Tough Nuts: Australia's Hardest Criminals

- Season 1

(2010)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.