About this season
Tough Nuts: Australia's Hardest Criminals is an Australian documentary television series narrated by Tara Moss . The program was created by the production company The Full Box and the series first screened on the Crime and Investigation Network in June 2010. A second season was screened in 2011. The series was nominated for Most Outstanding Documentary at the 2011 ASTRA awards.
Episodes (8)
1. Chris Flannery - The Man Called Rent-a-kill
Aired 24 June 2010 • 60 min
Christopher Dale Flannery earned the nickname of 'Rent-a-kill'. He was a hit man and gun for hire who would kill anyone if the price was right. Find out about the man who killed in cold blood before returning to his home to smother his children with affection and dote after his wife, Kathleen.
2. Chow Hayes - Australia's First Gangster
Aired 29 July 2010 • 60 min
Arguably Australia's most feared gangster, Frederick 'Chow' Hayes was a convicted double murderer, sentenced to hang in 1952 for the brazen killing of standoverman and former boxer, Bobby Lee.
3. Alphonse Gangitano - The Black Prince of Lygon Street
Aired 26 August 2010 • 60 min
Alphonse Gangitano was known as the Black Prince of Lygon Street and was the most lethal member of Melbourne's notorious Carlton Crew in the 1980s and 1990s. Through a series of re-enactments of the most significant events in Gangitano's life, relive the rise and fall of the Melbourne crime tsar.
4. Dennis Allen - Mr. Death
Aired 30 September 2010 • 60 min
Dennis Allen was the oldest son of Melbourne crime matriarch, Kath Pettingill. While the remainder of her sons are criminals and some of them vicious killers, not one comes close to the utter brutality of Dennis Allen.
5. Russell Cox - Australia's Most Wanted Man
Aired 28 October 2010 • 60 min
Meet Australia's most wanted man for a record 11 years. Russell 'Mad Dog' Cox was a man no prison could hold. He escaped from New South Wales' notorious 'electronic zoo', the maximum security Katingal jail - the jail the politicians had said was escape proof.
6. Mick Sayers - The Gambler
Aired 25 November 2010 • 60 min
Michael 'Melbourne Mick' Sayers was a run of the mill crook who got in too deep with some of the tough nuts in Sydney's organized crime scene. An associate and friend of Chris Flannery, Sayers ventured to Sydney and discovered that to survive on the mean streets, he had to turn his hand to drug dealing, extortion, race rigging and murder.
7. Ray Bennett - The Criminal Mastermind
Aired 30 December 2010 • 60 min
Raymond 'Ray Chuck' Bennett was Australia's criminal mastermind. A brazen armed robber and thief, he did the jobs that other criminals considered were beyond them. His most audacious robbery was The Great Bookie Robbery - a heist at the Australian Jockey Club while the bookies met to settle up from the weekend's trade.
8. Lenny McPherson - Mr. Big
Aired 27 January 2011 • 60 min
Lennie McPherson ruled the Sydney crime scene for four decades. He was a violent and vicious criminal and arguably the worst of the worst. Trace the rise and fall of Lennie McPherson from a street crook in the 1940s to the Mr. Big of the organized crime scene in Australia and to his death behind bars.