Deadline: When a gun to granny’s head is a cherished family memory

In some families, pretending to hold a gun to the head of your granny is a true Kodak moment. Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

Prisoners often “change religion” to get better food.

Melbourne’s top crime writers Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with their weekly dose of scallywag scuttlebutt.

WHERE HAVE WE SEEN THAT BEFORE?

As police searched for crime family figure Lex Peirce last week, a familiar-looking photo of he and his grandmother Kath Pettingill surfaced.

It shows Lex Junior enjoying some family time with his gran, pointing an object which looks a bit like a gun at her head.

Deadline was struck at its similarity to an old image of Lex’s uncle, Dennis “Mr Death” Allen in an almost identical pose in the 1980s.

Lex Peirce Jr with his grandmother. Picture: Facebook

Dennis Allen playfully points a pistol at the head of his mother, Kath Pettingill.

Allen, who was responsible for who knows how many homicides, is almost definitely pointing the genuine article at his mum’s head back at one of the many Richmond properties the family controlled when at the top of Melbourne’s heroin-trafficking tree.

Thankfully, police were able to round up Lex Junior at a hotel in Mont Albert on Tuesday night.

He has been charged with assaulting police and drug offences after an incident at Langwarrin last week.

Underworld matriarch Kath Pettingill was famously known as Granny Evil during her brutal family’s campaign of terror across Melbourne in the 1980s.

She had eight sons including Victor, who was charged over the Walsh St police murders, and Dennis Allen who was thought to have murdered up to 13 people.

CRANKY CRIM CRAVES KOSHER CUISINE

Jonas Black is a crank and a troublemaker.

When the South Gippsland council told him the illegal sheds he called “Jonastown” had to be demolished, he attacked two council workers who’d come to inspect his progress.

He cut open one man’s head in an attack that the prosecution argued was premeditated attempted murder, given he had a tarpaulin spread inside his 4WD and a grave-size hole dug in the bush near his property at Turtons Creek, near Foster.

Being seven years into an 11-year sentence and approaching the time to apply for parole hasn’t modified Black’s behaviour.

He is waging a court campaign to be given Kosher food at the Hopkins Correctional Centre, presumably arguing that he has embraced Judaism.

Building surveyor Matthew Patterson speaks outside court in Melbourne alongside his wife Carolyn after his attack Jonas Black was jailed. Picture: AAP

In fact, prison sources say, cunning crooks often “change religion” inside just to get better food.

Apparently, fake Muslims called Bruce and Craig tell porkies just to get halal.

Black is taking his fight to the Supreme Court, which is his right.

You wonder how his life might have turned out if he’d got permits to build his sheds. He could be sitting in one now, eating turkey-bacon and bagels.

TALE OF TWO LINDSAYS

The Queen’s Birthday honours elevate hundreds of unsung heroes, worthy folk who work selflessly for the greater good.

But this week Her Majesty’s advisers have confused one of those nice people with a self-admitted crime reporter, such as those responsible for this column.

The “Lindsay Edmund Murdoch” given a gong for services to journalism cannot possibly be the same person who worked the police beat in Melbourne in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Crime reporter Murdoch started out sweeping floors and delivering the local rag after being kicked out of school in Warragul. Then talked his way to a bigger newspaper in South Gippsland and then a job at the big time … the Dandenong News.

There is no proof that scallywag Murdoch was involved in a scandal in which someone rode a “borrowed” horse naked up the main street of Berwick at midnight under the influence of alcohol. Let’s just say he was lucky to escape to police rounds at The Age newspaper, where he consorted with disreputable elements of the heavy crime squads, whose idea of fun was blowing up crooks’ front porches with gelignite.

This Murdoch had a porn star moustache and was often mistaken for Ron Barassi — and, wonderfully, for a fugitive rogue detective named Colin Creed, who was on the lam for years over robberies and rapes.

Police were alerted to a sighting of “Creed” in a city pub, and shadowed the suspect. The target went to The Age building in Spencer St late at night, snatched a copy of the newspaper then shook his fist at the building, yelling obscenities.

The puzzled watchers then realised the “fugitive” was not the rogue detective Creed but rogue reporter Murdoch throwing a tantrum about not getting a story on page one.

We have thoughtfully redacted other stories. Such as the one about tackling a rival reporter with a beer stubby on the grounds “This is how we do it in the Latrobe Valley”.

Then there is the financial wizardry of living solely on expenses for many years as a foreign correspondent, in which time he paid off a couple of houses.

It is a matter of record that he once charged the cost of a taxi that was wrecked by an army tank. He denies having bought a camel on expenses. We could not possibly comment on eyewitness accounts that he persuaded gullible reporters in a Townsville restaurant to fill out taxi receipts for plausible amounts that would nicely cover the price of dinner and a dozen bottles of wine.

People who have spent all day covering the tragic death of soldiers in a helicopter crash need some way to decompress.

Proof that this larger-than-life Murdoch could not be the respectable retired family man now residing in a period National Trust house in Darwin is that the 1980s rogue never once admitted to having a middle name, let alone one like “Edmund”.

Lindsay Edmund Murdoch OAM of Coconut Grove must be relieved not to be that other guy, who seems to have faded entirely away. The crime writing caper is poorer for it.

DROWNED RATS

A tip for aspiring gangsters who reckon they can outswim the long arm of the law: bring your bronze certificate and a wetsuit.

Ben Cousins famously fled from police, with great success.

Two teenagers who took on the Ben Cousins biathlon option ended up in dire straits the other night after gang crime police sprung them cruising in a stolen car at Clyde North.

The pair bolted, as Cousins famously did in 2006, when he abandoned his Benz (and girlfriend) on a Perth highway and ran.

But whereas the star athlete then swam the Swan River, never mind the bull sharks, when the Clyde clowns jumped in the Cascade wetlands, they nearly drowned.

It turns out neither fugitive could swim. Police fished out an 18-year-old male before finding his 17-year-old mate semiconscious in the drink.

They were taken to hospital for treatment of hypothermia. After thawing out, they were charged over an aggravated burglary at Koo Wee Rup. Which is better than a watery grave.

JUDGE LIZ 1, IDIOTS 0

Judge Liz Gaynor gets the vote for straight talking when she gave Tony Mokbel’s jailhouse attackers, Dumb and Dumber, a good old-fashioned coach’s spray when she sentenced them for what she accurately called “a cowardly attack on a 53 year-old-man” — predicting they would end up “drug-addled, lonely old men” reduced to bashing women and children.

Food for thought for Teira Bennett and Eldea Tuira, both 22, not that they are seen as big thinkers so much as useful idiots manipulated by older gang members. Not that this has stopped idiots from mocking Judge Gaynor’s refreshingly frank comments. Such as one pair on a low-rent panel act, the Anthony Cumia Show in New York, which is about as hilarious as a broken leg.

THE DIRT

They’re consenting adults so we won’t be too harsh, but surely two teachers can find a better place to get it on than at school.

It was certainly a learning experience for the colleague who recently found the pair going hammer and tongs on a piano in the music room. The visitor beat a retreat as the duo played on. Honky Tonk Women, maybe.

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