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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 2007 he was the Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year and Victorian Law Foundation Journalist of the Year. He is currently senior crime reporter for The Age.
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 a number of crime novels, including the Underbelly series. Twice Australian journalist of the year, he is Associate Editor at Melbourne’s Herald Sun.
The authors’ work has been adapted into the top-rating Underbelly television series.
HOUSE of BOOKS
UNDERBELLY 2
John Silvester & Andrew Rule
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Floradale Productions and Sly Ink, Melbourne in 1998
Copyright © Floradale Productions and Sly Ink 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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ISBN 9781742699325 (ebook)
‘He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.’
PLATO
CONTENTS
1 Dead man talking
2 Till death do us part
3 Alphonse Gangitano – Thursday
4 Friday
5 A week later
6 Jaidyn’s world
7 The lime funeral
8 Stares and whispers
9 Sweet Jane
10 Monstrous but not mad
11 Riding with the enemy
12 Blood on the tracks
13 Let’s make a deal
14 The day we locked our doors
15 A rebel with a cause
16 The sting
17 Queen Street revisited
18 Liar, liar
19 No idea
20 After the smoking gun
21 Death in Brunswick
22 Taking the mickey
23 A routine shift
24 A mate’s farewell
25 A month later
26 Last roll of the dice
‘You woke up this morning. Got yourself a gun. Mama always said you’d be the Chosen One’.
THEME FROM THE SOPRANOS
CHAPTER 1
Dead man talking
New opening was a shallow grave
The job sounded perfect … almost too good to be true.
FOR Ron Williams, it was the beginning of a new beginning. Warmed by summer’s setting sun and a rare inner glow of satisfaction, he stood on an isolated beach in Western Australia, indulging his passion for surf fishing. He was – if not a world – then at least a continent away from decades of disappointment.
For the first time in years the battler from Melbourne could see a future that gave him hope for a better life.
No longer would he struggle in low-paid jobs, a potential casualty in every economic downturn. He felt he was going to crack the big time and become, finally, master of his own destiny.
Standing next to Williams on the deserted beach near Albany, was his new boss and confidant, a man who called himself Paul Jacobs, a successful company director and the driving force behind a national geological firm.
Although the two were the same age and physically similar, Ron Williams looked up to the man he’d known only a few weeks for having the qualities he lacked – drive, ambition and a sense of purpose.
Until they met, Williams had been convinced he was going nowhere. He had worked hard in Melbourne in a variety of dead-end jobs, but had nothing to show for it but a hard-won reputation for dedication. Pats on the back don’t pay the mortgage.
In his last job, he’d worked six days a week for a second-hand car parts firm in a southern bayside suburb. Yet he still lived with his elderly mother, lacking the money for a deposit on his own unit. His redundancy payment from Dulux, an earlier job, had long gone. Like many a lonely bachelor, he liked a drink, and found it hard to save money.
Now, aged forty-five, it seemed he finally had a break. In his kit was a signed, legally-binding, two-year contract to work in the mining industry at $60,000 a year, more than twice his wreckers’ yard wage back in Melbourne.
Even weeks afterwards, he must have marvelled at the good luck that had changed his life, when he’d spotted a small classified advertisement in the Herald Sun newspaper on 26 January, 1996.
It read: ‘GENERAL HAND GEO. SURVEY. Duties include camp maint. D/L essential. Suit single person 35-45 able to handle long periods in remote areas. Wage neg. Contract basis. Call 9423-8006 between 6-9 pm.’
He rang the number and found himself speaking to a Mr Jacobs, the man who would be handling the interviews. The nervous applicant slurred his words slightly but the prospective employer didn’t seem to notice – or didn’t care that the man on the end of the phone sounded a little drunk.
The prospective employer could afford to be selective. After all, fifty people had responded to the advertisement, but he was looking for a particular type, someone with special qualities. Ron Williams sounded most promising.
The first interview was held in modest surroundings – a small unit in the north-eastern Melbourne suburb of Greensborough, rather than a flash city office. That was easy to explain, and Jacobs explained it: he invested in WA exploration, not useless business status symbols.
For Williams the job sounded perfect – adventure, coupled with two years security and the chance to have another go at life, three thousand kilometres from past failures. Much better money, the possibility of being a key player in a small team, and the chance to work with an understanding boss who acted like an old mate. It sounded almost too good to be true.
Jacobs had sifted through the job applications looking for a man who was around his own age, had few ties and would not be missed if he disappeared. He short-listed fifteen names. Not a bad return from an ad that cost him $103.60 to run over three days.
Over the next few weeks Williams returned to the unit for follow-up interviews, each one bringing him closer to the job of a lifetime.
Slowly the f
orm of the interviews changed and the questions became more personal. Williams found himself confiding in the man who could be his boss, telling him of his broken marriage, of childhood difficulties and of changing his name by deed poll fifteen years earlier.
This was new ground for Williams, who tended to be a loner and who tended not to speak freely of his personal life, even to workmates he had known for years.
But Jacobs was a good listener, and a sympathetic one, so the story of Ron Williams’s life came out, piece by piece. Finally, Jacobs told him he had passed muster. He had the job.
It was to cost him his life.
THE problem with Paul Jacobs was that he wasn’t. His real name was Alexander Robert MacDonald, a Vietnam veteran, bomber, prolific armed robber and escapee. He had escaped from the Borallon Correctional Centre, near Ipswich in Queensland, in September 1995. He had been serving twenty-three years for armed robbery and escape.
In the next two years MacDonald robbed seven banks in three states and got away with a total of $320,800. He was possibly Australia’s last bushranger. He robbed country banks, taking hostages to try to prevent bank staff from activating security alarms, and then he used his bush skills to camp out until police road blocks were removed days later.
MacDonald would hike hundreds of kilometres and drive thousands to rob banks in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia. While most modern bandits used high-powered stolen cars to get away from crime scenes, MacDonald used push bikes, small motorbikes or his hiking boots. He’d been out of jail only two months when he first developed a plan to take on a new identity. But, as the plan grew more sophisticated – and cold-blooded – he decided he needed a patsy. Someone whose life he could take over.
Which is how Ron Williams came by the worst lucky break of his life. MacDonald was only three months older than Williams and they had uncannily similar faces and builds, although the escaper was slightly taller.
Williams provided documentation such as driver’s licence, deed poll papers and birth certificate for his prospective boss.
MacDonald used them to set up two accounts, one in a bank and the second in a credit union, so he could channel his armed robbery funds. He went to the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages to get a copy of the birth certificate he would later claim was his. He was to end up with a passport, driver’s licence, five credit cards, a Myer card, ambulance subscription and private health insurance under Ron Williams’s name.
But the trouble with taking someone’s identity is that there is a living, breathing witness who can expose the fraud at any time.
MacDonald believed he had that base covered. His credo was as old as crime: Dead men tell no tales.
It was brutally simple – and breathtakingly callous. So much so that Senior Detective Allan Birch, an armed robbery squad investigator, later had trouble grasping the ruthlessness of the quiet middle-aged man he was interviewing.
Puzzled about the identity swap, the detective said to MacDonald during an interview in on 26 July, 1997: ‘Can you explain to me how you would assume the identity of a person who responds to an advert for employment?’
MacDonald responded quietly: ‘You kill them.’
Birch: ‘Did you kill Mr Williams?’
MacDonald: ‘I did.’
THE VICTIM
RON Williams was a loner who spent most of his spare time fishing in Port Phillip Bay. He had married in July, 1981, and fathered a daughter but the marriage failed quickly. He legally changed his name from Runa Chomszczak to Ron Williams the same year he was married. He was a handyman who could make a fist of most trades.
He had plenty of workmates but few, if any, who ranked as true mates. He dreamed of adventure, but couldn’t see a way out of the rut his life had become.
He lived with his mother and spent as much time as he could at work, not because he was well paid or loved his job, but because it gave him company.
His former boss, the owner of Comeback Auto Wreckers, Kevin Brett, was to say of him: ‘He was a great little bloke. He was an all rounder. You name it, he could do it. He was a human dynamo.’
Brett said Williams was a gardener, handyman, storeman, painter and delivery man. He was a statewide reliever for Brett’s three car spare parts businesses.
‘He would have worked seven days a week if you let him. He lived for his work.’
He was later to die for it.
While Williams didn’t speak freely about his private life, his former employer sensed a sadness in his eager worker. ‘He was a little timid and easily let down. He’d had some knocks in his life.’
His only outside interest appeared to be fishing and restoring his car. Workmates said he would often head straight to the bay after knocking off work. He worked until the week before he was to go to Western Australia, but also kept a promise to paint the ceiling of a sandwich shop near his old job. That’s the sort of bloke he was.
Brett was happy to see his trusted handyman kick on to a new job, but he couldn’t help having a twinge of doubt – particularly when he found Williams had to sign a contract with secrecy provisions, and was being paid a retainer for weeks before he was to take up the new position.
His generous new benefactor was paying Williams around $500 a week not to work, which was more than he had been paid to work in Melbourne. It didn’t make sense to Kevin Brett, but he kept his doubts to himself, not wanting to dampen the enthusiasm of a man who, he felt, deserved a break.
Brett was to recall: ‘He was very secretive about his new job. I asked him about it and he said I had paid him peanuts and we had a laugh. He said the main reason he got the job was that he had no ties.
‘He said he took on the job because he wanted to get enough money to buy a unit. I told him there would always be a job here for him.’
His former boss said Williams would never have suspected he was being set up. ‘He just wanted to believe in people.’
THE MURDER
THE new hand asked surprisingly few questions about the work he would be expected to do in the outback. ‘Mr Jacobs’ told him the business was ‘a family concern doing geological survey on order from mining companies in Western Australia.’
He asked Williams to sign an employment contract saying he would not seek, or take any other type of work before they travelled west.
When Senior Detective Birch asked him later, ‘Why did you do that?’ MacDonald was to answer: ‘That was purely and simply because the guy was a little unstable and really didn’t seem fully committed to the new employment, and I wanted to have him locked in to the program.’
They left for Western Australia in MacDonald’s Toyota Land Cruiser utility in late February, a month after the job was advertised. Williams packed light. The boss already had any provisions they would need. Like any seasoned camper, he had a shovel in the back.
They drove across the country for four days, staying at motels, and drinking and eating together. Both men were excited. Both were looking forward to starting a new life.
Williams wrote postcards to his old workmates, relatives and his few friends. His new boss and mate was his usual helpful self and said not to worry about mailing them. He promised he would do that later.
But one postcard was sent straight after it was written, when the two men arrived in Albany, about four hundred kilometres from Perth. Williams couldn’t resist a little good-natured gloating to his former workmates at the car wreckers in Melbourne. He sat down and wrote a card in a pub. It read: ‘Hello boss. I’m sitting with the new boss eating oysters kilpatrick. Got to go, new boss is bringing the beer over.’
The condemned man ate a hearty meal. His last.
Shortly after they left Albany, MacDonald turned the dusty four wheel drive on to a dirt track leading to Cheyne Beach. He suggested they go fishing, knowing Williams was certain to be keen.
He had selected the beach by looking at a map because it was isolated. He remembered the district from his last visit, twenty years earlier.
T
hey walked down to the beach from the utility, Williams carrying his fishing rod, MacDonald a khaki knapsack he’d bought in an army disposal store in Mebourne.
Williams fished and the two men chatted for about an hour. Both were waiting for sunset. Williams because he hoped it would make the fish easier to catch. MacDonald because he wanted to catch his prey unawares in the twilight.
As they chatted, MacDonald bent over slowly, undid the knapsack and slipped his hand in. Inside was the ten-shot, sawn-off, semi-automatic .22 that he had tested months earlier by firing into the Mary River, near Gympie in Queensland. He lifted the gun out and, as he was to describe it later, brought it to his shoulder in one smooth motion and fired. He was about a metre away. The last thing Ron Williams saw was the flash leaping from the barrel as the bullet hit him between the eyes.
‘He was just standing there … I shot him once in the forehead and again in the back of the head when he fell to the ground,’ MacDonald was to tell police, as dispassionately as if he was talking about slaughtering a sheep.
Senior Detective Birch asked him: ‘With what intention, if any, did you take Mr Williams to that location?’
MacDonald: ‘Of killing him … I stopped the motor vehicle, we took some fishing tackle from the rear of the vehicle, proceeded along the beach, fished for perhaps an hour and then I shot him.’
MacDonald said he checked Williams’ pulse to make sure he was dead, carried him thirty metres up a sand dune and buried him. ‘I dug a hole, placed the body in it, covered it with sand, smoothed out the area (and) put branches and shrubbery over it.’
Senior Detective Michael Grainger: ‘You say your intention was to kill him – were you apprehensive or were you just – you – you had a job at hand and you were doing that job?’
MacDonald: ‘It was a job at hand.’
He said that as he prepared to shoot he ‘just switched off, I guess.’
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