The greatest court escape, at the top of the ladder by several rungs, must be that of the man, almost certainly Brian Kane, who shot and killed Ray ‘Chuck’ Bennett in the old Melbourne Magistrates’ Court in 1979. The killing was in retaliation for the death of his brother, Les Kane, in a long and complicated saga following the Great Bookie Robbery in 1976. There had been strict security at the Bennett trial when he had been acquitted earlier of Les Kane’s murder, but there was none on 12 November when Bennett was taken to the first floor of the old Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on La Trobe Street to answer robbery charges in Court 10. Bennett was waiting without handcuffs and with an unarmed guard outside the courtroom. Also on the landing was a man wearing a dark suit and apparently carrying a small briefcase, sitting on a bench at the head of the stairs and making no effort to hide away. The man shot Bennett three times in the chest with a .38. Bennett staggered down the stairs and out of the courthouse into a courtyard where he collapsed. Taken to St Vincent’s Hospital, he died within the hour.
The gunman escaped after threatening Bennett’s escorting officer and a Federal Policeman, possibly via the rear stairway leading to the court’s car park. From there it was easy enough to go into any of Swanston, LaTrobe or Franklin streets. Other accounts, however, have him walking down the front stairs of the court building and into a waiting car, driven allegedly—although to his death he denied it—by Dennis ‘Greedy’ Smith, the driver in the Great Bookie Robbery.
The day after Bennett’s death, his old mate Brian O’Callaghan, then serving a thirteen-year sentence for armed robbery, escaped from a prison van taking him to work at the Long Bay prison bakery in Sydney. With O’Callaghan temporarily on the loose and possibly making his way to Melbourne, the press and police predicted immediate trouble and perhaps an all-out gang war, but for the time being that did not materialise. Callaghan stayed out for two years until he was dobbed in and caught in a house in Carlton, but he does not seem to have busied himself on his former offsider’s behalf. Later he became a heroin addict and died in 2010.
Forty years on it is now generally accepted the killer was Brian Kane. After Bennett’s acquittal he had become more and more secretive, calling friends and family at odd hours, arriving in the dead of night and never giving his name over the telephone. In fact Kane had been getting into the courthouse night after night around midnight, pacing out the distances. His escape route has also become clear. He was taken straight to Essendon and put on a light plane to Adelaide, where he boarded a commercial flight to Perth. And there he stayed for the next three months. Eventually Kane was told he was no longer hot—at least as far as the police were concerned—and he returned from the west coast. On 26 November 1982 he was killed as he sat in the Quarry Hotel in Lygon Street, Brunswick. Police increased the reward for information leading to his assassin’s capture from $50,000 to $100,000 in 2009. There have been no takers.
Sometime before the Second World War plain old Jack Martin became Antonio Martini. As the years went by his crimes and misdeeds escalated to fit his new and more exotic identity. After the Second World War Martini bleached his dark hair and wore powder to hide his dark skin. Back in pre-war November 1937 he had shot at William Munro at the White Bay Service Station in Redfern in Sydney. Police security seems to have been lax because while he was at the police station after his arrest he pulled out another gun. Asked what he was going to do with it he very sensibly replied he was going to shoot his way out. It was something he tried to do regularly throughout his career.
Still in November that year he pulled yet another gun on a police officer when he was being put in the dock at Redfern Magistrates’ Court. He was fined £100, something the newspapers described as an ‘exemplary sentence’. He had only been out of prison for one day before he set out to rob taxi drivers. For the service station robberies he later received four years. Then in 1945 he escaped from court and the next year he was involved in a shoot-out at Taronga Park Zoo with the police who, for the first time, had been armed with sub-machine guns.1
In October 1988 three men, including a killer, jumped guards at the City Magistrates Court in Brisbane, which was followed by a car chase through the city. It ended when a police car rammed the getaway vehicle on Milton Road. As a result guards at Brisbane jail were issued with shotguns.2
Some courtroom escapes are short-lived. In December 1951 ex-boxer Stanley Shaw made a break when he went to the High Court in Melbourne to appeal against his conviction for the murder of his de facto Sylvia Holmes. In his defence Shaw had said he had been drinking with the brothel keeper, his former mistress Ada Cartledge aka ‘Maddocks’, during the afternoon in the Standard Hotel in Fitzroy. He had returned home at 5 pm to find Holmes had left a note for him and when he went back again at 6 pm he found her dead on the bed. An inquest in June 1950 returned a verdict of murder by persons unknown but when, in the August, Cartledge reappeared to say Shaw had told her he had hit and killed Holmes, he was charged with murder. He still claimed he had found her dead but after a retirement of only thirty-five minutes he was convicted and sentenced to death.
The appeal judges had turned down three of the four grounds of appeal and reserved judgement on the fourth when Shaw, escorted out of court, pushed the guards aside and ran into Little Bourke Street. He had reached William Street before a police constable grabbed him. The fourth ground was later allowed and at a retrial he was convicted only of manslaughter and received seven years.3
Some last a bit longer on the outside. Laurie Dodd had already escaped from a maximum-security prison in Broome in the north of Western Australia in 2000. He was serving a sentence for armed robbery and was one of nine men, in civilian clothes and described as ‘extremely dangerous’, who overpowered three guards, one a woman, working for AIMS, a private security firm, in the holding cells at the Supreme Court in Perth on 10 June 2004, when a prisoner asked to be allowed to go to the lavatory.4 Eleven had been in the cell but two had chosen to stay behind. Among those who went with him were armed robber Guy Fullgrabbe, one of two prisoners who had escaped from the minimum-security Karnet prison farm outside Perth by stealing a warder’s car, and Bradley Christopher Nicolaides, whom the police regarded as their number one target.
Fullgrabe was not meant to be at the court on the day of the escape. At his request, Fullgrabbe’s lawyer, Henry Sklarz, had tried to transfer him to Albany Regional Prison, 400 kilometres south of Perth, and booked a video link that would have allowed him to face an outstanding armed robbery charge from within the confines of the southern maximum-security jail. Fullgrabe had said he wanted to avoid the old, dank and crowded holding cells at the 101-year-old court building. But neither Fullgrabe’s transfer nor his video link had been organised by the time AIMS guards rounded up prisoners at Casuarina jail for their court appearances on 10 June. And when the chance arose to see his three-year-old daughter, Charisma, it is alleged Fullgrabe took the opportunity with the eight other men and ran.
Eight of them carjacked a Holden Commodore with Fremantle Dockers plates and a silver Land Rover. Another in the group was an allegedly four-time escapee Allon Lacco, who in May 1991 had escaped from Fremantle jail by leaping from a six-metre wall. He was among the first four to be recaptured when police used a set of spikes to puncture the tyres of the Land Rover. When he appeared at Perth Magistrates’ Court he alleged the police had tried to kill him.5
Nicolaides did not last long on the outside and was recaptured on 11 June. He and Claudio Gabriel Simeon, thirty-three, were back behind bars within two days, after being tracked down to a house in Perth’s eastern suburbs, where police allegedly found a .45 calibre pistol in the late-night raid. In October 2003 Nicolaides, who had ten convictions for armed robbery was convicted over an incident outside a Northbridge nightclub in which a man was shot. His trial, on charges related to an armed robbery at the suburban Bayswater Hotel, was aborted on 7 May after five weeks, when a juror had a heart attack.
Laurie Dodd and James Andrew Sweeney were caught in a mass swoop by the police in Kensington on 17 June. They were suspected of a raid on a TAB in South Perth during their life on the outside. Now only Robert Geoffrey Hill was left. He later telephoned Network Ten saying he would give himself up within twenty-four hours. He blamed the justice system for his escape, saying he had been in custody on an armed robbery charge since September 2002 and had lost his house and his family as a result. He was arrested before he could give himself up.6
Some planned escapes never get off the ground at all. On 26 January 1978 Mark ‘Chopper’ Read made an abortive attempt to snatch County Court Judge Bill Martin to obtain the release of his then friend Jimmy Loughnan from J Ward at Ararat Prison in Victoria, where he had another six years to go on a robbery sentence. Read took the lift to the sixth floor, where Martin was sitting in court, walked over to the bench and threatened him with a firearm. Read later accepted this was something of a suicide mission, writing, ‘I climbed onto the judge’s bench, put the gun to his head and demanded Jimmy’s release. I knew it would never work but I had given my word to try.’ The judge’s chief clerk, ex-military man Ernie Trotter, promptly tackled Read and grabbed the gun. Other officers ran into court and Read was captured but, according to some accounts, he had already received a kick in the testicles from the judge. Despite the plea by his barrister, who ingeniously if perhaps ingenuously described Read as ‘a comic character Charlie Chaplin would have portrayed sympathetically’, he received thirteen years. He later wrote to the judge apologising; Martin replied, saying he realised it was nothing personal.
The case had a curious sequel. In an effort to obtain the release of his friend Read, who was now suffering in the hellhole of H Division in Pentridge, nineteen-year-old Amos Atkinson, who had already done an eight-year stretch there for armed robbery, decided to take hostage the staff and diners of the Italian Waiters’ Club in Meyers Place off Bourke Street in Melbourne. Originally a hangout for off-duty waiters it has become a rather louche but fashionable restaurant. Like Read’s effort, Atkinson’s plan was not well-executed.
On the evening of 31 March 1978 Atkinson and his friend Robert Williams ran up the wooden staircase brandishing shotguns. One of them put a round in the doorframe and they knocked one of the diners to the floor, tipping wine and spaghetti over him. The police responded by sealing off both ends of the alleyway in which the restaurant was positioned. Atkinson then persuaded a doctor, another of the diners, to begin negotiations with the police. Initially he demanded that Read be released within twenty-four hours or he would start killing the hostages.
When the police failed to respond he sent out another hostage, Wendy McNamara, to make a second request. This time it was for Atkinson to see his mother. In the early hours of the morning she arrived at the restaurant in a dressing gown, went in on her own and hit her erring lamb on the head with her handbag, telling him to let the hostages go. He did so, letting them out in small groups over the next few hours, and then surrendered at 5.40 am. For his troubles Atkinson received five years and it was back in Pentridge with his hero, where he had parts of his ears sliced off as a tribute to Read. Later they apparently fell out. According to Read it was over something Atkinson perceived as a racial slur.7
And still they try. In February 2010, two years after extra security cameras were installed in Darwin Magistrates’ Court, Scott Golding, wanted in New South Wales for a stabbing offence, only reached the courtroom door before he was tackled, and in October 2015 another prisoner managed to escape onto the roof of Darwin Magistrates’ Court but then fell through it, back into court. It merely added another charge to those he was facing for aggravated assault and possessing drugs.
And then there are the bail jumpers. It is not simply those who are facing long sentences who abscond. Sometimes people who will only serve a few months at worst cannot stomach the prospect and are on their toes.
On 16 December 1939 the popular 3XY radio racing broadcaster Henry ‘Harry’ Solomons tried to cut off three rival radio stations in Melbourne in an effort to carry out an SP rort that would have produced over $1.5 million in today’s money. He intended to make a phantom broadcast calling out, ‘Buoyancy is playing up at the start’—a signal to his syndicate that the horse had already won—after the race had been run and the winner announced. Unfortunately the wires were cut too late. In fact his failed rort was not the first time he had phantomed. He had worked the scam rather more successfully in March 1937 at Harold Park greyhounds when Vacuum won at 10–1, and also on two races at Kembla Grange at Illawarra, south of Sydney.
Solomons went to New Zealand where, under the name of Raymond Dennison, he was fined £30 for tip slinging and told to leave the country. He was eventually traced to Suva in Fiji, where he was working as a tortoise shell salesman. His ingenious, if unsuccessful, defence was that what he had done was not illegal since SP bookmaking was itself illegal. On 10 August 1940 he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. There was some redemption when, years later under the name Solar Plexus, he took over commentating on boxing in Adelaide. His broadcasts were said to be far superior to those of anyone else.8
One of the more odd bail jumpers was anti-nuclear campaigner John Dixon-Jenkins, a former professor of child psychology in the United States. In 1984 he received six years for threats to injure—he had planted fake bombs in Melbourne schools to publicise his anti-nuclear campaign. Then on 20 August 1987, while serving the sentence he took six staff and three inmates hostage in Bendigo Gaol, barricading them with him in the prison library when he claimed he had a home-made bomb strapped round his neck. He said he would exchange them for the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
After two hours, Dixon-Jenkins agreed with the negotiators to release one of the hostages as a sign of goodwill. Lydia Kruytbosch, who was teaching a German class at the prison, was the hostage he selected to go first, and the others were finally released nearly two days later. After he had finished his sentence he claimed he was planning to sue the Australian government for $100 million after he was banned from lecturing in government schools. If he won he would donate the proceeds to children’s programs. In 1989, he was amazingly given $50,000 bail on the kidnapping charges and allowed to go on a world lecture tour promoting his book The Unified Theory of Existence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a result he stayed away. After he was retrieved from Los Angeles in November 1990 he fought extradition for nine months by which time he had converted to Islam. Eventually he pleaded guilty and received twelve years, something the Full Court of Appeal thought to be ‘heavy but not manifestly excessive’.9
Lisa Marie Smith has lasted a great deal longer on the run. Bound for Japan she had been arrested at Bangkok in early 1996, allegedly having over five hundred amphetamine tablets and four kilograms of cannabis in a false-bottomed suitcase. Smith put forward a not wholly promising defence that she had been tricked into carrying the bag by Hassan, a Pakistani whom she had met at a bar in the backpacker district of Khao San Road.
At first it was thought she was carrying opium but after five months on remand it was accepted it was cannabis. Then in June 1996 she was given bail by a Thai court, with her father putting up the $75,000 bond. She promptly left on her Australian passport, leaving her British one behind. She did not appear in court in the August and in the November she was reportedly trying to enter Britain from Greece. Described as ‘the most wanted woman in the world’ she was not heard of again until July 2014, when she was found running Hippetys, a café-cum-wine bar in Dublin’s fashionable Temple Bar district. She came to notice after her boyfriend had been involved in a fight trying to stop a youth gang kicking the sandwich boards outside the cafe. Ireland does not have an extradition treaty with Thailand and so, provided she does not stray into a country that does, she is probably safe.10
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Antonios Sajih ‘Fat Tony’ Mokbel was the drug king of Melbourne, laundering his immense profits through his Tracksuit Gang at racetracks, casinos and his brothel At the Top of the Town. Then in August 2001 he was arrested over possession of a traffickable quantity of cocaine. Given the grinding wheels of the Australian justice system he continued in his business, generating millions in profits until his trial in 2006 when, with the verdict looking to go against him, he broke his bail and went into hiding in Victoria on 31 March.
In the February his trial for importing cocaine had finally began. He had already agreed to plead guilty to trafficking in ecstasy, speed and cocaine. Indeed for some time it seemed as though Mokbel was well on his way to an acquittal on the importing charge. Despite prosecution objections his bail was continued and, after reporting to the South Melbourne police station on Sunday 21 March, Mokbel disappeared.
Immediately there were suggestions in the underworld that he had become another body in the gang war. He was certainly suspected of financing the deaths of Nik Radev and Lewis Moran, and his death might have been a reprisal. Not so, said the police, he had definitely flown. But to where? It was possible he was still lying low in Australia but the heavier money was placed on a return to his birthplace of Lebanon. Or there was Central America or Mexico or Dominica, which had once given the disgraced financier Christopher Skase a passport.11 Another suggestion is that he was tipped off that he was to face a murder charge over Radev’s death and fled as a result.
Assistant Police Commissioner Simon Overland vowed that even if it took five years Mokbel would be found and retrieved. On Tuesday 29 March he was found guilty in his absence and sentenced to a relatively modest twelve years. There were unconfirmed reports that for a fortnight he had hidden out in a farmhouse near Nicholson on the Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, and had then slipped away on a yacht bought in a friend’s name. Then it was suggested that an escape plan had been sold to him years ago by the late Lewis Moran, who had devised it for himself and then courteously made it available to others. If this is correct, Mokbel went from his apartment to Essendon Airport and then on to North Queensland, refuelling at remote airfields. He was then picked up by boat and taken to Malaysia. Using forged documents he flew to Turkey where he went into hiding in a remote village. It was as good a version as any. ‘He’s larger than life. If he’s alive he’ll show up’, said one lawyer.
Meanwhile, there were skirmishes over the forfeiture of his £1 million bail money, put up by his sister-in-law Renata. In April Justice Bill Gillard ordered Ms Mokbel to pay the $1 million surety or face two years in jail. In September 2006 jewellery and cash, which the police claimed were part of the Mokbel treasure, was dug up at a house in Alma Road in Parkdale.
Mokbel did finally did show up, wearing an ill-fitting rug when he was arrested in an Athens hotel on 5 June 2007. He had managed to cross to Fremantle, where he was smuggled out of the country on a yacht bound for Greece. Once in Greece he continued to deal in amphetamines and was joined by his girlfriend, the blonde Danielle McGuire, once the girlfriend of Mark Moran and later, for a time, a close personal friend of the former Comanchero biker Toby Mitchell. Mokbel and McGuire had a daughter together.
After a long legal struggle, Mokbel was extradited in May 2008 to begin his sentence and face new charges of drug trafficking. He had been named the paymaster for the murders of Melbourne identities Mark Moran and Michael Marshall, as well as that of Lewis Moran, for which he was alleged to have paid $150,000. In all cases the evidence against him was given by convicted murderers and he was acquitted. Mokbel was not so happy at the end of the new drug cases. After prolonged discussions with the Department of Public Prosecutions his lawyers obtained a plea bargain that in July 2012 the judge refused to accept. Although a number of charges were dropped he received the equivalent of thirty-five years with a 27-year minimum. The Court of Appeal was not sympathetic. Mokbel has subsequently been diagnosed with a heart condition and will not be eligible for parole until he is sixty-seven.12
Others have fared better in Greece. James Dalamangas is still wanted for questioning over two murders, the first in November 1997 of part-time bouncer Nick Voulekatos, shot five times in a car at Campsie, and the second of a Bankstown man, George Giannopoulos, stabbed in the neck in the kitchen of Pariziana, a nightclub in Belmore, south-west Sydney, in April 1999. He also failed to appear on charges relating to a brawl outside the Star City Casino in which his brother Peter died. Dalamangas fled to Greece and in 2009 he had reached the top of the New South Wales Most Wanted list with a $200,000 reward posted.13
Steve Anas has been on the run in Greece since the 26 April 1994 death of Toula Soravia, who was shot and killed in a robbery when she was on the way to the bank with the takings from her family’s service station in Summer Hill, Sydney. Anas, allegedly the mastermind, has been found not guilty in the Greek courts and, because he is a Greek citizen, he has avoided extradition. Two others, David John Patrick Zammit and Hakki Souleyman, were jailed for involvement in Soravia’s death. Zammit was paroled after serving twenty-three years; Souleyman served six.14