The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  If Dennis’s body had become a lurid patchwork of human graffiti, the wardrobe he chose to hide the colourful parade of creatures in was in no way comparable. A sleeveless blue singlet underneath bib and brace overalls were his favoured mode of dress for most occasions, social or business. But what transformed this drab working man’s uniform was the gold jewellery he habitually wore—diamond rings, bracelets, and neck chains, all of them in chunky 22-carat gold, much of it the soft, yellow variety from Thailand. Estimates of the value of his street jewellery have varied from $250,000 upwards. It says something for Dennis’s reputation that he was able to mix in criminal circles with more than a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of temptation dangling from his person without a thought for the risks involved. After his death much of this jewellery passed into the hands of various family members. It later became the subject of Federal Court warrants allowing seizure from a number of places, including pawn shops, to help pay off the massive tax debts Dennis’s estate had accumulated on his undeclared income from the sale of drugs. Kathy took action to reclaim the jewellery.

  After we got it the police seized it. So I went to court and got awarded it all back. At that time I was reporting at the Richmond Police Station three times a week. So after I got it back at the court I put everything on, every piece of his jewellery on me. I had the mink coat on and all the jewellery. I mean the rings were that big they were slipping off, the chains were nearly killing me. And I go to sign the bail book and the duty officer says: ‘I see you got the jewellery back.’ And as soon as I got outside I had to take it off it was so heavy. Now when Dennis worked hard, he did work hard renovating, he’d have to wash his neck with Drive to get the black stains of the gold off him. And of course gold in the heat makes you burn.

  The other distinguishing feature of Dennis’s appearance during his years in Richmond was his headgear. He and the entire clan—soldiers, Kathy and the family, even the girls working in Kathy’s massage parlour—would go through a period when they all wore Mexican sombreros. Next it would be headbands with Japanese lettering on them; once black gangster hats were in vogue, and so on. His women would wear T-shirts with the words ‘Dennis’s Dirty Girls’ printed on the front.

  There was a distinct sense of camaraderie in these days, before violence and murder replaced the laughs and the good times. Dennis would take up to a dozen of the family, soldiers and girls to his favourite restaurant, the Tai Ping at St Kilda Junction, for crayfish and chilli lobster. Another haunt was the Oyster Bar in the city, where his bill often came to more than $100 a head.

  There was one time we were in the Tai Ping and this bloke had a finch, a bird in a shoe box. He wanted to sell it, and he happened to pass it across Dennis’s plate. Dennis reached out and bit its head off. It annoyed him, leaning across his plate.

  This cavalier attitude to the good manners and sanctity of the dining table was typified during a visit to an upmarket Italian restaurant in Carlton one evening. Dennis, his girlfriend Jenny and The Enforcer and his wife were present. The Enforcer recalls:

  Dennis was wearing his overalls, and the only reason we got in was when he flashed this roll of notes. We were drinking $100 bottles of wine, and my wife and me ordered steaks, done medium. When they arrived and we cut into them, blood came out, so Dennis shouts ‘Garçon!’ and when the waiter comes over he says: ‘We ordered medium steaks, these are rare.’

  Well the waiter takes a look and says: ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, they are medium.’ So Dennis pulls out his .32, sticks it in the bloke’s mouth and says: ‘Are you calling me a fucking liar?’ The bloke’s shaking like a dog shitting razor blades.

  He says: ‘I’ll take them back.’ But we said it was okay, and Dennis ordered a bottle of their best wine, you can imagine what that was worth. The bloke who was pouring it was shaking so hard he spilled it all over the table, and Dennis says: ‘What’s your fucking problem?’ I said to him, ‘Pull up, Dennis.’ But he left them $120 tip to make sure we’d get back in next time. He liked their food.

  No portrait of Dennis is complete without some reference to his gross overindulgence in speed, which more than any other factor helped create the dangerous and unstable monster he became. Being so easily obtainable, speed has become increasingly popular in recent years, even though it’s generally regarded as even more harmful than heroin.

  Falling asleep while under the influence of speed is virtually a medical impossibility. The manic physical and mental energy it stimulates does, however, wear off after a time. The user can then choose to sleep it off or, much more dangerously, have another snort or hit. The effect of a second hit is the equivalent of sending a massive lie to the body’s natural warning systems. While everything is crying out for rest and recovery, the user becomes convinced there is a bottomless reservoir of mental and physical energy still to be enjoyed. In extreme cases, users may go without sleep for days and nights on end, perhaps snorting or injecting the drug every two or three hours until total exhaustion sets in.

  Most habitual users graduate from snorting speed—generally through a straw or rolled-up bank note—to injecting it. The most important difference between the two is the rate at which the drug takes effect—an injection is much more instant than when speed is ingested through the nose. The sudden jolt to the senses immediately after the injection, known as the ‘rush’, can in itself become addictive.

  The extent of Dennis’s overuse of speed at the height of his addiction would be difficult to believe if there were not so many witnesses to testify to the horrific behaviour it produced in him. According to The Enforcer, Dennis used seven grams of pure speed a day, ‘enough to keep a herd of bull elephants on their feet until the middle of the next century’.

  His usual method was to inject the drug into his arm, tying a dressing-gown sash around it, as often as every half-hour. Sometimes he didn’t bother to remove the sash between hits. Occasionally when this enormous intake left him desperately in need of sleep, he would turn to tranquillisers. The Enforcer recalls:

  There was this time when he’d been up partying for days, and he said he wanted to sleep. Did anybody have any Serepax? Someone had a packet, and he took fifty. Fifty in one go. It would have killed a horse. He goes into his bedroom, and four or five hours later bounces out like an athlete. ‘Come on, we’re going to party on,’ and he starts shooting up speed again. He must have had that much in his system the Serepax hardly had any effect.

  Like Kathy, The Enforcer finally came to a theory that because of his addiction Dennis sometimes thought he was invisible and not responsible for his actions. ‘Dennis was the only one in the regiment in step,’ he says. ‘Simple as that.’

  Late one night he and Dennis were transporting a box containing six .38 revolvers down the lane at the back of Chestnut Street in Richmond, where Dennis owned a house, both were on tiptoe, trying to make as little noise as possible but Dennis’s jewellery was ‘rattling like two skeletons fucking in a 48-gallon drum on a tin roof’. Suddenly an Alsatian dog burst through a fence and bit The Enforcer, who promptly kicked it and sent it packing back through the fence. Dennis angrily told him to stop making a racket. After they had dropped off the guns and were on their way back, the dog leapt out again, this time biting Dennis. He pulled out a .357 Magnum, shot the animal three times in the head, and turned to The Enforcer and told him to cut out the noise.

  * * *

  The longest period Kathy can remember Dennis going without sleep as a result of speed was fourteen days, but a week was not uncommon. During these sessions, he insisted on playing music non-stop at pain threshold volume, generally reggae and preferably Bob Marley And The Wailers. (His passion for Marley was so great that one night he accosted a roadie in the toilet of the Riverside Hotel in Richmond. The unfortunate man’s band had refused to play a Marley number Dennis had requested. Dennis was later charged with assault and illegal possession of a firearm.)

  As he reached the final stages of exhaustion during one of his bin
ges, he would be continually rocking backwards and forwards on his feet. The longer he had been without sleep the faster he rocked. In the final stages of exhaustion and intoxication Dennis was a grotesque, waking nightmare. Music roaring around him, a sash dangling from his arm, and a needle at the ready, he would rock backwards and forwards in the corridor or the doorway. He would forget who people were, people like his brothers and even Kathy. He would forget who he was, or where he was and became transformed into a jangling, incoherent exposed nerve, blindly probing for any physical sensation that could anchor him back to some semblance of reality. Sometimes that sensation would be a volley of gunfire, smashing and splintering wood and plaster. Sometimes the target was human, and it was bone and flesh that burst into fragments.

  In this condition Dennis was every bit as volatile and dangerous as unstable gelignite—primed and ready to explode. You didn’t cross Dennis at times like this. You didn’t go near him if you could possibly avoid it.

  * * *

  If that was Dennis, what was his environment, those Richmond back streets where he sold his drugs and guns, and tortured and murdered his victims? Anybody living in Melbourne for any length of time will have passed within a couple of hundred yards of Dennis’s territory, most without ever having seen it. The road taken is Swan Street, Richmond, heading from the affluent eastern suburbs into the city. Just before Hoddle Street, and within a kilometre of one of the world’s greatest sporting stadiums, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, there is a railway bridge passing over Swan Street. At a set of traffic lights on the city side of the bridge is a pub/night club called The Depot. A little-noticed left turn can be made here into Cremorne Street. A few yards down Cremorne Street the visitor again turns left, this time into Stephenson Street, and the boundary of what was Dennis’s domain. The first 200 metres of Stephenson are a curve, an unusual feature in itself for a city built almost exclusively on the American grid system of straight lines and right-angled intersections.

  What makes this stretch of Stephenson Street even more unusual is the ten-metre-high featureless concrete wall overshadowing one side of the street, hiding the railway line from view but never deadening the roar of passing trains, before it straightens out and narrows to almost single-car width.

  Back in the 1980s one visitor to the area found out exactly who ran things in this tight little bottleneck. He parked a truck outside 37 Stephenson Street and was immediately told to ‘fuck off’ by a boy. The youngster, who looked about fourteen, was Jason Ryan, Dennis’s nephew. This had no effect so the boy returned with a gun and began waving it about. Finally a man in bib and brace overalls strode out from the front of one of the little workers’ cottages on the left hand side of the street, and began pointing to imaginary lines on the road.

  ‘You can park here, and you can turn up to here,’ he said. ‘Anything past that and we’ll blow your fuckin’ van up.’ The intruder must have wondered what he had walked into. Whatever went through his mind, there was something about the manner of the man giving the orders that ruled out any protest.

  * * *

  In the middle of this section of Stephenson are numbers 35 and 37. Kathy owned 37 and Dennis owned 35. Both have high, brick walls bordering on the pavement and today appear neat and well-kept. Ten years ago Kathy lived in 35 and Dennis committed his murders in 37. He also built the concealing walls.

  A hundred metres down Stephenson Street on the other side of the road is number 102, owned by Dennis. Two doors up is number 106, which Kathy rented for a period. Next door to 106 is a vacant lot used as a car park. This was 108, where from 1982 Kathy owned and operated The Gaslight massage parlour after negotiating for the purchase in 1978.

  Running parallel with the straight section of Stephenson Street, fifty metres westwards towards the city, is Cubitt Street. Here Dennis owned numbers 41, 43, 45, 47, and 49, adjoining weatherboard cottages. Today numbers 41 to 47 are no more— an untidy, grassed vacant lot is all that is left. Number 49, a crumbling wreck, borders the vacant lot.

  Back in the other direction, 100 yards east of Stephenson Street, is Chestnut Street, where Dennis owned and lived in number 86, before moving into 37 Stephenson. This completed Dennis’s real estate portfolio in Richmond. He owned a total of eight houses, and Kathy two, within an area less than the size of a city block. They paid a total of $280,000 for them. Today their combined worth would be several million dollars.

  On the corner of Stephenson Street is The Cherry Tree Hotel, once the haunt of the legendary Melbourne criminal Squizzy Taylor. When Dennis was a regular here, the pub was a typical inner-suburban hole in the wall. Today it has enjoyed a facelift with soft-toned timbers and chrome in evidence. The drinkers are mainly locals with a sprinkling of yuppies.

  (Since its metamorphosis The Cherry Tree has acquired a fame independent of Dennis’s legacy. In March 1991 it was the scene of an attempted tryst between American singer Billy Joel and Australian TV hostess Sophie Lee. The repercussions from Billy’s rejected advances echoed from the bar of The Cherry Tree across the world to America, where his girlfriend, international model Christie Brinkley, was said to be so unimpressed she destroyed a hotel room.

  In June 1994 the media spotlight again fell on someone associated with the hotel—a former employee, Kellie Wilkinson, was murdered by Khmer Rouge guerillas after demands for a $50,000 ransom.)

  The Cherry Tree borders Balmain Street and is directly across the road from the disused Rosella food factory, which still towers over most other buildings in the area. It was ideal for the police as a vantage point from which they used to keep Stephenson Street and Dennis’s activities under almost constant surveillance. When they knocked off at the end of a shift, Kathy says, Dennis would occasionally pepper the building with gunshots, leaving them to worry when they returned about when the next volley was coming. Miraculously, Dennis was never charged or booked over any of these incidents.

  What about the machine gun? The police come to me the next day because Dennis never got up till about two p.m. and I was an early riser. They said: ‘You’ll have to stop him taking pot shots.’ I said: ‘What at?’ Little did I know they’re in this factory straight over the road from The Cherry Tree. Dennis had driven past with my girlfriend, who is about six foot. We called her The Talking Bone—she was the topless, bottomless waitress. And I said to her: ‘What about him machine gunning last night?’ She said: ‘Yeah, and I was the getaway driver.’ Ooh God. And the police were all laying on the floor, and they come to me to complain.

  The Enforcer tells the story of a similar occasion, when police installed one-way mirrors along the top floor of the factory.

  They could see out, but you couldn’t see in. One day it was just a shell of a building and the next day there were all these mirrors there, it didn’t take long to work it out. I said to Dennis: ‘They’re up there fucking looking at us.’ He said: ‘At least we know where they’re at.’ But then paranoia got the better of him and he put twenty bullets through the windows, twelve from a .22 automatic and eight from a .45 Colt. Blew all the windows out, and they came and complained to Kathy again.

  * * *

  I. It was John Grant who first introduced me to Kathy. At one stage photographs of both John and me were mounted on the wall in the visitors’ reception area at Pentridge Prison. Under the two photographs were the words: ‘Not to be admitted as visitors under any circumstances.’ John and I had gained entry to Pentridge on numerous occasions posing as friends of the prisoners we needed to interview. The resulting stories inevitably embarrassed prison authorities and, further up the ladder, a succession of politicians with responsibility for the system—hence the photographs. Later John was to receive a letter from the office of the then Social Welfare Minister, Walter Jona, banning him from entry to all Victorian prisons. When John showed it to him, Dennis asked: ‘Can you make it transferable?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Bent Cops, Dogs and Soldiers

  IT’S THE EARLY HOURS of the morning round at
Dennis’s place in Cubitt Street, Richmond. Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’ is pounding from the stereo, and Dennis and The Enforcer sit in the half-light of the kitchen, talking, drinking and shooting up speed. Dennis has been without sleep for the best part of ten days, and things are becoming a little jagged. But The Enforcer is a close and trusted friend—outside the family, probably the closest of them all.

  As Dennis reaches again for his bag of speed something wholly unexpected happens. At first both men wonder if the churning, vibrating sound they are hearing is coming from within their speed-raddled heads. But no, it’s not—ornaments and crockery are visibly shaking. Something strange is going on. The two men lurch to their feet, the house trembling around them. A brilliant light sweeps suddenly over the building, lighting up the back yard as if it was daytime.

  ‘Fuck,’ says The Enforcer. ‘They’ve finally done it, let off the big one.’ ‘What’re you fucking talking about?’ Dennis snarls. He grabs a Browning .25 automatic from its hiding place, taped under the table, and heads into the yard. The Enforcer prefers the front porch. If Melbourne has just been nuked, and the rumble and flash of the explosion is what they’re experiencing, Cubitt Street and the front of the house will afford a better view. ‘I’m going to kiss Melbourne goodbye,’ he mutters as he stumbles out of the kitchen headed the opposite way from Dennis. As soon as he hits the porch The Enforcer grins sheepishly to himself. How fucking stupid, it’s not the bomb, just the police helicopter hovering overhead, playing its new searchlight over the back streets of Richmond. He ducks back through the front door to find out if his boss has realised. But it’s too late. Out in the back yard Dennis has been blazing up into the sky with the Browning. It’s only his rage and ravaged state that prevent him from hitting the chopper. Even so he’s fired six shots in its direction.