Vikki Petraitis - The Russell Street Bombing

THE RUSSELL STREET BOMBING

by

Vikki Petraitis

In 1986 a bomb went off outside the main police headquarters in Russell Street Melbourne.

THE RUSSELL STREET BOMBING looks at the consequences of this shocking act of violence from the point of view of an entire city, the police force that was targeted, and in particular one 19-year-old victim.

On Thursday 27 March 1986, Constable Carl Donadio was19-years-old and had been in the police force for five months. After graduatingfrom the Victoria Police Academy, new recruits rotated through different areasof the police force to gain wider experience. For the young lad from Ballarat,every aspect of policing was fascinating. He'd joined up on a bit of a whimbecause a good mate had applied. Ironically, the mate didn't get accepted andDonadio did.

And because he'd joined the Force without much thought or research, CarlDonadio found the rotating exposures to different aspects of policingenlightening. His first stint was the St Albans police station, in the heartlandof the Melbourne's western suburbs. In the first couple of weeks, he and anotherpolice officer had been called to a domestic dispute at a St Albans house. Thedoor was opened by a boy of about four or five years of age and to Donadio'shorror, the small child said, 'What the fuck do you want?'

The young cop started to tell the child that he shouldn't use language likethat, but realised he was wasting his breath when the kid ran up the frontpassage way, yelling to his feuding parents, 'Mum! Dad! The pigs are here!' Thiswas Donadio's first glimpse of the hatred of police that could be passed on, viathe umbilical cord, from one generation to the next.

It was during his time at St Albans, that Carl Donadio decided where hisfuture direction lay as a cop. He was waiting at red traffic lights ridingshotgun with a more senior police officer.

'Don't look left,' his partner said to him.

'Why not?' Donadio asked, resisting the natural urge to look to the left atthe car that had pulled up next to them at the lights.

'They're dogs,' said the partner, using the police colloquialism forundercover surveillance operatives. Sure enough, Donadio could see out of hisperipheral vision, an undercover hold up a police badge surreptitiously at thewindow before they roared off after another vehicle.

Donadio was full of questions: how did his partner know they were dogs? Whatdid dogs do? And when his partner, who had worked in surveillance, told himabout life as an undercover operative, Donadio knew, then and there, that hewould pursue it as a career path. He reckoned that surveillance work would fitwith his policing philosophy - he was there to catch crooks. At 19, things weresimple. There were good guys and bad guys. And the cops caught the bad guys.

After a couple of months at St Albans, Donadio rotated through city traffic,the Traffic Operations Group, and then the Records department. From there, helanded a stretch doing court security. He would arrive at the Russell Streetpolice headquarters and his duty sergeant would allocate him a court to guard.It was his job to sit at the back of the courtroom and provide protection forthe magistrate should any angry family members disagree with a sentence, or if acrook got violent.

On 27 March which was Easter Thursday, Donadio was allocated a courtroomacross the road from the Russell Street police headquarters at the MelbourneMagistrate's Court. It would be his last shift before Easter, and he was lookingforward to a couple of days off to spend the long weekend at home in Ballarat.Aunts, uncles and cousins would all descend on the Donadio family home for oneof his mum's roast dinners. He was the only cop in the extended family and hecould regale them with some of his policing stories.

Working court security wasn't quite as interesting as St Albans. It was onlyDonadio's third shift at the court - the first two had involved boring fraudcases which had made the young cop look at his watch every couple of minutes -mostly in disbelief at how slowly the time was going. But this case was acriminal case and more interesting than the others.

Around 12.30pm, one witness finished his testimony, and rather than start thenext witness so soon before the lunch break, the magistrate adjourned early.Donadio stayed behind to ask the Clerk of Courts a question about courtprocedures. He was young and keen to learn as much as he could in his rotationperiod. He chatted to the clerk for a while and then made his way out the frontdoor. He would head over to the Russell Street police headquarters to get somelunch.

As Donadio was leaving the courthouse, another police officer, ConstableAngela Taylor, 21-years-old, flipped a coin with a colleague as to who go andbuy the lunches from the police canteen. Taylor had lost the coin toss andcrossed at the lights on Latrobe and made her way up to the south door.

As Donadio waited at the traffic lights on the corner of Latrobe and Russellstreets, he realised that he didn't know how to get to the police canteen viathe south door which was the closest door to Latrobe Street. He was new to theRussell Street police headquarters and only knew the route to the canteenthrough the north door a bit further up Russell Street. Rather than wait for thelights to change, Donadio walked back up Russell Street past the Magistrates'Court and began to cross the road, walking diagonally towards the north doorentrance to the police building.

A sudden impact sent him flying fifteen metres up the road. He landed on hisbackside and, momentarily stunned, thought that he must have been hit by a car.But then he saw plumes of smoke. He knew it wasn't a car that hit him.

At the same moment, but on the opposite side of the road, Angela Taylor wascaught in a fireball...

Inspector Bruce Knight of the Victoria Police SpecialOperations Group was looking out his office window. A bus picked up a group ofpassengers outside the entrance to the Russell Street police headquarters andtraffic lights at both ends of the block went red, momentarily emptying thestreet of traffic. It was 1pm and the day had been slow. He wondered to himselfwhat he was going to do to fill in a couple of quiet hours and was just about tosay as much to a colleague when he heard the explosion.

Before his eyes, he saw what looked like a car bonnet come flying up past thewindow. At the same moment, an explosion shook the building raining debris inthe usually quiet city street. The SOG was normally called out to such events;this time the action had come to them.

Hundreds of other occupants of the Russell Street police headquarters wererocked by the explosion as well. Windows all over the building shattered andfine black dust blew out of the wooden roof and covered desks and equipmentinside the building. Shocked police officers of all ranks looked out theirbroken windows and saw thick black smoke funnelling furiously from the source ofthe explosion - a car parked right outside their front door.

The first indication to the wider policing community that a major incidenthad occurred at Russell Street came over the police radio: