CHAPTER 20

HARVEY JONES'S BONES

When wannabe gangster Harvey François Jones disappeared on the evening of 15 July 1983, no one except his dear old mum seemed to be all that surprised. After all, the last person Jones was allegedly seen in the company of was Neddy Smith who, at the time, was the undisputed king of the Sydney underworld. And the fact that Jones was reputed to be carrying a large parcel of cash only fuelled the clandestine scuttlebutt that Neddy had seen his old drinking mate off and helped himself to the bounty. But, suspect as they may, no one was saying much – at least not out loud. Not even the police. Such was the fear that Neddy had etched into the carnivorous world of organised crime in Sydney in the early 1980s, that he ruled with fists of tungsten and a smoking gun.

Neddy Smith was ‘the man’. He had been given the ‘Green Light’ from the crooked cops in the New South Wales police force. This was an honour never before bestowed upon a criminal, and it meant that Neddy could do as he pleased, providing he didn’t kill a police officer. Bank robberies, SP betting (starting price; taking bets at fixed odds), narcotics trafficking, extortion, murder – you name it, and naturally enough, the bent cops had to get their whack of the earnings.

Neddy Smith and Harvey Jones were an odd alliance. A thin man almost two metres tall, 29-year-old Jones covered himself in crass imitation jewellery and was a gangster groupie and a notorious pest. He was also an obnoxious drunk, and over the years he had rubbed lots of hard men up the wrong way. He only managed to stay alive through the heavy company he kept, such as Neddy Smith. He always carried a ‘Dirty Harry’ .44 Smith and Weston magnum handgun and was partial to producing and shooting it wherever he happened to be imbibing at the time, terrorising other patrons and staff. Seeing as he did this with regular monotony and usually in Neddy’s company, Jones relied heavily on his fearsome mate to get him out of trouble when the proprietor of the establishment invariably complained to the police.

Harvey Jones’s claim to gangster fame was that he dealt in drugs, sold used cars on the Parramatta Road, collected debts with the help of his big gun and managed a brothel at Homebush in Sydney’s inner west. He always had large amounts of money in his pocket and didn’t mind spending it.

Jones had always aspired to be a gangster. In the mid 1970s he was a 62-kilogram firefighter who lived with his mother and told his sceptical workmates of his after-hours escapades with the likes of ‘George’ (George Freeman), ‘Len’ (Lenny ‘Mr Big’ McPherson) and ‘Abe’ (Abraham Saffron) and how he used to do ‘contract hits’ for them. The tall, skinny Jones, with his mop of long, curly hair, drove an extras-laden Ford Cortina with ‘Love Bandit’ painted along the side. He supplemented his meagre income by selling marijuana, stealing from the fires that he attended in his job and breaking and entering shops and houses on the weekends and at night.

Sacked from the fire brigade, Jones took up hooning off prostitutes. With the money he earned he opened a car yard at the newly established Upper Wentworth Centre at Homebush. Other car dealers moved into the centre, and business boomed enough for Jones to indulge in an extravagant nightlife around the Sydney nightclubs with an entourage of prostitutes and low-life hangers-on. By 1980, the now-very-affluent Jones was also managing the Upper Wentworth brothel and driving a metallic green Porsche Targa when he was pinched for his part in a $450,000 gold bar robbery from Transurety Australia. Fourteen gold bars weighing 50 ounces each had gone missing from the company’s safe.

Neddy first met Jones in Long Bay Jail when he (Neddy) was in for a parole violation and Jones was on remand for the stolen bullion charge and another of harbouring an escaped prisoner. The next time they caught up was at Stars Disco in Bondi in the early 1980s when Jones, out on bail after being committed for trial, jumped the bar, held a gun to the barman’s head and demanded that Neddy be served before shooting a few holes in the ceiling. Neddy allegedly arranged a $14,000 bribe to be paid to a prominent detective to make any possible charges over the incident go away.

In his 1993 autobiography, Neddy, he (Smith) claims that he became friendly with Jones and from that night on they would often go out on the drink together. According to Neddy, the night would always end up in a fight, with him (Smith) having to do all the fighting because Jones couldn’t hold his hands in the air. Smith claimed that he was forever getting Jones out of trouble after he (Jones) had produced his gun and shot at something or other in public places. After a while Neddy made it no secret that he was tiring of his gun-slinging mate. There were also persistent rumours that Jones might be gay, and that definitely wasn’t Neddy’s pound of steak.

In 1981, Jones had been committed to stand trial on the bullion charge. According to Jones’s elderly mother, in whom Jones was said to confide everything, her son was arranging to pay a senior detective $60,000 through Neddy to have the charges dropped.

In mid-1983, as the court case loomed, Jones was seen to be rounding up as much cash as he could to pay the bribe. While still working as manager at the Upper Wentworth brothel on a supposed wage of $2000 a week, he was also pawning jewellery, borrowing money from friends, selling sports cars and dealing in any commodity that might produce a buck. One of the last people to see Jones alive was Brian Rowe, the owner of the Upper Wentworth, who said that he saw Jones at the Homebush Hotel about 6 p.m. on the night of 15 July 1983. Jones told Rowe that the previous evening he and an associate had been thrown out of a bar in North Sydney so they had gone back and shot the place up. Jones was carrying a large amount of money and said that he was on his way into town to meet some detectives to have a charge against him dropped. Whether it was for the previous night’s effort or the bullion charges wasn’t made clear.

From there Jones vanished. Smith didn’t deny that he had an appointment to meet Jones that night but claimed that Jones never turned up. But when Harvey Jones did turn up many years later, Neddy Smith had a lot of explaining to do.

• • •

Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ Smith was born in the inner Sydney working-class suburb of Redfern on 27 November 1944. The name ‘Neddy’ was bestowed upon him by his uncle Dick for no particular reason. He was the second of six children in a fatherless family. His father was a United States serviceman who had left shortly after Neddy was conceived. By 13 he had had enough of Cleveland Street Boys High School and decided on a life of crime. Between 1959 and 1961 young Neddy was in and out of institutions for stealing, assault and breaking and entering. In May 1963, he was sentenced to six years in jail on 13 counts of breaking, entering and stealing. In jail he learned to be as tough as nails. Early in 1967, he came out of jail, more than 180 centimetres tall, weighing 100 kilograms and with the ferocious reputation of a man who wouldn’t take a backward step and could fight like a threshing machine.

After being convicted in June 1967 of the violent rape of a 20-year-old Petersham housewife, Neddy and Robert Arthur ‘Bobby’ Chapman were sentenced to 12 years in prison with a minimum term of seven years. When sentencing the two men, Mr Justice Reynolds said that the woman had been raped in circumstances of ‘appalling depravity’. The judge told Neddy that his action of ‘spitting on the woman when raping her indicated a warped and perverted mind’. Neddy served eight years in Long Bay, Parramatta and Grafton – regarded as the most brutal jails in New South Wales. He was tougher than ever when he was released in March 1975.

In November 1976, Neddy was arrested by Detective Sergeant Roger Rogerson of the Armed Hold-Up Squad and charged with two counts of shooting with intent to murder, assault with attempt to rob, attempted armed robbery and possessing an unlicensed pistol. But, at Rogerson’s instigation, he and Neddy struck a deal and it was found that there was no case to answer on all charges, except that of possession of an unlicensed pistol. So the charges were dropped, and eventually Neddy’s conviction on the pistol charge was quashed on appeal. More importantly, Neddy was now Rogerson’s underworld confidante.

• • •

It was only a matter of time before Neddy got into the lucrative narcotics trade, first as an enforcer and then as a dealer. By early 1977, his financial situation had improved dramatically. He bought a house in Henry Street in the inner-western suburb of Sydenham and turned it into an electronic fortress surrounded by three-metre walls, security doors and windows and closed-circuit television surveillance cameras. While those close to him maintained that the paranoiac security was to protect his family, drug-squad detectives thought differently. They believed that it was to prevent him from being robbed of a valuable substance – pure heroin. Big bags of it. In 1978, Neddy’s tapped telephone conversations confirmed the police’s suspicions and revealed startling information about a heroin smuggling ring that was responsible for shifting up to 11.3 kilograms of the drug every month. This was one of the biggest operations in the country and represented about 15 per cent of the 1978 heroin consumption in New South Wales.

The Age Tapes Royal Commission report by Mr Justice Stewart into the heroin ring said:

By listening to Smith’s conversations it was learnt that Smith was organising and financing heroin importation from Thailand. The names of a Bangkok bar owner, William (Bill) Sinclair, a Manly hairdresser, Warren Fellows, and Paul Hayward, a well-known Newtown Rugby League football star as well as others involved were mentioned and details of the importation were discussed.

NSW police passed on the information to Thai authorities and Sinclair, Fellows and Hayward were arrested in Bangkok and charged with possession of 8.4 kilograms of the highest quality No 4 Dragon Pearl heroin, worth about $3 million retail on the streets of Sydney.

All three were convicted and given long gaol sentences. Bill Sinclair vehemently maintained his innocence and on appeal was granted a new trial. On 24 January 1983, he was acquitted and returned to Australia.

It was later revealed that the most active courier, 26-year-old Warren Fellows, was paid $60,000 per trip to bring suitcases with as much as 13 kilograms of Thai heroin through Australian Customs.

Police raided Neddy’s fortress in Sydenham on 12 October 1978, the day after the arrest of Sinclair, Fellows and Hayward in Bangkok, and found $39,360 in cash and a receipt for a safety deposit box at the Marrickville branch of the ANZ Bank. In the box they found $90,100 in cash, $10,000 worth of diamonds and a short manual on ‘how to get a container past customs’. Neddy and his de facto wife, Debra Joy Bell, were charged with possession of money unlawfully obtained.

Drug-squad detectives raided homes all over Sydney in the following weeks and recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and vast amounts of heroin. Neddy’s stepbrother, Edwin ‘Teddy’ Smith, was one of the villains arrested and was found to be in possession of 1.5 kilograms of high-grade heroin. Teddy pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years in the slammer. Charged with having ‘goods in custody’ (the sum of $39 360), Neddy got six months. As this was also a parole violation, he was also expected to finish off the four years outstanding from the 1967 rape sentencing. It was during this term in Long Bay Jail that he met Harvey Jones.

Neddy was released in October 1980, two years earlier than expected by means of a succession of appeals to the High Court by his barrage of highly paid legal advisors. Out of the ‘can’, he teamed up with Warren Lanfranchi, a heroin dealer and thief he had met in prison. By mid-1981, Lanfranchi was having problems with the police. They wanted to speak to him about several bank robberies and the attempted murder of a police officer. Lanfranchi had aimed a handgun at a traffic officer’s face and pulled the trigger but the gun had misfired. The police do not like people who try to kill their fellow officers, particularly heroin dealers such as Lanfranchi. They wanted him to pay for what he had done. It would be Neddy Smith who would give the police what they wanted.

Lanfranchi, 22, didn’t want to go back to prison and had made it known that, if cornered by police, he would shoot it out. But there was an easier way: Neddy allegedly offered Detective Sergeant Roger Rogerson $50,000 on Lanfranchi’s behalf to have the investigations dropped. Rogerson agreed to discuss the matter and a meeting was arranged with Lanfranchi at a secret spot. On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 June 1981, Neddy drove Lanfranchi in a green BMW to a narrow lane called Dangar Place in Chippendale, just a few minutes drive from the heart of Sydney. According to his girlfriend, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, Lanfranchi had $10,000 in $50 bills stuffed down the front of his trousers and was unarmed when he left home for the meeting. At 2.50 p.m. Neddy parked the BMW near the entrance to Dangar Place and watched as Lanfranchi walked with his hands above his head down the lane towards Rogerson, about 40 metres away. What Lanfranchi didn’t know was that Rogerson was not alone. The laneway was surrounded by 18 heavily armed police.

According to Rogerson’s statement, Lanfranchi said to him as they finally met face to face: ‘I can’t do any more jail. Are we going to do business?’

‘There is no business. We are here to arrest you for the attempted murder of a police officer,’ replied Rogerson.

Realising that he had walked into a trap, Lanfranchi allegedly produced a gun from the front of his trousers and aimed it at Rogerson, who also drew a gun and shot Lanfranchi twice, in the neck and the heart, killing him instantly. Lanfranchi had not fired a shot. The gun found lying beside Lanfranchi’s body was more than 20 years old and had a defective firing mechanism. It had no fingerprints on it. And there was no sign of the alleged $10,000 that Lanfranchi’s girlfriend said he had concealed down the front of his pants.

At the coronial inquiry in November 1981 into the shooting of Warren Lanfranchi, thanks largely to evidence given by Neddy Smith, it was found that Detective Sergeant Roger Rogerson had protected himself ‘while endeavouring to effect an arrest’. Acting for the Lanfranchi family, Ian Barker QC said that it was open to conjecture as to ‘whether the deceased did in fact have a gun at the material time.’ As Smith would later testify in court, it was soon after he had delivered Lanfranchi that crooked police decided to give him the keys to the city of Sydney, referred to as the ‘Green Light’, which was permission to carry out armed hold-ups, bash anyone who got in his way, run SP premises and sell narcotics without fear of apprehension. Naturally, the crooked police wanted their whack. The only condition to the ‘Green Light’ was that Neddy wasn’t allowed to kill or harm a police officer. Apart from that it was open slather.

Meanwhile, as Neddy was endearing himself to the police by carrying out armed hold-ups and sometimes being driven away from crime scenes in a police car, things weren’t looking good on the heroin charge of a couple of years earlier. His stepbrother, Teddy, had had enough of being in jail and had cut a deal with the federal police. He would tell them everything he knew about Neddy’s alleged heroin dealing in exchange for remissions on his jail term and immunity from further prosecution.

At the 1980 Woodward Royal Commission into drug trafficking in New South Wales, Teddy Smith sang like Pavarotti and became the first hood ever to spill the beans on organised crime in New South Wales. He told the Commission that he had been inside Neddy’s Sydenham fortress when he took delivery of a suitcase containing 30 one-pound bags of pure heroin. Teddy claimed that Neddy started dancing around the room saying, ‘I’m rich, I’m rich.’ Further, he claimed that by using an ordinary domestic blender to remove the lumps, Neddy adulterated 13 ounces of pure No 4 Golden Dragon Pearl heroin with three ounces of Glucodin powder to make up one-pound packets, which he sold in sealed plastic bags. Packaging the three-ounce shares of pure heroin removed from each pound into one- and two-ounce packets, he sold them to friendly dealers without telling his partners.

Teddy also alleged to the Commission that during mid-1978 he made three deliveries a day for Neddy of half-pound and one-pound packets of heroin to cars parked in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Driving past the assigned car at slow speed, he dropped the package into the vehicle’s back window, which was wound down a few inches. At the peak of the operation, Neddy employed 14 people and was moving up to 25 pounds of heroin a month. And Neddy was rich. Very rich. His stable of cars included a BMW, a Mercedes and a Porsche, and he owned the fortress at Sydenham, a half share in a $17,000 speedboat and extensive jewellery, which included a $32,000 diamond ring. According to Teddy, Neddy had once told him that, while there were millionaires in the world who had it in assets, ‘he would be one of the only ones who had it in cash.’

On the strength of his stepbrother’s evidence, Neddy was charged with conspiracy to supply heroin. On the second day of his trial in May 1980, the prime witness, Teddy, had a sudden change of heart and admitted to the court that he had deliberately given false evidence and that everything he had said about Neddy’s involvement in the heroin trade was fabricated. He said that Neddy was in fact a choir boy who was misunderstood. The prosecution could not believe what it was hearing.

Judge Alistair Muir instructed the jury that, on the grounds of lack of evidence, Neddy had to be acquitted. But, change of heart or not, the non-parole period of Edwin William ‘Teddy’ Smith’s ten-year sentence for heroin possession was reduced considerably to run from his arrest on 27 October 1978, to 26 August 1982. When he was eventually released from prison, Teddy Smith left town in a hurry.

• • •

When Harvey Jones went missing in 1983, his mother was frantic and rang the police, who conducted an investigation. Given Jones’s track record and the company he kept, it was little wonder they had great difficulty finding anyone to cooperate.

In his 1993 autobiography, Neddy, Neddy casually explains away the disappearance of Harvey Jones. He claims that an irate detective had rung him on the morning of 15 July and told him that Jones and an associate, a particularly unpleasant piece of work named ‘Bob the Basher’, had been thrown out of a disco the previous evening and had gone back later and put two shots into the ceiling before being ejected again. The detective was concerned because these events had occurred on his ‘turf’ and the disco owners paid him protection money to ensure that these kinds of things never happened.

Smith claims that he then rang Jones, and after giving him a blast for about ten minutes, he said that he would telephone the detective to see what he wanted to do about it. Smith claims to have calmed the detective, then rung Jones back and said that he could get him off the hook and asked him (Jones) how much money he could get his hands on straightaway. Jones said that he could come up with $30,000 on short notice. Smith claims to have rung the detective back and persuaded him to accept this amount, which he would have to him that night. He rang Jones back and arranged to meet him at the Star Hotel in inner-city Alexandria early that evening. According to Smith, Jones never turned up.

Not so, according to a statement to police by Bob the Basher, who claimed that he saw Jones earlier in the night and that Jones had had a bag of money to give Smith. The Basher also claimed that he saw Smith meet Jones outside the Star Hotel a little later, and then walk in. The Basher saw Smith emerge alone from the Star Hotel about an hour later. He had not seen or heard of Harvey Jones since. When presented by police with this statement, Neddy handed it back, saying that it was rubbish. Allegedly, he was asked to sign a formal letter of denial of the statement, but he never did so, saying instead that his detective friends had vouched for him.

Three days after Harvey Jones disappeared, Neddy was taped talking to a detective about a bludger he knew who was missing. He told former Detective Sergeant Ron Daly, who was being recorded by Australian Federal Police:

I gotta find the bludger. His mother’s cryin’. No one can find him. If I can’t find him it’s no good for business.

Listen, mate, he’s an imbecile. But, ah, his mum rang me and ah, apparently he’s ah pissed off or somethin’. His mother’s worried sick about him. Bloody idiot hasn’t even rang her. Mate, I don’t really, I don’t want to help the cunt but his mother is a nice old lady … she’s about 60 and he worries the Christ out of her. If I were her, I’d hit him over the head with a house brick.

In his book, Neddy claims that Jones’s mother kept ringing him, crying, and asking if he could come to see her as she was too old to travel to his home. Neddy says that he went to her house and took his wife, Debra, with him to see if she could do something to help Harvey’s mother, who was terribly upset. Smith says that he and his wife stayed a few hours, offering consolation, then left, promising to keep in touch. But they never did.

• • •

During the next four years, thanks to the ‘Green Light’, Neddy’s charmed existence continued. He became the highest profile gangster in the history of organised crime in Australia. Throughout the 1980s, under the protection of the ‘Green Light’, he and his gang netted more than $600,000 from armed robberies, operated one of the biggest SP betting networks in Australia and imported and distributed millions of dollars worth of drugs. It was the era of the infamous New South Wales ‘Gang Wars’, when opposed underworld factions fought it out, sometimes in the streets, for control of the lucrative drug trade. It seemed as if, every day, someone was shot. Usually, Neddy managed to get a mention in the press somewhere, and as luck would have it, he emerged from it all unscathed.

Neddy’s luck held out again on the morning of 2 April 1986. As he was leaving the Iron Duke Hotel in the inner Sydney working-class suburb of Waterloo and was walking to his car, a Holden sedan burst from behind a line of trees, mounted the footpath and ran into him, slamming him against a wall. It is likely that anyone else would have been killed. But not the tungsten-tough Neddy. The badly battered gangster dragged himself back to the hotel where he was consoled by the proprietor until an ambulance arrived to take him to hospital. Diagnosed with six broken ribs, a broken leg and suspected fractures of the spine, a heavily plastered and bandaged Neddy was interviewed by television news crews and photographed by the press the following day as he was eased into a car in front of the hospital after defying the doctor’s orders and discharging himself.

The next day, on crutches, Neddy arrived at Channel Nine by helicopter and appeared nationally on Willesee. He described himself as an ‘average knockabout bloke’ whose reputation as an underworld figure and enforcer was a fabrication of the media and was totally undeserved. He told the interviewer Ray Martin that he knew the driver of the car that had run him over. He said:

This man is in close with the police. The police and certain crooks want me out of the way so they have teamed up. I have trod on quite a few toes.

Furthermore, Neddy said, he was an invalid pensioner who had suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for six years and he provided for his wife and family by the pension, gambling, borrowing from friends and sometimes stealing things off the back of trucks. He admitted that at one stage he had been a ‘debt collector and stand-over man’, but he had never had to ‘thump anyone’. He maintained that he was broke and ‘didn’t have two bob to rub together’.

On 26 April 1986, Terrence Edwin Ball, a 41-year-old Sydney pensioner, was charged with the attempted hit-and-run murder of Neddy Smith. At Ball’s trial, Neddy failed to identify him as the man who had tried to run him over and the charge was dismissed.

After more press than even the high-profile Neddy could take, he decided to move his wife, Debra, and their three young children to the New South Wales city of Newcastle, about 200 kilometres north of Sydney. The Smiths’ transport of a Rolls Royce or Mercedes Benz would change every couple of months. It was routine for a car to pick up Neddy on Monday mornings and return him to Newcastle on Friday nights to spend the weekend around the pool with his family.

• • •

On 30 October 1987, Neddy Smith did something very out of character. In a drunken frenzy, he committed murder in a public place and in front of approximately 70 witnesses. It should never have happened. Over a minor traffic altercation, Neddy stabbed another motorist to death in busy Coogee Bay Road and fled. Only hours later he was picked up by police and charged with murder. Then, amid howls of protest from the State Opposition, on 2 December 1987, he was granted bail of $50,000 on the murder charge after being formally refused twice at earlier hearings. Bail was granted on the grounds that Neddy hadn’t had a conviction in eight years, was the father of three children and was suffering from the advanced stages of Parkinson’s Disease.

On 21 December 1988, police spotted Neddy and a couple of men casing the Botany Municipal Chambers in South Sydney. The fact that the $160,000 Christmas payroll was due to arrive the next morning was no coincidence. The following day, at dawn, armed police took up positions in the council building, the nearby fire station and other locations. After the payroll vans arrived, Armed Hold-Up Squad detectives approached a white Holden panel van parked nearby and told its occupants to come out with their hands in the air. Neddy, Glen Roderick Flack, 32, and Richard John Harris, 27, emerged from the van, wearing green sloppy-joes and white gloves. A search of the van revealed a loaded .357 magnum pistol, a sawn-off 12-gauge shotgun, two black balaclavas, a walkie-talkie and a carry bag.

There was no bail for Neddy this time. At his trial, on 9 September 1989, he pleaded guilty to all of the charges relating to the bungled robbery attempt and was given a prison term of 13 years. But, that was only the half of it – he still had his murder trial to come.

The murder trial began on 20 February 1990. The court was told by Mark Tedeschi QC for the Crown that, on the day of the alleged murder, Neddy had spent most of the day drinking with a friend and was on his way along Coogee Bay Road to the Coogee Sports Club at about 9 p.m. For some unknown reason, the Honda (owned by Neddy’s wife but driven by his friend) stopped in the line of traffic, Tedeschi said. A tow truck could not pass and its driver, Thomas Millane, flashed his lights a couple of times.

The Crown alleged that Smith and his companion got out of their car and began fighting with Millane and his passenger, 34-year-old Ronnie Flavell. Millane heard Flavell’s call for help before seeing his friend lying on his back over the bonnet of a car parked nearby, the jury heard. Neddy Smith was standing over Flavell, and Millane saw what he thought was Smith punching Flavell with his free hand. But, as he pulled Smith away, Millane noticed a bloodied knife in Smith’s hand. The jury heard that Smith threatened Millane with the knife before jumping back into his car and driving away. Ronnie Flavell died in surgery shortly after in Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick.

Neddy was found guilty of murder, and on 16 March 1990, Mr Justice McInerney sentenced him to life imprisonment. But, seeing as the killing took place in 1987, prior to the 1989 truth-in-sentencing legislation which meant that a life sentence meant exactly that, Neddy’s life sentence could be reduced to a fixed term on appeal and he could hold out hopes of being released some day.

• • •

For a crook as smart as Neddy Smith, he must have spent a lot of long lonely hours in his prison cell, wondering how he had wound up back in the joint. His rat cunning and superior criminal ability to negotiate with all of the warring factions of the Sydney underworld had seen him rise to the top of his profession without a conviction in nearly a decade. Everything had been running like clockwork. He had wreaked fear and havoc wherever he went. Neddy was ‘the man’. A real tough guy. But his winning streak seemed to have ended.

It was now that Neddy decided he had had enough of life behind bars and didn’t want to die there. In order to have a chance of ever getting out of jail alive, to die in his own bed surrounded by his family, he realised that the only way out was to rat on his alleged former business associates in the hope that the authorities would show him leniency so he had at least a glimmer of hope of being released one day.

In mid-1992, Neddy began talking to Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) agents, who came to his prison cell to see what he had to offer. Under the deal they eventually offered him, he would be immune from prosecution for any previous offence (except murder) that he admitted being party to, and with normal remissions, the best possible result he could expect was a reduction in his sentence of six years to serve. But, with his track record, that seemed unlikely. Nonetheless, a splinter of hope was better than none at all. Neddy weighed up the options and went against what he so often preached – he turned dog.

As he sat in the witness box, day after day, at the 1992 ICAC hearings, which flowed over into 1993, Neddy’s face could have been carved out of granite. It was expressionless as he gave evidence in a voice that showed total disregard for discipline or reprimand. It was a face hardened by a life in the streets and prison. Neddy Smith – underworld boss, gunman, rapist, heroin dealer, armed robber, murderer and now Crown informer – was dobbing in the cops. Counsel assisting the ICAC, Barry Toomey QC, nursed his most prized stool pigeon through his evidence, which, if proven, would bring the New South Wales Police to its knees. Neddy was already the most notorious criminal in the country. Now he looked like becoming the most important informer in the nation’s history. Although in command intellectually, he was unable to control the continual shaking down the right side of his body and his right arm, the only noticeable signs of the advanced stages of Parkinson’s Disease that had been ravaging his huge frame for a decade.

In true gangland tradition, Neddy had refused to inform on any of his underworld mates. But he didn’t bat an eyelid as he gave up the cops whom he had allegedly done business with over the years in murder, bribery, drug trafficking, armed robberies, extortion and corruption at every level.

According to Neddy, the cops ran the lot, and by giving them all up, he had absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. After all, he was already doing life for murder and an additional 13 years for attempted armed robbery. He named dozens of corrupt police officers and told of the vast sums of money they earned from heroin trafficking. He told the Commission how he stood by and watched as Roger Rogerson gunned down an unarmed Warren Lanfranchi in 1981 and police took a bundle of money from the dead man’s trousers. He told a stunned audience how he earned the ‘Green Light’ by lying to a coronial inquest about the circumstances surrounding the death of Warren Lanfranchi and how detectives organised armed robberies, then picked up the robbers and drove them away from the scene.

For weeks Neddy sang like a nightingale, and Australia hung on his every word. When he had finished, he was promised nothing and taken back to his cell at Long Bay Jail for the long wait to see whether, one day, his treachery would pay off.

• • •

In 1994, Neddy Smith made a fatal mistake. He spoke frankly in jail to his cellmate, who had been wired by the police, of the fact that he had murdered Harvey Jones and how his driver had buried the body in sand near Botany Bay. Smith’s boasts were substantiated at 7.15 a.m. on 23 March 1995, when a Thomas Coburn was searching the beach beside Foreshore Drive, Botany, for coins washed up by the tide. However, on this occasion, he found something quite different from loose change. First, Coburn saw teeth, and then eye sockets peering out at him from the beach. When he scraped away the sand with a stick, he revealed the skull and the skeletal remains of a body – that of Harvey Jones. If skulls could smile, then there was little doubt that this one would have grinned from ear to ear at being unearthed after all those years. Harvey Jones had come back to say hello to his old drinking mate.

In 1995, Neddy was charged with seven murders from the good old days. At his committal hearing in September 1996, the charges of murdering drug dealers Barry Croft, Barry McCann, Danny Chubb and Bruce Sandery were dropped, so the charges against Neddy were reduced to three, being the murders of Warren Lanfranchi’s prostitute and drug-addict girlfriend, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, drug dealer Lewton Shu and Harvey Jones.

At Neddy’s eight-week trial for Jones’s murder, which ended on 9 September 1998, it was alleged that Jones went missing from the Star Hotel in Alexandria on 15 July 1983, where he had gone to meet Smith and give him a large sum of money to pay off a bribe to police. Smith was alleged to have picked up Jones, taken him to Botany Bay, shot him dead, taken his money and ordered his driver to bury the body. The hushed court listened to the damning 1994 tape recorded by his cellmate, a petty criminal code-named ‘Mr Brown’, of Smith telling of the killing of Harvey Jones:

When I got him he said, ‘I’d die for you.' I said, ‘You’re about to, ya fuckin’ mug' … Blew his heart out with a big .357.

Neddy’s driver, code-named ‘Mr Green’, told the court that he had witnessed the killing and buried the body at Smith’s behest. Mr Green told the jury of eight women and four men that he had met Jones and Smith at the Star Hotel in Alexandria between 7 and 7.30 p.m. and driven them to Botany Bay. He said he kept a look-out near a walkway to the beach while the two men walked off along the beach, and then he heard shots. Mr Green said he went to where the shots came from to find Jones lying dead on the sand with Smith standing over him with a gun in his hand. ‘He had a gun – it was a big one,’ Mr Green told the court. ‘I came down near where the body was and he (Smith) said to dig a hole. It was a pretty deep hole.’ Mr Green said that he used a shovel that was nearby to dig the hole. ‘He (Smith) had crazy eyes,’ Mr Green reminisced. ‘That’s all I remember, his eyes.’

It took the jury six days to return a guilty verdict. In sentencing Smith, Justice Carolyn Simpson said:

The killing was committed for at least three reasons. One, for monetary gain; two, to protect and preserve the prisoner’s own criminal empire; and three, because Jones had become a nuisance and a pest to the prisoner.

The prisoner’s criminal record, as I have stated it, alone disentitles the prisoner to any claim for leniency. Arthur Stanley Smith, you are sentenced to penal servitude for life. You will die in prison.

• • •

Although he is destined to die behind bars, Neddy Smith still has countless enemies, but perhaps the main one is time itself. The Parkinson’s Disease that has ravaged his huge frame for decades is now so bad that Neddy was barely audible at times while giving evidence as his head rolled about uncontrollably. One of his associates, who has observed the progress of Neddy’s Parkinson’s Disease (which Neddy calls ‘me shakes’) told a reporter that ‘he’ll never live it out’. There is no shortage of people who hope that this is true.

In 1996, Neddy Smith’s life was portrayed in the award-winning television series Blue Murder. The show also portrayed the life and times of Roger Rogerson and all of the old gang of everyone’s favourite corrupt cops, hitmen, drug dealers and assorted cut-throats who peopled Neddy’s world.

After being found guilty of the murder of Harvey Jones, Neddy was tried and exonerated for the murder of Warren Lanfranchi’s girlfriend, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp. On 14 June 2000, an appeal for a retrial of the murder of Harvey Jones was dismissed. Neddy Smith, Australia’s most notorious gangster, will die behind bars. In all of this one thing is certain: the infamy that Harvey Jones so desperately craved in life he most certainly achieved in death.