Deadline: Prosecutors take a gamble on killer Bandali Debs
It’s rare for a jury to be asked to take the word of a man who has killed young women and police, but that’s exactly what’s happening in a Melbourne court.
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Debs instant mash-up
Serial armed robber and multiple killer Bandali Debs has hit the witness stand for the first time in his life.
As Deadline has reported before, the 68-year-old contacted police only days after his former teenage robber sidekick Jason Roberts had convictions quashed over the murders of police officers Gary Silk and Rod Miller in 1998.
After more than 20 years of silence, Debs seems a willing prosecution witness against Roberts, his co-accused for the double killing at Cochranes Rd, Moorabbin in August 1998.
It’s rare for a serial killer to be a police witness.
Perhaps Debs found God in prison and is now a completely reformed character. Why else would the prosecution risk relying on someone with such a dark past.
In the end, judge and jury have to weigh up what Debs’ motivations might be to give evidence.
Roberts’ defence did get him admitting he had lied on oath earlier in this case.
In an extraordinary day of Roberts’ Supreme Court retrial over the murders on Thursday, it was revealed the four-time convicted killer had badgered the parole board to let him move from Goulburn Prison, apparently not a place he likes, to get to a Melbourne prison closer to his family.
Debs even asked VicPol for a release date and to drop any more inquiries into his criminal past.
The official story is that no deal was formally struck.
Even the prosecutor turned on his own witness, accusing Debs of “minimising” his role in the murders.
He has confessed to killing Miller, but has denied shooting Silk, at odds with the prosecution case.
Then defence barrister David Hallowes, QC, took his turn.
Hallowes reminded Debs of the two vulnerable women he shot in the head and asked him why he did it. Debs answered: “It just happened”.
Hallowes also called him a cold-blooded killer and asked: “You’re a violent man aren’t you, Mr Debs?”
“You could say that,” Debs answered.
That answer was undeniably true. Whether all of them were is for the jury to ponder.
Will Stan the Man please stand up?
In Sydney, the original “Stan the Man” was one of the most violent criminals of all time. Stanley John Smith, graduate of brutal boys’ homes, was a brutal enforcer for the brutal Lennie “Mr Big” McPherson and his nasty little mate, George Freeman.
Despite being linked to maybe 15 murders and more shootings and bashings than you could poke a Glock at, Stan the Man hardly did any jail time.
Smith found God before he died in 2010 at 73, which is just as well because there was a bit to sort out before he knocked on Heaven’s Door.
Such as the matter of his addict son’s heroin dealer being found murdered, having been repeatedly run over so that he died slowly.
The Melbourne “Stan the Man” is a different proposition altogether. Our very own Stan Longinidis gave up computer programming to become eight-times world kickboxing champion.
A short heavyweight with a sky-high reputation, that “Stan the Man” was and is an ornament to his sport, still revered by fans.
Then there’s the mysterious “Steven Jameson”, an alias adopted by an elusive scallywag whose parents named him Stanley when he was born way back.
This Stan the Man is the one recently dubbed “the fifth Beatle” of the Great Bookie Robbery crew of 1976.
Stan Jameson/Jones/James was a quiet presence around the coterie of robbers who pulled huge heists across Australia during the golden age of armed robbery in the 1970s, when huge payrolls were delivered in cash and police wore Del Monti suits.
Some reports of the arrest of a car full of armed men in Redfern in September 1974 mention a “Stanley Ernest Jones” alongside career robbers like Marko Motric, James “Jockey” Smith and Brian O’Callaghan. The fab four were bailed for a total of $28,000 but apparently failed to appear on charges of conspiring to rob the NSW railway workshops payroll of some $175,000.
By the time the story broke that police were hunting the bail jumpers a month later, Stan was “Stanley Ernest James” of “no fixed address” and aged 38.
The Redfern conspirator was the same Stanley Ernest James that Melbourne police badly wanted in July, 1976, to question over the bookie robbery at the Victorian Club three months earlier.
Detectives went late at night to the home of one Daniel Uriah Hacking in Kett St, Nunawading. Hacking, a dry cleaner, was home in his pyjamas but the police didn’t find Stan the Man.
What they did find, according to court evidence, was $11,400 in cash, which they later assured a magistrate was almost certainly proceeds from the bookie robbery.
Memories fade over decades, Deadline’s included, so it’s hardly worth mentioning that one of the police who found the cash that night now vaguely recalls it was “about 30 grand”. It’s obviously a case of memory playing tricks, because surely the armed robbery squad wouldn’t mislay close to 20 gorillas.
As for our man Stan, as the Sunday Herald Sun reported last weekend, he returned to Sydney suddenly in late 1979 and reputedly served some “time owed” while things cooled off in Victoria.
As far as anyone knows, he has spent the rest of a long and interesting life working for a suburban council and playing golf. No one ever questions his scores.
Heard something? Let us know deadline@news.com.au
High times at Eltham
Speaking of armed robbers, the shock allegation that the child abductor “Mr Cruel” might have been Normie “Chops” Lee, trusted mate of ace robber Raymond Patrick Bennett, alias Ray Chuck, has armchair detectives spilling their cocoa right across the world wide web.
Take “Rusty” from Georgia, USA, who corresponds with Deadline sometimes.
He will be devastated that doubt has been cast on his complex and entertaining theory — built over years from 16,000km away — that Mr Cruel is a veteran Melbourne journalist married to a prominent radio identity in this city.
Rusty has gone to enormous trouble to “prove” not only that our former workmate is Mr Cruel but that he also carried out infamous unsolved murders while living in America in the 1960s before returning to Melbourne to wreak havoc.
If nothing else, it goes to show that circumstantial evidence, unless it’s absolutely watertight, is never as good as the “smoking gun” variety plus good forensics and witnesses.
It also shows that a stranger on the other side of the world can dig up a staggering amount of detail about anyone by combing the internet.
Mongols hound dog lover Toby
There’s nobody more ex- than an ex-cop, they say. But outlaw bikies must run a close second, as the rebadged and now unbadged Toby Mitchell and his fellow exiles are pondering life without membership of the Mongols.
Mitchell, of course, was a Bandido sergeant-at-arms back in the carefree days before he was filled full of lead outside Doherty’s gym in Brunswick in 2011.
That shooting, and the one that followed it in 2013, left him with half his internal organs missing and chopped about after 30 operations — but it didn’t stop the one-time kickboxer from getting back on the Harley and later “patching over” to the Mongols, which was a bit like Dusty Martin switching to the Magpies.
Mitchell also got on to Instagram and has reputedly pulled some 300,000 followers.
But not everyone loves a star of the small screen device, and the Queensland-dominated Mongol hierarchy are leaking stories that portray Mitchell and his fellow outcasts as being beyond the pale.
This is for supposedly breaking the unwritten bikie law against “running with dogs”. That’s a charge that bikies, and crooks in general, level at people they don’t like any more. It has nothing to do with throwing frisbees to bull terriers or walking greyhounds, something that animal-lover Mitchell might like, given that his dad trained dishlickers.
“Running with dogs” is about mixing with people who have supposedly given evidence against others or assisted the law in some way. The funny thing is that the Mitchell camp says exactly the same thing about some of their former Mongol mates, such as Nick “The Knife” Forbes.
The dogs are barking that it could all end badly.
Two more shops set on fire as tobacco war rages on
Smoke stores in Thornbury and Frankston were set ablaze in the latest arson attacks in Melbourne’s tobacco war.
Kickboxer linked to Melbourne’s underworld emerges in Dubai
High-flying fighter and trainer Salim Aschna has become the latest figure with ties to Melbourne’s underworld to relocate to the Middle East, opening an up-market restaurant in the region.