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Going out in Style

In the history of gangland killings in Australia it would be fair to say that there have been some that could be straight out of a Hollywood movie. One of the most colourful was in 1927, when Melbourne’s most notorious gangster of the time, Squizzy Taylor, and infamous gunman Snowy Cutmore pulled guns on each other and fired at precisely the same time, before both slumped dead to the ground.

Another became the famous newspaper headline ‘the fastest hankie in the east’ when one night in Sydney in 1967 the feared gunman Raymond ‘Ducky’ O’Connor entered the Latin Quarter nightclub and sat down with three men at a table. A shot rang out and O’Connor slumped to the floor with a bullet to the head. Two detective sergeants sitting nearby arrived just in time to pronounce O’Connor dead, seemingly by his own hand. The pistol found on the floor was wiped clean of prints and no one was ever charged over the matter.

And whoever wanted Sydney crime boss John Stewart Regan dead made no bones about it. In September 1974, Regan was on his way to an illegal gambling casino when three gunmen emptied their police issue .38 revolvers into him at point-blank range, hitting him in the head, chest and liver eight times. As Regan lay dying in a pool of blood they calmly reloaded and emptied their guns into him again, just to be sure.

The list is endless. But there is one gangland hit that stands out above all others for the audaciousness in its place of execution. A place where a crook past his use-by date would think he was in the safest place on earth. The Melbourne Magistrate’s Court.

In the 1970s Raymond Patrick Bennett was a well-known crook about Melbourne and a master criminal planner, who was the brains behind one of Australia’s most infamous crimes, the Great Bookie Robbery. Bennett conceived the brazen plan while he was in jail in England, where he had been sent for his crimes as part of a gang of Australian shoplifters who had terrorised retailers throughout Europe for years and was appropriately known as the ‘Kangaroo Gang’.

Back in Melbourne in 1976 Bennett recruited six crooks he could trust with his life and, using commando skills he had learned in jail from an English team of villains known as ‘the Wembley Gang’, he set up an army-style training camp in the bush in rural Victoria, where he and his men went over and over every move of the forthcoming robbery until they were like a wartime unit on a secret mission.

The plan was to rob Melbourne’s on-course bookies of millions of dollars in cash on Monday settling day at the Victorian Club in Queen Street. Given that the on-course bookies either paid or collected from Saturday’s losers and winners in cash, there was a lot of money to steal. The operation went off like clockwork. At gunpoint the balaclavad commandos filled more than 100 calico bank bags with untraceable bank notes. The haul was officially recorded at just over $1 million but because a lot of the bets hadn’t been declared to avoid on-course betting tax, the real estimate was somewhere more like $2 million. In today’s money that would be in the vicinity of $10 million.

But, in the underworld, crooks with that much disposable income don’t stay a secret for long, especially when one of the robbers said to one of the victims, well-known boxing trainer Ambrose Palmer, ‘You too, Ambrose,’ as he was ordering those present to lie down at gunpoint. Palmer immediately recognised the voice behind the mask as a boxer who had once trained regularly at his gym and who was a known Bennett associate. It slipped Palmer’s mind to tell the police, but soon enough it was common knowledge in the underworld where to go looking if they wanted some untraceable cash. And lots of it. And what better way to make a quick buck than to rob the robbers. They couldn’t go to the police and complain.

One of the packs of vultures that expressed an interest was a particularly unpleasant group of painters and dockers led by the Kane brothers, Ray, Brian and Les. They provided the unofficial security for the bookies on settling day but it seems that on the day of the robbery their usual armed heavies had been called away on a needless errand, making the way clear for Bennett and his commandos to virtually help themselves to the treasure trove. Blind Freddy could have told them that the guards had been got at and it made them look stupid. And the Kane brothers were not men to be made to look stupid.

Fearing that he and his gang would soon be murdered and the money stolen, Bennett decided to act first. One night as Les Kane and his wife returned home they were confronted by Bennett and three other men. Kane was taken into the bathroom and executed as his wife was held down in another room where she could hear the shots. The killers dragged her husband’s body away in front of her, put it in the boot of Kane’s car and drove off. Neither Les Kane’s body or his car were ever found. Bennett and the three men who were allegedly with him were charged with murder but acquitted due to lack of a body and witnesses.

But there was always going to be an even-up for Les Kane’s murder. With reprisals going on all around him and no one hiding the fact that he was next, Ray Bennett was glad to be arrested on an outstanding armed-robbery charge and didn’t apply for bail, deeming it safer to stay in jail than go back out on the streets where there was a price on his head. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

One morning in November 1979 as three armed detectives escorted Bennett from the holding cells through the old Melbourne Magistrate’s complex to his committal hearing, a heavily bearded man in a hat and glasses walked towards Bennett, looked him fair in the eye, pulled out a snub-nosed .38 pistol from beneath his coat, said ‘Cop this,’ and fired three shots into Bennett’s chest at point-blank range. One of the detectives made a move towards the assassin, who pointed the gun at him and said, ‘Don’t make me do it,’ before he turned and fled. Ray Bennett staggered down a set of nearby stairs before he collapsed to the floor dead. His final words were, ‘I’ve been shot in the heart.’

In what was obviously no spur-of-the-moment murder, the gunman escaped through the court complex then through a prepared hole in a corrugated-iron fence in a garage behind the building, into a waiting car, and sped off. No one has ever been charged with Ray Bennett’s murder.