One former detective says matter-of-factly that two former colleagues removed four roofing nails and levered open the tin fence escape route days earlier. Interestingly, an RMIT gardener recalled seeing a man dressed in new overalls and digging with a new garden trowel next to the fence at 6.45am the week before the murder – possibly on the morning of the Melbourne Cup public holiday when the area would have been almost deserted. This man had a similar moustache to Brian Kane but it was an era when moustaches were fashionable – particularly among squad detectives.
The truth went to the grave with Brian Kane when he was shot dead in the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick in November 1982, almost three years to the day after Bennett’s death.
Twenty years on, Brian Murphy was on a short motoring holiday with his wife in Tasmania when contacted by the authors. He said he remembered distinctly the events of late 1979.
So who was the bearded hit man?
‘It was Brian,’ he said. ‘But not this one.’
The strange thing, he added, was that he’d seen a man who looked very like Brian Kane in Lygon Street the night before, and noticed he had grown a beard.
Nearly 25 years later another underworld figure was ambushed. It was Jason Moran who was related by marriage to the Kane family.
One of the first men on the scene was Phil Glare, who worked at a scrap metal yard across the road from the North Essendon football ground where Moran was shot dead.
The same Phil Glare who was on escort duty when Bennett was gunned down.
It’s a small world, after all.
7
SHOT IN THE DARK
HOW MARRIAGE GOT A MAN MURDERED BY MISTAKE
The killers probably didn’t see
his face in the dark as they
approached from behind.
NORMAN McLeod was a good man. But that didn’t help him avoid a murder contract meant for somebody else.
McLeod’s only ‘crime’ was to be driving a car that had previously belonged to his brother-in-law Vinnie Mikkelsen, a gunman whose deadly but dumb enemies killed the wrong man because they didn’t do their homework.
Mikkelsen was one of a family of fourteen children. The odds were that one of them would run off the rails, and Vinnie was the one.
McLeod had known the Mikkelsens most of his life and had knocked around with Vinnie, who was a year younger, when they were kids. Later, in the spring of 1969, he had married one of Mikkelsen’s seven sisters, Lynette.
But McLeod proved a good worker, father and husband, and police never had any reason to link him to the criminal activities of his tough-guy brother-in-law, who was quick with his fists and reputedly even quicker with a gun.
When Vincent started to associate with some of the local tough teenagers such as Laurie Prendergast, McLeod chose hard work over easy money. He went into the meat business, initially working as a boner after completing year ten in school.
The young married couple knew some of the local gangsters but they didn’t fall for the underworld attitude towards work and saving money.
Norman and Lynette had two daughters and continued to save as they chased the suburban family dream of owning their own home. It took them ten years to put together the deposit for their first brick veneer house in the then new estate in Rockbank Court, Coolaroo, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
McLeod, 33, had a reputation as a good toiler and after the meatworks folded he soon got a job as a storeman at Berger Paints in Coburg. He was popular at work, a member of the social club committee, and organised many of the staff’s after-hours activities.
He had a small share in a trotting horse called Perfect Call, paying $10 a month to be in it with friends. The horse did not live up to its name, as it never raced.
McLeod’s only other outside interest was a monthly visit on a Saturday afternoon to the First and Last Hotel to have a few beers with his mates. This would happen only if he worked overtime in the morning and when he went to the pub, Lynette would pick him up around 5pm. For a pair of honest battlers, it was close to suburban bliss.
Vinnie Mikkelsen kept in regular touch with his sister – usually visiting the McLeods every few weeks. But then, in 1978, the visits suddenly stopped. He had more pressing matters on his mind.
Mikkelsen had plans to disappear to the other side of the country – a decision that coincided with the disappearance and murder of Les Kane.
He took his two children out of school in October 1978. In January 1979, Mikkelsen was arrested in Karratha, a remote mining town 1600 kilometres from Perth, and charged with Kane’s murder.
In September 1979 Mikkelsen, Bennett and Prendergast were acquitted of the murder. But friends and relatives of Kane were keen to carry out their own homegrown version of capital punishment despite the jury’s verdict.
On 12 November, Bennett was shot dead in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court as the first part of the proposed payback. Within three weeks Mikkelsen decided to sell his four-door Mazda sedan with the distinctive number plates, ML 737.
The McLeods were paying their way but they were not so flush with funds they could ignore a bargain. So, when they had a chance to pick up a cheap and reliable sedan from a relative, rather than a shonky car dealer, they jumped at it.
Right car, wrong relative.
Like most families, the McLeods had a predictable routine. By 6.30am Norm would be ready to go to work. Lynette would drive him to the factory less than twenty minutes away and then drop their daughters at the house of a woman who would take them to their local primary school.
Lynette would then head to work at the Coles Supermarket in Sydney Road, Coburg.
Around 5pm they would retrace their steps and drive home together. Regular, steady and safe. And only too easy to follow.
On Tuesday, 15 July 1981, their elder daughter had a throat infection and had to stay home from school. Lynette stayed with her, leaving Norm to make his own way to work.
He drove the Mazda to the factory – the same car they had bought from Vinnie Mikkelsen nearly two years earlier.
The following morning the little girl was still sick. Norm was running late and had to skip his usual shower. While he dressed, Lynette made him sandwiches.
‘At about twenty to seven, he said goodbye, gave me a kiss and told me he would ring later that morning to see how (their daughter) was,’ Lynette later said.
It was still dark and the outside light was not working. This meant the two gunmen hiding outside would not have been able to identify McLeod’s physical features or see his distinctive bushy beard.
He walked out to the kerb where the car was parked, slipped behind the wheel and put his portable AWA radio in the passenger seat next to him.
Lynette went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for an early morning coffee. She looked out the window and saw fumes coming from the exhaust as her husband started the car.
‘Just about this time I heard about four really loud bangs. I thought it must have been an explosion. I went to the lounge window, pulled back the drapes and had a look at what had really happened. I immediately saw two people running really fast.’
She went outside and saw her husband still sitting behind the wheel. The driver’s side window had been smashed. Instinctively, she would say, ‘I opened the car door and turned off the ignition.’
She realised her husband was injured because he didn’t move and didn’t speak, but she still hadn’t grasped what had happened. Then the school caretaker from across the road came over and said to her: ‘Sorry love, there was nothing I could do – they had guns.’
It was only then she realised her husband had been shot. She collapsed, screaming.
Police later established that McLeod started the car and because it was a cold winter morning let it idle to allow the engine to warm.
In those few seconds, two gunmen approached from behind and fired two shots through the driver’s side window followed by three more.
McLeod was shot in the head, neck and ch
est. He died where he sat. The killers probably didn’t see his face in the dark as they approached from behind.
The gunmen then ran to the school opposite, through some vacant land and along Yuroke Creek to another road where their getaway car was waiting.
Later, the Coroner said Norman McLeod had been ‘callously murdered in a well-planned operation by two assailants who have not been identified despite extensive police investigations.’
Often, when police probe the background of a murder victim, hidden secrets emerge. Happy marriages can turn out to be shams, seemingly successful businesses can be on the verge of disaster and seemingly healed wounds still fester.
But a protracted police investigation found Norman McLeod to be exactly what he seemed: a good bloke, a devoted family man and a hard worker with modest tastes and realistic dreams.
Detectives found, ‘The deceased was happily married and he does not appear to have been involved in any criminal matters. He has never been charged or convicted of any criminal offences or has never been interviewed for any matter. He was not in any extreme financial difficulty or has any financial problems known to police.’
He was, they concluded, simply driving the wrong car and so had been followed and killed by gunmen too stupid to make sure they had the right target.
8
THE LIFE OF BRIAN
THE BITE ON THE EAR THAT STARTED A WAR
They had reputations for
rarely missing and they
wouldn’t that night.
BRIAN Kane knew he would die young and violently. It was just a matter of when and where. All he knew was that it wouldn’t be in his sleep.
‘He was convinced I would outlive him,’ said veteran prison priest Father John Brosnan a few hours after burying the man with the reputation as one of Australia’s toughest.
The wily old priest was sorry to lose Kane for more reasons than one – his onetime school pupil had been a generous donor to Brosnan’s favourite cause, shouting him a trip to Ireland and even a car to get around his parish.
Kane had plenty of reasons to stay on side with God’s gang. In the early 1980s, he was in the middle of an underworld war that had already claimed three lives and was still going strong. He needed all the help he could get, the more Divine the better.
Kane made a comfortable living by frightening fellow criminals, among others, and was well qualified to demand a share of the Bookie Robbery funds. He was not accustomed to taking no for an answer.
For years he had collected money from illegal gambling in Chinatown and he had a slice of Melbourne’s biggest and busiest two-up school and was a regular at various illegal gambling venues in Carlton as well as collecting debts for SP bookmakers.
But there was another steady and more lucrative source of income. For as long as anyone could remember, ‘ghost’ payments had been made on the Melbourne waterfront. Workers who did not exist were listed as dockies and wages were paid in their names – effectively as a bribe in return for industrial peace.
Unlike armed robberies and standover rackets, it was a regular, safe stream of cash. Police were too busy dealing with violent crime to worry about the rorts on the docks and the employers didn’t complain because a dock strike was more expensive than ghosted wages. It was part of the overhead expenses that made Australian ports among the most notorious in the world.
It took the Costigan Royal Commission into the Painters and Dockers Union to expose the practice as part of a complex, interconnected web of organised crime that included the lucrative bottom-of-the-harbor tax scheme and a string of unsolved murders.
Frank Costigan, QC, listed the murders of the Kanes, Bennett and McLeod as connected to dockland activity without publicly identifying a motive.
He declared Bennett to be a hit man: ‘Bennett was believed to have been a person who murdered on the payment of money.’
According to one investigator from the time, ‘The new breed came in and the bad blood was over the percentage of the ghosting down the wharves. There was always a percentage of wages paid to phantom workers on the wharf and the Kanes controlled it and divvied it out. It was big business and linked to organised crime.’
According to fellow standover man Mark Brandon Read, ‘Brian was a violent, cunning criminal who had the bulk of the criminal world and the waterfront bluffed, beaten and baffled.’
He once sat in a coffee shop with a policeman who had earned a national fearsome reputation. An underworld figure recalls: ‘The copper said, “If you look under the table there is a .38 pointed directly at your guts.” Brian just smiled and said, “There’s a .45 pointing at your knackers”.’
So Kane was tough. But a man like Bennett wasn’t easily frightened, either. He also had a reputation and, like the Kanes, was well connected in the Painters and Dockers. He was not going to pull off one of Australia’s biggest crimes and then hand over the profits.
Brooding dislike had erupted into bloodshed after Kane came off second best in a brawl in a Richmond hotel from one of Bennett’s mates, leaving him without part of his left ear.
Brian Kane’s brother, Les, vowed revenge. ‘Brian was dangerous but measured. Les was a psychopath,’ said a Melbourne underworld figure, voicing a widespread opinion.
Bennett, the man they called ‘The General’, reasoned that he couldn’t reason with Les Kane and decided to hit first.
When Bennett, Prendergast and Mikkelsen were acquitted of Les’s murder, big brother Brian became obsessed with a pay-back.
He saw Mikkelsen’s barrister at a nightclub after the acquittal and told him he was ‘going to cut your client’s head off and leave it on your front door step.’
Another time when he found the lawyer in a bar he pulled a gun on him as a reminder that not all was forgiven. One of Kane’s best friends, Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh, knocked the gun out of his hand. After Brian’s death ‘The Munster’ began to associate with colourful characters such as Alphonse Gangitano (shot dead in 1998) and Mick Gatto. Gangitano had hero-worshipped Brian Kane and did his best to take over his mantle as Melbourne’s premier standover man.
It was said that Kinniburgh, a master safebreaker and professional burglar among other interests, had business as well as social links with Gatto.
Kinniburgh was to excel in his role as underworld peacemaker until he was shot dead in December 2003. But that was half a lifetime later.
Kane’s moment of vengeance came in November 1979 when Ray Bennett was shot dead in the City Court while being escorted by police to an armed robbery committal hearing.
Brian Kane was the man who killed Bennett, although it has become part of underworld folklore that he had a little unofficial assistance along the way from rogue police with their own reasons to side with him.
While Kane was desperate to avenge his brother’s death he remained a reluctant gunman. According to one notable underworld source, Brian Kane hated firing guns. He usually carried one and was known to have pistol-whipped a man into a coma, and would insert the barrel into a victim’s ear and twist it, but he wasn’t a great one for pulling the trigger. Kane kept a low profile after Bennett was murdered but Ray had been popular in some circles and Kane knew he was living dangerously.
The harsh economic fact of life was that Kane could not afford to disappear for long. A close woman friend of his has told the authors that he and his younger brother, Ray ‘Muscles’ Kane, flew to Perth to cool off straight after the Bennett hit. But he was Melbourne bred – and that’s where the bread was. Standover men can’t work by sending stern letters of demand: they have to turn up in person sooner or later.
Men like Kane made a living by appearing to be bulletproof even when they knew they weren’t.
Kane was a professional, so he suspected it was only a matter of time. The Painters and Dockers motto, ‘We catch and kill our own’, meant that enemies would wait years before they grabbed their moment.
But Kane was not without friends – and some of them were in infl
uential positions in the CIB. In fact, when the gangland war broke out a core of experienced detectives decided to back the Kanes against the new breed led by Bennett.
As one detective, now retired, explained, ‘The centre of the older style criminals was in the streets of Richmond before it became trendy and the Kanes were entrenched in the area.
‘These people who came along lived in the spacious newer developments around Keilor.
‘In those days Bennett’s house was one of the first to have video surveillance. The older crims didn’t have that sort of thing because they knew that enemies wouldn’t come to your home. When Les Kane was gunned down in the bathroom of his own home with his wife and kids there it changed everything. It was a horrific event to kill a man in front of his wife and kids and then take him away and deprive the family the right to bury their own. That man and his car have never been found to this day.
‘There was a massive division among the criminals. The older crooks took the side of the Kanes and the young dashing criminals took the side of the Bennett group. People in nightclubs were challenged to take a side. At times people were declaring their loyalty to both sides.
‘We felt that it was about to get fully out of control with shootings in the streets. If they were prepared to machine gun a bloke in front of his family we thought that all the rules were out the window.
‘We decided to stick with the Kanes, not because we liked them but because the established older style criminals were predictable. They had rules – they caught and killed their own; they looked after their own.
‘I had many dealings with Brian Kane. He was an enormous source of intelligence to me; not that he was informing, he was feeding me intelligence he wanted me to know and I was feeding him information to try and keep him alive.
A Tale of Two Cities Page 16