The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  ‘He said “No,” he said, “I’m fucking telling you.” So after that I came back and he said, “How was the tunnel?” He used to call it The Tunnel of Love.

  ‘I said, “You were right about that screw.”’

  James Finch was another inmate who would go on to earn lifetime notoriety for his future role in the Whiskey Au Go Go inferno. Like John Andrew Stuart, his co-accused of that crime, Finch had endured a troubled childhood at the hands of a brutal father. Born in the UK, as a boy he was sent to a Dr Barnardo’s children’s home in Barkingside, Essex. His father was abusive towards the family and when he was seven, his mother, unable to cope, dropped her son off at the home promising to pick him up the following week. She never returned. When Finch first arrived at Barkingside, an official report concluded that conversations he had heard at home ‘persisted in colouring the boy’s mind with lurid horror stories’. It added: ‘At this stage, the boy’s mind reflects fantasies of murder, burning, shooting and destruction.’ Two years later, young Finch was sent to Australia and saw out his youth at Barnardo’s Mowbray Park Farm Training School in the town of Picton, 80 kilometres south-west of Sydney.

  Finch’s Mowbray Park Farm report said he was a ‘tough little boy who resents any show of affection or sympathy’. Even so, within three years he was declared ‘free of problems’ and left school at 15. A year after leaving Mowbray Park Farm, Finch was charged with damaging a railway sign with ‘rifle fire’. Then, in February 1962 he was sentenced to eight months’ detention for breaking, entering and stealing, and car theft. After numerous counts of reoffending he wound up in gaol.

  ‘He wouldn’t fucking back down to a soul on earth,’ says an inmate who knew Finch in Boggo Road. ‘Finch wasn’t a bully, not then.’

  As for John Andrew Stuart: ‘He was in a special cell with a wire door and he was under escort the whole time and I don’t know what he was doing or how long, I can’t remember. But he was always a smart-arse and he was handcuffed to double escort [two guards] once and there was a real bad screw. One afternoon there was no sewerage in the cells or anything and he [Stuart] used to have a plastic bucket, and here’s this bad screw, I can’t think of his name. He’s standing there with piss and shit all over him. Stuart had got him to the door somehow.’

  Even as a man in his early twenties, Stuart had a formidable, and growing, reputation among his fellow criminals. ‘He wouldn’t cop any shit,’ the inmate says. ‘I suppose you’d have to be a bit mad.’

  In fact, not long out of Westbrook, Stuart had already established a pattern of behaviour that would define the rest of his life. It was well known that he never went out in public without a weapon. He favoured a knife, which he would strap to his ankle. Over the coming decade, he would repeatedly commit crimes – initially break and enters, to support his heroin habit, but he would later graduate to rape, assault and in one instance attempted murder – and end up in prison. While inside he would be transferred to and from psychiatric hospitals, which he regularly absconded from, earning himself a reputation as an escape artist.

  In June 1962 Stuart sawed his way out of the notorious psychiatric ward, Ward 16, at Brisbane Hospital with a table knife. ‘Within eight minutes of his escape, every available police car and policeman was called into the manhunt,’ a local newspaper reported. Stuart had stolen the private vehicle of a policeman from the hospital grounds and would don the police tunic and cap he found inside the vehicle, to aid his escape.

  However, Stuart’s freedom was short-lived. The next day he was spotted by a detective in the stalls of the Regent Theatre in busy Queen Street in the Brisbane CBD, after an anonymous tip-off. One of the pictures screening that morning was The Threat, an American film noir starring Michael O’Shea and Virginia Grey. (Incredibly, the plot was not unlike the situation Stuart found himself in on that Saturday morning. The film centres on murderer and lunatic, Arnold ‘Red’ Kluger, who escapes from prison and wants to exact revenge on the people who put him inside.)

  Outside the theatre in Brisbane, three detectives rushed to the Regent and just as the 11.30 a.m. interval started, Detective Fred Humphries, on entering the theatre, recognised Stuart. He was eating an ice cream. ‘I went over to him and asked him to accompany me to the foyer of the theatre,’ Humphries told the press. ‘As we were walking up the aisle, with Stuart ahead of me, he turned and punched me on the chin throwing me off balance. Stuart ran and I chased him. While he was running he put his hand in his hip-pocket as if reaching for a gun. When we got into the foyer I fired warning shots … Stuart leaped down a flight of stairs and slipped on the marble floor.’

  In the end five shots were fired, the bullets having ‘ricocheted round the hall and lodged in the ceiling and walls’.

  Stuart was ultimately locked up again. The Sunday Truth reported: ‘Doctors said his psychiatric examination showed he had a high intelligence and was familiar with many standard textbooks on psychiatry. They said he could simulate … symptoms … particularly those of schizophrenia.’

  As punishment for his misdemeanours in Boggo Road, Stuart was often consigned to the Black Hole. ‘It was literally like a dungeon, an actual black hole,’ says one prison guard who worked there at the time. ‘You’d walk down these stairs into this dungeon, and the only light in there came through those little breather slits between the bricks, like you have in the walls of houses. It was really barbaric.’

  In 1964 Stuart would once again be released from gaol, but it didn’t take long before he found himself back in trouble. On 31 December 1965, just as Vincent O’Dempsey was about to see in his first New Year in Boggo Road, Stuart was arrested and charged in Sydney with a suite of offences that would guarantee him a long stretch of time off the streets. These included the attempted murder of the hitman Stewart John Regan and the malicious wounding of Giuseppe Cappa on 20 December, in Sydney. During the attack in the suburb of Paddington, Stuart had been in company with James Finch.

  Finch would ultimately be charged and imprisoned for the Regan shooting, though criminal associates say that Stuart fired the pistol and Finch took the rap for him. Billy Stokes would later write about this extraordinary ‘Wild West-style’ shoot-out in the streets of inner-Sydney between the madman Stuart, his close mate James Finch, and Regan, Sydney’s number one hitman and serial killer.

  ‘Both [Finch and Regan] were armed at the time and the way the story’s told it was just a case of Finch being faster on the draw,’ wrote Stokes. ‘They had been arguing over bail for a friend of theirs, Danny Landini [who had also befriended Stuart in Brisbane’s Boggo Road Gaol in the early 1960s]. He had been arrested, with Regan and others, on a charge of rape.’

  While Regan and the others had been granted bail, Landini had been left in gaol. Finch believed that Regan, who had plenty of money, should have bailed out Landini. Regan refused.

  Regan took a bullet in the shoulder but refused to testify against Finch. It didn’t matter. Finch was found guilty of shooting Regan and imprisoned.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1965, Stuart was also charged with feloniously wounding Robert Lawrence ‘Jacky’ Steele with intent to murder on 26 November, also in Sydney. A rape charge was also laid against Stuart and his co-accused, the red-headed gunman and fellow Brisbanite, Raymond ‘Ducky’ O’Connor.

  Stuart ended up pleading guilty to maliciously wounding Steele, although he would continue to profess his innocence for the rest of his life. He was sentenced to five years’ gaol, but another three years were added in early 1967 when he was found guilty of attacking a detective in Long Bay Correctional Complex.

  Corrupt New South Wales detective and now convicted murderer, Roger Rogerson, remembers the incident that saw Stuart’s sentence increased. ‘I’ll tell you how mad he was,’ Rogerson recalls. ‘This is my recollection … He was locked up at Long Bay. He made an allegation that he’d been bashed or flogged by arresting detectives.

  ‘Two guys from headq
uarters went out to investigate his complaint, Carl Arkins and his sidekick. They were with Internal Affairs … they’d telephoned the gaol before they went out. They had special interview rooms where police could interview prisoners. They met in this room and Stuart jumped up, king hit Arkins and smashed his jaw. Then he went to court. Charged with grievous bodily harm.’

  In a career spent mixing with some of the heaviest criminals Australia has ever produced, Rogerson says there were only three that were worse psychopaths than John Andrew Stuart. ‘That’s Christopher Dale Flannery, Stewart John Regan and Raymond “Ducky” O’Connor [another of Stuart’s childhood friends],’ says Rogerson.

  At Stuart’s sentencing for the Steele offence he indicated to police that he would be returning to Queensland when he finally got out of prison. It was an ominous sounding bell that should have been heard all the way from Sydney.

  As for Vince O’Dempsey, he was now a seasoned inmate. But the tedium of prison didn’t stop him planning for the future. He had one big ambition that he shared with a fellow prisoner.

  ‘He had an idea that he might blow up police headquarters in Brisbane,’ the prisoner says. ‘Vince said he’d checked it out and that you can go down into the undercover car park where there’s no … this is in the 1960s, no security, no gates. He said there’s a certain number of rubbish bins and waste bins, and you could pop the explosives in there, and away you go.’

  Vince and Shorty

  Boggo Road was also where the lifelong friendship and criminal working relationship between Vince O’Dempsey and Garry ‘Shorty’ Dubois began. O’Dempsey, back in prison for the second time after stealing a safe with Billy McCulkin, was just 28.

  ‘They were very close in there,’ says another inmate at the time. ‘Vince used to come and get Shorty and pull him aside and tell him things. He confided things in Shorty. Shorty was serving a sentence for rape. It was a big sentence for a rape by yourself. And Vince was a heavy. You heard the talk. He was this, he was that. He seemed to have a hold on Shorty.’

  One of Dubois’s close friends, who visited him a few times in Boggo Road, says Shorty’s eight-year sentence for rape was excessive. ‘I know for a fact he was set up on that,’ the friend insists. ‘It wasn’t rape. They picked up a bunch of girls in Chermside and went out partying and had sex with them. And when they were dropping them off, the younger brother of one of the girls has seen them getting out of the cars and went and told the mother. It escalated from there and to save themselves the girls said they were raped.

  ‘The youngest one there was the one who professed all along that it wasn’t rape, that it was all consensual. The ones charged with having sex with her, they were only charged with carnal knowledge. Two other girls who had sex still claimed rape for a while, and two of the blokes who were with them were sent to gaol, the same as Shorty.

  ‘Months down the track these two young ones who had cried rape, changed their story and went to a solicitor, the other two [blokes] were pardoned and released … the only one who went down for rape was Shorty.

  ‘His mother lost her house paying money, she hired a private investigator, she did everything she could to try and get a retrial for him but they would never allow it to happen. I attended a couple of court sessions. The police had groomed her [the girl] really well. She had pigtails and no make-up, she looked like a schoolgirl again. Her testimony was spot on to get him arrested. He got eight years.’

  The friend says Dubois was changed by his long stretch in Boggo Road. ‘I think it soured him a fair bit, and that’s when he fell under the spell of Vince O’Dempsey in there,’ he says. ‘I suppose being locked in there with him is a different thing, but when I met him [Vince] on the outside there was no entrancement. There was mistrust. He scared the fucking living daylights out of you when you looked into his black eyes. You knew he was a preacher. Slowly, over a period of time, stories emerged about him that consolidated the strange feeling I had about him.’

  One inmate remembers another thing about Shorty Dubois. ‘He seemed to be predisposed to Charlie Manson [the American cult leader and mass murderer],’ he recalls. ‘I thought he was half-joking, but he was serious … Shorty even looked like him. A short man. The moustache. The heavy rock scene. Drugs. LSD.’

  Manson had made headlines around the world when his Family cult committed a string of shocking murders in the United States in July and August of 1969. One of the victims of the cult was Sharon Tate, the pregnant actress and wife of film director Roman Polanski. Tate had pleaded for her life before being stabbed to death. The inside of the murder house, in Benedict Canyon, north of Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, was awash with blood.

  While Shorty may have been baying with excitement over Manson’s murderous antics, O’Dempsey, to all who observed him in gaol during those years, was the model prisoner. In fact, he used his lag time to further educate himself. ‘He was always doing these courses,’ one fellow inmate says. ‘Poultry farming. Animal husbandry. Agriculture. He could speak about anything at all, on any topic. He was quiet. Reserved. But once he got to know you he’d be just like a normal person. But there was something there, I felt.’

  The inmate says O’Dempsey was sometimes reflective about his childhood in Warwick. ‘He said all his brothers and sisters fought, the usual stuff,’ he says. ‘He talked about the Christian Brothers and all that shit.’ O’Dempsey would later reveal to a criminal associate that he hated Catholics, despite his own mother’s devotion.

  O’Dempsey also shared some information about his brief stint in the Australian Army, after the disappearance of Tommy Allen in 1964 and before his arrest for the safe robbery in 1966. O’Dempsey said he had been undergoing training at the Holsworthy Barracks outside Sydney when he was given a dishonourable discharge. ‘He told me there’d be no short-haired poofters in the Army,’ the inmate recalls. ‘Then he said when you had a shower down there at the Army base it got all steamy, and he just grabbed a soldier in the next cubicle. He said he raped him. He admitted that to the boys and everyone laughed. O’Dempsey thought that was funny.’

  There was one thing, however, that set O’Dempsey apart from the crowd in Boggo Road. ‘He had an air of complete confidence about him,’ one inmate recalls. ‘He didn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything. Whether that was because he already had a couple of notches on his belt at that stage, I don’t know.’

  Another former inmate recalled arriving in prison and spotting O’Dempsey and McCulkin together, after they were arrested for cracking the Waltons safe. ‘I hadn’t heard about O’Dempsey at that point, he was in the remand yard when we were there … him and Billy McCulkin,’ he says. As for O’Dempsey, ‘I thought I wouldn’t like to fuck with you. It was his demeanour and the way he spoke and that, he was pretty confident and he had a neck like a bull as a young bloke. The rumours would come out that he’d put someone underground, you know. You hear that about a lot of people, but then something about this one I believed.’

  He said you had to switch on and learn how to survive from day one in Boggo Road. The ex-prisoner said even in that gruel of hardened men, Vince O’Dempsey stood out. ‘I don’t think he drank tea or coffee,’ he remembered. ‘I think he used to exercise. I wasn’t in the same yard as him but I’d speak to him … when we used to get into [the same] yards you could play cards … he was a mad card player and he used to get the fucking shits if he lost, too.’

  The ex-con also befriended Garry ‘Shorty’ Dubois. ‘He was good, you know, I never seen the other side of him at all,’ he said. ‘He was pretty quiet, he used to be very, very fit and I was in the same yard as him, like in the last year or something, or whatever it was, and he was alright.’

  The inmate said in the 1960s it was an ‘offence’ to exercise, but the prisoners had ways of keeping fit. ‘Oh, you’d do chin-ups on your bloody shed awning, push-ups, sits-ups with a bolt around the stool … all that sort of stuff,’ he said. ‘You coul
dn’t run or anything. O’Dempsey had been a boxer, yeah. They’d say he was good; very, very hard. I don’t think he’d been beaten.’

  The prison screws gave O’Dempsey a nickname – Silent Death. ‘That’s what we called him – Silent Death,’ one prison guard recalls. ‘He rarely spoke to anybody inside. He kept to himself. He was a loner. When he looked at you with those steel eyes, your hair stood on end. He looked at you and you just about pissed yourself. You wouldn’t think that anyone could look that evil.

  ‘You just got the feeling that you could die at any moment with O’Dempsey. He’d stick you with a knife. He’d shoot you and wouldn’t bat an eyelid. For years after I used to have a recurring nightmare that my car broke down in the bush and I was out there alone. Then suddenly Vince O’Dempsey came out of the bush.

  ‘He was a very, very ruthless man. He was the most evil man that I ever encountered in prison in more than 30 years on the job. No question.’

  The Gift

  In gaol, while O’Dempsey largely preferred his own company, it did not mean he was deaf and blind to the currents that rippled through the Boggo Road community: the gossip, the mischief, the scams, the illicit drugs, and news beyond the gaol walls where criminals continued, day and night, to turn a quid.

  Right or wrong, O’Dempsey had heard that tattooist Billy Phillips had ratted him out over the Waltons safe job. There was a logical assumption, too, that McCulkin may have also sold him down the river, given the way he had evaded any serious gaol time for the job. He may have been sitting in prison but O’Dempsey was well connected on the outside. As a feared criminal, he could still have an impact and get things done.