A tip-off from an underworld source led Victoria's Piranha Task Force to a junkyard on Melbourne's northern fringe. Three metres down they found the skeleton of Terrence Blewitt. He was a violent armed robber who picked a side in the gangland war, an ally of Carl Williams, and a person of interest in the killing of Graham "the Munster" Kinniburgh. This film follows Blewitt from a shooting in Sydney that no one was charged with to a hole in the ground, and asks who put him there.
The Munster
Kinniburgh was shot late one night in front of his home in a quiet street in Kew in 2003. His life, the film says, was worth $150,000 to the contract killer Stephen John Asling. Thirteen years later Asling, then 56, was sentenced to life. Justice Stephen Kaye told him the murder was brutal, callous and utterly cowardly, and that he and Blewitt had killed for the most base of motives: reward.
Kinniburgh's death set off a chain. Four months later Mick Gatto shot the hitman Andrew "Benji" Veniamin in a Carlton restaurant. Gatto, later acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defence, had wrongly believed Veniamin killed his great friend. Days after that, Lewis Moran was shot dead in Brunswick as payback. Three hits in four months made the front pages.
Miranda, 1995
A shooting in suburban Sydney in 1995 is far less known than it deserves to be. Robert Jones was a security guard, 34, a man a judge had once praised for saving a woman and a child from a burning car. On a winter day outside the Westpac Bank in Miranda, he saw a masked bandit menacing a fellow guard and went to help. He almost certainly reached for his pistol. The bandit fired a sawn-off shotgun into his chest at close range and ran to a stolen red hatchback in the Westfield car park.
More than 600 people came to his funeral. There was no inquest until 2009, 14 years later, and it found only that an unknown person had shot him during an attempted hold-up.
The wheelman
In 2013, in a country pub a long way from Sydney, the getaway driver told the Sydney crime reporter Neil Mercer what the gunman had said when he jumped in the car: that he had struck a cowboy and had to put one in him. What gripped Mercer was that the driver had told the same story to authorities 14 years earlier.
The wheelman said he had met the secretive state Crime Commission and told them what he swore was true on condition he would not be charged. In 1999, he said, he was fitted with a listening device and sent to meet police who, five years earlier, had arrested him, Blewitt and a third man over a home invasion at Coffs Harbour. The plan was to show those police had allegedly acted improperly. It fizzled. No robber and no officer was caught. The wheelman named the third man in the Miranda crew, said the authorities had admissions, and said he had never even known there was an inquest. Conspiracy or blunder, the film says, he and Blewitt got lucky. The question it raises is whether Blewitt's crew had a green light, the underworld term for favoured criminals going unpunished in exchange for something certain police want.
A typical Victorian
Blewitt was already known in Sydney. In February 1985 he and two others ambushed an Armaguard van at a shopping centre in Dee Why, shot and wounded a guard and took the van. He received a non-parole period of 13 years, which makes it puzzling that he was free to commit serious crimes in the mid-1990s. A former armed robbery detective called him a nasty bloke and, half joking, a typical Victorian.
He loved grog and gambling, which an acquaintance says made him unreliable. He drank at the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale with Lewis Moran, who supplied him with drugs by the pound; detectives filmed him collecting speed from Moran in a Kensington park. Over several months he bought eight stolen cars for armed robberies from Moran's stepson Mark. At some point he met Asling, who later told a court that Blewitt fired the fatal shots at Kinniburgh. Some police believe it too, and have said so in court.
Thomastown
On 12 April 2004 a friend dropped Blewitt in a street in Melton to meet someone he may not have known as well as he thought. He walked towards a Hyundai sedan and was never seen again. Police traced the car to an innocent owner in a country town in 2013, and after a false lead at Yarrawonga they dug up his bones in a junkyard at Thomastown.
The junkyard had belonged to a successful criminal, since dead, heavily associated with the Carlton Crew. He had been with Gatto the day Veniamin was shot, and had offered to get rid of the pistol. The film is careful: it might be coincidence that the man now blamed for killing Gatto's friend ended up buried there. Perhaps the Carlton figures realised Veniamin had not killed Kinniburgh after all. Or it could have been a pre-emptive strike by someone close to Blewitt, afraid a careless word would lead back to them. Blewitt drank with the Moran family, and that did not stop him taking a contract on their great friend. Business, the film ends, is business.