Gangland Robbers (25 page)

In August 2006 a bag of diamonds worth $1.6 million, due to be displayed at the Australian Jewellery Fair at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, vanished. It had been sent from Melbourne, and either disappeared en route or from a vault in Sydney before being put on display. No charges were ever brought.

It was an October 2004 30-kilogram cocaine haul, using corrupt baggage handlers, that did for Hurley. The bag containing the cocaine had been the last thing loaded on an Aerolineas Argentinas flight from Chile. It was to be unloaded first, so it could be removed before it reached the baggage hall in Sydney and put in a designated bin for subsequent collection. Unfortunately for Hurley, the police had managed to place an informer in his network. Hurley and one of his associates fled. It was thought Hurley had gone to South America, but he was found living in Sydney and was remanded in custody. At the time of his death, aged sixty-one from cancer, on 23 January 2007, Hurley was under police guard in hospital, awaiting trial.

From the middle of the 1930s, Melbourne businesses suffered a series of wages snatches. One of the most sensational was the killing on 31 January 1936 of Titles Office messenger James Edward Scriven, shot while he was escorting a clerk to a bank in Little Lonsdale Street, in a robbery that netted nearly £1760.

It was not until October that charges were brought, and this was only after a John Stevens gave up the names of brothers Geoffrey and Rupert Davies and William Cody. Stevens told the police that he had been told the money was buried in North Richmond before being taken to Queensland to be changed. When he dobbed in the trio, Stevens, who had served a four-year stretch for a South Melbourne post office robbery, for which he claimed he had been framed, was under threat of a consorting charge. The Davies brothers and Cody were arrested after a gun battle with the police when they were spotted on a tram in Nicholson Street. Cody shot at a detective and jumped off the tram. Chased into Exhibition Gardens, he tried to fire again but the gun jammed.

There was also some hotly contested identification evidence. The police had not bothered to have a line-up but instead had shown the witnesses photographs and had a courtroom identification. At the first trial, Geoffrey Davies was acquitted and the jury disagreed about the other two. Retrials rarely help the defendants and, just before Christmas, they were found guilty. They appealed.

Now Stevens went to
Truth
to say that he had been pressured into making the allegations, and swore a statutory declaration to this effect. He was soon bent back by the detectives and swore another declaration
that the first one was lies. When the matter went to the Court of Appeal, the court would have none of it. However, the High Court listened more attentively, and had some harsh words about whether Stevens could be trusted to tell the time of day, and whether the trial judge had sufficiently explained the dangers of the identification evidence. A new trial was ordered. It took place in June and the jury disagreed once more. In August the prosecution gave up and offered no evidence, but the authorities were still not done with the men. Rupert Davies now pleaded guilty to perjury. He had given evidence at the first trial that he had never been to Brisbane, and for that lie he received two years.
Cody received six years
on a charge of shooting at the police with intent to resist arrest, in the gun battle in Exhibition Gardens the previous year.

Then, on 1 September 1938, Frederick Sherry, a shoe manufacturer carrying money to and from banks, was shot and killed at Clifton Hill as two masked men in a stolen car chased down him and his passenger. Two Pentridge graduates, Herbert Jenner and Selwyn Wallace, admitted being in the car but denied firing the shots that killed Sherry. There was a problem at the trial because Clarence Sherry, the dead man's brother, told the court he thought he recognised Jenner from a previous robbery with which he had not been charged.

In December the pair were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. At first the jury returned a verdict of accessory after the fact for Wallace but the judge told them this was not a proper verdict, and ninety minutes later they found him guilty. They also made a recommendation of mercy on the grounds of their youth. The pair's appeals were dismissed, but at the end of the month their sentences were each commuted to imprisonment for the term of their natural life.
This meant that only after
they had served many years might they obtain their release by the King's special intervention or the executive council's special decision.

Two days after Sherry's death, the staff of the Trocadero Theatre in Footscray were held up at gunpoint and the £60 evening takings stolen. The robber escaped in a stolen car.

Now transport company Mayne Nickless decided to introduce armoured cars as a deterrent to wages snatches. They bought two 15-hundredweight panel vans lined with armour plate steel and fitted with glass strong enough to withstand a .303 bullet. The money travelled in a safe whose handles retracted when it was dropped, making it
difficult to pick up. Once the vans were delivered the directors cold-called potential clients, and by the end of the first day, two—including Sherry's business—had been signed up. Once it was established in Melbourne, Mayne Nickless took the concept to Sydney in 1940, and then, after the war, Adelaide and Geelong. However, the Brisbane police refused to give Mayne Nickless's men pistol permits.

As the years went by and banks improved their security, cash-in-transit heists increased. Mayne Nickless's Armaguard division, and other armoured car companies, now provided what criminals saw as legitimate, and sometimes easy, targets.

Despite a reward of £2500, believed the largest then offered in Australia, no one was ever able to work out how £33 593, part of the Southern Army Headquarters' payroll, disappeared on 7 August 1952 between the bank vault and a Mayne Nickless truck waiting on the corner of Collins and Queen Streets to deliver it. And it was done without any guns or violence. That there was a conviction was, yet again, an example of ‘Loose lips give Jacks tips'.

The money had been placed in tins overnight, awaiting delivery the next morning. It seems that a gatekeeper was a few minutes late for work and also that around 7.30 a.m. the gates were left unguarded for a few minutes. The general belief was that it was an opportunistic theft, rather than a carefully planned one, but ‘small, dapper' Ronald Stanley Williams, a thief with form going back to the 1930s and who was convicted of receiving part of the money, never said. He had already opened his mouth sufficiently when, the day after the robbery, he had given in his notice at work, saying ‘My ship has come in and I do not think I will have to work again.' He was also spending money like a drunken sailor, staying at a hotel for a fortnight with three other people and buying so much champagne that the staff had to go to the bank to get change.

Four days after the robbery, the police said they had given up hope of recovering the money or even finding the thief. Then, at the end of September, they thought they had found one of the cash tins on Elizabeth Street. Unfortunately, it was a hoax. Inside was a note in the style of the then popular cartoon character Chad that said, ‘Wot, no numbers?' and ‘Thanks for the £33,000'.

There was a round-up of suspects on 15 October, when sixteen people were arrested. Fourteen of them were released, and Robert Vicar was charged with being a felon with a pistol. So was Williams,
who additionally was charged with having £56 that was suspected of being stolen. He received six months.

Then, in July 1953, two small boys were clearing out a shed in Moonee Ponds to make a guinea pig pen when they came across a jar containing around £800 in notes. One told his grandmother, who told the police. More jars were found in the shed and £2700 was discovered. On 27 July Williams was arrested. The rest of the final recovered total, of £4600 had been found in his brothers' backyards.

At his trial in December, the prosecution tried, without success, to prove he had stolen the money himself. For his part, Williams complained that the police had verballed him and threatened his witnesses. Convicted of receiving, he was sentenced to four years.
His appeal failed, and whether
on his release he ever worked again went unrecorded.

Information would also come from former employees. John Harding, using a false name, had worked as a driver for Mayne Nickless. In 1961 he, along with his offsider Geoffrey McInnes, went to Sydney, where, in conversation with Reuben Harvey, he said that security at the depot had been very poor. It was agreed he should apply for a job back in Melbourne and, on 29 March, he was immediately put on a payroll van, which set off with £90 000 from the North Melbourne depot and went first to the State Government's offices off Parliament Place. Two payrolls were delivered, and the van was then driven about 200 metres to the nearby Treasury Building. The escorts went in to deliver the payroll and when they returned ten minutes later, they found the armoured van had disappeared with the remaining £31 000. That afternoon, the police found the van, but not the £31 000, behind the Sylvania Hotel in Cambellfield.

The next afternoon, the police found the 19-year-old McInnes driving a new car, for which he had paid cash at lunchtime. He, Harding and Reuben Harvey each received five years, along with a further three for a variety of offences, including, in Harvey's case, robbing in company postmaster general employees of £3570, near the Sylvester post office in July the previous year.

Armaguard's post-war rival MSS Security was the creation of Devon Minchin, a World War II fighter pilot, but he suffered two major reverses. The first was when a theft from an armoured car in Martin Place, Sydney, led to Lloyd's of London cancelling its insurance. The second, led by Joey Turner, effectively ruined the business.

After World War II, Melbourne organised crime was largely run by a quintet known as The Combine, who were, in theory, members of the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union; how many of them actually turned up for work, as opposed to collecting one or more pay packets, is another matter. Harold Nugent, who the police by now regarded as ‘a reckless and dangerous criminal who may resort to firearms if cornered', was probably the most senior. The others were Freddie ‘The Frog' Harrison, his mate Norman Bradshaw (aka Cornelius) and former boxer Jack Eric Twist.
Standing slightly apart from the others
, mainly because he was in prison most of the time, was Joseph Patrick ‘Joey' Turner, also known as Monash. It was Turner, with his ‘dead' blue eyes, who seemed the most frightening.

Although he held a Painters and Dockers Union ticket for more than twenty years, Turner often claimed to be a miner and, although a talented thief and planner, he was also a thieves' ponce. If a job was done in Melbourne, Turner usually took a cut. The journalist Tom Prior, meeting him for the first time, described him as wearing ‘a well cut grey suit, smart yellow overcoat, cream sharkskin shirt, grey tie, hat and shiny black shoes'.
Turner had a diamond in his front tooth
, something he shared with the pianist Jelly Roll Morton and with Turner's good friend Kath Pettingill, who always spoke well of him. ‘Flash as a rat,' said a Melbourne barrister who knew him. Another regarded him as one of the three greatest criminals he had ever met.

Born in 1918, and another diminutive criminal who boxed at bantam-weight very badly—seven bouts, seven losses—Turner always maintained he didn't know where Pentridge was until, in his early twenties, he did his first job after a night out. In 1952 he received three months for consorting with Bradshaw, Miles Patrick O'Reilly, docker Leon Bazin and Stanley ‘Moocher' Birch; twelve months for possessing a firearm, which he said had been planted on him; eighteen months for armed robbery; and then, in July, a further two years, consecutive to the current sentence, for stealing around £2000 from a Mayne Nickless truck in Collins Street. It was the first time in a non-capital case the jury had been kept together throughout the trial to defeat any attempt at nobbling. The first trial had been aborted after a visit had been paid to the jury foreman.
Now Turner was warned that
he was well on the way to being declared a habitual criminal.

After serving his sentence for the Mayne Nickless job, Turner ran one of the first car-wash businesses in Melbourne. For a time, he made
a go of Washland, near Collingwood Town Hall, but this did not last long. Just as their predecessors had paraded in front of brothels in the 1920s, so the police now took to parking in front of the entrance, which tended to deter potential customers.

The apex, and the end, of Joey Turner's criminal career came in 1970, when he led a gang of Melbourne dockers in a raid on MSS. Charles Raymer, who had worked for the company for six weeks, provided information. On 4 June an MSS security van was stolen from Camberwell. Inside was a set of about a hundred keys. On 10 June thieves broke into the East Melbourne police station but apparently, and surprisingly, only stole a police cap and coat. At 2 a.m. the next day, when an MSS security guard answered a call on the intercom, it was two police officers wanting to return the keys that had been stolen from the van. The guard later identified the one in plain clothes, who had said he was a detective, as Joey Turner, because of his piercing blue eyes. Turner would bitterly dispute this. The ‘policemen' threw the bundle of keys on a table, and as the guard was picking it up, a gun was shoved in his face. He was pushed to the ground and handcuffed. Turner and his offsider cut open the wire cage holding the payroll money and left, taking $289 233. It was thought that within twenty-four hours, some of the money had arrived in Hong Kong.

The case was solved when Turner was caught because of his own carelessness. He had left a number of $20 bills in his trouser pocket. His wife had washed the trousers and, although he tried to iron the bills dry, they were still wet when he bought a kangaroo-skin rug from the souvenir store at the Southern Cross Hotel. When the shop assistant took the notes to the bank, the cashier became suspicious and checked the numbers. Bingo.