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Darcy Dugan: Australia’s Harry Houdini

They called Darcy Dugan ‘the Houdini of Crime’ and ‘the world’s most notorious jail breaker’. He was the confident convict who once swore ‘no jail will ever hold me’. Most didn’t. But Grafton and Bathurst jails did.

For more than 40 years Dugan was a celebrity of sorts, his headline-grabbing reputation was gained through a series of extraordinary escapes from custody in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He seldom stayed out for long but the shock to the NSW judicial and custodial systems was nevertheless considerable.

Darcy Ezekiel Dugan was an Irish-Australian born in August 1920 and raised in Newtown, the son of Dick Dugan, a tiler. His life of crime began with the leadership of a gang of young toughs. He had been in and out of reform schools for a range of stealing offences by the time he was 17.

At 30 Dugan escaped from Long Bay Jail by climbing through a lavatory roof and over the prison walls. He was recaptured after 10 days but escaped again soon after, this time from a cell at Central police station. He left a message on his cell wall for police. It read: ‘gone to Gowings’, the slogan of a popular department store of the day. It was 1950.

While on the run, Dugan and an accomplice named Billy Mears held up the Ultimo branch of the Commonwealth Bank in an attempt to steal a £20,000 payroll the bank was alleged to be holding.

But things went horribly wrong and when the bank manager, Mr Leslie Nader, reached for a gun, Mears panicked and shot two people. Captured soon after, Mears and Dugan were sentenced to death by hanging. Their sentences were eventually commuted to life imprisonment.

Dugan was freed in 1967 after serving 17 years but was returned to jail soon after on new hold-up charges. At age 61, in 1981, he was again arrested for more hold-up charges and walked free for the last time in 1985.

Although in his lifetime he spent 45 years in jail, the legend of Darcy Dugan created a cult following among the working-class in Sydney’s inner suburbs. His followers alleged that Dugan was clever, a dapper dresser and at one stage in his career he was dubbed the ‘Eastern Suburbs foxtrot champion’.

Even his keepers at the numerous jails he was in were complimentary of Dugan’s good humour and said that never at any time in jail, even in his darkest hours, did Dugan lose his larrikin sense of humour. But his aspirations to someday become a salesman or a journalist never amounted to anything.

Darcy Dugan died alone of respiratory failure in a Sydney nursing home in 1991. He was 71.

But while he may have been alone, Darcy was not forgotten by his cronies, who clubbed in to give him a fine service at the Wayside Chapel where the reverend Ray Richard said ‘to thank God for the uniqueness of Darcy’s life’. It was also said that Darcy had tried to negotiate the 11th commandment: ‘thou shall not get caught’.

Then it was on to a police escorted funeral procession to Rookwood Cemetery and then on to the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar in Kings Cross for one of the most outrageous wakes Sydney has ever seen, where Darcy was remembered by the oddest collection of Sydneyites ever gathered under one roof.

Australia may have had Ned Kelly, but Sydney will always have the legend of Darcy Dugan.