australian television information archive

Underbelly: Back where it all began

FOR criminals and corrupt police, the 1970s was the best of times. When Terry Clark, alias Alexander Sinclair, landed in Sydney from New Zealand in 1976, he didn't even need a passport. In any case, he could easily buy or forge them.

Clark was a small-time crook with big dreams. In Auckland, he'd been a police informer. Here, he would become a millionaire drug trafficker.

To women, until he turned nasty, Clark came across as a charming big spender. But to his enemies, he was evil: prepared to kill, then to chop off hands and heads, all in the name of business.

Long before Carl Williams, Tony Mokbel and other characters that have made Underbelly part of the vernacular, Clark's generation of criminals was the first to systematically exploit the permissive society's taste for drugs. This is the backdrop to the events depicted — with some dramatic licence — in Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities, the new television series starting tomorrow night.

It was a time when the Melbourne and Sydney underworlds were changing violently. Melbourne was the home of old-fashioned gunmen, schooled on the waterfront in theft, intimidation and revenge. Sydney criminals were just as ruthless, but they learned early that the way to easy money was to have police onside.

Sydney had been corrupt since the Rum Corps, but in the 1970s it exploded. A cell of bent detectives effectively franchised crime using "pet" criminals. People such as Lennie McPherson, a safebreaker but no mastermind, became a Mr Big after police gave him the "green light". Arthur "Neddy" Smith, a violent thug, became a protected mob leader. The smooth George Freeman made millions — so brazenly he was once photographed at Randwick races with the chief magistrate.

But there were a few honest police — and they had to break the law to prove it. They started illegally tapping gangsters' phones — producing what would later be known as The Age Tapes. They taped Freeman, drug syndicate boss "Aussie" Bob Trimbole and others. And what they heard horrified them.

Police, politicians and legal figures were recorded talking to crime bosses. It confirmed that in Sydney everything was for sale.

Protected criminals thought they were untouchable. When the Griffith cell of the Calabrian Mafia tired of a local businessman, Donald Mackay, who blew the whistle on the lucrative local marijuana racket, they ordered his execution in 1977.

They thought they could get away with murder and go on making millions. They were wrong: for them, the 1980s became the worst of times.

At first, politicians did little — bar the corrupt Al Grassby, who actively tried to sabotage the case — but the public was outraged. Mackay's murder was a new low: honest police trying to investigate it were betrayed by corrupt colleagues. For a while, the crooks still believed they could do anything — such as shooting NSW undercover policeman Mick Drury to stop him giving evidence in a Melbourne drug case in 1984. The fallout of the Drury case would ultimately lead to integrity commissions and reviews that broke the cosy police-gangster franchises that had controlled Sydney crime for decades.

Eventually, NSW police were no longer the best money could buy. But corruption died hard.

Sydney was so "hot" that Victorian police sneaked over the border to make secret raids — once burgling a corrupt businessman's home to steal his files and once following bent NSW deputy commissioner Bill Allen as he delivered bribe money to a government minister. In another illegal operation, they set up a listening post in a Sydney hotel, only to be raided and bashed by NSW police, who stole the bugging equipment.

But while the Victorians liked to blame corrupt Sydney detectives, their outrage was selective: they ignored crooks in their own ranks who got to retire with reputations and big bank balances intact.

Meanwhile, federal police were running their own investigation. Using legal phone taps, they were stunned at the extent of corruption but when they reported it, their cynical political masters stayed silent to avoid igniting a public outcry.

Police like Peter Lamb, a federal expert on organised crime — could do little except try to stop his team being infiltrated by corrupt state police. But Mackay's murder and the Drury shooting seven years later galvanised public opinion and reluctant politicians were pushed to order inquiries.

As corrupt Sydney detectives lost control of their crime franchise, the established pecking order unravelled. Ambitious new crooks were prepared to take on the older protected ones; bent police were drawn into setting up killings to protect their stake in organised crime.

A series of gangland hits ended in the murder of former Melbourne hitman Christopher Dale Flannery, who was almost certainly driven to his death by bent police. His body was never found.

In Melbourne, meanwhile, gunmen were at war. They had such contempt for the system that one, Ray Chuck, was gunned down at the city court. The killer was given inside information and someone with an intimate knowledge of the court complex assisted his escape. Bent police remain the most likely suspects. The suspected gunman, Brian Kane, was shot dead three years later.

Gunmen were so confident in the underworld code of silence that in one hit they did not bother to wear disguises. Most witnesses would not talk to police and those who did often went missing. One young witness persuaded to give evidence was silenced with a bullet. The suspected killer was Alphonse Gangitano, later to become a well-known gangster before he, too, was shot dead.

While the gunmen fought over personal honour and the proceeds of armed robberies, their world was changing. The new guard were the ones with access to South-East Asian heroin. Enter Terry Clark and the group he called The Organisation, but which became infamous as the "Mr Asia" syndicate.

Clark was the first to establish an international drug empire based in Australia, which he ran with escalating brutality: killing anyone he thought was a threat until, inevitably, he crashed. But as well as horror there are stories of redemption — many involving the women who were sucked into a vortex of violence, money and drugs. Somehow, a few managed to reclaim their lives — and will be watching screen versions of themselves over the next three months.

Judi Kane, for instance, was a good woman who married a bad man. Her husband Les was one of the most dangerous of his generation until he was machine-gunned in their Wantirna home.

Judi bravely testified against three gunmen charged with the murder and became a close friend of Pat Hunter, the policewoman assigned to protect her. Many detectives wondered why Pat, who became Police Association vice-president, socialised with the gangster's widow long after the trial. They found their answer in tragedy. When Pat was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, Judi nursed her. At the funeral in 1992, Judi Kane sat with senior police, accepted like family.

Allison Dine, a sometime trainee kindergarten teacher, became Terry Clark's lover and expert heroin courier. She would become a witness against him and, after receiving a new identity, disappeared from the crime scene.

Karen Soich was a young lawyer who fell in love with Clark and was once photographed rolling naked on a bed of banknotes. He was jailed for murder, but she was acquitted and returned to New Zealand to build a career as an entertainment lawyer.

And Donald Mackay's widow, Barbara, continued to live in Griffith, bearing her husband's murder with unflinching grace and dignity despite living near those who had plotted it. She refused to let hate destroy her family.

While the crooks in Melbourne and Sydney continued to kill each other over a shrinking empire, Clark was making a fortune in the shadows. Corrupt officials told him when any of his team were talking and he would have them killed. It would ultimately prove his downfall.

When the bodies of two of his couriers, Isabel and Douglas Wilson, were found at Rye in Victoria in 1979 it became a full-on homicide investigation. Paul Delianis, head of the Victorian homicide squad, realised the Clark syndicate had infiltrated the Federal Narcotics Bureau and declared war.

Delianis' initial investigations, followed by a taskforce headed by Carl Mengler, exposed the syndicate and finally revealed who had murdered the Wilsons and Donald Mackay.

Their investigations succeeded despite widespread corruption, police jealousies and political indifference. It was a long road, but the Mr Asia syndicate was finally smashed. Clark died in an English jail in 1983.

But one of the prize targets escaped. Bob Trimbole was a likeable racing identity with a vicious streak and friends in high places. When the Stewart royal commission was set up he was tipped off and left Australia secretly. He died in Spain in 1987, still rich and on the run.

But there are many untold stories. And many men, now old, who retired as respected police, judges, lawyers, politicians and journalists, and who would count themselves lucky their phones were not tapped in the bad old days. Or were they?

Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities. By John Silvester and Andrew Rule. (In association with Screentime and Channel Nine). RRP $24.95

By John Silvester and Andrew Rule
February 8, 2009