Killing the Fatboy: Carl Williams, Mick Gatto and the Melbourne gangland war (Part Two: 1976–1981)
By the mid-1970s, organised crime in Melbourne was dominated by the Painters and Dockers Union, control of which had been wrestled away from the left-wingers in the previous decades. Since then, the union had become an increasingly central part of the city’s underworld, exerting a tax on the proceeds of crime. To some degree, it appears that employers and the state largely tolerated this, given that the alternative had been a more militant PDU. As time went on however, further violence would lead to media headlines and a Royal Commission, with the union ultimately deregistered in 1993.
In April 1976, around $15 million was stolen from the bookmakers at Melbourne’s Victoria Club. Known as the ‘Great Bookie Robbery’, the heist is believed to have been masterminded by Raymond ‘Chuck’ Bennett, a Painter and Docker who had left the country in the 1960s to join a ring of Australian shoplifters operating in Europe. Known as the ‘Kangaroo Gang’, the group had also included the deceased Desmond Costello, and was dissolved in the 1970s, with several members entering the international drug trade afterwards.
For his part, Bennett returned to Australia, making waves with both the Great Bookie Robbery and his subsequent refusal to pay tribute to Les and Brian Kane, two senior figures in the FSPDU. With tensions escalating over the Great Bookie Robbery, Bennett struck first, with Les Kane gunned down in his home in 1978. Although Bennett was acquitted in the resulting trial, he was himself shot dead while appearing in court on an unrelated charge. The killer, generally believed to be Brian Kane, escaped. By 1982 however, he too was dead, murdered in a Melbourne hotel. Again, the crime remains unsolved, although in a later development, Bennett associate Laurie Prendergast disappeared a few years later.
The murky history surrounding the Painters and Dockers makes it unclear whether there wider struggles going on in the union that lay behind the conflict over the proceeds of the Great Bookie Robbery. At any rate, later developments give a sense of the power structure associated with the Kane, which would carry out without them. A close associate of the brothers had been Graham Kinniburgh, who gained a reputation as a powerful force in Melbourne’s underworld. As for the new generation of the city’s syndicates, Jason Moran would keep the legacy of the Kanes going by marrying Les’s daughter, becoming a prominent drug trafficker through his close contacts with former Painters and Dockers after the union was deregistered in the 1990s.
In 1980, the Royal Commission on the Activities of the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union was called. Headed up by lawyer Frank Costigan, the inquiry soon strayed from its initial focus on the PDU, and instead identified a unnamed Melbourne business owner as the conduit between organised crime and the legal economy. Eventually, this kingpin was identified as Kerry Packer, a major player in Australia’s media industry. Represented by future Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Packer vigorously defended the allegations of tax evasion and money laundering, with the charges eventually dropped in 1987.
Whatever Packer’s role in organised crime, the Costigan Commission kept the investigations into the Painters and Dockers separate from two other major inquiries of the time: the Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking (1977-1979), and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking (1981–1983), which had come during a period of wider turmoil in Australian crime. Unlike Costigan’s focus on the state of Victoria, these had centred on New South Wales, particularly the affairs of the Nugan Hand bank, which had collapsed amidst allegations of money laundering and connections to the CIA.
Set up in 1973, the events which led to the bank’s fall began in 1977, with the disappearance of Griffith business owner Don Mackay. An aspiring politician, Mckay had campaigned against local Marijuana growers in the region, attracting attention after tipping off the local police to a nearby plot. As it would be later alleged, local ‘Ndrangheta kingpin Robert Trimbole had ordered Mackay’s murder, which was carried out by Painter and Docker Jim Bazely. By that point, Trimbole had become a key player in the ‘Mr Asia’ heroin syndicate, which operated through various front companies. It appears that the Mr Asia group was also linked to the Nugan Hand bank through Brian Alexander, a Sydney-based solicitor who disappeared shortly before he was due to appear before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking.
Although Trimbole was never charged over the Mackay murder, the attention did lead to increasing scrutiny of the business dealings of the Griffith-based Nugan family. Soon, Frank and Ken Nugan would be charged with falsifying corporate documents, and hiring former police officer Fred Krahe to intimidate angry investors. By 1980, Frank Nugan was dead, found in his car with a bullet wound to the head which was ruled to have been self-inflicted.
While investigating the death, police found a business card in Nugan’s pocket. The card belonged to William Colby, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Subsequent revelations about the activities of the Nugan Hand bank would uncover covert operations across the Asia-Pacific region, most notably, the mass trafficking of heroin by the CIA’s contacts in the Golden Triangle. Facilitated by a network of legitimate companies set up by the bankers at Nugan Hand, heroin would pour into Australia, with a significant amount of it understood to have entered the country through Melbourne’s waterfront. During the violence which swept Australia’s underworld following the collapse of the Nugan Hand bank, the Painters and Dockers would be drawn into the conflict.
Part Three coming soon, for more on organised crime in Australia:
The Nugan Hand Scandal: Heroin, the CIA and a gangland war in Sydney
The Green Bans: Was Juanita Nielsen murdered on the orders of Abe Saffron?