Pod Insights ABC Rewind 02 | Ray Denning | The stitch up About this episode The story of one of Australia's most misunderstood criminals. With nothing to lose, Raymond Denning escapes Grafton prison in a rubbish bin. He has help from prisoner rights groups, and a desire to expose police corruption. The man-hunt for Denning turns farcical when he uses the media to make the police look foolish.
Transcript 5,232 words · 22 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 I defy anyone listening to this tape now to walk into your bathroom, close the door and spend just two days in it. Not two weeks or two months or two years and then tell me, come out and honestly preach you feel that prisoners should be given longer sentences.
0:33 Speaker 01 Hilary Harper with you on Radio National, jumping into the Good Ship Rewind to bring you part two in the wild story of career criminal Raymond Denning.
0:43 Speaker 02 Grafton escapé Raymond Denning surfaced in the latest edition of Australian Playboy with an account of his first two weeks on the run.
0:51 Speaker 01 In 1980, Ray escaped from Grafton Prison in New South Wales in a rubbish bin.
0:57 Speaker 02 The guts of the story is that he walked away from Grafton rather than ran, dressed in running gear and carrying a transistor radio and a bag of pepper for the tracker dogs.
1:06 Speaker 01 Denning's volatile life was always on the wrong side of the law.
1:11 Speaker 03 You're just put in there to rot. They want to break your spirit, they want to break your mind.
1:16 Speaker 01 There was the tragic death of his mother, being locked up in boys' homes, prison, prison escapes and more prison. But he was just getting started.
1:26 Speaker 02 Denning says that he was chased on foot by a police car before he managed to hide in the bush, burying himself in the dirt for three days while police walked all around him and helicopters flew overhead.
1:37 Speaker 01 When an earlier prison escape went wrong and a warder died, Denning got life.
1:43 Speaker 03 When the prisoner eventually is pulled times up, they wonder why he cuts loose on society.
1:49 Speaker 01 With nothing to lose, he's on the run again.
1:53 Speaker 02 Denning says that he ate grass and lizards for the first 13 days on the run and he lost three stone in weight in the process.
2:03 Speaker 01 This time, he has support and a political agenda. But old habits die hard, and in the end, Ray Denning would become the very thing he fought to stop.
2:17 Speaker 01 Producer Mike Williams picks up the story in 1980.
2:22 Speaker 04 Is it true that he was stopped by a police officer and asked what his name was? And he said his name was Ray?
2:29 Speaker 05 I doubt it. It's in the Playboy story.
2:33 Speaker 04 You don't reckon it happened?
2:34 Speaker 05 No. I don't think virtually anything in that story happened.
2:37 Speaker 04 Right, okay. Author and historian Mark Dapin thinks Denning probably just stole food and clothes from a nearby campsite, while police and Sydney's media combed the highways and byways of the Blue Mountains. They had no idea that Ray was hours away, probably drinking tea on the other side of the city. He had help.
2:54 Speaker 05 There is very, very little precedent outside of the draft resistors for a prisoner escaping into a sort of organised radical underground. And that is what happened with Ray, at least for the first few months after the graft and escape.
3:11 Speaker 04 At least two prisoner rights groups were working to coordinate his safety.
3:14 Speaker 06 And of course, there were a number of people who were prepared to put him up. One was [BLEEP].
3:22 Speaker 04 Former academic and Labor MP Meredith Bergman was a prisoner rights activist with Women Behind Bars. She helped line up a place for Ray to hide.
3:30 Speaker 06 And she was quite excited to have him staying.
3:34 Speaker 04 Excited?
3:34 Speaker 06 Yeah, she was a wonderful old lady. So the police are never going to find someone like that.
3:41 Speaker 04 Meredith met Denning while he was on the run.
3:43 Speaker 06 And I remember thinking, what a funny little fellow. Because he's really not terribly... well, he's not very imposing. He's quite short. He was very sort of deferential and polite.
3:55 Speaker 04 Was he really that good-looking? Everyone talks about his looks.
3:58 Speaker 06 No.
4:00 Speaker 06 I thought he looked like a scared eighteen-year-old.
4:12 Speaker 05 So the anti-Vietnam War movement and the anti-conscription movement kind of taught a lot of people how to organise demonstrations, how to print leaflets, how to behave when you're arrested. And once Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War ended in 1972, activists felt emboldened and seasoned.
4:38 Speaker 04 This was Meredith Bergman's story.
4:43 Speaker 06 Vietnam was totally my conversion process and I started getting involved, started getting arrested. And once you'd done that, a whole lot of other things just fell into place. I became involved with the anti-apartheid movement, Aboriginal land rights, the women's movement, of course, as it was beginning.
5:02 Speaker 04 And also prisoners.
5:05 Speaker 05 It was almost a hunt for the most oppressed of the oppressed to champion.
5:09 Speaker 04 Here's how Meredith saw it.
5:11 Speaker 06 I've always thought that I should take action when things present themselves to you. And because so many of my friends were lawyers dealing with these dreadful things every day, I could see how terrible it was and and also I could see that there was a chance you could change these things.
5:34 Speaker 04 Things like prison officers bashing inmates or closing the notorious and isolating intractable sections. By 1980, prisoner rights were already in the public consciousness. The Baathas riots of the early 70s led to the Nagel Royal Commission in 76. The controversial high-security prison Ketingal, known as the Electric Zoo, had opened and shut, but much was still unresolved.
5:57 Speaker 07 The New South Wales Minister for Corrective Services, Mr Hague, has described the situation in the state's prisons as explosive. Criminal charges against officers have been rejected.
6:07 Speaker 08 What about the prisoners that were bashed? What about the recipients of the floggings? What happens to them? They're still rotting in prisons.
6:12 Speaker 07 And it's raised the question again of the reopening of the maximum-security block Ketingal.
6:17 Speaker 02 Another former prisoner well-known for activism, Brett Collins, is now apparently under threat of deportation to New Zealand.
6:31 Speaker 09 Ray, look, Ray and I have such a long and beautiful history, beautiful history. He is my best friend without a doubt.
6:42 Speaker 04 In the late 70s Brett Collins shared his life with Ray. They grew close while they served time together in high security units within the New South Wales prison system.
6:52 Speaker 09 One tooth was missing and he put his tongue through his tooth and he'd go "Hee hee hee" and laughed through it. Now it seems like such a simple gesture but his face would light up. His ability to maintain his good humour and still have fight, it was amazing, it was quite special.
7:09 Speaker 04 After the Royal Commission revealed widespread abuse by prison officers and Katinga was shut Brett and Ray were shafted back to Grafton.
7:17 Speaker 09 For us to be returned to the very jail which was exposed as being the place of savagery and to be held there was just amazing and for Ray Denning himself, one of the key people who were the most hated in the system, for him to be there, it was outrageous actually.
7:34 Speaker 04 Denning was hated because he'd been given life for the bashing of prison water Willie Carl Faber during a botched prison escape. Faber eventually died of those injuries. The New South Wales prison system would not forget. But Denning always denied he did it. He said he was verballed by police.
7:52 Speaker 10 "I am starting to get depressed", he wrote, "because I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel in regards to putting a stop to their cover up. Help!"
8:02 Speaker 04 Verbaling was where police would make up a confession. Collins says he was verballed for his crimes. It messed with him.
8:09 Speaker 09 It meant that when I was convicted I didn't feel as though I had to accept the responsibility for my behaviour because the police never proved the case. They just told lies and so I found it even very hard a decade or two after I was released to even accept the fact that I did do the bank robbery for which I did get the 17 years.
8:30 Speaker 04 Brett felt other side effects when he got out. The beatings and months of solitary confinement continued to have an impact long after he was released.
8:38 Speaker 09 If somebody's close to you, and they feel too close. It took me years to feel even just a little bit normal. And then initially when I came out, I was armed. I was armed all the time. I couldn't even conceive of not being armed.
8:50 Speaker 04 You're scared?
8:51 Speaker 09 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Oh, absolutely. I felt constantly threatened by people around me, even though they were friends.
8:57 Speaker 04 But Brett also gained something from prison. He learnt he didn't have to let the law happen to him. He could be active. He could speak up for prisoner rights. And he did. And he gained a community. Forty years after he was released, he remains a leader within it.
9:13 Speaker 09 I'm doing it because I love the prisoner community and I have a special role to play and I'm playing it. And I'm playing it because I was given support. So there's a lot of love there.
9:23 Speaker 04 So Brett was out of jail by the time Ray escaped in 1980, and he was keen to help. He was part of an activist group called Prisoner Action Group. They worked together with women behind bars. And the group realised they had an opportunity. Ray's prison escape was a chance to draw, use that media attention to help their cause.
9:48 Speaker 11 Normally, the people that ring you in the middle of the night are the complete conspiracy theorists. I mean, the tinfoil hat-wearing. We get a lot of those types of calls at 2 in the morning, which is why when I got a phone call...
10:00 Speaker 03 This is Raymond John Denning here.
10:03 Speaker 11 I thought it was the Daily Mirror trying to...
10:10 Speaker 11 And so it took him a while to convince me that it was him.
10:15 Speaker 04 Michael Robotham is a bestselling author. Back in the early 80s, he was a wide-eyed journalist, working a red-eye shift when Ray Denning called and kept calling. Michael suspected Ray was an insomniac and lonely.
10:29 Speaker 11 I guess you'd say a friendship developed. We talked about football, we talked about TV shows, we talked about movies.
10:40 Speaker 04 Then one night, the conversation became more interesting.
10:43 Speaker 11 And Ray said, "Get up to police headquarters. Get up there now, you've got to go now, you've got to go now. So, look at the front window." And we got up there and we found a letter. He'd walked up to police headquarters in New South Wales. I mean, senior police officers that are working, working there.
11:03 Speaker 09 To find him.
11:04 Speaker 11 You know, looking for him. And he'd walked right to their front door. And it's always like he not just posted a letter, he put his hands and fingerprints on either side of the glass. It was a completely goading gesture. And one of the reasons that the police hated him so much was he made them look foolish so often.
11:22 Speaker 06 My memory is that the press even got in on the sort of half excitement of the, "Oh, here's the new postcard from Ray Denning." I think they found that all, well, it was good copy.
11:32 Speaker 03 "I'm willing to be charged with the escape. All I want in return is all the prison officers proved to be bashers. I want them charged also."
11:43 Speaker 04 The media attention was also a chance for Ray to continue his campaign against police verbaling. Michael says at that time, the average punter wasn't interested in the issue.
11:53 Speaker 11 The general public took the attitude, "Well, if he's a bad man anyway, then whatever it takes, you know. The police don't stitch up innocent men." There was only a relatively few lawyers and campaigning journalists that saw that this, if you allow a wedge like that to form, you know, it becomes, the thin edge just opens up and there's broader corruption involved.
12:14 Speaker 04 Michael makes the point that even if Denning did commit the crime against Faber, it didn't justify the way he was treated.
12:20 Speaker 11 The relentless beatings. No one deserves that. Pretty much, I think their desire was, "If we don't kill Ray Denning, we will push him to the point where he kills himself."
12:34 Speaker 04 And he would, or at least that's what someone would like you to believe. Denning's political stunts continued.
12:41 Speaker 05 He reviewed the movie Stir for Triple J, a prison movie.
12:46 Speaker 03 And straight on all those lies he told about decent officers in the newspapers and on television.
12:51 Speaker 05 And even recorded a new call sign for Triple J when it moved from Double J to Triple J.
12:58 Speaker 00 I'd like to congratulate Two Double J on going FM where they will be now known as Two JJJ.
13:06 Speaker 04 While he was there, he asked listeners to demand a more powerful killer wattage so Triple J could have further reach.
13:13 Speaker 00 So come on, gang, get together and write heaps of letters.
13:16 Speaker 12 Thanks, Ray, and welcome, Sydney, to the first prisoners' programme on Triple J FM.
13:22 Speaker 11 People loved it. A lot of people did. They saw him as, yeah, I mean, Ray was sort of this Ned Kelly figure who was fighting against the establishment, fighting against sort of, you know, corruption. And that's the way I perceived he was, that the narrative was going with a lot of people. People thought, wow, that's ballsy. That's ballsy, you know. Go, Ray, go.
13:46 Speaker 04 A band called The Electric Fans released a song called Run, Ray, Run.
14:03 Speaker 03 But it is only with your support will there ever be any sort of an inquiry.
14:09 Speaker 02 As for Ray Denning himself, he's now gone multimedia in his campaign to wake up the public about his own case.
14:15 Speaker 08 He's such a fine fellow that, I mean, people who really know him respect him. Well, I was there when it was being flogged. I saw it, I heard it. Hang in there, Ray, you know, like, I think you're doing the right thing, son.
14:26 Speaker 03 It will only be through pressure that any justice or humanity will be brought back into this country.
14:39 Speaker 11 The night came, on this bank of radios, we hear reports of shots being fired through the guard tower at Parramatta jail. And, you know, I'm waiting for the photographer to come down from upstairs with his camera bag, and the phone rang, and a voice said, "I want to claim responsibility for the shootings at Parramatta jail." This is the Reform Justice Devils. And straight away it popped into my head, well, I recognise the voice as well, but it popped into my, RJD Raymond John Denning. And I said, "Is that you, Ray?"
15:13 Speaker 11 "Nah." "Nah." "Oh, come on, Ray." He got quite irate, so he was saying, "It's not me, it's not me, okay, it's Reform Justice Devils."
15:22 Speaker 13 "It's not me."
15:24 Speaker 11 "It's the Reform Justice Devils." And so that became a big story the next day, but that was the last time I ever heard from Ray.
15:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm not sure that it was necessarily a deeply considered tactical exercise with a strategic goal beyond the idea that his own case would get another hearing.
15:53 Speaker 04 Former close friend, known only as Eddie, confirmed this was the case to background briefing in 1990.
15:59 Speaker 14 Ray was not politically involved in anything other than Ray Denning's cases. He never campaigned for anyone's case, really, outside of his own area of self-interest. The actions and Ray's public appearances die off. Why was that?
16:16 Speaker 05 The police raided a safe house where Denning was living with a couple of women. Denning got out on a tip-off before the raid, and he essentially went back into the underworld with the other people he knew. He drove a getaway car for a robbery, an armed robbery, in Glebe, and contacted a bloke called Bernie Matthews.
16:43 Speaker 04 Bernie Matthews served more time in Kittingel than any other prisoner. When he got out, he formed a support hub for ex-prisoners. He appeared on the radio and was asked what he'd say to Ray.
16:54 Speaker 08 Hang in there, Ray, you know, like, I think you're doing the right thing, so.
16:56 Speaker 04 But he could have told him that in person. Bernie was in touch, he helped him, he took Ray to a hippie commune, where he most likely was given his first taste of drugs. Eventually, Denning ended up in Queensland, where he met up with none other than his old Kittingel inmate buddy, Russell Cox. Cox was the only man to escape the extremely high-security prison, Kittingel. Since then, he'd been Australia's number-one wanted man, and for years, New South Wales Police couldn't find him, not a trace. And yet Ray had no trouble tracking him down through the small network of professional criminals. Together, they pulled off the biggest payroll robbery in Queensland history to that date.
17:39 Speaker 04 Over three hundred grand in just a few minutes.
17:43 Speaker 05 The guards arrived, they took the money out of the security vans in cash dens. Denning and Cox, unmasked, simply walked up. One disarmed a guard and held him at gunpoint, and the other took the money.
18:04 Speaker 05 They both vanished. Denning purportedly blew more than a hundred thousand dollars at the races subsequently, which again shows a man with no real plan.
18:15 Speaker 04 Next time Cox and Denning meet to commit crime, one will betray whatever friendship their relationship held.
18:23 Speaker 04 For now, Denning makes his way back to New South Wales, and the police are tipped off. Denning was about to meet a woman named Linda Jobson. His extraordinary run comes to an end at a set of traffic lights.
18:35 Speaker 15 Finally stopped in a car at Manly, ending his sixteen months on the run.
18:40 Speaker 14 With the recapture, I mean, it was sort of crashing back to earth. He realised basically that he was back in the nick. He wasn't going to get another chance to get out in a hurry.
18:51 Speaker 05 So Denning returned to jail and he remained a sort of political irritant to the prison authorities for a few months forever. His son was born while he was in jail. But when he eventually came to trial, he had obviously made some kind of deal with the police.
19:18 Speaker 04 The deal could have involved giving up a degree of activism in order to receive better treatment. Once he crossed that threshold of informing, there was no coming back.
19:28 Speaker 15 Ray Denning, the author, is still Ray Denning, the prisoner. So he certainly won't be at the official book launching here at the Redfern Town Hall tonight.
19:36 Speaker 04 As he sat, stirring in a Goulburn prison, a book was being launched. It was a collection of his writing titled The Ray Denning Diaries.
19:45 Speaker 16 It's philosophical. It's very intimate, very personal and unselfconscious book because it wasn't written for publication.
19:52 Speaker 04 But it is possible by the time a punter might have picked up that book, Denning's words would have rung hollow. Former friend and inmate known as Eddie again.
20:02 Speaker 14 Occasionally there'd be the sort of bit of moon talk about escape or this, that or the other, and a little bit of sort of surface radicalism, but basically it was chasing the arm.
20:14 Speaker 17 Were you shooting up with him at that time?
20:16 Speaker 14 I've used a lot of restricted substances with Denning over many, many years.
20:25 Speaker 04 The use of heroin was rising amongst New South Wales prisoners. The issue of if and how Denning abused that drug will become extremely relevant later in the story. Eddie also points out a growing bitterness between Denning and the activist groups that had helped him.
20:41 Speaker 14 And I think they also recognised that, intrinsically, the person was self-centred and their support efforts were wasted there. Bearing in mind that he had a lady by the name of Doreen Bart, constantly telling him that all of the radicals had abandoned him, all they wanted was a martyr for the cause. And now that you're arrested, you're no longer viable to them, which I must admit wasn't the case.
21:05 Speaker 04 Who is Dot? Barks?
21:07 Speaker 05 Bark.
21:09 Speaker 04 Bark.
21:09 Speaker 05 Bark, as in the composer.
21:11 Speaker 04 Okay, okay. So who is this person?
21:13 Speaker 05 Um, Dot Barks, so much in his story. Dot Bark is a bit of a mystery.
21:25 Speaker 05 When she comes into Denning's life, she's running a service station in Yass with her husband, John.
21:34 Speaker 04 She became one of Denning's pen pals.
21:37 Speaker 05 When Dot starts writing to Ray, the service station is apparently going well. John and Dot are respected business owners in the Yass area. She writes to Ray that she knew him in another life, and they were meant to be lovers.
21:54 Speaker 14 His initial reaction, that was just hysterical laughter, and I, this is a nice rat.
21:59 Speaker 05 She sends him a picture, I think, of a cat on a bed.
22:03 Speaker 14 And the first thing that came across was the money. And from then on, she aimed Ray's arse.
22:11 Speaker 04 It was probably Dot who first helped broker that deal between Ray and the police.
22:18 Speaker 04 Fast forward a bit, and their Yass service station falls into a financial hole. Through a prison connection via Denning, Dot and John Bark end up in Hong Kong to act as drug mules. They bungle the operation and get caught before they even pick up the goods. They're never charged for it.
22:39 Speaker 05 At some stage, Dot and John become registered police informants, and clearly have given information about very dangerous people to the cops, thereby putting in personal danger the guy who recruited them as mules, that being Denning.
22:59 Speaker 04 Worried, Denning most likely informs again. He's transferred to another jail. Why does Ray stay in touch with Dot even after she's given him up?
23:11 Speaker 05 Because Ray doesn't know she's given him up.
23:13 Speaker 04 Ah. The web of informing gets tangled very quickly. Denning spends several more years behind bars. His public profile lingers, and he tracks more pen pals. A single mum, Margaret Ann Denton, helps line up a fake licence for his next breakout.
23:33 Speaker 04 It's 1988. Ray has jumped on the back of an escape plan from medium security prison, Goulburn. He's out again. He seeks out Russell Cox again, finds him again, and this time they're down south. In Victoria, an opportunity in the shape of a vehicle carrying cash presented itself to Denning and Cox. But the security van they were tailing took notice. They'd clocked the Queensland number plates.
23:59 Speaker 05 It alerted the people driving the van that somebody was watching them, which is how the police came to be called, which is how Ken Ashworth came to be on the scene.
24:10 Speaker 04 Ken, can I just get you to say, just tell me your name and how you describe yourself?
24:14 Speaker 18 Ken Ashworth, 62 years of age, overweight. Yeah, still suffer PTSD and yeah, I like riding my push bikes and getting out for a walk, it helps me and I probably drink too much.
24:28 Speaker 04 This time around, you went a bit more personal.
24:33 Speaker 18 Well, it's the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
24:36 Speaker 04 If Ken Ashworth seems reflective, it's because he retired from Victoria Police just last year. 33 years ago, he was fresh on the beat.
24:45 Speaker 18 On the Friday, the 22nd of July, 1988, I was with a surveillance crew and we're out near Doncaster on another job when a Brambles van pulls into the Doncaster Shopping Centre.
24:58 Speaker 04 In the car tailing the van was Ray Denning, Ray Carrion, who he'd escaped Goulburn with, and single mother of three, Margaret Ann Denton.
25:06 Speaker 18 Ann Denton was the sort of would be recent girlfriend, de facto if you will, of Denning.
25:13 Speaker 04 The cops come up with a plan to trap them. While they're waiting, they see someone in another car have a chat with Denning. They don't know who this is. When Denning makes a move, they box him in.
25:24 Speaker 18 We met them nose to nose. I jump out.
25:26 Speaker 04 Were you undercover?
25:27 Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I jumped out, ran round, jumped onto the bonnet of the car and covered them with the shotgun as they sat there and they realised, oh shit.
25:37 Speaker 04 Nowhere to go. The other car speeds off, but it'd soon be caught.
25:42 Speaker 18 I've run round to the passenger's side and I could see that he's there and he's holding a 38 and I'm yelling, gun, gun. So I let another one rip from the shotgun through the side of the car and with that he's basically slumped there. We didn't know who he was until a little bit later. He said, you'll be surprised who you've got.
26:02 Speaker 04 Their lucky day. They'd stumbled onto the most wanted man in Australia, Russell Cox. Is it normal to take a photo with somebody you've just caught?
26:12 Speaker 18 You're talking about the trophy shot, aye?
26:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, I am talking about that shot, yeah, it's a classic.
26:17 Speaker 18 Back in the day it was, yes. It was to the squad practice because we'd take Polaroid photos of the offenders we charged and we'd just keep them on in our collators office as it was then. But, and yeah, you know, you wouldn't get away with it these days, but yeah, that was a trophy shot when you got Australia's most wanted.
26:39 Speaker 04 Denning and Cox were locked up together in Jaikijaika.
26:44 Speaker 05 But really, they had nothing much to do but talk to each other.
26:54 Speaker 05 And eventually Cox opened up to Denning about his life and crimes.
27:08 Speaker 04 Their chat included a recent shooting at Berkeley Square where the police had got the wrong man, resulting in chaos in the Melbourne underworld.
27:16 Speaker 05 Once Denning realises he's got something to trade with police, he contacts New South Wales Police with whom he's clearly done a deal before. Eventually, he gets extradited to New South Wales. He's kept in the Special Purposes Prison in Long Bay, the so-called Supergraft Prison. And he makes a series of statements in which he implicates virtually the entire New South Wales underworld in one thing or another.
27:49 Speaker 18 What prompted you to inform on another prisoner?
27:53 Speaker 03 Well, I've never been one for sitting on the fence. I've always taken a stand on what I believe in.
28:00 Speaker 05 He gives up Bernie Matthews, he gives up Billy Sutton, he gives up Brett Collins, he gives up Ann Denton, he gives up Ray Carrion, virtually every name mentioned in this story.
28:13 Speaker 18 Or his friends?
28:14 Speaker 05 All his friends.
28:16 Speaker 03 And I was 100% against authority and the system at one stage. And then I gerry that justice works for everybody, not just for the one side.
28:26 Speaker 05 Tells them everything he knows about everybody's plans, starts to say, "I've seen the light."
28:32 Speaker 03 I was prepared to stand up and be counted and form on other prisoners I believed had done the wrong thing, to give the victims a chance for once.
28:42 Speaker 05 BS gonna have some reward money.
28:49 Speaker 04 When somebody becomes an informer, obviously to the criminal world, this is one of the worst things you can do. But as a police officer, you must love it.
28:58 Speaker 18 Absolutely, absolutely. From what he had supplied, we were able to link a number of items back to COX.
29:06 Speaker 04 But not all of Denning's information was reliable.
29:10 Speaker 17 There's been a dramatic increase in the use of prison informers. New South Wales jails are chock a block with them. There, one in 10 prisoners are on protection.
29:18 Speaker 19 I often use the term representing a privatisation of the police verbal.
29:23 Speaker 04 As public consciousness of police verbaling finally grew, a new type of verbaling took its place.
29:28 Speaker 19 Juries are more reluctant to accept police evidence and so increasingly the evidence of prisoner informants has been used as a substitute, if you like, for the police verbal.
29:39 Speaker 17 As the police rely more and more heavily on criminal informers, the incentive to fabricate evidence grows.
29:46 Speaker 05 In his early statements, he hadn't mentioned it, but then he remembered that Tim Anderson had confessed to him three times that he had planted the infamous Hilton bomb.
29:57 Speaker 11 So much of this was about stitching people up.
30:01 Speaker 04 Author and former journalist, Michael Robotham.
30:04 Speaker 11 You know, improving your crime statistics and whatnot. I mean, Ray had been a victim of that. He'd been a victim of police verbals and unsigned statements and brutality. And ultimately became a party to that very thing. He became the problem when he was fighting for a solution.
30:21 Speaker 03 The Crims had a pretty good run in the past. Sure that we've had the verbal to contend with, but 99% of those cases, the Crim was guilty anyway.
30:33 Speaker 05 He wants the Barclay Square reward money, then he wants the Hilton bombing reward money, he wants WITSEC.
30:39 Speaker 04 Witness protection.
30:40 Speaker 05 But at the same time, he wants his sentence redetermined. There's a long, complicated kerfuffle. So it's a long time before any of the benefits that Denning might have expected or hoped for as an informer come his way. And by the time they do, by the time he finally does get out and does get WITSEC, it's clear that the information that he gave is not of the value that they hoped it would be.
31:07 Speaker 20 Tim Anderson, do you resent the release of Raymond John Denning? Let's not concentrate so much on the monkey. Let's look at the organ grinder. The message that's getting through to people in jail is, tell on your mates, it doesn't matter whether you lie, you'll still get the rewards.
31:21 Speaker 05 There are rumblings in the political establishment, why have we given this guy witness protection for life, you know, a new identity for life, when he hasn't really given us anything?
31:32 Speaker 21 Renowned criminal Raymond John Denning rolled over for the police, and in the Sydney underworld was known as a dog. This gave him a lot of enemies.
31:41 Speaker 05 His new identity lasts a couple of weeks and they take it away from him.
31:44 Speaker 03 I've put my life in danger, I know that, you know, I'm prepared to live with being called a dog. You know, I've got broad shoulders, I can live with that, that doesn't worry me one way or another.
31:56 Speaker 05 And leave him essentially living in Paddington openly, and having made an enemy of every heavy in the New South Wales underworld, virtually anyone who's illegally in possession of a gun, might well consider it to their advantage to use it on Ray Denning.
32:18 Speaker 21 One month after his unannounced, unexplained removal from witness protection, he was found dead in an inner-city terrace house.
32:29 Speaker 05 He dies of a heroin overdose in the arms of his girlfriend in Paddington. Everybody in the underworld and many people in the legal profession believe it was a hot shot.
32:44 Speaker 21 What's your take on it?
32:45 Speaker 18 Oh, look, I suspect he was bumped off. He had a target on him, there's no doubt about that.
32:50 Speaker 21 And do you think that the Police Commissioner knew that the threat to Denning's life was unmistakable? No one would think otherwise.
32:57 Speaker 04 The day before he died, Denning's family wrote to the state ombudsman they complained about him losing witness protection. The ombudsman investigated and released a report.
33:07 Speaker 21 This report is critical of the police and their decision to remove Denning from witness protection, and even critical of Police Commissioner Tony Lauer himself, because, quote, "The threat to Denning's life was unmistakable."
33:42 Speaker 01 In a poem, Ray described his life as an uphill battle. He died in 1993. He was just 42 years old. Raymond Denning's Stitch Up was produced by Mike Williams.
33:58 Speaker 01 The sound engineer was John Jacobs. I'm Hilary Harper, and if you love great stories like this one, catch Rewind's sister programme, History Showcase, each Monday afternoon at 2pm on Radio National.
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