underbelly
The authors
John Silvester has been a crime reporter in Melbourne since 1978. He worked for The Sunday Times Insight team in London in 1990, and has co-authored many crime books, including the Underbelly series, Leadbelly and The Silent War. He is currently senior crime reporter for The Age.
Andrew Rule started in journalism in 1975 and has worked in newspapers, television and radio. He wrote Cuckoo, the inside story of the ‘Mr Stinky’ case, since re-issued in the collection Sex, Death and Betrayal, and has co-written, edited and published several other books, including the Underbelly series. He is a deputy editor of The Age.
underbelly
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
JOHN SILVESTER AND ANDREW RULE
Published by Floradale Productions Pty Ltd and Sly Ink Pty Ltd
February 2009
Distributed wholesale by Gary Allen Pty Ltd
9 Cooper Street
Smithfield, NSW
Telephone 02-9725 2933
Copyright Floradale Productions and Sly Ink, 2009
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the publishers’ permission
Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities
The stories that inspired the Screentime series
for the Nine Network
ISBN 0-9775440-9-5
Cover design, typesetting and layout: R.T.J. Klinkhamer
For Paul Delianis and Carl Mengler, who saw the door was slightly ajar and crashed right through it.
Paul Delianis
Carl Mengler
CONTENTS
Foreword
1 Sleeping dogs lie
2 Lady killer
3 Friends in high places
4 Snake in the grass
5 Pre-emptive strike
6 Inside job
7 Shot in the dark
8 The life of Brian
9 A matter of time
10 Cox the fox
11 Hostile takeover
12 Travelling north
13 Code breaker
14 Friendly fire
15 Tommy gun
16 End of the line
17 In the back
18 Rentakilled
Bibliography
Biographies
The cast
FOREWORD
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times.
CHARLES DICKENS,
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
IN the late 1970s the underworlds of Melbourne and Sydney were changing – violently.
Melbourne was the home of old-style gunmen. Many were from generations of crooks, schooled on the waterfront in matters of theft, intimidation and violence.
In Sydney they were just as hard but they learned early that the only way to make big money was to get the police on side.
There had always been corruption – with police paid to look the other way – but in the 1970s it exploded to the point that a cell of bent detectives actually set up the ‘jobs’. They franchised crime to chosen crooks, who virtually worked for them. Lennie McPherson, a handy safe breaker but no criminal mastermind, became a Mr Big because police gave him the ‘green light’. Neddy Smith was a violent thug who became a big mobster because he was protected by manipulative police. The smooth George Freeman made millions under police patronage. It was so brazen that Freeman was once photographed at Randwick racecourse with the Chief Magistrate. In Sydney it was just another day at the races.
But there was a small group of honest police in Sydney – and they had to break the law to prove it. They resorted to illegally tapping the telephones of their suspects, people like Freeman and drug syndicate boss ‘Aussie’ Bob Trimbole. And what they discovered horrified them. Police, politicians, and legal figures were talking to crime bosses. It confirmed that in Sydney nearly everything was for sale – from knighthoods to ladies of the night.
The crims protected by bent police started to believe they were untouchable. When the Griffith mafia tired of the activities of a local businessman, Donald Mackay, who dared complain about lack of police efforts to deal with the lucrative marijuana industry, they calmly ordered his execution. They thought that by using a Melbourne hit man and ordering that the Italian weapon of choice – the shotgun – not be used, they could get away with murder and that corruption would flourish unchecked.
They were wrong. And while the politicians did little (except for the disgraceful Al Grassby, who actively worked to sabotage the case) the public was outraged.
But still the crooks believed they could do anything, including shooting an undercover policeman, Mick Drury, to stop him giving evidence in a drug case.
Meanwhile, federal police using legal phone taps in their own drug investigations, were stunned to pick up the extent of corruption – but their political masters stayed silent, preferring to do nothing rather than risk the inevitable political fall-out.
Powerful New South Wales political figures from both sides resisted federal overtures to clean up the rot. Police like Peter Lamb – a federal expert on organised crime – could do little except try to keep his team from being infiltrated by corrupt police.
But the assassination of Mackay in 1977 and the shooting of Drury seven years later proved to be watershed moments. Politicians reluctantly ordered inquiries.
As the Sydney detectives’ vice-like grip on crime (committing, not investigating it) began to loosen, the established pecking order collapsed. Ambitious new crooks were prepared to take on older, protected ones. And police were involved in setting up killings to protect their stake in organised crime.
This resulted in a series of murders culminating with that of hit man Christopher Dale Flannery, whose body was never found.
Back in Melbourne, the gunmen were at war and showed such contempt for the system that one was gunned down in the City Court on a busy sitting day. The killer was given inside information and his getaway assisted by someone with an intimate knowledge of the court complex. A small group of police remain the most likely suspects.
Gunmen were so confident of the underworld code of silence that on one occasion they did not bother to wear effective disguises even though witnesses could identify them. They had reasons to be confident. One young witness persuaded to give evidence was silenced with a bullet. Some bodies were found. Many weren’t. No-one was convicted.
But while the gunmen fought over personal ‘honour’ and to carve up proceeds of big armed robberies, the cold winds of change were coming. They were dinosaurs and the Ice Age had arrived. Well, if not ice (that would come later), at least the Heroin Age. A new order had taken over. Drugs were king and those with access to powders manufactured from poppy seeds in Asia made more money than the armed robbers and ‘dockies’ dreamed of. From then on it would be drug money, not guns, that controlled the underworld.
Terry Clark was a small-time New Zealand police informer who wanted to be a world-class crook and for a short time he got his wish. First through a massive importation of Thai ‘buddha sticks’ to New Zealand and then through a $100 million importation of heroin to Australia. He formed his own group, which he called The Organisation, and managed it ruthlessly.
Clark was the first man to establish an international drug empire based in Australia. He would not be the last.
While the crooks in Melbourne and Sydney continued to kill each other over the spoils of their shrinking crime rackets, Clark was quietly making a fortune in the shadows. If they had realised what he was up to, they would have surely moved in on him, removing his fortune or his toes.
Knowing what damage a police informer could do, he killed anyone he thought might
give him up to law enforcement agencies. Corrupt police, officials and lawyers told him when any of his team was talking. And then he would silence them permanently.
This ruthlessness and greed would ultimately prove his downfall. When the bodies of two of his couriers, Isabel and Douglas Wilson, were found in the seaside resort of Rye, south-east of Melbourne, it became a full-on homicide investigation.
Enter Paul Delianis, then head of the Victorian homicide squad. Delianis soon realised that the Clark syndicate, known as the Mr Asia gang, had infiltrated the Federal Narcotics Bureau.
The federal government at first denied the problem but a later inquiry resulted in the whole bureau being found to be beyond redemption. It was scrapped.
Delianis’ initial investigations, followed by those of the equally dedicated Carl Mengler, who headed a taskforce codenamed Trio, resulted in the syndicate’s exposure and finally revealed who murdered the Wilsons and Donald Mackay.
Their investigations succeeded despite widespread corruption, police jealousies and political indifference. It was a long road but the Mr Asia syndicate was finally smashed and Clark died in an English jail.
As Charles Dickens once wrote: ‘There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.’
There are many old men who retired as respected police, judges, lawyers, journalists and politicians who would count themselves fortunate that their telephones were never tapped back in the bad old days.
Or were they?
1
SLEEPING DOGS LIE
CONTRACT KILLING FOR THE MAFIA
He told them why they were to die and shot Wilson first, then his wife. But he did not shoot their dog.
THE bitch was a stray – part cattle dog, part fox terrier, mostly lucky. When she wandered into the Altona street where a meat inspector called Dennis Brown and his wife lived in the mid-1970s, instead of calling the dog catcher the couple adopted the little black and white mongrel. They called her Mitzy.
When the Browns bought an unfinished fibro holiday shack in the ti-tree behind Rye on the Mornington Peninsula, Mitzy was in her element. There were kangaroos and rabbits to chase, smells to investigate on walks along the tracks winding through the scrub-choked vacant blocks. The only danger was snakes in the grass.
Almost thirty years on, Danny Street is filled with houses, some of them expensive. But in 1978 it was an unmade road with a handful of shacks in it. The Browns were at Lot 55, and the two blocks to the south were covered in scrub. Dennis kept a few bee hives in the ti-tree and sometimes went shooting rabbits, Mitzy at his side. Man and dog didn’t miss much.
Early that year, Brown was checking his hives when he noticed that a long, narrow hole had been dug in the sandy soil under the ti-tree on Lot 59. Intriguingly, it had been covered with scrub. On visits after that, he would glance at the hole. For more than a year, nothing changed. But in April, 1979, he saw that the unknown digger had cleaned out and deepened the hole and covered it again with some fresh scrub.
About five weeks later, on 18 May, a Friday, Mitzy and her master came down early for the weekend. They were going for their usual walk when she stopped where the hole was and started to scratch furiously. Brown realised that the hole had been filled in – and saw signs that foxes and other dogs had already been scrabbling in the freshly turned sand. Whatever was in the hole attracted carnivores.
A less observant man might have missed it. A less curious one might have shrugged it off. Dennis Brown had worked at abattoirs all over Australia, among rough men in a tough business, and his instincts were high. Since he’d first seen it, he had fancied that the long, narrow hole looked a little too much like an empty grave. Now it was filled in, his fancy hardened into suspicion: if it were a grave, maybe it was no longer empty.
He whistled his excited dog away, got into his maroon 1976 Holden Kingswood and drove the four kilometres into Rye to talk to the police about the sandy grave in Danny Street.
At first, local cops thought it might be a cache of stolen property. Then they stuck a probe into the sandy soil and caught a whiff of something that made them feel sick.
The homicide crew came late that afternoon and forensic experts soon after. Portable generators throbbed all night to power the crime-scene lights. Dennis Brown didn’t hang around to see what he had found; he had a pretty good idea it wouldn’t be pretty and he was right.
There were two bodies. The first out was a young woman, fully dressed except for one boot – the other was later found on the road nearby. It didn’t take ballistic experts to see that she had been shot through the breast and the head. Underneath her was a man of about the same age. He had been shot twice in the chest and once in the neck.
Some distinctive clothing and jewellery – wedding ring, brooch and hair comb – gave the police a lead, but they must have suspected who they were looking for. It took less than 48 hours to identify the dead pair as Douglas and Isabel Wilson. It was, as police were learning to say in the 1970s, clearly drug-related.
The Wilsons were from New Zealand and they had form. The Victorian homicide squad, then headed by the renowned Paul Delianis, were keen to talk to their associates. Especially a Martin Johnstone and one Terry Sinclair, who had recently changed his surname by deed poll from his birth name. Johnstone and Sinclair were also New Zealanders, who had joined thousands of their countrymen to flock to the bright lights of Sydney.
So why had the Wilsons turned up dead outside Melbourne, a full day’s drive and almost 1000 kilometres south of where they had been living in Sin City? Delianis and his detectives were determined to find out. Not everyone in other Australian law enforcement bodies seemed to have the same enthusiasm for the task.
THE path that led the Wilsons to a shallow grave in a sleepy Victorian holiday town started on the other side of the Tasman where, a decade earlier, the teenage Douglas Wilson started dabbling in drugs while an above-average student at Auckland Grammar. But when his family treated him to a year in America in his final year, he developed a taste for drugs, spurning his private-school education and a comfortable middle-class start in life by dealing to support his own growing habit – and his scorn for the workaday world. His slide across the social divide to the dark side continued until he dropped out of a university accounting course and was arrested for trafficking marijuana and LSD in early 1972 when he sold an undercover cop some drugs. This slip earned him a short jail sentence.
Jail hardened Wilson’s habits into vices, pulling him further from the life he might have led into the one that would destroy him. By this time, he already knew Isabel, who was a year younger and had been mixing in a group which used drugs after she’d left home at sixteen.
Not long after getting out of prison in mid-1973, Wilson had returned to working as a tiler with his father’s business when a small-time crook recruited him to sell Thai ‘buddha sticks’ to the university crowd that the middle-class Wilson could mix with more comfortably than working-class criminals could. The man who recruited him was Terrence John Clark, who would use a string of aliases and later change his surname to Sinclair.
Wilson met Clark through a small-time criminal called James McBean, sometimes referred to as ‘Jim the Grammar School man’, who had helped Clark sell buddha sticks.
Wilson was good at selling dope: he sold 40,000 of a payload of 200,000 sticks that the edgy Clark and his smooth-talking associate Martin Johnstone had smuggled into New Zealand on a yacht called Brigadoon, netting each a million dollars at a time when that was enough to buy a street full of houses. But Clark and Johnstone weren’t interested in real estate just yet. They were bankrolling a bigger foray into international drug trafficking.
For all three, this early success was the bait that would lure each to his destruction. As for Isabel, she was fated to hook up with the drug-dealing, freewheeling Wilson as well as to drugs, and went along for the ride. She married him in 1977, and rarely left his side, but devotion didn’t help. It was a fatal attraction.
They both ended up with raging heroin habits and clouded judgment. And that would eventually put them in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a ticket to a sandy grave.
THE wrong place and time was the Gazebo Hotel in Brisbane in June, 1978. By then the Wilsons had been in Australia a few months. They were just two of several ‘kiwis’ Clark had recruited to distribute heroin in his expanding empire. Douglas Wilson was being paid a retainer of $400 a week by Clark, who had skipped bail and left New Zealand two years earlier, in 1976, after being charged with importing two cigarette cartons full of heroin fetched from Fiji by a woman friend. He had been living in Brisbane and Sydney under a string of aliases, moving from place to place. All the while building the drug running syndicate he liked to call ‘The Organisation’, but which would later become tagged by the media as the ‘Mr Asia’ syndicate.
Clark had developed a theory of avoiding detection through caution and planning. If he had stuck to the rules he laid down for the rest of the gang, he might have made and laundered millions of dollars and eventually lived the dream of ‘going legitimate’ and getting out in time.
Recruiting the Wilsons was an early example of the flawed reasoning and carelessness that would bring him undone. According to his contemporaries, Clark despised drug addicts, almost as if he wanted to ignore the effect of his obscenely profitable trade. But despite this contempt for ‘junkies’, he had chosen the Wilsons to work for him as drug and money couriers – and even part paid them in heroin for their own use, as well as the hefty retainer.
In Australia, he favoured using fellow New Zealanders and perhaps saw the Wilsons as more malleable – more reliant on him – because they were slaves to the drug he could supply along with the easy money they needed to support their indolence. Clark came to realise that slaves might obey cruel masters because they have to – but are not loyal to them. He could rule by fear, but fear is a form of hatred.
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