Gangland Melbourne by James Morton

Author:James Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522860382
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 2011-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

9

Shooting Stars

Some criminals have allure, some have talent, some pay great attention to detail. Ray ‘Chuck’ Bennett had and did all of those things. Like Bruce Reynolds, the leader of Britain’s Great Train Robbery, he had the brains and charisma to organise and lead a team. He was regarded by Chopper Read, himself no slouch, as not only a top gang tactician but also ‘one of the Australian underworld’s foremost bank robbers’. Bennett, once a member of the so-called Kangaroo Gang—which was in fact a series of close-knit gangs that shoplifted in Europe almost with impunity in the 1960s and 70s—was serving a sentence in Parkhurst, a high-security prison on the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England, when he devised the Great Bookie Robbery.

Built in 1880, the Victoria Club at 141 Queen Street was where Victorian bookmakers would meet to settle up on the first day after a weekend’s racing. In 1975, towards the end of his sentence, Bennett obtained a period of home leave and, amazing as it may seem, returned to Australia on a false passport to case the premises before returning to complete his sentence. Although security was incredibly lax for the amount of money floating around—some moonlighting detectives would look in to see things were all right and they invariably were—over the years a number of individuals and teams had considered the club as a target and decided it was too much like hard work. They included highly talented James ‘The Jockey’ Smith and the Chinese–Australian Leslie Woon, whose career in crime spanned twenty years. The Victoria Police Gazette described Woon as ‘not afraid to dirty his hands when planning a job. He doesn’t mix with the criminal element; using different names for his flat, car and telephone’. If Woon turned it down it certainly must have looked too much like hard work.

Now Bennett, another who had acted as a minder for Billy Longley in Melbourne’s waterfront war of the early 1970s, put together a team and took them out of the city for a period of training away from their wives and girlfriends. His second in command was another nominal painter and docker, Ian Revell ‘Fingers’ Carroll. Other members included Norman Leung Lee, who ran a dim sim restaurant, Bennett’s cousin Vinnie Mikkelsen, Anthony Paul McNamara and, while he denied it to his death, Dennis William ‘Greedy’ (sometimes ‘Fatty’) Smith, who was always thought to have been the driver. Although they had all worked together before, neither of the standover brothers Les or Brian Kane was part of Bennett’s team; neither—and particularly Brian—was thought willing to accept the discipline required. They were both said not to have minded their omission but it must have grated. Another who missed out was Bennett’s great mate Brian O’Callaghan, but that was because he was in Long Bay at the time. Bennett is said to have given him $100 000 from the takings. When Bennett was satisfied the team was ready, and after a weekend dress

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