Gangland Robbers (9 page)

He was charged with assault and robbery in July 1912, when he and another man, who was never charged, were alleged to have knocked down a Samuel Boland and his friend Dougall McDougall in an alley off Flinders Street. Boland said he and McDougall had been drinking in the Westernport Hotel when Thompson approached them, and that when they left the hotel, he and a second man followed them. Thompson was granted bail after the committal proceedings but fled to Perth, where
he was arrested at Goodwood races. Sent back east in September 1912, Napthali H Sonenberg, solicitor of choice for any halfway decent criminal of the time, defended him. At his trial in November, Thompson had an alibi that in the afternoon he had been at the races and was in a billiard hall at the time of the robbery. He was acquitted.

There were much bigger things to come. On 6 January 1913 commercial traveller Arthur Trotter was robbed of £215 and shot dead in the bedroom of his home in George Street in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. It was thought he had been drinking in a sly-grog shop and brothel that Taylor's wife, blonde Dolly Gray, ran, and had been boasting of the money he carried. That evening he was followed home. His wife, Beatrice, told the police:

 

We saw two men in the room and my husband called out, ‘What's your game?' The taller of the two men replied, ‘We want the money.' My husband said, ‘What money? There's no money here. This is murder.' One man said ‘Shoot the—!' Suddenly my husband jumped out of bed and hit the man who was pointing the revolver at him. The burglar then fired and when my husband fell he said to the other man, ‘Get the — money.' The smaller man ran to the bed where Mr Trotter had been sleeping and turning over the mattress, he took the money. The other man covered me with a revolver and told me to keep quiet. They then ran away out of a back door.

The taller man of the two was about 5' 6” in height, of slight build and fairly well made. He wore a brown felt hat. The smaller man was 5' 4” high and of similar build to his companion. He wore a cap but I cannot distinguish his clothes.

I think I would know the voice of the first man if I heard it again.
It was that of a youth just entering manhood
.

 

A week after the robbery, with the police saying they had no clues, the sales of guns had tripled. Householders were buying neat little Belgian guns, meaning that, over time, there would be more weapons on the market for the likes of Taylor.

Western Australian police still regarded Thompson as a relatively minor criminal who was not up to a ‘big job', but in Adelaide in 1906, he had received a three-month sentence for assaulting the police and his fingerprints had been taken. They were found on a windowsill at Trotter's home and Thompson was arrested, along with his girlfriend Flossie
Harris, in a house in Jones Lane off Little Bourke Street. Thompson was, reported the newspapers, given ‘a vigorous examination', whatever that may have meant. There was other evidence: he had been seen loitering nearby, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, and was known to carry a pistol.
Squizzy Taylor and Dolly Gray
promptly decamped to Adelaide.

Fingerprinting was still in its infancy worldwide and it had not been until the previous year that the admissibility of fingerprints as evidence in Australia was finally decided. Victoria's sole fingerprint expert, Detective Sergeant Lionel Potter of the Criminal Investigation Branch, told the court he was certain the print was Thompson's even though it did not tally with the one taken while he was awaiting trial in South Australia. Although the prosecution had experts from South Australia and New South Wales to back Potter up, Thompson's counsel, George Maxwell, blew smoke all round the court, asking how Potter could tell the difference between the fingerprint of a Chinaman or of a Mongolian. The jurors were given a magnifying glass and asked to compare the prints themselves. Thompson had done what he could, by rubbing his fingers on a cell wall to smooth the skin and taking a bite out of one finger.

From afar, Squizzy Taylor arranged other matters. Thompson's girlfriend Flossie, who was at one time suspected of being the smaller person involved in the robbery, alibied him to an extent and Mrs Trotter was no longer so confident in her identification. After retiring for four hours, and to great applause from the public gallery, the jury acquitted Thompson, who was again loudly cheered in the street outside.

He left for New Zealand, where he served a short sentence for theft, and then in August 1913 went to Charters Towers in Queensland, where he was arrested for being an idle person. The charge was withdrawn when he undertook to leave Queensland.
He had with him a doll
from a Christmas pudding that he claimed was his mascot of twenty years. And so Thompson continued his peripatetic life, with, after returning to Melbourne, ticket snatching at the Easter meeting at Williamstown racecourse in 1914, and being charged with attempted pickpocketing in 1915. He and a James Darcy hid in a crowd returning from the races, removing wallets from people boarding trams.

Perhaps the Western Australian police had been right all along and Thompson was not a big-time crim. On the other hand, over the next decade, Squizzy Taylor, now generally thought to have been the second man in the Trotter robbery, acquired an almost iconic status.

 

First came the Trades Hall robbery.

 

EXECUTION OF JACKSON

 

Melbourne, Jan. 24.

 

The execution of John Jackson for the murder of Constable David Edward McGrath in October last was carried out at the Melbourne Gaol at 10 o'clock this morning. Jackson, who was shot in the leg in the shooting encounter with the police at the Trades Hall, Carlton, when Constable McGrath was shot dead, limped on to the gallows, and when asked if he had anything to say, exclaimed in loud, firm tones: ‘I only wish to thank the gaol authorities and warders for their kindness to me, one and all.' In less than twenty seconds Jackson was a dead man. He weighed 10st. 1lb, and was given a drop of 7ft. 11½in., his death being instantaneous. He certainly died bravely. For some time prior to his execution he had been penitent, and took a deep interest in the ministrations of the Rev. Forbes.
Jackson was 51 years of age
, and leaves a widow and two children for whom he showed the utmost devotion.

 

This had been John Jackson's first and last conviction; he was a man the police regarded as a master of his craft and one of the most talented safebreakers of the time. Along with his offsider Edward Parker, better known as Patrick Hegarty, he had been suspected of the June 1907 robbery at the Victoria Mint—when some £1300 of gold was taken—particularly after well-known fence and putter-up Thomas Glanville admitted that he had bought the gold from them. It had been stolen hours after a local businessman, EM Pascoe, had deposited it at the mint. Glanville said that the robbery had been executed with a duplicate key taken from the original supplied by a police constable but the locksmiths said this was impossible. On 13 June Senior Constable Barclay was fined £2 for not taking sufficient care to guard the safe.
He had, it appears, failed
to lock the door to the office containing it. Glanville had offered to sell Pascoe's gold back to him at a reduced price but this had been refused. However, in October the government refused to compensate Pascoe. When depositing the gold, he had signed an indemnity absolving the mint for any losses.

In early 1912 Jackson and Hegarty were again arrested, this time for a robbery at the jewellers Webster & Cohen in Little Collins Street. Now,
in accordance with the new procedures, on their arrest their fingerprints were taken. On 14 February no evidence was offered against Jackson but Hegarty was not as fortunate. His fingerprint had been found on a ginger beer bottle at the shop. Detective Sergeant Lionel Potter gave evidence that the print matched Hegarty's. Potter, who claimed to have already examined 29 000 fingerprints, was given a thorough going-over regarding the reliability of his tests.

Hegarty was found guilty, and Judge Johnson sentenced him to seven years' imprisonment, to be followed by detention in a reformatory prison. Hegarty appealed and the chief justice held that, while he believed Potter to be honest, he could not accept that no two people's imprints could possibly be alike. The other two justices dissented and Hegarty's conviction was upheld.

In May 1912 Jackson went on trial for a jewellery robbery in January 1905 at Ayres, Henry and Co in Swanston Street. Three safes had been cracked and some watches stolen. On the face of a watch that had been left behind was a thumbprint, which Potter and Inspector Childs, the New South Wales fingerprint expert, said was Jackson's. However, Jackson, with no previous convictions, produced a magnifying glass for the jury to examine the prints, telling them that he made his money gambling and had never set foot in the shop. He also did well with the judge, who told the jury that they had to be sure that Potter was right about the print. It would, he said, be very hard to convict a man on a print taken seven years earlier. Jackson was acquitted.

His last great success was probably the ‘Eight Hours Day' robbery at Melbourne's Exhibition Building. The takings from a union carnival, said to be between £300 and £400, deposited in a safe at the Trades Hall on 26 April 1915, were stolen during the night. The thieves had also helped themselves to biscuits, cheese, wine and stout in the secretary's office. No charges were brought but it was generally thought that Jackson was involved, and that, with his regular offsider Hegarty doing time, his new helpmate was Richard Buckley.

Quite what induced Jackson to go on the October Trades Hall robbery in which Constable McGrath was shot is a mystery. He should have been comfortably off for the present and he was always the number one suspect in any similar job that went off in the city. He should have called it a day while he was ahead and, indeed, his solicitor Napthali Sonenberg had offered to invest Jackson's savings in a newsagency for
him but he had declined. Perhaps he had come to believe that, at the age of fifty-one, he was untouchable.

This time Jackson's offsiders were Alexander Ward and, once again, Buckley, who had a long record of violence. Buckley had been sent to the Jika Reformatory at the age of fifteen and from then on it was one sentence after another, until in December 1883 he was sentenced to four years and ordered to have three whippings, one a month in each of the first, third and sixth months of his sentence. This was for a street robbery in which a mattress maker, William Murray, was robbed of 25 shillings. He identified Buckley, then known as Summers, at a very rudimentary identification parade.
Buckley called an alibi in the form of a mixed-race prostitute
, Emma Thomas (also known as Quin Ding), and a thief, Ah Chong, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, were not believed. Sentencing Buckley, the judge told him:

 

It is monstrous that respectable persons can not be allowed to walk in the public streets of Melbourne in broad daylight without being assaulted and ill treated. I have to inflict such a punishment as will not only be a warning to you, but will make others tremble.

 

Buckley had received the whippings before he received a free pardon in January 1885. He was given no compensation and it left him a bitter man. By February 1897 he had eleven previous convictions when he received six years for a post office robbery. In April he received a further sixteen years, to be served consecutively, for another receiving charge and for beating an old man who was the acting caretaker on premises he had robbed. He had been found not guilty of yet another armed robbery. Now he told the judge about his wrongful conviction for which he had had no compensation and this time he was asking for some leniency. The judge thought he was being lenient:

 

If I liked I could order you to be kept
in irons for three or four years for the way in which you assaulted the old man Stewart or I could order you to be flogged.

 

Buckley had known Alexander Ward while in Pentridge, when Ward was serving fourteen years, imposed in September 1902, including twelve for shooting at a police constable with intent to kill. They had tried to escape, which merely added to their sentences.

In the roman à clef
Power Without Glory
, Frank Hardy placed Snoopy Tanner, a thinly disguised version of Squizzy Taylor, firmly at the scene of the October Trades Hall robbery. In his version, it was orchestrated by bookmaker and fixer John Wren (John West, in Hardy's novel) to get the union account books that could tell him where illegal payments were going, as well as the ballot box from a recent election. West and Tanner waited around the corner on the night of the burglary, monitoring its progress. However, a contemporary journalist, Hugh Buggy, who closely followed Taylor's career believed this was one of the few such occasions he was not actually a participant. It may be that Jackson thought there would be similarly rich pickings in the Trades Hall as those from a few months earlier. Unless Hardy's theory was correct, even if the robbery had been successful, they would have been disappointed. There was only £30 in the safe.

Shortly before 1 a.m. on 2 October, while making his rounds, Sub Inspector Charles McKenna heard tapping, which seemed to him to come from the Trades Hall, as he stood on the corner of Victoria and Lygon streets. When he and Senior Constable Warren went to inspect the premises, they saw two windows open. Warren stayed there, while McKenna ran to Russell Street police station, from where Constables Dent and David McGrath were sent to help Warren. They climbed in through a window, McGrath switched on the lights for the hallway and courtyard, and they began to search the building.

Papers, account books and registers were scattered through the typographical office, lending some credence to Hardy's theory. As well, the safe had been ripped open at the back. McGrath called out that he was a police officer, and the answer was a volley of shots, one of which hit him in the throat. A total of twenty-six shots were fired by the robbers and police, and Buckley was hit in the neck and thigh. For a time, it was thought he would not survive. Jackson was hit in the leg. Ward managed to climb out of a window and was found edging along a parapet.