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During
the early 1970s the Melbourne waterfront war was in full flight and
Longley, described as an " evil genius" disappeared from sight.
Despite
being one of Melbourne underworld's most sought-after figures, Longley managed to elude both police and his enemies for 16 months.
But,
unlike a few of his friends and a lot more of his enemies, Longley actually
turned up alive.
Longley
doesn't want to actually rub anyone's nose in it by bragging about his 16 months
"in smoke", but he reckons the police
and rival crims who were looking for him never even came close.
He
lived at a number of houses scattered around Melbourne, and even used to get out
for the occasional game of golf.
"I
also used to jog a mile every night at dusk and I never tried to disguise
myself," he says.
Longley
knows a bit about going into smoke. He ran free for 16 months as the Painters
and Dockers waged war on Melbourne's waterfront - a war that the Costigan Royal
Commission said had led to at least 40 people being murdered.
He
was just one of a number of Painters
and Dockers who went into hiding during
those wild and bloody times.
In
1971, Longley held a membership ticket in direct opposition to that of Pat
Shannon.
The
Shannon faction had the blue tickets. The
Longley faction had the white, stamped with the words: Members - We have
selected a change in the top leadership of our union.
A month before
the election, painter
and docker Robert John
Crotty suffered a fractured skull during an
altercation outside a South Melbourne pub.
He was one of Longley's closest friends.
Police were told Crotty, who had been beaten
with a housebrick,
'fell over and hurt himself'."
He suffered multiple fractures of his skull.
A week before the election, a shotgun was
fired in to the gates at Longley's home.
He went into hiding but his wife and child
remained at the house.
At
the Williamstown naval dockyards on the day of the election in December 1971,
Longley survived a savage gun attack believed to have been carried out by some
of Shannon's supporters. During
the offensive, the aggressors stole the ballot papers on the suspicion they had
lost the vote. The
votes were being counted by retired union official Pat Cullen. At
the Costigan Royal Commission, Longley said Cullen "had received an offer
too good to refuse," "Rumour
has it that it (the offer) was a pistol to the head," Longley said. Longley
told journalist Paul Anderson that "Cullen was counting the votes and when
he finished, naturally I was interested." "I'll
never forget the words he said to me: 'Billy, you not only won, you shit it in.
I'll see you back at the union rooms.' That's where he would have declared it
(the ballot result). Myself and a few others got into a friend's car and we
pulled out from the curb. We had only driven four car lengths when 'Bang, Bang,
Bang, Bang'." "I
can recall the car windows were down and the bullets were going so close, you
could hear them singing past. Believe me, it was close. It has been said that a
machinegun was produced and the window of the car I was in was shot out from the
inside and a hail of machinegun bullets hit one of their cars. It got hit by
that many bullets it had to be taken away and cut up. "Rumour
has it that that a few people (were hit or injured). Their car was absolutely
torn up by the number of machinegun bullets that hit it. That sort of balanced
the equation. I think there were five or six of their cars to two of ours. I
think we might have been in a lot of trouble otherwise."
Some
months after Longley disappeared in 1973, Pat Shannon was gunned down in South
Melbourne's Druid's Hotel (now the Water Rat).
Shannon
was running a fundraiser for an injured docker on the night of October 17,
1973, when he was killed.
The
gunman, gripping a handkerchief in his mouth as a form of disguise, levelled a
.22 rifle and shot Shannon three times.
He
was hit in the head, shoulder and chest.
He
reportedly muttered, "You cunt" before dying where he fell.
Fellow
docker John Loughnan told a latter inquest:
"I
was facing the Moray Street door. We drank to about 10 p.m. and then I heard
fire crackers go off. All of a sudden Pat said: "You cunt" and fell
off his seat. Then I saw blood flow from his mouth. I could not work out what
was happening. I did not see any of the (accused) men in the hotel."
Police arrested four men over the murder:
Longley, Kevin James Taylor, Gary Leslie Harding and Alfred Leslie Cannott.
Harding made a three-page statement to police.
In court, the Crown alleged that Longley paid
Taylor $6000 for the hit and that Harding pointed Shannon out to Taylor in the
hotel.
Harding's evidence was that he waited in the car
and Taylor ran up, threw the gun into the back seat and said: "I shot him,
I got him".
Longley, Taylor and Harding were convicted of
Shannon's manslaughter.
Within 12 months Harding was dead, hacked to
death in his Pentridge jail cell.
Longley
still maintains his innocence.
A
huge police hunt in 1973, '74 and '75 failed to find Bill Longley.
"I
was very fortunate in that I had an excellent network of very good friends who
looked after me," he says.
"I
remember a detective getting in the box during my trial and saying police had a
squad of 21 men looking for me around the clock.
So
you can imagine their surprise when I came forward with my lawyer and presented
myself at Russell St police headquarters after 16 months on the run."
Longley's
time on the run ended on February 13, 1975 when he gave himself up to homicide
squad detective Jimmy Fry.
He
says he came forward because he didn't want a judge to think his evasion of
police was evidence of his guilt.
"My
contention was that I wasn't fleeing the police but that I was keeping my head
down, like a lot of other painters
and dockers, on account of it was liable to
be shot off by opposing factions in the waterfront battle," he says.
"Those were wild times and a lot of my mates had been killed. I have a
strong self-preservation instinct, and that's why I went in to smoke."
"They
got the usual from me. Billy Longley's my name and I live at so-and-so, and
that's all I've got to say to you. Tell 'em nothing - that was the code in those
days."
Many
unionists died violently through underworld
feuds and powerplays.
But
Bill Longley
continued to survive.
There
was a price on his head but he also had strong men
on his side.
Longley
always maintained his innocence over the killing
of Pat Shannon and was desperate for a new trial
to clear his name.
He
saw publicity as his only hope. In
1980 he did the unthinkable and told the story of the union in the most public
way by agreeing to be interviewed in a series of articles in The Bulletin. He
told of how the union serves as a front for organised crime and that millions of
dollars were made through illegal activity and corruption.
"Don't let
anyone kid you that there is no corruption on the Australian waterfront,"
he said. "It's rife.
Longley added that he could "name 20 or 30 people who have been knocked by the
painters and dockers".
"They have
either been killed for money or simply their mouths. This is not just in
Melbourne, but in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth"
He said that
"ghosting" had been occurring on the docks and that the organisers of
the racket had at one time taken out a contract to murder someone and killed an
innocent person instead.
Longley said that the man had got away with it.
Victorian police
launched an investigation into Longley's claims but came back with a report that
played down the statements.
Prime Minister,
Malcolm Fraser however was far more interested, Longley's
claims disturbing him greatly.
He decided that only
a royal commission could settle the question once and for all of what was
happening in the union.
Francis (Frank)
Xavier Costigan, QC, was picked to preside and opened his hearings at the
Williamstown Court on October 1, 1980, with more than 200 union members protesting
outside.
Jack
"Putty Nose"
Nicholls hated the commission and nn June 16, 1981, he failed to
answer a subpoena to give evidence before Costigan.
Two hours later his body was
found.
Nicholls had committed suicide
in his light blue Falcon sedan on the Hume Highway just south of Albury.
He died with a single bullet
to the head. With him
were the ballot papers that he claimed proved victory over Billy Longley.
The next day, the union's Melbourne executive and
branch members met at the Council Club Hotel in South Melbourne where a motion
was put and carried.
Blaming the Costigan Commission for Nicholls'
decision to take his own life, the union decided to shut up shop.
Members, when summonsed to give evidence, attended
as legally required but refused to answer any and all questions put to them.
All were fined for their silence. The
royal commission pressed on. For the
first nine months it followed a predictable course investigating the dockies and
their associates. But then it opened up
vastly more interesting illegal activity. When
it was found that the painters and dockers had been enlisted by "tax
avoidance" experts to be dummy directors of sham companies which had false
addresses, the royal commission began inquiries which in effect took it into the
boardrooms of the nation. Costigan's team
found that some dockers were deliberately helping in "bottom of the
harbour" tax schemes, but the real villainy was being perpetrated by people
who were quite unused to physical labour or might not even have had a fist
fight. The tax-avoidance schemes, it was
found, had cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars. The
commission, which went for four years, was responsible for the launching of some
1,000 prosecutions. The Sydney Morning
Herald editorialised in September 1982: "A thread pulled from the Ship
Painters and Dockers' Union has led to the Victorian Government land deals in
1973 and 1974 and in turn to bottom-of-the-harbour tax evasion schemes, to the
Nugan-Hand Bank, to drug running, and to the Deputy Crown Solicitor's Office in
Perth".
In 1983, Longley was subpoenaed to give evidence
to the royal commission and
in November 1984, Frank
Costigan, QC, was scathing of the union.
"The
union has attracted to its ranks large numbers of men who have been
convicted of, and who continue to commit serious crimes," he said.
"They
treat the law with contempt, and are scornful of its punishments. The
treat law enforcement agencies as their enemies. They are motivated by
greed and are not controlled by any consideration for their victims.
Violence is the means by which they control the members of the group. They
don't hesitate to kill..."
But it was
obvious to all that the villainy went way beyond the painters and dockers.
The Federal
Government's response to the royal commission was to establish the
National Crime Authority.
Longley has been credited with from 11-16 other
killings, although he denies these.
Most of the dead were political rivals,
murdered in the year following the election.
During his lifetime, he was charged
with another murder, manslaughter and three attempted murders.
Longley
maintains that whenever a criminal was on the run they would head to Melbourne
and avoid the criminal haunts of Sydney.
"We
had a saying 'Sydney for money, Melbourne for blokes'," Longley recalls.
"When we would go through Sydney we would never go to Bondi or Kings Cross
because every crim in Sydney was concerned with what they used to call their
insurance.
"And
their insurance was picking up the phone and ringing through to their local CIB
and saying to a detective they knew that they had just seen x and y at the
Coogee Bay pub and they were still there if they wanted to get them - and not to
forget that the call was part of their insurance."
Sydney,
he says, was all about building up the insurance for future crimes by dobbing in
other criminals.
For Longley, Melbourne was a different place, a place where
criminals had principles.
"Things
were different in Melbourne. The significance of the saying 'Melbourne for
blokes' is that other crims wouldn't dob you in to police. There were principles
in the underworld then, and that's why so many international and interstate
crims chose Melbourne to go into smoke."
Longley
wasn't at all surprised early in 1998 when the much-publicised hunt for
Queensland escapee Brendon Abbott and his sidekick Brendon Berichon turned to
Melbourne.
The pair were just another couple of additions to the motley crew of
crims to have chosen Victoria as a hidey-hole while on the run.
Although Abbott
and Berichon were captured in Darwin in May, it was to Melbourne they fled after
Berichon allegedly freed Abbott and four other prisoners from a high-security
Brisbane jail in November 1997.
Longley
says Victoria used to be nationally and internationally renowned as a good place
for criminals to go to ground, and the list of fugitives from the past to have
done so reads like a Who's Who of crime.
It
includes British MP John Stonehouse, Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs, armed
robber and master of disguise Russell
"Mad Dog" Cox, notorious NSW crime figure Edward
"Jockey" Smith and convicted murderer Roy "Red Rat" Pollitt.
While
Longley says Melbourne's reputation as a place to hide hasn't changed, police
aren't convinced.
A former member of the now-disbanded Major Crime Squad, which
used to have responsibility for hunting fugitives, didn't have much time for The
Texan's theories.
"Some
of our best information on the whereabouts of escapees and other fugitives came
from the Melbourne underworld," the retired officer says.
"And
Victoria can't have been that great a place to hide in because all the crooks
nominated by Longley, other than Ronnie Biggs, were caught or killed."
He
also says police access to much-improved electronic listening devices, telephone
taps, surveillance techniques and sophisticated tracking equipment was making it
harder for fugitives to avoid detection.
In an ABC-TV special, screened in 1998,
Longley stated that among his friends were a number of senior Victorian police,
including Brian
"The Skull" Murphy, the former Victorian detective whose evidence
helped convict him of murder.
Murphy and Longley subsequently formed a rather unlikely friendship and business
partnership.
The pair became friendly after Longley’s release from gaol in
1988, and now offer their services as industrial mediators.
"I’d like to set up as a consultant,
advising people and firms on security matter. They might think I know the ropes,
as someone who knows life from the other side of the tracks," says Longley.
"Looking back on my life, I regret the
violence I’ve been involved in. But, the 1970’s were dangerous times on the
waterfront. If you were a member of one faction or another, you could finish up
with your head shot off,"
Now aged 81 (in 2007) and living quietly in
suburban Melbourne, Longley goes ballroom dancing and counsels school children
against getting involved in violence.
Longley
also lectured college students about keeping out of trouble and not being sucked
in to a life of crime.
"There is no glory in being in jail," he said.
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Billy 'the Texan' Longley
