Prelude to a Tragedy
On the evening of 7 March 1973, Lucy Kirkov, former manager of a number of clubs and restaurants owned by impresario John Hannay, was having drinks in the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub. Among the city’s surfeit of nightclubs and drinking spots, the Whiskey had quickly earned a seedy reputation. Petty gangsters and corrupt police came and went. Working girls were rumoured to be operating out of the long, rectangular first-floor club.
Kirkov occasionally worked at the Whiskey, and knew the new manager, John Bell, and the Little brothers. The likeable Bell was a well-known figure in the local club scene, in part for his imposing size, and his attractive, genial, fun-loving personality. He had taken over from John Hannay when Hannay was sacked in November the year before.
Bell’s daughter, Kathy, recalled the days her father worked at the Whiskey nightclub. ‘If I wanted to see him I always went into the Whiskey,’ said Kathy, who was about 13 years old in early 1974. ‘I’d meet him there, and I met, you know, all those sort of famous actors who used to sing in there. But yeah, I’d always come down to the Whiskey because they all did their business during the daytime and then he would sleep of an afternoon, and then go back to the club.’
She said she remembered her father talking about how there was talk at the time of criminals wanting to extort clubs and restaurants throughout Brisbane. ‘Well, he did say that they were trying to take over,’ she recalled. ‘But Brisbane was such a small country town back in those days. And he used to say to me all the time, “I don’t know what they want”, you know.
‘But I know my dad really loved [Premier] Joh Bjelke-Petersen because they could do whatever they wanted, they never had to worry about the law. You know, it really was a paradise up here [in Queensland]. Basically, you know, they said there was no casinos up here and there was no poker machines up here. But just about everything else went on. I think that John Stuart left down there [Sydney], thought he could take over [up here] because he knew people, and everyone went, “Nah, you’re nobody, really.”’
Kathy said corrupt police were always in and out of the Whiskey. Bell had a good relationship with some of them. So much so that Bell telephoned and warned them that something was going to ‘go down’ on the night of the fire.
‘Dad said that they always had to pay somebody,’ she recalled. ‘And, you know, I remember him saying about Russ Hinze always coming and getting money. They always had bags of money. They always had police in there … I don’t know who they were. But there were always corrupt police in the Whiskey or down at the Wharfies Club. It didn’t matter where you went, there was always corruption. Dad always said the police were corrupt and he loved it, he thought it was great, you know, they made so much money because the police were so corrupt and they would come to the club.
‘The police did know about the Whiskey Au Go Go that night, you know, because my dad had rung them and told them that Stuart would be in that night and they were told that something was going to go down. They were like, “No, no, nothing’s going to happen.” But it did happen, of course.’
Lucy Kirkov enjoyed drinking at the Whiskey, particularly the special ‘staff nights’ where off-duty staff would get together for a dance. On the evening of Wednesday 7 March, the night of the fatal fire, she was at the Whiskey when two men – both strangers to Kirkov – appeared at the reception desk. It was just after midnight.
‘I was at the Whiskey that night to see somebody or do something and I saw James Finch and John Andrew Stuart at the front door,’ she recalls. ‘They didn’t come in and sit down, they were just at the front door. I was about to leave and James Finch asked me if I wanted a lift home. They ended up leaving and I said to Belly [John Bell], who are they? And he told me that was Stuart and Finch.’
Criminal Robert John Griffith, an associate of Stuart and Finch, and erstwhile informant to Detective Tony Murphy, also happened to be driving through the Valley in the hours before the fatal fire. Griffith said in a statement that he had become aware from talk on the street that something was going to happen at the Whiskey Au Go Go.
‘As I drove past I saw Vincent O’Dempsey standing in the shadows to the right of the entrance to the [Whiskey] nightclub,’ he said. ‘I recognised O’Dempsey immediately.’
Inferno
Just as Bell had predicted in his unheeded warning to police, there were about 30 to 50 people at the Whiskey as midnight ticked over to 8 March. A young local band called Trinity was keeping the small crowd entertained while they waited for the main act, The Delltones, to arrive and do their show.
Trinity member Bevan Childs said it was the opportunity of a lifetime to play with The Delltones. ‘Oh yeah, they were pros, you know?’ He recalls: ‘I don’t know how many sets [we did], I don’t know what time The Delltones left. I mean they probably would have had two gigs in town that night, probably an early one and a later one. Yeah, probably later than ten or something like that. So they would have been well gone by midnight I’m guessing.
‘After our set, you know, after playing with The Delltones, we just sat down and had a drink.’
*
Just a few blocks away, nightclub performer and impressionist, Lyndon Brown, had finished his last set for the night at the seedy Flamingos club and planned to head up to the Whiskey to meet friends for a nightcap. Flamingos, in Little Street just off Wickham Street, was a joint frequented by the Lands Office crowd – tattooist Billy Phillips, Stuart, Finch, even Vince O’Dempsey – and fights among patrons were not uncommon.
The seasoned and popular Brown knew everyone in the scene, from Hannay to the Little brothers to John Bell. In the months leading up to 8 March, he’d also heard some disturbing news on the grapevine. ‘We knew that one of the clubs was going to get hit, and I was a bit worried about Flamingos, there was only the stairs and front door and you had to go down into the dressing room. You got dressed under the stairs in a little room down there.
‘We used to talk about it quite often. There’d been a bit of a power struggle happening in the Valley at that point for quite some time, with the Sydney mob. I used to try and keep out of it. I had my own job to do.’
But Brown did discuss the troubles with Flamingos owner Abe Yassar and bouncer Alf Quick. ‘I knew Alf at Flamingos,’ recalls Brown. ‘He was on the level. He was just a doorman, that’s all. You met everyone through Abe. I met a lot of the crooked cops through them. They came in for a drink and he’d just feed them and talk to them.
‘Billy Phillips and Finch and all them, they’d come in virtually every night, into Flamingos. They’d sit down and have drinks … That’s why I knew we weren’t going to be hit.
‘Abe was the first one to tell me that a club was going to go up. Prior to that, all that trouble going on with the Bellinos and the rest of them, the Wickham Hotel, that’s where it started … The Wickham had been one of the main points for trouble, and a lot of people were a bit scared about going in there. A lot of the rough nuts down there were giving everyone a hard time. I’d heard there was a bit of protection money being put on people to look after them so they wouldn’t get hurt around the place.’
Brown said several familiar faces were at Flamingos the night the Whiskey went up. ‘There were a few of them in there that night,’ he says. ‘I’d been down to the pub on the corner … [but] I just raced back to Abe’s to do the show at around midnight. I did the show and they were sitting in there at their normal table … I didn’t think anything of it.
‘I had to go down to the Whiskey directly after my show to meet up with a couple of friends who were supposedly in there. I was going to have a catch-up and a drink. I finished the show, had a beer with Abe, jumped in the car and went down to the Whiskey.’
At close to 2 a.m Stuart would make a fuss about the time and even asked Quick to use the phone to call and establish the exact time. He was adamant that he be placed in Flamingos. It was imperative he had an iro
n-clad alibi at that hour, given he knew what was about to happen.
Brown, in the meantime, had hopped in his car and was making the short drive to the Whiskey.
It was just after 2 a.m.
*
It might have been the early hours of a Thursday morning, but there were plenty of people out and about in Fortitude Valley, and within a short proximity of the Whiskey Au Go Go. Kath Potter was just around the corner from the entrance to the club. She was in the public phone box on St Pauls Terrace trying to find her boyfriend, whom she’d arranged to meet at the Whiskey.
Kath had a hunch he might be at Chequers, so she phoned the club, only to be told that he was at the Whiskey. Frustrated, she tried to get further clues as to where he might be. ‘All I can tell anyone is that, yes, I was at Whiskey Au Go Go on the night in question with my girlfriend Elizabeth,’ she recalled. ‘We went there at the request of my boyfriend at the time to meet him and have a couple of drinks and then go home as it was a week night and I had work the next day. Liz and I had a couple of drinks, looked for Bob [but] couldn’t find him, so the pair of us went down to the phone booth that was outside the club and over the road from the Shamrock. [We] made a phone call to Chequers up in the city to see if he was there and coming down. I was told Bob had left for the evening.’
Michael Kevin Dee, a truck driver and motor mechanic of Toowong, had been drinking inside the Whiskey with Ernest Peters and his son Desmond, two friends from the country who’d been in Brisbane buying a horse at the yearling sales. It had been a heavy drinking session, and by 2 a.m. Dee had had enough.
‘Oh, I’d had a fair bit to drink,’ Dee would later tell the inquest. ‘I’d had a fair session with these blokes. We’d been to the races prior in the day.’
Dee emerged into Amelia Street.
At that moment, Constable David John McSherry, of Brisbane’s Mobile Patrols unit, and his partner, Constable Kaye Suhr, decided to drive past the Whiskey Au Go Go and turned into Amelia Street. They were travelling in police vehicle 525.
‘We came along St Pauls Terrace from the Brookes Street end from memory, and I swung right,’ McSherry recalled. ‘That’s when I spotted that fellow getting into an iridescent blue … Holden Premiere … Anyway, he was having trouble getting his keys either out of his pocket or into his lock. No central locking in those days, you know. So I think I just remarked to Kaye, we might just swing around the block and follow him. So we went down Amelia Street and came around the block.’
The suspected drink driver was Michael Dee.
Meanwhile, Kath Potter was still in the phone box when her friend Liz noticed something unusual. A black car had cruised into Amelia Street and stopped in front of the Whiskey Au Go Go. Liz tugged at her friend, trying to get her off the phone.
‘While we were in the phone booth, this big long black car pulled up, three men in black got out, pulled a petrol drum from the back of the car out of the car and started to roll it towards the bottom of the stairs of the club,’ Kath recalls. ‘Liz saw it better than I did and remarked about it being very strange and I was watching while speaking on the phone. The next minute the three men shoved some material in the opening of the drum, moved it closer to the entrance and lit it.
‘By this time I had hung up the phone and we were both just standing there gawking, and of course the next minute there were flames, a bang and all hell broke loose. I grabbed Liz and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”’
Arthur Parkinson, slaughterman, was a light sleeper and had arisen in his flat at 56 Amelia Street, just a hundred metres from the club. He was ‘two-thirds’ asleep when he heard footsteps running down Amelia Street and a car door opening.
‘[The] car door opened and this voice [was] saying, “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here”, or something like that expression,’ he told the inquest. ‘I couldn’t be quite sure on what was said. Then I heard the door slam and the car take off at high speed. Going away from the Whiskey Au Go Go. I heard the screams as the tyres rounded the corner.’
Parkinson could hear breaking glass, and human screams.
Across the road, near the McDonald’s pastry shop, James Vernon Stewart, a council street cleaner from Wavell Heights, noticed a ‘blue glow’ in the foyer of the Whiskey.
‘It started to get bigger … it started to burst into flames,’ he told the inquest. ‘It was starting to get a fairly bright light on it then. I couldn’t help noticing because there was something peculiar about that light, you know. I just couldn’t make it out … it just busted and burst into flames and put the whole building up in fire. All I know from then on … it was a couple of girls that were screaming out, they want to get out, they want to get out.’
A drunken Michael Dee was still fumbling about his car when he heard breaking glass. ‘When I heard the noise I sort of half turned around and tripped on the chain … that is around this garden [at the side of the club],’ he told the inquest. ‘I looked up and the place was alight.’
Stewart, the council worker, saw a police car making its way down St Pauls Terrace and tried to wave it over. It was constables McSherry and Suhr, having just driven around the block.
They had missed the arsonists by just moments.
‘By the time we got back the place was on fire,’ McSherry recalled. ‘The rest of it was just more frantic than anything else. I called [police radio] to report the situation and requested the fire brigade. And then I got out of the car and tried to gain access to the back of the place but there was a very high steel fence with gates and I think it might have been double gates. And they had the big pointy spikes on top. I’m six foot and it was quite a bit higher than me. And there was no way of getting over it, there were no foot holds, you couldn’t climb over it. I suppose it was designed that way.
‘I remember running around the front to St Pauls Terrace to see if there was any other access doors other than the main door, which was off Amelia Street … I just came around from St Pauls Terrace to around the front and John Bell who was the manager, a big fella, he jumped off the awning and … he bloody near landed on top of me, I nearly shit myself. I knew him but not well. You know just from … because he was an associate of John Hannay who we knew, and Hannay was a dodgy bastard at the best of times.
‘I just said to him, “What’s the situation?” He told me … I don’t remember the number of people that he said. I think he might have said, “There’s 100 or more people in there, and there’s no way out.” I went back and frantically called bloody, called up [police radio] because the fire brigade hadn’t arrived at this stage … I don’t remember what I said but apparently I dropped the f-bomb in trying to accentuate the urgency of the situation and got into strife for doing it later.’
Inspector Daniel McGrath was on duty at police headquarters, North Quay, when McSherry’s call came through. ‘At about 2.08 a.m. … I was in the Operations room at Police Headquarters when a call came from Mobile Patrol 525 advising that there was a fire at the Whiskey Au Go Go … [Constable McSherry] advised that the Ambulance and Fire Brigade be advised immediately and this was passed on to the duty officers at the Headquarters. [McSherry] advised that the position was serious, the place was in flames.’
Flamingos entertainer Lyndon Brown was in his car on St Pauls Terrace when he saw the Whiskey fire. ‘When I got there the place had just gone up,’ he recalls. ‘I pulled up. I could see smoke as I was coming around the corner. I jumped out of my car and you could hear it actually roaring. I tried to chuck a rubbish bin up to the top window to smash it but I couldn’t, there were flames shooting out from all over the place.
‘A lot of people in the Whiskey didn’t know the windows were there because they had heavy curtains across them. You’d think it was just a wall. I know Johnny Bell was there. I knew him from the days of Sydney way back before he started in Brisbane. He was a bouncer at the Three Swallows down in Sydney.
‘My friends, I found out later they’d left at probably ten minutes before the thing happened. The whole front of the building was full of flames.’
It was just after 2.12 a.m.
*
Meanwhile, true horror was unfolding inside the Whiskey Au Go Go. Donna Phillips usually manned the bar at the Whiskey but had been asked to work at the front desk earlier that night. She recalls answering the phone at one point and a gruff voice saying, ‘Can I speak with Brian Little?’ When she asked to take a message because she couldn’t locate her boss, the caller hung up. She claimed she told Brian Little about the call and not long after he exited the building with a woman, who Phillips assumed was his girlfriend.
‘I was right at the exit door,’ she recalls. She was looking forward to the end of her shift and had just taken a glass of water from co-worker, waitress Decima Carroll, when a fireball shot up the front stairs and into the club. ‘I … turned, put the glass back down and then I saw the fire erupt through the front door. It came up the stairs. I didn’t hear any … I have no recollection of … an explosion. You know, I was since told there was no explosion in that sense. Although the fire certainly burst through the entrance.
‘It was just a great … it was an eruption … The curtains caught fire behind the top bar and a barman started to run away. His shirt was on fire and he ran around along the front windows … he turned the corner of the bar along St Pauls Terrace side and then fell over. And I watched him on his knees for a few seconds and I wondered what he was doing. I don’t know whether he was trying to steady himself or whether … he was on his knees for a couple of seconds and then he fell to the floor.’
Phillips saw Johnny Bell and his mates having a drink at a table not far from the bar near the entrance. She remembered him jumping up and running in her direction towards the back of the club. ‘Then two men in suits have run over and slid the sliding door [open] and turned to me … I was frozen on the spot … if those two fellows or anybody else had not run for it, you know, I would have been a goner … the lights had started to go out in a wave from the back bar. Then the smoke was starting to billow…
The Night Dragon Page 10
