Tough Nuts: Australia's Hardest Criminals

Chris Flannery - Rentakill Incorporated (1x1)

: 24, 2010

Christopher Dale Flannery earned the nickname of “Rentakill”. He was a hit man and gun for hire who would kill anyone if the price was right. TOUGH NUTS introduces the man who killed in cold blood before returning to his home to smother his children with affection and dote after his wife, Kathleen. In a TOUGH NUTS exclusive, we reveal Flannery ran a criminal enterprise, known as Rentakill Incorporated – a business not unlike the infamous Murder Incorporated in the mean streets of New York and Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. Flannery did not act as a lone figure; he used as many as four accomplices to commit murder for money while establishing a sound alibi for himself. Nevertheless, Flannery killed as many as fourteen people by his own hand. The criminal feuds in place in Sydney and Melbourne offered Flannery and Rentakill Incorporated, with an almost endless array of victims. Through psychological profiling, we look into the mind of the hit man, Chris Flannery. Flannery grew up, the youngest of three children. His sister and brother became hard working and respected members of the community while Flannery turned to crime. The answer to Flannery’s violence is due in part to the nine years he spent in prison as a young man. Flannery was placed in the worst prison environment in Australia at the time – Melbourne’s Pentridge prison ‘H’ Division. Routinely bashed and sodomized by guards, Flannery went on a hunger strike. His action led to a parliamentary inquiry into conditions in ‘H’ and a number of prison guards were forced into retirement. Flannery emerged a hero to many prisoners. The brutalization he endured inured Flannery to the suffering of others. His prison experiences led him to become a killer for hire. Flannery moved to Sydney to face a murder charge in 1980 and from there he got caught up in whirlwind of criminal feuds. Feared by everyone in the Sydney crime scene, Flannery was a stumbling block to a lastin