‘One day I sat with them and I said, “How come you guys are here every afternoon?” and they said they went to therapy, and I said, “What kind of therapy?” They said, “Well, we’re going for therapy because we don’t know whether we’re gay or not.” I told them I thought they’d know if they were or not. They said, “No, because we like women’s company, but we like men’s company better.”’
Kirkov recalls: ‘There used to be a team of three police who used to come in for morning tea, lunch; another lot for afternoon tea and dinner, and all that sort of stuff. It was always [Tony] Murphy, [Glen] Hallahan, and there was another guy but I don’t know what happened to him.’
A friend of Hannay’s at the time confirms the police presence at The Cave. Police Commissioner Frank Bischof had recently set up his Juvenile Aid Bureau and put Tony Murphy in charge. ‘John was probably most involved with Glen Hallahan,’ he says. ‘As for Bischof, we used to call him “Bischof the boy killer”. The word was he shot a paperboy in Melbourne Street, South Brisbane. At that hotel, the Terminus.’
Years later, when asked if it was true that Bischof was a regular visitor to The Cave, Hannay replied, ‘Yes, Bischof.’ When asked if he knew Tony Murphy, Hannay nodded. It was nothing new. In his line of business over the decades, he knew virtually everybody in the city when it came to restaurants, nightclubs and entertainers, let alone police and politicians.
According to author Geoff Plunkett, around the time that Kirkov was helping Hannay to manage Alice’s, Hannay was sacked by the Little brothers. John Bell took over the Whiskey’s management. By this stage the Littles’s clubs were in debt and accountants had been appointed to liquidate both the Whiskey and Chequers.
Then, less than two months later on 16 January 1973, Alice’s went up in flames, supposedly taking the financial records of the Whiskey Au Go Go with it.
Police suspected an insurance scam but nobody was charged with any offences in relation to the fire. Criminal Billy Stokes says: ‘When Hannay moved into the Whiskey Au Go Go he had the liquor licence, he was the only one authorised to write a cheque, he did all the hiring and firing of everyone there, but his official role was as the bookkeeper, and sort of like a manager … he said he kept all the Whiskey records at Alice’s restaurant … there was a fire in Alice’s and the records were lost. Now after those records are lost this is when everyone learned the Whiskey was broke and owed a squillion.’
And what of the Whiskey records? Had Hannay arranged the torching of Alice’s not only for insurance, but to incinerate incriminating evidence in the Whiskey’s ledgers showing that large amounts of money had mysteriously gone missing?
One close friend of Hannay’s at the time said: ‘I don’t think John kept any financial books for the Whiskey. At the end of the year, if you had to pay tax, you’d do the records up then.
‘John didn’t keep records.’
Torino’s
Brisbane was suddenly a city of fires.
In January 1973 two arson attempts were also made on Chequers Nightclub in the city, the other salubrious venue owned by brothers Ken and Brian Little. The fires were only small and because the damage was minor, the Littles didn’t report them to police.
Meanwhile, journalist Brian Bolton was continuing to receive information from John Andrew Stuart about the Sydney protection racket that he threatened would soon be overtaking the nightclub scene in south-east Queensland. According to records witnessed by author Geoff Plunkett, just four weeks after the fires at Chequers and Alice’s, on 20 February 1973, Bolton made a call to Police Minister Max Hodges to pass on some important information.
‘I suppose you’ve been told of the bombing threat on the Whiskey Au Go Go?’ Bolton asked Hodges.
‘No, what’s that all about?’
‘I’ve told [Police Comissioner] Mr Whitrod and Inspector [Don] Becker of several yarns I’ve had with John Andrew Stuart, you know of him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he says that an extortion racket is soon to blow up in the nightclubs in Brisbane and the Gold Coast,’ Bolton continued. ‘He says the men behind it are going to blow up an empty club, first as a warning, and if none of the owners takes any notice they’re going to blow up the Whiskey Au Go Go because it’s the easiest one to get at, while it’s full of people.’
‘No, I haven’t heard anything about it,’ the Police Minister said. ‘Next time I’m talking to Ray [Whitrod] I must ask him what he knows.’
Then, something happened that suggested Stuart’s prophecy was coming true. Five days later, at around 9.25 p.m. on 25 February 1973, a quiet Sunday evening in Fortitude Valley was shattered by a massive explosion in Torino’s restaurant and nightclub at 671 Ann Street, not far from the precincts main bars and clubs.
Decades later, Clockwork Orange Gang member Peter Hall confessed to the crime. He said he and the gang had been seconded by Vincent O’Dempsey and Billy McCulkin to bomb Torino’s. ‘We were paid to set the place alight, and we were told it was arranged by the owners of the club,’ Hall said in a police witness statement in the murder trial of Garry ‘Shorty’ Dubois in late 2016. ‘The deal was organised by Vince O’Dempsey through Shorty. We were told that it was an insurance job, and we were paid $500, which was split four ways.’
Peter Hall recalled setting the Torino’s fire. ‘I remember this night we did a drive-by, there were no lights on inside, so we parked the car and walked in, we forced the side or back door and took in big containers of petrol,’ he later told police. ‘It was pretty dark and I didn’t know the place, there was an upstairs area and I went up there. No one was there … we had been told no one would be on the premises, but we checked. We had two big plastic containers which contained fuel. We spread it all around in there, just downstairs, made a petrol trail to just outside the door we had forced and set it alight. I think it was Tom [Hamilton] who lit the match.’
Hall said they almost blew the Torino’s shopfront onto themselves, such was the power of the explosion. ‘As we were leaving the front windows blew out,’ he recalled. ‘We thought the fire would just follow the trail, we didn’t realise the fumes would cause an explosion of sorts. We didn’t really know what we were doing and we almost blew ourselves up. No one was hurt but we gave ourselves a fright.
‘I recall we were driving the green Studebaker, it was parked a block or so away and we ran back to the car. We watched the fire for a bit from a distance.’
Brisbane woke to the news that the Torino Restaurant and Nightclub – run by brothers Frank and Tony Ponticello – had been ‘bombed’.
Police suspected a bomb, given the extent of the damage, yet detectives were puzzled. The blast seemed disproportionate to the space being targeted. It appeared the perpetrators may have used a combination of gelignite, petrol and the building’s gas main. The Ponticello brothers told police they knew nobody who had a grudge against them.
‘That was our first and only big job,’ Hall admitted. ‘This was a big deal for us, up until that point we were just break and enter people, but it was good money and we got quite a buzz or an adrenalin hit out of it.’
At the time, Tommy Hamilton and Peter Hall also confessed to Tommy’s sister, Carolyn Scully, about their involvement in the Torino’s fire. ‘It was Billy McCulkin that organised all of that,’ she recalls. ‘That’s what he told me. Vince wasn’t even here [in Brisbane]. Peter told me, then Tommy told me. And then he [Tommy] said about the money. He was supposed to get $500 and then $500 afterwards and he [McCulkin] didn’t give him the other $500. He just cheated them out of it.
‘And I said, “You’ve done what you’ve done for what? And you could have been killed. What a fool. What a stupid thing to do.” They wanted the money, that’s all. Within a week and a half the police investigated it and said it was a gas leak. So it’s over and done with. Finished. No one knew.’
Over in Dorchester Street, Barbara McCulkin had
for some weeks been picking up information about the impending ‘fires’ through the rogue’s gallery of criminals visiting her husband, Billy. The house was full of chatter about the arson jobs and Stuart’s claims that Sydney bigshots were behind the string of fires. Even Vicki and Leanne were piecing together snippets of information they heard in conversations in the house in those early months of the year.
According to sources, Vicki was sharing stories about the fires with one of the children of Billy Phillips. By this stage, the Phillips’s family was living directly behind the McCulkins, and shared a gate on the back fence, an escape route of sorts, when needed, between the two families.
Barbara continued to work at the Milky Way café despite the mayhem around her, and cryptically said to her workmate Ellen Gilbert about the Torino’s bombing: ‘I’ll tell you something funny about that one day.’
What did Barbara have to tell that was so humorous? Could it have been that she knew who was behind the Torino’s arson, her husband included, and that the fools had nearly gotten themselves killed blowing up the joint?
For journalist Brian ‘The Eagle’ Bolton, the blaze at Torino’s confirmed that a wave of terror was about to hit the city. It was vindication of the scare stories he’d been running for weeks. Bolton wrote:
The bombing of a Valley nightclub last Sunday was just the first shot in a massive extortion racket by Sydney criminals demanding protection money from clubs between Brisbane and the border. One Sydney crime lord and another ranking crime boss are plotting to milk at least $10,000 a week from dozens of clubs and class restaurants.
When Sunday Sun put the result of its investigations to the Police Commissioner Mr Whitrod, he said: ‘Police are working on this line of inquiry.’
Bolton wrote that criminals were set to demand ‘a huge slice of the takings using the protection racket threat as well as a choking split of fees paid to entertainers they will insist be employed by nightspot operators’. The story continued:
The demands, it was decided, would be made after the first warning – the bombing a few weeks later of an empty Brisbane nightclub. If the nightspot operators did not heed the follow-up ransom demands, expected in the next couple of months, the bombing weapon would be used with no warning.
It was all wild and heady stuff from Bolton. John Andrew Stuart had told him this was coming, and it had. But the problem with the story, and Bolton’s theories of a southern takeover, was that you had to trust and believe John Andrew Stuart, a notorious liar. Despite all of his warnings, Stuart was nowhere near Ann Street on the night of the Torino fire. In fact, in what would amount to a fortunate coincidence, he was languishing in the city watchhouse, having been arrested earlier that evening for being in possession of a concealable firearm.
What Bolton and the police didn’t know was that the perpetrators of Torino’s were not from the Sydney badlands. They were local boys, who, after the job, had gone home to their rented place in Brisbane’s inner-north and drank the bottles of liquor they’d stolen from the now incinerated restaurant and bar. They were also unaware at this stage, that Stuart’s close friend, James Richard Finch, had just arrived back in Brisbane from the United Kingdom and that together the two would become embroiled in the plot of one of Australia’s worst mass murders.
One associate says he visited the home of some members of the Clockwork Orange Gang the morning after the Torino’s bombing. ‘I had met O’Dempsey in Boggo Road [in the 1960s],’ he says. ‘I didn’t meet Dubois until after the end of 1972. I met McCulkin around town, [and] at the auction shops they had in the heart of town.
‘The Clockwork Orange Gang, they rented a nice house. They had two Studebakers. Shorty Dubois’s girlfriend was still going to school, and she’d bring her schoolgirl mates back to the house. On the Monday morning I was on my way to work in town and I popped in to say hi. Hamilton admitted to torching Torino’s. Hamilton, Dubois, Hall and Meredith, they all told me that. They were all laughing.
‘They said O’Dempsey and McCulkin got them to do that.’
A Warning
Just days after the bombing of Torino’s on 27 February, a Brisbane Commonwealth Police officer, Sergeant Bill Humphris, reported in to Detective Sergeant Jim Voigt from Whitrod’s Crime Intelligence Unit (CIU) with some interesting details he was receiving from an informant.
Humphris reported that Stuart had told his informant that the ‘B … brothers’ intended on bombing the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub on Petrie Terrace, ‘by placing a bomb on the ground floor of the building while patrons were being entertained on the floor above’. Apparently they had told Stuart he could earn as much as $5000 per week if he would approach nightclub owners on behalf of a Sydney syndicate. Stuart allegedly told the informant they would first have to bomb a couple of clubs to show the owners they meant business.
Humphris’s information, however, was not immediately passed up the chain to Whitrod. Why? Given Voigt’s reputation for honesty and diligence, had the information indeed been passed on to the commissioner’s office but blocked before Whitrod could see it?
Detective Basil Hicks of the CIU also had a number of conversations around this time in which Stuart insisted that there was going to be another fire. On 28 February Stuart visited Hicks at his office and told him that four fellows from Sydney were asking him to make contacts around the clubs, so they could ‘come up and bomb one and collect money from the others’. At one point Stuart was close to tears. He told Hicks: ‘You don’t understand. They told me what they were going to do ... and they’ll expect me to do my part. I want someone to [go] round the clubs with me while I tell them I won’t have any part in it.’
The problem was, each time Stuart told his story, the details changed. According to author Geoff Plunkett, Hicks wrote notes on his recorded conversations with Stuart:
I don’t believe his story about the people from Sydney … It is possible he is just making the whole thing up to get more attention from Brian Bolton … Also he wants to make it known that if anything happens he is not responsible.
According to police records seen by Plunkett, Jim Voigt also made notes on the intelligence coming in from the Commonwealth Police in relation to the Torino’s incident.
We believe the recent fires have been for insurance purposes … We know that Stuart has been standing over club owners in Brisbane. However, we of the Crime Intelligence Unit are of the opinion that threats by Stuart and recent publicity is only a front for owners of various places to burn them down for insurance reasons, and we are almost certain that was the case with the burning of Hannay’s nightclub.
It seemed extraordinary that at this point in history, in the days before the Whiskey tragedy occurred, various nightclub owners and managers across Brisbane, assorted local gangsters and nightclub crooners and band managers, a journalist, and members of the Queensland State police force and of the Australian Commonwealth Police were aware that a nightclub was going to be variously firebombed or, incredibly, hit with hand grenades, and that it was likely to be the Whiskey Au Go Go, and that it would probably take place around Wednesday 7 March. But the warnings weren’t heeded.
Indeed, in the days leading up to the Whiskey tragedy, rumours were also filtering through to political circles. On the first day back from Christmas break, there was some curious and strangely prescient debate happening in State Parliament. During Question Without Notice, Russell Hinze – not yet a Cabinet Minister – addressed his own Minister for Works and Housing (whose responsibility also included the police), Max Hodges.
In parliament, Hinze asked Hodges if he had seen a statement in the previous Sunday’s Sunday Sun about a group of southern criminals who appeared to be coming to the Brisbane and Gold Coast areas and standing over restaurant proprietors. Hinze asked: ‘Is he prepared to assure the House that ample police protection is available both on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane to stamp out any Mafia-type hoodlums who may try to e
nter this State?’
Hodges replied: ‘This matter is under control by the Police Department. I can give the honourable member that assurance.’
It was a loaded question from Hinze, directed at one of the government’s own Cabinet Ministers and by proxy Police Commissioner Whitrod. Why would Hinze direct a Question Without Notice to a member of his own government? Had he been swallowing journalist Brian Bolton’s fantastical reports of a Sydney crime gang takeover of Brisbane nightclubs, or did he know something that nobody else did? Or was Hinze joining the growing band of those opposed to Ray Whitrod’s commissionership of the Queensland police. The dissenters, with detective Tony Murphy at the forefront, had been railing against Whitrod even before he was formally sworn in as commissioner in 1970.
Whitrod’s attempt to modernise the force through education, the admission of more women and the introduction of a system of promotion based on merit and not seniority, had more than pricked at the rank and file. There was open sedition. And the rancour had finally caught the attention of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Whitrod had survived several votes of no confidence in his leadership from the powerful police union, and had stood firm against the threats and childish practical jokes. But there was a sense in the first months of 1973 that anything was possible when it came to destabilising his power.
It appeared Whitrod was under siege from both the government and the Opposition. All that was needed to underline his incompetency and unsuitability for the job was a major, perhaps shocking, public catastrophe. As it transpired, that would serendipitously occur in less than 48 hours.
The Night Dragon Page 9
