In October 1973, the Secretary of Melbourne’s Painters and Dockers Union was shot dead in a South Melbourne pub.
Over the next decade, the violence that followed would draw in a royal commission, a federal government, and one of the biggest unsolved robberies in Australian history.
This video tells the story of the bloody war on Melbourne’s waterfront.
We will follow it from a shooting at the Druids Hotel to the Royal Commission that tried to make sense of it.
And we will keep one line clear throughout between what courts and inquiries established and what was only alleged.
First, a common misunderstanding.
Many people think every member of the Painters and Dockers was a gangster.
They were not.
The Union began in 1900 as a trade union for ship painters and dockyard workers.
[music] The criminal element was one part of its story, and a sloppy retelling blurs the two.
The union traces its roots to the Balain Laborers Union, founded in 1883.
In 1900, the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union of Port Jackson was formally established, and in 1909, it joined with state unions to form a national body.
By 1916, it was federally registered.
By the midentth century, the union controlled a hiring roster which gave it real power over who worked on the docks.
That power made it militant.
In the second half of the 1970s, one academic estimate says it was involved in about 40% of ship building and repair disputes while covering only 15% of the workforce.
That is the legitimate side of the story.
The other side grew in the shadows of the wars.
One historical entry says some members moved from ghosting, which meant inventing fictitious workers and collecting their pay, into more profitable crime.
By the late 1960s, it says the union was fighting for control of profits from narcotics.
Estimates of how many people died in that fight differ widely.
Police claimed that 30 to 40 painters and dockers were murdered between 1970 and 1974.
One encyclopedia entry puts the whole docks war at perhaps 40 murders.
Billy Longley later claimed the figure was closer to 60.
I will use the official numbers where I can.
Why did the waterfront become such a place?
Part of the answer is structural.
A union that controls who gets work has power.
A workforce built on casual labor where in 1939 about 90% of members worked as casuals is easy to exploit.
Those conditions made the docks an attractive place for people who wanted control.
Another part is opportunity.
A port is where goods and cash move quietly and where a union card can open doors.
The Royal Commission described how members were hired out for criminal projects.
That finding turns a simple labor story into something much darker.
Billy Longley was born in Melbourne in 1925.
He was known as the Texan, a nickname reportedly taken from a television western.
By the 1960s and 1970s, he was a feared standover man on the waterfront, and he was a leading figure in the union’s rough end.
In 1971, Longley ran for president of the Victorian branch and lost to Arthur Morris in what one source calls controversial circumstances.
That same year, there were shootings at the Williamstown Naval dockyards during Union elections and more on the warves and in waterfront pubs.
Then came 1973.
Pat Shannon was the union secretary.
In October that year, he was shot dead in the Druids Hotel in South Melbourne.
A local history society says the shooting started the bloody war on Melbourne’s waterfront.
The killing was not a one-off.
It was part of a pattern.
The violence was not always aimed at the people it was meant for.
On the 21st of April 1973, 10-year-old Nicholas Kolivat was killed by a stray bullet at the Mooney Valley Hotel.
The apparent target, Lawrence Chamings, was also killed.
One account records this among the waterfront era’s casualties.
It is a reminder that the Union War was not a contained feud.
The people who paid for it included bystanders and a child.
When we say dozens died, we should remember that some of them were never part of the fight at all.
The police were part of the picture, too.
In March 1971, a man named Neil Collingburn died the day after being detained for questioning.
One account says his injuries were allegedly sustained during that questioning.
That is an allegation only, but it shows why trust in the police on the waterfront was so low.
Longley was charged and convicted of Shannon’s murder.
In 1975, he was sentenced to life and he served 13 years.
He has always said he was innocent and one account says he claimed he was framed.
A court convicted him.
That is the fact.
The claim of innocence is his.
After Shannon, the union’s leadership went through changes.
Jack Nichols succeeded Shannon as Victorian Secretary.
One account says Ian Carol was elected union secretary in 1974 after first being appointed.
The name Carol appears again in the bookie robbery list.
And that overlap is exactly why investigators and writers saw the two stories as linked.
While that was happening, there was another scandal.
In 1975, the Beach Royal Commission into Victoria Police recommended charges against more than 50 serving officers, some for alleged links with crime gangs.
One source says most of those recommendations were never acted on.
The police were not an outside observer of the Waterfront War.
Was Shannon killed over the union or over the money around it?
Courts convicted one man [music] and never settled every question about motive.
Tell me what you think in the comments and subscribe if you want the rest of the story.
Now to a robbery that became a legend.
On the 21st of April 1976, a gang struck the Victoria Club on the second floor of a building in Queen Street, Melbourne.
They took what was probably millions of dollars from a bookmaker’s cash room.
The exact figure is unknown.
Estimates range from about 8 million to $16 million.
And the club reported only around 1 million to police, reportedly to avoid attention from the tax office.
In other words, nobody can say with certainty what was stolen, and the money was never recovered.
Names have long been linked with the robbery.
Ray Chuck Bennett is described as the alleged planner along with Ian Carol, Lorie Prenderghast, Norman Lee, and Brian and Les Kaine.
These links are alleged.
The sources I found say only Norman Lee was ever charged and he was acquitted.
What is known is that no one was convicted of the robbery.
[music] And what is also known is how many of the people linked to it died violently afterwards.
One account says Brian and Les Kaine were highranking members of the union which ties the robbery to the waterfront.
On the 19th of October 1978, Les Kane was shot dead at his home.
His wife reportedly named Bennett, Prendergast, and another man as the attackers.
The three were charged, but the charges were dismissed.
Accounts differ on whether Kane’s body was ever found.
Their guilt has never been proven.
On the 12th of November, 1979, Ray Bennett was shot dead on the steps of a Melbourne courthouse after a court appearance.
No one has ever been arrested for his murder.
One source says circumstantial evidence points to a conspiracy involving police, but that remains an allegation.
In 1982, according to one account, Brian Kaine was shot dead in a pub by two masked men.
Then on the 3rd of January 1983, Ian Carol was shot dead.
Lorie Prendergast disappeared in August 1985.
An inquest in December 2021 found he was dead from foul play.
By 1992, Norman Lee was one of the few men linked to the robbery still alive.
On the 28th of July that year, he was shot dead by police while trying to rob the Anset air freight terminal at Melbourne Airport.
He had been charged over the robbery and acquitted.
His death ended the way so many others in this story did.
Note what that means.
The robbery was never solved, the money never found, and almost everyone linked to it died by gunfire.
Whether those killings were connected to the robbery and to the union is a theory, but it is the theory that drives much of the legend.
Back in 1980, Billy Longley was in Pentridge prison.
In March that year, he went to the Bulletin magazine and made claims of murder, corruption, and extortion on the waterfront.
He had been in prison since 1975.
Those claims were what pushed the government to act.
Longley’s role deserves a closer look.
The man who set the royal commission in motion was himself a convicted murderer speaking from prison.
That does not make his claims false, but it does mean they had to be tested and a commission can test claims in ways a magazine interview cannot.
It is also worth asking why he spoke.
I cannot tell you his motive and no court ever ruled on it.
What we can say is that his interview led to the Royal Commission and that the commission went well beyond one man’s claims.
In September 1980, the Fraser government and the Victorian government appointed Frank Costigan, a barristister and Queen’s Council to lead a royal commission into the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union.
It ran from 1980 until 1984.
One of the earliest consequences was a death.
Jack Putty Nose Nichols was secretary of the Victorian branch at the time.
On the 16th of June 1981, he was found dead in his car while traveling to give evidence.
The death was ruled a suicide.
A famous line is credited to Nicholls, “We catch and kill our own.”
A newspaper report says other Union officials and underworld figures have also been credited with that remark, so the origin is uncertain.
The suicide finding stands, but there is lasting speculation that it was murder.
That is unproven.
The scale of the inquiry was large.
One review says Costigan had about 100 staff and examined nearly 3 million documents over four years, building more than 5,000 files.
That is one source, so treat the exact numbers carefully, but it gives a sense of how deep the commission dug.
It also helps to know what the commission was not.
It was not a court.
It could not convict anyone.
It could only gather evidence, draw conclusions, and pass material to prosecutors.
That limit is why you will hear the words found, alleged, and suspected so often in this video.
Costigan also warned about where organized crime was heading.
He described links to Asian and American crime and called it a real and developing problem.
That warning is part of why a national body was proposed.
Costigan looked beyond the docks.
His inquiry uncovered the bottom of the harbor tax schemes in which companies were stripped of their assets and left with tax debts then abandoned.
It also found that banks had allowed hundreds of accounts to be opened in false names.
The commission found the union had a positive policy of recruiting hardened criminals from 1971 onward.
It said members were hired out to anyone requiring criminals to carry out a project.
It also found money laundering, social security fraud, drug trafficking, and intimidation.
On the murders, the numbers need care.
A 1982 cabinet submission by the minister Kevin Newman cited 15 murders, 23 suspected murders, and 38 other violent acts linked to the union.
A separate account says Costigan identified 15 murders between 1970 and 1979 and 23 further incidents where death may have resulted.
Another summary says Dockers may have committed up to 30 murders in the previous decade.
These figures do not match and I do not know which is exact.
What they agree on is that the number was in the dozens and that the commission called it a serious problem.
The commission delivered five interim reports before the end.
Each one added to the picture.
Costigan did not wait until the end to speak.
The public heard about tax fraud, criminal recruitment, and violence step by step.
Costigan’s fourth interim report concluded that the union had built a reputation for violence and fear and had placed itself outside the law.
It was a stronger statement than most official inquiries make about a union, but the commission was never a trial.
Costigan himself stressed that.
He argued that a royal commissioner does not make allegations, far less start prosecutions.
His job was to investigate and report.
That is why so much of what he found remained unproven in court.
Critics said otherwise.
Some compared the commission to a star chamber.
Costigan’s allegations against the media magnate Carrie Packer, cenamed Goana in a leaked draft, were strongly denied.
Packer was never charged, and in 1987, the attorney general, Lionel Bowen, formally dismissed the allegations.
The Packer dispute is worth a final note.
The allegations against him came from leaked extracts of a draft report.
He denied them and no charges followed.
The argument resurfaced at his funeral in 2006.
It shows how an inquiry with strong powers and public hearings can leave reputations damaged without a verdict.
In 1984, the Hawk government shut the commission down.
Costigan finished as royal commissioner on the 26th of October 1984.
Critics of the closure said it came under political and business pressure.
That is an opinion, not a finding.
Here is what it left behind.
Cabinet papers released by the National Archives show the union’s conduct led the Fraser government to start reforms to national law enforcement and the Hawk government carried them through.
The result was the National Crime Authority, later renamed the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.
The commission also recommended changes to criminal law so that criminals could be stripped of their profits.
These ideas became more common in the decades that followed.
In a real sense, the war on the waterfront changed how Australia fights organized crime.
What happened to the union itself is less dramatic.
It was never dregistered for criminality.
On the 1st of December 1993, it was dregistered because its membership had fallen below 1,000, the threshold set by the 1988 Industrial Relations Act.
Its members had already moved into the Maritime Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
A source on the union adds a careful point.
Despite widespread allegations of criminality, the reason for dregistration was the membership threshold, not crime.
In other words, the state never formally ended the union because of the murders.
It simply stopped having enough members.
What about the men?
Billy Longley served 13 years and was released.
He died on the 27th of March, 2014 at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
He was around 88.
He insisted he was innocent of Shannon’s murder until the end, and a court said otherwise.
Frank Costigan died on the 13th of April, 2009 in Melbourne, aged 78.
His commission was controversial in its time, and some later felt he had been treated unfairly.
Many of the details he exposed would never reach a courtroom.
The echoes continued.
Decades after the painters and Docker’s heyday, the Melbourne gangland killings began.
A list of those killings groups some of the people involved with the old waterfront.
Graham Kenberg was shot in December 2003 and Lewis Moran in March 2004.
That list describes them as associated with the dockers.
It is a loose grouping and the entries say some people appear in more than one.
So I will say only this.
The waterfront culture left a mark on Melbourne crime.
I will not claim a single line from one war to the next.
So, what should a viewer take from all this?
Be careful with any version that treats the waterfront as a single criminal gang.
The record shows a union with a legitimate history, a criminal element inside it, a series of killings that were mostly never solved, and an inquiry that could investigate and report but could not convict.
Be careful also with the numbers.
The deaths were counted differently by police, by cabinet, and by the commission.
A fair account says dozens and says the exact figure is disputed.
Anyone who gives you one confident number without a source deserves a second look.
Here is the timeline in short.
1900, the union is established.
1971, shootings at Union elections.
October 1973, Pat Shannon is murdered.
1975, Longley is sentenced to life.
1976, The Great Bookie Robbery.
1980, the Royal Commission begins.
1981, Nicholls dies.
1984, the commission closes.
1993, the Union is dregistered.
Look at that list, and one thing stands out.
Most of the killings in this video happened before the inquiry began, and the commission followed a prisoner’s interview with a magazine.
Timing like that raises fair questions about how long the waterfront was left alone.
Think back to that October night in 1973.
A union secretary was shot dead in a pub.
It looked like one crime.
It was the start of the decade in which dozens of people died.
A robbery went unsolved and a government decided the state needed new tools.
What was established?
Longley was convicted of Shannon’s murder.
A royal commission found a policy of recruiting criminals and exposed tax fraud.
The National Crime Authority was created.
What was not established?
Who killed Bennett?
Who killed the Canes?
And whether Nicholls took his own life for the reasons assumed.
So the bloody war on Melbourne’s waterfront did not end in a courtroom.
It ended in a royal commission, a handful of unanswered questions, and a union that faded away when its numbers fell.
The story is part history and part mystery.
And the gap between them is where the legends
