Generally, prudent suspected criminals who are unexpectedly granted bail would sensibly not stand around and wait to be arrested or rearrested. The very best of them can remain on the run for years, even decades. One of them was Richard Buckley. Although he only stayed on the run for seven years what was remarkable was that he seems to have stayed in Melbourne all of that time. On 8 October 1924 Buckley and Angus Murray robbed bank employee Thomas Berriman as he followed his usual Monday routine of taking a bag of notes to Glenferrie railway station, something he had done at 11 am for the past six weeks. The plan, dreamed up by Squizzy Taylor, was simple. Berriman would be attacked as he walked up the ramp to the platform. The bag, together with any gun he might be carrying, would be snatched, and Murray and Buckley would jump into a waiting car. The driver was to be Taylor but, when it came to it, he preferred to skulk outside the police headquarters in Russell Street to set up a cast-iron alibi.1
Buckley, now sixty years old and with a long record of violence, was on parole at the time of the robbery. Over the years he had regularly been placed in solitary confinement, and for one earlier robbery—of which he claimed to be innocent—he had received the lash. He walked with a limp, something he blamed on a beating by the police. As Berriman came down the ramp Buckley asked him if he could carry his bag, which contained over £1850. Berriman replied, ‘No thank you, old man, I can carry it myself’. When Buckley tried to take his bag from him the brave, if foolish, Berriman refused to hand it over and was promptly fatally shot.
Murray helped Buckley as he limped along to the getaway car, from time to time turning and waving his revolver at pursuers. Two days after the robbery two women telephoned the police to say they had seen two men burning a briefcase in the yard of Taylor’s home in St Kilda. In the early hours of 11 October the police broke through the doors of the five-roomed detached cottage. When they called out, ‘Hands up’, Murray replied, ‘They are up’. Taylor was in bed with his girlfriend Ida Pender but of Buckley there was no trace. It was thought that he had been staying with Taylor but that night he had been out ‘tomcatting’ and on his return, seeing the police, he disappeared.
Murray was convicted of Berriman’s murder and hanged, but Buckley remained in smoke. Some thought it might be permanent and that he had been eliminated by or on behalf of Taylor. If he had not been killed, in theory it should have been easy to spot him for he was covered in tattoos—a cross on his right forearm, a dancing girl with a wreath on his lower inside right arm, and a woman’s head on his inside right upper arm. A coat of arms was on his inside left lower arm and a vase of flowers on the inside upper left. But he must have kept his sleeves down. He was now known in the press as the ‘Grey Ghost’.
Over the years there were reported sightings of him in the United States, Europe and other states of Australia. One story had him dying in London under the name of ‘Henry Freeman’, an early alias. In fact, he had never travelled very far. When he was arrested in 1930, it was found he had been living in Richmond and then Collingwood, before moving to Bowen Street, Ascot Vale, with his granddaughter Pat, taking occasional exercise at night dressed as a woman. There had been stories that he was supported by the financier John Wren but there seems to be little, if any, foundation for the rumours.
Buckley was convicted of Berriman’s murder. A Labor government was in office and Buckley’s death sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment. In 1946, suffering from dropsy and not expected to survive more than a few months, he was released. Like so many other early released criminals, Buckley found life on the outside much healthier and surprised everyone, dying aged eighty-nine on 15 September 1953.2
Some criminals abscond and then surrender when they think it a suitable moment, perhaps after witnesses have been squared or themselves disappeared or were disappeared. Squizzy Taylor had done this in 1922 when he was on a charge of breaking into a bonded warehouse, and so did Harold ‘Gentleman Joe’ Ryan, on bail for the £10,000 Canberra mail train robbery in 1930. Ryan had attended court regularly and simply vanished during one lunch break. Truth was at its most eloquent, writing of an elderly grey-haired mother sitting in her darkened room awaiting the return of her son. Over the years there were various sightings of him in and around Sydney and on one occasion he gave a statement to the press saying he had absconded because the police had got at his principal witness.
In June 1935 a firm of solicitors received a letter from Ryan asking them to arrange a meeting with a Detective Inspector Quinn so that he could give himself up. ‘I have come back from abroad to give myself up to the police to meet the charges against me. I have always had a complete defence,’ he told Quinn, adding that a man who had owed him money had failed to come through and he was left without funds to pay for his trial. At 7.15 pm on 19 June he was rearrested. Their absences did Ryan and Taylor a great deal of good. Both were acquitted.
The best criminals are often those the public has never heard of, and Sydney-based Chinese–Australian Leslie Woon from Rose Bay fits that category. He was also a great escapee. He simply disappeared in 1970 when wanted by the police over the Mayne-Nickless robbery in Sydney, and even more seriously by the legendary Sydney gang the Toecutters, said to be led by a police officer, Fred Krahe, who wished to share in Woon’s profits from the raid. Generally regarded as a major putter-up, Woon had organised a number of successful bank robberies in Melbourne, often using insiders to provide information and help.
He had started his career early with an armed robbery at the Mutual Cash Order Company on 28 October 1938, for which he received a two-year sentence. It had been an unsuccessful start to what is generally thought of as a brilliant career. Woon was highly regarded by both his peers and the police—the Victoria Police Gazette described him as, ‘Not afraid to dirty his hands when planning a job. He doesn’t mix with the criminal element; using different names for his flat, car and telephone.’ Other robberies included £35,000 from the ES&A Bank in Russell Street on 28 May 1962. At Woon’s trial in June 1963 the jury disagreed but ultimately he was convicted and sentenced to eight years with a six-year non-parole period.3
Shortly after his release he began planning the Sydney Mayne-Nickless robbery on 4 March 1970, which would ultimately prove disastrous for the perpetrators and fatal for one of them. Along with Frank ‘Baldy’ Blair, who had worked worldwide as one of the best shop-lifters in the business, Woon planned the robbery of the security van but sensibly did not go on the raid himself. Instead it was led by Painter and Docker Stephen Nittes, along with Blair and Alan Laurie Albert Jones. The raid was a simple one. Woon had found an inside man who told him that the guards, almost unbelievably, regularly parked the van in the Guildford shopping centre when they had their lunch before they made a delivery to the Commonwealth Bank. One of the security guards always opened the van door to put out the rubbish at a certain time. In came the robbers and out went $587,890.
The subsequent pain and suffering came in the form of the much-feared Sydney-based Toecutters Gang. First, they attacked the Docker Stephen Nittes, who handed over $20,000 to save his toes and probably his life. From being the hunted he promptly changed sides and set up Blair, who was kidnapped and had his toes cut and testicles torched to persuade him to reveal where he had deposited his $90,000 share. Blair died from his injuries and his body was thrown into Sydney Harbour in the belief that it would be eaten by sharks. It was not and washed up in Botany Bay. The blame for that misapprehension was laid at the doorstep of Jake Maloney, who was later shot by fellow Toecutter John ‘Nano The Magician’ Regan on 23 November 1971. According to underworld legend, just before Maloney was killed Regan said, ‘Sharks, hey, Jake, I’ll give you bloody sharks, you idiot.’
Alan Jones escaped their attention. Woon left the country and was thought to be in England where he was sought by the police and other criminals. At their trial Jones and Nittes received sixteen years apiece for their troubles.
Twenty years later, in 1981, with the police closing in on the Mr Asia drug syndicate, Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole was given the nod—so said the crooked Sydney doctor Nick Paltos, an offsider of George Freeman—that it was time for him to go before he was swept up. On 8 May, the day Trimbole left Australia for the final time, he and his long-time friend, 49-year-old one-time racehorse trainer Reginald ‘Mick’ O’Brien, had pulled off a coup at Hawkesbury racecourse when Species, backed from 33 to 1 down to 8 to 1, won the Provincial Stakes, netting an estimated $300,000.
Off Trimbole went to Ireland and it was not until 25 October 1984 that, then living under the name Michael Hanbury in Westport, County Mayo, he was arrested on suspicion of possessing a firearm. Efforts were made to seek his compulsory return to Australia but the Irish courts ruled he had been illegally arrested in preparation for the extradition attempt. Adrian Neale, the London solicitor who represented Trimbole in Europe and went to Ireland to assist in the defence of the extradition proceedings, remembers:
When he was released by the Irish court he literally walked out onto the street. He had no idea whether he was going to be killed by the Mafia. We went to a hotel—the middle of three on the Lansdowne Road. There was no way he could get out of the country on normal transport so I rang a friend of mine in British Airways and we found a guy who would take him out on a Lear Jet the next day. The pilot had contacts and I didn’t wish to know where he had gone.
Trimbole went to Spain, where he died on 13 May 1987 near Benidorm. Neale is convinced Trimbole was killed, sprayed with a gas and as a result suffered a heart attack. Curiously the Canberra Times had already reported that he died on a boat in the Mediterranean in late June 1985 and that he was buried at his birthplace of Platì in Calabria, southern Italy.4
Until Trimbole’s death O’Brien stayed in contact with him, and it was thought he was linked to an attempt to smuggle some of Trimbole’s estimated $20 million back into Australia. Certainly he had seen Trimbole in the village of Alfaz de Pi near Alicante, Spain, shortly before his death, and he wept copiously enough at the drug dealer’s funeral. On 13 January 1992 O’Brien was killed, shot through the screen door of a granny flat in Onslow Street, Granville in Sydney—one shot went through his arm and into his chest and the second into his abdomen.5
Christopher Charles Skase was another who went to Spain, or at least the Balearic Islands. He began his financial career as a stockbroker and then became a journalist working for the Melbourne Sun and the Australian Financial Review. In 1975 he bought Qintex, the core of his empire. He hooked up with Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen and for the next decade built a property empire. By the late 1980s he owned the Brisbane Bears, an AFL club, as well as the Mirage resort in Port Douglas. Qintex expanded to be a corporation worth $1.5 billion but the crash came when after buying the Seven television network Skase tried to buy the American studio MGM. Interest rates rose and he was now seriously over-extended. His failure to acquire the studio triggered a collapse in his pyramid of companies and he was not helped by a Four Corners’ report that indicated that by July 1989 he was moving money into foreign bank accounts.
His fellow directors of Qintex, which he had used as a personal bank, now demanded the repayment of $13.5 billion and Skase declared himself bankrupt to the tune of $170 million. The true figure was probably around $700 million. The ink was still wet on the proposed fraud charges when he found enough money to use a Dominican passport to get himself to Spain. From there he successfully fought off repeated attempts to extradite him—a plot to kidnap him was also abandoned—until his death following stomach cancer in Majorca on 5 August 2001. After his death his wife and family complained that Skase had been unfairly persecuted by the authorities. Little of the money has ever been traced.6
The South Australian fraud squad detective Colin Creed was another who did not stay around to be arrested. When police officers go off the rails it is often in a spectacular fashion, none more than Creed, the dux of his intake class. Perhaps his superiors should have taken closer order because, a connoisseur of wine and ‘always flash with cash’ when in the squad, Creed would spend $60 on a bottle of Riesling, a seriously substantial sum in the 1970s.
In April 1974 a young woman was raped in her home at knifepoint. When she went to Hindmarsh police station the next day she identified Creed, whom she saw there, as her attacker. He had been at her home some months previously investigating a minor burglary. He was found not guilty but after that his first marriage broke up. A year later he married a policewoman. On 10 April 1980 security cameras picked out a man in a Torrensville bank robbery and to the shock of officers it appeared to be Creed. He was questioned, brazened things out and, when he was not identified on a parade, he was allowed to go home. That night he vanished carrying out a bank robbery at Glenelg the following month. After that he went interstate and was said for a while to have teamed up with the robber and escapee Mad Dog Cox. While on the run he tidied things up by writing a formal letter of resignation from the South Australian force.
Creed’s career on the run was marked by near misses. First, there were suggestions that he had been standing over girls in Victorian massage parlours and that the underworld had put out a $15,000 contract on him. If the latter was correct he survived. Now number one on the government’s most wanted list and said to be a master of disguise and bluff, Creed was seen by police sitting in a car in Coburg in Melbourne for what appeared to be an inordinately long time. When questioned he toughed it out, saying he was waiting for an assignation with a married woman.
He certainly should have been caught in Queensland when, on 4 January 1982, police were alerted by a hotel manager who had seen green dye on Creed’s hands and suspected he had touched bank notes marked by the authorities, but after three hours of questioning he was released. He also survived a police raid following the January 1983 shoot-out at Cox’s safe house on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, when former Painter and Docker turned bank robber Ian Revell Carroll was killed. By the time the police searched the house, finding an arsenal of weapons and Creed’s fingerprints, he was long gone.
He was finally caught in the ABC bookshop in Hay Street, Perth, on 6 September 1983, when Creed was recognised by Ian Goldsmith, another South Australian police officer on holiday who said, ‘It’s been a long time, Colin, hasn’t it?’ The authorities were singularly reluctant to pay the reward money to the holidaying Goldsmith, arguing it was only part of his duty. Eventually with the help of his union an ex gratia payment was negotiated.
Creed pleaded guilty to charges relating to two armed hold-ups on 10 April 1980 at Underdale in Adelaide. In November 1984 Creed’s South Australian sentence of twenty-one years with a pre-parole term of twelve years was increased on appeal by the Crown to seventeen. A psychological report suggested that at the time he went off the rails he was ‘in a state of depression and anxiety and that contributed to his offences’. In early June 1986 the Victorian Supreme Court sentenced Creed to forty-five years in jail on charges relating to six robberies, three of them armed, to be served concurrently with the South Australian sentence.
Throughout his sentence Creed’s behaviour was exemplary but, as with all former police officers, he was at risk of attack from other prisoners. In February 1988 his cell was firebombed, destroying his computer equipment. Two months later, with his security rating downgraded, he was transferred to Mobilong in Murray Bridge. In 1995, deemed a model prisoner and with no objections from the police, he was granted parole. When he spoke of his time on the run he said, ‘You may as well be in prison … it’s a pretty terrible lifestyle.’ Some escapees, such as Brenden Abbott, might disagree.7
Overall the more cosmopolitan drug dealers and financiers such as Trimbole and Skase, and savvy police officers such as Creed, have a better chance of staying away or even leaving Australia than the common or garden robber. However, one of the longest-running manhunts in Australia, certainly in recent years, has been that of Gino and Mark Stocco, a father and son who were on the run and wanted for some eight years for a variety of offences, including robbery and finally murder.
On 8 October 2015, 68-year-old Rosario Cimone, described as a caretaker, was reported missing by his daughters. Cimone had convictions running back to the early 1980s, which included one where he had benefitted from the kindly New South Wales prison minister, Rex ‘Buckets’ Jackson, who, in return for a contribution to his lifestyle, arranged the early release of favoured prisoners. A white ute, also missing, was seen two days later at a property near Dunedoo in central western New South Wales.
Cimone, described as a mid-level Mafioso, had been kidnapped and killed by the Stoccos. They had killed him totally unnecessarily when he tried to evict them from his property, where they had been employed as odd jobs men. They fled the property, leaving his decomposing body behind.
They were finally captured in October 2015 when their car was seen with stolen plates passing a police surveillance post in north Victoria. They were traced and a shoot-out took place near Dunedoo. It was after that Cimone’s body was discovered. In June 2016 they pleaded guilty to charges that included the murder of Cimone and shooting at a police officer. They were sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment with a minimum of twenty-eight and thirty years respectively. The small disparity in pre-parole time was because of Gino Stocco’s age.8
Another man who kept his chasers at bay was Malcolm John Naden. Known as a bush tucker man, he was on the run for seven years from June 2005. In 2004 he had indecently assaulted a twelve-year-old girl with whom he was supposedly in a position of trust. When his neighbour Kristy Scholes, his cousin’s girlfriend, spoke to him about this he strangled her and then dismembered the body. He was already suspected of killing his cousin, Lateesha Nolan, who had disappeared the previous January but her body had not been found.
The next year he was spotted at Dubbo Plains Zoo, where it is alleged he had eaten a tortoise. The wildlife park was evacuated but there was no sight of him. Over the years, a $50,000 reward for his capture was doubled but, regarded as an expert bushman, he remained at large, breaking into a series of isolated properties to obtain food and clothing. In one house the police placed a bag with a tracker device and when Naden stole it they traced him. In November that year he shot one of the officers, Brad McFadden, wounding him in the shoulder, in an abortive attempt to capture him. The reward was now raised to $250,000.
At the time Naden was Australia’s most wanted man and he remained at large until 22 March 2012, when he was found in a rundown shack west of Gloucester, near Nowendoc, 360 kilometres north of Sydney. He was bitten by police dog Chuck during the arrest, after which he surrendered. Almost starving, his weight had dropped to 45 kilograms. In 2013 he was found fit to plead and received a life sentence for the murder of Kristy Scholes and a minimum of twenty-one years for the murder of Lateesha. There would, however, be no parole. The hunt was said to have cost north of $10 million.
Naden’s second cousin, Dean Nolan, a relative of Lateesha, who was serving a 24-year sentence for the murder of an eleven-year-old boy and wounding the child’s mother, bashed Naden with a handle from a sandwich toaster in Goulburn on 24 November that year. Nolan received an additional twelve months for the attack, which he claimed was retribution for the distress Naden had caused his family.9
Armed robbers John Bobak and Ronald Thomas met in prison and were released within days of each other, after which they spent the next few weeks drinking and fishing together. Then on 23 December 1991 fifty-year-old Gold Coast bookmaker Peter Wade and his girlfriend, Maureen Ambrose, were allegedly shot by them. The killing was in Wade’s flat in the Casa del Rey apartments in Whelan Street, the rough end of Surfers Paradise. Wade had been involved in crime over the years and had made his money in SP bookmaking netting, it was estimated, up to $70,000 a day. In semi-retirement Wade was living the life of a remittance man on funds sent to him by a Sydney solicitor with whom he was said to have deposited $2 million.
It appears Thomas and Bobak had been employed as hitmen. Their plan was to ambush Wade on his way home from the Surfers Paradise RSL but it failed. In the middle of the night Bobak crashed through the ceiling of the apartment and Wade was shot three times with a .22 when he went to challenge him. Thomas, following Bobak, was injured when a shot by Wade hit him in the mouth, fracturing his denture. Wade and Maureen Ambrose were found dead the next morning. Thomas was traced through palm and fingerprints on the balcony. There were also descriptions of men leaving the scene in shorts and t-shirts that matched Thomas and Bobak’s. Thomas was holding what appeared to be a red towel to his mouth. Amanda Teasdale, Bobak’s girlfriend and former dental nurse, later gave evidence that she had cleaned Thomas up.
Thomas surrendered on 19 January 1992 saying he had done so to clear his name. It was an ingenious and, since Bobak had disappeared and Wade and Ambrose were dead, almost uncontradictable story. In his version, he first met Peter Wade in early December 1991 in the Birdwatcher’s Bar in Surfers Paradise. They discovered they had had some mutual friends, including the Sydney gunman Chicka Reeves and a shoplifter, Jeannie Pink. On the afternoon of 22 December, he again bumped into Wade at the Birdwatcher’s and after drinking with him until 9 pm could not face the three-hour drive to his mother’s because he said he realised he was too pissed. He stayed the night on the couch in the lounge at Casa del Rey and was woken by a shot coming through the door. As he got up he saw a foot coming through the ceiling.
‘I shit myself,’ Thomas told the court frankly at his 1993 trial. Then the man who came through the ceiling, who was not Bobak but another bearded man with whom he had done time, shot him. He passed out and when he came to, a tall man, not the one who shot him, was standing over him. He had wrapped a piece of material around his head, helped him from the unit to his car and drove him away, south towards Coolangatta. Near the airport, the man made a phone call and fifteen minutes later a woman arrived and took Thomas to her home. He said he lived on mashed potato until his wounds began to heal. At the end of the first week of January, the tall man bought him a Kombi wagon, drove him to Sydney and told him to disappear. His major problem, however, was Amanda Teasdale, and the jury preferred her evidence to his. An appeal against his conviction for murder was dismissed.10
Descriptions of Bobak’s tattoos were circulated and he should have been easily recognised, since they included a horse on his lower left arm, an eagle on his upper right arm, an eagle and a skull covering his shoulder, the word ‘Ford’ on his right lower arm and an eagle’s head and hula girl on the front, a spider’s web on his right shoulder, a snake on the front, a skull on his left upper back, a panther on his right upper back, a Thai dancer on his left upper chest, a naked woman on his right upper leg and a snake on his right wrist. However, since the shooting there has been only one positive sighting of Bobak—back in 1992 in Richmond, Tasmania. One suggestion is that he has been killed on the orders of senior members of the Sydney underworld; another has him being sheltered by a biker gang on the Sunshine Coast; a third is that he has slipped back unrecognised into mainstream life and is living in a small town in rural New South Wales or Queensland. In 2013 reward money over the Wade–Ambrose killing was increased to $250,000 but it has gone unclaimed. In 2016 he was named Queensland’s most wanted man.
As for the contractor, it was thought the solicitor, who has never been publicly identified, had tired of doling out the funds and believed the money could be better used by him personally. He was said to have paid $50,000 for each of the killings.11
One man who evaded the 2007 Tomato Can sweep, when over a million pills/drugs were found in cans labelled as tomatoes from Europe and resulted in long-sentences for members of a worldwide drug-dealing syndicate, was murderer-on-the-run Graham ‘Gene’ Potter. He was wanted for an attempt on the life of Fedele D’Amico, one of Mick Gatto’s mates—the plot was for him to kill the man at Gatto’s son’s wedding. Granted bail for the latest attempted murder allegation, he absconded in 2010 and despite numerous sightings and one arrest remains on the run.
Potter had already served a life sentence over the murder on 6 February 1981 of Kim Narelle Barry. Although Potter was out on his buck’s night before his marriage to Sheree Jones on Valentine’s Day, he bashed Barry to death with a rolling pin and spanner and then cut off her fingers and head in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent identification of the body. The next day her parents identified her by a distinguishable birthmark. That night the find was reported on the news and Potter cleaned his unit, withdrew $3000, left a note for Sheree, and fled the country. After hearing he was wanted Potter returned to Australia and surrendered, telling the police that he left because he ‘feared for his life’. He then proceeded to tell them how drug dealers had come after Kim, killed her and forced him to help them hide the evidence. The men had threatened that if he told anyone, his family and he would be next.
The Potter family and his fiancée believed his story but few others did. He was charged and found guilty in March 1982 and sentenced to life imprisonment. A few months later he married Sheree in prison. In Australia a life sentence is not necessarily a whole-life one and Potter was released on parole in 1996 after only fourteen years. By then Kim would have been thirty-five years old.
He was now wanted for the Tomato Can drug deal and the attempt on Gatto’s mate. Despite a number of sightings in Queensland and several nationwide public appeals, Potter, with a $100,000 reward on his head, has managed to evade the police. In July 2016 there were unconfirmed reports that Potter, also known as Josh Lawson, John Page, Jim Henderson and Peter Adams, had been seen working out in a gym near Sydney. In March 2017 he was thought to be in Griffith in northwest New South Wales but by the December an alternative scenario was launched. Potter had been seen by local police in Tully, north of Townsville, on 28 August, when he ran from a vehicle during a routine traffic stop. An extensive search was carried out and his camping equipment was seized from the vehicle. It was thought he had been in the region for about six weeks. When he escaped he had run off into the bush. ‘Is it possible the crook had been eaten by a croc?’ asked veteran reporter John Silvester.12
Recently there has been a steady exodus of men one step ahead of the police to places from which extradition is difficult if not impossible. They have included Wayne Schneider, the former Hells Angel who left Australia in 2012 to live in Thailand to avoid police attention over his interests in drugs, but in his case it was an appointment in Samarra. He was abducted from his villa where he was staying with former biker Jay Malkoun and murdered in November 2016. When the police found his body his neck had been broken and there were signs he might have been tortured. Former kickboxer Antonio Bagnato, his former business partner and personal bodyguard, was found guilty in 2017 of his murder and deprivation of liberty and sentenced to death. He is appealing the conviction.