A Tale of Two Cities

by John Silvester

  ‘Peter had put his glasses in their case on the roof of the car. When they drove off, the case fell on the road. It had Peter’s name and address on it. That’s how the coppers knew who to look for. Next night the police came for Les.’

  The case was beyond even Galbally’s powers of persuasion. On 1 November 1976, Kane was sentenced to five years prison with a minimum of three and a half for wounding with intent. His mate Howard got six months for assault.

  The constant threat of violence eventually became too much for Judi. Once, Les fired shots over her head, trying to ‘ping’ some new enemy he’d made in yet another pub in Port Melbourne. It got so she didn’t want to go out with him because he had too many fights that would end in bashings or shootings.

  ‘I was living with the most violent man in Australia,’ she admits. ‘All his convictions were for assault … He’d done a total of seven years for assault before I met him. He’d say to me he was the skinny bloke on the beach and that there was always someone who wanted to kick sand in his face.’

  Those who followed in the Kanes’ violent footsteps years later failed to learn the lessons of history.

  Another gangster with a short fuse who liked to show how tough he was by terrorising weaker people was Jason Moran – who would be gunned down in June 2003.

  In the late 1990s, Moran was cut off while driving along Punt Road. In the car with him was Russell Warren Smith, who later described how Moran had grabbed a wheel brace, smashed the other motorist’s windscreen, dragged him from the car and beat him severely. No one stopped to help.

  ‘Jason got back in the car and was laughing,’ Smith said later.

  Moran’s actions were so similar to Les Kane’s you would think they were related by blood. Close – but no cigar. Moran was Les Kane’s son-in-law: he married Trish, Kane’s daughter by his first wife, Pat.

  In between court appearances, jail and the docks, Kane built a reputation as an underworld hard man. He wasn’t the only one.

  Raymond Patrick Bennett, also known to many by his boyhood name of Ray Chuck, was tough, cool and violent. ‘He was more professional than Kane. He was less likely to fly off the handle and better with a gun. You could talk to him and you knew he meant what he said,’ one policeman recalled of Bennett.

  While the Kanes liked to take a percentage of other gangsters’ work, according to police, Bennett was the independent type who preferred to set up his own jobs.

  The Kanes and Bennett’s crew had known each other for years and had co-existed well enough until there was a fatal clash of greed, power and ego.

  As Judi Kane was to recall: ‘Brian and Les would kill you. They got sick of it in the end but unfortunately they reaped what they sowed.’

  TRAVEL broadens the mind. Ray Chuck, later known as Bennett, the kid from Chiltern in north-east Victoria, had moved to Collingwood as a teenager. By the time he was a fully-grown bank robber and gunman, his horizons had broadened.

  While the remorseless Kane brothers dominated their hometown, the restless Bennett moved on. In the mid-1970s he went to Europe for a working holiday. Like many ‘good crooks’ from Sydney and Melbourne, Bennett and his great mate Brian O’Callaghan joined the notorious, ‘Kangaroo Gang’ that robbed jewellery stores and other ripe targets in the UK and on the Continent.

  For Bennett, his criminal ventures overseas were like a finishing school: he learned new techniques to try back in Australia. By the time he was ready to fly home he had virtually completed a master’s degree in world’s best practice stick-ups. It was as if he had compiled a ‘robber’s rulebook’ – a how-to guide for what the English called armed ‘blags’.

  He was particularly impressed with the Wembley Mob – a gang of East London crooks who carried out at least a dozen major armed robberies over four years. Their methods involved meticulous planning, gathering intelligence through cultivating insiders, specialised training, recruiting a close-knit team that wouldn’t break ranks and devising schemes to launder funds. (Ironically, they were brought down when a key member turned into a ‘supergrass’.)

  No one knew it at the time but the first clue that Bennett was planning a triumphant return to the armed robbery business in Melbourne was when he was spied by an alert policeman in the Moonee Ponds area one day in late 1975. It turned out that he was on a flying visit – literally. He had flown in for a few days to scout the scene while on pre-release leave from prison on the Isle of Wight. He then flew back to finish his sentence – and plot his big move.

  When Bennett returned again he was ready to execute the job that other armed robbers, including James Edward ‘Jockey’ Smith, had reputedly considered but decided was too risky.

  Bennett recruited a team of nine for the Bookie Robbery and all of them had specific jobs, including organising stolen cars, checking the escape route, setting up laundering methods, organising guns and cultivating an inside source.

  The team was said to include Vincent Mikkelsen, Laurie Prendergast, Ian Revell Carroll, Anthony Paul McNamara, Dennis William Smith, Normie Lee and two brothers who had done plenty of stick-ups.

  Bennett also consulted an outsider, a time and motion expert with no criminal record who had helped plan armed robberies in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth.

  The team was broken into an assault group of six with a backup unit of three.

  Bennett took the crew on a mini commando course in the bush in central Victoria, ruling that there would be no drinking and no women. To the team that was more a guideline than a rule and, as footballers and soldiers have done in similar situations, they broke out of boot camp to ‘play up’ at a nearby town.

  The target was the Victorian Club, then in Queen Street, where bookies settled after race day. Bennett chose the date – 21 April 1976 – the first settling day after Easter. He knew the bookies would be settling not for one, but three race meetings. Some suggest that an old bookmaker had pointed out this tempting target, later described by a senior policeman as ‘an over-ripe plum waiting to be picked.’

  Police were later told the team had a dry run in the deserted building during the Easter break. When the time came for the real thing, the gang, armed with sub-machine guns, made their move on the bookies. All went to plan – or nearly. One security guard bravely but unwisely went for his .38 revolver and was smashed to the floor with a gun butt.

  Normally, three members of the police Consorting Squad would turn up at lunchtime on settling day to act as extra security. But on the day of the robbery, the ‘consorters’ were ordered to Frankston by a senior officer on what would turn out to be a wild goose chase. Some in the squad still believe that Ray Bennett had the senior officer in his pocket and that he had deliberately nobbled the squad with the bogus Frankston job to make it easy for the robbery team to pull off the robbery unopposed. In any case, it probably prevented a gun battle that could have ended in a bloodbath.

  After the money was delivered to settle for 116 bookmakers, the gang took just eleven minutes to commit the robbery.

  They grabbed 118 calico bags filled with cash. The total stolen will never be known. The official amount was declared at $1.4 million, although wild guesses that it might have been more than $10 million have been thrown around because of unrecorded cash bets made ‘on the nod’ with trusted punters. Those most likely to know, bookies in the building that day, privately suggest the total was perhaps up to $2 million, still a staggering sum at a time when a house (now worth $2 million) could be bought then for $50,000.

  There are two theories on what happened to the money. One was that the gang had rented an office in the same building and hid the cash there for weeks. The other, accepted by the police, was that the money was put in a stolen laundry van and driven away by Dennis ‘Greedy’ Smith.

  The van was well-chosen, as the cash was delivered to people who laundered it as part of the master plan. Some was laundered through a female real estate agent in Sydney who bought property in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Some was sent to
Manila via Canada and was used there to set up Smith’s vice club, the Aussie Bar, later used as an offshore safe house by gangsters from Melbourne and Sydney. More of the cash was laundered through bent lawyers’ trust accounts.

  Shortly after the robbery, Bennett’s mother collapsed in a lawyer’s office with a fatal heart attack. When ambulance officers removed her outer clothes in a frantic effort to revive her, they found $90,000 cash in her undergarments. She had discovered that you can have too much of a good thing – that while thermal underwear is one thing, several kilograms of hot banknotes is not what the doctor ordered.

  Normie Lee, one of the conspirators, was like a brother to Ray Bennett and he promised him he would never talk to police. He was as good as his word. One of the key money men, Lee once took $60,000 to his lawyers in a plastic garbage bag, which was more comfortable than trying to hide it in his jocks and socks. But though police had good reasons to suspect the inscrutable Lee, they could never get him to say anything.

  Lee was eventually charged with receiving $110,000 of the proceeds of the bookie robbery. Police claimed he used his share to buy new equipment for his dim sim factory.

  Detectives seized his office safe but he refused to give them the keys to open it. Even when they took the safe to the Russell Street police quadrangle and hired a safe expert to cut it open, he stayed silent. So the expert fired up the ‘oxy’ torch and destroyed the safe to get it open. It was empty. But Lee had not said a word or offered a key to save it.

  Police weren’t the only ones looking for the bookie robbers. One crew made contact with the insurance company wanting a reward for ‘shopping’ the bandits. And the bookie robbers reputedly received the undivided attention of the Sydney ‘Toecutters’, so named because they would torture fellow criminals until they gave up their stash of cash. And police believe that the Kanes wanted a share, although this is disputed in some quarters.

  As part of his planning, the canny Bennett had instructed his men to keep a low profile and not to splash cash around after the robbery in a way that would attract attention. But a chance remark during the robbery put them in the frame – and under the gun. When the masked men ordered all 31 present in the club to lie face down, one masked gunman said to the then well-known boxing trainer Ambrose Palmer, ‘You too, Ambrose.’

  The robber instantly regretted his half-friendly throwaway line. He had once trained at Palmer’s gymnasium (as did world champion Johnny Famechon) and knew the old man might recognise his voice. Palmer naturally forgot to mention this to police, the story goes, but accidentally let slip the robber’s identity to people connected with the Kane brothers and other painters and dockers, who were well known in boxing circles. Word soon got around, and members of Bennett’s gang became targets for opportunists who wanted a share of the bookies’ cash.

  It was an ideal scenario for gang warfare. And that war was declared in a Richmond hotel in mid-1978, when Vincent Mikkelsen – a friend of Bennett’s and once a friend of Les Kane – refused a drink from Brian Kane and tossed out an insult about not drinking with ‘old men’. That was bad enough, but Mikkelsen committed an even graver social indiscretion by biting off part of Brian Kane’s ear in the resulting fight.

  Both men were so injured in the brawl they needed hospital treatment but the damage to Brian Kane’s ear was a daily reminder that he had been successfully challenged as the toughest man on the block.

  Musing much later about Kane’s reaction to his humiliating disfigurement, Bennett’s lawyer Joe Gullaci (later a respected judge) said: ‘It’s hard to be the number one standover man in town when you’ve got a piece bitten out of your ear.’

  That mouthful of ear was eventually to give Melbourne’s underworld heartburn and put the wind up the police force. But all Brian Kane knew then was that it was bad for his reputation – and that wasn’t good for business, let alone his ego.

  Mikkelsen came to expect massive retaliation. Bennett suggested Mikkelsen’s life be spared, and was warned: ‘If you stick your head in, it will be blown off.’ If war had not been formally declared before that, now it was on. And there was no Geneva Convention.

  JUST four years earlier, when Les had been in jail at Beechworth for shooting the off-duty policeman in the foot at the Croxton Park Hotel, Vinnie Mikkelsen and his wife Flossie had lived in the same neighbourhood – ‘just around the corner in Broady’, as Judi Kane remembered it. If the Mikkelsens weren’t close friends with Les and Judi then they were close to it. Judi was heavily pregnant with her second child, and when her waters broke she rang Vinnie Mikkelsen to help. ‘And he drove me to the Royal Women’s’ where she gave birth to her son. Les’s parents, Reg and Alice Kane, who had moved in while Les was ‘away’, stayed home to look after Judi’s two-year-old daughter.

  ‘Four years later it had all turned nasty,’ she says. She thinks the notorious fight in Richmond that led to the feud was orchestrated by Ray Bennett and his supporters to bring festering resentments to a head.

  ‘The night Brian had a fight at PA’s, the pub in Church Street near the river, they’d been following Brian. I reckon it was a set up,’ she told the authors.

  ‘Les and Chuck were both street fighters, and had been friends in the old days. The trouble started at a barrel behind St Ignatius in Richmond. Brian was there. He thought Chuck was arrogant – he’d been knocking people off – and Brian might have said something like, “Don’t think you’re going to do that to us.” Of course, he had to take up the challenge, and that’s how it started, really.

  ‘Chuck was deep and dark, don’t worry about that. Smart at what he did. We think he stewed on it. Got Vinnie on his posse, sort of thing.’

  Specifically, Chuck had knocked off ‘Wingy’, a painter and docker with a withered arm and what some contemporaries unsympathetically called a big mouth. Whatever the reason, it had caused him to go on the missing list – and heightened the tensions between the two camps.

  AFTER most of Brian Kane’s left ear went missing the threats flew on both sides. And each side knew such threats were neither idle nor boastful. It was a case of who would get in first. Blink and you were brown bread.

  Les Kane was an inner-suburban boy, well-known in Collingwood, Richmond and Port Melbourne and later moving to Broadmeadows and, ultimately, to the distant eastern suburbs to avoid his enemies.

  By 1978 it was clear the Kanes and their allies – including Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh, Wally Russian and the Morans – were worried about the brothers’ safety. Les tried to make himself a less obvious target – moving Judi and their two young children to a nondescript unit in Wantirna in the outer eastern suburbs.

  Les and Judi had lived together in a de facto relationship for years because Les, although separated, did not finalise his divorce from his first wife, Pat, until three months before marrying Judi in 1977.

  Judi was widely regarded as a good woman who fell for the wrong man. She was too loyal ever to say so, but the man she loved often treated her violently. Police were told that he beat her, once hitting her so hard she needed plastic surgery to repair the smashed cheekbone.

  The surgeon wrote on her cheek in large letters – ‘DO NOT TOUCH.’

  It may have been a message for the nursing staff or, perhaps, a stronger one for the guilty husband with the terrible temper.

  Another time he put a noose around her neck, tying the rope over a door to leave her hanging with her toes just touching the ground for an agonising ten minutes.

  Finally she had enough and shortly after their marriage she took the kids and fled to Sydney. She returned a few weeks later to give the marriage another chance – ‘for the sake of the children’. It was a decision that represented the triumph of hope over experience. As it turned out, it wasn’t a wise one. They were in too deep to have any chance of living happily ever after.

  THERE were two sides to Les Kane. The cunning, careful streak in him prompted him to drive to work at the docks in his overalls in a Morris mini van, so humbl
e and unpretentious and cheap it was almost an in-joke, because anyone that mattered knew that he could (and did) afford much better wheels.

  But the other side of Kane – the narcissistic big noter who wanted to be noticed and admired, with his double-header pay packets plus whatever ‘good earns’ he could pick up from standover, smuggling, robbery, thieving and gambling – meant he could not and would not stay under the radar the way more prudent operators might. The Collingwood streetfighting ‘lair’ in him made him a sucker for the status symbols coveted by young men who know no better.

  So, despite moving swiftly and secretly one night from the western suburbs to the foreign territory of Wantirna, and trying to ‘go into smoke’, Kane would not part with his loud pink Ford Futura or the purple Monaro that Judi drove. Keeping the distinctive pink Futura was probably a fatal mistake.

  Although the move was for their own safety, Judi couldn’t help resenting it. An accomplished netballer, she’d had to give up playing A-grade with her own team in the western suburbs. Her brother-in-law had said not to worry because she could play with a local team at Wantirna but it wasn’t the same for Judi, playing with a second rate side after playing at the top level.

  Life went on. Until 19 October 1978, a Thursday, when Les took his family to dinner at his sister Valetta’s house about 5pm, driving the pink Ford.

  When they returned just over four hours later, he backed the Ford into the driveway next to their rented three-bedroom unit on Mountain Highway.

  When they got there, the family’s miniature long-haired dachshund, Simon, which Les had bought for Judi in Beaudesert in Queensland, was sitting on a seat on the porch.

  Judi would later say everything seemed normal – but it wasn’t quite, as she would realise too late.

  After Les opened the door and dropped the keys on the kitchen table, Judi picked up the dachshund and carried him down the hall. If she had put the little dog down inside, she would later tell herself, perhaps it might have ended differently. But she had no reason to, and didn’t. She went to the back door and put the dog in the back yard, where he had a kennel, and never gave him a thought until later.