The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  Finch sang like a canary. In a series of world exclusives, Watt outlined Finch’s story, from his abusive childhood in the United Kingdom to his friendship with John Stuart and the fatal fire of 8 March 1973. Finch made the sensational allegation that a corrupt top police officer was the ‘mastermind’ behind the planning of the fire and extortion attempt. He said the cop, along with O’Dempsey, was responsible for planning the firebombing as part of a ‘Brisbane protection racket’.

  ‘A system of rotten cops and king criminals working together used me and they used John Stuart,’ he told Watt. ‘John Stuart was the prime manipulator but he wasn’t the champion. The bombing was supposed to have thrown a scare not just into nightclubs but all of Brisbane – restaurants, shops, SP bookies – the lot. It wouldn’t be much use burning a nightclub if they just wanted to stand over the three or four clubs in town.’

  Finch named Stuart, Billy McCulkin and Tommy ‘Clockwork Orange’ Hamilton as his accomplices in the job. Stuart was promised $5000 to enlist Finch to do ‘the dirty work’. He said O’Dempsey ‘had to be working in with the copper selling people out … those blokes don’t survive unless they’re doing that’.

  (An associate of the Clockwork Orange Gang disputes Finch’s version of events. ‘They were out doing break and enters on the night of the Whiskey fire,’ he says. ‘Peter Hall, Keithy Meredith, Shorty Dubois and Tom Hamilton were in a car, zooming around. They ended up getting together later in the evening to do a smash and grab on a mag wheel place, yeah.

  ‘Tommy had nothing to do with it. For starters, the boys were apart, as a gang, as a team, running around working, and as far as Tom being involved in anything like that … there’s no way in the world they would have got him to do anything like that. I don’t even know if he even met Finch. Finch has dropped his name in it. I don’t know why he’s done that. I’d swear on my life that Tommy had nothing to do with it.’)

  Finch claimed he and Stuart never spoke about the truth behind the Whiskey because Stuart’s mother, Edna Watts, had been threatened. ‘They said Mrs Watts would end up like Mrs McCulkin if we spoke out,’ Finch said. ‘It was always funny how me and Stuart got pinched but nothing happened to the other pair or Vince O’Dempsey. I always had a code of not squealing but nowadays I reckon it’s time the truth came out …’

  In another story as part of Watt’s world exclusive, Finch outlined with eerie precision the murders of Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters, Vicki and Leanne.

  ‘Finch said the offer of money to torch the Whiskey had been made through the driver of the car which took Finch and his accomplice, Thomas Hamilton, on their mission of death.’ He named the driver as Billy McCulkin. Hamilton, Finch said, struck the match that ignited the fuel.

  ‘When we got back in the car after setting fire to the place, I noticed for the first time that Hamilton was waving a pistol around,’ he said. ‘He seemed totally mad in that instant and he was screaming that it was lucky no one came out. He indicated he would have shot them. From what I have seen, and tried twice in gaol, he was on LSD.’

  Finch told Watt that Barbara had to be murdered because she threatened to go to the police and tell them about her husband’s involvement in the crime. Finch told Watt: ‘O’Dempsey and his sick crony Dubois were allowed to get away with murder to hide the truth of the Whiskey Au Go Go. They grabbed Stuart and myself but they didn’t get Hamilton and McCulkin and the people behind it.’

  He reiterated that he, Hamilton and McCulkin were dressed ‘like Black September terrorists’, in all black. ‘Finch said he had carried the petrol drums and tipped them on their side inside the Valley nightclub while McCulkin kept the engine of a stolen black Holden running,’ the report added.

  ‘Finch said he had no doubt the men who murdered the family were the two criminals last seen with them. Vincent O’Dempsey and Gary [sic] Dubois.’ He said that only Barbara was to be killed ‘but the sexual lusts of Dubois, who was known for his fetish for young girls, took over’.

  Even back in 1988, 14 years after the McCulkin murders, Finch wondered why O’Dempsey had never been convicted in the case. ‘If we had been O’Dempsey’s men I’m certain something would have been done to help us. As it was, we were left there to rot.’

  An Unexpected Funeral

  Vincent O’Dempsey returned to the world in 1991 following his release from prison in New South Wales on various drugs charges. His wife, Dianne Pritchard, had moved on, and had been in and out of a number of relationships while Vince was in gaol.

  ‘She was on with another bloke and had a daughter to him,’ a friend said. She’d been staying at a place that Vince bought for her and the kids at Crystal Creek in the Tweed Shire before he went to gaol. She then started moving around the area, living briefly in the village of Chillingham, not far from Murwillumbah, then Kingscliff on the coast.

  O’Dempsey settled back in Warwick. He frequented the National Hotel, or the ‘Old Nash’, not far from the Warwick railway station. There he met local girl Kim Smith, who was already married with two children. They moved into 1 Myall Avenue, in town, and would soon marry themselves. ‘They fought like cats and dogs,’ says one friend. ‘She threw a knife at him once and cut his face.’

  Vince, in the meantime, bought a cattle property in the village of Aratula, 67 kilometres east of Warwick. He improved the property with fencing and other infrastructure, then sold it. ‘He was washing some of his money through there, cleaning it,’ says one acquaintance.

  O’Dempsey then purchased a property close to Warwick township and started breeding alpacas. ‘It was a legitimate business,’ says one associate. ‘Vince used to say, “I’m a legitimate businessman, don’t you worry about that.” He was obsessed with genetics. The plan was to ship in some camels from Boulia [300 kilometres south of Mount Isa in Queensland’s Central West] and embryo transplant from alpacas into camels. Vince was full bore into it.’

  O’Dempsey was shocked to learn of his former wife Dianne Pritchard’s death in 1995. She had overdosed on heroin in a motel room in Murwillumbah. Even though she drank heavily, friends and acquaintances said it was impossible to believe she had taken drugs.

  One long-term friend said he was stunned by Pritchard’s death. ‘There used to be a sergeant down there at Tweed Heads and I used to give him tips on the horses,’ he said. ‘I had horses at the time and they were good horses and they run a lot of races you know. And he said [to me] that’s bad luck about Dianne. I said, “What happened to her?” He took me into his office and he said, “Read that.”

  ‘It was a report into her death. She went to a motel at Murwillumbah with a young prostitute, they got it on together and she was a user … Dianne never used to use heroin, she must have give it to her and they were all going on, it was a hot shuttle, it was this, it was that.

  ‘It was all there in the report … they knew who give it to her, who sold the heroin, they knew the lot.’

  Friends reported that O’Dempsey was visibly shaken at the funeral. He described his former wife as a good, ‘solid’ woman.

  ‘Now when Dianne died, Vince was upset,’ says one associate. ‘And he said, “Mate, you’ll never find a woman more solid than her.” She wouldn’t say a word, she’d go straight to the clink. He was cranky about the way she died.

  ‘Vince was still living in Warwick but it was only a few weeks later and then his wife, Kim Smith, she died of an aneurism in the head. And then it just went around like wildfire [that] he’s knocking all these women. Gees, he copped it over that. God, he copped it.’

  O’Dempsey was not responsible for either woman’s death. In the wake of Dianne’s death, he was left to care for their three children. He had no children with Kim. Following the deaths of his two wives, O’Dempsey was ‘in limbo’.

  It was around this time he visited an old mate from his Sydney days, the criminal Walter McDonald, who had settled with his family in the village
of Urbenville, in the Tenterfield Shire in northern New South Wales, near the base of Crown Mountain. It was a long way from the mean streets of Sydney in the 1960s, when McDonald consorted with the likes of gangsters George Freeman and Lenny McPherson.

  O’Dempsey took a shine to Walter’s youngest son, Warren. ‘My father and Vince were long-term friends,’ Warren McDonald would later tell police. ‘My dad was a man of few words. He did not talk about what he got up to. I knew that he grew pot over the years, but I don’t know if that was with Vince. I knew that Vince was a “crim” … by that I mean that he was involved in criminal activity including drugs and that he was a violent man.

  ‘Dad told me when I was first introduced to Vince that Vince was the most feared man in the underworld. He was a trusted friend of my father’s and so I was not overly concerned about Vince but I made sure not to upset him.’

  Warren had been working in his brother’s supermarket at Woodenbong, just south of the Queensland and New South Wales border in the Kyogle Shire, and a one and a half hour drive to Warwick. Seeing a future for Warren in his criminal enterprises, O’Dempsey took Warren under his wing. Over time McDonald became known as ‘The Apprentice’.

  ‘I started to spend a lot of time with Vince … and he would get me to do things for him,’ McDonald later recalled to police. ‘I spent a lot of time at [the] Criterion Hotel [in Warwick] with Vince and we would play pool. Vince was a very good pool player. Vince would never drink much … I have never seen the man drunk.

  ‘Over time we got to know each other quite well and I feel he started to trust me and get me [to] do jobs for him mostly to do with the animals. Vince would also get me to drive him to places. Vince didn’t want to drive his own car because he thought it might have been bugged. Vince was constantly concerned about security and being caught by police …’

  McDonald said O’Dempsey often reminisced about his days working at the mock auctions, and his associates in the early 1970s. ‘He talked about the group called the Clockwork Orange,’ McDonald said in a police statement. ‘There was a fella called [Billy] Stokes. Vince called him “The Chicken”. Vince would say, be careful, the Chicken would crack. Vince did not like Stokes at all.’

  McDonald, knowing O’Dempsey to be an alpaca breeder, initially wanted to get in on the alpaca game. He had dreams of exporting alpaca fleece to China. With this in mind, he bought a property at Karara, 50 kilometres west of Warwick. O’Dempsey, at McDonald’s invitation, came and looked over the place.

  ‘My dad and his friends would come out to my property and go fishing in the dam and sit around the campfire and drink,’ McDonald recalled. ‘There was a shearing shed and another shed which I think has [been] turned into a house now. It was decided that we would do a crop on the place and we started to get ready.’

  One O’Dempsey associate, who worked on that first crop, revealed how it worked. ‘This property, it ticked all the boxes [for growing cannabis] except the soil was really tough, it was really rough country,’ he said. ‘But we had more water than you could poke a stick at. One of the crew had a bulldozer and we cleared a little patch here and there. It didn’t take us long. We said [to Warren], don’t worry about the textile industry and the alpaca fleece, let’s get into this. We were like naughty little boys we were.

  ‘Initially there were four patches. The police got the rumour that it was 10,000 plants but that was wrong … there were about 2400 would be more like it … Vince had it all irrigated … it was a brilliant set-up.’

  The drug growers got a rude shock, however, before the first harvest. ‘We’d be sitting around the campfire at the end of the day … having a beer and a rum, and they’re all talking bullshit you know?’ the associate remembered. ‘One of the men kept saying the coppers won’t come in, they’d be too scared. If they know O’Dempsey’s here they won’t come in, they’ll send the fucking Army in first and then they’ll come in.

  ‘So every night sitting around the campfire this is what we copped. Well bugger me dead, one day, here comes the Army. The Army helicopters were coming over. We’re down watering the plants and checking everything and the fucking Army’s there. I thought we were all fucked. There was no point in running. The helicopters were that low you could see the pilot’s bubble on his helmet, and a bit of machine gun out the side. The plants were big, and we just hid … we’re all shitting ourselves. I was expecting everyone to be handcuffed.

  ‘We found out later the Army had a camp about 15 kilometres away … they flew straight across the crop. Didn’t see it because they were doing exercises. They weren’t even looking for that sort of stuff. We all needed a rum after that.’

  Swami

  At some point, Vince O’Dempsey attracted the nickname Swami or Swami the Magician. The Swami knows all. The Swami makes people disappear. O’Dempsey’s deceased friend, the hitman Stewart John Regan, was also called The Magician. Criminal associates would swear that the title was self-anointed. But what was the meaning of the moniker?

  The ‘evil’ Swami was a periodical feature in American comic books throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. Artist Stan Aschemeier, also known as Stan Asch, worked for DC Comics and their syndicated comics and created characters like Dr Mid-Nite and Johnny Thunder, and also worked on the Green Lantern and Mister Terrific. A shifty character he created was Swami, or Swami the Magician.

  Swami first appeared in Sensation Comics in 1944, and was described as someone ‘skilled at sleight-of-hand and ventriloquism and was a competent stage magician … he was a master pickpocket and thief … [and he] made a killing putting on stage magic performances and robbing the audiences blind as he performed tricks for them. He also made money as a blackmailer using information he gleaned from stolen letters from his audiences.’

  In 1946, in The Shadow series of comics, the Shadow has an encounter with the evil Black Swami, who is pictured on the cover as a type of monster, with mad eyes and large greenish claws for hands. Had the child O’Dempsey read these tales of thieves with mystical powers, and identified with Swami?

  During the late 1990s O’Dempsey spent his time moving between his home in Warwick and various properties tending to his drug crops. Swami knew how to avoid detection when he wanted to, and associates at the time recall various personality traits, including his obsessive paranoia of being followed or observed. People who knew him labelled him as ‘eccentric’ in his approach to his crops.

  ‘When he was in gaol he read a lot, and declared himself a horticulturalist, a botanist,’ says one man who worked on the crop. ‘The soil around the Karara area was hard country, but it grew good pot. In the end the plants were so big we had to pull them out with bulldozers. They were as big as trees.

  ‘He was eccentric with the water system. He didn’t have regular sprinklers. He developed these water emitters, about the size of a ciagerette packet, that you installed along the hoses, they dripped water. He worked out exactly how many litres per hour would drip out. It was the same system you’d use in a vineyard. It was expensive.’

  He said O’Dempsey declared himself an environmentalist. ‘He was a greenie,’ an associate said. ‘He hated feral cats. If you killed feral cats you were a hero. But you didn’t shoot a bird in front of him. Or a rabbit. We winged a galah once and didn’t he go off. He was spitting chips. He said we were cruel. How’s that?’

  One of the properties had a large dam and the crop was behind it. A small motorboat was sometimes used to cross the dam. Armed associates of O’Dempsey would patrol the property on motorbikes. There was another crop on a property near the little township of Yangan, just 20 kilometres east of Warwick. It was a place O’Dempsey knew well. His mother, Mary, had grown up on a farm there. One associate who visited the property said: ‘I remember you came in the front gate, the fence was metal chain wire and it was an electrified gate. I never saw Vince arrive or leave … there was talk of him coming in the back way.’

 
One woman agreed to work on the Yangan drug crop as a cook. She told police in a statement she remembered arriving at the property’s old farmhouse. ‘We pulled up on a flat area behind the house. There was a 44-gallon drum and seats in a circle on that flat area. The seats were made out of trees and this campfire was just near the house. The furnishings [in the house] were pretty basic, just a few lounge chairs, beds and stuff. There was a wood heater in the lounge room and I remember a police radio was in the house and was on all the time … and we all kind of kept an ear out for anything that might indicate police were coming.’

  The woman was given a tour of the kitchen. It was well stocked with food, including roasts and corned meat. ‘I can’t believe you’ve got all of this set up,’ she said to one of O’Dempsey’s associates.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘this is organised crime.’

  ‘I learned after a few days that I would be paid in marijuana or pot. I was being paid a pound a week which we were given at the end of the crop. It was only then that I realised I would have to sell it to get my money, which worked out at about $2000 a week.’

  She remembered the ritual whereby O’Dempsey and his workers would sit around the campfire at the end of the day’s work. ‘Vince was very conscious of his health, and didn’t really drink,’ she said. ‘He was definitely the boss and would keep an eye on everything. I noticed that Vince liked being out there, and was much more relaxed than when I’d seen him in town. Vince would occasionally make reference to things like being a doorman at the brothels in Sydney when he was younger. He would tell us about beating people up. He would talk about being a suspect in some murders, and would laugh and say things like, “Of course, I didn’t do that.”