The Matriarch

by Adrian Tame

  Dennis had invested several thousand dollars in the hotel, and no doubt felt entitled to enjoy its more private amenities. In need of somewhere quiet for him and his girlfriend to express their affection, he decided to borrow the Cooks’ marital bed for a while. His nephew Jason Ryan walked into the room in the middle of things and switched on the light. Dennis immediately pulled a gun out from under the pillow and shot out the bulb.

  Nor did he hesitate to interfere in his family’s personal lives. On one occasion when Dennis was rapidly tiring of a ‘squarehead’ (someone with no criminal record) named Ron, who was having an affair with Kathy, he let his feelings be known in a particularly unsavoury manner.

  Well something happened to this fucking dog, and it died and Dennis put it in Ron’s car. In the back seat. And Ron’s driven to work down at Port Melbourne, right, and he’s with Telecom at the time. And he goes up the bush, and his car was left in the yard, with the dog still in the back, and it was 100 degrees, and a week later he comes back. I never saw him again. Dennis and the soldiers wanted to get rid of him. I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend. Dennis was always worried they’d get me money.

  Apart from refurbishing the homes he bought, Dermis also spent considerable attention and money on making them more secure. He had little choice—growing police interest in his burgeoning empire made it essential for him to control access to the properties he used for dealing drugs, and later, firearms. Some of the precautions he took were deceptively simple—like using the window already present in the wall between the massage parlour at 108 Stephenson Street, and the house at 106. On one occasion Kathy found Dennis smashing into the wall with a sledgehammer.

  I said: ‘What have you done?’ He said: ‘I’ve dropped me bag of speed in the gap between the walls. About three or four thousand dollars. And I’m sledgehammering it to get it out.’ I said: ‘Have you ever heard of a stick with a bit of chewy on it?’ So I got the chewy and the stick and got it out for him. Another time seven grams of smack went through the washing machine in someone’s clothes. They forgot to take it out.

  Most of the drug-dealing at this time was done from the parlour, but the heroin was kept next door. When the buyer gave his order the required deal would be handed through the window in the wall. This meant that large quantities of drugs were never kept on the premises from which business was conducted—an essential precaution for trouble-free dealing. Another measure was to keep a fire burning in the grate whenever drugs were around in quantity. However uncomfortable this may have been on hot summer days, it guaranteed a ready means of destruction if an unexpected raid took place.

  Metal security doors, spotlights, high brick walls and barbed-wire fences were erected around various of the properties, and at 106 wide steel cages were built around the back door, with metal meshing forming a roof over the entire concrete back yard. Dennis also had his dogs and soldiers. Kathy was not impressed with either.

  He’d have up to half a dozen soldiers at one time, not all paid. The ones that bodyguarded me were paid $300 a day. I only had one soldier at a time. He had more, real hangers-on. He paid them money, but mostly drink and whatever. There was no bodyguard for Jason, my grandson, like they said. Jason just ran in the streets. There were about fifteen soldiers altogether at different times. All crooks.

  They weren’t my sort of men, not what I’d call hard men. They were about Dennis’s age. There was a toilet in the yard next door to 86 Chestnut Street. So one day this particular soldier who thought he was tough goes into the back yard, and all the guns come to his head, they’re going to shoot him, and a voice said: ‘The wrong one.’ So he walked back inside, crying, and said: ‘I resign.’ He was frightened. It was the jacks. They thought it was Dennis walking out there. Dennis would have been off [dead]. There was another time when two of them took him for a ride in their car, and he came back white-faced, and the hair’s sticking up on him. I was there. The police were blind drunk. There were times when they got like that, they would have killed him.

  An event that Kathy still finds difficult to discuss took place when two ex-soldiers kidnapped her, holding her against her will for ten days. Initially three soldiers lured her to the South Yarra Arms Hotel near Richmond for a lengthy drinking session which carried on to a motel, where Kathy eventually passed out. While she was unconscious one of the three men got cold feet about the scheme they had in mind and cleared out.

  Over the next week-and-a-half the two remaining soldiers forced Kathy to drive them around the state and even into New South Wales, keeping on the move and never letting her out of their sight. At a hotel in Lakes Entrance, in Gippsland, Kathy recognised a police inspector from Melbourne having lunch, but failed to catch his eye. She had around $10,000 in a bank account which the men forced her to withdraw and hand over to them. They then sent a note to Dennis saying: ‘Have kidnapped Hell City Kate.’

  Surprisingly, Dennis did nothing and it was left to Victor to deal with the matter. Not content with their note, the two men threatened to kill her or take her to a tattooist and get the letters ‘DRUG DEALER’ inscribed on her forehead in large letters. While Kathy did not really believe the death threat, she had no doubt they would have gone ahead with the tattooing.

  By this stage the $10,000 was running out, and the two men decided to return to Melbourne, where Kathy was finally able to make her escape, just as Victor was about to inform the police. She persuaded them to stop on St Kilda Road so that she could go to the toilet and ran across the parkland near the Shrine of Remembrance, leaving her purse in the car. Her two abductors were never seen again. But the other man who had dropped out of the project later had half his nose sliced off by her grandson Jason, in an entirely unrelated incident.

  When Kathy returned home she decided against telling Dennis exactly what had happened, and the episode was eventually forgotten. But later, she was able to turn her ordeal to advantage. Some time previously Dennis had given her a $10,000 magnum revolver bearing the American Presidential seal for her protection. Only the day after her return police carried out one of their regular raids on her home and seized the magnum. When she appeared at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court to answer the subsequent charge of unlawful possession of a firearm, her lawyer submitted the kidnap note as evidence of her need to have a gun for self-protection, thus securing her acquittal.

  To this day Kathy is unsure of the real motive behind the kidnapping. Until now she has spoken only to her son Peter Allen about the incident.

  He said: ‘I think you should tell me their names, because one day one of them is going to come up and say: “What have you got to say about your mother’s kidnapping?”’ And I told him the names. So he knows who they are, but I’ve never told anyone else. I didn’t tell Dennis . . . I don’t know if he’d have killed them, but I know someone else would have.

  Dennis’s dogs were only slightly more friendly than his soldiers. One was a Doberman, Julie, and the other a Rottweiler, nicknamed Fatso, but with a pedigree name half a block long. Anybody touching Dennis while they were around risked an unpleasant bite, despite their treatment at his hands. His favourite punishment for any wrongdoing, real or imagined, was to pistol-whip them close to death. But their diet consisted of highest quality beef.

  Other security measures were more sophisticated, in some cases too much so. Dennis was probably one of the first criminals in Australia to own either a car phone or a phone scrambler, both wildly expensive items in those days. He had difficulty working out the intricacies of such forms of communication, and when it came to an intercom system for one of the houses, he did little more than provide Kathy with something to chuckle over for weeks to come.

  You would have laughed. He’s put this intercom on back to front at 106 Stephenson. I’m outside and I can hear what he’s saying inside. So I’ve knocked on the door, and he says, ‘Why didn’t you speak into the thing?’ and I said: ‘Because I’m listening to everything you’re saying, I can hear it out here. You’ve put it on back to
front.’

  Oh God he was a dill at times. How’d it’ve been if I’m a policeman? We had walkie-talkies, we had scramblers, we had a scanner, and we had them come in and sweep for bugs. But Dennis got them that pissed that they left their equipment behind. And the walkie-talkies, well listen to this. He’s paid about three grand for them, right? So he’s in his bed and I’m round in Stephenson Street, but the buildings were in the way. So I keep walking and I get to his front door, and I go in, and I’m standing right outside his bedroom door, and talking real quiet. He says: ‘That sounds real good.’ I said: ‘Yeah, it should be, I’m right beside you.’

  He used to pay this old bloke, an alcoholic, four dollars a day to clean up the dog shit at 86 Chestnut Street. That’s all he was allowed to have by his wife Jeanie. So the old man sees this thing on the table, wraps it up, puts it in the burner, and sets fire to it. It was the walkie talkie. He was drunk. What do you reckon Dennis did? Flogged him.

  And the fucking scrambler. We had the biggest giggle. I had to go and see that James Bond movie Goldfinger to see how it works. We’re ringing the house where the scrambler was, and it sounds like Chinese. Little did we know you had to have two phones, and put the scrambler on one and use the other. It was funny.

  Before the slope moved in next door there was a young girl living there who worked at a travel agent. And she knocked on Dennis’s door one night, and she said: ‘Look, I don’t want to interfere with you, but your telephone conversations are coming through my television, and I can hear everything you’re saying.’ She was warning him.

  But what about when the jacks used to keep watch? I see this plainclothes copper poking his head in and out. So I go over to this bloke we knew who owned the factory, and I said: ‘What’s this bloke doing poking his head in and out like a fucking chook?’ Well I’d blown his cover. So I’d bought Jason one of those unicycles, one wheel, and I said to Jason: ‘Go round the street and tell him he can fuck me if he ain’t a jack.’ So Jason pedals round the back and says it. And there’s another jack there, and he cracks up laughing.

  And then they perfected Dennis’s whistle, the all-clear whistle at ten o’clock, to tell me if I was in bed that everything was sweet. Well they did it, didn’t they?

  By now Dennis had acquired a growing arsenal of guns and explosives. Many of the firearms were for his own use, but others were purchased, as Dennis put it, ‘so they can never be used against us’. They were concealed in a pile of rocks bordering the nearby railway line. ‘It was Crown land, and they weren’t going to arrest the fucking Queen of England, were they?’ Kathy says laconically.

  Before police from Operation Cyclops began raiding on a regular basis, 86 Chestnut Street received a visit from the drug squad early in 1983 when a small marijuana plantation was uncovered, resulting in possession and cultivation charges against Dennis. By the time Cyclops was in full swing heroin, speed, firearms and explosives were being found both inside the houses and underground in the gardens. Once Federal Police ‘lost’ a significant sum of money seized from one of Dennis’s properties. This money was presumed to have been the proceeds of drug sales, and its disappearance resulted in an internal inquiry.

  During one major ‘dig’ on a blazing hot day in the back garden of one of the Stephenson Street houses Kathy actually felt sorry for the policemen wielding the spades and took them each out a glass of lemonade. All except one. This officer had called her a ‘fucking slut’ a few days earlier, and she told him he could die of thirst before she helped him. Later the same afternoon another officer suggested they had gone deep enough and it was time to finish for the day. ‘No, keep ’em at it,’ Kathy told the officer in charge.

  ‘I wanted a swimming pool or at least a jacuzzi, and they’d nearly gone far enough,’ she explains.

  Many tall tales have been told about the methods used to bring drugs to the various houses in Richmond. One popular theory had couriers catching trains from nearby Richmond Station and throwing the packaged heroin from the train directly into the back garden of one of the Stephenson Street houses. Kathy won’t detail the actual means of delivery, but she laughs at the railway line story.

  Never. Never. How can you open those bloody train doors or windows? And what about the other passengers? That’s a load of shit. I suppose it’d get thrown right into the very holes we used to dig for it in the back yard. They must have been Deadeye Dick to chuck it so straight.

  Dennis’s journalist friend John Grant pours similar scorn on this myth: ‘He used to joke about it. He was paranoid about the police watching him and he’d insist that we talked out in the yard near the clothes dryer, because the electric motor gave off frequencies that interfered with the police listening devices. He’d say: “Watch out for the bags of heroin, you might get hit by one from the train.” He reckoned the police had tried throwing things out of the trains themselves to see if it could be done. He said the police were just making it all up, it was stupid.’

  * * *

  Somehow Dennis always managed to have the money for bail—or property as surety—on the mounting list of charges he was facing, even when the total amount was around $250,000.

  In November 1984 he raised $70,000 to bail Kathy and her youngest son Trevor out, after police dug up heroin in the back garden of number 35. Trevor had been living with Kathy at 35 Stephenson Street since early that year and Jamie arrived some months later on his release from gaol. They were both playing an increasingly important role in Dennis’s growing empire, particularly Jamie, who acted as an enforcer over bad debts. Another brother, Victor, was involved to a lesser degree, and had moved into 86 Chestnut Street during 1984.

  At the time of his death in April 1987 Dennis faced a total of more than sixty charges, ranging from murder to possession and trafficking in drugs, possession of firearms and explosives, and serious assaults. The vast majority of these charges were brought against him during the five years between the time he moved to Richmond in 1982 and his death. Yet he spent less than two months of the entire period behind bars. Most of the charges Dennis faced would have meant a remand in custody for a first offender, let alone a career criminal coming before the courts for fresh offences while on bail for others still unheard.

  So how did he convince the courts to allow him bail? The answer that he enjoyed good legal representation does not tell the whole story. The simple fact was that on many occasions police officers spoke on Dennis’s behalf, supporting his applications for bail. And why did they do this?

  The complete answer will probably never be known, but it is beyond doubt that Dennis had certain officers in his pocket. A number of internal inquiries were held by the police into this aspect of his operation. Witnesses have testified at various hearings to having been at one or other of Dennis’s properties when phone calls were received warning of imminent police raids. There was little doubt these tip-offs came from corrupt policemen.

  Jason Ryan and Peter Allen told different court hearings of being present when officers arrived at Dennis’s home so he could comply with the reporting conditions of his bail. Normal practice, obviously, is for the person on remand to report at the local police station. Kathy is quite frank about the situation:

  I knew for certain Dennis used to be in the lock-up. He’d be brought home by the cops to 102 Stephenson Street, and they’d all have a drink and everything, take him back a couple of hours later, and make out they were taking him for questioning. Certain members, that is.

  Dennis undoubtedly paid bribes to corrupt policemen, and boasted of forking out $25,000 for copies of documents detailing the Cyclops inquiry. He claimed the documents influenced him to reinforce areas of his operation the police saw as vulnerable.

  One legitimate reason for Dennis’s good relationship with certain officers was that he had turned informer, and was more valuable to the force on the outside supplying information about other criminals, many of them armed robbers, than languishing in gaol. This was unthinkable to Kathy, and totally opposed t
o the code on which she based her life.

  I never believed it at first. A bloke flew in from Asia with condoms full of smack down his stomach. Dennis arranged to meet him outside the Riverside Hotel but gave him up. When he got there with the smack to meet Dennis the cops jumped out and arrested both of them. They pissed the bloke off and then gave Dennis the smack. They kept the money. Dennis an informer—that shocked me. When he gave up people that he liked, it was the paranoia from the drugs.

  An example of the extent to which police were prepared to keep Dennis out of harm’s way involved the armed robber Jimmy Loughnan, who had attacked Dennis in gaol (see Chapter Four) and was to die in the Jika Jika prison fire at Pentridge in 1987.

  Three years before that, in 1984, Dennis informed on Loughnan and his role in a suburban bank robbery. According to Kathy, he probably even supplied Loughnan with the guns that were used in the robbery. As a result police were able to make a successful arrest, but Loughnan escaped from custody not long afterwards. So concerned were police that Loughnan had found out who gave him up and would go looking for Dennis that they supplied their prized informant with an official-issue bulletproof vest, which later turned up in the possession of Peter Allen.

  I know that’s right about Loughnan. Because I saw him myself. I went to walk in The Cherry Tree, and all the doors except one were shut. And as I walked in Loughnan pushed me out of the way, not knowing who I was. He was going in there to see if Dennis was in there, looking for him. I told that dog, that journalist I hate, Derryn Hinch, that he didn’t have a bulletproof vest, and I had it in the bed one raid, pushing it down with me foot.

  It is impossible to make even an informed guess about how many criminals Dennis put behind bars with his information. For obvious reasons no records are kept of such matters. But the frequency with which the police supported his bail applications indicates the number was significant.