Gangland Robbers Read online

  VICTORY BOOKS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2016

  Text © James Morton and Susanna Lobez, 2016

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited,

  2016

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Text design and typesetting by Typeskill

  Cover design by Nada Backovic

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Morton, James, 1938– author.

  Gangland: robbers/James Morton and Susanna Lobez.

  9780522870251 (paperback)

  9780522870268 (ebook)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Organized crime—Australia—History.

  Gangs—Australia—History.

  True crime stories—Australia.

  Other Creators/Contributors:

  Lobez, Susanna, author.

  364.1060994

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 To Greed From Necessity: The Last of the Bushrangers

  2 Early Days

  3 Sailing Away

  4 Jewey Freeman and Shiner Ryan Raise the Bar

  5 Squizzy Taylor’s Cohorts

  6 Between the Wars

  7 The Great Train Robbers

  8 Death and the Ginger Game

  9 When Thieves Fall Out

  10 A Handful of Professionals

  11 Cashing In

  12 Bonnies and Clydes

  13 The Independents

  14 Death on the Job

  15 Home Invasions

  16 There’ll Be Some Changes Made

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  It did not take long after the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia on 24 January 1788 for the robberies to start. On 27 February 1788 Thomas Barrett was hanged for theft and conspiring to steal from government stores. The same year, George Mitton was hanged at Parramatta for robbery. In 1790 William Harris and Edward Wildblood were hanged for a home invasion at Rose Hill, New South Wales, in which they assaulted one of the occupants and stole beef and flour. On 16 October 1794 John Hill was hanged for robbery. Two years later, Governor Captain John Hunter commented on ‘a gang or two of banditti who have armed themselves and infest the country all armed, committing robberies on defenceless people’.

  It was not until 1828 that the first robbery worthy of the name took place in Australia, with the looting of the Bank of Australia in Sydney. Founded two years earlier, and standing on George Street between a private home and a public house, the bank was regarded as socially superior to the Bank of New South Wales, which had already been in existence for a decade. Because of this, the Bank of Australia was not generally popular among the colonists.

  The plot to rob the bank seems to have been thought out by a former convict, James Dingle, who had obtained his Certificate of Freedom the previous year. He decided there must be a way of tunnelling into the vault through a drain under George Street, and put the plan to another convict, George Farrell. Other convicts were recruited, and tools supplied by a former London safebreaker, William Blackstone, known as ‘Sudden Solomon’, who now worked for a blacksmith. The digging took place at weekends.

  Around 11 a.m. on Sunday 15 September, they finally removed the cornerstone nearest the street, and the smallest man, Farrell, went in and brought out two boxes. They went back to the bank on Sunday night and achieved a result that was probably beyond the team’s wildest dreams. By the time they emptied the vault, they had taken a total of £14 500. They also destroyed the bank’s ledgers. An immediate reward of £100 was posted, which was upped to £120. When neither produced a response, the governor, Sir Ralph Darling, offered an absolute pardon and free passage to England to the man or woman who provided information.

  The Sydney Monitor thought:

  Such however were the unpopular and we will say impolitic principles on which the Bank of Australia was originally founded that among the bulk of Sydney’s inhabitants the Bank’s loss has created secrecy and in many cases open satisfaction …

  The very names of the founders and principal managers are so disagreeable to the Colonists that we feel greatly afraid that facility rather than impediment will be given to the circulation of the stolen notes to such a degree of circulation as will prevent detection.

  But, as robbers have found over the centuries, it is the disposal of the proceeds that is sometimes the stage when it is most difficult to avoid detection. Even with the public turning a blind eye, there was no way that passing a £50 note, of which there were 100, would not attract attention; a note greater than £5 would cause serious problems. Nor could bills be paid with handfuls of silver. And so, just as many other robbers have done, Blackstone negotiated with a receiver, Thomas Woodward. His terms were not onerous. Blackstone gave him £1133, and Woodward told him that when he changed it, he would give Blackstone £1000. The pair went to the Bank of New South Wales, where in a classic example of the rort known as the ‘corner game’, Woodward instructed Blackstone to wait outside, then simply disappeared through a side door. As many robbers have found to their cost, receivers are not always reliable.

  Some months later, Blackstone tried to rob a gambling den in Macquarie Street and was shot by a policeman who witnessed the attempt. Blackstone’s colleague in the robbery was killed and Blackstone was sentenced to death, which was commuted to life imprisonment. He was sent to the dreaded Norfolk Island, where, unsurprisingly, he disliked the conditions, and in 1831 he decided to shelve, or dob in, his mates from the bank, which might mean his freedom and being able to return to England. Meanwhile, he was lodged on the prison ship Phoenix.

  Blackstone did not tell the police the whole story of the Bank of Australia robbery; one of the gang was not arrested, but Dingle and Farrell were charged with breaking and entering, and the now-retrieved Woodward with receiving. They appeared in court in Sydney on 10 June 1831. Under English law, convicting them on Blackstone’s evidence presented a serious difficulty—as he had been convicted of a capital crime, his evidence was inadmissible in any case, criminal or civil. For the first time, the court broke away from the English rules of evidence and, by a two-to-one majority—with the chief justice dissenting—decided that the law was not applicable in New South Wales. Had it been, at that time few people would ever have been convicted. Dingle and Farrell received a very lenient ten years apiece; and the cheating receiver, Woodward, fourteen years.

  Blackstone received a pardon, £100 and free passage back to England but had not learned from his experiences. While waiting to be sent back, in July 1832 he was arrested for, but acquitted of, stealing a gun lock in Sydney. In February the next year, shortly before he was due to be shipped back to England, he was caught breaking into a warehouse and was again sentenced to transportation for life to Norfolk Island. In 1839 he was sent to Cockatoo Island, from which he was released in December the following year. Back in Sydney, Blackstone committed a few more, relatively petty, offences. But reports
that his body had been found in 1844 in a swamp at Woolloomooloo were incorrect. He died at the Asylum of the Benevolent Society in Sydney on 17 March 1850.

  The Bank of Australia never recovered its money but it did survive until 1843, when it folded amid allegations of financial mismanagement.

  If the Bank of Australia was not a lucky bank, then a barque called the Nelson was not a lucky ship. Under the command of Captain Walter Wright, and within days of the discovery of gold in Victoria, she sailed from London, arriving in Melbourne on 11 October 1851. With the glitter of gold in their sights, most of the crew promptly jumped ship. The Nelson was then towed to Geelong, and loaded with wool and 8000 ounces of gold, then worth around £30 000. She returned to Melbourne, to find replacement crew. Wright, as befitted a captain, stayed on shore, leaving the ship under the command of the first mate. On board were also the second mate and three other crew members.

  On 2 April 1852 a team of men, some dressed as women, others in frock coats, rowed across Hobsons Bay to the Nelson. The leaders were James Duncan, James Morgan, John Roberts and John James, alias William Johnston, who had come together through robbing diggers. Some accounts have it that passengers and crew were nailed up in the stateroom, where they remained until a steward found them the next morning. Other accounts claim that there were ladies aboard who were treated well and each given a glass of champagne. Despite the fact there were some forty other ships in the harbour, including water police and customs vessels, the robbers sailed away and landed on St Kilda Beach. There they divided the spoils, scattering the boxes that had held the gold in the scrub, where they were found the next morning by a compositor from the Argus who was on his way to work. Scavengers soon arrived in the area and one man made off with a ‘nugget of considerable size’.

  The robbers’ success was short-lived. A reward of £750 having been offered, the leaders were caught within three weeks. One had been just about to sail for Sydney, and the other three were in bed at the Ocean Child Hotel at Williamstown. Henry Davies identified James Morgan as the man who had woken one of the ship’s officers and put a pistol to his head. Rather generously, Morgan had then offered Davies a share of the gold if he joined in. He had declined.

  Justice was swift, and in May, Mr Justice Redmond Barry sentenced Duncan, Morgan, James and Roberts to fifteen years apiece on road gangs; the first three years were to be spent in irons. Barry did have doubts about Roberts, and said that if at any time during his sentence he could produce evidence to prove his innocence, the case should be reopened. Roberts managed just that, providing an alibi, but a short while later was convicted of another robbery and received ten years.

  Only around £2260 of what had been stolen from the Nelson was recovered. The rest was thought to have been fenced through a St Kilda publican, John Dascome, who was never charged. However, it was the raid on the Nelson that convinced the state authorities that they needed a proper detective force, and Scotland Yard men were brought out. As for the Nelson, she spent many years as part of the trade between London and Melbourne. On 7 October 1870, while on a voyage from Aguilas to the Tyne, she hit rocks and sank near the Seven Stones at the entrance to the English Channel, drowning the master, Captain Henderson, and two of her crew.

  But what exactly constitutes robbery? According to the Australian Institute of Criminology:

  Robbery is the unlawful taking of property from an individual or organisation without consent, and is accompanied by force or threat of force. A robbery may involve the use or implied threat of a weapon (armed robbery) or may not involve a weapon (unarmed robbery).

  While what occurred on the Nelson was certainly a robbery, strictly speaking the Bank of Australia job was not, although, doubtless, had they been interrupted, the men would have used violence to escape; it should probably be called a heist (a major theft not necessarily involving violence) but that word did not come into use until a century later. We have taken a rather broader view of ‘robbery’, and included what newspapers and the public over the decades have called robberies but that may not have come within the legal or sociological definition. Gangland Robbers, then, is an account of major property crimes in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day.

  One of the problems in bringing things up to date is the multiplicity of suppression orders the courts are now imposing and that continue long after cases have finished. Many of these are designed to protect those who have turned dog, even if they weren’t believed when they gave evidence at trial. Their names may not be bywords for the general public but these people are, of course, well known to the criminal community. Even if someone has been given another name and moved to another state to serve their sentence, they will be instantly recognisable in the prison showers from, for example, the unicorn tattooed on their right buttock. Suppression orders probably reached their zenith in 2012 when while sentencing a man on a charge of conspiracy to murder a judge closed the court to the media and the public and ordered his sentencing remarks, including the penalty imposed, be opened only by order of a judge.

  Some will find our choice of robbers arbitrary. Many offenders have turned out to be far more talented escapees than they are robbers and, for the most part, we have not included the stories of men such as Darcy Dugan and Brenden Abbott. (They will appear in our forthcoming Gangland: The Escapees.) There may be those who believe that their friends and relations deserve to be in Gangland Robbers. If they are kind enough to write to us, we will try to include those they nominate in any future edition.

  To Greed From Necessity: The Last of the Bushrangers

  1

  There are estimates that, during the nineteenth century, there were upwards of 2000 bushrangers, from escaped convicts who robbed to survive, to second-generation bushrangers, such as John Vane, who was born in 1842 and sometimes called the ‘last of the bushrangers’. But what is difficult is deciding exactly who was a bushranger and what exactly was bushranging. Did it have to be more than cattle rustling? Could it be a single bank robbery? Multiple bank robberies? Could it be holding up a homestead? A bail-up of a gold escort? It has been suggested that Jack Bradshaw, self-proclaimed ‘last of the bushrangers’, should not count as one because he only held up a couple of banks. Was bushranging really at an end after the capture of Ned Kelly?

  What is clear is that the golden era of the bushranger came with the discovery of gold in New South Wales. Before that, it really was a question of survival. In Tasmania, because of supply ships failing to arrive, conditions were so poor that in 1805 the authorities, faced with general starvation, actually released convicts, gave them arms and sent them into the bush to survive through hunting. It should not have been a surprise that some of them took up a different form of hunting. The bush surrounding the settlements was unexplored, but this did not deter the convicts from escaping, with the idea of making their way to Batavia (now Jakarta), or to China. Some died but others survived by joining forces with Indigenous people. Others took to bushranging.

  Eventually, greed rather than survival became the key word. The bushrangers were no longer always bearded and sweat-stained men living rough. Indeed, as early as the 1830s, the gang of the Dublinborn ‘Wild Colonial Boy’ Jack Donohoe were described as ‘remarkably clean’ bushmen, dressed in a raffish style. ‘Bold’ Jack himself was said to be fitted out in ‘black hat, superfine blue cloth coat lined with silk … plaited shirt … laced boots’.

  Some thirty years after the 1863 Dunn’s Plains robbery, discussing bushranging in general and the robbery in particular, the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal commented:

  The gradations were from idleness and petty stealing to cattle stealing; from cattle stealing to robbery from the person; then to robbery (under arms) of mails and escorts; followed by the ruin and extermination of honest storekeepers, attacks on the officers of justice, raids on banks, country towns and private establishments. The time had now arrived for a further advance —to the Neapolitan system of ransom. This made, the question was
seriously discussed in certain quarters whether the next successive movements would be camps, stations, regiments, batteries, and open attack upon the united Government forces.

  The reverse side of the coin is that by the 1880s, many, such as the Kelly Gang, had become what the Marxist writer Eric Hobsbawm described as ‘social bandits’, seen as ‘heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported by peasant society’ in the fight on behalf of the oppressed Catholics and small land owners. This was an attitude they took care to nourish.

  By the 1860s the New South Wales police were under pressure to put a stop to bushranging, and the Police Regulation Act 1862 provided for a central system controlled from Sydney. It was in June that year that Frank Gardiner devised the robbery of the Eugowra gold escort. At 3 p.m. on 15 June his gang bailed up the coach, which had four police officers as an escort—one sergeant on the box with the driver, and three in the coach itself. Earlier, the gang had bailed up two bullock drivers and had them place their wagons across the track. The police were completely unprepared; one was shot in the groin, another in the arm and the others fled into the bush. Gardiner’s men picked up 2700 ounces of gold and £3700 in cash, estimated to be worth $20 million today.

  Lieutenant General Sir Francis Pottinger was authorised to lead a recouping expedition. He and his men met with initial success, retrieving 1500 ounces of the gold and taking two prisoners, before they were bailed up and lost both the gold and the men. Eventually, arrests were made and after one of the gang, Daniel Charters, was given bail, he dobbed in his mates. There had been such a spate of robberies that a special commissioner was appointed to sit in Sydney and try bushrangers, including members of the Eugowra Gang, in February 1863. The only one of the gang who was hanged was Henry Manns, who had wanted to plead guilty and was of good character. Two others, John Bow and Alexander Fordyce, convicted by the special commissioner, were reprieved. Gardiner had vanished.