A Tale of Two Cities (22 page)

A minute later, three shots crash through the buzz of muttered conversations. There is a clatter of footsteps in the sudden
silence. Someone upstairs yells: ‘It's a .38. Get a gun!' Then the screaming starts.

A young
Age
reporter in the main court looks at his watch and scrawls down the time. It is 10.17am on that Monday morning, six days after the 1979 Melbourne Cup.

WHEN he heard the shots Constable Chris Carnie jumped up from his bench in the courtyard. So did Constable Alan Hill, who'd been waiting nervously to give evidence in the first case of his new career.

The two uniformed officers ran to the door leading to the stairs. Later, they gave slightly different accounts of where Bennett was standing, but it was probably on the landing between the first and second flight of steps. What neither ever forgets is that he had his arms crossed over his chest, and was bleeding from wounds in both hands. He said: ‘I've been shot in the heart.'

Carnie caught Bennett as his legs buckled. He and Hill carried him through the courtyard and into the tiled vestibule outside the clerk's office near the Russell Street doorway. Hill, a former Navy medic, tried mouth to mouth and heart massage. He knew it was no use. A bullet had burst the pulmonary artery; Bennett was drowning in his own blood.

Bennett's lawyer, Joe Gullaci, who would later become a no-nonsense County Court Judge, rushed downstairs with the dying man's wife, Gail. He pushed the stricken woman (he described her years later as ‘incredibly brave') into the clerk's office so she couldn't see the wounds. An ambulance came, but police stopped the dying man's wife and lawyer getting in it to go to St Vincent's hospital. They jumped in a police car, but the driver took them in exactly the wrong direction – towards Elizabeth Street.

It was symbolic, perhaps, of the way the whole affair was handled. Except by the gunman, whose timing and preparation seemed almost too good to be true.

A court reporter for
The Sun
newspaper, Julie Herd, had sat briefly on a bench beside the man before going into court ten to wait for the case to begin. She assumed he was a lawyer. He had gold-rimmed glasses, a full head of hair and a beard. He appeared calm and was dressed, she thought, in a dark blue suit.

Glare said the man walked towards Bennett, looked at him and said, ‘Cop this, you mother fucker,' as he drew a snub-nosed revolver from inside his coat and fired three shots.

Bennett turned and ran down the stairs. Glare yelled, ‘He's off, grab him!' Mugavin chased Bennett, assuming the shots were blanks and that it was an escape attempt, he later said.

Glare moved towards the gunman, who pointed the pistol at him and warned: ‘Don't make me do it.' According to later coronial evidence, Glare's colleague Paul Strang was inside the courtroom, where he helped Detective Sergeant Noel Anderson remove a pistol – allegedly used in Bennett's armed robbery – from an exhibit bag.

Ironically not all the bullets fitted the gun – meaning Bennett may have been able to beat the payroll charges. But by this stage he was past caring.

Meanwhile, the gunman had threatened a civilian witness, Raymond Aarons, (‘Move and I'll blow your fucking head off!'), then waited to see if anyone was going to follow him and slipped through a side door leading down a maze of back stairs and passages to a tin shed behind the police garage. An inspector, Bill Horman, later to be promoted to Deputy Commissioner and appointed as Tasmanian Police Commissioner, held the door shut, fearing the gunman was trapped and would try to come out. When Anderson produced the exhibit pistol, Horman opened the door and Anderson rushed through.

But, by then, the gunman was long gone – through a hole already carefully prepared in the corrugated iron shed wall. The hole opened into a carpark at the neighbouring Royal Melbourne
Institute of Technology. It was the perfect escape route – and it reeked of an inside job. Whoever did it had an expert knowledge of the court and the police carpark, or easy access to people who did have such knowledge.

By the time Bennett was pronounced dead an hour later, the rumour mill was humming. Frantic reporters with deadlines for the year's biggest crime story quoted unnamed police sources suggesting an ‘outside' hit man was paid big money – the mooted sum was $50,000 – to do the killing.

But before the last edition of the now defunct afternoon daily,
The Herald
, had hit the streets a different story was circulating inside Russell Street. At 2pm the head of the consorting squad, Angus Ritchie, took a call from an informer claiming the hit had been organised inside his own squad.

Some squad members jokingly encouraged the rumours in the police club that night. ‘We couldn't buy a drink for a week,' recalls a retired detective who still doesn't fancy being named over the incident. ‘Half the force thought we did it.'

Within days, the squad members would regret feeding the rumours because one detective was told there was a contract on his life to avenge Bennett's death. He carried a gun for two years.

Detectives, unable to protect Bennett when he was alive, were given orders to guard his corpse. They were instructed to go to the North Melbourne funeral home where the body was lying after police heard his enemies planned to break-in, cut his hands off and send them to his wife.

Meanwhile, the public was still being fed the company line of a contract killer. Details of the more sinister theory, involving police, were not made public until the inquest finally began in March 1981. But that was later.

TO his friends, Ray Bennett was tough, loyal, and good company. His lawyer, Joe Gullaci, liked him – though he admits Bennett
and his mates were ‘big kids with guns', professional armed robbers who terrified people and wouldn't hesitate to shoot rivals.

‘These blokes were pretty good at their trade – in and out quickly (on robberies) and no shots fired and no drugs – unlike the current crop running around using their own product. It seemed to me they were thieves with some honour,' the hard-bitten Gullaci would recall. It was this ‘honour' that eventually got Bennett killed.

They were the last of their generation. Gangsters who prided themselves on doing their own dirty work. Already they were a dying breed – in more ways than one. Soon it would be the drug dealers who would control the underworld and they could afford to hire others to do their killings. But back then it was the crooks with the most dash, not necessarily those with the most cash, who were respected.

Bennett's charisma won him friends on both sides of the fence: he once had a steamy affair with a policewoman he met while reporting for bail.

The watch-house of a suburban police station may not be as romantic as a Pacific beach but on a lonely nightshift sometimes a hard man can be good to find.

Consorting between crims and cops was colourful in other ways as well. In fact, the Consorting Squad that was assigned to know what the crooks were up to called themselves the ‘Fletcher Jones' boys – because, the joke went, like the clothing store of that name, they could ‘fit anybody.' Before DNA testing, target profiling and flow charts, they gathered intelligence in pubs, nightclubs and racetracks.

Their brief was to know what heavy criminals were up to, and to act first to prevent crimes. Their tool-of-trade – apart from sledgehammers, planted ‘throwaway' guns, unsigned statements and illegal telephone taps – was the draconian consorting law (now no longer regularly used) that meant if a known criminal
were caught consorting with another known criminal both could be charged and jailed. One of the phone taps picked up a senior policeman talking to Ray Bennett.

Squad members worked unsupervised, in small groups. Many socialised with criminals and had their own favourites. They were used as trouble-shooters by some senior police who turned a blind eye to methods used. A new detective would be given an introductory speech, ‘You are going to enter a special environment, you are going to work with some very capable men. They may do things you may not like, they may overstep the mark but they will get the desired results.' You were told to fit in or leave. Or something like that.

Some of them found the people they thought were the villains and then either massaged or fabricated evidence to suit their conclusions. Sometimes they were right.

One offender who'd been shot while being arrested – the kidnapper Edwin John Eastwood – had his wounded leg stretched in hospital to force him to talk.

It was an era when some of the heavy squads made their own rules and exacted severe punishment for any outsider who broke them. When Ray ‘Muscles' Kane pulled up at the lights, and noticed an off-duty detective with his heavily pregnant wife in a car next to him, he made a mistake that was to cost him several months in jail. Kane wound his window down and threatened the policeman, using a string of profanities. The detective quietly told him he was going too far, but the hyped-up Kane did not see the danger signs.

It was late December when the detective's squad mates caught up with Kane in a St Kilda flat. They presented the criminal with several sticks of gelignite, neatly wrapped in Christmas paper. As soon as he saw the gift he knew the evidence against him would be overwhelming. He didn't need a forensic report to know his fingerprints would be all over the package … they had taken the
paper from a drawer in Kane's flat and gift-wrapped it in front of him.

After he was charged he told a senior policeman, ‘I knew I shouldn't have shot my mouth off.' The policeman responded, ‘You take one of this squad on, you take all of us on.'

It was around the same time that underworld identity Ron Feeney accepted a murder contract, but police didn't know who the target was or when the murder would take place. To stop the shooting, a detective simply walked in, gave him an unloaded gun and said, ‘This is yours, Ron.' He was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. The hit was never carried out.

In the interview room a suspect who answered a question with the expression ‘no comment' could soon find that it was more an opening statement in protracted negotiations than a concluding remark.

One detective, annoyed that his suspect refused to make a statement, removed his size fourteen boot, claiming it was his shoe phone. He put it to his ear, then turned to the suspect and said, ‘It's for you.' – before beating the man around the head with the boot. The suspect then began to answer questions. Every time the answers weren't correct the detective would remove his boot, claiming he was taking another call. The suspect would answer questions again.

In another interview an armed robber refused to talk. Finally, a naked detective ran into the room and hit him around the head. The suspect, possibly more frightened of being confronted by a naked, overweight detective than the beating, confessed readily.

When one suspect wouldn't talk until he had spoken to a lawyer a helpful detective gave him the number for the on-call legal aid solicitor. The suspect was somewhat surprised when the lawyer told him to confess to everything immediately and plead for mercy. He did as he was told – unaware the number he had been
given was to another extension in the squad room where a waiting policeman was on hand to provide such advice.

While most squads at the time bent the rules to suit themselves the consorting squad had made it an art-form. Consorters, whose job it was to go to places where criminals hung out, combined business and pleasure for fun and profit. Some race clubs were so grateful to have them on course that they slung them payments paid in plain envelopes … written off as security payments, which, of course, they were. The money was put in a slush fund largely used to entertain interstate detectives who would always arrive thirsty and hungry.

The consorters didn't like critics. When a former criminal and prison activist, Joey Hamilton, publicly complained about some of their methods, two squad members went to his house in Carlton and blew it up with explosives, a retired detective told the authors. When Hamilton said at the time that police were responsible for the attack, few believed him – but he was right. What he didn't know was that there was a member of the media in the car at the time who chose not to report the incident.

This was the consorting squad before the police hierarchy decided that its dogs of war were out of control and disbanded it. Some consorters acted as judge and jury. The question is: were they also prepared to be executioners?

The circumstantial evidence is intriguing rather than damning. One grievance the consorters had against Ray Bennett came from the fact that they provided unofficial security for bookmakers on settling days at the Victorian Club. But, on the day the Bennett gang struck, the usual crew of armed detectives were not there – they had been sent at the last minute on an errand to Frankston, a coincidence that led some to suspect Bennett had connived with a corrupt senior officer to set up the robbery. It was the same senior policeman who had been caught earlier on illegal phone taps talking to Bennett.

Bennett told police, straight-faced, that he'd taken a call on the night of Les Kane's death to say that Kane had ‘gone off' and he'd immediately gone into hiding, fearing reprisals.

He wasn't the only one to fear reprisals. When the case went to trial at the Supreme Court in September 1979, court security measures were extraordinary. There were armed police, marksmen posted outside, and stringent identity and weapon checks on everyone who entered court. Even a prison chaplain, Peter Alexander, was not allowed to visit Bennett.

The three were acquitted, mainly because of the absence of a body. Though pleased with the result, they suspected not everyone was convinced of their innocence. Mikkelsen and Prendergast left Melbourne immediately for distant destinations. And Bennett, still to face charges on the payroll robbery, chose to stay in custody.

Seven weeks later, he was sent to the Magistrates Court for committal. This time, oddly enough, there was no security at all.