The Great New Zealand Robbery

by Scott Bainbridge

  Another pay clerk, James Cranswick, couldn’t remember the details of what he checked, but did recall the £5 notes he received were in two bundles of £500, and the numerical sequence of the last three digits ran from 301 to 500.

  On the morning of the heist, Ron Vincent had returned to the bank under police guard to retrieve the money that was due to be paid as wages to the late shift in the afternoon, as it now had to be recounted and paid to the early shift. Vincent noted the first £10 note from the money he received bore the serial number 4/F 879901. Together with pay clerk Heyder, he decided that this note was likely a continuation of the series of notes Heyder had checked, which ran 701 to 800. That meant the serial number of the notes that Heyder had checked would also have begun with 4/F and would likely have comprised part of the block sequenced 879601 to 879800.

  All of this meant that the first serial number—4/F 879901—was part of a portion of a block that would have started from 879800 and ended at 885500. This sequence had undoubtedly been amongst the stolen notes.

  — — —

  It was more difficult to determine the sequential series of stolen £5 notes. The array of banknotes found scattered across the floor of the crime scene were in no particular sequential order and did not tally with the last three digits of the notes recalled by clerks Heyder and Cranswick. It was guessed the numerical sequence of missing £5 notes ran 4/Y 569001 to 4/Y 569160 inclusive. It was believed the rest of the stolen £5 notes were likely to have run in the sequence either before or after that range.

  Controller-General Sam Barnett, the caretaker head of police, seconded two government accountants to assist in the reconciliation. Based on what was already known from the notes found at the scene and what was recollected by bank and payroll staff, most of the £5 notes were determined to be from composite blocks, and therefore used banknotes of various serials and not in any particular order. These would be impossible to trace unless they had suffered some fire damage, and even if such notes were found there would be nothing to link them positively to the payroll heist. Their best chance was with the £10 notes in the 4/F sequence. Based on the sketchy facts known, there was at least £6100 in £10 notes missing, of which £3000 would have been brand new. Approximately £11,000 in £5 notes were missing, of which £5000 might be brand-new notes. There was, besides, £2550 in £1 notes and £340 worth of 10s. notes.

  Detective Sergeant Bob Walton drafted a memorandum to all licensed hotels and major businesses around Auckland asking staff to be extra vigilant in examining the serial numbers of all notes tendered and, if they came across any within the known serial range, they were to notify police immediately. Similarly, all bank tellers were instructed to be alert and observant of customers attempting to open new accounts with large sums or attempting to change large sums of money, especially if tendering brand-new or scorched banknotes. Copies of the memorandum describing the suspected stolen money sequence numbers were placed on the walls of every bank in the country. Mr Le Sueur, New Zealand Manager of the Commercial Bank of Australia, sympathised but complained: while the Associated Banks were prepared to assist in any way, it was simply not possible for banks to disclose information concerning the opening of new accounts or of the deposit of money into existing accounts. Not only was this a breach of customer faith, it was logistically onerous, as bank staff were busy enough in their normal duties. He did, however, assure police that they would be notified should any burnt or scorched notes come their way.

  Detective Jones visited all seven main banks in Auckland’s CBD to reinforce Walton’s memorandum. He made enquiries at the New Zealand Insurance Company safe holdings and the Auckland Safe Deposit to see if anyone had placed blocks of money in a safe-deposit box. Mr Wilding, custodian for New Zealand Insurance, reported a man had come in at 9.40 on the morning of 3 December to ask about storing a steel box, which he claimed to contain a valuable collection of postage stamps valued at £1000. Wilding was suspicious, because the customer did not look like a typical stamp collector; he looked like a manual labourer and was somewhat rough in appearance. After being asked to complete an application form, the man said he had another appointment but would take the form away and bring it back completed within the hour. He didn’t return. The customer was described as being about 35 years, 5 feet 6 inches, with a prominent nose, sallow complexion, black hair, ‘Jewish’ appearance and wearing a lumber jacket. Wilding looked through photos from the rogues’ gallery, but couldn’t identify the customer.

  Despite Mr Le Sueur’s lofty pronouncements on the high and lonely destiny of bankers, police needn’t have worried about the willingness of bank staff to cooperate. This was exciting, and the majority were on high alert. Many tellers brightened their day by diligently scrutinising banknotes passed over the counter. In the two weeks after the robbery, CIB fielded dozens of calls from tellers all over Auckland reporting suspicious-looking men enquiring about changing money. Unfortunately, they could offer only vague descriptions. Few of the men actually went ahead with opening accounts and those who did used banknotes that couldn’t be related to the heist. Herbert Blumenthal, teller at the Australia and New Zealand Bank on Queen Street, reported that a man popped in at 11.10 am on 11 December to enquire whether the bank stocked £50 notes. When asked how many he needed, the man replied he would need about a hundred notes, and produced bundles of £5 notes from his coat pocket for the exchange. Blumenthal changed only one £50 note, saying that was all the bank had in stock at that time. He asked the man to write down his name and address. The man wrote in an indistinctive scrawl ‘A. Jackson, 636 Mount Eden Road’. The customer did not appear to be worried and said he said he knew of another bank which he reckoned would have sufficient stock. The man was described as being aged 40 to 45 years, 5 feet 8 inches, of florid complexion and stocky build, with dark hair swept back and wearing a sports shirt and trousers. A check showed that no one by the name of Jackson lived at 636 Mount Eden Road.

  John Lucas, teller at the Bank of New Zealand on Symonds Street, reported that a man of similar description called in at midday the same day and handed him three bundles of £5 notes totalling £100 each, asking to change them into £10 denominations. Lucas noted the man was also carrying additional bundles of £10 and £50 notes. During the transaction, the man remarked, ‘It’s hard to get fifties, isn’t it?’ but did not specifically ask for £50 notes.

  Both tellers and their respective colleagues who had noticed the customer were shown photographs but could not identify him. Mavis Fitzgibbons, who was a teller in the booth adjoining Mr Blumenthal’s, selected one particular photograph that interested police, as this man was also high on their suspect list. In fact, he had been routinely interviewed as a matter of course two days after the robbery but was disregarded as he offered up an alibi. Police had arrested this suspect on 2 December on a routine traffic matter, but before detectives realised he was in custody he had been released on bail. Now he was nowhere to be found.

  — — —

  The investigation continued. The heist smelled of an inside job—the offenders’ intimate knowledge of the building’s wiring and their highly significant visit to the safe’s old location both pointed in that direction—so the inquiry team were very interested in knowing who could have been in possession of that information.

  Any number of people had worked in the offices of the Waterfront Industry Commission over the years, but police concentrated only on those ex-employees who had form. There were only three, each of whom had come to the attention of the law for petty offences at one time or another. The first two had worked for the commission more than ten years prior, so while they would have believed the safe was located in the stationery cupboard—had they ever known its location—they were unlikely to know about the dodgy lock or the intimate details of the building’s wiring. In any case, one was on the straight and narrow and living in Christchurch, and the other had emigrated to England in 1955.

  Jim Lloyd was in Mount Eden Prison serving time for
false pretences and obtaining credit by fraud, and he had worked at the commission for a week in October 1954. The brevity of his employment, and the fact that the safe had been moved in 1953, also made him a long shot, but the detectives sniffed around him anyway.

  Prison guards were quizzed over Lloyd’s associations. He was in minimum security and tended to befriend other inmates in a similar predicament to his own. He wasn’t known to mix with harder cases, but that wasn’t to say he didn’t quietly seek out men who would be capable of pulling off such a robbery. What better place to recruit than prison? Alternatively, even if he wasn’t involved, if he’d had a thorough knowledge of the workings of the organisation—the location of the safe and approximately how much money was on the premises and when—he would have known the information was valuable. Perhaps the whole thing had been arranged from inside the walls of Mount Eden Prison?

  When he was interviewed, Lloyd denied having any involvement, claiming that his employment was so short and so long ago he could hardly remember it. He didn’t know anything juicy about the workings of the commission, he said, and at any rate he had never discussed anything to do with the commission with anyone, so far as he could recall, least of all his fellow inmates.

  The interviewing detectives were inclined to believe him.

  Nevertheless, a note was attached to the case file with a reminder to discreetly observe Lloyd upon his release and bring him in if he ‘was all of a sudden flush with money’.

  — — —

  Early suspicions fell on John Sharp, the 64-year-old Auckland Port Security night watchman. His role was to patrol the wharves and all associated buildings throughout the night. If there was any suspicious behaviour, his duty was to report directly to the Wharf Police. The unions saw to it that the night watchman roles were given to old seamen whose financial position meant they couldn’t afford to retire. It had little or nothing to do with their vigilance or integrity.

  In a statement to Hoy, Constable Baguley recorded his suspicions of Sharp.

  I located Sharp in one of the cloakrooms on the Marsden [wharf]. I spoke to him. I stood at the doorway and he had his back to me. I could see his hands were covered in some black substance and he was vigorously washing them. I mention this fact as I have since realised that the fact that there was ‘black’ on this man’s hands may be of some significance and might have been related to the safe-blast.

  When this was raised with him later, the supervisor explained one of the night watchman’s duties was to ensure all the lamps along the gangways were alight. It was common for at least one lamp a night to need replacing. What’s more, the lamps accumulated a thick build-up of soot and required regular cleaning. This was a task the night watchman usually carried out towards the end of his shift.

  Detectives noticed that Sharp was nervous when he was interviewed. He said he began his shift at 10.30 pm on Wednesday night. He made his inspection of the wharves and estimated that he passed the Northern Steamship Company building around 12.30 am, finding the main doors securely locked with a padlock for which the night watchmen, including him, carried a key. Unlocking these doors gave him access to the stairs leading to the first and second floors. His job was to walk up the two flights and check that the main doors to the respective offices were locked and secured. He didn’t have access beyond these doors. He couldn’t specifically remember whether he tried all doors or just walked up and down the stairs. He was aware the cleaners arrived in the early hours, so he didn’t usually bother to check if the doors were locked until after he knew they had left the premises.

  His logbook entries showed Sharp checked the building at 2 am, 3.20 am and 5.45 am. He told detectives he now believed he had been remiss on his 3.20 am check, in that he had unlocked the main doors and only had a cursory look around the ground floor without climbing the stairs. When asked why this was, he said he had met the night cleaners; he’d had a quick yarn with them on the stairwell but hadn’t proceeded further up. The logbook showed he checked the building again at 5.45 am, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain whether he walked up the stairs to the first and second floors. When pressed, he thought he probably hadn’t, because he trusted the cleaners and was certain they would have locked the doors when they finished.

  Despite the fact Sharp had obligingly remained behind to assist police long after his eight-hour shift had ended, they noted his jumpy and nervous demeanour. Although he didn’t have a key to the commission offices, he knew the layout of the building very well and could have deliberately turned a blind eye, allowing the offenders plenty of time to carry out the crime.

  He remained firmly in the frame, and it didn’t help that neither of the Scott brothers (the cleaners) could remember seeing Sharp that morning, let alone speaking to him.

  Detective Errol Jones was tasked with making inquiries into Sharp’s character. He learned that Sharp was an old sailor who had accumulated a number of minor offences before the war, but nothing since. He was ‘a heavy drinker, even during times of work’. If it were true that he didn’t check the security of the office doors, it wouldn’t make him the only slack night watchman on the wharves. The Port Authority employed four, and their supervisor told police it was routine for all of them to rattle the door handles once or twice a night, usually at the beginning and end of their shift, and to make false entries in the logbook for the checks in between.

  Jones learned Sharp drank at the Freemans Hotel, a rough establishment on the corner of Drake and Vernon streets in Freemans Bay that was frequented by both sailors and criminal types. Detective Jones told Detective Sergeant Schultz that his information indicated Sharp was known to drink in the company of criminals; he could therefore have indirectly (by running his mouth off when drunk) or deliberately given them information about the workings of the commission. Schultz put a tail on Sharp to see who he did associate with and whether or not he was flashing around large sums of money—a sure sign of someone involved in a robbery.

  It didn’t take long to make an interesting connection.

  The informant used stated that Sharp had been seen drinking in the company of Ronald Tattley and David Brady, the latter a low-level criminal associate of Māori Mac, and a regular visitor of Mac’s up at the Big House. It was possible Sharp had been feeding Brady information about the building and Brady in turn was informing MacDonald, who was coordinating the robbery from inside his prison cell. But if this were the case, who actually carried out the damn heist?

  CHAPTER 5

  CASTING THE NET

  Detective McCombe confirmed Les Schultz’s hunch: the detonator found at the heist scene matched one of 400 such detonators reported stolen from Etudes et Enterprises, a firm involved in earthworks on the major Glendowie housing project in October 1953. None of these had been recovered. This was the first to surface, and was potentially the first viable connection between known criminals and the Waterfront payroll robbery. Bob Walton instructed McCombe and Churches to widen their scope and track down and interview every single Auckland criminal convicted for any burglary offence since October 1953. Some raised their eyebrows at this; even Finlay was sceptical. Walton conceded it was a long shot, but argued it was amongst the very few positive leads they had.

  He was proved right, but it would be some time before it happened.

  Claude ‘Pooch’ Quintal was serving a stretch in borstal in Invercargill when the robbery went down. He recalled that after it happened many Auckland criminals went to ground for fear of being stitched up for it.

  The Jacks rounded us all up after Johnny McBride’s murder in 1955. My brother Ted and I were popped for car conversion and he did his stretch up at the Big House, and I was sent down to the borstal in Invercargill because I was only seventeen. Throughout my lag I would see other fellows I knew from Auckland. We would make friends and suss out what that fellow’s particular skill was. You see, borstal was just a breeding ground for crooks. I was nearing the end of my stretch in late ’56 and thought it was funny there w
as nobody from Auckland coming in. Ted said later there was very few of the crew getting banged up. We figured it was because of the Waterfront job. Nobody wanted to be associated with it for fear of getting fitted up by the Jacks. There were guys going round big-noting saying they were involved. We knew with that amount of money stolen the Jacks would not let up and [would] throw away the key. So everyone behaved themselves for quite a long period of time.

  I got out at the same time as Ted and we talked about it. He said the word on everyone’s lips was that it was Ron Tattley. I must admit his name immediately sprung to mind when I first heard of it [the robbery]. He was the king of the safe-breakers at that time. If anyone could have pulled off a job that big, then it was him.

  Ronald Tattley was one of New Zealand’s premier safe blowers. Highly professional and well organised, he made the initial suspect list because he was a known associate of George Newman, who was in jail with Richard MacDonald for the April crime spree. Tattley usually preferred to work alone or with one other partner. There were several parallels between his MO and the heist.

  On 4 May 1956, Tattley was suspected of breaking into the premises of R & W Hellaby Limited and significantly, as it seemed, the battery he used to power the electric detonator that blew the safe was swiped from one of the company vehicles parked outside. The use of a battery sourced at the scene put him high on the list of likely suspects.

  Tattley was known to drink in the Freemans Hotel and he had been seen at different times in the company of David Brady, a known associate of MacDonald, and John Sharp, the night watchman. The possibility was that MacDonald planned the heist from his cell and relayed instructions to a hand-picked crew via David Brady, his regular visitor. Tattley, being an associate of Brady, could be trusted and had form. The police had seen nothing to rule this theory out.