Andrew Rule: Antonio Arce, who helped capture fugitive Jonathan Dick, is our latest quiet hero
One of the people involved in Jonathan Dick’s capture went largely unnoticed. So step forward Antonio Arce, the quiet hero, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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Victoria’s most wanted man was run down in a dramatic confrontation in the city early last Monday morning. Now the whole story can be revealed.
All week it has sounded as if a posse of two pulled off the citizens’ arrest of the year, but that’s not quite true.
We don’t want to rain on the parade of David Cammarata and his cousin/friend/bodyguard Dion Raiola, currently sharing the limelight for their DIY law enforcement.
But let’s not overlook the gutsy passer-by who actually grabbed the accused murderer, Jonathan Dick, something that 17,000 Victorian police hadn’t managed in 30 months.
This unsung hero is Antonio Arce, a Colombian national who has studied and worked in Australia for 10 years and is hoping to get a visa to settle permanently with his local girlfriend. Antonio was on his way to work in the kitchen of Mick Jagger’s favourite Melbourne tapas restaurant, MoVida, when he saw a strongly-built man run from the Hosier Lane corner towards him as he walked along Flinders St.
Two men were chasing the running man and were unlikely to catch him, which is why they were yelling for someone to stop him.
Antonio, who is tall and lean and 28, blocked the running man and pushed him into the wall of the Nandos restaurant near the Hosier Lane corner.
As the two grappled and fell, Antonio sprained his wrist. By then, his work was done: Messrs Cammarata and Raiola had caught up and were understandably keen to subdue Jonathan Dick, which explains why the alleged killer had so much blood on him by the time police arrived.
Despite his injured arm, Antonio continued to MoVida and started chopping onions in the kitchen before police cordoned off the lane. He was still working away when the restaurant’s joint proprietor Andy McMahon turned up a little later and explained to him exactly what he’d done.
When Antonio found out he had tackled one of Australia’s two most wanted men, he was shocked. Where he comes from, the former home of the Pablo Escobar’s cartel, to bring down public enemy number one is a good way to end up on the missing list.
His bosses McMahon and Frank Camorra took the shy Colombian to the Epworth hospital in Richmond to treat his wrist. He went home for the rest of the week on doctor’s advice, which partly explains why his role in Dick’s arrest has been overlooked.
Staff members joking about catching “El Chapo” didn’t help. The quiet chef could be forgiven for imagining there could be repercussions, which there won’t be. But his workmates have suggested he is entitled to half the $100,000 reward for apprehending the wanted man, given he stepped in single-handed to stop him until the cavalry arrived.
It’s not the first time MoVida staff have seen laneway action. A few years ago a diner turned violent, assaulting his wife and then staff members. That time, Andy McMahon and a kitchen hand took the deranged man outside and “subdued” him until police arrived. Hosier Lane is colourful in more ways than graffiti.
It was a big week for have-a-go heroes. Just seven days before Jonathan Dick’s arrest, a blood-spattered man wielding a knife ran amok in Sydney’s CBD, yelling Islamic phrases.
The fear that such a person might be preparing to attack strangers did not stop a 64-year-old lawyer, John Bamford, from tackling him with a wicker chair grabbed from a cafe.
And the fracas attracted three British visitors, brothers Luke and Paul O’Shaughnessy and their friend Lee Cuthbert, who caught alleged “knife man” Mert Ney and held him down with plastic milk crates: an instant reaction that might have stopped an already tragic incident escalating into another Lindt cafe-style hostage debacle. As it was, Ney was charged with murdering a young woman.
It doesn’t always end well for have-a-go heroes. Luke Mitchell was stabbed to death when he intervened to protect a woman being assaulted by three Thai nationals near a Brunswick massage parlour in 2009. It took years for international law enforcement agencies to track the killers, which was cold comfort to the family of the brave man who gave his life to help a stranger.
Mitchell’s death came two years after the Melbourne CBD murder, when a Hells Angel drug dealer, Christopher Wayne Hudson, shot two good Samaritans who came to the rescue of his girlfriend, Kara Douglas, as he dragged her from a taxi by the hair.
It happened in the King St “nightclub precinct” about 8am on June 18, 2007. Solicitor and father of three Brendan Keilar, aged 43, had everything to live for but he threw himself at the armed and much larger man. So did Dutch backpacker Paul de Waard.
Brendan Keilar was shot dead, De Waard was badly wounded and Kara Douglas lost a kidney. Hudson fled but gave himself up two days later after hiding at a safe house at Wallan, north of Melbourne.
An occasional rough sleeper, Michael “Trolley Man” Rogers, became a short lived social media sensation after ramming a would-be terrorist with a shopping trolley after the attacker stabbed Pelligrini cafe proprietor Sisto Malaspina to death last November. It turned out that Rogers was a flawed character with a rap sheet but that didn’t stop him being the hero of the hour.
Then there is the burly young Islander man who jumped out of his car with a baseball bat to confront Dimitrious Gargasoulas as he drove in circles at the corner of Flinders and Swanston before his fatal rampage down Bourke St in 2017.
The “batsman” was keen to stop the lunatic but Gargasoulas was driving clockwise, which put him on the inside of the circle, making it difficult and dangerous to reach him with the bat. If Gargasoulas had driven in the opposite direction, he would probably have been stopped with one well-aimed swing … and six lives would have been saved.
As it is, the man with baseball bat is the have-a-go guy who never quite got to be a hero, but his heart was in the right place. This is more than can be said for the accidental hero who was instrumental in the arrest of a violent prison escapee in 1997.
Andrew Jeffrey was one of five prisoners who broke out of a Queensland prison with Brenden “the Postcard Bandit” Abbott late that year. Abbott swiftly distanced himself from Jeffrey and three other “dumb and dumber” prisoners, instead going on a nationwide robbery spree with his protégé Brendan Berichon.
Jeffrey was so thick that he boasted in a Footscray pub that he was an escapee, a claim that caused another drinker to scoff in disbelief. Jeffrey’s honour being at stake, he went outside with the doubter to settle the argument. The pair was still fighting when the police arrived and arrested Jeffrey.
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The accidental hero of that story lost the bet, and possibly the fight, and had no chance of any reward. But there seems a good case for Antonio Arce to be considered for his share of the reward offered for the capture of Jonathan Dick.
Not to mention the small matter of eventually being granted a visa. Some might think he is the sort of citizen we need.