Award winning cop Leslie O’Hagan farewelled, honoured for extraordinary service
Even with a smoking gun at his throat, Les O’Hagan didn’t cower; his steadfast bravery won him two valour awards during his career. But despite his appetite for risk, he lived a long and interesting 95 years.
Police & Courts
Don't miss out on the headlines from Police & Courts. Followed categories will be added to My News.
When the angry drunk with the smoking shotgun put the barrel under Les O’Hagan’s chin, he didn’t flinch. He kept talking.
O’Hagan had a fly rod in his hand — a convenient prop that gave him the excuse to speak calmly to the agitated shooter about a fishing mate he pretended to be looking for.
The man had fired over the heads of two local policemen an hour before when they were called to the scene. Those police had wisely retreated because the shooter had people near him who could have been hurt if an attempted arrest started a shootout.
It was a Saturday night in Euroa in June 1982. Les O’Hagan, a 54-year-old inspector, got to the scene around midnight from his home in Benalla after a day’s fly fishing in the hills.
Apart from the rod and a plausible line of chat to distract the shooter, he had a pistol hidden in his fishing clothes.
O’Hagan believed in making a decision and backing himself. If he was wrong this time, he risked being killed.
O’Hagan kept talking until he saw his chance. He grabbed the gun barrel, wrenched it from the man’s grasp and drew his pistol. Job done.
Les O’Hagan had just pulled off the feat that won him his second valour award, a Bar for the “VA” he’d received 18 years earlier. He was the first of only two officers to do that in Victoria, and the rules had to be changed for it to happen.
Despite his appetite for calculated risk, Leslie John O’Hagan VA would live a long and interesting life, dying of natural causes in the Northern Territory on Remembrance Day two weeks ago, just after his 95th birthday.
O’Hagan was “Liverpool Irish”, like most from the English port city known as the biggest Irish city of all. He arrived in Australia with his father in 1949 aged 21, “ten pound poms” out to build a new life.
The first step: building a cheap house in what were then bare paddocks west of the Maribyrnong, now known as Avondale Heights. There was no sewerage or services but that didn’t matter.
Les was the oldest of five. His mother and the four younger children arrived months later.
Les brought with him the Liverpool lilt he never lost, a love of rugby union, and the toughness instilled by a wartime childhood of surviving German bombing raids.
His father was a glazer. As a teenager, Les had spent time building temporary shelters for families whose homes were bombed out. That experience made him strong physically and mentally.
By the time he got to Australia he was a good carpenter and knew enough about building to do it on the side for most of his time in the force, a silent partner with his plumber brother, Peter, and a third investor involved in racing.
At 25, O’Hagan was a good all-round tradesman and regular with the Footscray Rugby Club. He had ambition and energy but wanted the security of a Government job. In 1953, he joined the force.
Other police liked having him around. He had an imposing physical presence and was a sharp thinker and decisive leader. He worked in stations around the city and inner suburbs, carving a reputation among criminals for being hard but fair.
The Liverpool lad who had survived bombing raids wasn’t unnerved by safecrackers and armed robbers. Crims and fellow cops sensed that granite core in him well before the day in 1964 when he first came to public notice alongside another brave policeman.
On a quiet Tuesday night in late September, a call came from a woman named Margaret Ikin in Leopold St, South Yarra, near where the then Sen. Const. O’Hagan and First Const. Harold Suttie were in the old St Kilda Rd station.
It was 10 days after Melbourne beat Collingwood in front of a monster Grand Final crowd at the MCG, 10 weeks since The Beatles had played sell-out concerts at Festival Hall.
When O’Hagan and Suttie arrived, the frightened house owner opened the door and told them the man in the hall behind her had threatened her. She said he was a boarder who refused to move out.
The unwelcome guest was Dr Noel Panettiere, who despite his medical degree, was working as a labourer because of his unstable mental condition. O’Hagan was big and burly. But Panettiere was bigger — and quite unhinged.
When Panettiere saw the policemen, he said “I live here” and moved out of sight.
When they followed him, Panettiere pointed a .303 rifle at them. Suttie told him to put it down, saying “Don’t be silly.”
Panettiere said “I am not being silly” and worked the bolt, ramming a round into the breech and cocking the rifle. Suttie said they had heard the landlady’s side of the story “and now we want to hear yours,” asking him to sit down and talk.
Panettiere said “No, get out or I will shoot both of you.”
The confrontation went on for many minutes, with Pannatiere threatening to pull the trigger. He was getting more delusional and irrational. O’Hagan sensed he would shoot unless they stopped him.
During the conversation, both policemen had edged slightly closer, despite the rifle swinging back and forth. They sprang at Pannetiere, who hit Suttie in the face with the rifle barrel, but O’Hagan tackled him from the other side.
The three fell to the floor and Pannetiere pulled the trigger. The bullet missed them both and hit the skirting board.
The struggle went on for minutes. O’Hagan hit the madman with his baton but it had no effect except to make him crazier. Eventually, they managed to handcuff him.
Suttie’s cut eye needed three stitches and he had sprains and bruises. O’Hagan had strained tendons in both shoulders.
It took two years in the mental ward at Ararat before Pannetiere was deemed fit to be tried for attempted murder. In 1966, he was sentenced to two years by a judge who praised the bravery of the policemen who had risked their lives to arrest him, earning the force’s highest bravery award.
By 1970 O’Hagan had been in the force 17 years and had the respect of people on both sides of the law. He’d worked in the consorting squad, handling the most dangerous men in the underworld.
One of them was the standover man, killer and former boxer Jack Twist, notorious for (but never charged with) croaking Freddy “The Frog” Harrison at the docks.
Twist was banished to San Remo, warned never to come closer to town than Frankston. He had all the police on the Mornington Peninsula “bluffed” but he remembered O’Hagan.
When Twist turned on one of O’Hagan’s colleagues in a Mornington hotel, the cop dropped O’Hagan’s name. Twist left quietly.
O’Hagan locked up a lot of bad men. Around 1972, police intelligence sources heard that one of them was planning to harm him or his family when he got out of jail.
By this time O’Hagan and his wife Lillier had two daughters and a son living in Wandin Rd, Camberwell. The street had inspired the name Wandin Constructions for the family business that built blocks of flats around St Kilda.
O’Hagan was proud to have found enough extra money to move his family to the leafy eastern suburbs but he took any chance of a threat to them very seriously.
So did the police command, which posted him to tiny Corryong, high in the north-east, a long way from underworld haunts in St Kilda and Port Melbourne. Even there, he could not keep still, building a block of holiday apartments.
Apart from mandatory stints at Russell St in order to take promotion, O’Hagan would stay in northern Victoria — moving from Corryong to Benalla to Shepparton.
In 1986, he retired. But only from the police force.
After more than 40 years of working, 33 of them in the force, 58 years of age did not seem any reason to stop work. So, to his wife’s shock, he bought the lease to Mary River Station next to Kakadu in the Northern Territory. It was tens of thousands of acres of wild country.
The O’Hagans’ oldest daughter Harmony had married a “north Queensland cowboy”, Michael Teelow, and that influenced her father’s decision to go to the Top End.
Mary River Station was full of cattle and feral buffalo and mustering them with helicopters for export was O’Hagan’s idea of a retirement project.
The buffalo and cattle muster subsidised the building of a roadhouse and caravan park at Mary River, a thriving business which O’Hagan later parlayed into other property at Adelaide River.
He wasn’t quite a beef baron or a tourism tycoon but the likely lad from Liverpool had more than justified his parents’ decision to migrate from wartorn England.
Victoria Police sent a deputy commissioner to Les O’Hagan’s funeral in the Territory last Monday as a mark of respect. Master of ceremonies was one of his oldest friends in “the job”, John King.
Many contemporaries had died before him, others were too frail to make the trip. Some stories were told — but not all. Such as the time he caught three cocky young men in dinner suits breaking young plane trees in St Kilda Rd.
When the cockiest vandal sneered “Do you know who my father is?” O’Hagan retorted, “Why don’t you ask your mother?”
The suit swung a huge punch, which O’Hagan shook off.
“Matey,” he told the toffy vandal, “if you can’t do better than that you’re in trouble.” He then dropped him with one short punch. The offender’s father was a QC so the incident was hushed up.
The blunt humour of a bold man is not forgotten by crime reporters he met, notably when there were searches for fugitives in the high country.
Before the media rightly hailed O’Hagan for his heroic actions at Euroa in 1982, he was like a lot of “old school” police who resented reporters who were critical of police actions at a time when there was plenty to criticise.
In November 1981, after a long day in the bush looking for a kidnapper and rapist named William Cavanough and the young woman he had abducted, O’Hagan and other police gathered with reporters at the Kevington Hotel near Jamieson.
He stared at a black dog dozing near the reporters in the bar and said loudly: “You don’t care what sort of company you keep, do you?”
Tradie cleared of murder charges over death of mafia lawyer Joe Acquaro
A murder charge laid against a tradesman suspected of shooting mafia lawyer Joseph “Pino” Acquaro has been dropped after years of legal challenges.
Real Housewives star accused of leaking celebrity nudes online
Venus Behbahani has outed herself in court as being under police investigation for the leak of celeb nudes.