Murder and mayhem: Seven crims on Australia’s most wanted list
They are the crims who with cunning, contacts and disguises have eluded capture — some for decades — despite high-profile rewards and repeated police appeals. Is one hiding in plain sight near you?
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Underworld figure John Macris who was dramatically executed in Greece last November had prior to his death been in contact with one of Australia’s most wanted fugitives James Dalamangas.
Macris, who led an international drug syndicate, moved to Athens in 2009 about the time Dalamangas, known as Jimmy to his mates, was put at the top of the NSW Police most wanted list, with a $200,000 bounty on his head.
The NSW man tops the list of the nation’s Seven Deadly Sinners — seven men who with cunning, contacts and disguises have eluded capture by police and, in some instances, the other crims they have crossed.
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Dalamangas has been living in Athens since he fled Australia in 1999, initially to work as a bouncer in the Greek capital before quickly moving back into the local criminal milieu.
The dual national was in 1997 suspected in the execution-style murder of bouncer and concreter Tim Voukelatos, shot five times in the head as he sat in his car in the Sydney suburb of Campsie.
Two years later Dalamangas allegedly stabbed to death father-of-two George Giannopoulos who had been innocently attempting to intervene in a fight between Dalamangas and another male at a Greek community evening at a Sydney nightclub.
Gentle giant George, 32, was knifed in the neck and stomach at the Pariziana club at Belmore in Sydney’s south west.
Dalamangas then used a false passport to get out of the country. He has been described by those who knew him and also investigated him as one of the most violent people they have ever encountered.
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News Corp Australia can now reveal the 48-year-old and Macris began moving in the same organised crime circles in Greece, including a large expat Aussie community, and for a time lived in the same Voula district.
The pair was seen together at a number of nightclubs just a couple of weeks before Macris was gunned down on October 31.
“We know he is there in Athens and on the islands but getting extradition from there is really difficult,’’ a senior NSW Police officers said.
Macris’ shooting death was captured in dramatic CCTV footage showing one assassin running up to his car and blasting him through the driver’s window. Macris can be seen staggering out of his car and trying to run away before being shot again. A murder investigation continues.
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MASTER OF DISGUISE
Also making the Seven Deadly Sinners list from NSW is the innocuous-looking but dangerous Graham Gene Potter.
Potter bashed to death 19-year-old shop assistant Kim Barry at his Wollongong flat in 1981 after she rejected his attempted seduction on his buck’s night. The pair knew each other from dance classes and had met up at a disco.
A day after he murdered her he used a hacksaw to cut off her head and fingers which he dumped in garbage, while her body was left in bushland.
He was sentenced to life and served 15 years in jail but on release in 1996 re-entered the underworld.
For some reason the woman he was engaged to when he carried out the murder married him while he was in jail and they moved to Tasmania in 2002. The Potters owned three properties in Tasmania. In 2008, he was arrested for his alleged supporting role in the importation of $440 million of cocaine and ecstasy by a mafia group.
Potter had met mafia drug runner Pasquale Barbaro in prison and worked for him outside, running errands and eventually agreeing to kill someone for $100,000.
As a hitman Potter made a good coal miner. He couldn’t even organise a getaway car that worked. Which is lucky, because police were watching him as he bungled his chance of killing a mob target.
Potter was charged along with Barbaro and others in 2008 over the huge drug import but jumped bail in 2010 and vanished.
He has since been named as wanted in connection with conspiring to murder two Melbourne underworld figures. There have been various apparent sightings of him over the years particularly down in the Riverina district on the NSW-Victorian border, but he has eluded capture and has been described by police as a master of disguises, dying his hair, wearing layers to alter his weight and appearance and being protected by other criminals.
Either Potter the bumbling mob “hit man” has proven a genius at disguise and is hiding in plain sight or he has come to a deservedly bad end.
If he is still alive, he has spent nine years without leaving any sort of electronic trace: mobile telephone, credit card, toll road charge. It can be done but becomes more difficult all the time.
Potter has more than police chasing him. The inference he could inform on mafia figures suggests he does not have a bright future.
TATTOOED HITMAN
John Victor Bobak, is one of Australia’s most wanted criminals, a fugitive on the run for more than two decades.
The career criminal is wanted over the execution-style murder of SP bookie Peter George Wade and his defacto Maureen Ambrose in their Surfers Paradise unit in 1991.
Bobak’s accomplice Ronald Henry Thomas was arrested in 1992 and later jailed over his role in the murder. He was shot during the horrific crime and his blood was found at the scene.
Bobak would now be 69 and investigators say he previously lived in NSW and Queensland.
Police believe Thomas and Bobak were paid up to $50,000 each to kill the pair, with claims they were contracted for the hit by a Sydney solicitor.
While there are theories Bobak could be dead, police have said they believe he is still alive. He has been known to use the aliases Jeff Henley, John Baker, Lee Heuston, John Redmond, Ronald Montgomery and Terry and James Bobak.
A $250,000 reward is on offer for information which leads to Bobak’s capture and conviction.
Police have released an artist’s impression of what he may look like now and say his tattoos are distinguishable.
He has a horse tattoo on his lower left arm; an eagle on his upper right arm and a skull which covers his shoulder; the word ‘Ford’ on his right lower arm and an eagle’s head and hula girl on the front; a spider’s web on his right upper arm (shoulder) and a snake on the front; a skull on his left upper back; a panther on his right upper back; a Thai dancer on his left upper chest and also on his right upper chest; a naked woman on his right upper leg above his knee; and a snake on his right wrist.
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HISTORY OF ATTACKS
Professional snooker player Michael Davidson Tillman is wanted over a brutal attack where he stabbed his victim nine times in the neck and chest on the Gold Coast.
Tillman has been on the run for almost a decade.
He was arrested and charged with attempted murder after the Gold Coast assault but didn’t appear in court a year later.
He is also wanted over a serious assault at Benowa Tavern in which he allegedly knocked a man to the ground, got on top of him and bit off the side of his nose.
He is 175cm tall, with a muscular build, green eyes and light brown hair.
Now aged 47, police have suggested he may be living in Sydney.
In 2004, Tillman was jailed for manslaughter after he killed a former friend in a fight outside a pub in Sydney. During the fight, Tillman gouged the man’s eyes and kicked him in the head three times as he lay on the ground.
MOST WANTED ‘POSTER BOY’
“In a bet there is a fool and a thief,” an age-old proverb states.
But the wisdom remains valid, as the alleged victims of South Australian fugitive and accused conman Jonathan Robert Simmons can attest to.
Simmons has spent nearly three years wanted by SA Police over an alleged gambling website scam, starting in September 2014 and ending the day after the Melbourne Cup.
Police say Simmons had promised to help gamblers by giving them the inside running during the Spring of 2014, through a website he claimed to be developing.
But the mug punters who allegedly forked out a total of $58,000 to fund the phantom website quickly discovered they had backed a loser.
Detectives from Eastern Adelaide CIB issued a summons for Simmons to face court in early 2016 on 10 deception-related offences.
Magistrate Oliver Koehn issued an arrest warrant after Simmons failed to show up for his first court hearing in May 2016.
Simmons received the dubious honour of being SA’s poster boy for last year’s annual launch of Operation Roam, in which members of the public are urged to help police catch fugitives across Australia.
But he remains at large, and police believe he may be in hiding in Victoria or NSW — or has remained under the radar in SA.
The 37-year old is believed to have used a number of aliases including Tristian Simmons, John Robert Griffiths and John Simmons.
Simmons is 170cm tall, with blue eyes and was last known to have thinning light brown hair and a medium to heavy build.
Police warn anyone who spots Simmons not to approach him “under any circumstances”, and to instead call triple-0.
$1 MILLION REWARD
Stuart Pearce, 61, is suspected of having murdered his wife Meredith and three of their children, Adam, 11, Travis, 9, and Kerry, 2, in 1991 at their Adelaide home.
Meredith was found tied to a chair with a towel pushed into her mouth while his three children were suffocated with plastic bags placed over their heads.
They all died before the house was set alight with petrol. A fourth son, Matthew, survived because he was staying at a friend’s home overnight.
The murders stunned South Australia, but despite a $1 million reward and various sightings in the state and elsewhere Pearce has eluded capture.
Police have also not ruled out he has taken his own life.
SWORD-WIELDING KILLER
David Dick, a popular and pleasant 36-year-old carpenter and suburban cricketer, was cutting through the basement car park underneath the sprawling Doncaster Shoppingtown in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs on the morning of February 3, 2017. He was hurrying to catch a bus to work, but someone who knew his routine was waiting for him.
As David stepped out of a car park lift, he was attacked with a sword. It was calculated, vicious and fatal. He was left bleeding to death while his attacker calmly stepped back into a lift and left the scene, carrying the weapon.
Police and the victim’s horrified family were baffled by the attack. David Dick was a blameless man with no enemies. Who would want to kill him?
It wasn’t until after security footage of the suspected attacker was screened that the dead man’s family received the second terrible shock: the unknown attacker was almost certainly David’s older brother Jonathan Dick.
The suspicion hardened when Jonathan’s old blue Ford Fairmont sedan was later found abandoned in a street in Ivanhoe East, a short drive from Doncaster. A local householder supplied security footage of a man walking down the same street and matching the killer’s description: a solidly-built man, around 176cm tall with brown hair.
It turned out that Jonathan Dick, then 38, had been missing for two days from the rundown house where he had lived alone for several years at Seymour, north of Melbourne. His neighbour told reporters of a solitary man who disappeared that week and has not been seen in Seymour since.
Police at first were confident the missing man would be found quickly — on the road or at railway or bus stations or with relatives or friends interstate. As weeks turned into months, it seemed increasingly likely he had committed suicide in some hidden spot.
But all that changed early on the morning of August 23 last year, when a former classmate of Jonathan Dick’s stepped onto the footpath outside his family house in Church St, Keilor. It was just before 7am and the rear vision camera on a passing garbage truck caught a glimpse of sudden violence.
A man in a red top and blue jeans attacked the terrified resident with a hammer. The victim suffered head wounds but was not badly hurt. He recognised the attacker as Jonathan Dick, who had grown his hair shoulder length since his brother’s murder 18 months earlier.
Dick ran away, heading south. Again, he vanished. He hasn’t been seen since … at least by anybody willing to tell police about it.
Originally published as Murder and mayhem: Seven crims on Australia’s most wanted list
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