Underbelly 2

by John Silvester

  For an unknown break-in artist Lawless embraced the world of crime and became a prolific thief from 1962 until 1964. ‘I worked every day, seven days a week, full on. I made a hundred pounds a day.’ This was in the days when the average worker made twenty five pounds a week. He broke into shops, supermarkets and cafes and stole cash, cigarettes and coffee. He once pulled eleven jobs in a night and eighty burglaries in two weeks.

  He had two men on retainers who would check out likely targets, examine the alarms systems and observe security guard movements, ‘I paid them every Friday.’

  It was almost the perfect racket. Virtually unknown, Lawless could have set himself for life and then drifted into comfortable anonymity. But, like most crims, he could not quit while he was ahead. There was always another job, another earn. ‘I got greedy. My own undoing was going beyond my boundaries. Camera shops and gun shops.’

  When he was finally arrested in 1964, Lawless says, he owned a house in Noble Park, had an interest in two car yards and forty thousand pounds in two safety deposit boxes. ‘Police asked me if the money was mine. I said I couldn’t help them, so I lost the lot.’

  But Lawless was a thief with a sharp mind, a solid memory and a healthy ego. ‘When I was a motor mechanic, I realised you needed the right tools. When I decided I was gunna be a thief I needed a set of legal tools. I decided I wanted to know what a lawyer knew.’

  The boy who couldn’t pass seventh grade went on to be one of the best jailhouse lawyers in Australia. He completed three years of a law degree and ended up with a $4000 legal library.

  ‘I was arrested thirty-three times between 1964 and 1969 and lost two cases.’

  It was in the days when police could produce unsigned ‘confessions’ as evidence. While juries routinely accepted police evidence without question, Lawless would always tell juries the statements were fabricated.

  ‘I was “verballed” (the victim of fabricated statements) but I had a retentive memory and I could undo them on their mistakes,’ he claimed.

  He once produced his unsigned police confession and proved to a jury that a policeman would have been flat out even typing the statement in the stated time of forty-eight minutes, let alone formulating the questions and waiting for the suspect to reply.

  ‘I was unco-operative with the police at all times. I wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t sign for property. I wouldn’t do anything and then they’d produce these unsworn statements that didn’t make sense.’

  Despite Lawless’s claims that he was railroaded more often than a freight train he does not pretend to be an innocent man. He said that in almost every case he was the right man but the police did not have enough evidence.

  ‘I did nearly all of them. A couple of them I didn’t know anything about but most of them I did, yeah.’

  He became fascinated by the law. ‘I would talk to barristers every chance I had.’ But his relationship with his lawyers was always delicate. He was the only major criminal who could boast that he sacked two barristers who went on to become a County Court Judge (Michael Kelly) and a High Court Justice (Daryl Dawson). Even more annoyed with another barrister, Peter Faris, QC, who went on to become the head of the National Crime Authority, he actually punched him in an interview room. ‘After that he sacked himself.’

  Between 1969 and 1972 he said he went through twelve trials and won eleven. ‘The only time I went down I had a barrister. I sacked him during the trial but it was too late.’

  In 1972 he was charged with the murder of Christopher John Fitzgerald, who was shot dead in Noble Park. Lawless was found guilty at his second trial after the first was aborted, and formally sentenced to hang, a sentence commuted to life in jail.

  More than a quarter of a century later he still maintains he was framed. The star witness in the case was Rayma Joyce, his lover and mother of his daughter. She gave two statements to police, one clearing and the second implicating Lawless in the murder.

  For ten years Lawless fought his conviction all the way to the High Court, where he lost four to one. Dissenting Judge, Lionel Murphy, described his conviction as a ‘miscarriage of justice.’

  The prosecution alleged the two men argued in a car, got out to fight and then Lawless shot Fitzgerald.

  In 1982 Rayma Joyce signed a statutory declaration stating her evidence implicating Lawless was false. For the convicted murderer it was the breakthrough he had dreamed of since his sentence. But a month later she changed her mind again and withdrew her sworn declaration.

  More than quarter of a century after the killing it is impossible to establish what really happened on Sunday, 24 September, 1972. But it is almost certain that if the Crown was to present a similar case today a conviction would be highly unlikely.

  Lawless remains bitter about his conviction but does not blame the woman. ‘She was under enormous pressure. They would have taken her children if she did not co-operate. She’s changed her story so often that it would be impossible for anyone to believe her now, one way or the other. I get on all right with her. We have a daughter and a granddaughter together.’

  While inside he followed his twin obsessions of the law – in a decade-long fight for a retrial – and sport, running marathons and playing visiting teams at football. ‘I’ve always loved footy, I still do’. He lined up on former North Melbourne rover and VFL President, Allen Aylett, for one game inside Pentridge. ‘He asked me what I was in for and I said “murder”. I think that was the last game he played.’

  He spent four and a half years in the top security H-Division in Pentridge during the so-called ‘Overcoat Gang’ war involving prisoners bashing and stabbing each other. According to Lawless, some prison officers were prepared to fight fire with fire.

  ‘You would break rocks and then you’d get a belting. You would never know when the belting would come. It was madness, mate.’

  Lawless, the jailhouse lawyer, didn’t choose sides, but even so, he was drawn into the violence. Only once was he moved to use a home made knife on another inmate. The prisoner told an inquiry Lawless had confessed to the Fitzgerald murder. Enraged, Lawless used a handleless prison shiv to try to stab him. But the blade could not pierce the thick leather jacket the man was wearing. The knife twisted and slipped and ended up cutting the attacker. ‘I nearly lost my thumb,’ he says, and still bears a long the scar on his hand.

  The ‘victim’ was uninjured.

  In 1986, Lawless suffered an aneurism leaving him with limited use of his left side. Typically, he decided to develop his own rehabilitation. He took to playing tennis with his left hand to recover his coordination and strength. ‘A prison officer I could always beat was able to beat me easily then, but after three months I was beating him again.’ The following year Lawless won the Pentridge tennis challenge, using a mixture of right and left handed shots.

  In 1987, a change of law enabled him to apply for a minimum jail term. Still suffering the after-effects of his aneurism, he was given a minimum of fourteen years by the Supreme Court, leaving him eligible for almost immediate release.

  He was taken to the Governor’s Office and asked if he was ready to be freed. ‘When I said yes he just told me to fuck off.’ With his possessions in two cardboard boxes and $38 in prison savings he found himself in a pub in Bell Street, one hundred metres from the prison.

  His then girlfriend, Diane, later to be his wife, came to pick him up by taxi. ‘That about chopped out the money. I was shovelled out of the jail with no preparation, I tried the best I could.’ Twelve months later, the police who advocates well-known theory involving leopards and spots, were not surprised when Lawless was arrested with three other men, armed with shotguns, trying to rob a Ringwood bank.

  ‘I had been in for fourteen and a half years and the only people I knew were crims.’ He said he had ‘introduced’ two of the stick-up men and was only roped in to a hands-on role in the robbery at the last minute. ‘I didn’t want to be in on it but I didn’t want to let them down,’ he said.

  T
he last policeman to arrest Lawless, Peter Butts, then an experienced sergeant in the armed robbery squad, does not buy the last-minute inclusion excuse. ‘We had the crew under surveillance and they regularly met at Lawless’s house. They took off to do the job from his house.

  ‘I think he didn’t realise that police methods had changed a great deal from when he was out previously.’

  Butts said he was surprised that after years of fighting so hard to get out of jail Lawless would fall back into committing potentially violent crime.

  ‘For a man of his age to team up with good armed robbers to run into banks was a surprise to me. When he was arrested it looked like his whole world had collapsed. It was like a bad dream for him.’

  Butts said detectives also found stolen police identification in a file at Lawless’s home.

  Although he hated jail time, Lawless admits that being sent back to prison was probably the best thing for him. This time he knew he would be released within a few years and he began to prepare for life on the outside.

  He married Diane and when he was released in 1991 he kept a much lower profile. He said he tried to avoid old criminal associates, although ‘It is impossible not to run into some of them.’

  Lawless was painting a mower shop in the eastern suburbs when an old prison mate walked in and recognised the man in the paint-flecked overalls as one of the biggest names in crime. ‘Hey, Peter, I thought they’d never let you out,’ the former mate said, by way of introduction.

  ‘He said it in front of everyone there. It was so stupid, I wanted to hit him on the head with a paint tin. ’Although out of jail for years, he remains a prisoner of his past. In 1998 his fourteen-year-old granddaughter saw a picture of her kindly grey-haired grandfather in the criminal memoirs of Mark Read, Chopper From The Inside. She asked, ‘How come I don’t know anything about this?’

  With two children and five grandchildren, Lawless, who lives under his wife’s maiden name, does not advertise his criminal past. Having suffered two aneurisms, two strokes and living with a permanent stiff left shoulder, he has had to learn to cope with his physical limitations.

  While Lawless still passionately argues he was wrongly convicted of murder he does not live in the past. He is a keen punter and was even granted a licence to train greyhounds. The standards required to be accepted at in the greyhound fraternity is hardly the same as at the Melbourne Club, but Lawless had to pass police probity checks and pass he did.

  But his passion remains football and as an AFL-qualified coach spends much of his time with the Street Hawks. One of his biggest supporters is Puma National Promotions Manager, John Forbes, who met Lawless in Pentridge during a sporting function in the late 80s. ‘There was an altercation in the weights room and I ended up being lifted off the ground. Peter stepped in and saved my bacon.

  ‘I told him then and there that I owed him one and that when he got out I’d help him if he went straight.

  ‘You have never seen a bloke work so hard since he’s been out. I’ve got a lot of time for him.’

  No-one can look into the future but Lawless appears to have made the jump back into mainstream society. ‘I’ve been out for seven years now. For me, that’s like a lifetime.

  ‘In 1958 they brought in the parole system. This is the first time since then that I’ve been free of it. This is the first time in forty years that I don’t owe time.’

  It is impossible not to feel the irony of the full-time criminal, who spent most of his adult life bucking the system, now trying to instil team sport discipline into the footballers of the Puma Street Hawks, some of them angry young men with criminal records.

  One rainy Wednesday recently after a Reclink game was cancelled two men with a common interest sat in the Michael Tuck Stand at Glenferrie Oval, chatting like old mates as the trains rattled past. The former chief police commissioner, Mick Miller, who has undergone successful open heart surgery, gently chided the convicted murderer about his chain smoking. ‘It will kill you in the end,’ he told him.

  The former policeman, the career criminal and an ex-boxer turned social worker, Henry Nissen, then pitched in together, sweeping and cleaning the rooms before locking up.

  The cop and the robber are not friends and never will be – but they share a common interest in football and people who need help. But in a strange way the two men’s careers were linked. Lawless was one of several criminals whose complaints of alleged police illegality resulted in the 1976 Beach Inquiry into the force. The Premier of the time, Sir Rupert Hamer, was looking for a new Chief Commissioner as the incumbent, Reg Jackson, was about to retire. The then Deputy Commissioner, Laurie Newell, was the recommended candidate and the clear front runner.

  But Sir Rupert wanted a younger man to clean up any problems in the force in the wake of the Beach controversy. Senior Cabinet colleague and Lawless’s former teacher, Lindsay Thompson, knew Mick Miller well. He was impressed with the policeman’s braveness and grace under pressure. The two men worked together during the kidnapping of a schoolteacher and six primary school students from the tiny Faraday State School near Castlemaine in 1972. Mick Miller got the job.

  Miller says of Lawless. Through his football, he has shown himself to be committed to help the socially disadvantaged.’ The former commissioner says you judge people on what you see. And what he has seen of Lawless, and men like him connected with Reclink, he supports fully.

  ‘They help the socially disadvantaged and the dysfunctional gain a sense of purpose,’ he said.

  At one game Lawless gave the players the standard address at quarter time, advising them to play within the rules and not to become upset at the umpire’s decision.

  ‘One thing I’ve learned in this state, is when the whistle blows, that’s it. No-one ever changes their mind, it’s a waste of time arguing.’

  POSTSCRIPT

  Lawless spent two years agonising over whether to talk openly about his life. He feared that some people, including his employer, would never accept that a man with his reputation could reform. When he was employed he was not asked about his criminal background, and having legally changed his name by deed poll, he did not volunteer it.

  Less than two weeks after Lawless’s story became public he was called to his office to meet his supervisor. He was surprised when he arrived to find a security guard also present. According to Lawless he was asked if he had ever had another name and then asked about his criminal record.

  He was then sacked.

  CHAPTER 16

  The sting

  Conning dirty old men for fun and profit

  She collected husbands – a couple of her own, several of other people’s.

  AT first glance, she makes an unlikely femme fatale. She’s fifty, and for anyone half that age she could be a favorite younger aunt, the naughty one who teases you, swears a bit and laughs a lot. But if you were an old man — aged sixty-five to eighty five, say — with an itch for female company, she’d look inviting enough. Especially if she wants to. And if you are old, lonely and rich, she certainly wants to. She’s an expert at it.

  Marilyn — not her real name — is a mother, a grandmother and a successful small-business proprietor. What her family doesn’t know is that she is also rather devious when it comes to serious subjects like sex and money. Her friends call her ‘Mrs Swindell’, and they’re only half joking. Her specialty, these days, is taking dirty old men to the cleaners.

  In fact, she has manipulated the sexual harassment laws and the Equal Opportunity Act to relieve a millionaire of $30,000 for seven weeks’ ‘work’.

  This is how she did it.

  THE plot, if you can call it that, is hatched in late 1997. Marilyn boasts to her friends that she will extract money, serious money, from ‘some old boy’ before Christmas. It starts as a joke, and ends as a bet. One she’s well-equipped to win.

  Marilyn, not to put too fine a point on it, has been around a bit since she left her parents’ farm in western Victoria almost thirty years a
go.

  She was a bright girl — she started school at four, high school at ten — but in that time and place brains didn’t mean much if your parents didn’t think daughters were worth educating.

  The choices, she recalls, were ‘nursing, teaching or typing’. She chose nursing. She was good at it, she says. But, later, after leaving the country boy she’d married at twenty (’I was too young; he was too dull’ she wisecracks) she gravitated to the fast life, and did a lot of things that would have shocked her respectable folks, had they known.

  Not that she was self-destructive. She doesn’t smoke, hardly drinks, despises drugs and those who use them; her vices have always been men and money, preferably together.

  She is short, stocky and no classic beauty, but people like her. Especially male people. Her assets, apart from a sharp brain, a quick tongue and a steady nerve, are roguish green eyes, a nose just aquiline enough to make her face pleasantly predatory, an infectious smile — and what she describes as the signature feature of the oldest profession, generous breasts.

  She collected husbands — a couple of her own, several of other people’s. She once ran away to Europe with one of the latter. When the money and the novelty ran out, she left the man with a huge hotel bill and a guilty conscience.

  Later, she was visited in Melbourne by two men employed to collect unpaid European hotel bills. She calmly told them that although they had the right address they were out of luck: the woman they were looking for had moved to Scotland. She even wrote down an address for them.

  In the late 1980s, Marilyn opened a sandwich and catering shop in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. It was a success, like most things she has done. But, after a few years, it palled, and she sold up.

  Then, last year, she went back to nursing. Which is where the story really begins …