underbelly
The authors
John Silvester has been a crime reporter in Melbourne since 1978.
He has co-authored many crime books with Andrew Rule, including the Underbelly series, Leadbelly and Tough: 101 Australian Gangsters. In 2008 he was the Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year and Victorian Law Foundation Journalist of the Year.
In 2009 he and Rule co-hosted the compelling and slightly disturbing ABC documentary Dead Famous.
He is currently senior crime reporter for The Age and is an excellent driver. He is described as a spooky eccentric by people who do not know him.
Andrew Rule is a Walkley award-winning reporter who has worked in newspapers, television and radio since 1975. He wrote Cuckoo, the inside story of the ‘Mr Stinky’ case and has co-written, edited and published too many crime books, including the Underbelly series.
Twice Australian journalist of the year, he is a senior writer and deputy editor for The Age and a failed racehorse owner.
The authors’ work has been adapted into the top-rating Underbelly television series.
underbelly
THE
GOLDEN MILE
JOHN SILVESTER AND ANDREW RULE
Published by Floradale Productions Ltd and Sly Ink Pty Ltd January 2010
Distributed wholesale by The Scribo Group www.scribo.com.au
Copyright Floradale Productions and Sly Ink, 2010
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the publishers’ permission
Underbelly: The Golden Mile
The events that inspired the Screentime series for the Nine
Network.
ISBN: 978 0 9806971 0 0
Typesetting, layout and design: R.T.J. Klinkhamer
Cover photograph and design: Harry Rekas, [email protected]
Image selection and styling: Danie Sprague
Corruption is like
a ball of snow:
once set a-rolling,
it must increase.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, LACON (1825)
CONTENTS
1 The cash, the bash and the gash
2 Teflon John, the new king
3 The killing of Danny K
4 The policeman’s daughter
5 Cooking Chook
6 No sympathy for the Devil
7 Debbie does detectives
8 The Christmas Club
9 Billy, not silly
10 Get Louie
11 Roger the dodger
12 Smoking out Mr Sin
13 Bruce Galea, gambling man
14 Who killed Revelle Balmain?
15 Murphy’s Lore
16 George Brown’s body
17 Fine Cotton unravelled
18 McMillan the villain
Bibliography
The cast
The real king of the Cross
is cash: money sucked from
the pockets and pay packets
of the many who fuel
the black economy of
sex and drugs, then
redistributed to a rich
and powerful few.
1
THE CASH, THE BASH AND THE GASH
In Sin City the fix was in – in the boxing ring and betting ring, at police headquarters and Parliament House. This was Australia’s underbelly. And it didn’t get any tougher than the strip they called the Golden Mile.
IT’S a wonder Christopher Dale Flannery lasted as long as he did. By the time George Freeman found the nerve and the manpower to kill him, the mad dog from Melbourne had already survived a few close shaves.
Not all were as public as the one in January 1985, when he copped bullet wounds in one hand and one ear courtesy of two men in a green car who opened fire near the house he shared with Kath and the kids in Turrella.
Flannery, crazy brave, had jumped a fence and called to Kath to grab him a rifle. It’s not easy hitting a hit man once he’s been spooked, so the would-be assassins left the scene. They knew there would be another day.
Not long before, Flannery had fluked another lucky escape – one he might not even have known about.
It was an incident that shows how red hot some Sydney police were running in the 1980s and 1990s. It also confirms the theory that killer cops got rid of Flannery on Freeman’s behalf – and that when they did get him, it was not their first attempt.
The story, revealed by an eyewitness to the events described below, goes like this …
A delegation of bent cops – Sydney’s deadliest – made a flying visit south of the border because they’d heard Flannery was visiting his old haunts around Brunswick in inner Melbourne. Kill him back in his hometown, the theory went, and the hit could be blamed on almost anyone, with no blowback north of the Murray. It was a good theory but a dud plan.
The would-be hit squad of rogue detectives made their temporary headquarters at the shady Port Melbourne pub run by the notorious former VFA footballer Fred Cook, a full-forward whose prolific scoring on the field was overshadowed by all the scoring he did off it.
Drugs and sex were Cook’s principal vices, which led him to keep bad company. The sort of company that comes with strings attached. So when the Sydney crew arrived late at night and woke Cook and his wife of the moment – he’s had a few, between jail stretches – he had to oblige their demands for a full range of the adult entertainment the pub provided.
This ranged from the barely legal – topless barmaids – to strippers and hookers who weren’t fussy about the company they kept, as long as cash and drugs were in the deal.
Not that the coppers would pay for anything, of course. Their motto was ‘Crime doesn’t pay – and neither do we’. The bill for the girls and the grog was picked up by arch criminal – and police informer – Dennis ‘Mr Death’ Allen, who kept cash, guns and drugs at the pub as well as at various addresses among the sixteen houses he owned across the river in Richmond.
Just ‘looking after’ the mysterious visitors that night cost Allen five grand, Cook reckoned later. Allen’s willingness to pick up the tab and show the Sydney cops a good time was an interesting connection given Allen’s longstanding relationship with a couple of Melbourne cops, one being the corrupt Paul Higgins.
At some stage that night, two of the Sydney cops went to Brunswick. Their information was that Flannery would be at or near a certain address. It seemed too good a chance to miss – but they missed. Whether by dumb luck or intuition or a tip-off, Flannery didn’t front that night, and the Sydney guns went back to Port Melbourne with no extra blood on their hands and consoled themselves by partying the night away. No expense spared – because they weren’t paying.
Fate, of course, in the form of George Freeman, would catch up with Flannery back in Sydney. And the dogs were barking that a couple of the same bent cops that visited Melbourne that night were among the last to see him alive.
That’s how it went in the 1980s. For a while there, gangster money could buy police easier than it could fix a boxing match. Anybody that didn’t know that could ask Barry Michael.
BARRY ‘Boy’ Michael was good-looking for a fighter until the night Alphonse Gangitano bit a hole in his cheek and smashed his nose flat with a glass ashtray while hoodlums held him down.
Michael was maybe the toughest white lightweight boxer of his time and confident with it. But he should have known better than to sit down with his back to the traffic in a nightclub where the gangsters hung out.
One consolation for him, later, was that Gangitano needed a crew of goons to do the damage. The other was that no one shot him, which was his first thought when they turned on him.
Michael had fought hundreds of rounds in the ring in hal
f a dozen countries and had punched his way out of street fights and pub brawls. He’d survived three of the great ring ‘wars’ of Australian boxing in the 1980s. But that night was the nearest he came to death – and disfigurement.
He didn’t see the trouble coming. Truth was, it had been festering ever since the night he won the International Boxing Federation (IBF) junior-lightweight title from Lester Ellis two years earlier, in 1985.
The bashing was revenge, a sickeningly violent postscript to one of the greatest (and most brutal) title fights in Australian sports history. Michael had won it when the Carlton crew wanted him to lose and they were bad losers.
Michael – too old and supposedly too heavy to make the weight safely – had pulled off an audacious heist to lift Ellis’s new world title in one of the last fifteen-round fights ever held.
Age and cunning, in the form of 30-year-old Michael, had upset public sentiment – and the betting – by weathering and then wearing down the murderous attack of the champion, who was ten years younger.
Barry Michael was one of the most intelligent pro boxers in the business – not just cool under fire but cocky with it. He talked to Ellis right through the fifteen rounds, goading him into wasting his energy so the younger man would try to hurt him instead of boxing clever.
It was risky – a version of Ali’s legendary ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy to undermine the stronger and younger George Foreman in Zaire. Michael took the biggest shots in Ellis’s armoury and, ignoring his broken nose and the blood on the canvas and all over the referee’s shirt, somehow persuaded Ellis none of it really hurt him.
‘That all you can do, Lester?’ he said in one clinch. ‘That wouldn’t hurt my sister.’
The crowd of 10,000 had booed Michael – the old villain of the piece – and cheered the young ‘Master Blaster’ from Sunshine. Most bet accordingly – including unhappy gangsters in the Gangitano camp, closely connected with promoting the fight.
Michael had called Gangitano weeks earlier to tell him he’d made the weight limit at his training camp without losing the strength to go fifteen rounds, and advised him not to bet against him.
It was the truth but maybe it had sounded to Gangitano like pre-fight tactics to rattle the Ellis camp. In the event, Gangitano’s people had ignored the tip and bet heavily on Ellis. The Carlton crew had big plans for the kid and none of them involved Michael, who was aligned with the painters and dockers through veteran fight trainer Leo Berry and waterfront identity ‘Spider’ Holman.
But the fight unfolded according to Michael’s plan – not Gangitano’s. With each fighter aligned to opposing underworld camps, the unexpected result would inevitably cause tension. Pride and money were at stake. Gangitano had lost both, and it would fester.
The ideal outcome for the Carlton crew was that Ellis would get away with a crowd-pleasing win to beef up his record – and prospects of more title fights, big gate money and the chance of sponsorships and television rights that come with a championship belt.
Betting on certainties is as close as most gangsters get to a religion but cheeky Barry Michael, born Barry Swettenham, had torn up the script.
Losing money and face was a poisonous mixture but Gangitano hid it fairly well until the night Jeff Fenech beat Tony Miller in early 1987. After the fight Michael had agreed to meet Gangitano at Lazar’s nightclub, a big bluestone pile on King Street, heart of the nightclub strip. By the time Michael and his mate and wife got there, it was hours after midnight, a time when only bad things happen. The wannabe ‘Godfather’ was waiting with his crew.
They shook hands and discussed their grievances: Michael wanted money and Gangitano a re-match to promote. Michael, sitting on a couch with Gangitano, had his back to the other gangsters. Suddenly, his wife screamed a warning: they had king hit Barry’s friend Simon and knocked him out.
Michael snapped his head around and saw the bouncers carrying Simon out. ‘I thought I was off,’ he would tell the authors later, meaning he expected to be shot. He turned to Gangitano and yelled, ‘You rat, you set me up.’
Gangitano grabbed him and bit his face. Michael gouged the big man’s eyes, trying to make him let go. The hoods all grabbed him, and he went down in a blur of savage punches, kicks and bites.
The bouncers were wary because they knew the gangsters were armed but they stopped the beating turning into murder, yelling, ‘He’s had enough!’. When they dragged the boxer out of the crush, his nose was under his left eye, his cheek was torn open and he was gouting blood.
But he could still think. ‘Take me to St Vincents,’ he said, ‘and let them think they’ve had a win.’ It was a smart move. He knew he would be safe from a follow-up attack in hospital.
Later, a bouncer told Michael he’d kicked a pistol away from one of the hoods. He will never know if they’d planned to kill him – or whether Gangitano was clawing back some face to boost his reputation as a standover man.
Big Al would find out a decade later, after doing it again in another King Street bar, that his psycho routine could be fatal. The legal fallout from that bar room bashing led to his execution by his ally Jason Moran – making Gangitano an early casualty in what would become known as the Gangland War. That war, of course, would be fought in a glare of publicity that reached a crescendo when Moran and a mate were gunned down at a junior football game in 2003.
But in the time between Barry Michael’s bashing and Gangitano’s murder in 1998, there had been plenty going on, too – it’s just that most of it wasn’t making it to the front page or the evening news. And it wasn’t all in Melbourne.
When it came to money, the biggest rackets were in Sydney, where the lines between the underworld and the everyday world were more blurred. In Sin City the fix was in – not just in the boxing ring and betting ring but at police headquarters and Parliament House.
This was Australia’s underbelly. And it didn’t get any tougher than in Kings Cross, on the strip they called the Golden Mile.
THE cops who work the Cross have always taken a perverse pride in their beat. For years, Kings Cross detectives have had their own tie and cufflink motif – a crude hybrid of a syringe, dagger and pistol under the letters ‘KX’.
It looks like something knocked up by one of the several tattooists whose parlours do a roaring trade just up the street from the police station.
One thing is sure, if a local tattoo parlour did it, the price would be right. They know how to look after the law at the Cross. It’s been that way since the heyday of the razor gangs, sly groggers, two-up schools and SP bookmakers who flourished there between the world wars.
A good place for a cop to get a cold drink or a hot steak in the 1980s and 1990s was the Bourbon and Beefsteak, known as the ‘Bourbon’ and still a Kings Cross landmark. The three-storey white wedding cake of a building is part of the scenery, like the giant Coca Cola sign sitting above the intersection of Darlinghurst Road and William Street, the hardened arteries in the heart of the Cross.
The Coca Cola sign, the Bourbon, the Texas Tavern and other garish Americana reflect the Cross’s history as the place US soldiers flocked to spend their pay on R & R leave. Half a lifetime after the Vietnam War ended, the legacy of R & R lives on in the Cross’s free-for-all street market in sex and drugs.
The Bourbon might have been redecorated since the fall of Saigon but the decor was never the secret of its drawing power. Sydney criminal lawyer Charles Waterstreet says its main appeal ‘in the old days’ was that it was one of few places that stayed open all night.
‘That was what it had going for it. It was all red, with mood lighting and smoky, a sort of Land’s End full of people who had kicked on from somewhere else,’ says Water-street.
People have flocked to the Cross after dark for decades, like moths to a lamp. Some visit for a few hours. Others return too often or stay too long for their own good. Some die there.
Dirty money has always been milked from the Cross, from the oldest profession and its near relatives.
Faces and names change but the rackets don’t.
Once, Abe Saffron was called ‘King of the Cross’ for good reason. There have been pretenders since, like the Bayehs and the Ibrahims, but the real king is cash: money sucked from the pockets and pay packets of the many who fuel the black economy of sex and drugs, then redistributed to a rich and powerful few.
Cash greases the wheels of corruption and for too long it reached the highest levels in Sydney. It flows uphill, seeping up from the streets to reach premiers, police chiefs and public servants, prosecutors and judges.
None of this could have flourished without people in high places turning a blind eye to police who were conniving, complicit or compromised by bribery, blackmail and protection.
Bent cops profited from protecting rackets in the streets where they were supposed to uphold the law. Others felt powerless to do anything about it.
They could tell themselves it didn’t matter – that police were above the law, that the street people were below it and that what the rest of society didn’t know wouldn’t hurt it.
But they were wrong. Crime and corruption can touch anyone.
SHE was a judge’s daughter but that didn’t matter on the street. At the Cross, she was just another piece of meat in a market where everything had a price, in cash or powder.
As a teenager, she would stuff her private school uniform in a bag, pull on jeans and tee shirt and hang out in Darlinghurst Road.
It wasn’t enough for her to play the tourist, to rubberneck at the needy, the greedy and the desperate in the Golden Mile, to smoke cigarettes and sip cappuccinos in dingy cafes before going home to dawdle through her homework.
This one had the self-destructive gene, the deadly blend of boredom, loneliness and thrill-seeking that the human vultures smell. The street hookers could have warned her to stay away but that wouldn’t have stopped her. By the time she left school she’d met people in the clubs who got her into drugs because they ‘liked’ her. Soon she was shooting up heroin.
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