Menu
What's new
Troll Kingdom

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

The Road to 2,222

raychuck.jpg


RAY Chuck was the mastermind of the 1976 Great Bookie Robbery and one of the most dashing crooks of his time. Long before he was led from the old court-holding cells in Russell Street, he knew there was a bullet waiting for him.Charged with an armed robbery, he thought he was safer in custody than on bail. He was wrong.
Chuck and two others had beaten charges of killing painter and docker Les Kane, machine-gunned within a few feet of his horrified wife and children in their Wantirna home a year before.

Kane, later described by his widow Judi as "the most violent man in Australia", had declared war on Chuck and his mates, Vinnie Mikkelsen and Laurie Prendergast. But the wily Chuck had got in first.

Les Kane's body and his pink Ford Futura were never seen again. But his older brother, Brian Kane, Melbourne's top stand-over man, had no doubts about who'd done it. When witnesses described the courthouse killer as a man in a suit with glasses and beard, everyone assumed it was Brian in disguise. As investigations petered out, it seemed clear that rogue police helped him set up the perfect hit.

Someone thought so because, three years later, Brian was shot dead in a Brunswick pub by masked men. Mourners at his funeral included the entire Moran clan: three of them later shot dead in their own war. Such is life — and death — in Australia's criminal world.

The painter and docker war was always compelling. Now it's showbiz. The life and crimes of the Kanes and their enemies are part of the 1970s and 1980s crime scene mined by the producers of Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities.As the title suggests, the series tells interlocking stories from Sydney and Melbourne — not to mention the murder of Donald Mackay in Griffith. A unifying theme — apart from police and political corruption — is horrific violence. Skilled filmmakers can convey this with brutal impact. Harder to convey is the invisible damage done to those left behind.

The murders portrayed in the series left women and children to piece together shattered lives. Most of them have kept to themselves for 30 years — as dignified, in their way, as the admirable Barbara Mackay, widow of the brave man who died for his principles.

There is Kath Flannery, widow of the hitman Christopher Dale Flannery, whose body was never found after he disappeared in Sydney in 1985. There is Gail Bennett, widow of Ray Chuck. And Ursula Prendergast, widow of Ray Chuck's co-offender Laurie Prendergast. Each has children who have grown up in the shadow of their fathers' violent lives and deaths.

Judi Kane, widow of Les, has broken her long silence in order to have some influence in the depiction of her family before the nightmare of October 19, 1978, when the gunmen came for her husband.

Like most tragedies, hers began as a love story. The young hairdresser fell for a man whose cocky self-assurance hid a psychopathic streak. By the time she realised they would never live happily ever after, she was in too deep. Les and his brother and all the others who lived by the fist and the gun were doomed to a fatal clash of ego, greed and power.

"Brian and Les got sick of it in the end," she told me last year.

"But, unfortunately, they reaped what they sowed."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top