ESCAPEE WHO WROTE THE ROBBER’S RULEBOOK
The gang was better equipped,
better trained and better
prepared than the police who
were trying to catch them.
NO WONDER there was a rush to rent the neat weatherboard home in the quiet bayside hideaway of Mt Martha, south east of Melbourne.
For a start, it was only 200 metres from Port Phillip Bay, with access to beach and water. And, on the outer fringe of suburbia, it was ideal for someone seeking seclusion at a reasonable price. Many houses in the area were holiday homes, vacant most of the year. The rest were largely occupied by retirees who respected their neighbours’ privacy.
Four families applied to take the long-term lease on the fully furnished house. But after examining references and conducting interviews the owners felt they had found the perfect tenants in a couple who introduced themselves as Kevin and Sharon Ames.
And for six months after the couple moved in, the owners had no reason to doubt their choice.
He was a fitness fanatic who went to bed early and she was a stay-at-home type who spent evenings knitting in front of the television.
They were never short of money, paid their rent on time, looked after the property properly and without complaint and didn’t throw parties. He was always up and out by 5am for his daily run on the beach with his dog. (Later it would be established that fitness was not his only motivation: he wanted to be out of the house at the time police traditionally carried out early morning raids).
But on 3 January 1983 the quiet tenants had one of their rare visitors. It was a man in his early 40s, driving a flash imported maroon Chevrolet utility.
It was the first week of the New Year, where work traditionally takes a back seat to sun and socializing, but this group of people was self-employed and rarely took a break.
The meeting this day, in the quiet house in Helena Street, was about business and it would end badly.
The fact was that the tenants were Russell Cox, a New South Wales prison escapee and prolific armed robber, and his loyal de facto wife Helen Deane.
Cox was known as ‘Mad Dog’ although he was one of the coolest criminals around. That’s why, while on the run for more than a decade, he was able to blend into the background. And that’s why he was known inside prisons in three states as ‘Cox the Fox.’
The ‘Mad Dog’ nickname was given to Cox by one of the authors. It was not one of his career highlights.
Many times Cox was close to capture, but each time he was able to talk or fight his way out of trouble. Once, when stopped by two Queensland police, he pulled a gun, disarmed them and drove off.
A Victorian policeman who had been training at an inner-suburban boxing gym went for a drink in Richmond with a few of his sparring partners. At the pub he was introduced to a quiet bloke sitting at the bar. They had a chat and then the quiet man drifted away. It was Cox.
Once, when overcharged at a Japanese restaurant, he queried the bill then meekly backed down rather than risk a public confrontation.
The restaurant manager might have been less self-righteous if he’d known the quiet customer was almost certainly carrying a gun.
But Cox was extremely violent if he were cornered. He was a much better friend than enemy – as his visitor in the American car was about to find out.
Cox had been serving life for the attempted murder of a prison officer in an earlier escape, then broke out of the top security Katingal division of Sydney’s Long Bay Prison in 1977. The division was later closed on humanitarian grounds – not that it worried Cox, by then long gone.
When he was let into the exercise yard he pulled himself up with one arm and cut through the bars with the other with a saw. He then painted the bars to hide the saw cuts until he was ready to go.
Just on lock-up time he said he’d forgotten his runners and slipped back into the exercise yard, through the window, over two football fields and away.
It was a feat of strength and ingenuity. But prison authorities expected he would be back in custody within days. They were optimistic. It took eleven years.
The Chevrolet driver was hot-rod enthusiast and gunman Ian Revell Carroll, a heavy player in Melbourne’s underworld for decades.
They were there to discuss future jobs and to split dividends. It had been a good year and the future was looking even better. They had guns, brains and an inside man in a security firm.
It was, for them, a boom-boom economy. They were part of Australia’s best ever stick-up crew. The gang included the surviving elements of Ray Bennett’s Great Bookie Robbery team, reinforced by hand picked replacements such as Santo Mercuri (who, five years later, would kill security guard Dominic Hefti during an armed robbery in Brunswick) and Cox himself.
The team had lost key players to guns, drugs and prison but they had eager apprentices, including two young men whose underworld careers would blossom until they were shot dead in a later underworld war – Jason and Mark Moran.
For Jason it was an interesting career choice. It meant he was working with the survivors of the team that killed his wife’s father – Leslie Herbert Kane.
It also meant he worked side by side with Cox, the number one suspect for killing her uncle (and his childhood hero) – Brian Kane. So while blood may be thicker than water, cash speaks all languages. And a rolling stone gathers no moss and a watched pot never boils – but we digress.
Carroll was another graduate from the Painters and Dockers crime finishing school. He was arrested with Neil Stanley Collingburn in 1971 when police found a set of golf clubs suspected of being stolen in the boot of a car the pair were using.
Collingburn received fatal injuries while in police custody. Two detectives, Brian Francis Murphy and Carl John Stillman, were later acquitted of manslaughter. It was later established that the interview and the fatal consequences were pointless. The clubs were legitimately acquired and not stolen.
Carroll, a former professional boxer, had been recruited by Bennett as a key member of the Bookie Robbery team. While he was supposed to be living as a battler on waterfront wages he had graduated to executive class, driving his Mercedes or one of his eight vintage cars. He put his children through private school and began several businesses, including a computer company and an American car-importing firm.
A posthumous check of his financial records showed he had more than twenty bank accounts, some in false names, and an impressive property portfolio. He was building a luxury home on a two-hectare block in the outer Melbourne suburb of Wonga Park.
In the months that followed the Bookie Robbery, Carroll deposited nearly $450,000 in cash in different accounts. It was unlikely to have come from overtime at the docks.
In the six months from September 1981 until February 1982, Carroll made a series of huge deposits in his various accounts. His income spike coincided with four Melbourne armed robberies that netted the gang nearly $600,000 in cash. Business was so good that Carroll was able to take a 35-day holiday in the US.
Cox and Carroll had become almost inseparable. Carroll’s friends and relatives noticed the usually gregarious car enthusiast had become secretive and chose to spend most of his time with the mysterious escapee.
On this day when Carroll went to visit Cox, money was one of the first items up for discussion. As no minutes are kept of such business meetings, police could only piece together fragments of what happened that afternoon.
It was a warm afternoon when a man holidaying with family and friends decided to take a break from listening to the fifth Test in the Ashes series during the tea break. (He didn’t miss much. It was a draw. England nightwatchman, the rotund Eddie Hemmings made a stubborn 95 but, again, we digress).
The man stretched his legs and then sat in the back yard and opened a book. It was 3.55pm.
Over the side fence he heard an argument and a scuffle. ‘I heard a woman scream, “Don’t shoot him!” or “Don’t point that at him!”
When he peered over the fence he saw a man and a woman struggling. The woman had a pistol in her hand and appeared to be fighting a losing battle to keep the gun away from him. The man screamed, ‘Give me the fucking gun.’
The witness said the man dragged her away and grabbed the handgun. ‘I saw this man raise the gun and fire one shot towards the back fence. I just thought it was a cap pistol or someone playing so I thought nothing of it and went back to reading my book.’
It must have been a riveting read.
About two minutes later he heard another shot and looked over again. ‘I saw a person lying on the ground in the middle of the back yard dragging himself along the ground towards the house. He fell to the ground. I presumed he was dead.’
When police were called, the man in the backyard was, indeed, very dead.
Just months earlier the cashed-up Carroll had bought the Mt Martha house from the couple that had rented it to Cox.
So not only did Cox kill his business partner but his landlord.
Dead, Ian Revell Carroll was able to tell police more about the elite team of armed robbers than he ever had when he was alive.
It was clear he had been in a fight before he was shot. He had a bruise on his left shoulder and a bite mark on his left upper arm. His right knuckles were bruised and his left thumbnail was black and bloody. He had cuts and abrasions to both knees.
He was wearing conservative brown corduroy pants and a tee shirt. The only clue that he may have been a gangster (besides the bullet holes) was the gold chain around his neck and the heavy tattoos over his legs, arms and back. Further examination would show old wounds, including one where he was shot in April 1972.
He must have been a slow learner.
Where Carroll was found near the shed behind the house, a trail of blood was still visible on the grass.
In his pocket was a bloodied Seiko watch, indicating he could have used the old street fighter’s technique of using it as a makeshift knuckle-duster.
He had been shot twice with a .38 handgun. One bullet went into the pelvis and created little damage. But the second entered the left side of the chest and went through both lungs, causing him to drown in his own blood as he crawled towards the house to get help.
He was found lying on his back in the yard with his head resting against a trellis.
In the driveway were two parked cars – a Ford Escort panel van and Carroll’s Chevrolet utility. The driver’s seat cover of the orange Escort was drenched in blood and in the back on a mattress was an Able Baby hammerless .22 revolver also covered in blood.
The front bench seat of the Chev was bloodstained, indicating someone bleeding heavily had hopped into the car from the passenger side and slipped over behind the wheel. There was an empty, black holster under the front seat that would have fitted the bloodied .22.
It was what police would find inside the house that revealed the secrets of the armed robbery team that had pulled the biggest jobs in Australia for seven years.
There was a blood-covered green towel in the bathroom and a partly-cooked meal on the stove.
The house was ‘clean’. There was not one envelope, note, address book or diary that would point to the real identity of the people renting the house.
But there was a mountain of evidence that showed the real nature of their business.
In the hallway was a bloodstained, orange stool directly under a ceiling manhole that was askew and smeared with blood.
There was a dust mark where an object had been moved. In the ceiling space was a vinyl bag containing a wig, a walkie-talkie and a police scanner. A second plastic box contained silencers, a small radio receiver, a machine gun and boxes of ammunition wrapped in a tablecloth.
It was clear police had found the command centre of the payroll gang. And there was more – much more.
They soon found three large wooden chests originally used to import and export parts for Carroll’s car business.
The boxes, about a metre tall, wide and long, were topped with tools to look like tradesmen’s boxes. But in carefully-made hidden compartments, police would find what Detective Senior Sergeant David Sprague would describe as, ‘One of the largest arrays of weaponry and associated crime equipment ever seized in this state.’
It included machine guns, military semi-automatic weapons, handguns and a pistol stolen from Ireland.
There were stick-on tradesmen signs to use on the side of vehicles during armed robbery surveillance, disguises, security guard uniforms, medical kits that included bandages, painkilling injections, antibiotics and splints.
The official police inventory listed: ‘The hidden compartment in one box contained four revolvers, two armalite rifles, magazines, ammunition, handcuffs, balaclavas, bullet resistant vests, false vehicle, personal identification signs and stolen Armaguard uniforms. The top sections of the boxes contained tools and overalls, giving the appearance of being a legitimate tradesman’s tool-box should they be searched. Other boxes included items such as liquid ammonia and tennis balls for guard dogs, first-aid kit containing pethidine, morphine, motor vehicle ignition barrels, handcuffs, bullet resistant vests, gas masks, hand-knitted balaclavas, false magnetic vehicle signs, magnetic flashing lights, stolen security company uniforms and false moustaches, hair and skin colouring. Two of the revolvers located in the residence were from an armoured vehicle robbery and an automatic pistol was stolen from a Northern Ireland Police Officer.’
In short, it proved that the gang was better equipped, better trained and better prepared than the police who were trying to catch them.
Detectives also found handwritten notes on armoured car movements in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.
The blood in the two cars and through the houses showed that Carroll had managed to shoot Cox in the gun battle.
Cox, they say, was prepared for any contingency, and although badly wounded, climbed on the stool to grab his escape kit from the ceiling that included cash, firearms, false identity papers and first aid equipment.
The blood smears in both cars indicated he had a serious wound to the upper left thigh. Police say he tried the two cars before leaving in a third that was backed into the drive just after the shooting.
A Ford panel van was later recovered in Oakleigh. The previous owner was one Santo Mercuri – an armed robber who would later turn killer.
There was a green towel saturated in blood and a pool under the driver’s pedals. Experts estimated the wounded man had lost more than two litres. He was in deep trouble.
Cox’s longtime lover Helen Deane was a nurse’s aide who could help in the short term but she would have known he needed expert medical assistance to survive.
If the injured man went to a local hospital or medical centre a doctor may have linked him to the Mt Martha killing as the news broke. So he and Deane drove to New South Wales, convincing a doctor in Gosford that the wounded man had accidentally shot himself in New Guinea. Cox told the doctor he chose to fly home for treatment rather than risk the poor medical standards there. As a self-inflicted wound sustained outside Australia, there was no need to report the ‘accident’ to authorities.
The doctor swallowed the story while Cox swallowed the painkillers. The bullet was dug out, the wound cleaned and the fitness fanatic escapee made a full recovery.
Detectives went through the Mt Martha house looking for clues. Then they returned to the backyard and to a roughly-made shed that was probably once a child’s cubby house. Inside, police found two bullets of different calibres, a pair of men’s leather sandals, blood on the floor and signs of a struggle, including broken cement sheets that made up the walls. They believed the dispute started in the shed and then spilled into the yard.
Police forensic experts carefully dismantled the shed looking for clues. They found wood, cement sheets and bricks, then a grounding of sand. They dug down – but not deep enough.
The object of the argument was just a few centimetres under their feet – a large plastic barrel designed for home brewed beer.
Six months later police returned and dug again. This time they found the barrel. It was empty. Many years later Dave Sprague, by then a Commander, said he believed the barrel had contained at least $1 million in cash and probably documents such as passports.
‘That’s what they were arguing over,’ he said.
Cox, or someone acting for him, came back to get the money after police cleared the crime scene in January.
Waste not, want not.
THE child who would eventually become known as Russell Cox was born Melville Peter Schnitzerling in Brisbane 15 September 1949, several weeks before he was due. The tiny premature baby was nicknamed ‘Tim’ by his family.
As a boy, he was in and out of Queensland youth training centres, Boystown and Westbrook, before finally being sent to an adult jail in 1966 for stealing a car in Seymour. In 1972, he started to use the name Russell Cox and began his long career as an armed robber.
In 1974 he was arrested in New South Wales over a string of armed robbery and theft charges and sentenced to eleven years. His co-offender was a Melbourne man on the make – Gregory John Workman – the Preston hoodlum shot dead by Alphonse Gangitano in 1995.
In 1975, after an unsuccessful attempt to break out of Sydney’s Long Bay Jail, Cox was sentenced to life for the attempted murder of prison officers during the escape bid. For Cox it was just a hiccup and within two years he had learned from his mistakes. Not by reforming but by refining his escape methods.
On 3 November 1977, he broke out of the supposedly escape-proof Katingal Division of Long Bay and soon teamed up with master tactician Ray Bennett in Melbourne.
How come?
Police were to find much later that the escape of some of Australia’s most dangerous prisoners were not one-off events.
The Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence completed an investigation, code-named Operation GAP, which found that a nationwide network existed to help prisoners on the run. It found that the group provided escapees with safe houses and fake documents.
The theory was confirmed when it was found that jail breakers and armed robbers Christopher Dean ‘Badness’ Binse and James Edward ‘Jockey’ Smith used the same safe house in Daylesford at different times while on the run. Gunman Ian ‘Rabbit’ Steele was also provided with a fake passport to head to England – a novel twist that sent a convict back to the Old Dart. It did Steele no good. He was later sentenced to life there for murder.
On New Year’s Eve 1977, a notorious armed robber was arrested in Northcote in a shootout but a second man jumped from the car and escaped. Police believe it was Cox.
He used forged identity papers to successfully apply for a passport under the name of Gary Nevin, giving his address as Williams Road, Toorak.
In May 1978, prison officers found evidence of an attempt to break into Katingal. This was something different. According to police intelligence, Cox and another well-known armed robber had tried to free some mates.
They failed – proving that while you could break out of the ‘escape-proof’ jail it was too hard to break in.
Cox was to find more than a partner in crime when he teamed up with Bennett. He would find a partner for life.
In 1978 he met Helen Eva Deane, Bennett’s sister-in-law, and they became lovers.
The green-eyed, petite Deane was educated at the Prahran Technical School and had become a qualified nursing aide.
She was blood loyal to Cox, nursing him when he was shot and abandoning friends and some relatives to live life on the run.
Late in 1978 they moved to Queensland but he maintained his links with the Melbourne underworld.
He would fly in key members of the Bookie Robbery team for the jobs. But it cost to enlist the best and on one occasion he just broke even after masterminding the robbery of the Strathpine ANZ branch of $5780. He later said it cost him nearly $5000 to fly his handpicked crew (including Ray Bennett) from Melbourne and back.
Other jobs were more lucrative – including payroll jobs from the Prince Charles Hospital ($16,618), Royal Women’s Hospital ($62,446), Woodlands ($38,000), Boral Cyclone ($21,348), Queensland Railways ($327,000) and Queensland Bacon ($90,329).
Cox stayed on the run not only because he knew how to commit an armed robbery but when to walk away from one.
In November 1983, Queensland police scored a tip-off that Cox was planning to rob the Brisbane railway yards. The armed robbery squad launched a stake-out operation.
Cox walked into the yards, wandered into the canteen and bought a drink. This was his usual practice before a ‘job’. He did his own surveillance, wandering around his target dressed as a worker. He saw two men in railway uniforms but correctly picked the dog with them as a police canine.
When he left, driving an old Valiant, he was pulled over by two members of the squad, who did not know he was their suspect.
Cox was to pull a gun, disarm the two detectives steal their keys, lock the police car and drive off, leaving them unharmed.
While he would have had no compunction about killing police, he knew shots would bring back up – followed by unrelenting pursuit. He knew it was always better to slip away than shoot it out.
COX and Deane lived healthy lifestyles on the run. She was a vegetarian who used herbal toothpaste and he rarely ate red meat.
Standover man Mark ‘Chopper’ Read once remarked the most dangerous thing about Cox was the vegetarian curry he cooked in Pentridge’s high security H Division. He was a repeat offender.
Cox fancied German beer and good wine and the couple loved Japanese food. Living on the run did not thwart their international travel plans. They visited Japan and the Philippines using false passports while being hunted around Australia. He later said he also went to the UK, where he worked as a seaman.
Cox managed to stay at least one step ahead for more than a decade because he was smart enough not to play the tough guy. For a violent criminal, Cox could appear remarkably calm. He became an expert at appearing ordinary in extraordinary circumstances.
Cox and Deane would always rent moderate, furnished homes, which they would share with their black Labrador, Devil.
Cox’s brother was a champion surfer who retired in the United States, and athleticism and self-discipline ran in the family. Cox loved the beach and regularly ran fifteen kilometres a day. But he didn’t drop his guard. He always had a sub-machine gun under the front seat of his car and had a handgun concealed on his body even when running.
The chatty Deane and quiet Cox passed as perfect tenants and usually provided glowing references when renting a house.
In November 1981 they moved into a small house in Lynette Street, Nunawading, taking a six-month lease at just $75 a week. An armed robbery squad detective rented a similar home just two streets away but did not cross paths with the fugitive.
In January 1982 Cox and Deane made sixteen separate deposits for a total of $30,000 in a building society account held under false names. They travelled around Victoria to make the deposits making sure that none were big enough to raise suspicions.
In February, Cox withdrew $25,000 to buy 80 hectares at Broadford next to a property owned by the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. Police reports suggest Cox and Deane used the small log cabin on their country retreat as an emergency safe house. In March 1983, two months after the Carroll murder, the cabin was found burnt out. Police believe it was either a revenge attack by friends of Carroll’s or – more likely – it was torched by Cox himself to remove any evidence he had stayed there while recovering from his gunshot wound.
Detectives say Cox tapped a phone line into a police station so that he remained up to date on the search for him.
During one raid where police narrowly missed the pair, they found theatrical books, which had chapters on make-up. They believed he used actor’s make-up, false teeth and wigs to continually change his appearance.
Cox preferred heavy, military-style weapons and kept bullet-proof vests and gas masks.
He often used the alias ‘Mr Williams’, the same name used by his favorite comic hero, The Phantom. Even Devil the dog had an alias: he was known as ‘Butch’ when they were on the run. In fact, he might not have answered to his real name at all.
After the Carroll killing, Cox moved to Queensland and joined the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland under a false name. He bought two high-powered military weapons from a Brisbane gun shop after producing fake identity papers.
He studied Australian bushrangers, including Ned Kelly and the ‘Wild Colonial Boy’. His favourite magazine was Soldier of Fortune. He also read non-fiction Australian crime books, contributing in a small way to these authors’ meagre income in those lean years.
According to ‘Chopper’ Read, Cox won $15,000 on Tattslotto while on the run. ‘I’ve shot people for less,’ he said.
Read also said Cox had once revealed he’d turned to crime when he won a raffle for a new bike when he was ten years old but because he wasn’t present at the draw the prize was withdrawn and raffled again. He was so angry ‘he stole a brand new bike and told everyone he had won it in a raffle,’ Read said.
Read said Cox was famous in the underworld for his cool head.
‘He was pulled over for licence checks and breath tests and was never fazed. Once, when there were police screaming all over the place, he just drove off. The police didn’t notice the dog running after the car. Russell just opened the door of the car and Devil jumped in, barking out the back window at the police, who were blissfully unaware.’
Cox was cool under pressure, a loving partner and would try to avoid a fight if he could but, underneath it all, he was a gunman.
IT would be the hardest job in policing: to go undercover and infiltrate the tight knit Bookie Robbery team.
The risks were enormous. This mob killed rivals and would have no hesitation in shooting nosy outsiders.
But Graeme Henderson, a detective who had just returned from studying overseas under a Churchill fellowship, was keen to use the tactics he had learned and there was no bigger target than Ray Bennett.
Henderson recruited Rob Robertson, a Vietnam veteran, who was brave to the point of recklessness, and together they would be the first full-time undercovers in Victoria.
It was nearly two years after the robbery that police found their first way in – and that was only because the gang had no intention of retiring on the spoils from the Victoria Club.
They continued to pull off big jobs in Perth and Brisbane using methods imported from the London team known as the Wembley Mob. In February 1978 they were looking for a new target in Melbourne.
Bennett believed the heat was off them. His best friend, Norman ‘Chops’ Lee, had been acquitted of charges over the Bookie Robbery and most of the team were free and available.
Again he hand-picked the crew and this time included an armed robbery expert who would never crack under pressure – Russell Cox.
After all, Cox was near enough to family now that he was living with Bennett’s sister-in-law.
As usual, Bennett wanted an inside man and on 18 February 1978, a Queensland SP bookmaker made tentative approaches at Flemington races to a part-time worker for the Mayne Nickless security company, the same firm that handled the cash delivered on the day of the Bookie Robbery.
If the security man could provide information on cash movements and payroll deliveries there would be a handsome ‘earn’ in it for him.
But Mayne Nickless learned of the potential breach through its own security systems and contacted police, who slipped Robertson into the firm.
The operation, code named Osprey, was designed to destroy the million-dollar payroll gang.
Robertson became Brian Wilson – a security guard with a weakness for luxury cars and fast women. And he wanted cash to support his lifestyle.
Robertson (as Wilson) twice met the Queensland man – a skilled armed robber known as ‘Bikkie’ at a North Melbourne hotel to discuss possible targets.
‘He told me they were the crew behind the Bookie Robbery and they wanted another job worth between $8 million and $10 million,’ Robertson remembers.
On 22 April Robertson met key gang members at Werribee races. Bikkie introduced him to ‘Kelvin’. It was Russell Cox.
‘He was super fit and super smart. The consummate professional at what he did,’ Robertson said later.
The undercover told the team he had identified a likely target – the Country Roads Board offices in Denmark Street, Kew.
While it wouldn’t be a $10 million heist, it was still worth the risk.
The payroll would usually be $600,000 but on 4 May it would be swollen to $900,000 because of back pay.
Embellishing the story as he went, he told them it would be ‘a piece of cake.’
The inside man was promised 10 per cent of the takings in funds that would be laundered through Dennis William Smith’s Manila bar operations.
He was told he would get $5000 up front and the rest about a week later.
Police planned to take the sting to the line. This was their chance to catch the Bookie Robbery master-minds. But it was uncharted waters. Undercover work in the 1970s was rudimentary – largely ‘buy-bust’ drug deals at a street level. No police in Australia had tried such an elaborate – and dangerous – ruse.
They fitted out a Mayne Nickless armoured van with James Bond style electronic devices to foil the robbery and the Special Operations Group was briefed. The briefing was straightforward: If the crooks have guns don’t hesitate to fire. In other words, police were preparing for a gun battle.
They were simpler times and Coroners tended not to ask too many questions.
On 26 April Roberston met ‘Kelvin’ and ‘Bikkie’ at a North Melbourne coffee shop. ‘They wanted to check me out. Ray Bennett just wandered past to have a good look,’ Robertson said.
Four men, including two identified as Bookie Robbers, followed them to the target for last checks before the job.
Cox authorised the raid but only after doing his own homework. He later told Roberston he had donned a workman’s dustcoat to check out the building and found the payroll office was protected by only a plywood door. ‘He said they would kick it in and do the job without any problems.’
Once Cox approved the job, the team began to gather, with up to fourteen staying in different motels around Melbourne.
At 8pm on the night before the raid, Cox and Robertson met again in North Melbourne. They were waiting for Bikkie to arrive with the $5000 deposit for the information but the Queenslander was late.
Cox suggested they go somewhere quieter to wait and the undercover agreed. They went to the nearby deserted Victoria Market where the police back-up team couldn’t follow without being seen.
One of the shadowers said they knew if they went in they would blow the job but if they didn’t the undercover’s life was at risk.
‘He was an ex-serviceman who was absolutely fearless and a first class operative. Basically, I think he was half crazy. He wasn’t that flash at his paperwork but he could think on his feet. We decided to let it run.’
Robertson says he felt fully in control. ‘I didn’t have a gun and I wasn’t wearing a tape. I had a knife in my shoe but that wouldn’t be much good against a gun. To this day I don’t think Cox had any intention of harming me.’
But as they were standing and chatting, a police car with three uniformed police on board pulled over. One of the police recognised Robertson, but was alert enough to realise it was an undercover operation and continued to perform a routine identity check. Robertson produced a fake licence while Cox produced a real, long-barrelled .38 revolver.
‘I have no doubt he was going to kill the coppers,’ Robertson said. The undercover started talking, telling Cox that he could solve the problem and there was no need to shoot.
He ripped the microphone from the police car and took their guns, throwing them on the market roof.
Robertson then forced them into a large rubbish bin and placed heavy wooden pallets on top.
‘Before Cox ran off he said to me “You’re a true Briton, and then fired a shot in the air”.’
Robertson ran back to the coffee shop to ring for back-up when another police car arrived. He told the two policewomen in the car he was in the middle of an undercover operation and they should not use their radio but ring the head of Osprey, Detective Chief Inspector Fred Silvester.
Despite the warning, one police officer foolishly used the radio to inform headquarters they were talking to an undercover policeman at the market.
‘Cox always used police radio scanners. He could have been tipped off straight away. He had the knack of knowing when a job wasn’t right and he would walk away from it.’
Cox ran from the market to the Marco Polo Hotel where he met the team leaders.
Meanwhile the SOG was already in the Country Roads Board building, doing a floor by floor search to check if the bandits had already set up.
Cox told the others their inside man had probably been arrested and was still wearing his Mayne Nickless shirt. They believed that if the police connected him to the robbery he would be able to identify some of them. They decided to abort the job and scatter.
It was just as well – for them. The SOG also had a meeting. They were not going to take any chances. The fact that a key gang member was prepared to kill three police hardened their resolve to shoot first.
But Bikkie did send the undercover $500 with a message that he was sorry the job didn’t go ahead. Proof that occasionally there is honour among thieves.
Years later, when Robertson was working at the Consorting Squad, he saw Bikkie at the races, sauntered over and just said: ‘How’s Russell?’
The Queenslander quickly lost his tan, as he turned white.
‘Years later I got some feedback from Russell – he said he thought I had done a good job,’ Robertson would recall.
IN the end it was dumb luck that brought down Russell Cox and it was sheer luck that kept him alive.
It was on 22 July 1988 when the crew from an armoured van heading to Doncaster Shoppingtown in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs radioed police to say they feared they were being followed.
A local divisional van was despatched to check the scene but saw nothing suspicious and radioed headquarters to say they were leaving the area.
But an armed robbery squad crew in the area, headed by Paul ‘Fish’ Mullett, turned up and located the car, a Holden station wagon, in the shopping centre car park.
Mullett contacted the armed robbery squad office and three crews, all heavily armed, headed east.
Members of the squad, armed with concealed pistol grip shotguns, wandered around the shoppers trying to see would-be armed robbers.
Meanwhile police opened the back of the Holden station wagon and the first item they saw was a prison library card in the name of notorious gunman Raymond John Denning, who had escaped from New South Wales’s Goulburn prison just days before.
The detectives knew they were onto a heavy criminal but they were unaware that Denning had teamed up with Cox.
When Denning had escaped he’d headed to Queensland and made immediate contact with Cox, who told him to go to Melbourne where they would meet in Doncaster. He set Denning up in a local motel and began to plan the next armed robbery.
Armed with a scanner Cox, Denning and a woman were inside the shopping complex where they remained until they heard the divvy van report that it was leaving the area.
But the armed robbery squad was equipped with new, ‘silent’ radios that could not be intercepted by scanners.
Denning, wearing a brown Stetson hat, walked back to the Commodore and slipped in behind the steering wheel. Then a second man, wearing a black hat, wandered over, opened the passenger door and stood there chatting. It was Cox, not that the watching police knew that.
He sat in the passenger seat but left the door ajar as he continued to chat. Finally, he moved away but returned for a few more words before heading to the car parked next to it – a yellow Ford Fairlane sedan.
They were on the move.
As Denning took off an armed robbery squad car, driven by Paul Mullet, drove straight at the station wagon then stopped, just kissing the front bumper. But to be kissed by this Fish did not involve a quick release.
His passenger, Ken Ashworth, later to win a Churchill Fellowship, jumped on the bonnet of Denning’s car and pointed a loaded shotgun at the driver. The escapee quickly realised that the gig – and his hands – was up.
But Cox had spent more than a decade on the run because he could slip through doors just before they shut.
He drove straight at detectives while brandishing a dark-coloured revolver. Police opened fire, yelling, ‘He’s got a gun!’.
Members of the armed robbery squad in the 1980s were famous for many things, such as bravery and the capacity for marathon lunches. One detective even had the ability to sing the Robin Hood theme song backwards. But subtlety was not among their many talents.
What occurred next was more fitting to a John Wayne movie than a staid suburban shopping centre.
Police on foot and in cars chased the suspect, who continued to wave a gun. He drove to the edge of the carpark until he saw there was no exit, then threw a U-turn and drove straight back into what must have appeared to be the Guns of Navarone.
The ‘robbers’ and local police began to fire – sending more than 80 slugs from handguns and shotguns in his direction and peppering the car. The handgun shots bounced off the wind-screen until Cox drove directly at them – then Ashworth blasted it out with a shotgun.
Cox’s car hit another vehicle and smashed head-on into a wall. But Cox was still armed and ready to chance his luck until Ashworth fired another shot into the passenger door. Only then did Cox concede his eleven years on the run was over.
Miraculously, despite the hail of lead, Cox was left with just a slight nick to an eyebrow caused by a glass fragment. All the shots had missed him.
Over the following few days, police were to receive reports from people whose cars had been parked in the shopping centre inquiring how their vehicles ended up with ‘shrapnel’ damage.
Dave Brodie was one of the armed robbery squad that day. He joined the police force in 1977, around the time Cox became Australia’s most wanted man. ‘I always thought it would be fantastic to catch him one day.’
But when the man in the black hat was arrested, no-one knew who he was. ‘He just said, “You blokes will jump through hoops when you know who I am.”’.
When they checked the cars, police knew they were dealing with a serious crew. In the Ford they found gloves, binoculars, beanies, three sawn-off semi-automatic rifles and shotgun cartridges.
In the wagon they found maps, bullets and a motor vehicle lock pick, a revolver, hair dye and a manual for a hand-held police scanner.
It would have appeared the visitors weren’t there for the Myer winter sale.
Detectives took the mystery man back and it was only fingerprints that established they had arrested Russell Cox.
Cox remained staunch and refused to answer questions but he sportingly posed with members of the armed robbery squad for a team snap. The big-game hunters wanted a record of catching the biggest name in Australian crime.
But most of the pictures were stolen when the police photographer’s car was burgled the same night.
While Cox refused to talk, Denning – who had escaped while serving a life sentence for escape, malicious wounding and armed robbery – opened up.
‘He said they were following the van “for fun” and had no intention of robbing it – at least not then.’ Brodie said.
Denning was a cult figure in New South Wales and was seen as a latter day bushranger. So it was a surprise when he became a police informer.
When Denning gave evidence in New South Wales, a man in the gallery threw a bone towards him yelling: ‘You forgot your lunch, Denning – here it is.’
Cox and Denning fell out after another armed robber, Graeme Jensen, was killed by police in October 1988. Jensen was killed when police botched an attempt to arrest him over the murder of security guard Dominic Hefti in a robbery. The trouble was, Jensen didn’t do it.
According to Denning, Cox was happy that Jensen was killed, believing the Hefti murder would be wrongly pinned on the dead man.
Denning then decided to talk and he had plenty to say. He listed armed robberies and other crimes he knew Cox had committed.
‘Russell Cox told me that this murder and armed robbery committed on Dominic Hefti had been done so by himself with Sam Mercuri and a person named Mark Moran.’
He said that after Mercuri was wounded, Cox planned to kidnap a doctor to tend to his mate. ‘Mark then said that wasn’t a very good idea and Russell was dirty on him for that.’
According to Denning, Cox acted as a crime mentor to Mark and Jason Moran. He said Cox showed them how to build secret compartments after he went to Jason’s flat and saw two kilos of speed sitting in a normal drawer. ‘Russell told me that he has given Mark and Jason advice in relation to drugs, money, guns and all that in secret compartments.’
Denning said one of the reasons Cox’s mail on armed robberies was always right was that he had inherited a security guard contact from Ray Bennett. He paid the guard ten percent for information and once gave him a video player as a bonus.
But the close connection with Bennett was obviously a problem as the Morans were linked to the Kanes through friendship, business and marriage. The tension would have been somewhat greater because it was suspected that Cox almost certainly killed Brian Kane in the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick in 1982.
‘Mark’s father wasn’t to know that Mark was working with Russell because Mark’s father had been close to the Kanes over the years,’ Denning told police.
According to Denning, Mercuri and Moran turned on Helen Deane when Cox was jailed. ‘Sam Mercuri and Mark terrorised her and drugged her, trying to find out information as to where he had money buried.’
He finished his statement saying, ‘I realise that I am in great danger of being killed by any number of persons through what I have informed to the police.’
He was right.
Denning received a shortened jail term in exchange for his cooperation but died of a drug overdose in 1999 that many believe was a hotshot. He died only days before he was to give evidence against Cox.
After Cox was arrested, police found a card for a lawn mowing service and through it tracked the gardener’s client list to a property in Bowen Road, East Doncaster.
In January 1988 Cox rented the house directly from the owner under the name Peter John Roberts.
Police found a false cupboard in the laundry, disguises, dustcoats with pens in the pockets, notes on movements of armoured car deliveries, a fake plaster cast for an arm and a list of coded phone numbers. The list was given to ASIO but its experts could not crack the Cox code.
Cox had even cut off the tags on his clothes so that if he had to abandon his safe house police would not be able to work out where he shopped.
Police also found a grappling hook with a rope attached and a rowing machine.
But it took police ten days to find his house and the secret storage cupboard was empty.
But the most sinister find was a single page from a telephone book with one name underlined. It was the name of a woman who had inadvertently been involved in the armed robbery in which the security guard Dominic Hefti had been killed.
Just eleven days before Cox’s arrest he had led the team of bandits who jumped two armed guards carrying a cash tin from a Coles Warehouse in Barkly Square, Brunswick.
In the struggle, Hefti was shot in the chest and the leg. He died two days later at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
But Hefti had managed to fire a shot, hitting one of the bandits, Santo Mercuri, in the hand. Cox and his team, including Mark Moran, fled with $33,000.
The bleeding Mercuri commandeered a car from a woman and drove away, eventually making his way to Cox’s East Doncaster home, where Helen Deane tended his wound.
The phone book address found at the house was for the woman whose car Mercuri had stolen. Denning later told police, ‘It was decided … that they try to find her home address and knock her because she was the only one that Sam believed had identified him.’
When Cox was caught Deane and Mercuri saw the police helicopter above the shopping centre and fled. A policeman’s mother, who lived across the road, later identified both suspects as having been tenants in the house.
Hefti’s murder sparked a spate of killings. Police wrongly believed that armed robber Graeme Jensen was responsible and he was shot during a seemingly clumsy attempt to arrest him on 11 October 1988.
The following day two young uniformed police, Constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, were murdered in Walsh Street, South Yarra, as a payback by criminals who believed the armed robbery squad was shooting to kill.
Much later, Ken Ashworth would be assigned to investigate the Hefti murder and he used groundbreaking DNA technology to link Mercuri to the crime. Mercuri, 47, pleaded not guilty to murder and armed robbery but the DNA and X-ray material was overwhelming. He was sentenced to 25 years with a minimum of twenty. He died in jail in 2000.
Before he became a robber, Mercuri was an outstanding sausage maker. Perhaps he would have been better sticking to small-goods than small arms.
In September 1982, Helen Deane and Russell Cox were invited to a family wedding by Mercuri. A photo taken at the reception shows a smiling Mercuri and Deane. But between them is an empty chair. Even at weddings Cox preferred to be invisible.
After his arrest Cox was charged with a number of offences, including the murder of Carroll but he beat that charge on grounds of self-defence.
At one of his first hearings, police noticed a demure looking woman in the public gallery. It was Helen Deane. They later found out she was armed with a pen pistol.
Cox was never convicted over the many armed robberies he pulled in Queensland (six between 1978 and 1983), the jobs he organised in Victoria nor the three murders he was said to have committed. He was extradited to New South Wales, where a judge found that Katingal was not a gazetted prison and so he beat the escape charge. His initial life sentence for an earlier escape bid and shooting at guards was reduced to a 29-year minimum but the 11 years on the run were included.
Ashworth went to visit him in the hope he would finally talk. ‘He just put one hand up and said, “I’ve got nothing to say,” and then he walked away.’
While in prison he was a polite loner who was popular with inmates and prison guards.
He studied at Grafton TAFE and passed courses in computer studies, numeracy, literacy and youth work and first aid. He was awarded a certificate in hospitality and studied food and nutrition. He became a qualified fitness trainer and boxing coach.
The circle was completed when prison guards pushed for his release, believing him to be fully reformed.
Cox had been a ruthless gunman and a violent man. He terrorised payroll and bank staff and was a killer. But ultimately his coolness, his professionalism and his refusal to turn on others won him the respect of police, prison officers and the underworld.
When he was released from prison in 2004, the loyal Helen Deane was waiting. The crook had finally made her an honest woman and they had married while he was still inside jail.
They refused offers of interviews, turned their backs on celebrity gangster status and disappeared to Northern Queensland.
Police believe they are living a quiet life near the beach – probably on what was left of the money dug up from Mt Martha that had been hidden inside a home-brew barrel.
Who says crime doesn’t pay?