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The Murder of MP John Newman: Australia’s First Political Murder

The murder conspiracy against John Paul Newman, State Labor MP for Cabramatta, in Sydney’s south-west, was the district’s worst-kept secret and almost comical in its stupidity. The first three planned attempts – which it seems as though most of Cabramatta knew about – never got past the planning stage. The first two actual attempts never happened because the murder scene was overpopulated and then the would-be assassins lost their nerve.

And when John Newman was actually murdered, his killers used their own cars to speed away from the shooting, left a succession of would-be hitmen who had been asked if they would do the job, and a club full of people who had either been asked to participate or at least knew that a murder was going to take place and who was the intended victim. But yet, despite the amount of work done by the task force, it took years to bring the culprits to justice, and even then the actual killers got away.

At 9.30pm on the Monday night of 5 September 1994, John Newman returned to his home in Woods Avenue, Cabramatta, from a branch meeting of the ALP and was gunned down by two assailants in his driveway in front of his partner Lucy Wang. Wang, severely traumatised, never got a very good look at her fiancé’s killers. Although he never pulled the trigger, the man behind John Newman’s murder was high-profile businessman and local Labor Councillor Phuong Ngo, who also owned the local Vietnamese newspaper and made no bones about the fact that he wanted John Newman’s job in state politics.

The two men openly took each other to task about problems within the burgeoning Cabramatta Vietnamese community and about the crime rate, which was the highest in New South Wales and saw dealers openly approaching citizens in shopping centres and at the railway station, offering them deals of heroin. John Newman’s car suddenly became the target of paint bombs while parked in his front driveway.

It didn’t help matters when an anonymous flyer circulated throughout Cabramatta calling for an investigation into the unsubstantiated criminal activities of Phuong Ngo, his alleged dealings in drugs and association with leading crime bosses. Phuong Ngo decided to take matters into his own hands.

Basing himself at Cabramatta’s Mekong Club, which he created to support the social welfare activities of the community and of which he was Honorary President, Phuong Ngo told one of the staff to make inquiries about getting a gun. The quest for the gun soon spread throughout the club as one associate asked another, and soon there were employees driving all over Sydney’s southern suburbs with handfuls of money in search of a handgun. They came up with a sawn-off .22 rifle, a .32 Beretta, a Colt .45 and a Ruger.

With a Mekong Club poker machine attendant and another employee as his hitmen, Ngo sent them on their mission to kill John Newman. Plans at three venues – Mr Newman’s office, the Fairfield Council Chambers and the Yagoona Greyhound Club – fell over at the last minute due to cold feet on the part of the hitmen. Their first real attempt outside a Cabramatta Vietnamese restaurant failed when they missed their signal from Phuong Ngo that John Newman had finished his meal and was leaving. As it turned out it wouldn’t have happened anyway, as the gunmen had decided that there were too many people about. A second attempt, outside John Newman’s home, came to nothing when the hitmen got frightened and couldn’t decide who was going to shoot first.

Phuong Ngo sacked his two would-be hitmen and recruited a bar attendant and the personnel manager from the Mekong Club to kill John Newman. On their reconnaissance of the proposed murder scene, the two new hitmen used their own cars, with Ngo following them in a car owned by the Mekong Club.

On the afternoon of Saturday 3 September, two days before the murder, a woman told police she recalled seeing a white car parked in nearby Bowden Street. It was identical to the one that was owned by the Mekong Club and driven by Phuong Ngo. That same night at the corner of Bowden and Huey streets, near John Newman’s home, three sisters recalled seeing a green early-model Fairlane that looked conspicuously out of place. One of the girls also recalled seeing the same car parked there on and off over recent days. In nearby Judith Street, an Asian couple briefly saw a man answering to Phuong Ngo’s description standing beside his car.

On the Monday night that the murder took place, Phuong Ngo and his two hitmen attempted to set up a fake alibi. This involved false minutes to a staff meeting that they had attended earlier stating that they all had left much later, thus supposedly accounting for their whereabouts at the time of the murder.

The conspicuous green Fairlane with the assassins inside parked near John Newman’s home while Phuong Ngo waited with the Mekong Club’s Camry parked nearby. John Newman arrived home just after 9.30pm with his fiancée, Lucy Wang, and got out of the car. The bar attendant approached John Newman, fired four times, hitting him twice, and then fled back to the Fairlane, which took off with the Camry driven by Phuong Ngo in hot pursuit. The cars stopped at a service station, where Phuong Ngo took the pistol for disposal and the others made their way back to the Mekong Club. Ngo dumped the pistol in the Georges River and joined the others later.

Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence and hearsay that pointed to Phuong Ngo and his associates as John Newman’s killers, and although they were questioned many times, there wasn’t enough hard evidence to convict them. It wasn’t until a 1998 coronial inquest into John Newman’s murder that it was decided that there was enough solid evidence to charge Phuong Ngo and his associates with murder. But even then it wasn’t going to be easy. The first trial was aborted and a second trial resulted in a hung jury.

Then the Crown hit the jackpot when Phuong Ngo’s former personnel manager at the Mekong Club decided to tell the court all he knew in return for indemnity from prosecution. In June 2001, Phuong Ngo was finally found guilty of John Newman’s murder and sent to jail for life with no possibility of parole. His two co-accused, who had actually carried out the murder but had also decided to roll over, were found not guilty and set free.

Phuong Ngo now resides in Goulburn Jail’s Supermax prison, which is reserved exclusively for New South Wales’ worst prisoners.