A Tale of Two Cities (37 page)

There are many versions of what really happened. Some have been told – some haven't.

Roger Rogerson was never convicted of attempting to bribe Drury or involvement in the attempted murder.

He maintains his innocence.

Flannery's version will never be known because he went on the missing list before he could be charged. Prendergast was also murdered and his body never found.

Williams' co-offender Jack Richardson could not assist after his body was found in country Victoria with two bullets in the back of his head. Almost certainly the last person he saw was Flannery – who took the contract to kill likeable Jack on behalf of Williams.

Williams was frightened the former star ruckman, who played more than 100 games with West Adelaide and Sturt, would roll over and talk to police. And he was right. The man they called Melbourne Jack was starting to indicate he wouldn't mind a chat to the right detective.

Richardson was last seen talking to two men in a Fitzroy Street ice-cream parlour in St Kilda on 4 March 1984. It was only a few hundred metres from where Flannery used to work at Mickey's Disco.

Timing is everything. Richardson disappeared the day before he was due in court for a preliminary hearing on Williams' heroin trafficking charges.

Another man close to the crew was Melbourne drug dealer Leslie ‘Johnny' Cole, who was shot dead outside his Sydney home on 10 November 1982. His biological son, Mark Moran, would be killed in eerily similar circumstances when he was ambushed outside his home in June 2000.

The only man who survived – at least for a time – to tell his story was Williams himself, who admits he was prepared to pay $100,000 to have Drury killed.

Williams spoke to the authors just weeks after he was released from Goulburn Prison in 1992. He said he wanted to make a fresh start. Sadly, he didn't make it.

He recalled that on the day of the deal in the Old Melbourne his instincts told him there was something wrong but greed and a brain clouded with heroin made him go ahead regardless.

‘I knew Brian Hansen – he said he had a drug buyer (Drury) down from Sydney. The deal was supposed to kick off at lunchtime, but for about nine hours I smelled a rat. I didn't want to do the business. Brian, on the other hand, was insistent, he said he had counted the money and that everything was sweet.'

Williams was in another suburb, but after being badgered he agreed to go to the Old Melbourne with the heroin. But he was ‘light'. He was supposed to supply a pound but had already sold four ounces to a regular customer.

Still wary of the stranger from Sydney, he wanted the deal done in public. ‘I didn't go into the hotel, I waited in the car outside.

‘To cut a long story short, Brian went into the hotel, came back with Drury and introduced him. Well, he didn't want to get into the car. (Drury wanted to control the situation and signal waiting police to move when he saw the heroin.)

‘I smelled a rat. I showed him the gear but there was something wrong.' Moments later, Williams saw an unmarked police car in his rear view mirror speed around the corner.

‘They were so keen to block me in that they skidded past the car. I put it in gear and just took off.'

Williams may have been filled with juice but once he abandoned his car close by, near Melbourne University, the former star footballer could easily outpace his pursuers on foot. He knew the university layout well and escaped after dumping the drugs. About four months later, he was arrested in Adelaide and charged with heroin trafficking.

The committal was a shambles. Police who declared they could identify Williams were discredited. Only Drury's evidence survived. The case was certainly not helped by New South Wales
and Victorian police squabbling with each other. Despite repeated requests, Drury's statement was not delivered until the day of the hearing.

When the Director of Public Prosecutions decided to directly present the case to a higher court, Williams believed only one man stood between him and a long stretch in Pentridge Prison and that man was Michael Drury.

‘I knew I needed help because the only bloke who stuck to his guns in the committal was Drury. He was unshakeable. It wasn't his efforts which fell down for the prosecution; it was the Melbourne police around him, trying too hard.

‘Mick Drury said it like it was, the others painted a picture which couldn't be finished. They ran out of paint.'

Williams had had enough dealings with corrupt police to believe he could still buy himself out of trouble but he needed an ‘in'.

He needed someone to get an offer to Drury that he could make a big dollar if he just massaged his evidence a little. He wouldn't need to tell obvious lies, just forget a few key facts and stumble a few times with his answers. That would surely be enough.

In the underworld there is a loose group of ‘mates' who try to look after each other when they get a chance – favours are called in, monies paid and advice given.

Williams had a mate in Sydney he thought could help him – Christopher Dale Flannery – known as Rentakill. Flannery and Williams had first teamed up as juvenile offenders and as young adults had pulled armed robberies together. In jail they sometimes shared a cell.

‘I knew Chris, I always found him to be a thorough gentleman.' Alan, it must be said, was never a good judge of character, although he did add as an afterthought about Flannery: ‘He was also a murderer and a paid killer.

‘I ran into him in Melbourne and mentioned to him that I had been pinched by an undercover copper from Sydney. I asked him if he could do anything in regard to getting him to change his evidence or slow it down.

‘He said he would see what he could do, that he had a couple of jacks (police) in Sydney sweet. He said it would cost and I said I wasn't worried about the cost side of it.'

According to evidence given in a series of court cases, Roger ‘The Dodger' Rogerson approached Drury with a bribe offer on behalf of Williams, an offer Drury refused.

Williams may have been nasty but he wasn't mean. The offer, for the standards of the early 1980s, was generous. ‘I offered $30,000 at one stage, $50,000 at another stage, $100,000 and an open ticket in the end.'

According to court testimony, Williams met with Flannery and Rogerson at a Sydney restaurant where he was told the bad news that the bribe offer had failed.

Williams was devastated. He knew he was looking at a long stretch inside. Then Flannery broke the silence: ‘Well, if it was me, I'd put him off (kill him).'

Williams didn't immediately respond then just said: ‘That's a big step'. But it didn't take long for him to take it.

‘The deal was done in the restaurant,' Williams said.

That deal, done in cold blood over cool beers, was to kill Drury for $100,000. The contract called for a down payment of $50,000 and the rest after the killing.

‘I was using the gear (heroin) at the time. If I had my full faculties there is no way I would have been involved in the plan.

‘I was a giant in the trade; I thought I was invincible, and unpinchable. But I stepped over the line with the Drury thing. It is something I will regret for the rest of my life.'

It was madness. But the fact they could even suggest that you could kill an undercover policeman in his home in front of his
family and resume business as usual shows how out-of control Sydney was in the 1980s.

The corrupt syndicates – some linked to the highest police, legal and political networks – really believed they could fix anything.

The Drury shooting would prove to be the tipping point. The fallout would result in the destruction of many of the established criminal fiefdoms and the cosy police-gangland franchises that had controlled organised crime in Sydney for decades.

It would lead to setting up integrity commissions and external reviews. No longer would police be a law unto themselves.

Williams sent the deposit to Flannery and then waited for the inevitable. He did not know when and where Drury would be killed – he left that to his paid ‘experts'.

And Williams, through dumb luck, ended up with the perfect alibi. He had been picked up for speeding and had to produce his licence at the Greensborough police station. It proved he was in Melbourne at the time of the shooting.

Drury was gunned down while he was washing dishes at home. ‘When I knew he had been shot it was panic-stations. The heat was on. Basically I didn't realise the repercussions this would cause. It was just a stupid thing to do.'

When Williams stopped being a stick-up merchant and moved into the drug trade he tried to stay clean and to treat it as a business. But soon he was just another junkie – a rich one with an endless supply – but still just a junkie.

‘I started smoking, and then it was up the snozzer and then up the Warwick Farm (arm). I was stoned all the time, I wasn't thinking straight.'

Williams said that when he heard that Drury was shot he, ‘started getting into the gear (drugs) even heavier than ever.

‘I knew I was the number one suspect from day one. But I also knew that the police who had anything to do with me knew that
I was not the sort of gangster who would premeditate this sort of murder.'

If so, the police were wrong.

For all his talk of remorse, at the time Williams was happy that Drury was out of the way and could not give evidence in his heroin trial.

‘I was more concerned about the matter at hand than Drury,' he admitted later.

But the Sydney undercover detective, fighting for his life in hospital, made what everyone thought was a dying deposition outlining the attempted bribe by Rogerson.

Everyone, including his colleagues, expected him to die. He had been, after all, shot twice at point blank range. Even Flannery was convinced, assuring Williams: ‘He's lost a lot of blood; I don't think he'll make it. He's lost a lot of blood and is very weak.'

But this time Flannery, who had more experience with gunshot wounds than most surgeons, was wrong.

‘When he realised he was going to live, Chris said not to worry about sending the other $50,000. The job hadn't been completed,' Williams said.

Flannery may have been a cold-blooded killer but he expected to get paid only on results. But his honour did not extend to refunding the $50,000 he had already been paid. And Williams was not game to raise the subject.

The ultimate irony is that Drury recovered and gave evidence against Williams in his heroin trial but the drug dealer beat the charges on the evidence.

‘The whole plan was a waste.'

Drug dealing heavyweight or not, Williams was now the weak link. Once Drury made his statement implicating Rogerson in the attempted cop killing, all roads led to Melbourne.

Williams was the only one who could implicate Rogerson and Flannery in the attempted murder.

Within days stories in the media suggested the shooting related to the ‘Melbourne Job.' Clearly this meant people on both sides of the law began to look for him.

Williams was still regularly reporting on bail and would be easy to find. He agreed to have a coffee with two well-known Victorian detectives in a Greek café in Melbourne.

One of them, the legendary thief-catcher Brian Murphy, told Williams that New South Wales police were out to kill him and he should not go home that night.

It was a bluff. ‘I just wanted to stir him up so he would talk,' the streetwise Murphy said later.

It worked. ‘He went to a public phone and rang his wife, telling her to grab a few things and get out.'

Williams had few friends outside the underworld.

‘Squareheads' tend to ask too many questions about unexplained wealth and lazy lifestyles. But Williams' brother-in-law Lindsay Simpson was the exception.

A friendly man who worked in the building trade, Simpson would drink with Alan and not pry into areas where he was not welcome.

But on the day Williams was told he was a marked man, ‘good blokes' like Simpson were the last thing on his mind.

‘I was told I was to be knocked. I was completely paranoid and I clean forgot that Lindsay was to come to my house that night,' Williams said.

Waiting outside the house to kill Williams was Roy Pollitt, a crim known as the ‘Red Rat'. It was a nickname that was defamatory to rats, unfairly maligned ever since the Black Plague.

Pollitt had escaped from jail and was being harboured by ‘Mr Death' – Dennis Bruce Allen – a prodigious Melbourne drug dealer and killer later found to have direct links to Rogerson.

It was Allen who commissioned Pollitt to kill Williams. When Pollitt saw a man pull up at Williams' home in Lower Plenty, he
drew his gun and made the victim kneel on the ground with his hands behind his head in a hostage pose. The innocent man kept trying to tell the gunman that it was a case of mistaken identity and that his name was Simpson.

It did him no good. He was shot dead in cold blood.

It may have begun as a case of mistaken identity but when Pollitt pulled the trigger he knew his victim was not Williams. He shot him to remove a potential witness.

‘Lindsay was a good family man. It took him eight years to have a baby with his wife. Six years of hospital and doctors' appointments. Finally he has a kid and just before its first birthday, Lindsay is dead.' Allen paid Pollitt a $5000 deposit in counterfeit notes for the hit and then refused to pay the rest after it was found he'd killed the wrong man.

Williams used to deal drugs with Allen, who died of chronic heart disease in 1987. ‘Dennis was a conniving man and particularly dangerous in his own little world of Richmond. But he lacked a lot of heart and he had to be juiced up to do anything. He was frightened of going to jail – every time he hit the nick he'd get the horrors.'

For Williams, the writing was on the wall. His life as one of the biggest drug dealers and most powerful men in the underworld was coming to an end. The man who could sit in a Sydney restaurant and effectively sign a death warrant for a detective, was now frightened and on the run.