The National Crime Authority was an attempt to deal with the problems on a national basis using state and federal resources. Don Stewart was its first head and the National Crime Authority’s initial chief investigator was the former head of the Melbourne homicide squad, Carl Mengler.
Mengler, whose warm personality and ready laugh concealed a determination to expose corruption, was tasked with reinvestigating the Sydney murders in an operation code named Curtains.
Senior Sydney police did not welcome the National Crime Authority investigation for several reasons. Firstly, no police force would want the new boys on the block to succeed where they had failed. And secondly, they knew if the full story were told the chronic corruption of New South Wales dirtiest could no longer be hidden in dark places.
Within the National Crime Authority was a carefully positioned New South Wales mole, who reported back on a daily basis to senior Sydney police on the progress of the supposedly secret operation.
In February 1986 Mengler told his team they had to go back to the beginning. He didn’t want them just to read existing statements and pick holes in the grammar. He wanted them to get out of their air- conditioned offices and back on the streets. He told them they must treat the old crime scenes as active sites and imagine the murders had just been committed.
Some of the team assigned to look at the Sayers murder were not convinced, but Mengler made them an offer they couldn’t refuse – get on with it or get out.
The National Crime Authority was seen as the law enforcement body of the future. It had coercive powers, bugging equipment and hand-picked investigators but it was old-fashioned policing and a ballpoint pen that would create the first breakthrough.
In August one National Crime Authority detective placed his pen in the bullet holes in the garage door of Sayers’ house and then followed the invisible line back to the vacant block across the road.
Using simple garden tools, the police dug up two spent .223 WW Special cartridge cases. New South Wales police, using metal detectors, had previously searched the area but had drawn a blank.
Tests found the bullets were fired from a 5.56mm Colt selfloading assault rifle. The second breakthrough came when rifling marks on the cartridges were found to match a weapon seized a year earlier from the Hunter Valley property of major drug dealer, Barry McCann. The bullets also proved a match to the shots fired at Flannery in the failed murder attempt in January 1985.
McCann hated Flannery and was also a great mate of Domican.
Snap.
So why would McCann be involved?
McCann and Flannery fell out after a violent confrontation in the Lansdowne Hotel. There are several versions of what happened. Kath Flannery claims that during an argument, McCann’s wife threatened to glass Flannery who responded with a short right to her jaw that left it swollen and badly bruised.
Another man produced a shotgun and the Flannerys decided to take their custom elsewhere.
They were banned from that day on from returning to the pub. This was hardly surprising, as it was owned by McCann.
Later Chris sent flowers as a form of apology. Who says chivalry is dead?
And, according to Kath, McCann had also crossed Sayers off his Christmas card list.
‘Michael Sayers was killed because he ripped off McCann for $250,000 worth of hash outside the Lansdowne Hotel in the boot of the car.’
Many colourful characters enjoyed the hotel. Bob Trimbole’s son, Craig, provided the amusement machines in the bar and Aussie Bob was an occasional patron.
McCann was big and getting bigger. He was able to buy a 1000-hectare horse stud in the Hunter Valley for $450,000 cash.
One of McCann’s team was to brag that he threw away his carpet underlay and replaced it with $100 notes – to conceal $3 million.
The boss was said to have kept up to $4 million in cash on his property.
So who ordered Sayers death? The National Crime Authority alleged that McCann and four others decided he had to die – ostensibly because he owed Barry $400,000.
But Sayers still had plenty and could have at least made a part payment, so it wasn’t purely the money. McCann had plenty of that. It was a statement – a show of strength directed to old school gangster and rival drug dealer Neddy Smith – that he was a force to be reckoned with.
One of the men eventually charged over the Sayers murder was former boxer turned gunman Ray Thurgar, although the case was thrown out by a magistrate due to lack of evidence.
By 1990 Thurgar had lost his strong silent image and had became chatty with the Independent Commission Against Corruption, whose investigators visited him inside Long Bay Jail at least four times.
In December 1990 he was released from prison declaring he would make a clean start by buying a small laundromat in Randwick. But in May 1991 he was gunned down outside his business in Alison Road.
In August 1991 Tom Domican, Victor John Camilleri, 31, and Kevin Victor Theobald, 32, were found not guilty of conspiring to murder Sayers.
One of the major sticking points was the use of a police informer and notorious liar as a key witness.
The evidence about the discovery of the bullets at the scene was also contested, with the defence asking why it took so long to find the key evidence.
The jury heard that National Crime Authority officers found the spent cartridge shells 18 months after Sayers was shot.
National Crime Authority Inspector Geoffery Schuberg, admitted he wasn’t going to search, but his supervisor ordered it ‘in no uncertain terms’ on 15 August 1986.
They then found the bullets within an hour.
When asked why he had not previously searched the area, Schuberg said, ’I’d accepted the search had been carried out at the start of the murder investigation. I honestly didn’t believe anything would be found 18 months after the murder.’
The main target of Operation Curtains was Tom Domican and in October 1986 he was charged with the attempted murder of Flannery.
But the charges kept coming, including conspiring to murder Flannery and conspiring to murder his wife, Kath.
He was charged with the murder of Sayers, and three further murder conspiracy charges.
Many thought that he would be buried under the weight of charges but Domican, the former London bouncer, fought and fought.
Even when he was convicted of the attempted murder of Flannery and sentenced to 14 years he vowed to clear his name. One by one he was acquitted of the charges and after a battle that went all the way to the High Court, the Flannery conviction was quashed.
Understandably bitter, he told accomplished Sydney journalist Neil Mercer in 2003: ‘It was all political to stop me saying anything about the Labor Party, to destroy my credibility. The National Crime Authority was part of all that gang war shit, then with the help of the media they built me up into this underworld figure.’
So what does McCann say about the claims?
Not much.
He was shot around 30 times in a Marrickville park on 27 December 1987.
McCann had a reputation as a Sydney kneecapper, yet the autopsy showed that while McCann had been riddled with bullets, his knees remained intact.
Irony in a full metal jacket.
17
IN THE BACK
THE DRUG DEALER WHO WOULDN’T GIVE UP HIS KILLERS
What better way to test
Flannery’s loyalty than
to get him to kill one
of his best mates?
TONY Eustace was a man of few words and he wasn’t going to waste any while taking his dying breaths in the emergency unit of the St George Hospital.
When a policeman asked him who had shot him six times in a Sydney street an hour earlier, his response was as brief as his life expectancy. ‘Fuck off,’ he responded.
These were his last words on that subject – or any other – as he died shortly afterwards on the operating table.
Eustace was born in Liverpool on 26 November 1942 and m
igrated to Australia just after turning 21. He was a low-level crook charged as a young man with possession of stolen property and SP bookmaking. Like many of his ilk he didn’t hit the big money until the first drug wave hit.
Eustace became a heroin-dealing middleweight. He could move enough gear to live well but, at least for a while, he could avoid close police attention.
He was on the move but those in front of him were not prepared to get out of his way. He eventually attracted the attention of the Australian Federal Police and was charged with serious drug offences.
Like fellow Sydney underworld murder victims, Eustace had strong Melbourne connections. In 1985 he was on bail in Victoria after federal police charged him with conspiring to import cannabis valued at more than $8 million. The cannabis charges were not his biggest problem. The taxman had already destroyed him financially.
He had been forced to sell his house in Coogee and put his Mercedes in the name of his girlfriend’s mother. But while his girlfriend was obliging, the relationship had come at a cost as he had to pay his wife about $40,000 in a messy divorce settlement.
Eustace, known as Liverpool Tony, Spaghetti Eustace and the less complimentary Useless Eustace, was a good heroin dealer but a lousy legitimate businessman. He was a not-so-silent partner in ‘Tony’s Bar’ in Double Bay and dabbled in the export business with spectacular lack of success. He owed $50,000 to a wholesale seafood business after he couldn’t pay for lobsters he exported to Greece in 1980. Clearly he ignored the old proverb: Beware of Greeks making bisque.
He also laundered $30,000 in drug money through a business selling factory-seconds towels. When the Sydney underworld war heated up, Eustace was one of the few who remained loyal to Flannery. After the first attempt on Flannery’s life in January 1985 it was Eustace who helped hide him. They were known to be so close that Tony was on a short list of suspects thought to have helped Flannery go hunting for Tom Domican for a payback shooting.
Certainly, Domican later told police he suspected Flannery, Eustace and a Melbourne painter and docker as the hit team that tried to kill him near his home.
If it were Eustace helping that day, he was about as good an assassin as he was a seafood exporter. They got the wrong bloke. On 3 April, Domican’s mate, Victor John Camilleri, was shot and wounded while Domican did not have a hair on his balding head harmed.
From November 1984, friends say, Eustace was apprehensive and began to fear that mid-range drug dealers with big-time ambitions could be an endangered species.
And his fears grew as he found himself offside with both sides of the warring bodies.
As a friend of Flannery’s and a suspect in the Camilleri shooting he was a target for the so-called Domican camp (although Tom has always maintained he was not a gangster but a misunderstood political number cruncher).
When asked why he was concerned, Eustace told a friend: ‘Some madman from the western suburbs wants to run Sydney.’
As radio commentator Steve Price lives in the east, he probably meant Domican. In fact, as Price didn’t move to Sydney until years later, he almost certainly meant Domican.
He began to move from house to house regularly and told friends he could be ‘off’ because he had been protecting Chris Flannery. He started to carry a gun and his fears increased when he spotted two men using walkie-talkies watching him while he was eating in an upmarket restaurant in Double Bay.
Later, he thought two men were following him in a green Commodore. Police would allege that Domican and one Roy Thurgar had access to an identical Commodore registered in the name of a close family associate.
But while Eustace was dodging the Domican faction he had reasons to fear the George Freeman forces for several reasons.
According to Kath Flannery, when Freeman wanted Chris to kill Mick Sayers the hit man sought Eustace’s advice.
They met at the Royal Oak Hotel in Double Bay where Eustace told Flannery he shouldn’t carry out the hit because Sayers was a ‘good bloke.’ Intriguingly, he also said Sayers wouldn’t be a problem because he was soon to be arrested by the Federal Police on drug charges.
Tony was on the money. In July 1984 Sayers was arrested as part of a joint federal-state police operation and spent four months inside before he made bail.
But if Freeman knew that Eustace had persuaded his favourite hit man to refuse a contract he would have been unimpressed.
Worse was to follow. The man with few words opened his mouth too much. He asked a hypothetical question to another crook: ‘What happens if George goes?’
The crook reported it to Freeman, who was already on war footing. Those five words were effectively Eustace’s death sentence. And what better way to test Flannery’s loyalty than to get him to kill one of his best mates?
On 23 April 1985, the weather in Sydney matched Tony Eustace’s mood – both were filthy. He had taken the risk of protecting and hiding Flannery – and now the Melbourne hit man was asking him for $25,000, saying he was set to disappear overseas.
Eustace got a call while sitting at his favourite restaurant that afternoon from Flannery wanting yet another favour.
Enough was enough. He agreed to meet Flannery but his patience was running out. ‘Fuck these Melbourne people,’ he said after hanging up.
He was running late and parked his car near the meeting place at the Koala Inn. The Mercedes was booked for being at an expired metre at 2.35pm. Nearby a brown Valiant was booked for being at an expired metre around the same time.
Someone had bought the car less than two weeks earlier for $1945 cash under a false name. It was, of course, Flannery’s favourite make of car to use when carrying out a hit.
But according to Kath, Flannery was worried for his mate and even warned him he should stop driving his readily identifiable gold Mercedes as it made him an easy target.
As they left the meeting Eustace promised to get some money and meet later at the Airport Hilton. It is reasonable to assume the meeting place was picked because Eustace believed that once he gave him the money Flannery would head overseas and become someone else’s problem.
Tony went back to Tony’s Bar and had a drink with a mate – who bought him a second and was keen to settle in for the evening. But Eustace was in a hurry and said he had to go to the airport. It was pouring rain and his mate told him he was crazy to head out but Tony said he had no choice.
Before he left he went over to one of the staff who was owed wages and peeled off $500 from a large stack of cash he had inside a paper bag tucked in his shirt. Police believe this was the money he was to give to Flannery.
Eustace headed towards the airport in the rain. He didn’t make it. He parked in Gertrude Street, just 200 metres from the hotel, about 6.30pm. Several witnesses said they saw a gold Mercedes parked nose to nose with a brown Valiant.
They saw the internal and external lights illuminating the empty Mercedes and three people in the Valiant.
Witnesses heard several shots before watching a man holding a gun run back to the Valiant, do a three-point turn and drive away. Some said they saw another person in the front seat of the Valiant. We will never know the identity of the second man – or woman. One intriguing theory is that the second person in the car was George Freeman himself, who used Flannery to lure the victim to the dark street for the ambush.
Certainly Freeman was not home that night and he went out wearing his ‘lucky’ black outfit – the clothes he wore when he was about to commit a major crime.
In phone taps recorded during the Federal Police’s Operation Lavender, Freeman’s bent doctor Nick Paltos was caught talking about the case with Graham ‘Croc’ Palmer.
Paltos: I’ll tell you who shot Useless, I’ve got to be honest with you.
Palmer: Freeman?
Paltos: Yeah, he did. George Freeman, he shot him, all right … He owned up to it today.
Police believe Eustace hopped into the Valiant and gave Chris his $25,000 farewell present. After his last goodbye and as he walked ba
ck to his car Flannery (or possibly Freeman) hopped out and emptied six shots from a .45 pistol into the back of his good friend.
About fifteen minutes later a local young man saw the man on the ground and called out, ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’ve been shot,’ the dying man responded.
He was asked how many times and muttered, ‘About four or five times.’ He was the master of understatement.
The young man asked who did it and Eustace answered: ‘I just stopped to help them – they looked as though they needed help and they shot me.’
To the end Eustace showed Flannery loyalty he didn’t deserve.
The Valiant was later recovered in the airport carpark. It had travelled only about 170 kilometres since its new owner had bought it on 12 April.
At 5pm on 23 April, Flannery hired a Falcon from Budget Rentals at Mascot Airport. He returned it the following day and paid $73.40.
In what must have been seen as an amazing coincidence, just three weeks earlier when Flannery was dumping a Valiant he used at the time Camilleri was shot, Kath hired another car – also from the airport.
The murder taskforce concluded: ‘The evidence points to Flannery as the murderer.’ The National Crime Authority went further. ‘It is the opinion of the investigators that Christopher Dale Flannery, quite probably through his association with George Freeman, played a major role in the murder.’
Flannery may have got away with the murder but his cards were marked.
By killing (or setting up) his best ally he showed all the warring elements – and more importantly the police power brokers – he was prepared to turn on anyone, which meant no-one was safe.
The underworld war was bad for business. If it kept going it could prompt a royal commission that would expose the fact that corrupt police ‘green lighted’ favoured gangsters to let them commit crimes with impunity.
Flannery was out of control. Freeman, Neddy Smith, McCann, Lennie McPherson and key detectives knew he had passed his use-by date.
A Tale of Two Cities Page 28