There is a maxim in the underworld that one’s best partner in crime is oneself—and it is one largely followed by Australian identities. In the late 1920s Sydney was plagued by the Grey Shadow, the name given by newspapers to a lone robber who wore a long grey coat as he carried out a series of armed hold-ups. Who he actually was has never been satisfactorily resolved but whoever he was he started a trend. Soon there was an influx of Shadows, including Owen Glyndwr Evans, who was deported to England in 1931 after serving two years for a series of about 100 burglaries. Then there were wannabes such as Herbert Granville, who pleaded guilty to a number of burglaries and left a note behind in a car he had rifled. It read: ‘Beware of the lone wolf and the grey shadow.’ But no one believed he was the Shadow himself.
Another claimant was Clarence Jones, who told one victim, Ethel Molloy, that he was the real thing and that a man arrested earlier was not the Grey Shadow. When Jones came to court the magistrate was not impressed. ‘Grey Shadows and Blue Shadows are becoming so common that they are a nuisance to the public,’ he said, sentencing him to three months for stealing a motor car. The charge of attempting to obtain money from Mrs Molloy was dismissed. Shadows were indeed becoming a hazard. One victim, William Tory, became so traumatised after a Shadow attacked him that he tried to commit suicide. Black Shadows, as well as grey and blue ones, were also becoming a menace. A man claiming to be the Black Shadow bailed up three taxi drivers in quick succession in September 1929.
As one Grey Shadow disappeared, another emerged. The previous month a man claiming to be the real Grey Shadow held up Arthur Hunt, the licensee of a Darling Road wine saloon, his wife and a friend, stealing a little under twenty pounds. Hunt later told police that the man had boasted ‘there was not a detective clever enough in Australia to catch him and that he was itching to shoot someone’. If it was indeed the Shadow, he was remarkably indiscreet because he also told Hunt he was a timber worker and was married with four children.
Hunt’s attacker may have been laying a false trail because the man thought most likely to have been the original Grey Shadow was a 29-year-old salesman, Thomas Herbert Skinner, who was arrested after robbing shopkeeper Richard Woods in Rozelle in early 1930. Chased by the police, Skinner shot one constable in the groin and got away but he was caught after a fingerprint on the lens of some spectacles—dropped in the robbery—was identified as his. Skinner fought it out, claiming he had been at the cinema with Vera Lee and that the whole case against him was a frame-up. He was sentenced to ten years with hard labour. Whether he was the real Grey Shadow or the fad had simply run its course, incidents with robbers wearing grey dusters faded away into the night.
Another man whose name had come up as the Grey Shadow was the career criminal Joseph Harold Ryan, who in August 1929 was acquitted of beating and robbing eighty-year-old Henry Wheale of twenty-seven pounds and James Stewart of fifteen pounds. Ryan may not have been the Shadow but he was certainly in the frame for what became known as the Mudgee train robbery. At about 11 p.m. on 8 April 1930, two masked and armed men entered the brake van after the train left Emu Plains on Sydney’s outer west and held up the guards. The thieves jumped off just before the train, travelling at about 30 miles per hour, entered the tunnel on the Glenbrook side of Sydney, taking with them 4600 pounds’ worth of bullion and another 13 000 pounds in cheques. At first it was thought that Australians were not capable of such a daring robbery and that American criminals must have been involved. For a time it was even suggested that the D’Autremont brothers, who in 1923 had robbed a train in Oregon, had been responsible. This was always highly improbable, even given lax prison security, for, at the time, the brothers were serving life sentences in the United States. The always suspect Italians were also considered but, when it came to it, it was good old Australian planning.
In May the next year the Canberra mail train was robbed at Queanbeyan and this time 10 000 pounds was stolen. It was a very different affair. The Commonwealth Bank had sent the money to Canberra in a mailbag. The train stopped at Queanbeyan at 4.15 a.m., when the bag and other sacks were unloaded and left on the platform for transfer. When the train reached Canberra, it was found that the Commonwealth sack no longer contained the cash but was packed with telephone directories.
On 30 April 1931, Ryan was charged with both of the train thefts, and James Caffrey and Arthur Collins were charged with receiving from the Canberra mail theft and also with a well-planned and -executed robbery of jeweller Samuel Cohen. Everyone was given bail and Ryan made the most of this unexpected opportunity to abscond. The papers thought he would soon give himself up and Truth was at its most eloquent, writing of an elderly, grey-haired mother sitting in her darkened room awaiting the return of her son. Over the years there were various sightings of him in and around Sydney and on one occasion he gave a statement to the press that he had absconded because the police had ‘smoked’ his principal witness.
Then, in June 1935, a firm of solicitors received a letter from Ryan—who had apparently been in England and was suspected of a gold robbery in Birmingham—asking them to arrange a meeting with a Detective Inspector Quinn so that he could give himself up. At 7.15 p.m. on 19 June he was rearrested. ‘I have come back from abroad to give myself up to the police to meet the charges against me. I have always had a complete defence,’ he told Quinn, adding that a man who had owed him money had failed to come through so he was left without funds to pay for his defence. By then, another man, Lancelot Lynch, had been acquitted and Arthur Collins had pleaded guilty to concealing knowledge of the Canberra robbery. Ryan, somewhat optimistically, thought that having done the decent thing and given himself up he might receive bail again. The argument cut no ice with Judge Curlewis.
The Canberra robbery was tried first and much of the Crown’s evidence came from an informer, thief and forger Percy Jacobs, who in 1928 had received two years for a 1200-pound fraud. Jacobs gave detailed evidence of Ryan’s pre-planning, but at crunch time, denied being personally involved, although Ryan had promised him 1000 pounds. This produced an outburst from Judge Curlewis: ‘Why you were to get 1000 pounds I do not know. You did nothing to earn it,’ adding, ‘I do not know if the jury will convict on this man’s evidence alone.’ In fact, Jacobs was supported by George Morris (known, because of his size, as ‘The Ambling Alp’—in reference to the giant boxer Primo Carnera), who had driven Ryan and his one-time friend Collins from the Mudgee robbery and had buried the cash on his farm. Morris claimed that Ryan had been standing over him because of a conviction some eight years before, which, if it came out, would lose him his job as a part-time postmaster. But there was clearly more to Morris than was apparent at first glance. Yes, he knew a man Jenkins but, no, he had never shot him nor had he placed a bomb in his car. (Jenkins was the receiver Percy ‘Snowy’ Jenkins, who had been shot and whose shop was bombed in a Melbourne gangland feud over either car re-birthing or drugs.) Morris also knew Alexander McIver and Francis Delaney, convicted of bombing the Greek Club in Melbourne in 1928.
Ryan’s counsel, mixing his metaphors nicely, made a splendid attack on the evidence: ‘The rotten house the Crown has built you would not hang a dog on.’ And the jury declined to do so.
On 8 October, Ryan went on trial for the Mudgee robbery. This time Arthur Collins, who had done amazingly well for himself in plea bargaining—a bind over for the Mudgee robbery and an order to leave the state for his part in the attack on the jeweller Cohen—was there to put his old friend away. Morris was again on hand to give evidence that he had collected Ryan and Collins after they had made their way from the track and had taken them back to his farm where the money had been buried, to be collected by Ryan later. Collins was there reluctantly, demanding before he said a word that he be given assurances he would not be prosecuted. By the end of his evidence he was being treated as a hostile witness.
Ryan, making a statement from the dock which meant he could not be cross-examined, claimed that Morris and Collins were lying and trying to put their crimes on him to save themselves. Invited to account for his wealth, he ingeniously did so. His savings in the name of George Brown had been put together years earlier and came from betting; those in the name of Thompson were used to give to his mother. Thompson had kindly allowed him to use his name. He also called alibi evidence that he had gone to the funeral of a taxi driver—the same Thompson—and had been at the widow’s home with two other drivers on the night of the robbery. After deliberating for twelve hours the jury announced they could not agree.
At the retrial Collins clearly thought he had had enough and failed to appear to give evidence. On 2 December 1935, after the jury retired for rather less than an hour, Ryan was finally acquitted of the Mudgee train robbery. Veteran crime reporter Greg Brown told Larry Writer, author of Razor, that he thought Ryan was the best of the Sydney hardmen of the period, far superior to both Chow Hayes and his offsider Joey Hollebone. ‘Always impeccably dressed, very quiet … but if you told anyone that Joe Ryan was looking for them, they’d go bush.’
It was by no means the end of the matter, however. On5 April 1932, William Cyril Moxley attacked Dorothy Denzil and her boyfriend Frank Wilkinson while they were in their car parked near Liverpool. Moxley, a good-looking Sydneysider with black curly hair of which he was intensely proud, had been declared a habitual criminal in 1925 and subsequently became a police informer, in the pocket of Superintendent William Mackay. When the talented safe-breakers Andrew Duncan and Edward Devine would not let him join them on an expedition, he dobbed them in. After their acquittal, they kidnapped him in Parramatta, gave him a bad beating for his trouble and then shot him in the face. He escaped near Homebush and dobbed them in again. He had no luck with that either because once more they were both acquitted.
It seems the masked Moxley had first demanded money from the courting couple. When Wilkinson tried to fight him off and partially tore off the mask, Moxley beat him unconscious. He then raped the girl and killed the pair, burying their bodies in a shallow grave where they were discovered a week later. Moxley’s fingerprints were found in the area and he was caught on 21 April, still in the vicinity. On 16 April the enormously popular Smith’s Weekly had described the case as ‘The Most Fiendish Murder of a Generation’. Moxley made a long confession to Superintendent (later police commissioner), William Mackay personally. In return Mackay gave evidence at the trial to say that Moxley’s behaviour had deteriorated since he had been shot by Duncan and Devine.
Unfortunately, on 30 July Smith’s Weekly was duped by an ex-constable into printing that not only had Wilkinson been the driver of the getaway car in the Mudgee train robbery but that he was a pimp and blackmailer who was the victim of a gangland execution. Specifically, the article alleged, Wilkinson had been with Barney Dalton when he was shot in Kings Cross; Moxley had been there with the killer and Wilkinson had been blackmailing him. Other newspapers attacked Smith’s Weekly but the paper took a statutory declaration from the constable and maintained its stance. On 31 July Truth came up with a letter from Moxley, which it published, headed ‘Clears dead man’s name’. Smith’s Weekly took another fortnight before it retracted the story, describing its informant as ‘Wicked Beyond Belief’. It was too little and too late. The public never really forgave it and the grave error substantially contributed to the decline of the paper.
Moxley was hanged on 28 August. Although his conviction was seen as one of the highlights of Mackay’s career, it has since been suggested that the evidence against him was fabricated.
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One pre-war robbery whose ramifications ran for several years was the bail-up of the Cleveland Street pawnbroker and fence Nathan Segal by Robert Sydney Jones and Eric Kelly on 20 March 1939. In the raid Segal was shot. There was no doubt about Jones’s guilt but there was considerable doubt about Kelly’s, whom Jones had exonerated at the trial. Both received life for shooting with intent to murder, and throughout his sentence Kelly continued to maintain his innocence. He managed to obtain an inquiry under section 475 of the Crimes Act and, although Segal said he might have made a mistake in his identification, and another serving prisoner Leslie Lang said he had been with Jones and fired the second shot, the judge reported there was no doubt of Kelly’s guilt. His efforts lasted until August 1946, when the High Court finally rejected Kelly’s claim and the Minister of Justice refused to intervene.
As for Jones, on 7 November 1941 he escaped from East Maitland jail, north of Newcastle. Along with William Burney, declared a habitual criminal at the age of twenty-four, Jones had hooked a rope to the rail on the perimeter wall. Burney was caught three weeks later in Darlinghurst, but Jones hid out, waiting for a boat to take him to South Africa. An arrangement was made to put him in a cabin trunk and load him onto the boat, where a crew member had been paid to look after him. Unfortunately he was dobbed in for the reward money and the scheme was aborted. On 7 January 1942 Jones was eventually run to ground in Elswick Street, Leichhardt, and, at the end of a gun battle with the police, he shot himself with his last bullet. As a result of the escape the jail’s governor was demoted and several warders were dismissed.
The trick for the escaper is not necessarily the escape itself, which is often relatively easy, but managing to stay out afterwards. The pitfalls are many, the pleasures often few, and then only very temporary. First, there should be reliable contacts outside the prison to provide transport and safe houses. Unless these are relations or very close friends these people will require payment, often at extortionate rates. Money left in safekeeping with supposedly trustworthy sources often disappears during years in jail. A continuing life of crime is almost inevitable for an escaper without vast resources or the ability to get out of the country. It’s the same the whole world over. The British Great Train Robbers found that most of their money evaporated in payments to those who looked after them for a few weeks, and there were more payments made to ensure they were not dobbed in.
Over the years, some escapers have managed to get quite a long way. One of the furthest was the baby-faced and ruthless John Brendon Parker, who ran a little team of robbers with his long-time girlfriend Elsie Bowden as the getaway driver. From a middle-class family, Parker started his career in 1918, when he appeared in the Children’s Court for stealing, and from then his record was of breaking, receiving, standover and robbery under arms. He was also suspected of being a high-class safebreaker. The team was caught on 14 June 1928 after they ransacked a tailor’s shop in Hurstville, stealing 600 pounds’ worth of cloth. One of the team had dropped out and dobbed them in. Sentenced to four years and declared a habitual criminal, the diminutive Parker escaped from the Darlinghurst lock-up in August while awaiting transfer to prison. Using a fretsaw, he stood on the shoulders of other prisoners as they covered the noise of his sawing by singing ‘There’s a long, long trail a-winding’. Parker then broke a plate-glass skylight, clambered over a roof and lowered himself to the ground. He stayed in Sydney for some time before, disguised as a woman, he obtained a passport and stowed away for Europe on the German steamer Mosel. Again he was dobbed in and when the ship docked at Bordeaux on 26 October he was arrested and was brought back to Australia in February 1929. His career continued into the 1950s, when he served a three-year sentence, again for breaking, and once more was remanded at the Governor’s pleasure.
When Parker was nearing the end of his career, Darcy Dugan, one of Australia’s greatest serial escapers, was at the peak of his. On 15 December 1949 he and William Cecil Mears escaped from Sydney’s Central Police Court. It was Mears’s second successful escape, Dugan’s fourth. At the time they were serving ten years for the robbery of an elderly woman in Paddington. Mears was at court to give evidence on behalf of Dugan, who had also been charged with possessing a pistol. During the lunch adjournment they cut through the cell bars with a hacksaw and ran into Central Lane where they boarded a tram.
They had both escaped three months earlier while on remand at Long Bay. Dugan had also escaped on 25 January 1946, when he forced his way out of a moving police van. He did not last long on the outside but in March that year he had cut a hole in the roof of a prison tram on its way from Long Bay to Darlinghurst Police Station and was off again.
This time he and Mears were arrested in Alexander Street, Colloroy, on 14 February 1950. They were now charged with assaulting and robbing the well-known jockey John Thompson as well as shooting and wounding Leslie Nalder, manager of the Ultimo branch of the Commonwealth Bank, on 13 January 1950. They made one final escape bid at the committal proceedings. Dugan slipped his handcuffs and made it through the court doors before being recaptured. At their trial they were sentenced to death but this was commuted and Dugan was released in 1985. He died in 1991 at the age of seventy-one.
In March 1999 John Killick escaped from Sydney’s Silverwater prison in a helicopter organised by the Russian-born 41-year-old Lucy Dudko. Killick, a career criminal regarded by his fellow professionals as a gentleman, had first been convicted in 1960 and then served eight years for a series of TAB robberies committed in 1977 and 1978.
In August 1984 he had escaped in Brisbane while being taken to the Princess Alexandra Hospital for treatment of an injured eye. His then girlfriend, twenty-year-old Jacqueline Hawes from Adelaide, wearing an auburn wig, brought him a pistol and he held up his guards at gunpoint. While on the run he wrote to the Brisbane Mail, saying that everything he had done had been for the benefit of his nine-year-old child. A year later Hawes received two months for aiding and abetting the escape. Killick was sentenced to six years for three armed robberies committed while on the run.
In October 1998 he had robbed the Commonwealth Bank of $32 000 and three months later held up the Bowral branch of the National Australia Bank, shooting at an off-duty police officer in his escape. Now, charmed by Killick, Lucy Dudko, who left her scientist husband Alex for him, hired the helicopter for what the pilot thought was to be a joyride over the Olympic Games site. Instead he found himself ordered at gunpoint to land in the prison exercise yard. He was later found bound with radio wires. The pair were thought to have left the state but were recaptured in a cabin at a caravan park six weeks later, on 9 May. Two pistols were found under Killick’s bed. He had apparently devised the escape after reading Robert Lindsey’s novel The Flight of the Falcon.
On 21 December 2000 Judge Barry Mahoney handed Killick the maximum sentence of twenty-eight years for the helicopter escape and some related matters, rejecting submissions from a solicitor and a CSE case manager that Killick could reform. It was argued that he had been well on the way to rehabilitation in the early 1990s when, after a series of personal reversals, he slipped back into a life of crime. Killick will be seventy-three when he can first apply for parole in 2014. Lucy Dudko, who was sentenced to a minimum of seven years, was released in May 2006. One of the conditions imposed on her was that she could not visit Killick.
One of the great robbers and escapers, who more or less operated solo, was Bernie Matthews, who began his career in October 1969 when, at the age of nineteen, he was arrested and charged with two armed robberies and possession of a sub-machine gun. It immediately established him as a cut above the average. He escaped from the Court of Appeal in June 1970 and, on his recapture, received ten years, plus six months for the escape. In November that year he escaped from Long Bay jail. Perhaps he was not that successful an escaper because, during his years in prison, he made some fifteen failed attempts. This time he was recaptured seven weeks later, by which time he had robbed two banks and a payroll office. One was the Rozelle bank in early December, which again was a solo effort. Armed with a sawn-off .22 automatic, Matthews jumped on the counter, yelled at the staff and customers, had his bag filled and was away, taking with him something in the region of $3000, which can probably be multiplied by ten today. The money went on gambling, women and liquor. Matthews later said of career bank robbers, including himself: ‘They’ve got no respect for money, you know, because it’s easy come, easy go, so you might have $100 000, you might have $10 000, there’s no respect there because you haven’t earned it … It’s the adrenalin rush of getting it.’
After his sentence Matthews made an effort to start his own business and settle down. Then, on 20 February 1991, he was arrested in Sydney by members of Task Force Magnum of the Sydney Major Crime Squad over a Brambles security van robbery at Sunnybank Hills in Queensland on 3 April the previous year. Petrol had been poured over the driver and staff to force them to open the back of the van, and $694 000 was stolen. The evidence against Matthews was from a police informer, and a police inspector who alleged Matthews had made a verbal confession to him. Committed for trial, he remained in custody until, on 26 October, Garry Sullivan, a former Rugby League international, and William Orchard were arrested for an armoured car robbery the day before. They put their hands up and admitted to the Brambles robbery. Matthews was released two days later and the charges were finally dropped. His efforts to obtain compensation for his wrongful imprisonment came to nothing. After his release he began a highly successful career as a journalist, but that came to an abrupt halt when in April 2008, then aged 58, he was arrested in Sydney on drug and gun charges. In the autumn of 2011 he was still awaiting trial.
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One of the dangers of working in a team is not only that you might be dobbed in by a mate who thinks he can cut himself a deal with the police but also that you might be killed by your offsider. Take Louis (or Lory) de Barbarezz as an example. At the end of December 1969 the body of the 31-year-old conman and thief (who was Yugoslav-born but claimed to be French) was found in a grave in Brighton-le-Sands, along with the mattock and steel wrench that had been used to kill him. His leg was hacked off. He had been missing since the previous September. Paul Arthur Barnhart, in Long Bay, told the police that de Barbarezz had been condemned by a kangaroo court held in Kings Cross, perhaps with kingpin Lennie McPherson presiding, after a feud over the spoils of a series of robberies. The police thought there were possibly six others who had been killed and buried in the preceding eighteen months, either because they were informers or because they had quarrelled over the proceeds of robberies. One victim had been buried in a forest, the second was de Barbarezz, a third dumped in the sea in concrete, a fourth buried in a cemetery, a fifth thrown in a river and a sixth put in a garbage dump. The seventh was still missing.
More information emerged in June 1970, when Barnhart pleaded guilty to being an accessory to murder and received ten years. He then gave evidence against Barrie Ronald Bruce Levy, saying that he had lured de Barbarezz to Kyeemagh near Kingsford Smith Airport with the promise of a safe-blowing exercise. Barnhart claimed that Levy then attacked de Barbarezz with a Stillson wrench, yelling that de Barbarezz had nearly got him killed over an incident with John Stuart (later convicted of Brisbane’s Whiskey Au Go Go murders) in Long Bay. Certainly Levy and de Barbarezz had known each other and had in fact worked together in the theft of seventy-five furs from Mark Foy in May 1965. Levy, who consistently denied his guilt, was sentenced to life imprisonment and, with escapes from custody and breakings when on licence, was still in prison in 2000 when Justice Dowd set a minimum term which enabled him to apply for almost immediate parole.
Another robbery that brought pain, suffering and death to the protagonists, this time from outsiders, was the Mayne-Nickless robbery on 4 March 1970 in Sydney. The raid itself was a simple one. Incredibly, the guards regularly parked in the Guildford shopping centre while they ate their lunch inside the van before making a delivery to the Commonwealth Bank. When one of the guards opened the van door to put the rubbish out, in came the robbers and out went $587 890.
The pain and suffering came in the form of the much-feared Sydney-based Toecutters Gang, named for their tendency to amputate the toes—and other parts—of criminals to convince them to share their ill-gotten gains. Frank ‘Baldy’ Blair had his toes cut and testicles torched to persuade him to reveal where he had deposited his $90 000 share of the robbery. Blair died from his injuries and his body was thrown into Sydney Harbour in the belief that it would be eaten by sharks. It was not and it washed up in Botany Bay. The blame for that misapprehension was laid at the doorstep of the red-headed Jake Maloney, who was later shot by fellow Toecutter John ‘Nano The Magician’ Regan on 23 November 1971. According to underworld legend, just before Maloney was killed, Regan said, ‘Sharks, hey Jake, I’ll give you bloody sharks, you idiot.’
Meanwhile the Toecutters attacked the docker Stephen Nittes, who was also on the Mayne-Nickless raid. He handed over a substantial part of his share. Another robber Alan Jones escaped their attention but both he and Nittes received sixteen years for their part in the theft. Leslie Woon, the talented organiser of the robbery, left the country and went to Europe when he heard the Toecutters were interested in his share too. It was many years before he returned.
Former robber Mark ‘Chopper’ Read has a story about the Toecutters that tells how they kidnapped a robber to question him over a theft of $75 000. On his back the man had a tattoo of an eagle fighting a dragon and, with a pair of pliers, the Toecutters slowly ripped it off. The man died halfway through the operation. They then took the view that no man would die in such pain for the sake of the money and reasoned that his wife must have it. They promised her they would return him if she paid over the money. It was only after she had done so that they told her she could have his body.
Another story is that the corrupt copper Fred Krahe, often suggested as a leader of the Toecutters, recruited Kevin Gore (another suggested leader) and Jake Maloney to retrieve the Mayne Nickless money on his behalf. In turn, the Melbourne hardman Brian Kane was dispatched by leaders of the Painters and Dockers’ Union to deal with Gore and Maloney.
Much of the information on the Toecutters is speculative and some accounts claim the gang was led by an Englishman, Linus or Jimmy ‘The Pom’ O’Driscoll (or Driscoll), who was said to have grey-ferret eyes and to have been the personal bodyguard of the IRA deputy leader Joe Cahill, as well as serving in the Congo under ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare and being a friend of the Kray twins. Driscoll was convicted of the Maloney murder but was released on appeal and later deported after being convicted on a weapons charge. It appears, though, that he was completely rehabilitated and was allowed back into Australia in the 1990s.
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It was the fear that she might dob in bank robber and ex-French Foreign Legionnaire Fred Harbecke and his offsiders, James Patrick Thornton and Alan Stanley Dillon, that led to the death of Helen Paunovic. She was shot as she left a coffee lounge in Kings Cross on 29 December 1967. The men had all met at Grafton jail where they were labelled as ‘Intracs’.
One of the more violent of the quasi-independents, who regularly tried to shoot his way out of the slightest of troubles, was James Edward Smith, brought up in the Colac district of Victoria and who, because as a teenager he was apprenticed to a trainer, was known as ‘The Jockey’. Early in his criminal career Smith, regarded as a bank robber’s bank robber, teamed up with Ronald Ryan, who would become the last man to be hanged in Australia after killing a guard in an escape from Pentridge. This time, however, it was Smith who tried to shoot a police officer when the pair were caught burgling a shop in 1962. On this occasion, fortunately, the gun jammed. In 1973 the situation was repeated when a police constable, Russell Cook, was searching a car. Smith again tried to shoot and once more the gun jammed.
Charged with a string of robberies in Sydney, despite his earlier escape attempts Smith was given bail. He skipped and was found in Melbourne. Sent to Pentridge, he was there only a matter of weeks before he obtained a visitor’s pass and walked out. One thing he was good at was dealing with horses and now he combined the names of two of the country’s top trainers, Tommy Smith and Bart Cummings, and set up as trainer Tom Cummings. He did well at country tracks but the life of a small trainer has never been an overflowing cup. In 1976 he shot and injured Jerry Ambrose in a robbery in Sydney and on 13 June the following year he killed bookmaker and crime associate Lloyd Tidmarsh at his home in Kogarah. It was said to be a robbery but the $200 in the safe was left untouched. This time he was arrested in Nowra and tried to shoot Detective Bob Godden, who saved himself by putting his thumb between the breech and the trigger of the gun. In December 1977 he was charged with Western Australia’s then biggest hold-up, the Taxation Department’s $176 000 payroll snatch in Perth in May 1975. Smith was given a life sentence, of which he served fourteen years, for the attempted murder of the detective and on appeal was acquitted of the other charges after allegations that his confession had been fabricated.
He was released on 12 February 1992 and a day later was shot in the chest and left for dead outside his home in Curlewis Street, North Bondi. Dr Crozier, who was on duty the day Smith was brought into St Vincent’s, recalls:
When he arrived he had multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen; he was barely alive. We split him from the chest to just above the penis, a big mid-line incision. He’d been shot through the liver, bowel, but it hadn’t hit the heart or aorta, so he survived … He left the indelible impression on me that with the right combination of good luck and good treatment a person can survive multiple gunshot wounds.
This is a far cry from the 1920s and 1930s when the victim was likely to develop peritonitis, which must be a great comfort to today’s wannabes.
Smith declined to help the police, who said that he was another with so many enemies it would be difficult to say who might have shot him. He was in hospital for a month. Then, on 12 June, one of Smith’s offsiders, former boxer turned standover man Desmond Anthony Lewis, was shot at Bondi Junction on his way home from the Nelson Hotel where he had been watching a Rugby League Test. It was thought the killing was linked to Smith’s shooting as well as standover man Roy Thurgar’s death the previous year.
For a time, Smith made good money dealing in amphetamines and it was said he was so mean he would ‘bite the head off a shilling’. But, over the months, according to his flamboyant solicitor, the column-writing Chris Murphy, he became something of a recluse. In November 1992, breaking the rule of never shoplifting for oneself, Smith tried to steal kitchen equipment from Grace Brothers in Erina. Stopped by the store detective, he yet again produced a gun and hijacked a couple to drive him away. He hid in the bush for a while and later teamed up with Christopher Dean ‘Badness’ Binse—another escapee from Pentridge—in plotting a series of armed robberies.
Smith died on 5 December 1992. About 8 p.m. he was seen speeding by Senior Constable Ian Harris, who followed him to the Farmer’s Arms Hotel in Creswick, Victoria. Asked for his identification, he pulled a gun on the officer, and when Darren Neil, a bystander who had seen the incident, approached, Smith fired a shot into the ground. Neil retreated, drove his car a short distance and dropped off his children. He then drove the car at Smith, distracting him. The constable pulled his own revolver and shot Smith three times in the chest.
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If outsiders and one-time offsiders didn’t harm you, you could do a great deal of damage to yourself. In the late 1930s the standover man and professional shoplifter Charles ‘Kicker’ Kelly turned to safebreaking. He should have stuck to what he knew best. Instead, in one early outing, he put too much gelignite in a safe lock and blew both it and his leg off. In July 1947 William Chitten went one worse, killing himself when a gelignite bomb exploded in his pocket as he tried to blow the safe in a Surry Hills factory. He had lost the sauce-bottle top, which should have covered the makeshift detonator.
That is not to say that over the years there have not been singularly spectacular robberies organised with military precision. One of the earliest of the major post-war robberies was at Cockatoo Docks when, at about 10 a.m. on 13 April 1946, three men armed with a Thompson machine gun and automatic pistols robbed five waterside employees of 12 000 pounds. The money had just been collected from the Drummoyne branch of the ES&A bank and the armed employees were in the launch to take them to the wharf when they were held up by a machine gun–wielding masked man and his colleagues. The robbers left the waterfront in a highly polished stolen black Buick, which was later found in Kalgoorlie Street, Leichhardt. Despite the offer of a reward of 1000 pounds and a free pardon to any informant provided he had not actually been on the robbery, the underworld remained staunch and no charges were ever brought. It was the first robbery in New South Wales in which a machine gun was used.
One of the great non-violent robberies, known as the ‘Chinese Takeaway’, which may be the biggest ever in Australia, took place on the evening of 2 January 1988 when three tankmen (the underworld term for safebreakers), squeezed through a gap in the wall of a construction site next to the Haymarket branch of the National Australia Bank in Sydney’s Chinatown. A window had been left open and, with a 10-metre light extension ladder, they climbed through it to begin a systematic raid on the eighty-two safety deposit boxes in the bank. They were lucky because when they tried to blow a cash vault they had tripped a wire but security guards thought it to be a false alarm and did not check the basement.
Quite how much the thieves took will never be known because only half the people renting the boxes came forward to detail their losses, which were mainly in gold ingots and bars and jewellery. At the time gold was selling legally for $670 an ounce and estimates of the total haul have been put between $10 million and $100 million. Almost certainly much of it went abroad to Hong Kong and Singapore. The mastermind was often said to be robber, launderer and drug importer Michael Hurley, who, in December 1980, had been charged—along with his younger brother Jeffrey—over the theft of the Golconda d’Or, a $2 million diamond dating from 1793. It had been on display at Sydney Town Hall and the police believed a team of four switched the diamond for a fake after picking the lock on the case. Because the brothers looked almost identical the witnesses could not make a positive identification and the charges were dismissed.
Michael Hurley died on 23 January 2007 awaiting trial on a massive drug importation. He had been suffering from cancer.