‘Chopper,’ he said, ‘I could butcher the Australian criminal world if I had a dozen like you.’
IT was perhaps the most precise, well-planned armed robbery ever committed in Australia.
The plan was hatched in a cell of an English prison. The gang was hand-picked and taken to a remote area in country Victoria to train and to get the timing down to seconds. The leader knew that to avoid a shoot-out, everything would have to work perfectly.
It culminated in a breathtaking raid on the Victorian Club in Queen Street on April 26, 1976. The gang escaped with somewhere between $1.4 and $12 million. The true total was never really known as the bookies were coy about how much was in their bags that day.
The leader of the gang was Raymond Patrick Chuck Bennett, a career criminal with a taste for the high life. He was tough and a born leader.
Several months before, Bennett had slipped into Australia while on a week’s pre-release leave from the Isle of Wight prison. He was seen at the time by a young policeman at Moonee Ponds. Bennett flew back to England satisfied that the job could be done. When he finished his sentence he returned to set up the audacious robbery.
Bennett’s robber recruits each had specific roles to practise at their secret training camp. Like a football coach, Bennett told them to give up women and drinking during the training. But, like footballers, many of them slipped out to disobey the coach’s orders. They spent months training. Each was confident he knew what to do.
One man, who was in charge of the stolen cars, later went on to become an international criminal. He was eventually convicted over drug matters and was sentenced to a long prison term.
A time-and-motion expert recruited for the job was little known to police. He was later found to have helped organise several of the country’s biggest stick-ups. He eventually was sentenced over an armed robbery in Sydney.
The gang of about nine decided to hit the bookies on April 26 because they knew the amount of cash on settling would be huge. The bookies had to settle for three meetings over the Easter break.
According to former Deputy Commissioner Paul Delianis, the Great Bookie Robbery crew was probably the most polished armed robbery gang in Australia. ‘They specialized in commando-like raids for years,’ he said. ‘They copied the style of an English group of criminals called the Wembley Gang, which used similar tactics. ‘
No-one was ever convicted over the bookie robbery and most of the money was laundered overseas. When Bennett’s aged mother collapsed in a solicitor’s office one day ambulance officers who cut her clothing away to give her cardiac massage found $90,000 hidden underneath.
But justice sometimes moves in mysterious ways. After the bookie robbers became the talk of the criminal world many of those allegedly involved in the robbery did not live to spend the money.
Bennett himself was gunned down in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on November 12, 1979, by a brazen killer, probably Brian Kane. It was believed to be a payback for the murder of Leslie Herbert Kane, who had gone missing from his Wantirna home in 1978. Brian Kane was later shot dead in a Brunswick hotel.
Ian Revell Carroll went on to become one of the best organisers of armed robberies in Australia. He was killed in a gun battle in the backyard of his rented Mt Martha home in 1983.
Anthony Paul McNamara continued to associate with criminals. He was found dead of a heroin overdose, allegedly from a drug hotshot, in Easey Street, Collingwood in 1990.
Another member fled to outback Western Australia after he was marked for death.
Two brothers involved graduated to organising their own stick-ups. One is now in jail serving a long sentence.
Norman Leung Lee was the man who was allegedly given the task of laundering the cash from the job. It was alleged some of the money was used to buy equipment for his dim sim factory. The rest was allegedly invested in land and international drug and arms deals.
Lee was shot dead by police, allegedly as he tried to rob an armed van at Melbourne Airport in July, 1992.
Lee, 44, had been charged 16 years earlier with laundering $124,000 in cash from the bookie robbery. He refused to talk to police and stood silently while they cut open his safe looking for money from the robbery. It was empty, and he was acquitted.
It was an era of gunmen who planned big armed robberies. It was a time just before drugs took over the underworld. And it was a time when gangs of vicious criminals preyed on their own: headhunters or toecutters would torture armed robbers to get a piece of the action.
IN the 1970s there were some real hard men about, old style crims. Thinkers with dash, men who had the brains to devise a plan and the guts to carry it out. In that era there were none better than Ray Chuck Bennett. He was one of the real tough guys I have known. I was proud to call ‘Chuckles’ my friend because he was a bloody good bloke. The human scum who cheered and celebrated at the news of his death are not forgotten and, like all cowards, will get theirs in the end.
Ray Chuck, which I think was his original name before he took the name ‘Bennett’, was a thinker and a top gang war tactician. He was also a master planner and one of the Australian underworld’s foremost bank robbers. Without Ray Chuck’s thinking the Great Bookie Robbery would never have been pulled off.
Ray was a criminal leader whose personal courage gave strength to the men who followed him. Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox, widely considered to be Australia’s greatest bank robber and a man whose thinking ability, physical courage and mental coolness is a legend in the criminal world, was a true and loyal friend of Ray Chuck’s. However, in Ray’s company Cox was a follower, never a leader, which gives an insight into the leadership abilities of the man.
The war between Ray and his crew and the Kane brothers is now part of Australian criminal folklore. They were the two top Melbourne crews and they destroyed each other in a sea of blood all over Brian Kane’s massive ego and powerful waterfront and criminal following, not to mention Ray’s personal pride. He refused to take a backward step or give an inch. A little known fact was that as a younger man Ray acted as bodyguard for waterfront strongman Billy ‘the Texan’ Longley. Long after Ray Chuck left Longley’s company the enemies he made in those early days with Billy remained with him.
The truth about the war between Ray Chuck and Brian Kane is simple. They didn’t like each other as kids and grew up hating each other more and more. In the name of peace and common sense they would from time to time over the years give each other a hello across a public bar. Kane would offer a loud greeting with Chuck returning a curt and firm nod of that hard head of his.
Deep down, Chuck believed the Kane brothers to be police informers under the personal care of a well-known Melbourne policeman. Ray Chuck was a thousand per cent criminal and he described Brian Kane as ‘half a policeman.’
What happened had to happen. It could end no other way. As for the Kanes trying to stand over Ray and his crew over the proceeds of the bookie robbery – thus supposedly starting the final blood war that destroyed both sides – the real reason for the final conflict was never so grand. In fact, it began over a bloody fist fight in the Royal Oak Hotel in Richmond that started with an exchange of insults between Kane and Chuck and resulted in Brian Kane being beaten in front of his friends and hangers-on.
Threats of death toward the wife and children of Chuck made by a drunken Les Kane simply brought to the boil a hatred that had been simmering for 20 years. The line was drawn and sides were taken. Chuck attacked, and like the general he was he broke the Kane empire apart and drowned them in their own blood.
Les Kane simply went on the missing list.
The story is that a frightened, panic-stricken Brian Kane, while in hiding, reached out for his old protector – a very tough policeman – and the late Christopher Dale ‘Rentakill’ Flannery, and they plotted, set up and carried out the death of Ray Chuck in the Melbourne magistrate’s court. It was a classic and unbelievable underworld killing that is today part of Australian criminal folklore.
Some people might find it hard to believe the rumor that one of ‘Victoria’s finest’ could be involved in such a crime. And I, of course, would dismiss such suggestions as foul slander and gossip. As far as the policeman was concerned, it was one of the hairiest yarns I have ever heared.
The murder, not long after, of Brian Kane (in the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick) was simply a ‘mopping up’ action carried out far too late by a broken-hearted and blood-loyal friend of Ray Chuck’s. With Chuck dead, there was no joy or celebration at the news of Brian Kane’s death. Chuckles was gone, and a thousand Kanes in their graves couldn’t bring him back. I cheered at the news of Les Kane’s death, but I didn’t cheer at Brian’s. Ray was dead and it was all too late.
After I was betrayed and stabbed seven times in H Division in 1979, Ray Chuck, who was in H Division at that time, came in to my labor yard to see me. He showed me great kindness. He cheered me up and encouraged me to get well and get back into it bigger and badder than ever.
‘Chopper’, he said, ‘it’s one big, bloody kennel, and most of the good blokes are double agents and dogs and secret policemen. And the rest of the pricks are too weak to even talk about. You make your own rules, you run your own race, you fight your own fights and live your own life … and if anybody doesn’t like it and wants to rock’n’roll, bury the maggots. It’s not a popularity contest, Chopper.’
*
THERE is a story about Ray Chuck that I cannot vouch for as the truth, but he told it to me and Jimmy Loughnan when he was in B Division of Pentridge for a short time in 1975, and it’s worth telling.
Ray’s version of the story is that when he was in prison in England he found himself in the same jail as Reggie Kray, one half of the dreaded Kray twins, my boyhood heroes who ruled the London underworld and nightclub scene for more than a decade. According to Ray he got into a argument with Kray and blows were thrown and Ray won the fight, sending Kray to the floor bleeding and beaten.
Great story, but I didn’t want to believe it. I’m not saying that Ray Chuck couldn’t have held his own in a fight with Kray, but he could never have beaten him in an English prison and survived. However, the story was believed by all who heard the yarn … until the toecutter they called ‘The Pom’ heard it. He roared laughing, as he had heard a different version of events from friends of his in England, ex-members of the Kray firm like himself.
According to ‘The Pom’ there had been some sort of fight – with Reg Kray winning – and with Ray Chuck yelling verbal threats. Ray was later grabbed and beaten in the showers by a crew of East End crooks who were on Reggie Kray’s team in jail. Ray continued to show disrespect for Reg Kray and although no more violence took place there was ill will. When Ray got out he was kidnapped at the gate by a car load of East End boys and given a bloody good flogging and driven to Heathrow Airport and told he’d taken a right liberty by mouthing off at Reg Kray. He was told if he returned to London he would go home in a box.
My opinion is that if the story is even half true, I can’t understand how Ray ever got out alive. The Kray twins invented the torture business. As I’ve said. I think the world of Ray Chuck, but it gave me the shits to hear him say he’d punched on with Reg Kray and won. The other version is much more acceptable, to my way of thinking.
*
ONE Kane I did like and respect was old Reg Kane, father of Brian, Les and Ray. I first met him in a hotel in Port Melbourne in 1972 in the company of Horatio Morris. In fact, it was old Reg who pulled me to one side and advised me to watch old Horatio, who was a stone-killing hard man, and friendship would have meant nothing to him if I put a hole in my manners even by accident.
Horatio would shoot you in the head just as a lesson ‘not to do it again.’ Old Reg was genuinely concerned about my future wellbeing while mixing in the company of Horatio Morris. Reg was a great old fellow, a gentleman with a kind, generous, caring heart who felt sorry for people. He was always a soft touch for a good sob story and a much-loved and respected man: even the blood enemies of his three sons held no ill-will towards him. He was a hard man of the old school whereas his three sons, for all their swagger and bully boy violence and fearful reputation, were never in their father’s class.
Reg grew up smacking the bottoms of men like his sons, and as much as he loved them, he was never overly impressed when stories of his sons’ conduct and talk of their fearful reputation and their so-called fighting ability reached his ears. Reg was a real hard man, while his boys dreamt of being hard men and pretended and played the role. I often suspected that Reg was at times embarrassed when Brian and Les swaggered into the pub bunging on their tough-guy routine.
*
WHILE I was never friends with Brian Kane and we stood in two separate camps, we were never bitter enemies and didn’t hate each other. We simply did not trust one another. I personally felt that his reputation within the Melbourne criminal world was vastly overrated.
However, I will give credit where credit is due. Brian was a violent, cunning criminal who had the bulk of the criminal world and the waterfront bluffed, beaten and baffled. Why he got away with it for so long was a puzzle to me. However, Brian and his semi-retard brother Les did get away with it for well over a decade, so my hat goes off to them.
A small touch of comedy I will mention about Brian. He always was concerned that he might be charged with carrying a gun, but he also knew it would be unsafe for him to walk down to the milk bar unarmed. He came up with this brilliant plan that he would hide his shooter in the handbag of any girl he was with at the time.
I told him once that when the day came that he did get blown away he would be found with his hand stuck in a bloody handbag, which was no way for a hard crim to go out. My attitude was that if you don’t carry your gun on you, you might as well not have a gun at all.
Anyway, my few words in jest proved true. When Brian did get blown away, with his last dying breath he was trying to get his bloody gun out of a handbag next to him. With his luck he probably would have grabbed the lipstick, and not even his color, at that.
I cannot name the man who killed Brian Kane. However, it is no great secret in criminal circles who pulled the trigger. And he, too, felt that the old gun in the handbag trick was the height of good humor. For a rat-cunning, shifty, streetwise old hood Brian Kane certainly died dumb.
*
ANOTHER person from that era was old Normie Lee, Dim Sim Normie, Chinese Normie, call him what you like. He was one of the quiet men of the Melbourne criminal world. He was involved with Ray Chuck’s crew, mostly in the thinking department.
Normie didn’t run around mouthing off or trying to shoot people in pubs. He was a loyal and trusted behind-the-scenes helper. It was always believed that Normie used money from the Great Bookie Robbery for Chuckles and the crew. There have been a number of rumors that several people went on the missing list via Normie’s Dim Sim machines and came out in tasty tid bits for public consumption, Les Kane among them. However, that was only rumor, although I have tended to steer clear of dimmies since then. Call me delicate, if you like.
I found Normie to be gentle, polite and good-natured, but very secretive and a touch paranoid. For Normie to die such a violent death was out of character. I know many men who I think could end up dying in a gun battle and Normie just wasn’t one of them. He was just another member of Ray’s crew who lost his way after the death of the General.
*
THE king of the headhunters in this country was the man known far and wide in the underworld as ‘Jimmy The Pom.’ I won’t use his real name because it would not be etiquette. Despite the mayhem and bloodshed behind him, Jimmy has never copped many serious convictions and he’s retired now, so he might be a little offended if his real name was connected with the kidnapping, torture and murder his crew carried out here and in England over the years.
‘The Pom’ was the master of violence. He was a former mercenary, former member of the Kray brothers firm in London’s East End and the IRA. His reputation for violence was not only Australia-wide but international.
‘The Pom’ was not strictly an accurate nickname for Jimmy, because his sympathies were with the Irish. He reputedly acted as personal bodyguard to the IRA deputy Joe Cahill in the early 1960s. Later, the story goes, he served under the famous mercenary ‘Mad Mike Hoare’ with his fifth commando unit in the Congo in 1964. He came to Australia in the late 1960s, and with a small crew of ex-IRA men and Sydney and Melbourne criminals, he started what became known and feared as the ‘Toecutter Gang.’
This might be hard to understand, but to me ‘The Pom’ was a wonderful fellow. I’m nothing if not egotistical, and he flattered me – paying me the highest of compliments when I was only 24.
‘Chopper’, he said, ‘I could butcher the Australian criminal world if I had a dozen like you.’
‘The Pom’ backed Billy Longley in the bloody painters and dockers war in the 1970s. He was arrested in NSW for the murder of Jake Maloney in 1972, was later acquitted on appeal, came to Victoria on weapons charges and then was deported. The last I heard of him he was involved in business with Charlie Kray, the older brother of Reggie and Ronnie Kray. The word is that he is now retired in comfort, spending his summers in Spain with the rest of London’s retired gangsters.
Jimmy was a friend and a teacher to me. I will never forget some of his sayings. One was: ‘There is no mafia in Belfast’ … meaning that when it comes down to tin tacks, blood will beat money every time. Another saying of his was: ‘Don’t toss the party until the body’s been buried.’
*
THERE are many stories about people like ‘The Pom.’ But the most fearsome is about the ‘tattoo torture’ job in NSW in the very early 1970s.
It happened when the toecutter gang kidnapped a payroll bandit and put him under heavy questioning as to where he had hidden $75,000. After removing every toe on his left foot and getting nowhere, they knew they had a tough bastard on their hands.
They laid the bandit on his front and held him firmly while they cut around the edges of the poor fellow’s back — right around a big tattoo of an eagle fighting a dragon. Then they took a pair of pliers and slowly peeled the skin and tattoo off the fellow’s back. They told me later it was like ripping leather. It took a fair amount of strength and care to remove the full back job tattoo. The blood-curdling screams stopped half way through the operation. It was thought by all concerned that the fellow had simply passed out. However, when they tried to revive him, it was found that the poor bugger had died.
They thought about this. They figured no man would suffer the tortures of hell simply to protect money. No man could endure the insane pain of being skun alive after having his toes cut off just to safeguard the whereabouts of a few rolls of paper. Then they realised that although the bandit wouldn’t lay down his life for money alone, he might do it for love. The guy had died for love, not money.
The answer was that the money must be in the possession of the payroll bandit’s wife, and he had died to protect her. The toecutters wrapped the tattoo skin in plastic and a member of his gang visited the wife, a beautiful woman who had been a loyal and loving wife to the bandit for 20 years since they had been teenage sweethearts.
She asked: ‘Is he alive?’
The answer was ‘Yes … give us the money and you can have him.’
She paid the money over. Then they told her that the operation was a success … but the patient had died.
Postscript: the woman in question never went to the police. I was told by a gang member a long time later that she was the strongest lady he’d ever met in his life. And the look on her face is still a memory that haunts him to this day.
I would describe it as one of his few regrets. Maybe his only one.
*
A TOECUTTER very close indeed to ‘Jimmy The Pom’ and a well-known dockie just as close to Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley were rumored to be responsible for the death of Alfred ‘The Ferret’ Nelson, a painter and docker who went on the missing list in the early 1970s during the dockies’ wars.
Nelson’s car was pulled out of the water near South Wharf. It is believed by some who should know that ‘The Ferret’ died a painful death, indeed, and that the toecutter mentioned above was in charge of proceedings. The story goes that before they filled in the grave the painter and docker urinated on Nelson’s mortal remains.
The toecutter was a blood and guts boy from way back, but he could not abide what he called ‘bad manners.’ He pulled out a .45 automatic and told the dockie: ‘If you don’t put your dick away in two seconds I’ll blow the bloody thing off.’
The dockie, one of the toughest men on the Australian waterfront, obeyed with such haste that he wet his pants. Or so the story goes.
Of course, I could never admit that a man close to ‘The Pom’ told me this story first hand or in the first person, and I’ll have to put it down as just another old criminal yarn.
‘The Pom’ played by hard rules, yet he also had a strange sense of fair play and correct conduct. When he was with Mad Mike Hoare in the fifth commando unit in the Congo in the mid-1960s he was asked to question a suspected informer. There is a scurrilous allegation that he removed the man’s eyes with a teaspoon before questioning – yet refused to allow torture below the belt, as he could not abide crude conduct. Strange man.
There is a story that Jimmy walked into a Sydney hotel and an acquaintance remarked to him that it was a ‘nice day.’ Without a word Jimmy pulled out his gun and smashed the fellow across the face and said: ‘When I want a weather report I’ll ask for one.’ What a comic.
*
THINKING about ‘The Pom’ and his adventures brings back the name of a well-known underworld figure, Johnny Regan, the so-called ‘vice king of Sydney.’ Regan was a hoon – a common or garden pimp – a criminal pastime that in NSW is seen as a good job if you can get it. In Melbourne, a hoon or pimp is one step up the social ladder from a rockspider. Men involved in living off the earnings of women are regarded by right-thinking people as scum, bludgers, pimps and arsewipes.
I will never forget the time when Regan was down for the Melbourne Cup once I showed him just what I thought of his reputation as a violent and highly dangerous man. We both ended up at the same party and his big talk and loud mouth drowned out all the others until I headbutted the fool to the ground.
I put the rat down three times before the old gunman Horatio Morris said to him: ‘You’d better stay down, son, or he’ll kill you.’ And that was the last we heard of Johnny Regan until he got himself killed the following year. He was a joke, typical Sydney ‘piss and wind.’ He had plenty of razzle dazzle and ‘We play rugby, aren’t we tough’ talk. I’ve never met a pimp who could fight, and Johnny Regan was a classic example. No doubt if I’d been a woman in a brothel he would have beaten me near to death.
If you’re wondering what this has to do with ‘Jimmy The Pom’, stay tuned. To cut a long story short, rumor has it that he was the last person to see Regan alive. Naturally, I couldn’t possibly vouch for the accuracy of this allegation, and I would put it down to foul slander and gossip. But in the interest of telling a good story I will recount this and other rumors just as I heard them from someone very close and dear to Jimmy himself.
‘The Pom’ was arrested for the murder of another toecutter called Jake Maloney, who had himself earlier killed Kevin Gore. ‘The Pom’ was rightly acquitted of the charge, but the rumor persisted that Maloney died because he wrongly advised that a body tossed into Sydney Harbor would be eaten by sharks. ‘The Pom’ knew nothing of sharks.
As it happened, a chap by the name of Baldy Blair was thrown in the harbor (he was dead at the time) and the rumor is that a certain toecutter was horrified to read in the newspapers that Baldy’s body was not eaten by sharks at all, but washed up on the beach in Botany Bay.
The rumor is that the last words Maloney heard were: ‘Sharks, hey, Jake. I’ll give you bloody sharks, you idiot.’ And then a gun went ‘bang, bang’ and that was the end of Jake. Of course, I do not believe for a moment that this reflects on the character of ‘Jimmy The Pom’, as it is nothing but gossip.
Mind you, if I had been an innocent bystander, and a policeman had asked me if I could describe the person who spoke those last words to Jake Maloney, I would point just below my chin and say: ‘Only up to here.’
That’s the sort of effect the old toecutter has on people’s memories.
THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR
Have you ever seen a body on a cold dark night?
And even though he’s dead, he can still give a fright,
Ever tried to dig a hole with garden spade?
Then shorten him at the kneecaps with the slice of the blade,
It’s not an easy job, please take my word,
So forget the other stories you may have heard,
Dropping him in the hole, and trying to take care,
Then offering up to heaven a silent prayer,
And feeling a bit like God’s garbage collector,
The underworld’s answer to the funeral director.
