Gangland Robbers (24 page)

After his death, his wife Valerie Hill told Channel Nine's
A Current Affair
that Jockey was not a dangerous man and there had been no need for her husband to be shot: ‘He wouldn't harm anybody, no matter what he's been blamed for. He's one of the kindest, most gentle men you could ever meet.' As for enemies in the underworld, he had none. ‘He was well liked and respected by his friends, so why would he have any enemies on this side?'

Generally, opinions were divided. The police thought he had taken part in a recent armed robbery in which shots were fired and hostages taken. There was also a story circulating that, at the time of his death, he had been contracted to murder a police officer on the Central Coast who had made allegations against his colleagues. Very much his
modus operandi
, it was said. On the other hand, Chris Murphy wrote that Smith had been a protector of the young and weak in prison, and that after he had been shot at Bondi, prisoners and criminals raised $30 000 with a whip-round for him. Smith had given it to a friend to hold but the police seized it. Murphy was instrumental in its return. The prisoners at the Metropolitan Training Centre sent a $500 wreath for his funeral.
An associate commented that
, ‘like so many of us he was getting too old to go back to jail'.

By the time he was fourteen, Christopher ‘Badness' Binse, short-term companion of Jockey Smith, had been labelled uncontrollable and sent to Turana boys' home. From then on, it was a revolving door of crime and prison. At seventeen he was sent to Pentridge and upon his release started to commit more serious crimes, including numerous armed bank robberies. Given the nickname ‘Badness' by a friend in Pentridge in 1988, his ego was immense. After one bank robbery, he took out an advertisement in the
Herald Sun
that read, ‘Badness is Back'. His home in Queensland, bought with the proceeds of crime, was named Badness, which was also on his personalised numberplate.

In September 1992 Binse escaped from St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, using a gun that had been smuggled in for him. He was then
arrested, and almost immediately escaped from Parramatta, on 26 October. However, only hours after his friend Jockey Smith was shot dead, Binse was arrested at a farmhouse near Daylesford. A woman friend was charged with harbouring him.

In 1993 he was convicted of four counts of armed robbery, for which he received a total effective sentence of seven years and six months, with a minimum of five years. This time, the sentencing judge apparently described these offences as ‘about as bad as bank robberies can be'. In 1996 he was jailed for six-and-a-half years over the 1992 armed robbery of a Commonwealth Bank, a theft of more than $36 000, and for escaping from Long Bay. In 1997 he lost an appeal against a ruling allowing wardens to put him in leg irons and handcuffs.

In 2001 Binse became one of the first inmates of the $20 million high-security jail within the Goulburn Correctional Centre in New South Wales, generally regarded as an unhappy place for prisoners. In 2005 he was released from the super max after serving his full sentence, and began a campaign calling for improved rehabilitation programs.

Sadly, his time on the outside was relatively short-lived because, in December 2006, he was sentenced to a minimum of thirty months for possessing an unregistered weapon, after brandishing a gun in the Spearmint Rhino in King Street, Melbourne. He had also left a bullet on the counter. The police alleged he had threatened to kill Cherie Willis and Kosala Jayasundra when he was at the club. While on remand for the 2006 offences, Binse was the victim of a serious assault.
He thought fellow prisoner and
underworld gunman Gavin Preston had recruited his attackers.

For a time, Binse had shorter sentences. In 2010 there were convictions for possessing cocaine, carrying a prohibited weapon, dealing in property suspected to be the proceeds of crime, and having custody of various false identity documents, for which he received a modest aggregate sentence of twelve months' imprisonment. While back in jail, in Port Phillip Prison in 2011, he tried to sue the state of Victoria over two alleged jailhouse assaults, claiming they happened at Barwon Prison in May 2006 and Marngoneet Prison in July the following year.

After his release, in November 2011, he went to live with a former girlfriend and his daughter. He said he was assaulted ‘by four bikies' and talked of his fears for his safety to biker Toby Mitchell, who himself later survived a shooting. Binse obtained a bag full of weapons to
protect himself and his daughter, and began wearing a bulletproof vest. But he could still be seen out and about, at one point attending the same boxing match as former Comancheros boss Amad ‘Jay' Malkoun and Melbourne identity Mick Gatto.

Following the attack on Mitchell, Binse decided to have it out with Gavin Preston. On 9 January 2012 he drove in a black Land Rover to an address in the Melbourne suburb of Seaford, parked his car and tried to steal a nearby vehicle. The attempt failed, and Binse decamped, leaving the Land Rover behind. The police were called, and in it they found a loaded .22 semi-automatic handgun, fitted with a silencer, located beneath the driver's seat.

Then Binse went for a jackpot, deciding to rob Armaguard security guards delivering money to the Westside Hotel in Laverton. At about 11 a.m. on 19 March 2012 two guards left the van and went into the hotel. They collected $235 090, which was placed in a large blue bag. As they left the hotel and returned to their van, Binse, now wearing a hood, mask and sunglasses, climbed a ladder he had brought with him, pointed his shotgun at one of the guards, and demanded that he throw over the fence to him the bag containing the money. This was more easily demanded than done, and when the guard threw the bag, he failed to clear the fence and it landed in the car park. Undeterred, Binse ordered the two guards to lie face down on the ground, before jumping the fence to recover the bag. Pointing his shotgun at one of the guards, he took the man's service revolver and ordered the other to hand his over. He then collected the blue bag, climbed back over the fence, and rode off to the rear of the Laverton Market, where he dumped his motorcycle and shotgun in a nearby dam, changed clothes and drove away in a white van.

It did not take the police long to tag Binse as a suspect, and they watched him as he went regularly to the Atak storage facility in Ballarat Road, Albion. Then, on 20 May 2012, two police officers in an unmarked vehicle saw Binse riding a Honda motorcycle, along with a man on another bike. Approximately ninety minutes later, two other police officers saw his bike parked outside La Porchetta in Niddrie. Binse came out of the pizza restaurant and saw the four officers as he was walking to his bike. He turned around and walked back into the restaur ant, the police officers following him. When one of them put his arm on his shoulder, Binse produced a loaded revolver—one of the guns taken from
the Armaguard robbery. The officer backed away, dropping his police radio in the process. Binse snatched it up and was off home to Sterling Drive, Keilor East.

At 6.40 a.m. the following day, members of the Victoria Police Special Operations Group (SOG) surrounded the Sterling Drive home. Binse was inside with his partner, and was armed with one of the Armaguard revolvers. They called on him to surrender but instead he attempted to barricade himself inside the house. The siege went for forty-four hours with Binse's partner in there with him. From time to time he randomly shot at the police, and fired from the back door of his house towards the property's rear fence.

Around 7.30 p.m. on 22 May, Binse's partner left the house. While she had not actually been held hostage, she was worried that her departure might escalate the shooting and trigger a reaction from Binse. At approximately 2 a.m. the next day, SOG took action. They fired tear gas into the house, which brought out Binse, carrying the revolver. When told to drop it, he did but then made a move to pick it up. Several non-lethal bean bag rounds were fired at him. He managed to pick up the revolver but was then immediately hit with further bean bag rounds, fell down and was arrested.

By then, Binse's container
at the storage unit had been searched and the police had seized what amounted to a small armoury, including a .357 Sturm Ruger revolver, identified as stolen from one of the two Armaguard personnel, and a .45 calibre Auto-Ordnance Corporation-brand Thompson model 1928-A1 submachine gun, along with ammunition.

In May 2014 Binse pleaded guilty to the robberies, to using a firearm while being a prohibited person and to reckless conduct endangering persons. The trial judge, Justice Terry, accepted that he had been worried about his own safety and that of his family. Psychiatrists thought Binse was suffering from a form of mixed personality disorder, with antisocial and narcissistic traits. They believed that any future imprisonment in a restricted custodial environment—which is what he could have expected—would have a significant adverse effect on his mental health.

Binse was sentenced to a further eighteen years with a non-parole period of fourteen, with Justice Terry echoing his 1993 colleague in describing the offences as ‘about as bad as robberies can be'. Days after he was sentenced, Binse revived his lawsuit against the state of Victoria for his stabbings in jail. In December 2014 his application for leave
to appeal on the grounds that his sentence was disproportionate was rejected.
Justice Weinberg thought that
, if anything, it might have been on the lenient side.

There was further trouble for Binse when, in October 2015, and now known as Christopher Dean Pecotic, he was charged with a series of seventeen offences, including seven armed robberies dating back to 1988. The year ended rather more positively for Binse/Pecotic when he was back in court again in December, representing himself and blaming his legal team for his troubles. ‘This is so toxic, it's so rancid. You'll be offended,' he told the judges when he renewed his application for leave to appeal against the 2014 sentence. It seems he had also begun to cooperate with the authorities, which, as fellow crims fear, does not mean simply behaving better in prison.
This time, he was given leave
to appeal, on the grounds it could be argued the sentence was manifestly excessive for a man in his middle to late forties.
On 26 February 2016 Binse
pleaded guilty to the 1990s robberies, which had netted him around $400 000.

One of the great non-violent robberies, possibly the biggest ever in Australia, took place on the evening of 2 January 1988, when three tank-men (the underworld term for a safecracker) squeezed through a gap in the wall of a construction site next to the Haymarket branch of the National Australia Bank in Sydney's Chinatown. A window had been left open and, using a 10-metre light extension ladder, they climbed through it, to begin a systematic raid on the bank's eighty-two safety deposit boxes. When they tried to blow a vault they triggered an alarm but, fortunately for the thieves, the security guards thought it was a false one and did not check the basement.

Quite how much the thieves took will never be known because only half the people renting the boxes came forward to give the details of their losses, which were mainly in gold ingots and jewellery. At the time, gold was selling legally for $670 an ounce, and estimates of the total haul are between $10 million and $100 million. There were suggestions some of the non-reported boxes contained heroin; almost certainly, much of the haul went to Hong Kong and Singapore.

On the street, the dogs barked the name of the charismatic Michael Hurley as the organiser. He was born in 1946, one of eight children. He left school aged fifteen and joined the Painters and Dockers Union,
working on the wharves and stealing imported goods. He became an SP bookie, armed robber, money launderer and, from the 1990s, a major drug importer, who was mostly able to stay out of court because of corrupt police contacts.
His team, which over the years
included Danny Chubb, Malcolm Field and Les Mara (an ex-Balmain Tigers player), was variously known as the Friendly Gang, the Balmain Boys and, by the mid 1990s, the Coogee Mob.

In 1977 Hurley received four years with a two-year minimum for breaking into a customs-bonded store at Mascot and stealing $1 million worth of watches. It was then he asked Sydney supremo George Freeman to look after his wife, Lena, while he was away. His one-time friend looked after her too well and, after a relationship with Freeman, she eventually became the manageress of a massage parlour in the eastern suburbs. This pleased neither Hurley nor his wife's stepfather, John ‘Jack' Muller, who shot Freeman in the head in his driveway on Anzac Day 1979. Fearful of the reprisals Freeman was bound to exact, Hurley sent a string of messages to the great man saying, ‘It wasn't me.' Freeman had recognised Muller, who was shot dead six weeks later, with Freeman out of town when the killing took place.

For a time, Hurley moved into heroin dealing but, Freeman's great friend Stan ‘The Man' Smith having told him that this was frowned upon, he turned to marijuana and later cocaine dealing. An exceptionally careful man, Hurley never used a public telephone, and maintained he was nothing but a refuse cleaner whose wealth had come from winning the lottery twice. After Freeman's death, Hurley became a new, if much more benign, Mr Big. More benign or not, a neighbour, told it would upset Hurley, discontinued the installation of an air-conditioning unit. When Hurley's fireplace was stolen, it was returned within twenty-four hours. On a positive note, every year Hurley threw a grand Melbourne Cup Day party for the locals.

In October 1980 Hurley was charged after the theft of the Golconda d'Or, a $2 million diamond that dated from 1793. It had been on display at Sydney Town Hall and the police believed a team of four had switched it for a fake after picking the lock on the case in broad daylight.
He was put on an identification
parade with his almost identical younger brother, Jeffrey, and not picked out because the witnesses could not distinguish between the two of them—the charges were dismissed. The stone was never recovered and Hurley later claimed that,
unable to sell it, and in an act of cultural vandalism, he had crushed the stone and sprinkled it in Sydney Harbour to destroy the evidence. He also claimed to have uncovered a system where guards put a money box in a lift at ground-floor level, turned a key and it was sent to the required floor, somewhere around the fourteenth. Hurley rejigged the lift so it stopped on a vacant floor, and removed the box, which contained $600 000, before sending it on its way upwards.