Gangland Robbers (20 page)

Within a month of Bennett's death, John Mervyn Kingdom, a friend of the Kanes, walked into St Vincent's Hospital with three bullets in his groin and stomach. He told the police he had been walking in North Fitzroy when he ‘felt a pain' but, naturally, had neither heard nor seen anything. One theory was that he had been kidnapped and shot in reprisal for Bennett's death. Things quietened down for the next few months but then there were further reprisals, although not at first from Bennett's side.

Around 6.45 a.m. on 15 July 1981 Norman McLeod, Mikkelsen's brother-in-law, walked across his front lawn, got into the Mazda parked outside his home in Rockbank Court, Coolaroo, and was shot three times through the side window by two men armed with shotguns. They then ran away down a branch of the Moonee Ponds Creek. He had been mistaken for Mikkelsen, whose car he was using. No charges were ever brought.

Brian Kane spent 26 November 1982 with an old friend, Sandra Walsh. In the evening, they went for a few drinks at the Quarry Hotel, Lygon Street, Brunswick East, near the intersection with Weston Street. After about an hour, Sandra Walsh went to the lavatory and two men came in to the hotel. One of them, tall and thin and wearing a black balaclava, walked over and shot Kane in the face, knocking his teeth out.

If the police hoped to get any help from Walsh, they were mistaken: ‘He was shot and that's all I'm saying,' she told them. Kane died the next day, and Walsh later made a statement that she had driven him in her Jaguar to the Quarry Hotel. But that was a mistake, she told the coroner eleven months later; she had been confused. Earlier in the day, she had lent her car to a Trevor Russell, who had dropped the Jaguar off there during the evening.

And in criminal circles—and who would apparently know better?—the names Vinnie Mikkelsen and Russell ‘Mad Dog' Cox, whom the police interviewed in 2010, were barked. Neither was ever charged. Much later, when the case was reopened in 2009, Greedy Smith came into the frame.
Then, even more recently, the name
of the contract killer Rodney Collins has been floated. He has not been charged either.

Laurie Prendergast came out of hiding but, in turn, disappeared in August 1985. Whether this had anything to do with the Kane family, or their friends, is another matter. There were plenty of people from Sydney to Melbourne and back again, who wanted him dead. Another member of the team, Anthony McNamara, died in Collingwood in 1990. He was a drug addict and it was suspected that a hot shot (a lethal injection of heroin intended to look like a random overdose) had been administered.

If Greedy—sometimes known as ‘Fatty'—Smith was in on the robbery, as opposed merely to laundering the proceeds, he partially survived the robbers' curse. In February 2002 he received three years for a series of drug charges and, in later life, sold drugs from his Rolls-Royce. He had suffered from diabetes and melanoma, and had part of his leg amputated. The remainder of the limb had the emblem of North Melbourne Football Club, of which he was a keen supporter, on it. In his career, Smith acquired more than fifty convictions, and lived until August 2010, when he suffered a fatal heart attack, aged sixty-five. He died still denying that he had been a driver in the Bookie Robbery and the getaway driver in Brian Kane's killing.

Another man who at one time had enemies to spare was the multi-faceted Jim Taousanis. Once a strong-arm man for Sydney identity Lennie McPherson, the karate expert, Kings Cross bouncer and gym instructor Taousanis and his offsider took to waiting in false ceilings with his offsider, crawling into a hotel's strongroom and, like bank robber Brenden Abbott, dropping down when the staff arrived. An informer had told the police—rightly or wrongly—that the pair had carried out a very successful raid on Sydney's Hilton Hotel in April 1991, netting $300 000, and that they were going to repeat the exercise three months later on the night of 22 July.

That was when the wheels came off. A team led by Detective Sergeant Craig McDonald was staking out the Hilton's premises when the ceiling gave way and the pair fell into the gift shop underneath, setting off the alarm. They burst out of the shop and began firing. McDonald was hit in the arm and the gunmen made off down Pitt Street, towards Town Hall Station. Taousanis later told the police he shot McDonald because, ‘I had the edge.' McDonald had hesitated before firing and Taousanis was prepared to shoot straightaway.

The raid had serious ramifications. Taousanis and his offsider went to prison as, in different circumstances, would McDonald. Taousanis also served a sentence for a bashing he undertook on behalf of Lennie McPherson, who had fallen out with a businessman over a $20 million contract. While in prison, he converted to Christianity and, by all accounts, turned his life around. After his release on parole in 1998, he gave talks pointing out the folly of a life of crime.

In November 1999 gunmen opened fire on Taousanis in Collins Street, Tempe, hitting him three times as he was walking his girlfriend to her home the evening before their wedding. He was shot in the lung and leg, surviving only because of his physical fitness. He had been due to stand trial for the murder of businessman Peter Mitris, who disappeared in 1991 and whose body had never been found. Saddened by the adverse newspaper articles written about Taousanis, his friend and mentor the Reverend Dave Smith of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church wrote to a newspaper: ‘Jim is one of the nicest blokes I've got the privilege to call my friend. He's a member of the church, he works with kids, he's done some bad stuff in the past but that was 10 years ago. Some of the media reports have been outrageous.
He's one of the gentlest guys I know
.' No one was ever charged with the hit on Taousanis and nor was it clear who had ordered the contract.

Meanwhile, things had not gone well for McDonald. For a time the New South Wales police had provided him with a weapon and some protection but, in due course, these were withdrawn and by 1996 he felt abandoned. Obsessed with the idea that Taousanis was going to kill him, he turned to organised crime figure Leslie George Kalache as the only man who would, and could, protect him. There was, of course, a price to be paid.

When three kilograms of speed were found in a raid on Kalache's house, McDonald tried to persuade a younger officer to wipe the prints for $5000. He went to his superiors and McDonald went to prison for a minimum of eighteen months. Along with two other officers who were in the gun battle of 22 July, he sued his employer, claiming they had not been given body armour or shotguns. The claim was initially for $750 000 between the three of them, but the police dillydallied in settling the claims and ended paying a total nearer to $2.5 million.
As for Kalache, he was pleasantly
surprised when he received a seven-year minimum for the drugs, but less pleased when the Court of Appeal trebled it to twenty-two years pre-parole.

Eventually, Taousanis went on trial in February 2001, the prosecution alleging that the Mitris killing was over the theft of $30 000 worth of drugs sent to Australia in magazines. The first jury disagreed, and he appeared before a single judge in the retrial. The evidence was a mishmash from men who were involved in the murder, boosted by a prison snitch doing life for murder, who told the judge that Taousanis had confessed to him in prison.
The judge stopped the trial
at the close of the prosecution's case.

Threatening to inform on robbers to the police is never a good idea but that is just what Kings Cross prostitute Helen Paunovic did. Her threats were taken seriously, and she was shot and killed on New Year's Eve 1967 as she left Mamma Eve's Coffee House and crossed Kellett Street to the Mansions Hotel. This incident was also an example of why, once used, firearms should be disposed of. Bullets from the weapon that had been used were the same as those used in a robbery at Bexley when shots were fired into the ceiling. The same weapon had been used when Stefan Stefanovic was shot at in the early hours the previous November at his home in Erskineville. The police discovered his wife had been having an affair with a hospital cleaner, John Marney, who had let German-born, ex-French Foreign Legionnaire Fred Harald Harbecke and his team use his home as a depository for masks and weapons. Marney had had Harbecke shoot Stefanovic.

Paunovic had earlier borrowed £50 (now about $1000) from Harbecke, and told him that since she knew he was a bank robber, she would not pay it back. If he threatened her, she would go to the police. Harbecke pointed her out to his offsiders, Allan Dillon and James Thornton, whom he had met in Grafton Gaol, where they had been labelled ‘intractables'. Thornton took the offending gun from the back of a Pontiac and shot Paunovic dead, Marney dropping the gun in Sydney Harbour. All received life imprisonment.

Harbecke became the first inmate of Katingal, the notorious, supposedly escape-proof prison within a prison, when, along with Earl Heatley, he tried to escape from Long Bay in November 1972, attacking a warder with a braille printing machine. He survived Katingal but it is not clear what happened to him after his release. It's certain, though, he was deported to Germany, where it was rumoured he had been involved in another bank robbery.
Other versions have him returning
to live in Queensland.

Solicitors' clerk Brian Alexander was another suspected of being too close to the police. Born in Sydney in 1939, he first worked with Philip N Roach, a solicitor who represented lower-level criminals and prostitutes in the Kings Cross area. He took correspondence courses to qualify either as a solicitor or barrister but never completed them. Alexander also became known to, and was later the associate of, both criminals and a group of New South Wales detectives. After working for Roach for nearly twenty years, he then joined the practice of solicitor John Aston. One of the men with whom he dealt was notorious robber Neddy Smith.

On 25 March 1981 Alexander, along with two federal narcotics agents, was arrested and charged with conspiracy. The allegation was that the three of them had disclosed confidential information to Terrence Clark of the Mr Asia drug syndicate. The case was dismissed at the committal proceedings because the Crown could not prove beyond doubt the source of the leaks. It was, however, the end of Alexander's legal career, and he drifted into drinking heavily and working in hotels. Then the underworld learned he was likely to give evidence to the Stewart Royal Commission into drug trafficking, naming names, dates, places and amounts.

On 21 December 1981, shortly after Alexander was seen drinking with three men in the King's Head Tavern near his office in Park Street, Sydney, he disappeared. Two weeks later his car was found abandoned near The Gap at Watsons Bay, a notorious suicide spot. According to Neddy Smith, however, Alexander was too much of a coward to commit suicide. He had heard that Alexander had been driven to the Darling Street wharf in Balmain, from where, his hands cuffed behind his back, he was thrown from a launch, an old gas stove tied to him. He was apparently crying when he went into the water. Smith concludes, ‘But I had no part in it. That was something I wouldn't wish even on someone like Brian Alexander.'
Others are less convinced
.

Over the years, Queensland has had its share of quality robberies and retaliations. The Beerburrum mail robbery, then the second-biggest in Australia after the Mayne Nickless robbery, took place on 17 April 1974, when armed bandits wearing women's wigs held up the mail contractor on the Bruce Highway, 40 kilometres north of Brisbane. The contractor's four-ton truck was forced off the road and the driver, Noel
Thompson, bailed up with sawn-off shotguns. He was then made to drive 3 kilometres along a forestry track, tied up hand and foot, and bundled under his truck. Thompson heard the men say they were looking for $25 000 in notes that were being sent for destruction. He told them he had nothing of value and one of them replied, ‘Do you know you're carrying half a million dollars?' Thompson said he didn't. In all, $488 000 was stolen; the bandits dropped $53 000 as they fled. Nearly $300 000 was never recovered.

Jack Edward Wilson was born in Goondiwindi and had a long record for theft, assault and robbery going back. He and Donald Frederick Flanders were arrested for the Beerburrum mail robbery on 7 May—Wilson in the Boulevard Hotel, Kings Cross, where police said they found more than $130 000 in cash wrapped in foil in a suitcase and trunk; and Flanders in Brisbane. The case against Flanders relied mainly on identification, and his solicitor asked the magistrate to stop the prison authorities cutting his client's thick, greying collar-length hair and large sideburns. Otherwise, he said, acquaintances who might provide an alibi would be unable to recognise him.

In March 1975, amid allegations
of bricking, both men were found guilty and received ten years. Wilson was released in December 1982, and was promptly extradited to Victoria to face charges of burglary and causing an explosion. The next year, in Melbourne, he was placed on a $1000 bond. On 19 July 1986 his body was found in a car in Tarcutta, New South Wales, 20 kilometres east of Wagga Wagga. He had been suspected of two robberies in Queensland, when $300 000 was taken from a Springwood bank, and $80 000 from Jupiter's Casino on the Gold Coast.

One former prison officer remembered him:

 

Jack Edward Wilson was an old school crim and armed robber. They didn't come much tougher. The man hardly said a word, he was a dark visaged, brooding type of bloke who kept to himself, he reminded me of a rougher Clint Eastwood to look at. He had a 35-year criminal history and was an armed robber by profession.

With Wilson you knew where you stood, he didn't like anybody. It was common knowledge that the money still hadn't been recovered and he would have been something of a marked man inside. Once again it highlights the choices people make with their lives, many criminals would have been great company directors or CEOs. The amount of planning, preparation and persistence they put into
the pursuit of their chosen lifestyle, channelled into business would have probably made for a more financially rewarding life. As one crim said to me, ‘Boss, I do it because I love the thrill.'
I guess you can't argue with that
.