One of the earliest escapees to flee to, rather than from, Australia was Isaac Solomons, often said to be the model for Dickens’ Fagin. Born in 1787 in Gravel Lane in Houndsditch, London, he began his career at the age of nine. His colleagues regarded him as a coward but, rather like Melbourne’s Squizzy Taylor a century later, he turned out to be an expert planner. On 25 April 1827, then aged forty, he appeared at the Old Bailey. On his way back from court to prison he stopped with his escorting officers for a drink, drugged them and promptly disappeared, going first to America and then to Hobart to where his wife, a noted receiver, had been transported. He was dobbed in and, in an early example of extradition, was sent back to England, where he was acquitted of all the capital charges on 9 July 1830, but sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation for receiving. Solomons later rejoined his family and Mrs Solomons continued her career as a receiver in Hobart but, apparently, it was not a happy reunion. He died in early September 1850.1
One of the earliest of the great conmen murderers in Australia was the bigamist, confidence trickster and serial killer from Liverpool, England, Frederick Bayley Deeming, who first arrived in 1883 and worked as a gas fitter in Sydney. Arrested for fraud, he fled to Port Adelaide and then sailed for South Africa and ultimately returned to England. Sentenced in Hull to nine months’ imprisonment for another fraud, he was released in July 1891 and promptly killed his wife Maria and their four children in Rainhill, Liverpool, before sailing to Melbourne with his mistress Emily Mather, arriving at the beginning of December.
By the twentieth of the month, Emily had been buried under the cemented hearth at their rented accommodation in Andrew Street, Windsor, and Deeming was gone. He was arrested on 12 March the next year at Southern Cross, 370 kilometres east of Perth after the Victorian Police had notified their counterparts in Western Australia. The new tenant at Andrew Street had complained about the smell and Emily’s body was discovered. Her head had been bashed in. Now posing as Baron Swanston, Deeming had just become engaged to Katie Rounsefell, sometimes described as an heiress, to whom he had proposed within forty-eight hours of meeting her. One fiancée was never enough; he had also been courting a Maude Beech.
Defended by future Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, who ran a defence of insanity, Deeming maintained he had been visited by an apparition of his dead mother who had told him to kill all his women friends. In the alternative defence argument he confusingly maintained Emily was still alive. The jury was not convinced and Deeming was hanged at the Melbourne Gaol after smoking a final cigar, while an appeal hearing was taking place in front of the Privy Council in England. There the great advocate Edward Marshall Hall was led by Gerald Geoghegan QC, asking that Deeming should be given leave to appeal against his conviction in Victoria. While he was on his feet Hall tugged at his sleeve and was ignored. The second time Geoghegan told him off in no uncertain terms. At the luncheon interval Geoghegan asked Hall what he had wanted. ‘Just to tell you, our solicitor has received a telegram. They hanged our client this morning,’ was the reply.
A crowd estimated at over ten thousand had waited outside the prison gates for news of his execution on 23 May 1892. While in prison he had claimed to be the Whitechapel murderer, Jack the Ripper, but it is generally thought he was falsely boasting. There is no supporting evidence and it seems that there is an insuperable bar to any claim advanced on his behalf: he was in prison for his various rorts at the time of the murders. There may have been any number of escapes from Australian and American jails of the period, but in England convicts were kept in such harsh conditions an escape there was unlikely.
Regular visitors to Australia were escapees from the French prison colony at New Caledonia. Prisoners from there frequently turned up on New South Wales beaches. By 1884 it was estimated that no fewer than 247 escaped convicts had arrived in Australia from that penal settlement. In the five years to June 1891 it was thought a further fifty-seven had managed to make land successfully.
Although it was 1500 kilometres from Brisbane, in April 1881 five Frenchmen, including the Apache pimp Dominique Leca, the murderer Marcel Doucet and armed robbers Pierre Tallepied and Georges Blaise, this latter pair serving seventy-five years and life respectively, fled New Caledonia and landed on Stradbroke Island off Brisbane, where they were found wandering on the beach. Charged with vagrancy, much to their annoyance they were sentenced to six months. That allowed time for them to be identified and handed over to the French authorities.2
Some escapees from New Caledonia behaved rather worse than others. In 1885 these included Jean Olivier Lansque, described as ‘one of those gentry who have lately in unpleasant numbers been surreptitiously leaving New Caledonia and favouring Australia with their presence.’ He had escaped three times in the previous three years before he and his companions built a small yacht, managing to hide it from the warders. Landing in Queensland at nightfall they made their way overland to Brisbane, stole money and clothes, and took a steamer to Sydney, where Lansque separated from his companions and started in business as a thief. His line of employment was brisk for a time, till he became jammed in the window of a suburban hotel that he was barbering and was ignominiously caught by some of the guests.
Convicted of burglary, while in jail at Darlinghurst he succeeded in making a short-lived escape, but was soon recaptured. After the warrant for his extradition had been signed, he displayed a good deal of sangfroid, telling the court, ‘Ah well, I’ll be back in Australie yet! I have only forty-five years more to do in Noumea, and I may have another forty-five years added to my sentence for escaping, but I’ll be back! Till then, adieu, messieurs!’ In fact he had only been sentenced to eight years for robbery. On 25 August 1889, the Extradition Court ordered him to be sent back to New Caledonia on the next mail boat. He may have been lucky. Other prisoners who had escaped, were recaptured and then extradited expected to be shot as a punishment.3
As might be hoped, the aristocratic political prisoner Henri, Marquis de Rochefort-Luçay, editor of La Lanterne, behaved considerably better than many. Sent to New Caledonia, de Rochefort tried to escape a number of times before he agreed to pay a captain £400 to be taken with companions to Australia. He and another swam to the ship after dark but, on hearing French voices they realised they had picked a French man-ofwar and, almost exhausted, had to swim on before they were picked up. He landed in Newcastle and later made his way to America.4
On 26 August 1953 the 29-year-old John Balaban was the first ‘New Australian’ to be hanged—the three previously convicted of murder had been reprieved or sent to mental asylums. On 5 December 1952 the prostitute Zora Kasic, who lived in dire circumstances in Torrensville in Adelaide, was murdered and mutilated with her stomach cut open. Balaban accepted he had met her in the Sunshine cafe in Gouger Street in the CBD, but denied he murdered her. He was charged with her killing but released when the Crown declined to proceed with the case.
On 12 April the next year he went on a rampage, killing his wife Thelma, her mother and Phillip Cadd, Thelma’s six-year-old son by a previous marriage, ‘because they deserved to die’. Verna Marnie, a waitress in his cafe, survived a jump from the first floor in her effort to escape him. He later admitted killing Riva Kwas in Paris on 19 February 1948. He had gone with her to her room to have sex and, for reasons known only to Balaban, he strangled her. ‘I did not have any intention of killing her, but I had the feeling I had to,’ he said. Pleas that he was insane were rejected. While in the death cell he fought with the warders but on the morning of his execution, in the moments before his death, he was preoccupied with arranging his hair for the gallows.
Going in the other direction was the Englishman Henry Gilmour. In the early hours of 3 April 1894 three Victorians, Buck Montgomery, better known as Milligan, Curly Williams and Gilmour failed to blow the safe of the Union Steamship Company in Sydney. Milligan and Williams were caught and hanged but Gilmour, (also known as Edward Smith, Seymour, Palmer and George Sweeney) fled across the Domain. Born in 1856, Gilmour had been in Australia for twenty years, during which time he had acquired a string of convictions, often under the name Sweeney. A member of Milligan’s Tobacco Gang, which preyed on tobacco dealers and bookmakers alike, he had received three years in 1882 for housebreaking and five years in 1883 for bank theft. He had been caught just before he sailed for California under the name Horace Dysart, carrying over £700 on him.
After the abortive Union Steamship robbery he escaped and sailed from Newcastle on a wool ship to Callao in Peru. He was thought to have then made his way via America to London but nothing was heard of him in Australia for nearly ten years. Later it appeared he had travelled with another Australian, James Ward, known as ‘Quiet Jimmy’, an expert climber of whom it was said he could quite easily scale the dome of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral.5
Gilmour had indeed reached London because on 19 November 1894 he received seven years at the Old Bailey for two housebreakings carried out with Ward, who received three years. In April 1901, now using the name Gilmour again, he was arrested in the flat of 39-year-old Louisa Kolb in the Avenue Henri Martin, Passy in Paris. Around 3 am, Kolb, a one-time actress at the Palais Royale Theatre, had woken while he was trying to rob her and she was badly beaten in the struggle that followed; in all she received forty-three wounds. Her screams were heard and the concierge ran for the police.
When they arrived they found Gilmour in another room bandaging his hand. He had severed an artery in his wrist in the struggle. He was identified not through the new science of fingerprinting but the almost outdated Bertillonage system, the meticulous measurement and recording of different parts of the body. He also had a hat with the name of London hatter HM Stanley of Eastcheap. Gilmour appeared for trial in the late November, described as small, hard faced and with a small stiff moustache, dressed in a black frock coat and with a blue cravat. There were suggestions that he had been Kolb’s lover but he gallantly denied this, claiming he had seen her wearing a great deal of jewellery in the street and, as a result, persuaded one of her lovers, a man he called Wilson, to let him in the flat. Wilson and he were to meet the next morning at the Gare du Nord and divide the spoils.
The jury refused to find there were any mitigating circumstances in his case and there were reports in the Australian papers that he had been guillotined. In fact, in the December he received a sentence of penal servitude for life, which meant transportation to French Guyana or Caledonia, from which escape was still thought to be quite easy. If he did escape there are no reports in any papers giving any of his usual names. Curiously, three days before the robbery, Oscar Méténier’s play Son poteau, about a woman who parades her jewellery and so attracts a burglar, had been produced at his Théatre du Grand Guignol.6
Undoubtedly one of the most talented of the Australian criminals in England between the wars was James McCraig (or George Enright), who became known as ‘The Human Fly’ when he worked in America and ‘The Wizard of the West End’ in London. It was his ability to scale the highest and most inaccessible of buildings that earned him his nick-names—in 1925 he won a bet climbing the facade of the Home Office. Before he left Australia he was more prosaically known as Cyril Pegg, a youth who cheated children out of their savings with never-fulfilled promises of dolls and cricket bats.
McCraig claimed he was born in Tasmania, supposedly the son of a wealthy cattle dealer, and worked as a jockey before going to America in 1919, where he was arrested in May that year. Later in England he received nine months’ imprisonment at Marlborough Street Police Court after an attempted burglary of a jeweller’s shop in Piccadilly Circus. On his release he returned to New York, where he worked as a stuntman. After another arrest in California he escaped from San Quentin and it was back to England. On 11 June 1924 he and the London criminal Charles ‘Ruby’ Sparks managed to steal the Wernher jewel collection from the family’s Piccadilly home. The problem for them was that the police immediately circulated a detailed list of the stolen jewellery and it became impossible to fence. An arrangement was made between McCraig, the police and the insurers that he would return the jewellery in exchange for immunity and a share of the reward money.7
The money did not last long and on 28 June 1925 McCraig was found by a housemaid asleep on the sofa in a house in Clarendon Place. When she questioned him he replied that he had been invited in by a lady. The housemaid went to make inquiries and McCraig threw himself out of the window, falling 30 feet, breaking his right leg and four toes. In hospital a friend brought him in clothes, boots and a stick and out he limped. He was caught at Croydon Airport as he was about to board a plane for Paris. Perhaps unexpectedly, he was found not guilty at his trial on 1 September 1925. He was almost immediately rearrested and found guilty of an attempted burglary at the Grosvenor Hotel, but his luck held. In October that year the Court of Appeal quashed his three-year sentence. In February 1926 he was sentenced to nine months as an incorrigible rogue after being seen on the fire escape of the Hyde Park Hotel. He ran away but this time was caught.
His career was now going downhill and he was sentenced to two months’ hard labour on 4 April 1928. He then travelled to Newcastle in north-east England with Americans James Hynes—who claimed he had been the bodyguard of New York gangster Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen during the Prohibition in America—and Harry Kleintz when, on 28 June 1928, he received four years after being found burgling a jewellers. The Court of Appeal turned down their applications for leave to appeal, saying the only possible reason to grant the applications would have been so that they could increase Kleintz’s sentence.
The Fly was still working in the mid 1930s when he was dobbed in before he burgled Sir Richard Meller’s home in Mitcham, Surrey. On 8 January 1936, under the name George Enright and now described as ‘a master criminal’, he received a three-year sentence at the Central Criminal Court. In May 1939 McCraig, then aged forty-five, went down for another four years for receiving two suitcases. He remained in England, still acting as a caser for younger ladder gangs, until his death in May 1952 in a Kensington hospital.8
In 1922 confidence man James Francis ‘Gentleman’ Jim Casey simply walked out of Darlinghurst police station in Sydney. Waiting with others for a transfer to Long Bay and wearing his own clothes he managed to get out of the recreation yard and walked to the front gate, which was unlocked but had a constable standing outside. ‘Only one prisoner, constable,’ he told him. Casey then asked him for a cigarette and walked away, telling him he should ensure the gate was kept locked in future. He promptly went to Europe to join other Australian conmen, such as Bill Warren and Gerald Riviere, working swindles in the big hotels and seaside resorts. He was not arrested until 1924, when he was the last of the team to be caught in a sweep by Scotland Yard. He seems never to have been extradited and was charged with obtaining £15,000 following a confidence trick in Paris in 1930. He died in a North London hospital in March 1947.9
In December 1939 Jack ‘Snowy’ O’Neill, along with Harold Joseph ‘Gentleman Joe’ Ryan, who was regarded by the New South Wales police as one of the few criminals with brains, were convicted in Vancouver of theft and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. They were correct about Ryan having brains. He had been acquitted of both the Mudgee train robbery in 1931 and the murder of George Morris, a witness in that case, in 1944.10
As for O’Neill, he had escaped after being arrested at Randwick racecourse, where he was seen pickpocketing. A talented surfer, and equally talented sprinter and former boxer, gambler and thief, he jumped a fence and was next seen at Bondi Beach later in the afternoon in a bathing costume, leading a child by the hand. When an officer approached him he said, ‘Let’s find the mother first’, and then ran into the sea. The detective then shot him in the arm and in the subsequent struggle a deaf-mute intervened, thinking it was the plainclothes policeman who was the villain of the piece, allowing O’Neill to escape. O’Neill later hijacked a car and drove to Newcastle where, using a passport bought from a sailor, he caught a boat to America.11
Some have managed to get quite a long way. One of the ones who travelled farthest was the baby-faced and ruthless John Brendon Parker who ran a little team of robbers with his long-time girlfriend Elsie Bowden as the getaway driver. From a middle-class family from Sydney, Parker’s career started in 1918 when he appeared in the Children’s Court for stealing and from then on his record was of breaking, receiving, standover and robbery under arms. He was also suspected of being a high-class safebreaker. They were caught on 14 June 1928 after they had ransacked a tailor’s shop in Hurstville, stealing £600 of rolls of cloth. A man, scheduled to go on the job, dropped out and dobbed them in. Sentenced to four years and declared a habitual criminal, the diminutive Parker escaped from the Darlinghurst lock-up while awaiting transfer to prison. Using a fretsaw smuggled in earlier, he stood on the shoulders of other prisoners while, to cover the noise of the sawing, they all sang ‘There’s a long, long trail a-winding’. He then broke a plate glass skylight, clambered over a roof and lowered himself to the ground.
Parker stayed in Sydney for some time before, disguised as a woman, he obtained a passport and stowed away for Europe on the German steamer Mosel. Again he was dobbed in and on 26 October he was captured in Bordeaux in France, but it was not until February the next year that he was brought back to Australia. His career continued into the 1950s, when he served a three-year sentence, again for breaking, and once more was remanded at the governor’s pleasure.12
Some escapees are simply unlucky; that, or sometimes God is on the side of the righteous. The well-known Sydney criminal, the dapper Walter ‘Warrigal’ Naughton, led the police a merry dance when he absconded his bail on a robbery charge in Sydney in 1930. Dressed in plus fours and with a small moustache as his only disguise he made his way via Adelaide to Perth where he planned to catch a boat to Colombo and then on to England. Initially he intended to sail on the Orantes but discovered that Detective Comans, a New South Wales police officer whom he knew, was also to be on board, on his way to bring a female prisoner back from Ceylon. He transferred to the Baraboo. Unfortunately the detective was delayed when the woman took poison and he also transferred to the Baraboo. They saw each other going to the dining room just before the boat sailed and immediately Naughton told the purser he had heard his brother was dangerously ill and he must leave the boat. He had his luggage unloaded and was on the dock when Comans, leaning on the rail, saw him and called out for him to be arrested.13
Most of Australia’s criminal exports were conmen and thieves rather than robbers. An exception was Robert Augustus ‘Denny’ Delaney, who first worked in England between the wars and specialised in smash-and-grab raids. Before he went to England he had served sentences in Australia and the United States. He now devised a relay system of getaway cars in a robbery and used women as spotters and stalls—reconnoitering the premises and diverting the shop assistants. A charming man, said to be the head of a gang of Australian and South African criminals and who had his women associates billing and cooing over him—he tended to call them ‘Sweetie-Pie’ and ‘Ducksy-Wucksy’—he worked out of London’s Soho, first with Henry Moore, known as ‘Diamond Dick’, and later with Reggie Roberts.
One of Delaney’s more spectacular robberies was the March 1922 theft of a safe from the post office at Euston Station, carried out in full view of the public on a Saturday evening. For another, this time in May 1932, he organised a raid on a furrier’s in the Brompton Road. Part of the proceeds was a dressmaker’s dummy that, at a crucial moment in the chase, was thrown into the path of the pursuing police car. The driver naturally did not wish to run over what appeared to be a naked woman and so swerved to avoid the body, giving Delaney and Roberts time to escape. On another occasion Delaney jumped into the Thames and had to be pulled from the mud. A talented cat burglar, he served over twenty years in jail, including a seven-year sentence for burglary in 1929. In 1934 he received nine years for burglaries in Sussex. His wife Olive, whom he had married bigamously, was bound over for two years. He died aged fifty-three in Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight in December 1948.14
For a time in the 1960s and 1970s Australia provided shelter for some of London’s top robbers, as they stayed out of the way of the British prison and judicial system. Pride of place went to Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber who escaped from Wandsworth prison in south-west London, but others included Eric Flower, who organised the Biggs escape, and the robbers Ronald Everett, Alfie Gerard and Jerry Callaghan, themselves the top of the first division of the blag. At the time Gerard and Callaghan were also wanted for murdering the ‘Mad Axe Man’, Frank Mitchell, on behalf of London’s criminal Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie.
On 8 July 1965 English-born Biggs, sentenced to thirty years for his part in the Great Train Robbery, escaped from Wandsworth by scaling the wall and leaping onto the top of a waiting furniture van. On 30 December he arrived in Sydney before moving to live in Perth and then Melbourne. The next year his wife Charmian arrived using a passport in the name of Furminger. After she joined him they lived together in Adelaide and Melbourne for three years under false names and had a third child. At first Biggs ran a boarding house in Adelaide and then took a job as a foreman carpenter at Tullamarine Airport in the name of Cooke.
It was not until late in October 1969 the police had any real leads. Then there were alleged sightings of Biggs and the others in Canberra, but these were quickly discounted. However, all Canberra police were now carrying photographs of Biggs. Then Eric Flower was found at his home in Castle Howard Road in Beecroft, Sydney, and was returned to England. With him went another top-class London villain, Ronnie Everett. Shortly after, the police swooped on Gerard and Callaghan. In their turn they were extradited to face charges of robbery and causing grievous bodily harm—the murder allegations had been abandoned after the Krays had been acquitted in early 1969.
Curiously none of them seems to have carried on his trade in his adopted country. At the time of his arrest Everett was running a trucking business in Sydney. Back in London, in June 1970 he and Callaghan pleaded guilty to wounding a police officer and received six years’ imprisonment. In 1983 Everett was involved in what was then the largest Security Express robbery in England and he fled again, this time to Spain. An application for his extradition was refused on the grounds that too long had passed but he was later extradited for drug offences.
When Gerard was arrested on New Year’s Day 1970, reels of film of Biggs and his family taken by him were found. This, the police thought, would be a breakthrough in their inquiries since they showed his mannerisms and facial expressions. Previously all they had had was five mug shots of him. But it was all too late. Knowing an arrest was imminent, Biggs failed to appear at his job at Tullamarine on 17 October 1969, shortly before the police arrived at his home. On 14 November the police received a tip-off that Biggs was going to be on a TAA flight to Sydney. They searched two planes but there was no sign of him.
Almost immediately after the Flower arrest, the enterprising Truth offered to set up a $20,000 trust fund for Biggs’s children if he surrendered. The paper did not rate Biggs all that highly, going along with the general theory that Bruce Reynolds, Gordon Goody and Charlie Wilson were at the top of the pecking order. It considered Biggs to be a mere soldier and so the trust fund might be inducing. If he did not surrender, the paper prophesied dire things for him. If the police found him then it was back home to finish off his thirty years, plus, no doubt, a few more for his escape. Even that might be preferable to the paper’s other option, which was to end up in the hands of Sydney’s ‘Toecutters’, who did just that, snipping the toes and other parts off their victims to persuade them to hand over the proceeds of robberies. It was thought Charmian Biggs’ protestations that they were penniless could not be believed—at the very least it was thought there was around £125,000 of train robberty money that would be of interest to them. Before Charmian arrived Biggs had had an affair with an Ann Pitcher in Adelaide, who apparently still harboured tender feelings for him. If Charmian were ever to go home there would always be a bed for him, simpered Truth.15
In fact it was not until 5 February the next year that Biggs, who had been hiding out with friends, boarded the SS Elinis in Melbourne and sailed for Brazil. There he had a son, Michael, with a nightclub dancer eighteen years his junior. Now, because of the child, he could not be deported. Charmian remained in Australia and in May 1970 she was given a six-month permit to stay. This was later made permanent.
In May 2001, a sick man and thinking his sins and crimes would be forgiven, Biggs, sponsored by a tabloid newspaper, returned to England. He was wrong. He was promptly returned to prison where he remained until his release in 2009, by which time he had suffered a series of debilitating strokes. He died in December 2013.16
When Privy Councillor John Stonehouse, the English Labour MP for Walsall in the West Midlands of England, disappeared from his US hotel on Florida’s Miami Beach on 24 November 1974 he went about as far away as he could. His clothes were found neatly folded on the hotel’s veranda along with his passport. He had financial troubles and was being investigated by the Department of Trade and Industry. For a few days it was thought he had set out to drown himself, but on Christmas Eve that year he was found living under the name Clive Mildoon in St Kilda by Victoria Police, who were actually looking for the equally vanished Lord Lucan, who had disappeared two weeks before Stonehouse, following the murder of his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett. Having obtained a forged passport in the name of one of his constituents, Stonehouse had come to Australia to begin a new life with his mistress, his secretary Sheila Buckley.
Using false names, Stonehouse set about transferring large sums of money between banks as a further means of covering his tracks. Under the name of Mildoon he deposited $21,500 in cash at the Bank of New Zealand. Unfortunately for him, he was seen at both banks by a man who reported him to the police. The police initially suspected him of being Lord Lucan. Investigators noted that the suspect was reading British newspapers that also included stories attacking the ‘recently deceased’ John Stonehouse. They contacted Scotland Yard, requesting pictures of both Lucan and Stonehouse. He was arrested on 24 December 1974, when the police instructed him to pull down his trousers so they could be sure whether or not he was Lord Lucan, who had a six-inch scar on his inside right thigh.
There were problems with his extradition and he tried to obtain asylum from both Mauritius and Sweden before he was finally deported in August 1976. He pleaded not guilty but was convicted and received seven years at the Old Bailey for fraud. He was released in 1979 after suffering three heart attacks. He married his mistress in 1981, wrote a number of books and joined the now defunct Social Democratic Party in Britain. On 25 March 1988 Stonehouse collapsed on the television set of Central Live in Birmingham, during a program about missing people. Just under three weeks later he died from a fourth heart attack, on 14 April 1988. He was sixty-two years old.
Twenty years after his death it was disclosed that, while Stonehouse was serving his fraud sentence in 1979, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and top cabinet members had learned from a Czech defector that Stonehouse had been a paid spy for Czechoslovakia (as it was then) since 1962. He had provided secrets about government plans as well as technical information about aircraft, and received about £5000. The government decided there was insufficient evidence to bring him to trial, and so no announcement or prosecution had been made.17
It is, of course, not the way justice should be conducted but a great deal of time and money would have been saved had Bassam Hamzy not been retrieved when he disappeared after killing Kris Toumazis outside the Goodbar nightclub in Sydney’s Oxford Street on 30 May 1998. Hamzy fled first to Belize and was then traced to Miami in Florida in the United States, in January the next year and deported. While on remand in Silverwater in Sydney he compounded his troubles by recruiting a contract killer, ‘Jack’, to dispose of a key witness for him. Jack was to bring him a finger of the dead man as proof. Unfortunately for Hamzy, Jack turned out to be an undercover police officer. Hamzy received twenty-one years for the murder and a further twelve for the conspiracy. He has since gone on to found the Muslim prison group Brothers 4 Life, become a major drug distributor controlling the gang from the prison, and a serious and continuing thorn in the flesh of the corrections system.18
In the 1970s the great trio of drug dealers in Queensland was ‘Snapper’ Cornwell, Richard Bull and, very much the junior partner, Terry Basham. Dapper Bruce Richard Cornwell, a friend of the major dealer ‘Aussie Bob’, Robert Trimbole, was one of those targetted by Frank Costigan QC in his Royal Commission into Organised Crime. Cornwell was given his nickname because he was said to be slippery as a fish. Born on 29 January 1944, the smartly dressed Cornwell, also known as ‘Fillets’, who grew a moustache to cover a harelip, began his criminal career with convictions for violence and then a charge of possessing a small amount of cannabis in the early 1970s. He ran a news agency in Sydney and was an SP bookmaker before he began his life as a drug importer, bringing in cannabis from South-East Asia as a courier for Sydney club owner Michael Moylan Junior’s syndicate, which from 1975 imported drugs from Thailand.
Richard Bull moved to Noosa Heads in Queensland in 1979, establishing the Hairloom salon. There must have been a very considerable number of women in the area who wanted expensive perms and highlights for, on an investment of $9000, Bull owned two speedboats and an ocean-going vessel, a Porsche, a Mercedes, several properties and a share of a racehorse. Others unkindly thought the money came from drugs rather than clipping. His tax returns showed Hairloom to be a very modest success, if one at all, and his income in the period 1980–83 apparently dropped from $140 to $25 a week.
Terry Basham, who had arrived in Australia in 1956, bought a milk round in 1962 and sold it seven years later. From then on it was the flamboyant life of a very successful drug dealer who, for a time, was a close friend of both Snapper Cornwell and Bull, acting as Cornwell’s heroin distributor in Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales. Then things soured.
In late 1979 Bull left some $30,000 with Basham and, when he went to collect it, finding no one at home he ransacked the house. He did not find the money either and, when he returned a fortnight later, this time with two heavies, Basham was well prepared. While a man with a rifle covered the heavies, Basham, wearing a knuckleduster, gave Bull a bad beating. Then, on 14 August 1982, Basham and his de facto Sue were shot to death at their home in Murwillumbah. The back door was bashed down and Sue, who was knitting and Basham, who was watching television, were each shot twice with a .38. Their two-year-old daughter was unharmed and during the night, waking and finding her father cold, went and fetched him a pair of slippers to try to warm him. She was discovered covered in blood the next day by her grandfather.
It cannot have been Bull who killed Basham and his wife. At the time he was skiing in New Zealand with his girlfriend Sylvia Lux, ten years his junior. It was suggested that whoever put up the contract had first offered it to members of the Melbourne branch of the Painters and Dockers Union who, for some inexplicable reason, had declined it. Bull was, however, linked to drug dealers worldwide and suspected with Cornwell of major drug importations into Australia, including one in January 1984. Now, instead of using Sydney Harbour as a drop-off zone, they used the Whitsunday Passage in Queensland. But as the police learned of Bull’s movements from telephone taps, so Bull must have learned of their interest in him. Or it may have been the $500,000 tax bill that sent him on his way. In February 1984 he disappeared and was thought to be sailing around the Queensland coast in a yacht, Skylab. Warrants for his arrest were issued.
Bull would next be sighted on the other side of the world. In April 1986 he was arrested at the West German border after an Interpol tipoff. He was remanded in custody to await extradition and the heavily pregnant Lux planned a stunning escape. At 5 am, as Bull was being driven from the Innsbruck prison for a court appearance, she followed the van on a high-powered motorbike. When the van stopped at traffic lights Bull kicked the van door open, dropped out onto the road, climbed onto the pillion and the pair was off and away. ‘I was young, in love and pregnant. Pregnant women do silly things,’ she later said.
The flight had its consequences. Lux went into labour and their prematurely born son, Morgen, was placed in intensive care. It all ended romantically if, for Bull and Lux, in tears. Bull had intended to walk to Spain but he wanted a report on Morgen before he left. On 29 July the pair were arrested in a cafe near the hospital. Lux said:
We’d planned that I’d walk out of the hospital and past him and he would make sure no one was following. Because I was so long he thought there was something wrong with Morgen. As I walked towards him, he asked if Morgen was all right. That was it. We walked into the cafe and sat down and ten seconds later three big guys came in and held a gun at his head.19
Extradited to Australia, Bull served an eighteen-year sentence for importing cannabis worth between $7 and $10 million from Thailand. Lux eventually served twelve months of weekend detention for conspiracy to obtain Australian passports by fraud. The pair married in jail in 1988. The Australian Taxation Office cleaned out Bull’s bank accounts and the hairdressing salon was sold. He was finally released from prison in 1993 but, while Sylvia Lux remained in Sydney, he went back to the Sunshine Coast, where he died in Noosa Hospital in February 2004. Friends rallied to help pay for his funeral.20
As for Cornwell, whose antennae were always twitching, he had also learned of a police stakeout on the Bull drug deal he was conducting. The police swooped but Cornwell was gone minutes before the detectives arrived. He sold his assets, converting them into gold, and simply disappeared for a time. Cornwell was finally arrested in the summer of 1986 in England, where his wife Carmen had been put under surveillance and where she was seen talking, it was thought, to Aussie Bob Trimbole. In fact it was to her mother’s de facto, Jack Levy. She was followed to a house in Hampstead, a smart London suburb, and this time the Snapper was soon on the hook. His extradition was ordered and, given his capacity for disappearance, he was put on the Prime Minister’s Boeing 707 at the RAF base at Brize Norton and flown back to Australia. In 1987 he was jailed for twenty-three years with a fourteen-year minimum for his drug importation with Richard Bull and fined $6.9 million.21
Perhaps Pentridge’s most celebrated escaper to export himself in recent years has been Gregory John Peter Smith, now better known as Greg Roberts, the author of the bestselling Shantaram. Well educated and a political activist at Melbourne University, he took to robbing Building Societies over a three-month period—twenty-six in all with a derisory total haul of $37,000—to support a heroin habit. Caught in 1977 he was sentenced to twenty-three years reduced to sixteen. Sent to Pentridge, he was part of the Overcoat Wars between imprisoned Dockers and a gang led by Mark Chopper Read and, he says, was tortured by the warders. On 18 February 2004 he and an offsider escaped. Later he told Dave Morley on George Negus Tonight:
We broke into the governor of security’s office, which was just here, and then got up to the ceiling, used a buzz saw to cut a hole in the ceiling, got into the roof, cut through the roof with the buzz saw, and then used an extension cord, and draped it exactly where the sign is, and we got over there, straight down to this bottom part, ran across here—actually, walked—and walked down the laneway here. Once we were in that lane, we were invisible. We couldn’t be seen by anyone. And at the end of the lane we were in Sydney Road, and away.22
Roberts went to India and was not recaptured until 1991, when he was arrested at Frankfurt, smuggling heroin into Germany. He was deported, served out his sentence and was released in 1997, becoming a very successful author.23
On 13 December 2002, Dimitri Debaz, a senior member of a gang known as the Bronx Boys, was shot by Raymon Youmaran in the car park of the Playhouse Hotel in Sefton, Sydney, in what the police claimed was a drug-related killing. A fight had broken out at Dimitri’s brother Aleck’s birthday party, at which Youmaran and his friends arrived armed with a Glock pistol and another gun. Dimitri Debaz left the hotel and was shot when Youmaran and, so the prosecution alleged, Raphael Joseph (aka Rafi Tooma), sprayed bullets at the hotel, hitting Debaz three times at close range when he was on the ground sheltering behind a car.
Joseph led the authorities a merry dance, fleeing to the United States from where, on the grounds that he would be tortured or killed by the Bronx Boys on his return to Sydney, he fought an ultimately unsuccessful battle to avoid extradition. He may have been right. One of his friends, Sadi Jago, had been beaten, shot in both legs and had caustic liquid poured on his neck in an effort to make him say where Joseph could be found. However, charges against Joseph were later dropped and, by now regarded by the police as a major player in Sydney’s drug trade, he disappeared on 20 March 2014 after eating with a friend at Fat Noodle in Sydney’s Star Casino. One of his friends drove him to a car park near a McDonald’s in Auburn, where Joseph said he was to meet someone. Telling his friends he would be back in half an hour he got into a silver Holden Commodore and was never seen again. No ransom money was ever demanded from his family and by the next year the police were convinced he had been murdered by a rival drug gang.24