The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  Phillips lived in a rundown Queenslander on a steep ridge at 29 Earl Street, Petrie Terrace. It was a convenient location for the corrupt Detective Hallahan, who lived less than a hundred metres away in St James Street, and liked to call on his neighbour for information on a regular basis; sometimes Billy sent a girl over to Hallahan’s flat, other times the detective dropped by Earl Street to smoke marijuana. It was all just part of an ordinary day for Phillips, who lived with his de facto wife, Tracey, three little children and any number of friends and associates who happened to drift by.

  By the late-1960s the imposing, bearded Phillips had started mixing with ‘some very heavy characters’. He had a lengthy criminal record, primarily for assault, and was struggling financially. As a way of bolstering his tattoo business, which operated out of the Earl Street house, he was dabbling in the sale of illegal firearms. By the age of 26, Phillips had gained a reputation for being able to procure handguns and shotguns and was the first port of call for interstate criminals looking for a weapon.

  At 8.50 a.m. on Monday 9 October 1967, postman Jonus Mickus, in his Postmaster General – issue shirt and wide-brimmed hat, lugged his post bag up Earl Street, dropping off the mail. He delivered a small package to the Phillips home and continued on his route. Ten minutes later, working Belgrave Street, parallel to Earl Street, Mickus heard a tremendous blast issue from Number 29.

  Vaulting the Phillips’s back fence, Mickus rushed through a rear door to the house where he found Phillips’s wife, Tracey, 23, screaming and writhing on the bedroom floor. Billy Phillips was unconscious beside her, and their five-month-old son, Scott, was knocked out on the bed and bleeding from facial wounds. Bomb shrapnel was embedded in the victims’ bodies. The two other Phillips children were wandering about the house, dazed.

  In a rare and disturbing event for Brisbane, the Phillips’s had been sent a letter bomb. Addressed to Phillips and clearly intended for him, Tracey had innocently opened the parcel, the size of an alarm clock and wrapped in brown paper. The impact blew off her left hand and mangled her right, and her upper torso and face were mutilated.

  Police later learned the bomb contained a nine-volt battery detonation system and gelignite. It was housed in a small, Asian-style trinket box made of magnolia and birchwood. Did the assassination attempt stem from underworld knowledge that Phillips had been working as a police informant?

  Surgeons were unable to save Tracey Phillips’s right hand and she was also blinded. Her face was disfigured and it was discovered she was pregnant and lost the baby. Phillips and his son recovered.

  Neighbour and friend Glen Hallahan quickly set about interviewing some known criminals to try and establish who may have sent the bomb. As part of his investigation he contacted brothel madam Shirley Brifman in Sydney. Brifman would later recall talking to Hallahan in an interview with police: ‘Tracey Phillips copped the bomb. Glen told me that Billy stood at the door and said to Tracey, “Don’t open that, it will be a bomb” … Being a sticky beak she did open it.’

  At the time of the bomb, O’Dempsey was sitting in Boggo Road on his safe-cracking and weapons charges. He had been locked up for more than a year and was due for release in late 1970. He was with some of his fellow inmates when news of the bombing came over the radio. O’Dempsey immediately turned to some of the inmates and confided to them that the bomb had been delivered in a jewellery box. This information was not yet available to the public.

  Years later, criminal Billy Stokes would write in his waterside workers magazine, Port News:

  The Loner [O’Dempsey] is well known to police. He is considered a very violent man capable of violent acts, and is, in fact, the man who claims to be the instigator of the parcel bomb that was posted to a Brisbane tattooist, William Phillips, several years ago. The fact that this parcel bomb was opened by Phillips’ de-facto wife, who subsequently suffered the blast with her children, is only a pointer to how callous some violent men can be.

  Although The Loner was serving a term of imprisonment when the parcel bomb was posted, he liked to make it well known that it was on his instructions that the bomb was posted to Phillips because of a personal dispute between them.

  Decades later, one of O’Dempsey’s lovers would tell the police, and a court hearing, about Vince and the Phillips bomb. When police suggested she confess to what she knew about O’Dempsey and his past, she said in a record of interview: ‘You can’t protect me. Billy Phillips’s wife’s hands got blown off. Vince was in gaol and Vince was responsible for it from Boggo Road Prison.’

  The police asked: ‘What’s your source of that information?’

  O’Dempsey’s former lover said: ‘Vince. Vince told me he did it. That he was responsible. That he didn’t mean for it to happen to her. He told me the whole background version of the story.’

  Billy Stokes later said: ‘In gaol during the 1960s, Vince O’Dempsey told me that he thought Phillips had informed on him to police, and because of this suspicion when Phillips was posted that parcel-bomb, some thought O’Dempsey may have arranged it.’

  Another criminal associate says O’Dempsey was fascinated by explosives and was an expert on the subject. He says O’Dempsey used these skills in his ‘safe-cracking days’ in the 1960s. ‘He promised me, like, he’d teach me about explosives,’ the associate says. ‘So I got these electric dets … detonators … and had two of them in a plastic bag, in a sandwich bag in me pocket. And he said to me, he said, “The first lesson, never carry two dets in a plastic bag in your pocket together. One spark, you’re fucked. It’ll blow your chest clean off.”

  ‘I said, “You’re fucking joking, I thought you’d have to have a spark to set them off?”

  ‘And he asked me: “Would you risk it?”

  ‘I thought, fucking little bit too dangerous for me, fucking explosives. But they used to blow safes and that, see? When they’d knock a safe off they’d blow the door out.’

  The associate had also heard a lot of talk over the years about the bomb sent to Phillips’s place. ‘But to my understanding … he [Vince] didn’t do it, right?’ the associate says. ‘Billy Phillips was seen with O’Dempsey after the bombing … Vince tried to quieten it all down, you know, to make it look like it wasn’t him. But see, he gave the order. There’s no two ways about that, and Billy’s sheila got her fucking hand blown off, didn’t she?

  ‘There you go.’

  Not long before Vince O’Dempsey was released from gaol, he told a friend in gaol that he had a visitor appear in his cell. He said the devil had come and sat on the end of his bed. O’Dempsey said the devil spoke to him but the language was indecipherable.

  The friend replied: ‘I thought he might have told you to keep up the good work.’

  A Black Day for Society

  Vince O’Dempsey was released from Boggo Road Gaol in Brisbane’s Dutton Park – just a couple of kilometres south-west of Highgate Hill – in December 1970. Before he was set free, he had some minor altercations with some of the Boggo screws who were harassing him as he waited, in his suit, to be let out.

  Another prisoner was also due to be released at the same time. The second O’Dempsey got out, according to the other prisoner, he remarked that it was is ‘a black day for society’. That’s exactly what he said. Boggo Road … that’s what furnished O’Dempsey. He came out a brand new shining fucking monster.’

  O’Dempsey immediately went to stay with Billy McCulkin at his newly rented property in Dorchester Street. McCulkin would later tell police that O’Dempsey was there for about six weeks and was a model house guest. He used to go to bed early and he kept to himself.

  His recent stint in gaol had certainly been his most prolonged time away from his home town and after his release O’Dempsey split his time between Brisbane and Warwick. By 15 February 1971, he had returned to Warwick and commenced work at a poultry farm in Dragon Street, across the railway line, just west of town.
The farm was owned and run by a highly respected family in Warwick. ‘Vince was just a factory worker in the abattoir,’ says one former co-worker at the farm. ‘He was dealing with knives and things like that. On any given day we were processing anywhere between 1500 and 3000 chickens. Vince was a good worker. He’d kill about 400 to 600 per day.’

  During ‘smoko’, the workers would gather around the table in the smoko room and trade stories. ‘He was an extremely interesting man to talk to,’ the co-worker recalls. ‘He could tell you anything you wanted to know about Appaloosa horses. He used to talk about his time in Boggo Road. He’d say you can get anything you like in prison, from tobacco to drugs. Blackmarket stuff.

  ‘He used to insist he never, ever did any of it himself, the drugs and stuff. But he was the instigator, the organiser of the blackmarket stuff. Vince’d be in there in the smoko room eating his cake and chatting away. He was a very smart man, very cluey. But he had terrible eyes. Scary blue eyes. They were chilling.’

  The co-worker recalls O’Dempsey expressing his hatred for the police. They were all ‘pigs’ to him. One day the co-worker said O’Dempsey approached the poultry farm workers during another break. ‘Vince said to me that he never, ever killed anybody, he always got someone else to do it. He said that to a group of us. He said he’d never been found guilty of any murder, and that there were always ways around it. I really believed that man the day he said that.’

  After two months at the poultry farm, O’Dempsey simply didn’t turn up for work one day, and never returned. The farm’s employment records show that the date O’Dempsey formally ceased employment was 23 April 1971.

  His tenure may have been fleeting, but he left a lasting impression on his fellow workers. ‘You often wondered what made him tick,’ one said. ‘We’d just sit there and listen to his stories and hear the things he had in his brain and just be amazed. You’d ask yourself – is he human? It was like he stepped out of a fairytale. Out of a book. We were naive I suppose. But we were left to wonder – did that really happen?’

  While most of O’Dempsey’s family still lived in Warwick, including his ageing parents, he also maintained a few old friendships. A creature of habit, at 32 years old O’Dempsey was fit from prison. He returned to his old rugby team, the Collegians, for a weekly hit-out.

  To some of Warwick’s young men at the time, he was already a legend. He’d bashed a copper almost to death. He’d done two stints in prison. He may have killed a man. When he was in town, playing pool, or going from one pub to another in Palmerin Street, the young toughs followed him like he was ‘the Pied Piper’.

  But O’Dempsey had plans, and fresh out of gaol he couldn’t get traction without money. It didn’t take long to realise that there was more money to be made in Brisbane. It was Billy McCulkin who got him a job at Queensland criminal identity Paul Meade’s ‘mock auction’ shop in Queen Street.

  Mock auctions were a scam that stemmed back to the Victorian era, where criminal associates of those running the auctions would act as fellow customers purchasing superior goods at bargain prices. The auctioneer would then win the trust of gullible buyers and sell them inferior or faulty goods at inflated prices. McCulkin would later tell police he worked ‘wrapping things’ with O’Dempsey at Meade’s auctions. O’Dempsey, in fact, acted as both security guard and spruiker, enticing pedestrians to come into the auctions.

  ‘You had to buy a box at the door to get in,’ says one former visitor to the mock auctions. ‘The condition of getting through the door was to buy a box. One day these two guys came in and they didn’t have a box and O’Dempsey, being the pedantic bastard that he is, noticed this. He said they can’t be in here. He thought they were jacks [police].

  ‘He went over to them and he pointed out a sign on the wall which was one of those signs that says, you know, the management reserve the right to refuse entry to anybody. They told him to piss off so he read it to them again and asked them if they understood it. They told him it didn’t apply to them because they were coppers. He said, “Who the fuck do they think they are?” When he got worked up his face was very stern. The eyes, they’d penetrate your skull. He told them to get out and said he’d remove them if they didn’t. They left.’

  O’Dempsey also enjoyed a good practical joke. A former associate recalls a day at the mock auctions when a lady tried to return a clock that didn’t work. ‘Vince said, “No worries Madam I’ll fix it up for you.” So … they had this rat trap and they caught this dead rat. They threw it in the box and wrapped it back up and said, “There you go Madam. She’s all fixed.”

  ‘He used to get on the [front] door and … spruik out, “Come one, come all.” Oh God, he was a funny one … we did have some good times, you know?’

  O’Dempsey would also make frequent trips to Sydney. It was there he met his future de facto wife, the prostitute Dianne Pritchard. Pritchard had somehow gotten herself involved in a sensational murder in Sydney in late 1968, when O’Dempsey was serving time in Boggo Road in Brisbane.

  A woman, Miriam Mordo, 49, had been killed by a bomb placed in her car in Five Dock in the city’s inner-west. Four men were charged, including Kingsley Harris, 26, of no fixed address. Harris allegedly told police he had been offered $2500 to frighten Mrs Mordo because she had made one of his co-accused, Paolo Falcone, 54, a baker in Five Dock, a ‘slave’ by giving him the ‘evil eye’.

  Dianne Margaret Pritchard, 18, of Victoria Street, Kings Cross, was charged with being an accessory after the fact, having harboured, maintained and assisted Harris following the murder. She was pregnant when she was charged. She was found guilty and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

  One of O’Dempsey and Pritchard’s friends says they would have most certainly met in Sydney in the early 1970s. ‘She was a prostitute in Sydney at the time and everyone in that community knew each other,’ he says. ‘She must have been introduced to him by his mate Stewart John Regan. She never had a brain to bless her with.’

  Pritchard was also terrible ‘on the drink’. Friend Carolyn Scully, sister to Tommy Hamilton, says: ‘Well, she had a hard life. She got on the grog. She was shocking. She could be pretty aggressive if she was drinking. You couldn’t say she was a good mother or anything, but she liked to be happy. She liked to go out. Liked to enjoy herself.’

  Regan, like O’Dempsey, was deemed a psychopath by criminals and police alike. He would soon establish a small business empire in south-east Queensland, buying and selling land and renovating and flipping properties. Regan was particularly partial to the Noosa region and at one point would go on to make a property investment with O’Dempsey and businessman Paul Meade. But Regan’s main source of income, his bread and butter, was on the mean streets of Sydney.

  One newspaper report outlined Regan’s credentials as a brothel keeper and hard man in the Cross: ‘… the surly criminal maintained a Harem like some Eastern sultan,’ it wrote of him. ‘Police knew that Regan’s exploitation of Kings Cross prostitutes had been the basis of his fortune and believed that he kept his five key girls disciplined by knuckle and boot techniques. These five girls … earned up to $7000 a week between them, of which Regan took more than $5200 … the girls said he brought them flowers and gifts to the Kings Cross flats he provided for each of them.’

  Mirroring Regan, O’Dempsey would soon become Brisbane’s own vice hard man, and control the trade for corrupt police.

  When O’Dempsey was in Brisbane, he would occasionally drink with McCulkin and others at the Lands Office Hotel, a hive of local and interstate criminals and corrupt police. They were known as the ‘Lands Office Mob’.

  O’Dempsey eventually secured his own flat in Harcourt Street, New Farm, but he still stayed in touch with McCulkin, dropping into Dorchester Street to offer racing tips.

  McCulkin later offered a description of O’Dempsey as a man who took ‘short quick steps like a woman’; that he held one arm in front
of himself with his arm bent at right angles when talking; that he kept fit and did not smoke; that he had an intense interest in guns, particularly sawn-off shotguns; that he was in the Army and topped the class in ballistics; that he was colour blind; that he was hard to frighten, methodical, and tight with money; that he didn’t like the sunlight because he was fair-skinned and burnt easily; and that he had a tattoo of St George and the Dragon on his chest, on his back and both legs.

  O’Dempsey shared one trait with McCulkin. Both had tattoos of mice on their penises. It was why McCulkin was referred to as ‘The Mouse’.

  When he was back in Brisbane, O’Dempsey also stayed in touch with the young criminal and convicted rapist, Garry Reginald ‘Shorty’ Dubois, whom he’d met in Boggo Road. Dubois, in turn, would regroup with his old neighbourhood gang, including Tommy ‘Clockwork Orange’ Hamilton, Peter Hall and Keith Meredith.

  Peter Hall later confirmed to police that by the 1970s the gang had graduated to a virtual full-time break and enter crew. ‘We would usually drive around beforehand and check places and things out,’ Hall recalled. ‘We would go for small things, hairdressers and things, then if there was a bigger job that needed more men we would arrange to meet up at a time and place during the night and do the jobs together. We had a few contacts we used to get rid of the gear. It was just how we lived. We also had people we knew that would give us shopping lists and we would go and do shoplifts to get the items and sell them to the consumers at good prices.’

  And where there was crime, there were corrupt police. Peter Hall remembered that the gang had a tidy arrangement with local coppers. ‘There were some coppers we spoke to back then,’ he later told police in a statement. ‘Money would change hands, like a couple of hundred, and charges would be broken down … we never got off scot-free. ‘They [the police] were from Nundah station, and when we first met they were nasty to us, so over time we got to know them. Sometimes they just got to keep the stuff they took off us. It didn’t hurt to ask, sometimes if we got caught we would see if they could help. I can’t remember their names but they busted me and Tom [Hamilton] at a house at Wavell Heights one time and after that we had a bit to do with them.’