Jake Maloney, one of the Toe Cutters, was at a safe house in Sydney. He had fallen out with his closest associate. Someone had quietly got into the property, walked up behind him, put a silenced machine pistol to the back of his head and fired. No one in the street heard a thing. There were very few men in Australia who could build a gun like that, and when the police arrived they believed they knew who they were looking for: Linus Driscoll, known as Jimmy the Pom.
The silent ones
In a city of men who settled things with their fists, Driscoll was the quiet one, and his value was technical. According to the barrister who later defended him, he owned small pistols altered to fire short automatic bursts, each fitted with a silencer. He called them the silent ones. Associates swore they had watched him test them in his back garden.
Robbing the robbers
Two years earlier a Mayne Nickless armoured van had been robbed at Guildford of $587,000, at the time the largest robbery in Australian history. A group of criminals had a sinister idea: why rob a bank when you can rob the men who robbed it? They took Frank "Baldy" Blair first, believed to be the organiser. They burned him with a blowtorch and took off his toes with bolt cutters, one at a time. He was never seen again. The press called them the Toe Cutters: Kevin Gore, Billy Maloney, his brother Jake, and Jimmy the Pom.
Their victims could not go to the police. But, the film says, a criminal who cannot call the law can call somebody worse. Blair's two partners were from Melbourne and deeply connected to the Painters and Dockers, and they were said to be incensed. Melbourne needed someone local. In Sydney in 1972 the obvious candidate was Regan, 27, known as the Magician for his ability to make people disappear, a man described by numerous accounts as a psychopath in the clinical sense. One theory has always been that Melbourne asked Sydney for a favour. Whether Regan was ever formally hired, nobody has proved.
Three men in a month
The first to go may not even have been the target. Robert Donnelly, 27, was not a Toe Cutter. On 1 May 1972 he called at Kevin Gore's house in Rose Bay and borrowed Gore's 1970 Ford Fairlane. He never came back, and no trace of him has been found. For 50 years the police theory has been that whoever went after the Fairlane thought Gore was driving it.
Two days later Gore walked into an associate's office in Paddington, where another man was waiting. Gore said he would be back in half an hour and left with him. It was Regan. Gore was never seen alive again. On 7 May the Fairlane turned up burned out in Earlwood with a single .38 cartridge case inside. An anonymous caller told police that the car had been burned by a criminal known as the Stockman. Nine days after that call, the Stockman disappeared too.
The bomb and the verbal
On 19 October 1972 the war reached Driscoll's front door in Oatley. Suspicious of a car parked outside, he checked it and found ten sticks of gelignite under the back seat, wired to a remote detonator. He called the police, and it was made safe. Two detectives, Detective Sergeant Brazel and Detective Senior Constable McMillan, later said he named the Maloney brothers and told them he would handle it in his own way. Driscoll always denied saying it. Those words, never signed or recorded, would decide the rest of his life.
Five weeks later Jake Maloney was shot dead in a house in Revesby. Within weeks Driscoll vanished. On 5 July 1974 Victorian detectives arrested him in Melbourne, living under a false name, with a modified .22 machine pistol and a photograph of Regan. Then detectives from Sydney arrived, among them Roger Rogerson, later the most notorious corrupt policeman Australia produced.
Police said Driscoll confessed. He said they made it up, and there was no tape. In Australia this had a name: the verbal. In 1975 the jury believed the police, and Driscoll was convicted of murder and sentenced to life. He took it to the High Court of Australia and in August 1977 he won. The court found the unsigned record of interview should never have gone before the jury, and that the seized guns, which had nothing to do with the murder, were prejudicial. At the retrial he was acquitted, after almost four years inside.
The ledger
Regan did not last as long. He turned up unannounced at Lenny McPherson's house and looked at McPherson's son in a way McPherson did not like. On 22 September 1974 he was shot dead in Chapel Street, Marrickville, by two close associates of McPherson. He was 29. The murder has never been solved.
Blair, Donnelly, Gore and the Stockman were never found. Driscoll survived a bomb and beat a life sentence, and was then deported to Britain, where he disappeared. One story says he was found years later in London, working as a plumbing and heating engineer. Another, which the film calls a stretch, says he came back under a false name to kill Raymond "Chuck" Bennett, the man behind the Great Bookie Robbery. What is documented is simpler: many around him died, and he did not.