This chilling profile of the soon to be release Dane Sweetman comes to us courtesy of Tough: 101 Australian gangsters by John
Silvester and Andrew Rule.
DANE Sweetman was a small-time criminal and full-time loser when he embraced the racist world of neo-Nazis while serving two years jail for armed robbery. His love of violence was ingrained. He had been found guilty of attempted murder by age 16.
But it was while in jail in the late 1980s that Sweetman found a violent cause to match his vicious nature. As far as he was concerned, he was no longer just another head case, he was a political freedom fighter. He covered himself in tattoos, including swastikas, Nazi skinheads, KKK and Native White Protestants Supreme. From within jail, Sweetman wrote to colleagues urging them to violence and providing plans on bomb-making. In one letter, Sweetman told a Nazi sympathiser how a group of Right-wing fanatics had a secret organisation called “The Guard” in Pentridge prison in 1987. “Give the dogs what they deserve, full-on racial warfare, there is no stopping us when we’ve started,” he wrote. From jail, Sweetman provided detailed plans for a car bomb. “I’ve seen them blow the entire back end off a Commodore,” he wrote. In his rambling jail diary, “Dance of the Skin, Reflections of a Neo Nazi Skinhead”, Sweetman gave an insight into the mind of a disturbed racist. He said that while in prison in the 1980s he developed his Manifesto for Racial Warfare. He declared he wanted to kill drug users, pushers, homosexuals, doctors, teachers, police, child molesters, priests and pornographers.
“We recruited men within the jail and even some in blue for the purpose of information. There are many screws (prison officers) who espouse our Guard philosophy, some are Klan (Ku Klux Klan).” In his diary, Sweetman claims responsibility for a secret war on the streets of Melbourne. He admitted a series of crimes, including murder, arson, stabbings, bashings and street assaults. “The day after my release (in December, 1989) we set about and thus fire-bombed the St Kilda Road Synagogue. The Yids were furious.” He said his group returned the following day and daubed the synagogue with racist taunts and Nazi slogans before throwing more fire bombs. “We then made our petrol bombs right there on the street. It was a job well done.”
He said that soon after his release he began to walk around the city. “The place was awash with yellow, black and mongrel brown faces.” He gloated over details of his gang attacking two Asian men in the city and using a razor to slash one’s throat. He wrote about attacking another man because he suspected he was a homosexual. Sweetman said he brought gloves and balaclavas at a city army disposal shop for the job. His gang wrapped the man’s head in a sheet and beat his genitals with a baton and Sweetman jumped on five of his ribs. Like many of his German Nazi heroes, he was hypocritical about homosexuality. He had already been charged with the sexual penetration of a male under 16. As a payback against the man who informed police of an assault, Sweetman wrote, he built another bomb. “l sat the bomb at the base of the front door, I lit the fuse and ran…”Later that night we drove back to the scene. The house was a scene of utter destruction, the front door was nowhere to be seen, the veranda had a huge gaping hole in it and the brickwork surrounding the door was blackened and ruined. The paper said no-one was hurt which was unfortunate as we wanted to see as many hurt and maimed as possible.”
He wrote with pride of kicking a young woman in the street because she had an Asian boyfriend. By the time he was 22, he had been charged with attempted murder, malicious wounding, intentionally cause serious injury, possession of a pistol, assault with a weapon, armed robbery, assault by kicking and murder.
When police arrested him as a teenager, they went to his room and found the walls covered with posters from horror movies, and kit creatures from horror movies. They also found two sawn-off shotguns and a canister of cyanide in a secret storage area. A policeman, who wrote a report on Sweetman in the early days, stated with bureaucratic understatement: “The defendant appears to be pre-occupied with violence”.
In 1991, on his birthday, December 19, he was sentenced to 20 years with a minimum of 15 for the murder of David Noble. He expected a longer sentence. Sweetman murdered Noble with an axe at a party to celebrate Hitler’s birthday on April 20, 1990, and then cut the legs off the body before dumping the remains in the Boulevard, Kew. He stunned the court when he produced a prison ’shiv’ and slammed it into the bench, saying he had it to kill a police witness. Sweetman is due out of jail in November 2005, but few believe he is reformed. He has a written hit list of 11 witnesses and police he intends to attack. “Your day is coming,” he wrote. But while Sweetman has vowed war against the world, mainstream prisoners are tired of him.
His predatory sexual behaviour in jail has resulted in him becoming an outcast. On December 30, 1994, five of Australia’s toughest prisoners went to see Sweetman. The committee was a murderer, a drug dealer, an armed robber and two brothers with violent records. “They told Sweetman that he was a boy raper and a dog. They said they knew he was providing sweets and canteen goods to a group of younger prisoners in return for sexual favours,” a prison source said. “He was told he was to be put off (murdered).” Next day he put himself into protection in Barwon prison. But on seven occasions notes were put under his cell door telling him he would be killed. In March 1995, he was moved to the protection unit in K Division in Pentridge. Fellow inmates included Paul Denyer, the Frankston triple murderer, multiple rapist and double killer Raymond “Mr Stinky” Edmunds, and Hoddle street mass murderer Julian Knight.
