The criminal careers of many start young. One story of ‘Mad Dog’ (sometimes ‘The Fox’) Russell Cox is that, at the age of eight, when he won a bicycle in a raffle he was told he was too late to claim it. He then stole a brand-new bicycle, telling people this was his prize. Born Melville Peter Schnitzerling on 15 September 1947, he soon graduated to burglary and robbery, and in 1974 was sentenced to fourteen years for armed robbery.
Cox arrived at Sydney’s prison within a prison, Katingal, the maximum-security facility inside the Long Bay complex, after an attempted escape from Long Bay on 8 August 1975 in which he, Marko Motric and another would-be escapee held a loaded Beretta, smuggled into the prison, to Superintendent Steve Tandy’s head and shot and injured another officer. Tandy was then pushed into a five-tonne truck and they forced yet more officers to open the gates. The escape failed when Cox drove along Anzac Parade with another officer on the bonnet used as a human shield and they were rammed by two trucks. The tyres of their truck were shot out, and Cox and the others then tried to escape on foot. The men were shot in the legs and, it is said, were left without treatment for over twenty-four hours.
For the escape and kidnap Cox was sentenced to life imprisonment, including fifteen years hard labour. In due course he was sent to Katingal. In November 1977 Cox had been allowed to do chin-ups on the sidewall. But how he acquired a hacksaw and was able to cut through two small sections of the wire fence has never been satisfactorily explained. Author Bernard Matthews, himself a talented escapee in his younger days, suggests that a message was sent out in invisible ink—in this case uric acid, which when warmed shows up the writing—and that as a result half a hacksaw blade was smuggled into the unit. In the following weeks Cox painstakingly cut through the wire a stroke or two at a time as he was doing his chin-ups. A flaw in the prison design was that he was partially obscured from the CCTV camera.
Shortly before 9 pm on 4 November he persuaded a warder to allow him into the exercise yard to collect a pair of joggers he had left behind. The screw was distracted and Cox seized the moment to jam a table tennis bat into a crevice in the wall and shimmy up to the cut wire. He squeezed through the caged ceiling of the exercise yard and climbed off the roof. Moments later he was spotted scaling the two 4.5-metre perimeter fences and running to a waiting car, but by then he was gone. He had already created history. Russell Cox had defeated the ‘escape-proof’ Katingal.
Overall it was a bad night for the New South Wales prison authorities. In a completely separate escape two others took off from the Cessnock Corrective Centre in the Hunter region and a fourth man disappeared from the low-security section of Long Bay. Unsurprisingly there were reprisals by the authorities and exercise facilities were withdrawn. Matthews maintains that the food hatches in Katingal were shut, so further restricting the already limited airflow.1
There were the usual reported sightings—Randwick and Circular Quay were among the locations—but Cox disappeared from view for eleven years. He certainly spent some time in England and Europe and later at a safe house on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, where he lived with his girlfriend, green-eyed, dark-haired vegetarian and trained nurse Helen Eva Deane. She was the sister-in-law of Ray ‘Chuckie’ Bennett of the 1976 Great Bookie Robbery in Melbourne, and Cox had met her a year after his escape from Katingal. At this house Cox took infinite care and was known for exercising his dog on the beach at five o’clock in the morning to give himself the chance of escape if, by misfortune, the police came looking. It was also at this house that Painter and Docker, and veteran of the Great Bookie Robbery, the English-born Ian Revell Carroll died on the morning of 3 January 1983.
After the Great Bookie Robbery Carroll followed in his leader Chuckie Bennett’s footsteps and became one of the great planners of armed robberies, including an attack on a bullion van in Tooborac, north of Melbourne, in spring 1981. He would leave nothing to chance and team members were supplied not only with weapons but also a medical kit in case of injury. He was suspected of, but never charged with, a gold bullion theft in Barkly Street, Footscray, and he was thought to have robbed in the twelve months or so before his death the Nabisco factory, Victoria Rail in the November, a $120,000 payroll at WR Grace & Co. on 9 December, when a receptionist was temporarily taken hostage, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia on 15 February 1982. He was also a major importer of drugs.
Carroll put the proceeds to good use. His children went to private school. He had racehorses and a stable of vintage motorcars as well as a Mercedes. By the time of Carroll’s death he and his family had twenty-three bank and building society accounts and he had started work on a Tudor-style mansion he was building at Wonga Park, north east of Melbourne’s CBD.
On 3 January 1983 Cox and Carroll quarrelled and a gunfight broke out. Carroll was killed and Cox badly injured. Deane drove him to New South Wales for treatment, telling the doctor he had been injured in Papua New Guinea and had not trusted the local medics. In fact, until the shootings Cox and Deane had been regarded as ideal neighbours. It was only when the police searched the house that they uncovered a cache of arms, including high-powered rifles, machine guns, police radio scanners, balaclavas, bank bags, security officers’ uniforms, a surveillance van, safes, telephone codes, cash and documents.
After the shooting Cox and Helen Deane disappeared and for the next five years they led the police a merry dance, with the Sydney Morning Herald quoting a police spokesman saying of Deane, ‘She’s a crook, but obviously she’s doing something right. Like Cox she’s no fool. She hasn’t even been sighted for five years.’
Their nemesis turned out to be another armed robber, Raymond Denning, who had had a bad start in life when as a child he had seen his mother set herself on fire while his father was in prison: ‘I went into my mother’s room and she was burning on the bed. I got a saucepan full of water and threw it over her but it was no good.’ His criminal career began when he was given probation in 1966 for theft and progressed from there. It was now he claimed he had been brutalised in prison with the warders hosing him with freezing water and then leaving him shivering in his cell. His life then became a cycle of escape, bank robbery, recapture and further sentences.2
In 1973 Denning received thirteen and a half years with a five-year non-parole period for armed robbery. The next year, during an escape attempt from Maitland Gaol, west of Newcastle in New South Wales, he deliberately and gratuitously attacked warder Willy Carl Faber, who was so badly injured he never returned to work and died four years later. In 1976 Denning received a life sentence for the attack. On 1 September 1977, along with Red Rat Pollitt, Mad Dog Cox and a number of others, Denning made a short-lived break from Maitland. The next year he received six years to be served consecutively with his life sentence.
After Katingal’s closure Denning was sent back to Maitland and it wasn’t long before he began causing more trouble. After a demonstration in June 1978 in which benches, showers and lavatories were smashed in exercise yards by four former ex-Katingals, including Denning and Warrick James, the pair held out for over sixty hours, in freezing conditions, before surrendering. By the end, the ordeal seems to have been conducted in a gentlemanly way. They had built themselves a wind-break from the rubble while officers handed them blankets and left out a meal of roast beef and jelly for them. Now the Opposition called for the reopening of Katingal. It was rejected and Denning was sent to Grafton Gaol.
On 2 April 1980 Denning became the first man to escape from that prison in eighty years. Other prisoners hid him inside the day’s rubbish and once out Denning trotted away. His absence was not discovered until two hours later. After an early scare, when police stopped the car being driven by his then girlfriend in the Blue Mountains, Denning fled into the bush, helped by a series of young women. He managed to stay out for over a year. During this time he taunted the police, leaving a message out for the CIB and appearing on 60 Minutes. He went to a prisoners’ art show during the visit of the Director of Correctional Services. He sat in the public gallery of Parliament House. Towards the end of the year shots were fired at the guard tower at Parramatta Gaol. Almost immediately afterwards the journalist turned award-winning author Michael Robotham received a telephone call, purporting to come from Reform Justice Devils, which claimed responsibility as part of its campaign against police brutality. He told Denning he recognised his voice and Denning replied, ‘It’s not me. It’s the Reform Justice Devils’, who curiously had the same initials. All this, Denning claimed, was to bring to the public attention the police use of the ‘verbal’, where a suspect would apparently make a series of damaging oral admissions and then refuse to sign a written confession. These verbals would then be admitted in evidence and a conviction would follow.
It was not until 8 November 1981 that Linda Jobsen, with whom he had been living in Mona Vale, collected him from the Manly hydrofoil in Sydney and their car was promptly surrounded. Returned to prison, he gained the support of Detective Inspector Aarne Tees, who in 1983 wrote in a statement to the Parole Board, ‘The prisoner is not addicted to drugs. He has had little time at liberty during the past decade. In this time it cannot be said he is an associate of the criminal element.’ Others might have thought, if Denning was not, then who was. Indeed, when he sentenced Denning, Judge Alf Goran told him, ‘It appears to me you attempted to become some sort of folk hero. The reality is you continued in your pattern of crime while at large.’
In July 1988, with his earlier escapes forgiven, Denning had been playing tennis with Ray Carrion at the minimum-security wing of Goulburn when the pair jumped a fence and were away. It was this escape that has been the subject of the speculation that Denning was allowed to escape, specifically to find Cox for the authorities. It was known Denning had contacted Cox during his 1980 escape. Within a matter of hours Denning was joined by Margaret Anne Denton who, when she heard of his escape, left her family to be with him. Together with Carrion he robbed a bank in Zillmere, 14 kilometres north of Brisbane’s CBD, and then travelled south to make contact with Cox once again. Together, Denning said, he and Cox had carried out the Transurety robbery in 1981.
On 22 July 1988 Cox went with Denning to rob a Brambles security van in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster. With them was Denton. Apparently Helen Deane was uneasy about Cox working with Denning and Denton, and she was right to worry. The trio, in a Holden Commodore with Queensland plates, tailed the security van into the Doncaster shopping complex and, as Cox moved to a second car, the police struck. Denning’s car was rammed by the police and Cox, making his way out of an underground car park, had his windscreen blown out. He hit a red sedan and then crashed into the car park wall. It was the end of his eleven years on the run.
Over the years there have been suggestions that the whole thing was a police sting and that Denning was looking for an early release from his cumulative sentences. Back in custody, Denning, now a pedigree dog—at one court hearing, a man in the gallery threw a bone at him saying, ‘You’ve forgotten your lunch’—certainly dobbed in Cox, telling the police that The Fox had been on another hold-up eleven days earlier in which security guard Dominic Hefti had been shot. ‘I know it took a long time, but I’m thirty-eight and I’ve been loyal to the wrong side, you know, it’s as simple as that,’ he told them. For this he was given immunity for his part in the Zillmere robbery and also the Transurety robbery with Cox.
Admitted into the Witness Protection Scheme (WitSec) Denning also gave evidence that Graeme Jensen, later shot by the police, had not killed the security guard Dominic Hefti in a Melbourne robbery. He also dobbed in Red Rat Pollitt over the killing of Lindsay Simpson in that botched contract killing. As well, he gave evidence against Tim Anderson, who was convicted in the Hilton bombing case. The Court of Appeal later quashed Anderson’s conviction, saying Denning’s evidence was wholly unreliable.3
In 1991 when Denning’s release date was being discussed he was cited as a model of reform. While in prison he had also been involved in a $12 million attempt to smuggle heroin from Hong Kong but this little blip was overlooked. In 1989 the Truth in Sentencing legislation had abolished remissions and any prisoner without a fixed sentence could apply to the court for a minimum and a total term to be fixed. In April 1991 Justice Wood thought, ‘It is exceedingly important to be able to demonstrate to other prisoners that a man once considered intractable and beyond redemption is capable of mending his ways and returning to life on the outside.’ Wood thought there was no alternative but for Denning to go into WitSec.4
He was released from prison on 21 April 1993 and became a campaigner for prisoners’ rights, writing an account of his stay in Grafton. On 5 May 1993 Denning was discharged from the WitSec. His information had been described as ‘consistent’ but the reasoning behind the decision to discharge him did not appeal to the New South Wales Ombudsman, David Landa, who later conducted an inquiry into it. A diarised note by Chief Superintendent McKinnon—‘advise COP [Tony Lauer] ditch Denning from WitSec. Risk too great.’—was apparently made because it was thought likely that Denning would commit further offences and once back inside he would betray the secrets of WitSec, and how it worked to other criminals. Landa thought there had been no indication that Denning was about to fall off the witness wagon and, in any event, criminals probably knew perfectly well how WitSec worked.
On 11 June that same year, Denning left his girlfriend in bed at their terraced house in Paddington and went for a walk. On his return he climbed into bed and died following a heroin overdose.5
At his trial, Cox admitted breaking out of Katingal but ran the defence that because of the violation of minimum standards both in Australia and worldwide it was an ‘unlawful place of detention’. His second argument, which was much more promising, was that there was no escape from lawful custody because Katingal had never officially been designated a jail under the Prisons Act 1952. This was correct—a legal oversight—and Judge Freeman directed the jury to acquit him. The greatest non-violent escape from an Australian prison had never happened.
Many of the other charges against him were also dropped. However, Cox was later tried for the Carroll murder and acquitted after the magistrate said he could not decide who had fired the first shot. He and ex-South Australian police officer Colin Creed, then on his toes, were named as part of a gang running through Victoria and New South Wales that had pulled off nine armed robberies, netting them in excess of $1.3 million. The next year Cox received five years for using a firearm to resist arrest and eventually, in 1996, he was finally sentenced to twenty-five years for his robberies.
In September 1988 Helen Deane was arrested when she went to a remand hearing for Cox and was found with a .25 pen pistol in her bag. She was promptly charged with harbouring an escapee and unlawful possession of a firearm, and received six months’ imprisonment. She was also charged with two armed robberies in Queensland but, after Denning’s death, these charges were dropped.6
Cox never tried to escape again, and began to co-operate in a program mentoring first offenders. He was later transferred from the supermax in Goulburn to Grafton for the final years of his sentence. Amid a political row—‘Has he really reformed?’ ‘What evidence is there he is no longer a danger to the public?’—but supported by Superintendent Tandy, Cox was released in December 2004 and retired with Helen Deane to live quietly in Queensland.7
Break-ins to free prisoners are another matter altogether and much more difficult to execute; however, four months into his thirty-year sentence in 1964 Charlie Wilson, thought to be the treasurer of England’s Great Train Robbery, was freed by three men. During the night they climbed the outside wall of the relatively insecure Winson Green prison in Birmingham, coshed and tied up a guard and took Wilson. From there, by a circuitous route, he made his way to Canada, where he was tracked down in 1968 when his wife made a telephone call to her parents in England.
A much more altruistic break-in had taken place in Victoria thirteen years earlier, when the year 1951 did not end well for security at Pentridge. On Boxing Day Harold ‘Dusty’ Sheehan, a one-time former prisoner and another who had earned the enmity of ‘Pretty Boy’ James Walker, was found under a ‘secret’ trapdoor in a mess hut in the reformatory section of the prison. Sheehan had an earlier record for escapes. On 12 April 1947 he broke out of the Beechworth Reformatory with Arthur Dibbens and another boy. They were quickly recaptured the next day, found hiding in a ditch, and were taken to Wangaratta police station. The next day they were off again, albeit briefly, after picking the cell lock. Two years later, on 7 September 1949, Sheehan escaped from McLeod settlement on French Island.
It was another two years later when Sheehan, holding a suitcase, scaled the perimeter wall of Pentridge with a rope and a metal hook to bring in whisky, wine, tobacco and magazines as Christmas presents for the friends he had made when he had served part of his seven-year sentence there. Twenty feet of rope and hacksaw blades were found to be missing from a garage near the prison. He received six months for the break-in, with the magistrate telling him there might have been a future breakout ‘due to your assistance’. At the end of February 1952, with a very favourable summing-up from Judge Stafford, Sheehan was acquitted of breaking into the garage and stealing the hacksaws and rope.8
The gifts in his Christmas suitcase, though, were nowhere near the quality of those left by William ‘Darkey’ Clarke and James Brennan when they were surprised by a warder at Pentridge just before December 1887. They had broken in and left a thousand plugs of tobacco, fifteen bottles of brandy, milk, newspapers, Christmas cake and chocolate before Warder Jackson found a hook and rope attached to the wall of number 5 tower. He held Clarke and Brennan at gunpoint until help arrived but two other men escaped. Clarke was fined £10 with an alternative of three months, and Brennan £5 or two months.9
The year that Sheehan broke out of Beechworth was also the year when just before Christmas a man, never caught, broke into Pentridge and stole a Christmas cake, an alarm clock and some ornaments from a warder’s home in the grounds. Much more seriously, at the height of summer in 1977 the air conditioning failed at the ill-fated Katingal, Long Bay’s prison within a prison, and for a time emergency services were unable to repair it. The fifteen remaining prisoners sweltered and began to get sick. When it failed again the next year Katingal’s fate was sealed. At 5 am on 31 May, Mad Dog Cox was almost certainly one of at least two heavily armed men carrying gelignite, oxyacetalyne torches and boltcutters who were disturbed cutting through the canopy over the exercise yard. One of the others was alleged to be Steve Sellers, also known as Steven Jorgic, safe-breaker, bank robber, drug dealer and standover man who, when he tried to stand over Graham Kinniburgh for part of the money taken in a safebreaking by the Magnetic Drill Gang, was shot by Kinniburgh. Sellers had earlier made statements to the Beach Inquiry into the Victoria Police, claiming he had been pushed out of a third-floor window.
He and Cox had already managed to get into Katingal by cutting wire fences and using an extension ladder to scale a wall. They dropped into the exercise yard using a rope ladder but when they cut open a door leading to the prison itself sparks from oxyacetylene equipment alerted an insomniac woman nearby who phoned the police. They had managed to cut to within a metre or so of the master switch to the cells. In their flight they left behind loaded pistols, a rifle, a shotgun and sticks of gelignite, along with the power-cutting tool, a bag and chisels. The alarm was given and Cox and his offsider disappeared the way they had come. It had been bad enough for the escape-proof prison to lose Cox when he was an inmate. It was far worse when he could get back in and be minutes away from pulling off a mass escape.10
When pensioner Raymond Herbert Goodwin was arrested, the prosecution’s case at his trial in June 1978 was that he had conspired with Cox and Sellers and had bought them a power-cutting tool for $900. He indicated he would run a defence of duress.
In March 1979, with Cox still on the run, Sellers faced a charge of conspiring to break into Katingal the previous year to free its inmates. He was granted bail on condition that one acceptable person deposit $10,000 or two people lodge $5000 each. Instead, Sellers effectively paid for his own freedom when law student Wendy Bacon lodged $10,000 cash that barrister Peter Livesey had collected for Sellers in Melbourne. As a result Livesey was struck off and Bacon, who had qualified for the Bar, found herself refused admission and instead became a journalist and political campaigner.
Sellers was later acquitted after defending himself in a ten-week trial. According to the now disgraced police officer Roger Rogerson, Sellers’s name had been given to him as a potential murderer of the prostitute Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, whose boyfriend, Warren Lanfranchi, Rogerson had shot and killed. There was no other evidence to support this. Sellers died in 1988 when the car he was driving hit a gum tree near Orbost in far eastern Victoria.11
Possibly the greatest Australian prison escape to rival Brenden Abbott’s from Sir David Longland in Brisbane and that of Cox from Long Bay is one of the most unheralded: the freeing of robber Joe Tognolini from Yatala in Adelaide on 27 June 1980. It followed the earlier escape of Werner Thrun from the same prison. Quite how Thrun had managed it no one has discovered and, worse for the authorities, he went back to collect his mate Tognolini, known as Joe Tog, a man who during his criminal career took part in three prison riots, was shot twice in the head and was stabbed in a quarrel in a prison yard.
Tognolini was a true interstate criminal and a member of the so-called Pub Gang, which had netted around $100,000 in a series of hotel raids. On 21 March 1973 while serving seven years for shooting with intent to resist arrest he had made a short-lived break with Michael Considine, who was serving ten years in Pentridge in Melbourne for armed robbery. They had been loaded into the prison van with ten other prisoners and six warders. One of them had a tube of condensed milk on his person. Inside the tube was hidden a chisel. As the van was stuck in traffic on Sydney Road, Brunswick, the two men chiselled through the floor of the van and managed to escape through a hole they made. Handcuffed together they took off down Sydney Road, where they were caught. They had been unlucky. While they were still under the van a warder had seen them reflected in a shop window.12
Tognolini had also escaped with Thrun from Mount Gambier prison in South Australia in November 1978 and been recaptured after a fortnight. Additionally he had served time in Pentridge’s H Division and the cages at Boggo Road in Brisbane as well as S Division at Yatala. If Russell Cox failed in his attempt to free the men in Katingal, Thrun and his colleagues, who came to release Tognolini, certainly did not. In came three men with bolt cutters and oxyacetylene torches and, after an hour of noise, sparks and smoke that went unnoticed, out with them went Tognolini. For once, there was sufficient backup for him to stay out for some months. When he was caught the following November he commented, ‘It still amazes me how the outside fellow [warder] wasn’t aware of it. My mate was at the window for about an hour.’ Apparently one prisoner in B Division had told an officer that there were men on the roof but, at the later inquiry, the man was said to have had ‘emotional and behavioural problems’ and his story was disregarded.
The year before Tognolini’s escape there had been a mass breakout at the prison when six men escaped in August 1979. Without backup they were soon caught. The overall result, however, was the 1980 Royal Commission under the chairmanship of Gresley Clarkson to inquire into escapes and became a nap hand of alleged graft, assault, sexual assault, security and possession of unauthorised material, not only in Yatala but in all South Australian prisons.13
At the other end of the scale was the ‘break-in’ that released drug dealer Ian Saxon Hall, once of the band Ian Saxon and the Sound, who was said to have imported ten tonnes of cannabis resin aboard a yacht Rolling Thunder in January 1989. During the rest of that year and into early 1990 this was distributed throughout Australia, realising $77 million. The cash was washed by sending gold or money to Singapore and Hong Kong. Funds were also sent to three bank accounts in Europe and the Middle East controlled by drug rings. Then it all started to unravel.
Hall tried to speed up the laundering by depositing funds with the Bank of Singapore in Sydney in the name of the Pacific Islands Church. Unluckily for him the bank manager became suspicious when an account that had had an annual turnover of rather under $50,000 suddenly had $4 million. The account was frozen and Saxon’s overseas contacts became unhappy. He met with members of the money-laundering scam on 25 January 1990 to warn them that Arab ‘hitmen’ were after them. Unfortunately for Saxon both of them were National Crime Authority (NCA) informers and were wired up. He was arrested the next day when the police found $5.4 million in cash, drugs, gold bars and jewellery. He was committed for trial in September 1991 on charges relating to cannabis proceeds and associated money laundering. Regarded as a model prisoner, he vanished while still on remand on 2 March 1993 from the Metropolitan Remand Centre (MRC) at Long Bay in Sydney. One former associate who thought ‘we shall never see him again’ was being overly pessimistic.
When Hall was recaptured by officers from the NCA on a beach in California on 21 April 1995 he claimed that masked men wearing overalls and black boots had entered his cell and kidnapped him. They must have released him unharmed because he had been on the run for the past two years, using both Belgian and British passports. Returned to Australia he fought the escape charge and amazingly the first jury disagreed, but he later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years to go with the twenty-four, with a minimum of sixteen to be served, for masterminding the importation of the hashish.
Rather more prosaically the authorities thought Hall had actually escaped in a delivery van, something he later confirmed. Every Tuesday morning the laundry would be collected from both wings at the remand centre. However, instead of taking laundry directly to the MRC it was quite usual for the driver to go to the cafeteria to pick up a bacon and egg sarnie. While he was parked there Saxon, wrapped in a sheet, was put in the back and went out with the truck to a waiting car. He was eventually released in May 2008 and deported to New Zealand.14