A Tale of Two Cities (21 page)

Judi often wondered later: if she'd let the dachshund run loose in the hallway that night, would it have gone straight to the bedroom door and started barking and warned them of intruders? Given that there were three men, armed with semi-automatic weapons modified to fire like machine guns, it would surely still have been a fatally one-sided confrontation. Les had a pistol in the pocket of a coat hanging up handy. Even if he'd got to it he was unlikely to have stood a chance. Or would he? Superior odds had never frightened him. That's why three men had come for him. And some still whisper there was a fourth, a driver left outside who later helped dispose of the body and the car.

THE men who ambushed Les Kane were so confident that the code of silence would never crack that two of them didn't even bother with disguises and the third was easy to recognize. They had history on their side. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s police drew a blank when pursuing painters and dockers murders because witnesses refused to talk.

The best-known example of this happened on 6 February 1958, after gangster Freddie ‘The Frog' Harrison pulled up at South Wharf in his 1953 Ford Customline to pick up his pay and return a borrowed trailer. As he was unhooking the trailer, a man
produced a shotgun and said, ‘This is yours, Fred,' and shot Harrison in the head.

There were thirty men in the area. Each later said he saw nothing. A dozen potential witnesses declared they were in the toilet at the time. It was a two-man toilet.

The man who was helping Harrison uncouple the trailer was covered with blood. He told police that when he heard the blast he looked right and walked off. The shot had come from his left so, naturally, he saw nothing.

It was part of the culture of the Melbourne underworld that no one talked. And the killers obviously believed that no one would ever give evidence against them.

But after a quiet hint from her brother-in-law Brian Kane, Judi spoke to the head of homicide, Detective Chief Inspector Paul Delianis. And she decided to do something extraordinary in her social circle – to tell the truth to the authorities.

She immediately identified two of the suspects, Mikkelsen and Bennett, and later identified the masked third man as Prendergast.

She had known the three for years. Mikkelsen, after all, had been the near neighbour in Broadmeadows who had driven her to hospital to have a baby when Les was in prison in 1974.

But after the fight between Mikkelsen and Brian Kane, the friendship was fatally fractured.

Les knew that when Bennett became involved it would probably end in gunplay. Bennett and his mates liked guns. His bookie robbers had been armed with semi-automatic rifles modified to fire continuously like a sub-machine gun. The backyard gunsmithing had reputedly been done by the notorious ‘Jimmy the Pom', Linus Patrick Driscoll of the notorious Sydney ‘toecutters', so named because they used bolt cutters to torture armed robbers to force them to give up their haul.

When Les told Judi he had been told Bennett was going to try to kill him she couldn't understand why someone she had known so long would become a lethal enemy.

She told her husband he shouldn't take the talk too seriously but he had said, ‘Don't underestimate him. I know.'

He was dead right.

But although his body and his Ford were never found, the three murder suspects were.

FOR the first time in years police had an eye witness in a gangland murder prepared to give evidence.

It was years before a formal witness-protection program would be available, so homicide chief Delianis quietly organised for Judi Kane to be cared for by one of Victoria's most respected policewomen – Pat Hunter.

Despite the nature of her work, Pat Hunter did not let herself become cynical. She always tried to see the best in people. She and Judi soon became firm friends. One well-meaning detective warned Pat she was blind to the ‘real' Judi Kane – describing her as just a ‘gangster's moll.' He was wrong.

Later, when Pat was diagnosed with leukaemia, it was Judi who would nurse her. And the doubting detective later apologised to Judi. ‘I was wrong, she was real quality,' he admitted later.

At Pat Hunter's funeral, the front row of the left side of the chapel was reserved for top ranking police – and Judi Kane. She had earned everyone's respect – and never let anyone down.

But back in 1978, she was a rare commodity – an eye witness in a triple murder.

For the three gunmen, the police were the last of their considerable problems. By killing Kane they risked immediate and deadly retaliation. The evidence that they knew this was overwhelming.

Ray Bennett's 11-year-old son had settled well into Keilor Heights High School and was seen as an attentive and cheerful student. So his Year 7 co-ordinator John Shaw was surprised when the boy stopped attending class.

When he asked why young Bennett was missing he was told the boy was sick, but there was no note or doctor's certificate. After a week, the teacher telephoned home and spoke to the boy's grandmother.

‘I asked if Danny was sick. She appeared upset and said that Danny was happy at school, he did not want to be away from school but it was not his fault he had not attended.'

Ray Bennett's wife Gail later told Shaw the family would be away in Queensland for a month while their son ‘convalesced'. The teacher prepared some tests and even lent his absent student a text-book for his time away.

He didn't see the boy – or the book – again.

The Bennetts did not contact the school again and strangely, no application for a transfer for the young Bennett was ever received.

When police asked Shaw to check the last day Danny Bennett went to class, attendance records showed it was 19 October … the day Les Kane had been shot dead.

Police documents later released under Freedom of Information stated: ‘… have no knowledge of his whereabouts. By the 19th December, 1978, Bennett's solicitor could not locate him. He failed to make his whereabouts known to the parties involved in the purchase of a house which he contracted to buy, and subsequently lost a substantial amount of money. His wife and child were last seen in Queensland. The current whereabouts of he and his family are unknown.'

Police would also discover that Bennett would take out life insurance policies – first checking they would be valid in the event of his murder.

For the Mikkelsen family the story was similar. Vinnie Mikkelsen's daughter suddenly stopped going to Meadow Fair North Primary School after 18 October and his son vanished two days later.

No explanation was given. So both the Bennett and Mikkelsen families made themselves scarce as soon as Les Kane disappeared – but before it was publicly known he was missing.

They knew Kane was dead well before the police did.

One of the first calls Judi Kane made had been to the Bowling Green Hotel in Carlton, then frequented by crooks and coppers.

‘Les is off,' she told a close associate at the pub. (‘Off' is underworld shorthand for murdered).

The three suspects ran but they couldn't hide – for long. On 1 December, the Special Operations Group found Prendergast hiding in a rented flat in Essendon.

By the time homicide Detective Senior Sergeant Arthur Robbins entered the flat, Prendergast was lying on his stomach next to the double bed, naked and handcuffed. It wasn't a good look.

Prendergast looked up and said, ‘Thank Christ it's you.'

Robbins asked what he meant and Prendergast answered, ‘I thought it was the Kanes.'

Certainly Mikkelsen was even more determined to avoid a chance meeting with anyone connected to the Kanes. He headed to outback Western Australia, where he took up mining – a dirty, dangerous occupation but safer than the one he'd left behind.

Back home in Melbourne, someone left a message that they were keen to catch up. On the same day as Prendergast was arrested, Mikkelsen's Broadmeadows home was firebombed.

In January 1979, Mikkelsen was arrested in Karratha, a small mining town 1600 kilometres from Perth.

Prendergast, Mikkelsen and Bennett were charged with Les Kane's murder and Judi Kane would be the star witness.

Police documents prepared for the prosecution said ‘evidence of flight will be relied on to show a consciousness of guilt in the cases of Bennett and Mikkelsen' but said the motive for Les Kane's death was not clear apart from the fact there had been ‘some bad feeling … between Kane and Mikkelsen for some time.'

IN court, defence lawyers savaged Judi Kane. They questioned her about any beatings she had suffered, implying that she had much to gain from her husband's disappearance.

They argued he could have been killed by warring factions in the Painters and Dockers or other enemies in the underworld.

The forensic evidence left little doubt that Kane was dead. The traces of brain matter found on the doormat told them that.

But there was no body, and that is nearly always an advantage to the defence.

Prendergast's barrister Michael Kelly gave one of the best closing speeches ever heard in the Supreme Court, one that had jury members literally sitting on the edge of their seats, and that other lawyers still mention decades later.

The jury acquitted all three. But their real peers – in the underworld – had found them guilty long before. And they were waiting for the chance to pass sentence.

WHO KILLED THE GREAT BOOKIE ROBBER?

Everybody knows he is a target.
Except, it seems, the police
whose job it is to know.

 

THE man in the dock knows there's a bullet out there somewhere with his name on it. But he doesn't know it's already in the hit man's revolver, and there's an itchy finger on the trigger, counting down the minutes.

He is Raymond Patrick Bennett, also known as Ray Chuck, and has just stepped into the old Melbourne Magistrates Court from the holding cells.

If he's worried, it doesn't show on his deadpan boxer's face, close to handsome despite its broken nose sprinkled with freckles and dark eyes set in a hard gaze. It's a face that doesn't quite match the bold check jacket with the leather elbow patches, which looks a little like something a jackaroo might buy in a reckless moment on a city holiday.

At 31, Bennett could be among the most dashing Australian crooks of his generation, but a reputation like that wins enemies, and he has plenty. So many that, for seven weeks before this day in court, he has pointedly avoided bail, preferring the predictable
discomforts of the Pentridge remand yards to his chances on the outside. He's always been game, but not foolhardy.

Still, he ought to feel safe here, in court, surrounded by dozens of people – including lawyers and policemen – and just across the road from Russell Street police headquarters. But he doesn't.

He has told his lawyer, who waits above, that he wants his wife kept away from the public areas of the court. He has taken out a huge life insurance policy, asking if the company will pay if he's ‘shot walking down the street'. Months earlier, he sent his young son overseas to keep him out of danger. In one of the court cells reached through the door behind him is a message freshly written on the wall: RAY CHUCK, YOU WILL GET YOUR'S IN DUE COURSE YOU FUCKEN DOG.

Everybody knows he is a target. Except, it seems, the police whose job it is to know.

Bennett is in court for committal on armed robbery charges over a $69,000 payroll heist in Yarraville. A magistrate has to weigh the evidence to judge if he should be tried in a higher court.

Like all prisoners in custody who have to front a magistrate, he has been brought in through the Court One dock. Committals are automatically adjourned to one of the two courts upstairs, in a double-storey extension behind the main court.

Depending on who's telling the story, three – or perhaps two – detectives escort Bennett past the crowded bench seats and people standing at the back of the room, and into the open courtyard for the short walk to the stairs leading to courts ten and eleven.

Certainly more than one person was interested in Bennett's court proceedings that day. At 8.50am Clerk of Courts Mary Bourke received a call from a man who said, ‘What court is Chuck in?' when asked who was calling, the man said he was the accused's brother. She told him it would either be Court 10 or 11.

By coincidence, there is a union demonstration at Trades Hall a block away and 167 officers have been called out, leaving Russell Street short of the uniformed police who usually escort prisoners. Which is why, it is later explained, two consorting squad detectives called Glare and Strang are asked to help an armed robbery detective, John Mugavin, to escort Bennett.

The consorters are tired and irritable. They have been entertaining interstate detectives down for the Spring Carnival for weeks and are deeply hung over. They have gone to the court to check dates for four upcoming cases and to buy milkshakes to line their tender tummies.

They don't want to be in court doing escort duties. They want to do it quickly but there is a delay. Bennett doesn't want to walk past the group hanging around outside the court in case he is recognised by witnesses in the case.

Glare checks the scene and spots a man in a suit with tinted glasses, shoulder-length hair and a neatly trimmed black beard. He assumes he is a solicitor. ‘It's all clear,' he tells the escorting police.

As Bennett and his escort walk past, a young constable waiting to give evidence mistakes the well-dressed robber for another detective. It's easy to see why. The dashing crook is a cut above the crowd in the court-yard.

The nineteenth century court is Dickensian, and Hogarth could draw those waiting their turn in the dock. There are pimps, prostitutes, thieves, vagrants, drunks, louts and lost souls from the seedy side of a big city – the bad, the sad and the slightly mad, all chain smoking in the court yard. Bit players in this depressing daily drama, they watch surreptitiously as Bennett the underworld star is led past, through the doors and upstairs to his fate.