82

Who Killed Mr Rent-A-Kill?

May 1985. At apartment 1401 of the exclusive Connaught building overlooking Sydney’s Hyde Park, Christopher Flannery slipped into a designer label tracksuit and tucked a loaded .38 pistol into his belt. It was 8 am. In his leather bag he had a false passport in the name of Christopher James and $40,000 in cash. Mr Rent-a-Kill was leaving town.

Things had got too hot, even for Australia’s prince of hitmen. The warring factions of Sydney’s crime syndicates had combined to put out a $100,000 contract on Flannery’s scalp. Flannery had decided he would rather leave Sydney on a plane than in a black rubber bag with a zipper up the middle.

He had good cause to be concerned for his life. Four months earlier Flannery and his family had been lucky to escape with their lives after being sprayed with machine-gun fire at the front of their home at Arncliffe, in Sydney’s inner west. Now that the big money was on offer, the cream of the bounty hunters would come out of the shadows looking for a quick earn.

As the wind whistled down Oxford Street on that nippy May morning, it was Flannery’s intention to drive his car to the airport, fly to Melbourne and then take a vacation overseas until things cooled off.

Flannery had been instructed to attend a meeting that morning at the southern Sydney mansion of his old employer, crime boss George Freeman, for whom he had worked briefly as a bodyguard. The meeting was supposedly to discuss the upheaval in gangland and to tell Flannery to stop shooting people in public places.

Flannery believed his old boss was one of the people behind the contract on him, and that if he turned up for the meeting he would never leave alive.

When his car wouldn’t start in the Connaught’s car park, he returned the keys to his wife and walked out onto Oxford Street to hail a cab to take him to the airport. From there he vanished. Flannery’s wife reported him missing and told police that he was supposed to have gone to visit Freeman. The following day police searched George Freeman’s home. They found nothing.

Few people were sorry that the hitman was missing, presumed dead. When asked in 1987 if he thought that Flannery was dead, George Freeman replied: ‘I hope so, your Honour, because if he isn’t, nobody is safe.’

Flannery’s fearsome reputation was justified. At the time of his disappearance he was suspected of being involved in up to 14 murders, beginning in the mid-1970s. To this day there is a warrant out for his arrest for the shooting of undercover cop Michael Patrick Drury. Miraculously, Drury lived to point the finger at Flannery and the man who hired him.

Christopher Dale Flannery was always going to be a gangster. Born in Brunswick, Victoria, in February 1949, he never knew his father, who divorced Chris’s badly battered mother when Chris was just 14 months old. He was streetwise at 12 and an accomplished car thief and house burglar before he was 14.

By the time he was 16, Flannery had been convicted of assaulting police and possessing firearms. By 22, he had served four years for rape, and had convictions for carnal knowledge, and at 25, he had served more time for armed hold-ups. But it wasn’t until the notorious disappearance of Melbourne businessman Roger Wilson, in 1980, that Flannery’s talents as a professional killer captured the public’s attention.

By now it was legend that Flannery served drinks at his parties from an ice-filled coffin and that his bible was a blue hard-cover medical textbook devoted to the study of gunshot wounds.

The Wilson trial embellished the legend. In Victoria’s longest ever murder trial, it was alleged that Flannery and another assassin were hired by a Melbourne businessman to kill Wilson for a fee of $35,000. It was further alleged that the two gunmen posed as detectives and waylaid Mr Wilson as he drove his Porsche along the Pacific Highway. The killers, the police said, dragged the handcuffed Wilson to his pre-dug grave, and Flannery shot him in the head.

But Wilson didn’t die. According to police informers, Wilson ran off, his head bleeding profusely, with Flannery blazing away in hot pursuit. The Crown alleged that when the wounded Mr Wilson ran into a fence and Flannery caught up with him, the hitman went berserk. He reloaded his gun and emptied the contents into Roger Wilson as he begged for his life. Wilson’s body was never found.

Flannery, along with three others, including his wife, was charged with the murder of Roger Anthony Wilson. Key witness for the prosecution, Debra Boundy, disappeared without a trace before the trial. With no body, no witness, no murder weapon and Flannery maintaining that he was having dinner with his mother at the time of the murder, all four were acquitted in October 1981.

As Chris Flannery walked from the court after being exonerated, police arrested him and he was extradited to New South Wales to face charges relating to the 1979 murder of standover man and massage parlour minder, Raymond Francis Locksley.

Flannery was released on $30,000 bail and was eventually acquitted of murder in June 1984, after the mysterious death of one of the main Crown witnesses.

By this time, Flannery had settled in Sydney – and had been credited with the contract killings of at least 10 people in New South Wales and Victoria. He was feared by both the police and the underworld, and was undoubtedly the country’s highest profile gun for hire.

On 6 June 1984 Flannery gunned down undercover cop Michael Patrick Drury as he washed the dishes in the kitchen of his home in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood – there was a $100,000 contract from the Mr Big of the Melbourne heroin trade, Alan David Williams, on Drury. Williams had tried to bribe Drury to change his evidence in a drug case against him; when he couldn’t be persuaded, Williams called in Flannery to solve the problem. Flannery shot Drury twice at almost point-blank range through his kitchen window with his favourite tool, a .357 Magnum. Although almost blown apart by the impact, Drury lived.

After being on the run for several years, Williams confessed to conspiring with Flannery to kill Drury. He was sentenced to 14 years jail for that, and another six years on drug charges.

In late 1984, Sydney was in the middle of a gang war over heroin and control of the vice and gambling rackets. There is little doubt that it was Flannery and an accomplice who killed heroin supplier Danny Michael ‘The Tub’ Chubb at Miller’s Point in Sydney in November 1984. As Chubb left his Jaguar, two men walked right up to him in the street and let fly with a shotgun and a .357 Magnum.

Police believed that the contract on Chubb came from Barry Raymond McCann, who owed The Tub $200,000 for heroin. It was cheaper to have Flannery knock Chubb off for $50,000 than pay his outstanding account. McCann immediately claimed The Tub’s heroin distribution network as his own.

On 27 January 1985, as Flannery, his wife Kathleen and their 12-year-old daughter were about to enter their home in Arncliffe, they were sprayed with machine-gun bullets from a passing car. Barry McCann had got the word that Flannery had taken a contract from some of the late Danny Chubb’s associates to knock him (McCann) off. McCann had decided he would get in first. Unfortunately for McCann, his boys bungled it. Now the war was really on.

The next to go was Michael John ‘Melbourne Mick’ Sayers, again at the behest of McCann. Flannery was a good mate of Mick Sayers. McCann planned to wait until Flannery and Sayers were together, and get a couple of his thugs to get rid of them both.

On the night of 16 February 1985, Sayers returned to his home in beachside Bronte from a city restaurant with his girlfriend, Marian Ware. As Sayers got out of his Mercedes to open the garage door, two masked men stepped out from the bushes and started shooting at him with a .357 Magnum and a rifle. Sayers crouched behind his car for protection, and after a few seconds he left his shelter and sprinted down Hewlett Street, towards the beach.

As he ran he was hit by at least one shot and fell to the ground. One of the assailants ran up to him and shot him several times in the chest with a rifle, killing him instantly.

At the time of the shooting, Christopher Dale Flannery was dining at the River Inn Restaurant in Surfers Paradise. Police believed McCann had got incorrect information about Flannery being with Sayers that night.

Then there was more upheaval in villianville. Early in 1985, godfather and peacemaker of Sydney’s organised crime, Frederick Charles ‘Paddles’ Anderson, 70, died after a long illness. Paddles was still warm in his grave when the struggle to carve up his empire began.

The political and police muscle that Anderson had so cleverly manipulated for years had gone to the grave with him, and the pretenders to his throne started going after the spoils in a very ungentlemanly manner. This turmoil suited Mr Rent-a Kill down to the ground. The loose cannon of the underworld was hot to trot. But first Flannery had some unfinished business to attend to.

Flannery teamed up with an old ally, Anthony ‘Spaghetti Tony’ Eustace, and went looking for the hoods who had shot at him and his family and would have shot him if he had been with Sayers. Mid-morning on 3 April 1984, Victor John Camilleri, 27, and Kevin Victor Theobald, 28, were driving along Kingsgrove Avenue, Kingsgrove, when a brown Valiant sedan with three men in it pulled alongside. Eustace was at the wheel, Flannery was alongside him and a third (unidentified) man was in the back seat. Flannery leaned out of the passenger side window and started blasting away with a .357 Magnum.

Camilleri was hit in the left shoulder and neck and spent 10 days in hospital with a punctured lung. Theobald was not hit. Both men claimed that it must have been a case of mistaken identity, and vehemently denied any knowledge of Flannery or the Sayers murder.

By now, all of the Sydney underworld had gone to ground for fear of being allied with either party and being shot. It was then that Flannery sowed the seeds of his own destruction. He took a contract on his trusted friend and ally, Tony Eustace. An organised crime figure at the top of the ladder had been trying to get at Eustace for years, ever since being dudded by him on a dope deal. With Flannery living in Eustace’s pocket, it would be the ideal time to get revenge.

Flannery took the contract, proving once and for all that no one was safe while he was alive.

In the early evening of 23 April 1985, Tony Eustace was having a few drinks with friends at his restaurant, Tony’s Bar and Grill, in Bay Street, Double Bay. He was summonsed to the phone, and then explained to his friends that he had to go to an important meeting at the Airport Hilton. He didn’t say who the meeting was with. His friends tried to talk him out of it. Rain was bucketing down. It wasn’t a night to be going anywhere. But Eustace was insistent. He drove off into the maelstrom in his gold 450SE Mercedes.

At about 7 pm, several youths at football training in a park about 200 metres from the Airport Hilton heard several shots ring out. They looked over, and saw a Mercedes parked nose-on to a brown Valiant. The lights of both cars were on and both doors on the driver’s side of the Mercedes were open.

About the same time, a jogger heard four gunshots and ran towards the cars as the Valiant dimmed its lights and drove off. The jogger found the bullet-riddled body of Tony Eustace and rang for an ambulance. Barely alive, Eustace was rushed to hospital, and when questioned by police just before going into the operating theatre, said, ‘Fuck off.’ He died on the operating table from blood loss caused by seven bullets in his back from a .45 automatic. The following day, Federal Police officers found an abandoned brown Valiant in the car park at the Airport Hilton. It was registered to a bodgie name. Flannery drove a brown Valiant.

Police also established that Flannery had rented a Ford Falcon about two hours before the murder. They believed that this was the car Flannery used after he dumped the Valiant.

When the news of Spaghetti Tony’s death at the hands of his friend reached the ears of the organisers of crime, it was agreed that they would have a meeting to restore order in the underworld. The main issue was the fate of Mr Rent-a-Kill. As no one had any use for him anymore, it was agreed that an open contract for $100,000 would be put on his head – whoever killed him was entitled to the money. And it was agreed that no one was to have anything to do with him unless it was to bring about his demise.

So when someone rang Flannery on 8 May and told him to be at the meeting at George Freeman’s house the following morning, they weren’t breaking the rules. It was open season on Christopher Dale Flannery. That morning, 9 May 1985, was 16 days since Flannery had killed his friend, Tony Eustace. He had heard about the open contract on his life. It was time to leave town.

There are several theories about what happened to Chris Flannery that morning. One, depicted in the ABC mini-series Blue Murder, begins with his car being tampered with. It wouldn’t start, so he had to look for a taxi. He was picked up instead in an unmarked police car by four detectives and shot in the heart from the front seat as he struggled between two officers in the back.

Another is that as game as Ned Kelly, he went to George Freeman’s house and was shot dead there at a meeting of the heavyweights of organised crime. His body, according to this theory, was rolled up in a carpet, concealed in a secret room in the house and disposed of later.

There is also a story that he was dragged into a car by three assassins who took him to a boatshed in Balmain where he was garrotted and shot in the eye with a small-calibre pistol. Flannery’s ear was offered as proof of the kill and the $100,000 bounty was paid.

But while all of the stories about the demise of Christopher Dale Flannery differ, there is one aspect that everyone seems to agree on: that his body was taken out to sea, weighed down and dumped.

In underworld folklore – though hardly original – Mr Rent-a-Kill now sleeps with the fishes.