He knew the hard men, the hired thugs who worked in the dark of Brisbane’s underworld, including one “sick puppy” rumoured to have his own private graveyard. He knew the prostitutes who did

favours for the bent cops and which nightclub owners ran drug rings on the side. In the late ’80s he was called as a witness by the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption but no-one asked him what he knew about Brisbane’s worst mass murder, the 1973 firebombing of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub, in which 15 people died. For nearly 40 years, John Wayne Ryan has kept silent.

But now the private detective, firearms expert, martial arts champion, former TV stuntman and special agent to Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Office, Akron, Ohio, has decided to

crime

Story Susan JohnsonPhotography Russell Shakespeare

For nearly 40 years, John Wayne Ryan sat on his memories of Brisbane’s Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing – until the past came knocking.

fire trail

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tell all. But why now? Doesn’t he fear – still – disappearing into thin air the same way that Barbara McCulkin and her two daughters did one hot January afternoon in Brisbane in 1974 because they, too, knew too much about the Whiskey firebombing?

A longtime resident of Perth, Ryan, 67, looks like the old-style cabaret entertainer he once was (he was briefly an interpreter of Elvis Presley songs). Plump, tanned, tattooed, wearer of sharp suits and chunky gold bracelets and rings, Ryan himself says he is almost unrecognisable from the fit young man with the blue-tinted aviator glasses from the corrupt Brisbane of the ’70s. Yet 18 months ago, when he was back in town working on an investigation, Ryan decided to visit his old haunts in Fortitude Valley on a bit of a nostalgia tour, and someone recognised him.

“I was walking up near where Pinocchio’s used to be, near the old Hacienda [on the corner of Brunswick and McLachlan streets] – with my wife Catherina, because it’s where we met – when I got this tap on the arm, which isn’t a good thing to do to me. You’ve got to understand that the radar goes up when I get to Queensland. So I swivelled around and this person asked, ‘Aren’t you John Ryan?’

“I was pretty blunt and said, ‘Yeah, why?’ And he said ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ It was someone who lost a relative in the fire … I won’t name the person, but I was amazed they recognised me.” They had a conversation about the fire, and the fact that mystery still surrounds the case (both men convicted and sentenced for the bombing, petty criminals James Richard Finch and John Andrew Stuart, maintained that police “verballed” them by inducing false confessions). Stuart died in prison in 1979, claiming his innocence until the end, and Finch was deported to England in 1988 after serving 15 years. Ryan’s unexpected meeting with the relative of one of the fire’s victims got him thinking about those long-ago events.

Then, on a separate visit to Brisbane in February this year while on another job, Ryan dropped in on an old family friend – someone he’d known as a child growing up on Brisbane’s northside. “Mum died in 1992 and she’d kept all these newspaper clippings and among them were all my notes,” Ryan recalls. “Mum left the clippings with a family friend in an old suitcase and when I called in to say hello, she said, ‘I’ve still got a couple of ports of Ida’s. Do you want them?’ And I started going through them and it all started coming back.”

Ryan began writing down everything he knew about those days, straight out, just as it came. “The story’s got to be told – if my memory goes, the story will too. It’s coming up to the 40th anniversary soon and, you know, there’s hardly

anyone left who lived it. I lived it.” Now the result, I Survived, Ryan’s book on the underground life of Brisbane in the seamy 1970s, is finished. “No-one believes that it was just Stuart and Finch who were involved, and there are still some people around, relatives, who are looking for closure,” he says.

Ryan hopes his high profile will protect him from any possible reprisals: “The only reason I’m still alive is that I was pretty high-profile [in Brisbane’s “underbelly” scene] … and I know what happened because I took notes,” he says. “But you’d have to be naive to think it’s all gone away; there’s still crooked guys as well as nice guys.”

Ryan has a reputation as a straight-shooter and he prides himself on remaining incorruptible – now he thinks the time has come to shine the light on Brisbane’s darkest secrets. “The Fitzgerald Inquiry didn’t dig up everything by a long stretch of the imagination,” he says. “If anyone thinks that period of Brisbane’s history has been completely raked over – cops on the take, greedy businessmen and well-known politicians with their hands out, willing to turn a blind eye – think again. John Wayne Ryan is here to remind the complacent of disquiet.”

JOHN RYAN WAS THE SEcONd bOY bORN iNBrisbane to a young woman called Ida Ryan (née Smith). She was on her second marriage; her first husband, a fireman, had been killed in World War II and because the young widow was struggling financially, her first son, Don, was sent to live with wealthy relatives.

She met her second husband, John Edward Ryan (known as Eddie), while ballroom dancing. Although Eddie was a burly wharfie who went on to become Queensland state secretary of the Australian Foreman Stevedores’ Association (now the Maritime Union of Australia), he was also a keen ballroom dancer. “He was a very powerful man,” Ryan says of his father. “He had the ear of all the waterfront gangsters.”

Another son, Tony, arrived a few years later. John never knew his absent stepbrother, only that he was living a rich life somewhere far away and his younger brother – like many younger brothers – struck him as a bit of a pest. John wore thick glasses and, until he started doing martial arts training when he was about seven, was regularly bashed by the school bullies. He was also a bit of a bookworm: “I was always reading Larry Kent, you know, those private eye books, penny dime novels that one of my uncles gave me.” His mother had started work

Breakthrough …Martial artist Ryan qualifies for his black belt in karate in Brisbane, 1964; (opening pages) at the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in 1972, and today.

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as an in-store detective for Myer in the newly opened Chermside Shopping Centre, rising to become a senior store detective, and the young Ryan relished listening to her and her fellow security workers telling stories about their days on the job.

For a while he wanted to become a policeman but his mother told him his poor eyesight would disqualify him. “Then something happened in 1960, when I was 15,” Ryan says. “A guy won the lottery and in those days the names and addresses of the winners were published. His eight-year-old son, Graeme Thorne, was kidnapped in Sydney. I remember turning around and saying to my mum, ‘If I can’t be a copper, I’m going to be a private detective. I’ll tell you right now that kid’s dead.’ And it turned out I was right; I just knew it.”

Whatever sense it was that allowed a 15-year-old boy to imagine the worst, it was a talent that Ryan perceived in himself and set about developing. Clearly learning to defend himself while still so young was also part of that talent. “I just found out early what I wanted to be,” he says. “I’ve always had a good sense of people – even later, when I became a bouncer, I could tell when someone walked in the door if there

was going to be trouble, and I was rarely wrong. It’s called kinesics, the study of body language, and most bouncers have that talent but after a while it really starts to develop.”

Ryan used his talent for spotting trouble as a teenager when hanging around The Hub, “a hamburger joint” opposite the old Dawn Theatre at Chermside, a cinema near where he lived. “All the guys from Sandgate and Chermside used to hang out together; a few of us knew each other,” Ryan says. “John Stuart was three years older than me and a bit of a legend. He’d been sent to reform school for stabbing a kid and when he came out he was a big deal.”

Ryan’s first job after leaving school at 14 was

serving in a Surfers Paradise shop called “His & Hers”, owned by his uncle, but pretty soon he craved more excitement. Returning to Brisbane, Ryan returned to his first love: crime and criminals, the straight man among the crooked. He would spend the next decade amid the prostitutes, drug dealers, embezzlers and psychopaths of the Valley, finally forced out not because his own life was threatened but because of threats made to the woman he loved.

IN THOSE DAYS THE VAllEY wAS QuEENSlAND’Scrime capital. “Between 1971 and 1978 there was a lot of crime in Queensland – drugs, prostitution, brothels, murder, kidnapping – and all of it was totally overseen by police management,” Ryan says.

By the ’70s he was working as a private detective and bodyguard, which is how he came to be around during the critical days of the firebombing of the Whiskey Au Go Go, the upstairs nightclub on the corner of St Paul’s Terrace and Amelia Street on the edge of the Valley (now home to journalism outsourcing hub, Pagemasters). “About September or October in 1972 I came into it. I was trying to set up my own little security agency; I was

“As a bouncer, I could tell when someone walked through the door if there was going to be trouble.”

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night-safe banking for massage parlours, going to the bank after hours; this was in the days when there were night safes and you could put the money through the door.

“My [private investigation] company was hired around this time and I was bumping into old friends, networking, trying to get a business going,” Ryan says. “I was hired to do a couple of investigations and got contacted by a firm about the liquidation of the Whiskey Au Go Go. [The club] was only ten months old, and somewhere between $20,000 and $70,000 in cash had gone missing.”

The liquidators had also heard a rumour going around that the Whiskey was going to be blown up by underworld types. “The rumours were that this guy called John Stuart had arrived back in town [from Sydney, where he had been involved in petty crime] and was running around telling everybody that it was going to be blown up,” Ryan recalls. The truth was that Stuart was being paid by someone – still alive and living in Queensland, unfingered by the Fitzgerald Inquiry – to go around spreading rumours to frighten the owners of the club. In fact, several people – including bent police, petty criminals and supposedly “straight” businessmen – had a keen interest in the club being torched. The Whiskey was “the jewel in the crown” of clubs – and being sold off for a rock-bottom price.

“I was working inside the Whiskey until the Sunday before the fire, when they sacked me,” Ryan says. “Well, they didn’t sack me exactly, they just said they didn’t need my services any more.” If Ryan thought it was odd at the time, with the passing of the years it has become chilling.

The fire happened about 2 o’clock in the morning of Thursday, March 8, 1973, and the poor souls trapped inside did not stand a chance. Two drums of petrol were ignited inside the club’s doorway and flames flew up the staircase, engulfing the upstairs room. Within minutes smoke filled the building and claims were later made that grease had been smeared on the building’s fire stairs. Ryan alleges that five people were in a car that fled from the scene and each of them got paid for his part in the catastrophe. An inquest into the deaths of the 15 people who died was halted because of the commencement of Stuart and Finch’s trial (a legal requirement), but Ryan says he is still waiting for it to be re-opened.

Through his police contacts, Ryan secured original photographs of the victims. “The police photographer took them and I got the originals the morning they were taken – the cops got the copies. There were some straight cops in Queensland

then but unfortunately they were very low-ranking. There were far more crooked ones.”

The bodies were taken from the club straight to the morgue, where they were photographed, still in their nightclubbing clothes, covered in thick, black soot. They weren’t burned to death; most had died of smoke inhalation. “They were photographed on the draining boards; the trolleys with drains, and they had little blackboards with numbers written on them in chalk, one to 15. Number four is missing, I have no idea why.”

Ryan recites, like a litany, the names of each victim. He remembers especially Decima Carroll, 29 years old, who was working as the nightclub’s cashier, and who lived in inner-city New Farm and had three little kids. It was the death of such innocents that always got to him, as in the disappearance in the January following the bombing of Barbara McCulkin, the estranged wife of local crim Billy McCulkin, who disappeared with her daughters Barbara Leanne, 11, and Vicki Maree, 13, after allegedly blurting out to neighbours that she “knew things” about the Whiskey bombing.

“She’d overheard all this stuff and she rang me and wanted my partner and me to get her out of Brisbane. She wanted us to get her into a safe house – she thought she was going to be killed by a corrupt senior detective who was not charged during the Fitzgerald Inquiry.” Ryan wanted to get her out immediately but she wanted to wait until the following day because it was one of her daughters’ birthdays and she hoped their father might drop in. “We drove over the next day

and they weren’t there. There was mail in the letterbox, and one of the women from next door said there’d been a big domestic the night before … you’ve got no idea of how gutted I felt.”

Ryan slowly began to realise the extent of corruption in Queensland and how intertwined it was with government and the police. In the years following the bombing and the McCulkins’ disappearance, several attempts were made on his life: “One night I was sitting waiting outside [strip club] World By Night, doing surveillance on cops who were getting money and free hand-jobs and what have you. I was [slumped] in the back of the car when another car came up behind

After the fire … (clockwise from above)The gutted Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub; the petrol drums that ignited it; and the charred interior where 15 people died.

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He was also knifed, set upon by gangs, raided by police and in 1976 was arrested for bribing a public servant, but Ryan’s QC proved that on the day of the alleged bribe he wasn’t even in the country. After a couple of other trumped-up charges, he lost support from the businesses he was under contract to and was practically bankrupt. “So, in 1976, I applied for a job in the prison; I became a screw at Boggo Road.” He discovered yet more crime: prison officers beating

remand prisoners; prostitution and SP betting rings run out of prison; guards being bribed to let prisoners out to do a bashing. By 1978 he was out and back in the clubs, but this time on stage.

“I was doing cabaret acts at Pinocchio’s. But nothing stopped [the intimidation] … one night I was on stage there and Catherina was in the audience. Sitting behind her was one of the most dangerous cops I knew. I saw him talking to her and when I came off I asked her what he’d said. He’d told her she had beautiful eyes and asked if she was with me. Then he’d said, ‘Well, he’s not going to be around much longer’. By then there’d been five attempts on my life and that didn’t worry me but now that it involved her … well, within two weeks we were gone.” It was July 1978.

The couple (who later married, and now have a son, John, 35, who works in security like his father) moved to Sydney and then England, where John worked as a security supervisor at the Tower of London. During the family’s American years, Ryan advised various state and federal US offices and departments on firearms, martial arts and later, Forensic Voice Stress Analyzer Training. He also developed Australian government training manuals for private detectives and security officers.

In 1987, Ryan was called to give evidence to the Fitzgerald Inquiry. “It was a set-up,” he says. “The cops put me in a room and asked me to identify the names of crooked cops. I was shown photos of cops from the 1950s, as young men, impossible to identify. I told them I would never lie under oath. I said: ‘I’m not going to identify these guys!’” Just before he was due to appear he also received a visit from a Perth cop about an unrelated matter; the family had been in Perth since 1979: “It seemed a strange coincidence that, just as I was about to appear as a witness against the police, a copper turns up trying to arrest me for perjury.”

Now, Ryan hopes that his book will go some way to righting the injustices of the past. “There’s an old Chinese proverb,” he says. “‘If you stand at the river long enough the bodies of your enemies and adversaries will float by’.” I Survived by John Ryan is available from June 25 as an eBook and in October in paperback (Bookpal).

“There were some straight cops in Queensland in those days but they were very

low-ranking.”

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