Gangland Robbers

by James Morton

  It was in the winter of 1978 that Les Kane first thought he was going to be knocked—or, at least, that was when he told his second wife, Judi, of his fears. Apart from doing standovers, he had a good income from the Geelong docks, picking up several pay packets a week. Brother Brian, also a nominal docker, was a debt collector and enforcer, and few were brave enough to resist his invitations to settle a debt.

  By August Les Kane was seriously looking over his shoulder and he, Judi and their two children rented a unit at Mountain Highway, Wantirna, around 24 kilometres east of Melbourne’s CBD. At around 9.15 p.m. on 19 October, when the family returned from visiting relations, three men were waiting in the house. Judi and the children were bundled into a bedroom, and Kane taken into the bathroom and shot. His body was dumped in the boot of his pink Ford Futura, which the men drove away. What was odd was that the three men, two of whom Judi had known for years, did not attempt to mask up. She said one was Chuck Bennett and the second was Vinnie Mikkelsen. The third was Laurie Prendergast, the offsider of all-purpose hitman Chris Flannery.

  Kane’s body was never found and it was thought he quite possibly became dim sim in Norman Lee’s restaurant. But there were sure to be reprisals, and at the end of November Mikkelsen’s house, in Nathalia Street, Broadmeadows, was burned out. In the meantime, Brian Kane went against all known gangland rules and decided Judi Kane should go to the police. His reasoning appears to have been that they would find Bennett and he, Kane, would kill him once they had done so. The others could wait.

  On 1 December Prendergast was arrested and, that evening, Judi Kane picked him out on an identification parade. Bennett and Mikkelsen were arrested later. The trial started on 3 September 1979, but by then, Bennett had been charged with a $69 000 armed payroll heist at Yarraville a month earlier and was in custody. Despite an attempt being made to force her car off the road, Judi Kane stuck to her guns, identifying all three men. But, says one lawyer who watched the trial, ‘What was obvious was that the Crown case had very serious issues, and the defence challenged every bit of it.’ There was no doubt that Kane was a wife beater, Judi Kane having had plastic surgery on two occasions after his ministrations. It was suggested at the trial that she had either killed her husband herself or, more probably, had arranged for his disappearance.

  Then there was the lack of forensic evidence. According to Judi Kane, her husband had been machine-gunned, yet there was no chipped paint and no cracked mirror in the bathroom, let alone a bullet hole in the wall where he was shot. Surely not every bullet had hit him. The only evidence that her husband had been alive on the day he was supposedly killed came from her. Many thought that while Kane was certainly missing, it hadn’t come about quite how the jury was being told it had. Some believed he might have been killed up to a week earlier. All the men called alibis and, unusually in a major criminal trial, Bennett actually gave evidence. Norman Lee came to court to say Bennett had spent the evening with him and his family. Prendergast had a brother, Billy Lewis, who closely resembled him and there were suggestions it could have been Lewis who Judi Kane had seen.

  In the pre-DNA 1970s, juries liked ‘no body’ cases even less than they do today and some states still did not prosecute in those circumstances. Kane hadn’t been gone all that long and, given his lifestyle, there was always the chance he was still in smoke. Part of the defence case was two people giving evidence they had seen him after the alleged shooting and abduction. On 21 September, after retiring for only two-and-a-half hours, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. After the acquittals, Prendergast went straight into hiding and Mikkelsen flew out of Melbourne the next day. Norman Lee went to Singapore.

  Brian Kane could never accept his brother’s death or the verdict. ‘There wasn’t going to be a life for Brian after Les’s death, ever,’ says a family friend. ‘He just wanted Chuck’s head on a platter.’ From after his arrest on the robbery charge, Bennett was in Pentridge although he declined to go into segregation. He knew reprisals were likely and was said to have taken out fresh life insurance, and his 13-year-old son was sent out of the country.

  There had been strict security at the Les Kane murder trial but there was none on 12 November 1979 when Bennett was taken to the first floor of the old Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on La Trobe Street to answer the robbery charges. Bennett was waiting without handcuffs and with an unarmed guard outside Court 10. Also on the landing was a man wearing a dark suit and apparently carrying a small briefcase, sitting on a bench at the head of the stairs, making no effort to hide himself. He shot Bennett three times in the chest with a .38. Bennett died within the hour at St Vincent’s Hospital.

  The gunman escaped, possibly via the rear stairway leading to the court’s car park; from there, it would have been easy enough to go into any of Swanston, La Trobe or Franklin Streets. Other accounts, however, have him walking down the front stairs of the court building and into a waiting car that Greedy Smith was driving.

  Unsurprisingly, the underworld buzzed with rumours, one of which was that Brian Kane and his brother Raymond had imported an interstate hitman and paid him $50 000. Both brothers gave statements that they were not involved. Ray gave his lawyer, Frank Galbally, the names of the people he had been with, adding that he would make himself available for an interview. Brian Kane’s statement was shorter and more combative:

  I do not believe there can be any evidence whatsoever connecting me with this killing. Therefore I will say nothing further about this matter as there is no way in which I can assist the police.

  Forty years on, it is now generally accepted the killer was Brian Kane. After Bennett’s acquittal, he had become more and more secretive, calling friends and family at odd hours, arriving in the dead of night, never giving his name over the telephone. Kane had also been getting into the courthouse night after night, around midnight, pacing out the distances. His escape route after the shooting has also become apparent. He was taken straight to Essendon and put on a light plane to Adelaide, where he boarded a commercial flight to Perth. And there he stayed for the next three months. Eventually, Kane was told he was no longer hot—at least as far as the police were concerned—and he returned from the west coast.

  The day after Bennett’s death, his old mate Brian O’Callaghan, then serving his 13-year sentence for the armed robbery, escaped from a prison van taking him to work at the Long Bay Prison bakery. With O’Callaghan temporarily on the loose and possibly making his way to Melbourne, the press and police predicted immediate trouble, and possibly an all-out gang war but, for the time being, that did not materialise. O’Callaghan stayed out for two years, until he was dobbed in and caught in a house in Carlton, but does not seem to have busied himself on his former offsider’s behalf. Regarded as one of the great robbers of his era, he died in October 2010 at the age of sixty-two. He had been a cocaine addict for some years.

  Within a month of Bennett’s death, John Mervyn Kingdom, a friend of the Kanes, walked into St Vincent’s Hospital with three bullets in his groin and stomach. He told the police he had been walking in North Fitzroy when he ‘felt a pain’ but, naturally, had neither heard nor seen anything. One theory was that he had been kidnapped and shot in reprisal for Bennett’s death. Things quietened down for the next few months but then there were further reprisals, although not at first from Bennett’s side.

  Around 6.45 a.m. on 15 July 1981 Norman McLeod, Mikkelsen’s brother-in-law, walked across his front lawn, got into the Mazda parked outside his home in Rockbank Court, Coolaroo, and was shot three times through the side window by two men armed with shotguns. They then ran away down a branch of the Moonee Ponds Creek. He had been mistaken for Mikkelsen, whose car he was using. No charges were ever brought.

  Brian Kane spent 26 November 1982 with an old friend, Sandra Walsh. In the evening, they went for a few drinks at the Quarry Hotel, Lygon Street, Brunswick East, near the intersection with Weston Street. After about an hour, Sandra Walsh went to the lavatory and two men came in to the ho
tel. One of them, tall and thin and wearing a black balaclava, walked over and shot Kane in the face, knocking his teeth out.

  If the police hoped to get any help from Walsh, they were mistaken: ‘He was shot and that’s all I’m saying,’ she told them. Kane died the next day, and Walsh later made a statement that she had driven him in her Jaguar to the Quarry Hotel. But that was a mistake, she told the coroner eleven months later; she had been confused. Earlier in the day, she had lent her car to a Trevor Russell, who had dropped the Jaguar off there during the evening.

  And in criminal circles—and who would apparently know better?—the names Vinnie Mikkelsen and Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox, whom the police interviewed in 2010, were barked. Neither was ever charged. Much later, when the case was reopened in 2009, Greedy Smith came into the frame. Then, even more recently, the name of the contract killer Rodney Collins has been floated. He has not been charged either.

  Laurie Prendergast came out of hiding but, in turn, disappeared in August 1985. Whether this had anything to do with the Kane family, or their friends, is another matter. There were plenty of people from Sydney to Melbourne and back again, who wanted him dead. Another member of the team, Anthony McNamara, died in Collingwood in 1990. He was a drug addict and it was suspected that a hot shot (a lethal injection of heroin intended to look like a random overdose) had been administered.

  If Greedy—sometimes known as ‘Fatty’—Smith was in on the robbery, as opposed merely to laundering the proceeds, he partially survived the robbers’ curse. In February 2002 he received three years for a series of drug charges and, in later life, sold drugs from his Rolls-Royce. He had suffered from diabetes and melanoma, and had part of his leg amputated. The remainder of the limb had the emblem of North Melbourne Football Club, of which he was a keen supporter, on it. In his career, Smith acquired more than fifty convictions, and lived until August 2010, when he suffered a fatal heart attack, aged sixty-five. He died still denying that he had been a driver in the Bookie Robbery and the getaway driver in Brian Kane’s killing.

  Another man who at one time had enemies to spare was the multi-faceted Jim Taousanis. Once a strong-arm man for Sydney identity Lennie McPherson, the karate expert, Kings Cross bouncer and gym instructor Taousanis and his offsider took to waiting in false ceilings with his offsider, crawling into a hotel’s strongroom and, like bank robber Brenden Abbott, dropping down when the staff arrived. An informer had told the police—rightly or wrongly—that the pair had carried out a very successful raid on Sydney’s Hilton Hotel in April 1991, netting $300 000, and that they were going to repeat the exercise three months later on the night of 22 July.

  That was when the wheels came off. A team led by Detective Sergeant Craig McDonald was staking out the Hilton’s premises when the ceiling gave way and the pair fell into the gift shop underneath, setting off the alarm. They burst out of the shop and began firing. McDonald was hit in the arm and the gunmen made off down Pitt Street, towards Town Hall Station. Taousanis later told the police he shot McDonald because, ‘I had the edge.’ McDonald had hesitated before firing and Taousanis was prepared to shoot straightaway.

  The raid had serious ramifications. Taousanis and his offsider went to prison as, in different circumstances, would McDonald. Taousanis also served a sentence for a bashing he undertook on behalf of Lennie McPherson, who had fallen out with a businessman over a $20 million contract. While in prison, he converted to Christianity and, by all accounts, turned his life around. After his release on parole in 1998, he gave talks pointing out the folly of a life of crime.

  In November 1999 gunmen opened fire on Taousanis in Collins Street, Tempe, hitting him three times as he was walking his girlfriend to her home the evening before their wedding. He was shot in the lung and leg, surviving only because of his physical fitness. He had been due to stand trial for the murder of businessman Peter Mitris, who disappeared in 1991 and whose body had never been found. Saddened by the adverse newspaper articles written about Taousanis, his friend and mentor the Reverend Dave Smith of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church wrote to a newspaper: ‘Jim is one of the nicest blokes I’ve got the privilege to call my friend. He’s a member of the church, he works with kids, he’s done some bad stuff in the past but that was 10 years ago. Some of the media reports have been outrageous. He’s one of the gentlest guys I know.’ No one was ever charged with the hit on Taousanis and nor was it clear who had ordered the contract.

  Meanwhile, things had not gone well for McDonald. For a time the New South Wales police had provided him with a weapon and some protection but, in due course, these were withdrawn and by 1996 he felt abandoned. Obsessed with the idea that Taousanis was going to kill him, he turned to organised crime figure Leslie George Kalache as the only man who would, and could, protect him. There was, of course, a price to be paid.

  When three kilograms of speed were found in a raid on Kalache’s house, McDonald tried to persuade a younger officer to wipe the prints for $5000. He went to his superiors and McDonald went to prison for a minimum of eighteen months. Along with two other officers who were in the gun battle of 22 July, he sued his employer, claiming they had not been given body armour or shotguns. The claim was initially for $750 000 between the three of them, but the police dillydallied in settling the claims and ended paying a total nearer to $2.5 million. As for Kalache, he was pleasantly surprised when he received a seven-year minimum for the drugs, but less pleased when the Court of Appeal trebled it to twenty-two years pre-parole.

  Eventually, Taousanis went on trial in February 2001, the prosecution alleging that the Mitris killing was over the theft of $30 000 worth of drugs sent to Australia in magazines. The first jury disagreed, and he appeared before a single judge in the retrial. The evidence was a mishmash from men who were involved in the murder, boosted by a prison snitch doing life for murder, who told the judge that Taousanis had confessed to him in prison. The judge stopped the trial at the close of the prosecution’s case.

  Threatening to inform on robbers to the police is never a good idea but that is just what Kings Cross prostitute Helen Paunovic did. Her threats were taken seriously, and she was shot and killed on New Year’s Eve 1967 as she left Mamma Eve’s Coffee House and crossed Kellett Street to the Mansions Hotel. This incident was also an example of why, once used, firearms should be disposed of. Bullets from the weapon that had been used were the same as those used in a robbery at Bexley when shots were fired into the ceiling. The same weapon had been used when Stefan Stefanovic was shot at in the early hours the previous November at his home in Erskineville. The police discovered his wife had been having an affair with a hospital cleaner, John Marney, who had let German-born, ex-French Foreign Legionnaire Fred Harald Harbecke and his team use his home as a depository for masks and weapons. Marney had had Harbecke shoot Stefanovic.

  Paunovic had earlier borrowed £50 (now about $1000) from Harbecke, and told him that since she knew he was a bank robber, she would not pay it back. If he threatened her, she would go to the police. Harbecke pointed her out to his offsiders, Allan Dillon and James Thornton, whom he had met in Grafton Gaol, where they had been labelled ‘intractables’. Thornton took the offending gun from the back of a Pontiac and shot Paunovic dead, Marney dropping the gun in Sydney Harbour. All received life imprisonment.

  Harbecke became the first inmate of Katingal, the notorious, supposedly escape-proof prison within a prison, when, along with Earl Heatley, he tried to escape from Long Bay in November 1972, attacking a warder with a braille printing machine. He survived Katingal but it is not clear what happened to him after his release. It’s certain, though, he was deported to Germany, where it was rumoured he had been involved in another bank robbery. Other versions have him returning to live in Queensland.

  Solicitors’ clerk Brian Alexander was another suspected of being too close to the police. Born in Sydney in 1939, he first worked with Philip N Roach, a solicitor who represented lower-level criminals and prostitutes in the Kings Cross area. He took cor
respondence courses to qualify either as a solicitor or barrister but never completed them. Alexander also became known to, and was later the associate of, both criminals and a group of New South Wales detectives. After working for Roach for nearly twenty years, he then joined the practice of solicitor John Aston. One of the men with whom he dealt was notorious robber Neddy Smith.

  On 25 March 1981 Alexander, along with two federal narcotics agents, was arrested and charged with conspiracy. The allegation was that the three of them had disclosed confidential information to Terrence Clark of the Mr Asia drug syndicate. The case was dismissed at the committal proceedings because the Crown could not prove beyond doubt the source of the leaks. It was, however, the end of Alexander’s legal career, and he drifted into drinking heavily and working in hotels. Then the underworld learned he was likely to give evidence to the Stewart Royal Commission into drug trafficking, naming names, dates, places and amounts.

  On 21 December 1981, shortly after Alexander was seen drinking with three men in the King’s Head Tavern near his office in Park Street, Sydney, he disappeared. Two weeks later his car was found abandoned near The Gap at Watsons Bay, a notorious suicide spot. According to Neddy Smith, however, Alexander was too much of a coward to commit suicide. He had heard that Alexander had been driven to the Darling Street wharf in Balmain, from where, his hands cuffed behind his back, he was thrown from a launch, an old gas stove tied to him. He was apparently crying when he went into the water. Smith concludes, ‘But I had no part in it. That was something I wouldn’t wish even on someone like Brian Alexander.’ Others are less convinced.