The secret confession that unravelled Melbourne’s deadly underworld web

No one really knows why cult criminal and notorious escapee Raymond John Denning turned police informer, and no one really knows if that decision cost him his life.

For years the gunman was a counter-culture hero, blowing the whistle on the secret and brutal world behind bars.

There were good reasons Denning became a bad man. His dad, Jack “The Hat”, was a thief who physically abused his wife. When he was about to be released from prison to terrorise her, she chose escape by suicide. Ray found her. He was 10 years old.

A headline act in NSW, Denning decided to try his luck in Melbourne after escaping from Goulburn Prison on July 15, 1988.

Through a network of sympathisers, he contacted the notorious armed robber Russell Cox , who was on the run since escaping from Sydney’s Katingal jail in 1977.

Cox was born in Queensland and did most of his jail time in NSW, but to understand his criminal journey, you must understand his connections to Melbourne’s criminal royalty.

Master armed robber Ray Chuck and Cox were close – they married sisters – and when Chuck was planning Melbourne’s 1976 Victoria Club Great Bookie Robbery he wanted Cox on the team.

Cox tried to escape from his NSW prison to join Chuck, but failed in his attempt. When he did escape the following year, he eventually teamed up with one of the Great Bookie robbers, Ian Revell Carroll , only to later kill him in a shootout. (A Melbourne magistrate dismissed murder charges against Cox, ruling it was not clear who shot first.)

A week after his escape from Goulburn, Denning met Cox at Doncaster. Cox tried to book his mate into a local motel, saying the escapee couldn’t stay at his safe house because he was looking after a wounded associate.

Denning could not have known that the associate was Santo Mercuri, who had been shot in the hand a few days earlier by wounded security guard Dominik Hefti when Cox’s team raided an Armaguard crew at Brunswick. Hefti would die from bullet wounds.

The murder of Hefti sparked a deadly domino effect culminating in the October 12, 1988 ambush murders of Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre in Walsh Street, South Yarra.

What we now know is that a rats’ nest of criminals connected with Cox deliberately laid a false trail to blame another armed robber, Graeme Jensen , for the Hefti murder.

Two major underworld figures who hated Jensen and liked Cox deliberately blamed the wrong man.

When police tried to arrest the innocent Jensen in Narre Warren on October 11, 1988 – 38 years ago this month – he attempted to flee and was shot dead. The Walsh Street ambush 13 hours later was a payback by Jensen’s gang.