Chopper Unchopped (33 page)

But not all ladies of loose morals are easy victims.

There was one prostitute who managed a small parlor in Prahran who stood about six feet tall and could have taken up a career on the catwalk had she been so inclined in her younger days. Her name was Lucy.

In those days Lucy had two girls working for her who were in their late teens. One night they had a visit from a group of AFL footballers from a well-known club.

The footballers were loud and drunk, celebrating a football victory. They got a little violent and refused to pay the service fee. They locked the door and raped all three women. Then they left without paying.

About a week later they came back, with a few more in the pack, for a repeat performance, only to find ‘Juicy Lucy’ standing in the doorway with a double barrelled shotgun. She screamed, ‘You bastards aren’t going to get away with this again’.

She bashed a big ruckman in the head with the butt of the gun, cutting him badly, then fired one barrel over the head of the rest of them. There were footballers everywhere running for their lives.

They might be heroes to mugs, old women and little kids, but AFL footballers don’t count for much in the underworld. And as any working girl can tell you, they have a poor reputation in the parlors as loud mouthed drunks who complain about the entrance fee.

‘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.