Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [35]
Macari was a promising suspect. After a preliminary interrogation at CIB, Detective Sergeant Brazel told the head of the Consorting Squad, Detective Sergeant Jack O’Neill: ‘He’s English, hasn’t worked for about eighteen months, and for mine he’s Mr Brown from Qantas.’2
Even before police stopped Macari in his flash American car, the police investigation was closing in on him. Officers were looking for him under one of the many aliases he had used, they had his fingerprints from England and patient checking of gelignite and typewriters was starting to provide new leads. Macari maintained there was a mastermind behind the bomb hoax, known to him only as Ken, who had taken all but $125,000 of the ransom money. It was Ken who had been inspired by the movie The Doomsday Flight and had told him what to do. ‘He threatened me personally and spoke of what some of his mates would do to me,’ Macari told police.3
After Captain Ritchie had handed over the money, Macari claimed he took it straight to Ken, who was waiting in a white Valiant. ‘The agreement was $125,000 and he gave me or he took out of the bag approximately that amount. Seven bundles, I think. Removed the suitcases to the boot in the car. They drove off.’4 The police officers did not believe him for a minute. Macari was a proven liar. When the police asked for his date of birth he said: ‘I don’t know. I’ve told people that many things about my birthday, I can’t remember the right one.’5
At his court case it became clear that Macari had watched The Doomsday Flight with a friend on the portable television in the back of his black and cream Commer van while on a trip to Townsville in Queensland. Afterwards he told the friend: ‘That would be a good way to make money.’6 He bought gelignite in Mount Isa and an altimeter in Sydney, and recruited Poynting to help him type out the letters.
Macari pleaded guilty to extortion and was deported to England after serving nine years of his 15-year sentence. Poynting served four of his seven years. Police recovered $138,240 of the ransom money stuffed behind the fireplace of the former butcher’s shop in Annandale and managed to recoup some of the stolen cash from the cars and properties Macari and Poynting had bought. But almost half – $239,000 – of Qantas’s money was still missing. Macari and Poynting had taken a skin-diving course, and police believe they put the money in two corruption-proof safes and sank them in the sea – probably within sight of Macari’s ocean-view flat. The money has never been recovered.
The bomb hoax became known as Australia’s most audacious crime and inspired a movie of its own, Call Me Mr Brown, and a copycat crime by a 17-year-old in 1997, which was quickly revealed by security checks as not serious. Meanwhile, the film that inspired the hoax, The Doomsday Flight, was taken off the air for several years. Macari was later linked to the mystery of the murder of Billy Day, 24, who went missing after taking a trip to Queensland in a camper van with a ‘Peter Brown’ in 1970. English Detective Chief Inspector Andrew Ravassio interviewed Macari about it on his return to England. ‘When I suggested he knew what happened to Day he said, “You prove it”,’ said DCI Ravassio.7
For Qantas the missing money was the least of its problems. The start of the 1970s saw an oil crisis, a worldwide economic slump and an airline industry geared up for high capacity with wide-bodied jets holding seats that few people could afford. It was just one in a series of economic problems the airline had encountered