A Tale of Two Cities (44 page)

He told one of his few remaining friends he feared that police would try and kill him to stop the gang war.

He told his sister-in-law, ‘I think I'm going to die … They're going to get me … I just can't keep running like this.'

But there was one policeman (or at least a suspended one) that he (almost) trusted – Roger ‘The Dodger' Rogerson. While on the run he kept in contact with Rogerson – although he was wise enough to never let him know where he was hiding.

But then on 8 May – the day before Flannery disappeared – the rogue detective cast a giant shadow over the case. It was Rogerson who contacted the taskforce and said he could organise a meeting with Flannery.

The officer in charge, John Anderson, was not ready to put allegations to Flannery but thought a meeting could break the ice.

Anderson later told the inquest, ‘I was sort of taken back a bit but, nevertheless, I took the view that I had nothing to lose by meeting Flannery so I said yes … I would speak to him. Rogerson later got back to me and said he would not come to the CIB he had this contact with Flannery … so the venue was set to meet him at a club in the city and I went there about 1.30 on 8 May and I took Detective-Sergeant Coughlin with me.

‘I wasn't really ready for the meeting but I thought something positive was going to come from it … I was hoping Flannery would tell us about the background to the confrontation but it wasn't to be. I came away a little bit disappointed actually.

‘At the club I didn't have any great conversation with Rogerson because they were both there when we arrived … Rogerson did the introduction … Flannery was seated at a table and having done that introduction Rogerson moved away from the company. I don't know why. He wasn't asked to move away. We tried to be as sociable as possible.'

As the pair sat and talked at the New South Wales Cricketers' Club, Anderson could see that Flannery was there under sufferance. ‘I don't think he liked our presence there. I think he was
keen to get away from us as soon as possible. He gave the appearance he was anxious to leave.'

So it would appear that it was Rogerson who pushed for the meeting.

Flannery told Anderson he didn't know who shot at him in January, but it was obvious that he was blaming Domican. Anderson said that Flannery appeared very nervous, with Flannery implying that the feud between him and Domican had ‘come too far to be resolved'.

It was clear that the war would end only when either Domican or Flannery was dead.

‘It was obvious to me that he (Flannery) was not going to sit back and allow people to shoot at him without taking some sort of action himself. I came away with the apprehension that he would do something further himself,' Anderson said.

But Anderson noticed that when Flannery left, Rogerson hung back and walked out a few moments later.

‘I expected them both to leave together … it caught me by surprise when one went prior to the other,' Anderson said.

The question remains, did Rogerson set up the meeting so that he or his team could follow Flannery to his secret address just two kilometres away?

Rogerson was suspended from the force and was soon to stand trial over attempting to bribe Mick Drury.

The erratic and dangerous Flannery could have been a star witness against Rogerson if he could be turned, and the hit man was running out of options. A new identity and a new start could have been his only way out.

Six weeks after Flannery disappeared, Rogerson was acquitted of the charge. It is certainly reasonable to conclude that as a result of that meeting Flannery's hideout was exposed. But the exact apartment number may still have been a secret,
giving him at least some protection. Even then, if the flat number were known there was no way a hired killer would risk bursting in on Flannery, who was always armed. Freeman and his associates didn't want a shoot-out; they wanted an ambush.

And Freeman – the professional punter – always wanted the odds on his side. Just hours after Freeman left the detectives and Rogerson at the club, Freeman paged him to organise a meeting for the next day.

If Flannery were allowed to drive to Freeman's in his Valiant he may have been seen entering the secure property and the car would have to be dumped. By disabling the sedan it put Flannery on the street outside the building. This part of the theory tallies with Neddy Smith's version of what happened.

But it is believed that after accepting a lift from police who just happened to be passing, they drove him to Freeman's.

Present with Freeman was his crony, underworld heavyweight, Lennie McPherson. Although on his guard, Flannery was lured into the den where Freeman used the silenced sub-machine gun to kill Flannery. The light calibre of the bullets was such that they did not pass through the body. Linus Patrick Driscoll modified the gun and one from the same batch was used to kill Les Kane in his Melbourne bathroom years earlier. Then, as in the Flannery case, no bullet holes were found in the walls and the body was never recovered.

With Flannery dead, Freeman thought he would have some time to dispose of the body and clean the house but Kath was on the phone within hours.

It is known that on that afternoon Freeman had left the house for unexplained reasons. Certainly when Kath rang a second time he was not home and his wife, Georgina, took the call.

If police had gone to the house straight away, perhaps they would have found some evidence to back up the theory. But
having unintentionally warned him he was a suspect with a call on 9 May they did not complete a comprehensive search until 20 May, giving George plenty of time to get his house in order.

The taskforce concluded: ‘Two days before his disappearance Freeman had a conversation with Dr Paltos indicating he intended to kill somebody at his home. There can be little doubt that the intended victim was Flannery. Should Flannery have been murdered on 9 May, it would appear that he had been intercepted prior to his arrival. It does not seem feasible that Freeman would carry out the execution in his own home where his wife and five children could become involved. There is no scientific evidence to support such an occurrence and it is more likely that Flannery has been intercepted by persons he trusted prior to his arrival there.'

It found: ‘What is believed to have occurred is that there has been reconciliation between McCann/Domican and Freeman/McPherson whereby Flannery became isolated. With his removal there would be reason to believe that the previous conflict would be put to rest. In order to achieve this and appease Mc-Cann/Domican the scene was set where Flannery was betrayed by alleged friends.'

As Kath Flannery was to tell the National Crime Authority: ‘When Chris was killed we were virtually trying to sell the house to move to Queensland. He knew he couldn't survive in Sydney. They were too strong. You see they'd been doing what they had been doing for a hundred years.

‘These people were not going to stop until they got him. They were so blatant about it. George sold Chris out because they've said, “Look, we know that Chris sold out Drury now you've got to get rid of him because he's told a certain police officer that if I start he'll kill him”.'

But while police would never find sufficient evidence to
charge Freeman, Kath was convinced he was behind her man's death and she was determined to get her revenge.

One of Flannery's friends was the son of a respected New South Wales public official. The friend had dabbled in cocaine trafficking and when one of his partners refused to pay, Chris paid a visit and the partner paid up.

Flannery would part finance two trips to Bolivia for the friend to buy cocaine. One of the importations netted each of them $170,000.

Just days after Flannery went missing the cocaine smuggler met Kath at the Melbourne Airport Travelodge. ‘She looked terrible – she appeared very tired and weepy eyed,' he would later tell the National Crime Authority.

She told him that Chris was dead. At a later meeting at a Melbourne restaurant she said that Freeman organised the hit but McCann paid for it.

Eventually, the drug importer agreed to back up another Melbourne criminal in an attempt on Freeman's life.

But, quite unwittingly, Federal police from Operation Lavender would save Freeman's life – not once, but twice.

The perfect place, the Melbourne team decided, was when George Freeman went for his regular Thursday medical checks with Dr Paltos. Some say he needed his asthma monitored. Others said he was addicted to morphine that was supplied by the obliging Dr Nick.

On two Thursdays Flannery's mate sat off the surgery (each time with a different Melbourne gunman) ready for the hit but on the first occasion he noticed a suspicious van and on the second he saw men near the surgery he believed were Freeman's bodyguards. In fact, they were Federal police from Operation Lavender who were trying to conduct discreet surveillance on the good doctor. The would-be hit man said he believed Freeman
had been tipped off. He said when Freeman arrived, ‘He had a nasty scowling look on his face. He started pointing at us while he sat in his car.'

Freeman later wrote, ‘The underworld grapevine ran hot that night. It was no secret who had taken the contract out on me.'

But Kath was too loyal to let it rest. Heartbroken and isolated, she turned to Melbourne for support. The painters and dockers raised $10,000 for her. Perhaps believing that the Sydney gangsters who arranged her husband's murder would come after her, she decided to fight back. According to a secret National Crime Authority witness, she got ten sticks of gelignite from Alan Williams and was set to blow Tom Domican and another Sydney identity into the next world. The plan was to plant the gelignite in the exhaust pipes of two cars so that they would explode as the engines heated.

But the New South Wales police were tipped off about the gelignite plot by an ‘extremely reliable but confidential source in Victoria,' which probably saved a couple of worthless lives.

On 3 June Freeman opened his mailbox to find a letter with a photo of a small child coloured blue. He took it to be a threat against his children.

The Sydney gangsters weren't going to let Kath pick them off and threaten them, so it was inevitable she would get a warning she could end up with her husband.

Two weeks after Flannery's death, Kath's car was torched. Police believed her enemies did it as a warning but some wondered if she had done it herself to raise public sympathy. The car was insured.

In July, members of the Sydney underworld who had once been at war were seen sitting and talking amicably. A few days later a crew of heavies were seen cruising around near the Flannery family home.

On 19 August, Kath called the police after finding a suspicious device under her Ford LTD. It was a bomb rigged to go and designed to be set off by remote control.

Some police believed that she set the bomb herself, claiming the gelignite was from the same lot she sourced from Williams. It seemed unlikely, given that her plan had been to use hot exhaust pipes to explode the gelignite rather than a complex remote control.

The taskforce found it ‘had been constructed by a person with expertise in the area of electronics.' It was doubtful that Kath had done it herself.

Soon after, she sold her house and moved to the Gold Coast with her children. Since then, apart from the occasional minor legal problem, it appears Kiss of Death Kath has left the underworld behind.

 

Apart from extensive original research and interviews with sources on both sides of the law, the authors have drawn on published sources listed below. We wish particularly to acknowledge the work of the late Richard Hall and of Keith Moor, Bob Bottom, Tom Noble and gun-for-hire John Kerr.

 

Booth, Pat:
The Mr Asia File
.

Bottom, Bob:
Connections
.

Bottom, Bob:
Connections 2
.

Bottom, Bob:
Shadow of Shame
.

Bottom, Bob:
Without Fear or Favour
.

Freeman, George:
An Autobiography
.

Goodsir, Darren:
In the Line of Fire
.

Hall, Richard:
Greed
.

Hickie, David:
The Prince and the Premier
.

McCoy, Alfred:
Drug Traffic
.

Moor, Keith:
Crims in Grass Castles
.

Noble, Tom and Smith, Arthur:
Neddy
.

Reeves, Tony:
Mr Big
.

Reeves, Tony:
Mr Sin
.

Silvester, John and Rule, Andrew:
Tough: 101 Gangsters
.

Silvester, John and Rule, Andrew:
Underbelly
series, 1-11.

Whitton, Evan:
Can Of Worms
.

Wilson, David and Murdoch, Lindsay:
Big Shots
.

Wilson, David and Robinson, Paul:
Big Shots 2
.

Victorian Coronial reports into the deaths of Ray Bennett, Les Kane, Brian Kane, Norman McLeod, Laurie Prendergast and Roger Wilson.

NSW Coronial report into the presumed murder of Christopher Dale Flannery.

Final report of the NSW Drug/Murder Taskforce.

Nagle, John: Special Commission of Inquiry into police investigations into the Donald Mackay murder.

Royal Commission reports from:

Costigan, Frank.

Stewart, Donald.

Williams, Edward.

Woodward, Philip.

Supreme Court transcripts (various).

 

Leslie Herbert Kane
. Born Carlton 1 December 1945. One of three gangster brothers and heavily connected in the notorious Painters and Dockers Union. In the 1970s considered Australia's most violent man. Shot dead in the bathroom of his Wantirna unit 19 October 1978. Body never found. Three men charged – and acquitted – of the murder.

Raymond Patrick Bennett
. The mastermind behind the 21 April 1976 Great Bookie Robbery. Charged and acquitted of the murder of Les Kane. Shot dead inside the Melbourne Magistrates Court 11 November 1979 allegedly by Les's brother, Brian.