Fred Cook: the footy star and the drug that changed it all
BOOK EXTRACT: FOOTY star Fred Cook had it all. A stellar sporting career, a thriving pub and a gig on TV’s hottest show — then he met Dennis Allen.
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JUST as a criminal element had attached itself to the hotel under the previous owners, some of Fred Cook’s regulars were well known to police. As he says, a few had seen more stations than Puffing Billy.
But because of his stature as a great Port Melbourne footballer, he encountered no trouble in his early days at the hotel. The only time he saw a punch thrown was when a suspicious wife found her husband having lunch with his secretary upstairs. There was no drug dealing, no prostitution, no gambling, no violence.
In 1984, Cook was introduced to a heavily tattooed man named “Dennis”. He was wearing green brace and bib overalls and white running shoes, drinking southern Comfort and Coke, and chain-smoking Viscounts at the bar. Cook saw that he liked to wear expensive jewellery — lots of it. He thought Dennis was a blowhard, but he let it go because he was spending a lot of money, tipping big and shouting drinks to people around him. To his great regret, Cook got to know Dennis too well.
Dennis was Dennis Allen, and he was one of Melbourne’s most violent criminals. A lot has been written about him since his death in 1987 and he’s invariably described as a “notorious” underworld figure.
In the 1980s, he lived in Richmond and made a fortune selling drugs and firearms. At one stage he had converted his heroin dealing into nine properties in the suburb.
It was unwise to mess with him. Some who did never lived to regret it. A body count piled up around him. Allen was suspected of, but never charged with, a string of murders.
Allen was the first child of Kath Pettingill. Two of her other sons, Victor Peirce and Trevor Pettingill, were two of the men charged over the murders of Victorian police officers Steven Tynan, 22, and Damian Eyre, 20, in Walsh St, South Yarra, in 1988.
The slaying of the young constables was said to be a payback for the death of Melbourne criminal Graeme Jensen a few days earlier. Jensen had been shot by police in his car as they tried to arrest him at Narre Warren.
The four men charged in connection with Walsh St were acquitted. After the case, Kath Pettingill sheeted home the blame to Allen. “We’re still paying for his sins,” she told television reporter Martin King. “We all are. He died before he could be punished.”
Tony Farrell, whose son Anthony was one of the men charged over the Walsh St murders, often drank at the Station Hotel. He introduced Cook to Allen.
Cook approached him as he did all his customers, chatting and making sure his glass was filled and he was comfortable in his surrounds. Allen was; he became a regular. He had watched Cook play for Port Melbourne and often asked him about his career.
Cook was happy to talk football and whatever else Allen wanted to yarn about. After all, he would often spend $1000 in one sitting, on drinks, meals and tips. Eventually, Cook came to understand that his cashed-up patron acquired his money in a way less lawful than what he did.
“He just opened up and said he was selling heroin and he was making s---loads of money out of it,” Cook says. “I mean, s---loads, ridiculous amounts.”
Sports writer Scot Palmer knew all about Dennis Allen. In the early 1980s, Palmer and his family took over the Cherry Tree Hotel in Richmond.
INSIDER SPEAKS: The callous slayings by Dennis Allen
THE BLACK LIST: Peirce, Allen on Anderson’s roll call
Allen spent a lot of time at the Cherry Tree, considering it his “local” and his turf. But Palmer was out to run a successful hotel and was intent on stamping out its criminal crowd. Allen quickly came to dislike him. He would pay for his southern Comfort and Coke with $50 notes and leave the change. But the Palmers, not wanting to be “bought”, always set it aside and handed it back when he next visited.
More than once, bullets were fired into the walls of the hotel. Palmer and his wife, Lorraine, lived on their nerves. They were “constantly on alert, wondering who would be next through the door and would there be a confrontation”, he wrote in the Sunday Herald Sun in 1996.
“Whenever it was Dennis and his spiky-haired nephew Jason Ryan, in their identical work overalls and snow-white sandshoes with the lace holes removed, our hearts sank.”
Palmer banned Allen after a nose-to-nose argument and was later told a contract had been placed on his life.
Allen invited Cook to his house in Stephenson St, Richmond. Geese wandered around the backyard. Allen explained they guarded property better than dogs.
They were sitting in the lounge room when Allen walked out and returned with a Magnum Highway Patrolman.
“He said, ‘Them f-----’ coppers are up on the bell tower (the Bryant and May factory across the road).’ And he’s gone ping, ping, ping, shooting at them,” Cook says. “I just couldn’t believe it. He’s taking pot shots at the cops who were doing surveillance on him.”
Cook was startled. But it didn’t stop him from going around there again two weeks later. He shared a southern Comfort and Coke with Allen, listened to Bob Marley music, admired the exotic fish swimming in giant tanks and snorted cocaine. The affable former Port Melbourne football champion was keeping bad company and getting into bad habits.
“Here,” Dennis Allen said, taking Fred Cook’s drink, a Bacardi and Coke. “Try this.”
Allen pulled a bag of white powder from his trouser pocket, put some on a pen knife and tipped it into Cook’s drink. Standing behind the bar of his Station Hotel, Cook drank it in one pull and quickly felt a lot better.
Cook had been battling the flu, and on this day late in 1984 he was feeling lousy. He was down to do a sportsman’s night at a suburban football club with St Kilda’s Brownlow Medal star Neil Roberts and English Test cricketer John Snow, and needed to be at his sharpest to tell his football stories and raise a few laughs.
He explained his plight to Allen, who said he had just the answer, reaching for the bag. It was the first time Cook had taken speed. Straight away he got a tremendous lift. “I felt bloody fantastic,” he says.
He began to use it more regularly, figuring he had it worked out. It was simple maths: if he took twice as much, he’d feel twice as good.
People told Cook to steer clear of Allen. Early one morning police pulled over his car as he was leaving Allen’s house. One of the officers told him, “Fred, when are you going to wake up? Don’t you know he’s only using you for respectability?”
Cook didn’t listen. He admits it was “exciting, even exhilarating” to mix with Allen and his associates. “It was a different world. I wasn’t involved in the crime, but I was looking in on it. There’d be girls and prostitutes and drugs everywhere,” he says.
“It’s like that line in the Peggy Lee song — is that all there is to a fire? There wasn’t much I hadn’t done on the right side of the law.” From what Cook saw, no day at Stephenson St passed without incident. One afternoon, Allen mistakenly took a hit of heroin instead of amphetamines and collapsed to the floor.
Cook performed mouth-to-mouth and heart massage on him, until ambulance officers arrived and administered Narcan. Allen came to — and turned on the ambulance staff. Kath Pettingill gave Cook $1000 to keep them happy. He gave them something that pleased them more — his autograph — and returned the money to Pettingill.
Around the same time, Cook heard something that still haunts him.
“Dennis Allen had a kid hanging around his joint. He was a bit slow. Allen got it in his head the kid was a police informer. He wasn’t. He was just hanging around there giving Allen a chop-out, doing a few bits and pieces around the house. Anyway, we were sitting in the lounge room.
Allen said I’d better go. That’s what he always said to me when something was about to go down, ‘Fred, you better f--- off.’ By the time I’d gone out the front door, I heard bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, the tone of different gun shots.”
Cook bolted to his car. He heard no more about it. He never saw the kid again.
In one instance when he was with (girlfriend) Sally Desmond, Cook borrowed Kath Pettingill’s car and brought it back a day earlier than was arranged. He entered the house and sat on the couch. Allen produced a pistol and whipped it across his face. Desmond jumped in.
“She saved my a---. She really did. She got up and stood between me and the gun,” Cook says. “It was the right environment for Dennis Allen to shoot because there were a few of his friends there, all off their heads, and he could have used them to clean up the mess. In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have let anyone smack me across the mouth. But that wasn’t the time for me to fight back. He’d have put bullets into me, quick smart.”
Desmond was terrified as Allen went into a rage, which she says Pettingill set off by claiming Cook was going to steal the car. By that stage, Desmond says, he’d “completely lost the plot, he was off the planet”. “Dennis Allen thought everyone was against him, was crazy with paranoia because of all the s--- he was taking. He threatened to blow both our heads off.”
WHEN Cook opened the Station Hotel it was his pride and joy. But by late 1985, he says he was “drug f-----” and concerned only about his next hit. He was beyond caring about the pub. His idea he could turn his back on the drug when he wanted was a falsehood.
He tried, but he felt sluggish. He needed it as a pick-me-up, “to bring me back to life, make me feel better”. Amphetamines had been his way of getting through busy days. Now he couldn’t go without it. In his own mind, he’d become an addict.
INSIDER SPEAKS: The callous slayings by Dennis Allen
THE BLACK LIST: Peirce, Allen on Anderson’s roll call
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