The brutal lives of the Kane brothers

The Kanes were standover men and fighters regarded as psychopathic even by underworld standards. This is their story of violence and dishonesty on Melbourne’s streets.

Raymond “Muscles” Kane holding a picture of his brother Les and niece Suzanne.

The late Pentridge Prison chaplain, Father Brosnan, once said he’d taught the Kane brothers to fight as schoolboys.

“I didn’t do a bad job, did I?” he said proudly. By that time, two Kanes were dead and the third was in jail for killing a woman, so the knockabout priest’s coaching record wasn’t great.

If the Kanes had followed the Queensberry Rules outside the ring, they might have lasted a lot longer.

But they were sentenced from birth to a life cycle of violence and dishonesty.

Brian Kane, best known of the three brothers, once said that their father refused to buy school books for him. Instead, he told him to go and steal some then write his name in them.

Brian would end up a Golden Gloves boxer and a ruthless standover man, collecting debts for SP bookies, but he was not the most violent of the three brothers.

That was Les Kane, even by underworld standards regarded as psychopathic when he lost his temper.

Brian Kane

Les Kane.

It was, arguably, Les’s propensity for violence that brought the Kanes undone.

He once tried to bribe his way out of wounding a police officer at a northern suburbs hotel.

He and Brian fell out with up-and-coming armed robber Raymond Patrick Bennett, known in armed robbery circles by his original name, Ray Chuck.

Chuck alias Bennett had made the mistake of pulling off the heist of the century — the Great Bookie Robbery of 1976 — and then having the nerve not to share the money with the Kanes and their crew.

The stand-off led to a pub brawl in which Brian Kane had part of his left ear bitten off by Bennett’s mate, Vinnie Mikkelsen.

As Bennett’s then-lawyer Joe Gullaci noted drily, it’s hard to be a standover man when someone takes a bite out of your ear. Mr Gullaci always was perceptive, which is why he would later become a judge.

The ear chomping was a deadly insult that had to be avenged in blood. Bennett, who was also perceptive, decided to get in first.

That’s why three masked men burst into Les Kane’s not-quite-secret hideaway in Wantirna in late 1978, bundled Judi and their two small children out of sight and shot Les to death in the bathroom.

Les Kane died vain — he was pulling out grey whiskers in front of the mirror when his killers came calling with machine guns.

Les Kane holding his young daughter Suzanne Kane. Les was shot in his Wantirna home in 1978 with his wife and children close by.

His body and his pink Ford Futura car were never found. The theory that both could have been crushed into a tiny cube at a car-crushing scrap metal yard is hard to discount.

Brian, who once told colourful detective Brian “Skull” Murphy he’d have liked to be a policeman, ran his own investigation while ducking around Melbourne to stay a step ahead of the killers he was aiming to kill first.

He even offered to pay police for help in tracking down the enemy.

In the end, Bennett thought it would be safer in custody, so did not apply for bail on a relatively minor charge.

But that decision gave the Kane camp a chance because they knew Bennett would have to appear in court.

It happened the week after the 1979 Melbourne Cup, when Raymond Patrick Bennett was ushered from the holding cells through the old city court in Russell St to go to an upstairs court.

Before he was led through the dock, he passed a cell with a message scrawled on the wall: RAY CHUCK, YOU WILL GET YOURS IN DUE COURSE YOUR F..KING DOG.

A minute or so after he was escorted upstairs, there were three shots and the sound of running feet.

A man looking like a solicitor in a dark suit with spectacles and a beard had jumped up as two wary detectives led Chuck past him, snarled “Cop this, motherf..ker” and shot him with a snub-nose .38 pistol.

Raymond Bennett aka Ray Chuck.

The scene outside the old City Court after Ray Bennett was shot.

The front page of The Sun on 13 November 1979 after Bennett was gunned down.

Special Operations Group members and police search the court building after the shooting.

The shooter got away down a prearranged escape route, at the end of which was a man-sized gap conveniently created in the corrugated iron back wall of the magistrates’ garage at the rear.

The shooter was undoubtedly Brian Kane. He stepped into a car with his surviving brother, Ray “Muscles” Kane, and they drove to the airport to catch a flight to Perth to cool off. At least, that is what the Kane widows have always believed, and they should know.

There were persistent rumours that certain police helped set up the hit.

There is the minor mystery of the “gardener” seen in the RMIT car park behind the city court the day before the hit on Les Kane, right where the hole appeared in the court’s garage wall.

Brian Kane had avenged his brother’s death but he, too, was now a marked man.

Chuck/Bennett had good friends in the armed robbery business, including the fugitive jail escaper known as Russell “Mad Dog” Cox, so the vendetta lived on.

Brian Kane had the covert support of some crime squad detectives because, the story went, they thought he was the lesser of two evils.

Brian Kane met his end at the Quarry Hotel on Lygon Street in Brunswick. Picture: Sarah Matray

Police outside the pub in 1982 Picture: Ian McPherson

The decision to murder Les Kane in his own home in front of his wife and children was a step too far, they said. Old-time crooks like the Kanes wouldn’t stoop to that.

Then again, perhaps rogue police wanted the same thing the Kanes had … a slice of the Great Bookie Robbery loot.

But the bookie robbery cursed almost everyone who had anything to do with it.

Not long before Brian Kane met his end in 1982, Brian Murphy saw him in the street late at night, obviously drunk or drugged or both.

When Murphy asked why he was in such a state, Kane said “I’ve got nothing to live for.”

He was shot a week later, in the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick on 26 November, 1982.

Father Brosnan’s best boxing student died game. He shoved his female companion out of harm’s way then up-ended the table to try to foil the two masked assassins.

The shooters have never officially been identified, although Russell Cox’s name is often mentioned with that of a murderous reptile named Rodney Collins, who did the world a favour by dying.

Ray Kane lived longer than his better-known brothers, but didn’t live better.

He was a standover man and thief and eventually was jailed for murdering his ex-girlfriend. He served his time and died of natural causes a few years ago.

Only a few old-time Richmond identities were still around for his funeral. It was, in some ways, the end of an era.

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Originally published as The brutal lives of the Kane brothers