under surveillance he was seen to lose up to $10,000 a night playing Russian poker without apparent concern. He was also a regular at a Double-Bay card-school run by Federal Police target, Graham ‘Croc' Palmer.

As a prolific SP bookmaker he was posthumously, and perhaps conveniently, blamed for one of Australia's most notorious racing scams – the Fine Cotton Affair.

In August 1984 city racehorse Bold Personality was swapped for the bush plodder Fine Cotton in a race at Eagle Farm in Brisbane. More than $1 million were wagered, pushing the odds from 33/1 to 7/2.

Many people were implicated and some of those said Sayers was the driving force behind the rort. But, of course, by that time he was dead and could not defend himself. In New South Wales the only thing better than a live ring-in is a dead scapegoat.

Two months before the Fine Cotton ring-in, police raided his Bronte home and arrested Sayers' father over an SP operation. Police claimed the cash turnover for the day was $81,000.

Certainly while the drug business was good Sayers was a big spender who owed money around town. He was paying back
$400,000 to his good mate Danny Chubb at $20,000 a week but that debt had died when Danny did just a few weeks earlier.

Sayers owed an SP bookmaker $120,000 and it was eventually agreed he would settle at a meeting at a Double Bay hotel in May 1984.

The bookmaker saw Sayers approach carrying a brief case when Mick was intercepted by two men in suits and taken away.

Later a shaken Sayers returned with the briefcase, which was now empty. Mick told the bookmaker that Federal detectives had grabbed him but agreed not to lay drug trafficking charges in return for the $120,000.

It would later be established that the ‘detectives' were Flannery and a mate and the ‘arrest' was just another Sayers scam.

But Sayers and Flannery were not always play-acting. They were the prime suspects for the murder of Melbourne crook turned Sydney drug dealer, Les Cole.

Leslie John Cole was shot in the garage of his Sydney home 10 November 1982. He had survived an attempt two months earlier but this time he was shot twice in the chest and once behind the right ear.

Eighteen years later his son, Mark Moran, would be shot dead outside his Melbourne home in similar circumstances.

Police said Cole was aligned with the Melbourne Kane Clan, the standover family involved in its own underworld war. Intriguingly Cole had been in Melbourne the day before he was killed, and just over two weeks later Brian Kane was shot dead in Brunswick.

Were the deaths connected or was it coincidental? The trouble was that each murder was investigated by a different police force that often concealed information from each other. So the truth is no-one will ever know the truth.

DESPITE his debts, his occupation and his recent drug charges Sayers appeared to be relaxed, that is, until the attempted murder of Flannery.

His good friend Danny Chubb had been shot dead and then Flannery miraculously survived an attack where 30 shots were fired at him. Sayers was quickly on the phone to assure Chris he had nothing to do with the attack.

Sayers knew that as crooks were being asked to take sides he would be seen as a potential ally of Rentakill and as such a threat to be neutralised.

But Flannery and Sayers were no longer close and Mick was as concerned about his so-called mate as his known enemies.

According to Kath Flannery, ‘Chris had a terrible fallout with Michael Sayers.' As usual, it was over money. Flannery had loaned Sayers $15,000 at 100 percent interest and expected $30,000 back. And you reckon the Reserve Bank is tough.

Kath said Mick was slow to return the money and this broke up the friendship.

But she also claimed George Freeman wanted Sayers killed and planned to use Flannery as the hit man. According to her, Freeman told her husband that Sayers planned to kill Flannery and he should get in first.

Kath said Freeman gave him a Valiant, a gun and a false beard to do the job. Tellingly, Rentakill took them – at least initially.

Eventually Flannery met Sayers to discuss the bad blood between them. ‘They worked it out and everything was fine. Chris went and gave George the gun back and the car. George wasn't happy about it all and that was the start and the end for Chris.'

If the meeting were designed to reassure Sayers, it didn't work. He came back and told his girlfriend, ‘If I die, Chris Flannery is responsible.'

But on the day of the killing, Flannery had an alibi. He was dining in an upmarket Surfers Paradise restaurant with his old
mentor Ron Feeney, from Melbourne's Mickey's Disco. Flannery even paid with his American Express card.

So if it weren't Chris, then who did it?

It was not so much a suspect but a suspect car that gave police their best lead.

A week before the murder a panel van pulled up in the street and the driver asked if Mick Sayers lived here. The man then said something that stuck with the witness, ‘I'm a heavy, don't mess with me.'

On the night of the killing a neighbour saw a panel van parked near Sayers' house – hardly unusual considering how close they were to Bondi Beach.

But what made the car stick in the mind of the resident was that he noticed the two men in the panel van were not ‘surfietypes' but fit men aged between 30 and 40.

Just after the shooting a man and a woman saw a Holden HQ panel van driving from the area with its lights off – only to relight them as it moved away.