The Great New Zealand Robbery

by Scott Bainbridge

  Their movements from there were unclear, and would have depended on what had to be done to equip themselves to perform a ‘soup-job’, as cutting a safe open with gas equipment was quaintly known. Depending on where they drove to collect the equipment, and/or an additional team member, the round trip could have taken three-quarters of an hour if within the confines of the city, or up to an hour and a half if their quest took them out into the suburbs.

  The detectives’ best guess was that the crew were back with their equipment and/or their gas-axe artist by 2 am, and that they used the 30 minutes before the night cleaners arrived to lug their heavy gear upstairs and set it up. Then they quietly waited.

  — — —

  Alan Scott ran a business with his brother Colin cleaning offices around the city, and the ground-floor offices of the Northern Steamship Company building and the front and rear staircases were on their round. As a rule, they usually arrived at the Northern Steamship Company building between 2.30 am and 2.45 am. But Thursdays were different. They had two additional buildings in Queen Street to clean, which they did on their way down, and didn’t arrive at the Northern Steamship Company building until 3.40 am. Who knows whether the offenders had anticipated this? If not, they would have become extremely nervous, because to cut the safe open would take close to 45 minutes. Time would be exceptionally tight.

  Alan Scott finished and started packing up his van at 5 am. He glanced over towards the Auckland Municipal Bus Terminal and noticed a solitary man sitting on one of the benches under a shelter. The man was wearing a tweed overcoat and hat, and seemed to be looking over to the rear of the Northern Steamship Company building. He turned away when he caught Scott’s eye. The Scotts departed at 5.15 am, and Alan Scott maintained that the man was still sitting on the bench looking over in the direction of Customs Street. As they drove off, the man turned back to face the building and watched as they left. Neither of the Scott boys could remember any other vehicles parked in the area.

  As soon as the coast was clear, the crew upstairs in Mr Gill’s office would have received a signal. The gear was already set up and the gases set to their respective pressures: all it took was to turn the feed on and strike a match. The flame would have ignited with a pop and fierce roar, illuminating the office with a flat white glare. As the operator lowered goggles over his eyes and bent over the safe, his companion or companions would have glanced nervously at the cloth over the window. Any gap there, and they might as well signal passers-by in Morse code to let them know what they were doing.

  When the cone of the flame was directed at the top of the safe, the metal would first have darkened at its touch, then a spot the size of a threepence would have glowed—cherry red, then orange, then yellow. As it changed to white, a hole would have appeared and sparks would have begun crackling about. With unhurried, practised skill, the wielder of the torch would have dragged the flame down, then across, then up, then across again to join the rough slot he had cut, perhaps leaving a sliver of metal at the corner so that the oblong cut-out didn’t fall into the hole. The piece of cut metal could then be prised up and twisted off like the lid from a tin of soup.

  Holding the torch in one hand, the operator would have plunged his leather-gloved hand into the hole to scoop out smouldering handfuls of sawdust and asbestos fibre, tossing them aside until he had clear access for the flame to the inner skin of the safe. The second hole was smaller and would have taken a little less time to cut. Once he was through, the operator would have snuffed the torch, reached in and prised the smaller oblong plate out. He may even have allowed himself a little flourish as he let this fall to the ground.

  Gas-cutting experts the police consulted estimated the execution of the cutting would have taken around 45 minutes. That would have brought the time to around 6 am. People would be out and about shortly, and the robbers would soon lose the cover of darkness. But there would still have been a bit of a wait until the margins of the hole were cool enough for an arm to be inserted.

  Once they judged it safe, the offenders reached in and quickly dragged out the seven canvas bags full of money. But one of the bags seems to have snagged on the jagged edges of the hole and ripped open, spilling dozens of notes on the ground. Rather than gather the notes up, the robbers left them, and discarded the torn bank bag. The others they placed into two larger leather carry-bags.

  They would probably have preferred to take their equipment with them, but time was against them. One of them fetched a cushion from a sofa in the ladies’ restroom and laid it on top of the gas bottles. He then set fire to it, perhaps hoping the fire would ignite the gas bottle and blow the office and any potential evidence to smithereens. Then they walked quickly but calmly down the back stairs and out through the fire-escape door. It was already light. When they saw a man—Eric Thomas—glance up at them from where he was sitting in Tyler Street, they acted casually, chatting as they passed him by. They would have been nervous when they sensed he was following them, and whichever of them was the mastermind of the operation would definitely have preferred that their getaway driver was less conspicuous about the manner in which he collected them on Customs Street. But, as they leaned back in the leather seats of the car, they would have allowed themselves a bit of a smile and a deep sigh of relief.

  It was hardly flawless, but they’d pulled off the heist. Now it was time to put the next phase of the plan into operation.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE USUAL SUSPECTS

  ‘I couldn’t detect any trace of fingerprints whatsoever,’ Harry Lissette explained. ‘Even on the walls where they cut the wiring—there was nothing. They must have used heavy gloves. The only thing I found was the one faint rubber shoe print which, I stress, was so faint I couldn’t capture a clear image. I’m afraid we’ve got nothing of any evidentiary value whatsoever. All I can really confirm with some degree of certainty is that the shoe is roughly size nine.’

  ‘It’s all a bit scary that they didn’t leave traces,’ Bob Walton said. ‘I’ll get the guys at Modus Operandi 23 to run a make and compare it to the Costume Jewellery heist. This is a professional hit. We should let the Aussies know. I reckon three or more crooks were involved, purely because it would have taken at least two or three strong buggers to carry the equipment upstairs without drawing undue attention to themselves. And it would have taken the combined strength of two jokers to drag the safe out of the cupboard like that, with another guy ready to disable the alarm system immediately.’ The others nodded.

  ‘They knew what they were doing, all right,’ McCombe said. ‘It looks like they had about the right amount of gelignite to blow the safe, but they hadn’t banked on the security plug. When blowing it nixed, they brought up exactly the right equipment to do the soup-job. The pressure readings on the gauges of the gas bottles were at the precise pressure levels to cut it open. I’ve been on this squad a few years now and I know plenty of jokers who can rattle the shit out of a safe. But I can’t think of any of the crackers who can do a soup-job. Do you, Les?’

  Schultz shook his head. ‘MO can’t think of many, either.’ He read from a memo. ‘They say “the field of known, active safe-breakers skilled in the use of both cutting torch and electric detonators is limited”. I’ll get my guys to act the lean, fizz out which mugs have been broadening their horizons and learning the intricacies of the soup.’

  ‘This detonator you mentioned,’ McCombe jazzed. ‘Looking at the description, this is an electric gasless. This is the type they use in tunnelling work or in quarries. The Drainage Board uses them too. They have a delay of between three and ten seconds. Clever. Can’t say I’ve ever come across this type of detonator in a safe-break.’

  Schultz sat up. ‘A while back, crooks knocked off a couple of hundred detonators from the Glendowie Project. We thought they’d start showing up, but they never did. Never did find out what happened to them, either. Looks like one of them might have surfaced after all. Might be an idea to get MO to revisit that little lot and comp
are who we suspected then with who is round now.’

  Thomas Irving was quiet. He was ranked equal to Walton and Schultz, but he was over a decade older and had attained his rank in the days when police officers were promoted on the basis of time served rather than merit. That system had only lately changed, as the result of the shake-up of the New Zealand Police instigated by Samuel Barnett. Irving disagreed with what he thought were the hasty promotions of men who had served fewer than ten years, although even he admitted a grudging respect for Walton’s brilliant detective mind. As the others paused for thought, he finally spoke up.

  ‘It’s pretty clear to me that our robbers had inside knowledge of the layout of the building. First, they located the hidden trapdoor on the ground floor. Even in broad daylight, you wouldn’t know that was there when you walked into that office, and they found it by torchlight. And you’d have to know the building intimately to know the main wiring ran through there. Second, they knew exactly which wires to cut, because they took out the telephone system for the entire building but only cut the power to the side offices on the first floor. And never mind all that. You could only get to the foyer of the Northern Steamship Company from the door on the ground floor. Yet no sign of forced entry was found on the door. What d’you reckon? The robbers must have had a key.’

  Hoy tamped his pipe. ‘When they broke into the commission office upstairs, they jemmied a cupboard between the second and third offices. I asked Captain Stanich what the significance of this cupboard was, and he said they use it to store stationery and office supplies. But get this: this cupboard used to be the strongroom. The safe used to be in there until it was shifted to the fourth office in ’53. I reckon Tom’s right. The robbers were tipped off by someone who knew the layout of the building and the goings on of the commission from at least three years prior. They wouldn’t have bothered with that cupboard if they knew the safe had been moved. And, anyway, we know they knew that a large amount of money was stored inside the safe the night before payday. That wasn’t general knowledge.’

  The group spent most of the rest of the meeting kicking around the names of potential suspects. Most local possibilities were nixed. Consideration was then given to whether the offenders were part of an Australian firm. The border between Australia and New Zealand was pretty porous to the underworld in those days, due to the volume and nature of trans-Tasman shipping. In the 1950s, it was relatively easy for a person to stowaway—the popular term was ‘ring-bolt’—if one had the right connections or means of persuasion. It wasn’t just the economy that critically depended on the waterfront: seamen in ports all over the world had long-standing associations with the criminal underworld, and for a ‘drink’ (a financial reward or favour) passage aboard an outgoing vessel could be arranged quite easily. Schultz would lean on his informants to see who was in town, while Sherwin would shut down the wharves and set the wharf police to patrolling the vicinity of outbound vessels and searching any that were due to depart.

  Since June 1956, at least three Australian shop-breaking gangs were known to have been involved in operations in Christchurch, Timaru and Dunedin. Almost nightly, safe-breaks had netted gangs £1500, and city leaders were demanding action. The final straw came when the safe at the Christchurch magistrates’ court was broken into and relieved of £7 (equivalent to $350 at the time of writing). Detective Superintendent Frank Aplin headed south and set up a special squad of constables ‘not averse to a bit of biff ’, as he explicitly specified, to supplement the beat constables and special burglary squad in Christchurch and Dunedin and mount nightly patrols.

  Truth followed the South Island crime wave with almost weekly front-page coverage:

  One safe was blown in Dunedin with a technique seldom encountered previously by detectives in this country. Possibly this fact gave rise to the present rumour that expert Australian criminals have joined forces with local underworld characters.24

  The ‘seldom encountered’ technique was a soup-job. Many of the southern safes had been cut open. Perhaps one or more of these gangs had ventured north?

  Les Schultz ventured his opinion that the case would likely be solved by some crook squealing. Twenty thousand pounds was, as he put it, a shitload of dough, and if there were a gang of men involved, chances are there would be at least one ‘big-noter’ amongst them who wouldn’t be able to resist opening his trap. The success of such a heist could bring the best and worst out in the criminal fraternity. Some would admire the achievement, but there would be just as many who would view it as an opportunity to shitcan—to settle scores or generally land someone in it. The chances of this happening increased if there were jealousy, rivalry or some other motivation to do a stitch-up, and given the personalities of many of the more prominent criminals there was no shortage of any of these drivers. Once the robbers’ identities were known to their fellow crooks, they would be in a precarious situation, unless they had a solid plan in place as to how to shift the money.

  A haul of this size would be difficult to ‘clean’ without the right connections, and it would come at a cost, whether as a percentage of the takings or as a set fee with a high interest rate. In the criminal fraternity, it was difficult to know whom to trust, and the robbers could hardly cry foul to the authorities if they were extorted or double-crossed. They were vulnerable.

  Within a day or two of the heist, the State Fire and Accident Insurance Company announced a reward of £500 for information leading to the apprehension of the persons concerned and the recovery of the whole or a substantial part of the payroll. This will have piqued the interest of even more people with connections to the shady side of the street. Within two days, a number of men with criminal records—especially known safe-breakers—had been visited, and sly-grogs and gambling joints had been shaken down by Schultz and his squad. In a report to Finlay, Walton wrote:

  Numerous criminals of Auckland freely admit they too would like to know the identity of the offenders with a view to turning the information into a monetary gain for themselves, either by blackmailing the offenders or collecting the £500 reward. Information is usually readily forthcoming from the criminal class in Auckland, and there is no doubt that they would happily snitch off the offenders, if such were known to them.

  There was truly no honour amongst thieves. But the worrying thing was: no one seemed to know who had pulled it off.

  — — —

  Some of the names thrown up as the detectives jazzed on who they considered capable of pulling off such a heist were promising.

  ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this robbery involved some combination of Jack West, Richard MacDonald, Archibald Banks and Gus Parsons,’ Walton said.

  Trouble was, three of them were up at the ‘Big House’ even as the inquiry team took their names in vain. John Sidney ‘Jack’ West was regarded as New Zealand’s premier safe breaker. He was then doing a stretch in Mount Eden for blowing the safe of the Putaruru TAB in April 1956. Schultz interviewed him anyway, reasoning that, even if West couldn’t have been physically involved, he may well have passed on information to associates. West initially denied all knowledge of who was responsible, but when Schultz gave him a sniff of the reward he goosed three or four he could think of. However, Prison Superintendent Horace Haywood, who had been listening to the conversation, rubbished the information. He reckoned it was common knowledge that West ‘had a blue’ with the guys he had named and they were waiting outside the walls for him to finish his stretch so that they could deal to him.

  Two of the other men Walton and Schultz believed were capable of organising a robbery of this magnitude were just as easy to find as West. MacDonald and Parsons were also guests of Her Majesty at Mount Eden Prison. Both were associated with the man who was considered to be a prime suspect, Archibald Banks. Parsons was a long-term business associate of Banks. MacDonald had his own crew but both had been brought down at the same time when a tip-off had compromised one of Auckland’s leading criminal enterprises.

&nbs
p; In March 1956, the nation was outraged when a cleaner had stumbled across a burglary in progress at the Auckland Bus Company depot in New Lynn and had been severely beaten as a result. Photographs of the large wrench used in the bashing were run in the newspapers, prompting a telephone call from a conscientious young fellow who believed he could positively identify the tool. The caller told police he had recently started working as a car groomer for Atlas Motors on New North Road, and on the Friday before the robbery he had been preparing several cars for sale. On Monday morning, he arrived at work and found the boot of one of the cars open and several items that should have been in there missing. These included a number of puncture-repair tools, and the wrench. He assumed one of the other staff had pinched the tools to put in another vehicle that was about to sell, so he thought nothing more about it until he saw a picture of the distinctively large wrench in the newspaper. Perhaps, he thought, it had been stolen after all.

  The information was music to the ears of the detectives who received it. Atlas Motors was a dubious second-hand used-car dealership on New North Road in Mount Eden, catering to the lower end of the market. The company was established in 1955 by two shrewd conmen named Archibald ‘Archie’ Banks and Augustus ‘Gus’ Parsons.

  Parsons was born in 1916, and from a young age he desired easy street, and was always looking for the next get-rich-quick scheme. He trained as a butcher and opened a shop in Wainuiomata. A slick amateur boxer, he could have been a serious contender but was too impatient and turned his skills to becoming a stand-over tough in the Hutt criminal underworld, collecting money for bookmakers from people who owed them, and robbing rival bookies. In 1944, Parsons met and befriended Archie Banks, a talented pharmacist who had turned his skills to bootlegging—supplying whiskey to hotels, clubs and brothels in wartime Wellington.