A Tale of Two Cities (18 page)

Brian Kane and brave friend Sandra Walsh. She tried to save him after he was shot by two masked men.

Doomed love: the glamorous Fran Kear on holidays with Brian Kane in Queensland. She loved the man but not the way he made money.

Leslie Herbert Kane: street-fighting man whose body was never found.

Brian Raymond Kane as a young standover man: quick to the punch but too slow on the draw.

Death of a gangster, Melbourne-style: Brian Kane had given Pentridge Prison chaplain Father John Brosnan a car and air tickets to Ireland. Fr Brosnan gave his former pupil a eulogy.

DEATH OF A PAINTER AND DOCKER

‘Thank Christ it's you.
thought it was the Kanes.'

 

LESLIE Herbert Kane might have been the toughest and wildest of three brothers who made their living scaring people, most of them other gangsters. But to the woman who loved him, and maybe still does, he was a man of contradictions: he ran with and fought against some of the toughest crims in the country but he (and his older brother Brian) didn't have tattoos, didn't smoke, kept fit and were natty to the point of vanity. And both brothers could be impulsively kind, especially to priests and children.

Judi Gay would become Les's second wife. He already had two daughters with his first wife Pat when he met Judi at the Winston Charles nightclub in Toorak Road in 1970. She was an apprentice hairdresser and a keen sportswoman – she had played for Victoria in under-16 netball (and would play the game at a high level until her early 40s). She came from what Les called a ‘squarehead' family: her father was a hard-working foreman mechanic at the Yarra Falls knitting mill in Abbotsford until the mill closed, then a cleaner at the St Kilda Road army barracks.

At 21, Judi's good looks and physical vitality turned heads. At 25, Les Kane turned heads too, often by kicking them. He was a lean man with a strong nose and blazing cobalt blue eyes that contrasted with the tanned, olive-skinned features. It was a fierce and fearless face of the fighting Irish variety: it could belong to a prize fighter or an IRA terrorist. He combined a bit of both on the docks and in the pubs and nightclubs.

Judi was initially wary of the hard man with the intense gaze and the cocky self-assurance of one who backs himself as the toughest man in the room. Her first instincts might have been right but she was young and her heart over-ruled her head when he refused to take the hint and kept chasing her.

‘I gave him a bodgie phone number to begin with. I didn't want to get mixed up with him,' she would recall. But he sought her out the following week, and rebuked her over the bogus telephone number. She made a weak excuse, pretended she'd made a mistake. This time, half flustered and half flattered, she gave him the right one. And in that careless split-second she changed her life.

Because, of course, he called her, suggesting a quiet meet at Pelligrinis restaurant in the city. And she went. She didn't like the fact he was married but he told her he was separated.

Within months they were living together in an apartment in East Melbourne. She liked it, she would say later, smiling at the memory of the carefree, animal joy of a new relationship with a man who seemed to have plenty of money – and spent it freely – and who apparently feared no one and nothing except boredom. They could walk across the Fitzroy Gardens to the city to theatres, restaurants and, inevitably, nightclubs, which was where the trouble happened. She recalls her new man being ‘hounded by coppers' in the clubs, the Top Hat and the Galaxy.

‘Brian didn't drink much at all but Les liked a drink and when he was drunk he was wild,' Judi would recall almost 40 years on.
‘Most of the painters and dockers drank all the time and that led to a lot of the trouble. There was a lot of animosity with the coppers – like cowboys and Indians, really.'

She says quietly that Les was ‘the most violent man in Australia' but that he could be impulsively generous. And there was something dashing about him and his brother Brian that some women found irresistible and some men admired. Other people were just intimidated by them. Of course, as the Kanes would find out, a reputation is just about the most dangerous thing you can have in the underworld. The brothers started building theirs early, from the time they went to St John's Catholic Primary School in East Melbourne to Collingwood Tech, known in the 1950s and 1960s as ‘Pentridge Prep.'

Their father, Reg Kane, was a hard-drinking scrap metal merchant in Collingwood. The saying ‘meaner than a junk yard dog' fitted him. He dealt in scrap and got into plenty, and he brought his boys up to fight his battles for him. As teenagers, they were urged to fight and got a taste for it. No wonder all three of Reg Kane's sons grew into violent men: Brian the fit, disciplined Golden Gloves boxer who became a high-level standover man; Les, for a time the most feared street fighter in Melbourne, and Ray, nicknamed ‘Muscles', who lived a less public life of crime than his notorious older brothers but was whispered by some to be a more lethal gunman than either of them. In the end, Ray was the only one of the three to survive, though he served a sentence for murder.

Les, the second son, was born in Carlton on 1 December 1945, and joined Melbourne's traditional criminal breeding ground – the Painters and Dockers Union – at just fourteen.

Soon he and his brothers were making a tidy living from the docks, but not from hard work. They soon had a slice of the secret payment system that ensured the docks continued to function – at huge cost.

It was a brutally simple standover tactic where wages were paid to non-existent employees – or ‘ghost' workers – in exchange for promises of industrial harmony. Les (like most ‘dockies') picked up two pay packets every week. ‘The foreman got four!' laughs Judi Kane.

It was straight out graft and corruption, as would later be revealed by Billy ‘The Texan' Longley, but no one complained. Those who made waves could find themselves under them – somewhere in Port Phillip Bay. Men went ‘on the missing list' and were never seen again. Such as Alfred ‘The Ferret' Nelson, whose car was fished out of the water near South Wharf but whose body was never found.

It was in this environment that Les Kane excelled. He was physically brave, ruthless and reckless. But his strength was his weakness. When the fit took him, he was capable of almost anything. And ‘fit' is a good word because violent rage would erupt in him as if something had short circuited in his brain.

His violent temper made him feared but it also landed him in court many times when he could have easily avoided trouble. It also meant he would make enemies with long memories and short fuses.

‘Brian had a bit more decorum because he was Golden Gloves and everything but Les was “all in” and barred nothing,' recalls his widow Judi Kane, the handsome, much-respected woman who nurses memories – good and bad – of the man who gave her a rollercoaster ride and two children who are now successful adults.

‘Les was fearless and had a terrible temper. He had bright blue eyes that flashed when he was angry … he and Brian were fearless and they would pick up a gun. Les would just smash 'em. All his criminal record is for assault.' As far as she knows, he only ever did the one robbery – ‘but it was a good one.'

A policeman who regularly locked up Les Kane says he was ‘psychotic' and ‘had a target on his head from an early age'.

One example of many, the policeman says, was that he ‘stabbed his neighbour's dog, (belonging to) a nice Polish lady, and then wanted to carry on when I got there. I told him we could do this the easy way and he could come along – or I could call the posse and it would end badly. He decided to come along.'

By the time Kane was in his early 30s he had appeared in court 27 times – almost all for crimes of violence.

When Kane was just 21 he was asked to leave a Collingwood hotel. He responded by throwing two glasses of beer over the publican, a Mrs Irene Bennett. When another man intervened, he knocked him to the ground and kicked him in the face, breaking several bones.

The judge, who sentenced Kane to two years and three months, described him as a ‘violent, vicious and dangerous man.'

The judge seemed more outraged by the beer-throwing against the woman than by the male victim being kicked half to death.

Although Kane was considered among the best streetfighters in the Melbourne underworld in the early to mid-1970s, he did lose a bare-knuckled bout with Paul Higgins – a colourful detective who would later hit his own legal hurdles after being charged with serious corruption that would lead to a marathon court case and a lengthy jail term.

The fight between the toughest cop and the toughest (but lighter) crim began in a city nightclub, the Top Hat, continued down three flights of stairs and ended with Kane unconscious in Bourke Street.

The ‘hiding' didn't change Kane and, if anything, made him even more dangerously erratic.

In many incidents of that freewheeling era, there is the police
record of how things occurred, and the scenario subsequently put in court by the defence. Then there is the hearsay version handed down by various people connected to the main players. Sometimes these accounts vary a lot in detail.

At a Sunday smorgasbord in the giant lounge of the Croxton Park Hotel in January 1971, Les Kane and a painter and docker mate, former boxer ‘Frannie' Bayliss, were reportedly pestering two women. It ended badly when one of the pair of knockabouts poured a jug of beer over the women, according to two off-duty licensing squad police who happened to be working on the door and who assisted in removing the ‘dockies'. The incident was virtually over when Les Kane turned around and shot one of the policemen in the leg with a pistol he was carrying.

It was as stupid as it was violent.

Judi Kane recalls the incident this way: ‘Les shot an off-duty copper in the foot at the Croxton Park Hotel. He and Frannie Bayliss had been at a dockers' barrel somewhere and then went to the Croc. A bouncer wouldn't let them in. He was an off-duty copper. Les shot at the ground but he'd had a few drinks and got him in the foot.