‘I asked him why he wanted a fight and he said, “I just wanted to test your reflexes, no hard feelings”.’
Two months after he was acquitted of the Bennett murder he met the woman he would marry. They were an odd couple, proving that opposites attract. She worked in banks. He robbed them. Perhaps they could have driven to work together.
In May 1981 he married Ursula and they had a child, Lauren – whose godfather, police say, was Russell Cox, the notorious New South Wales escapee and gunman.
In 1982 the young family moved to the outer Melbourne suburb of Warrandyte, where they were building a new house. Even then he tried to make it difficult for enemies to find him. He chose to buy the land in the name of David Carter – one of his many aliases.
‘Once Laurie met me we stayed close as a family and tried to keep to ourselves. Laurie didn’t really want me to associate with my old friends,’ Ursula would tell police later.
In 1985 – seven years after Les Kane was killed, and three years after Brian Kane’s murder – Prendergast remained wary. He used disguises, refused to trust strangers and stuck with an old crew of contacts he had known for years. As police said, ‘Laurence Prendergast lived in constant fear of being murdered.’ It was the only way he knew to survive.
For the moment.
One of his oldest friends, Christopher Dale Flannery, was in his own underworld war in Sydney and had just become a casualty.
Flannery went missing on 9 May 1985. Some suggest Prendergast started to make noises that he would try to avenge Flannery’s death.
The theory goes that Prendergast (rightly) blamed George Freeman for Flannery’s death and planned to hit the Sydney crime boss.
One theory is that Freeman, a renowned race fixer, decided to fix the situation by getting in first and organising for Prendergast to go missing the way his mate Flannery had.
Certainly, many believed that Prendergast had worked with Flannery in Sydney. Former Sydney detective Roger Rogerson went as far as to claim it was Prendergast who shot undercover policeman Mick Drury in his Chatswood home on 6 June 1984.
About a week before Prendergast went missing in August 1985 his wife borrowed $6000 from a credit company and gave him the money.
She told police that although they were not financially stable, Prendergast acquired a passport in July for an overseas trip.
So just weeks after Flannery had gone missing Prendergast found the need to be able to head overseas. And he needed cash – quickly.
There was another sign that the normally cautious criminal felt he was at greater than normal risk. After years of police raids, he had taken to hiding handguns so that he didn’t get charged with being a felon in possession. But shortly after Flannery went missing he began to carry a gun again.
Ursula told police he carried a silver pistol when he felt threatened. She said that in the last month before he disappeared he began to sleep with it under his pillow. He took it from storage just after Flannery disappeared.
On 15 August, the same day she gave Prendergast the $6000 in cash, Ursula took their daughter to the Gold Coast to visit her parents.
Laurie stayed home, because he was scared of flying. Prendergast and his 13-year-old stepson Carl met up with a group of men. The teenager noticed Laurie was carrying a paper bag full of cash. Was this the loan money? If so, what was he trying to buy?
Certainly there were no obvious signs Prendergast planned to disappear. He had invested heavily in his new house and had just commissioned an in-ground pool.
On Friday 23 August Laurie let Carl skip school as it was the last day of term and they had both had a late night. They cleaned the house for Ursula’s return. Then Prendergast drove Carl to Doncaster Shopping Town. The arrangement was that the boy would later catch a bus back to Warrandyte then call Laurie from a local coffee shop to get a lift home. When there was no answer he walked home.
Earlier, two builders working on the block next door had seen Prendergast drive from the house in his silver Volvo. There is no evidence that he returned.
When Carl walked in he found two cups and two dirty plates from a meal of baked beans in the sink. There was also half a load of washing in the machine and part in the dryer.
This surprised Carl as it seemed strange to leave the house messy after they had spent the morning cleaning it ready for his mother’s return.
That night Ursula called home to say she would be back the next day.
‘Laurie was meticulous when it came to punctuality, so it seemed odd to me that he hadn’t contacted Carl to let him know where he was.’
On the same day a woman noticed a silver Volvo parked in Cartwell Street, Heidelberg. When it hadn’t been moved four days later, she reported it to police.
It was Prendergast’s car – parked and locked. The radio was still tuned to 3KZ, Laurie’s favourite station. In the car was the remote control to his garage and the Football Record from the previous week’s Essendon v. Melbourne game.
Carl would later tell police that when they were at the football Prendergast saw someone he recognised and needed to avoid.
But there was something else in the car – a cigarette butt. Friends said Laurie was not a smoker and did not let anyone smoke inside the Volvo.
When Ursula arrived home someone who understood her concerns picked her up. It was Gail Bennett, Ray’s widow.
She went to a lawyer’s house that night and contact was made with the major crime squad. The following morning she officially reported Prendergast missing to the Brighton police but she remained so frightened she refused to give her home address.
She would tell police later, with an understandable touch of bitterness, ‘Laurie’s friends show no concern as to his disappearance or whereabouts.’
Either they didn’t care or they already knew what had happened and there was nothing they could do about it.
Ursula told police, ‘When I started going through Laurie’s things a couple of days after he disappeared, I located that pistol secreted amongst his clothes in his drawer in the robe in the main bedroom. I believe this indicates that Laurie wouldn’t have left home on his own accord or that, if he did voluntarily leave home to meet someone, then he trusted the person he was going to meet.’
Certainly she had her suspicions, once confronting his cousin Billy at gunpoint although there was no evidence pointing to his involvement.
Laurie and his cousin Billy were not close but in the months before he went missing they began to socialise again. A witness told police he saw Billy’s van near his cousin’s home on the day he disappeared.
Billy chose to remove the name Prendergast from the side of his VW van around the time Laurie disappeared. It was probably a wise move.
There were many theories about what happened. One was that he was abducted and murdered in Yarrawonga, set up by the group still loyal to the Kanes. The most popular theory, of course, was that he was killed as a pre-emptive strike before he could move against George Freeman’s Sydney forces as a payback for killing Flannery.
As Coroner Maurice Gurvich found, ‘In many ways the story that unfolded here resembled the plot of a gangster movie of the genre popularised by the Warner Brothers. There was evidence of deception, aliases, disguises, fraud, strange property and financial transactions, large sums of money in a paper bag, a missing gun and other evidence, all central to the disappearance of Laurence Prendergast. And there were allegations of a cover-up and conspiracy. All this together with the intervention of a clairvoyant make the ingredients of a good B grade screenplay.’
Or could it all be much simpler?
One of his closest – and most violent – friends suspected that Laurie had been making after hours visits to his wife.
So was it the oldest motive of all?
When Kath Flannery was interviewed by the National Crime Authority in Sydney the widow asked, ‘How are you going with Laurie Prendergast?’
Detective: Not good.
Kath: I would be looking i
n his own camp.
10
COX THE FOX
ESCAPEE WHO WROTE THE ROBBER’S RULEBOOK
The gang was better equipped,
better trained and better
prepared than the police who
were trying to catch them.
NO WONDER there was a rush to rent the neat weatherboard home in the quiet bayside hideaway of Mt Martha, south east of Melbourne.
For a start, it was only 200 metres from Port Phillip Bay, with access to beach and water. And, on the outer fringe of suburbia, it was ideal for someone seeking seclusion at a reasonable price. Many houses in the area were holiday homes, vacant most of the year. The rest were largely occupied by retirees who respected their neighbours’ privacy.
Four families applied to take the long-term lease on the fully furnished house. But after examining references and conducting interviews the owners felt they had found the perfect tenants in a couple who introduced themselves as Kevin and Sharon Ames.
And for six months after the couple moved in, the owners had no reason to doubt their choice.
He was a fitness fanatic who went to bed early and she was a stay-at-home type who spent evenings knitting in front of the television.
They were never short of money, paid their rent on time, looked after the property properly and without complaint and didn’t throw parties. He was always up and out by 5am for his daily run on the beach with his dog. (Later it would be established that fitness was not his only motivation: he wanted to be out of the house at the time police traditionally carried out early morning raids).
But on 3 January 1983 the quiet tenants had one of their rare visitors. It was a man in his early 40s, driving a flash imported maroon Chevrolet utility.
It was the first week of the New Year, where work traditionally takes a back seat to sun and socializing, but this group of people was self-employed and rarely took a break.
The meeting this day, in the quiet house in Helena Street, was about business and it would end badly.
The fact was that the tenants were Russell Cox, a New South Wales prison escapee and prolific armed robber, and his loyal de facto wife Helen Deane.
Cox was known as ‘Mad Dog’ although he was one of the coolest criminals around. That’s why, while on the run for more than a decade, he was able to blend into the background. And that’s why he was known inside prisons in three states as ‘Cox the Fox.’
The ‘Mad Dog’ nickname was given to Cox by one of the authors. It was not one of his career highlights.
Many times Cox was close to capture, but each time he was able to talk or fight his way out of trouble. Once, when stopped by two Queensland police, he pulled a gun, disarmed them and drove off.
A Victorian policeman who had been training at an inner-suburban boxing gym went for a drink in Richmond with a few of his sparring partners. At the pub he was introduced to a quiet bloke sitting at the bar. They had a chat and then the quiet man drifted away. It was Cox.
Once, when overcharged at a Japanese restaurant, he queried the bill then meekly backed down rather than risk a public confrontation.
The restaurant manager might have been less self-righteous if he’d known the quiet customer was almost certainly carrying a gun.
But Cox was extremely violent if he were cornered. He was a much better friend than enemy – as his visitor in the American car was about to find out.
Cox had been serving life for the attempted murder of a prison officer in an earlier escape, then broke out of the top security Katingal division of Sydney’s Long Bay Prison in 1977. The division was later closed on humanitarian grounds – not that it worried Cox, by then long gone.
When he was let into the exercise yard he pulled himself up with one arm and cut through the bars with the other with a saw. He then painted the bars to hide the saw cuts until he was ready to go.
Just on lock-up time he said he’d forgotten his runners and slipped back into the exercise yard, through the window, over two football fields and away.
It was a feat of strength and ingenuity. But prison authorities expected he would be back in custody within days. They were optimistic. It took eleven years.
The Chevrolet driver was hot-rod enthusiast and gunman Ian Revell Carroll, a heavy player in Melbourne’s underworld for decades.
They were there to discuss future jobs and to split dividends. It had been a good year and the future was looking even better. They had guns, brains and an inside man in a security firm.
It was, for them, a boom-boom economy. They were part of Australia’s best ever stick-up crew. The gang included the surviving elements of Ray Bennett’s Great Bookie Robbery team, reinforced by hand picked replacements such as Santo Mercuri (who, five years later, would kill security guard Dominic Hefti during an armed robbery in Brunswick) and Cox himself.
The team had lost key players to guns, drugs and prison but they had eager apprentices, including two young men whose underworld careers would blossom until they were shot dead in a later underworld war – Jason and Mark Moran.
For Jason it was an interesting career choice. It meant he was working with the survivors of the team that killed his wife’s father – Leslie Herbert Kane.
It also meant he worked side by side with Cox, the number one suspect for killing her uncle (and his childhood hero) – Brian Kane. So while blood may be thicker than water, cash speaks all languages. And a rolling stone gathers no moss and a watched pot never boils – but we digress.
Carroll was another graduate from the Painters and Dockers crime finishing school. He was arrested with Neil Stanley Collingburn in 1971 when police found a set of golf clubs suspected of being stolen in the boot of a car the pair were using.
Collingburn received fatal injuries while in police custody. Two detectives, Brian Francis Murphy and Carl John Stillman, were later acquitted of manslaughter. It was later established that the interview and the fatal consequences were pointless. The clubs were legitimately acquired and not stolen.
Carroll, a former professional boxer, had been recruited by Bennett as a key member of the Bookie Robbery team. While he was supposed to be living as a battler on waterfront wages he had graduated to executive class, driving his Mercedes or one of his eight vintage cars. He put his children through private school and began several businesses, including a computer company and an American car-importing firm.
A posthumous check of his financial records showed he had more than twenty bank accounts, some in false names, and an impressive property portfolio. He was building a luxury home on a two-hectare block in the outer Melbourne suburb of Wonga Park.
In the months that followed the Bookie Robbery, Carroll deposited nearly $450,000 in cash in different accounts. It was unlikely to have come from overtime at the docks.
In the six months from September 1981 until February 1982, Carroll made a series of huge deposits in his various accounts. His income spike coincided with four Melbourne armed robberies that netted the gang nearly $600,000 in cash. Business was so good that Carroll was able to take a 35-day holiday in the US.
Cox and Carroll had become almost inseparable. Carroll’s friends and relatives noticed the usually gregarious car enthusiast had become secretive and chose to spend most of his time with the mysterious escapee.
On this day when Carroll went to visit Cox, money was one of the first items up for discussion. As no minutes are kept of such business meetings, police could only piece together fragments of what happened that afternoon.
It was a warm afternoon when a man holidaying with family and friends decided to take a break from listening to the fifth Test in the Ashes series during the tea break. (He didn’t miss much. It was a draw. England nightwatchman, the rotund Eddie Hemmings made a stubborn 95 but, again, we digress).
The man stretched his legs and then sat in the back yard and opened a book. It was 3.55pm.
Over the side fence he heard an argument and a scuffle. ‘I heard a woman scream, “Don’t shoot him!” o
r “Don’t point that at him!”
When he peered over the fence he saw a man and a woman struggling. The woman had a pistol in her hand and appeared to be fighting a losing battle to keep the gun away from him. The man screamed, ‘Give me the fucking gun.’
The witness said the man dragged her away and grabbed the handgun. ‘I saw this man raise the gun and fire one shot towards the back fence. I just thought it was a cap pistol or someone playing so I thought nothing of it and went back to reading my book.’
It must have been a riveting read.
About two minutes later he heard another shot and looked over again. ‘I saw a person lying on the ground in the middle of the back yard dragging himself along the ground towards the house. He fell to the ground. I presumed he was dead.’
When police were called, the man in the backyard was, indeed, very dead.
Just months earlier the cashed-up Carroll had bought the Mt Martha house from the couple that had rented it to Cox.
So not only did Cox kill his business partner but his landlord.
Dead, Ian Revell Carroll was able to tell police more about the elite team of armed robbers than he ever had when he was alive.
It was clear he had been in a fight before he was shot. He had a bruise on his left shoulder and a bite mark on his left upper arm. His right knuckles were bruised and his left thumbnail was black and bloody. He had cuts and abrasions to both knees.
He was wearing conservative brown corduroy pants and a tee shirt. The only clue that he may have been a gangster (besides the bullet holes) was the gold chain around his neck and the heavy tattoos over his legs, arms and back. Further examination would show old wounds, including one where he was shot in April 1972.
He must have been a slow learner.
Where Carroll was found near the shed behind the house, a trail of blood was still visible on the grass.
In his pocket was a bloodied Seiko watch, indicating he could have used the old street fighter’s technique of using it as a makeshift knuckle-duster.
A Tale of Two Cities Page 18