The ‘green light’ racket meant selected crooks could do anything short of killing a policeman. But Flannery had already tried to kill undercover detective Mick Drury.
And then he made the mistake of threatening the wrong man. According to Neddy Smith, during a vicious argument Flannery once yelled at a powerful police figure: ‘You’re not a protected species, you know – you’re not a fucking koala bear.’
But neither was he. And he was the one who would soon be extinct.
18
RENTAKILLED
VALE CHRISTOPHER DALE, ROGUE MALE
‘My first reaction was
one of relief. I hoped he’d
been killed.’
BY early 1985 Chris Flannery was running out of friends. This was hardly surprising, as he’d killed most of them.
Flannery had built a fearsome reputation for killing on command but when an attack dog begins to snarl at its master it’s time for the big sleep.
Flannery had made too many enemies in the underworld. Police alleged that Sydney hard man Tom Domican was out to kill him, although no charges would ever stick. A heavy drug dealer called Barry McCann was no fan of the mad dog from Melbourne, either. This may have related to the fact that Flannery had once punched McCann’s wife in the face. He later sent her flowers as an apology but a left hook followed by a few orchids was never going to work.
Flannery’s boss George Freeman had lost patience with him and was a little frightened of the unpredictable gunman. Flannery was said to have refused Freeman’s contract to kill Mick Sayers – so he was no longer obedient.
He had also killed his good friend Tony Eustace – proof that he was no longer loyal. He had shown he would kill anyone for anybody if the price were right or even if he just felt like it. He was on every team and therefore he was on no-one’s. It was a dangerous place to be.
But more importantly, perhaps fatally, Flannery had lost his pull with the corrupt detectives who were the main stabilising element in the Sydney underworld.
Flannery had threatened police and had shot one – undercover detective Mick Drury. Even when the notorious Neddy Smith had been given the ‘green light’ to pull virtually any crime he wanted, he was warned he would be protected only if he did not harm police.
In the end, Flannery had managed to alienate all the players that influenced the Sydney underworld. It was not a recipe for longevity. But the truth was, even when he was just a cocky youngster, he’d lived by the rule ‘live fast, die young’. Which is exactly what he did.
FLANNERY might have been half crazy but he was no fool. There had already been one attempt on his life and he knew it would not be the last. His sister-in-law described him as being jumpy – ‘a caged animal that could not relax’. In the end his catlike reflexes would not be enough. He was about to run out of his nine lives.
He abandoned his family house and kept moving between hostels, hotels and private homes. He would also wear disguises and change cars every few days and always carried a loaded gun. As the pressure grew, he took to leaving the safety catch off and the gun cocked. It was risky but better than giving an enemy any advantage in a shoot out. He knew half a second could make all the difference in a showdown.
But eventually he became sick of packing his bags, and in April 1985 rented an apartment under an assumed name in the prestigious 30-storey Connaught Building, conveniently across the road from the Criminal Investigation Branch. Perhaps he thought being nestled next to the police would give him extra protection.
If so, he was horribly wrong.
He leased the apartment at $350 a week for three months under Kath’s brother-in-law’s name of Mougalis.
It is almost certain that key members of the underworld and corrupt police had a council of war and decided that Flannery had run out of time. But the hit man would be hard to trap. He was cunning, dangerous and frightened. He kept his address secret and stopped being seen in public. He was short of money because he could no longer act as Freeman’s bodyguard.
At one stage Freeman even suggested he should disappear. ‘Go away for a while and things will be taken care of.’ He chose to ignore the advice.
As is usual in the underworld, it would be left to a ‘mate’ to set up the target and this time the friend was Freeman himself.
On 8 May Flannery agreed to meet members of the murder taskforce informally to talk about the Eustace murder. He denied any knowledge of the case and said his mate had not turned up for the second meeting that was supposed to go ahead at the Airport Hilton.
But what if Flannery had been seen meeting the detectives? Flannery was frightened, so perhaps some were concerned he was trying to broker a deal with the police that would involve implicating Freeman.
On the very same day he met the murder taskforce detectives, his pager went off with a message – ‘Ring Mercedes’ – Freeman’s code name. Flannery did what he was told and Freeman organised a meeting for next morning.
Dangling a bait, Freeman told him he wanted him to come around to inspect a modified sub-machine gun fitted with a silencer. It was from the batch modified by Linus Patrick Driscoll and used in the Bookie Robbery and to kill Leslie Herbert Kane in Melbourne.
Flannery, a gun nut, couldn’t resist.
The trap was set.
But, according to Kath, Rentakill was nervous. ‘Poor Chris was a wreck,’ she said. That night he began to worry if he were being set up. He speculated to Kath that if Freeman wanted to kill him he would lure him into the house and then use the gun with a silencer to finish the job. For her part, Kath had also feared for her children’s safety after an earlier attempt to kill Chris in a drive-by shooting.
On the morning of 9 May Flannery dressed for his meeting with Freeman. He was wearing the uniform of the day – pants, a tracksuit top, and the mandatory gangster jewellery in the days before it was called bling. He had with him a passport in the name of Christopher James, a light brown wig and a loaded .38 handgun – cocked with the safety catch off.
When asked by the National Crime Authority if her husband had been armed that day, Kath responded as if it were a stupid question. Would you ask a surgeon if he had washed his hands before he entered the operating theatre?
‘Oh, he had a gun and it was loaded and ready to go … Yes, it was a silver .38, a little silver one,’ she explained.
But when asked to identify the weapon she became a little vague.
‘There were so many coming into Chris from others and going from Chris to others that I can’t be sure what type it was but I do know that at the time he had a handgun and from memory it was a pistol.’
He planned to ring Freeman from a public phone at the Miranda shopping centre near George’s house to tell him to lock up the dogs and open the front gates so his favourite hit man could slip in without delay.
Flannery took the lift down to the underground carpark and walked over to the Valiant he had bought a few days earlier while his brand new car was being repaired after someone ran into the back of it, causing $5500 worth of damage.
But the engine on his old Valiant wouldn’t turn over so he returned to the apartment, telling Kath he would take a taxi and be back in a couple of hours. She would later recall that he said to her, ‘Ring Marshall Batteries and get a new one. I’ll be back at 11.30 and we’ll go to the movies.’
He was seen leaving by the building’s security officer at 8.15am. He was never seen again.
Kath did as she was told and rang the battery supplier. But when the serviceman arrived and turned the key the motor jumped into life. It is almost certain one of the hit team had disconnected the battery to force Flannery out of the front door of the building so he could be picked up, and had then reconnected it later to cover the trail. They wanted it to look as if Flannery had decided to do a runner rather than having just run out of time.
There were a hundred theories about what happened to Flannery, but one thing is certain. He died that day and it was his friends who set him up. T
he irony is obvious. The man who made so many disappear suffered the same fate. In other words, the karma bus flattened him.
But who was driving?
In his autobiography, Neddy, Smith claims, ‘Rumour has it that Chris was picked up by a policeman he knew well and trusted, who offered him a lift. The car went only a short way before it stopped at a set of traffic lights, where two ex-police climbed in. The car took off and Chris was then shot several times in the head and chest as the car drove along.’
New South Wales Coroner Greg Glass heard from 132 witnesses during his three-year investigation into the death and was able to debunk several of the more colourful theories such as the one that Flannery was garrotted in a boatshed and dumped in the harbour, shot by police while driving on the Newcastle Highway, murdered and buried in a Sydney building site and hit from behind with a meat cleaver and fed into a tree-shredder.
But he did confirm underworld folklore that it was friends and not known enemies who had done the job.
‘I am therefore comfortably satisfied that Flannery was betrayed, deceived, possibly lured into a motor vehicle, by someone, or by some persons, whom he trusted and was then killed, with the remains being disposed of in a manner unknown,’ Glass said.
He said the evidence raised a ‘strong suspicion that Roger Rogerson was involved in Flannery’s disappearance and his death, or at least knew what happened to him. Rogerson had the motive and opportunity to cause harm to Flannery.’
He found Freeman may have been ‘connected with Flannery’s fate’.
Rogerson has always maintained he was not involved. Much later ‘Roger the Dodger’ told Channel Nine’s Sunday program, ‘Flannery was a complete pest. The guys up here in Sydney tried to settle him down. They tried to look after him as best they could, but he was, I believe, out of control. Maybe it was the Melbourne instinct coming out of him. He didn’t want to do as he was told, he was out of control, and having overstepped that line, well, I suppose they said he had to go but I can assure you I had nothing to do with it.’
Kath Flannery told the National Crime Authority that she quite liked the charismatic cop they all called ‘Roger’.
‘I got to know him in ’72 when he was one of those who verballed Chris and they hated each other and then when I got to know him I didn’t mind the guy.
‘He’s always been good to me. He’s always been good to the children. I don’t think for a moment he probably doesn’t take a bit here and a bit there but I don’t think he is as bad as some of them going around.’
But she claimed that about two weeks after her husband disappeared, Rogerson turned up with an offer of $50,000 from Freeman to shut up about the case. She refused: ‘I told him to stick it up his jumper.’
Freeman also maintained he was not involved. In his book he wrote that when he first heard of the earlier failed attempt to kill Rentakill outside the Flannery home, ‘My first reaction was one of relief. I hoped he’d been killed. No such luck.
‘Kath Flannery has tried every means possible to fit me for her husband’s disappearance and alleged murder – but I’ll stack my credibility against hers any time.’
Kath Flannery may have been many things but no one could doubt that she was blood loyal to her Chris.
Flannery, on the other hand, believed monogamy was a board game. He regularly visited brothels and had a two-year torrid love affair with a part-time model known as Ms P that ended the previous year.
Flannery rang Kath three times a day when he was on the road to tell her he was still alive and kicking. When he didn’t ring from Freeman’s house Kath knew the worst. He was gone.
She rang Freeman and immediately suggested not only was her husband dead, but Freeman was involved in the murder.
At 3pm she rang and Freeman responded, ‘Why don’t you go and see your mate Rogerson, or Billy Duff (another corrupt New South Wales detective)? He’s probably locked up somewhere.’
She rang her solicitor who checked with the police. Flannery was not in custody.
Kath went to the murder taskforce at the CIB building at
4.30pm to report that her husband had been murdered but she refused to give detectives her address across the road.
There was good reason for this. In the apartment were Chris’s tools of trade – guns and disguises – and she did not want police to be able to seize them. If Freeman were behind the death of her husband she might have had some use for that equipment at a date to be fixed.
Kath again rang Freeman and this time the conversation was more pointed. ‘I’ll see you later. We’ll see about you,’ she said.
‘Good, do your fucking best, lady,’ he responded.
Hardly the way to speak to a grieving widow.
Kath’s prompt visit to the taskforce gave police their first real opportunity. If they could get a break they would be able to find the crime scene and perhaps a body. But if they didn’t locate the area where Flannery was murdered they would always be hard pressed to identify the professional killers.
The head of the taskforce, John Anderson, rang the suspended Rogerson and told him Flannery was missing. This was quite reasonable because Rogerson, having a known link to the hit man, might have been able to shed some light on the case. But if Rogerson had in fact been directly involved in the murder he was unwittingly given an early warning that the taskforce was on the case.
Later Coroner Glass would say the strong links between Flannery and Rogerson should have been aggressively investigated. He said the connection, ‘strangely was not the subject of inquiry after 9 May.’
From the outset, Kath made it clear to the police she believed Freeman was involved. So what did they do?
You would expect they would have grabbed a warrant and raided the last known location Flannery was supposed to visit: Freeman’s house.
But they didn’t. For some reason the police called Freeman first to tell him they wanted to pop over for a chat and a bit of a sticky-beak. George said that without a warrant they were not welcome. Police made an appointment to see him the next day.
If Freeman were involved it would be lunacy to warn him that a search was going to take place. Or was it?
Kath had told them she believed Chris had been shot in the house, hidden in a secret compartment in the billiard room, then transferred in the boot of an old car to a boat and dumped at sea.
On 10 May two detectives went to the house. Freeman, through his lawyer, refused to comment but offered them an invitation to search the house.
The detectives, without calling any forensic back up, conducted the search and found nothing.
On 20 May – eleven days after Flannery was killed – police returned with forensic experts for a thorough search. They found the secret compartment that Kath had told them existed in the house. It was in the den and not the games room. Twisting shelves that swivelled open revealed the compartment hidden between two wall cavities. As would be expected, it was clean.
‘Nothing was turned up,’ Freeman later gloated.
Meanwhile Kath had to make herself busy. She knew the police would come to their apartment so she grabbed the guns – a
.45 pistol and a sub-machine gun – and put them in the Valiant. The car started first time, adding weight to the theory the car had been disabled by someone to force Flannery onto the foot-path where he could be grabbed. She drove the car to a friend’s house where she hid the guns to be used later.
So what really happened?
It is the authors’ opinion that in late April 1985 there was a secret meeting in Sydney attended by corrupt police and several major crime figures including Barry McCann, Lennie McPherson and George Freeman.
At the meeting it was agreed that the war had to end as it was bad for business and the growing media pressure could result in a royal commission. It was unanimously decided that Flannery had to go if the murders were to stop. McCann said he was prepared to pay for the hit and Freeman agreed to control the planning. As Flannery was still on the mov
e, difficult to find and always armed, a drive-by street shooting was considered unlikely to succeed, remembering that an earlier attempt had failed spectacularly.
Freeman decided on the high-risk strategy of killing Flannery in his own home. For Freeman the advantages outweighed the risk. While there was a risk of leaving some forensic evidence he knew that if it were done within the walls of his house, there would be no witnesses and the body would never be found as it could be disposed of discreetly.
Many would just think Flannery had run away because of fears for his life. Without a corpse and with no witnesses, who could know for sure?
In addition, Freeman knew that if he shot him from behind he could finish the job. It would ensure the hit would not be bungled a second time. The motive not to fail was strong, because no one would be safe from Flannery’s revenge.
This is a theory like many others but what can be established is that in the days before the murder Freeman sought advice from the underworld doctor of choice, Nick Paltos, on removing bloodstains after a murder.
Just two days before Flannery was killed, Paltos was recorded talking to Croc Palmer on Federal Police phone taps.
Paltos: He said mate, “I need your help …” Freeman said to me … “I’m gonna knock someone off … I wanna know about blood, how long blood lasts …” He’s said gonna do it at home, he’s gonna brick a bloke at home.
(Freeman said) “What I think’s gonna happen they’re gonna come to my house they’ll never think … It’s so fucking dicey”.
Palmer: Surely not that fucking stupid.
Paltos: I said, “I’ll give you some good fucking advice, you want to be very fucking careful …” “Anyway, I know what’s going on,” he says… “Everything’s right for five years, there’ll be peace for five years, after this week”.
Palmer: Are they just going to make this cunt disappear?
Paltos: I think so … He says it’s gonna be blood on the carpet, he says, “You know I’m worried if they see the carpet,” and I said, “You’re a fucking mug, a miserable fucking …” I said, “Cut the fucking bit out, cut the fucking bit out and throw it away” … He said, “You’re fucking right”.
A Tale of Two Cities Page 29