Once he was allowed to sit, the man leaned back and accepted the cigarette he had been offered. He sucked a few deep drags and announced, ‘I’m not saying a word, boys. Bring in your chief and then we might see about talking.’
Detective Sergeant Thomas Irving was the ranking officer. Seated alongside him were detectives Schultz, Kyne and Hoy. Hammond and Constable Parker were present only because it was them who had hit the jackpot. The man sat calmly smoking his cigarette. Irving and Schultz peppered him with questions, but he stared at an invisible spot on the wall, not uttering a word. After an hour and a half of this, sandwiches and black coffee were brought in. Only then did the man’s demeanour change. He ravenously devoured the food and, apparently grateful, he let his guard down slightly.
‘All I’m prepared to confirm is that my name is Trevor Nash and I live at eight Bridge Street, Papatoetoe.’
At last, those in the CIB main room outside the office had something to be getting along with. People swung into action. Members of the Modus Operandi group were desperately pulling files, trying to develop a profile of Nash from his prior convictions. He was in the system, but his card index offered slim pickings.
Peter Goodyear was a detective present that day, and recalls:
No one had heard of this joker before. I don’t think he even registered on their list of likely suspects. It was always believed a gang of experienced crooks committed the Waterfront job, yet this guy was a loner; a petty criminal who preferred working by himself. None of Les Schultz’s guys, who had a handle on who was doing what, could work out where he fit [sic] in with any of the other usual suspects. Ivan Hoy had left the office and hastily prepared an application for a search warrant. By the time they were ready to go, a number of available detectives from other units had been roped in to assist with the next crucial stage, all cramming into three cars, and the car containing Irving, Hoy, Parker and Nash in the lead. As the cars departed the police station in convoy, Nash asked Parker to divert through Newmarket, as he wanted to check his car, which was parked up Remuera Road. He pointed to a green Ford Anglia parked opposite the Rialto Theatre and Parker realised this was what Nash had been looking towards earlier when they collared him. Nash unlocked the car and was instructed to sit in the back seat. Nash picked up a newspaper and began to read, while Hoy, Irving and Parker proceeded to carry out a search. On the back seat were a number of articles purchased that day from various shops. On the rear floor was a canvas overnight bag. Hoy tipped out bundles of £5, £10 and 10s. notes, and silver and copper coins.
‘Is this your bag, Nash?’ Irving asked.
‘Found it in my car,’ Nash snapped back.
‘Where did the money come from?’
Nash pointedly shook his newspaper and resumed studying it.
Irving sighed contemptuously. ‘Take the car back to the station so we can pull it to bits. Who knows what treasures we might find?’
Nash’s Ford Anglia was meticulously searched. Under the floor mat on the front passenger’s side were 108 £10 notes in four bundles. In the glove compartment between two tins was a smaller cigarette tin containing an oily, greenish-stained rag. All the notes found in the car had the appearance of being smeared with a substance the same colour as the grease on the rag; it was believed that the banknotes had been smeared with it to make them look older than they were.
Peter Goodyear was an acting detective at the time. He had been posted to the Indecency Squad in 1957, investigating sex-related crimes. Together with Detective James McCarthy and Acting Detective Malcolm Churches, he called into shops and hotels on Broadway and in part of Remuera Road, between Great South and Khyber Pass roads, to work out where Nash had spent the money and to reconcile it with the many items found in his vehicle.
‘I was in the main squad room when the call came in that a fellow was spending up large, making small purchases with ten-pound notes, which was an awful lot of money back then,’ he recalls.
We all immediately thought of the Waterfront payroll robbery and the fact the offenders were still at large. There was a great deal of excitement and it was all hands on deck. Many detectives from other units dropped what they were doing and headed out to Newmarket to assist. We were all keen to help solve the robbery and get this guy, so even though we all worked in different parts of the police, this was one time we all came together. I was tasked with going from shop to shop in Broadway, uplifting ten-pound notes. Some shops he didn’t go into at all but I do recall coming out with a fair few tenners, and so did other detectives. Nash was certainly busy that day! The shop owners were very good; they were happy to hand the notes over, even if it meant they were down on their takings. There was a general feeling they were all assisting on something big.
Besides the 108 £10 notes, totalling £1080, Nash was found to have £350 in £5 notes, a large stash of £1 and 10s. notes, and an assortment of silver and copper coins. The cash found in his car and on his person amounted to £1678.1s.2d. All four bundles of £10 notes found in his car bore the serial number beginning 4/F 879.
Most of the shops Nash visited had not done the day’s banking by the time twenty detectives descended on Newmarket, and most were able to produce the £10 notes he had passed across.
• From both Liddell’s stores in Broadway where Brian Wallace became suspicious, Nash had tendered £10 notes 4/F 879647 and 4/F 879793.
• From Lornie’s Paint Store next door: 4/F 879706.
• From McKenzie’s, where he bought hair cream and snatched the change from the shop assistant before she could count it: 4/F 879759.
• From Kirkpatrick’s and Stevens, where he bought a tie worth 10s.6d.: 4/F 879766.
• From Windsor Jewellery, where he bought an imitation French ivory brooch worth 10s.6d. and declined to have it wrapped or boxed: 4/F 879767.
• From Sharland’s Pharmacy, where he bought sticking plasters totalling 4s.3d.: 4/F 879771.
• From W. S. Burns and Sons, where he bought a hammer: 4/F 879787.
• From Schollum’s Bookstore, where he asked for Saturday’s Evening Post, but it had sold out, so he bought American Life: 4/F 879795.
• From Nicol’s Tobacconist, where he was first spotted by Hammond and Parker, he bought a box of Beehive matches: 4/F 879727.
• From Henderson Electrical, the last store he went into before he was apprehended, he bought the hit record ‘Yes Tonight Josephine’ by Johnny Ray for 6s.6d., declining the offer to hear it first: 4/F 879763.
• He was found to have bought bananas from Norman Choy, tendering 4/F 879792.
• And detectives learned he had bought a large quantity of beer and spirits at the Newmarket Hotel Wholesale, where he handed over £10 note, serial 4/F 879739.
Some stores carried out lunchtime banking, but quick work by the police succeeded in retrieving the notes he had spent in those stores before they were lost into circulation. Hill and Stewart’s morning takings had already been banked, but the banking slip at the Bank of New Zealand confirmed a £10 note with the serial number 4/F 879602 had been amongst those deposited. This was the note that Nash used to purchase the Patti Page record from Maureen Stewart.
A total of 22 £10 notes from the serial sequence 4/F 879 were paid into Newmarket banks that Friday. Kenneth Griffin, a government analyst, carefully examined the notes and concluded that all of these notes were brand new but had been treated with oil and dirt and crumpled to give them the appearance of being old. Despite their crumpled and stained appearance, they ‘felt’ new. The edges were sharp and not ‘feathered’, as was more typical of notes that had been in circulation over a long period of time. These notes appeared to be uniformly crumpled—it looked as though someone had grabbed a handful and screwed them all up at the same time—rather than randomly wrinkled, as happened in normal usage. Furthermore, if the notes had been used and had been passed through the banks—as all notes in circulation inevitably are—they would have had a distinctive fold in the middle, as it was the general prac
tice of tellers to fold £10 notes in bundles of ten. None of these notes had that distinctive fold.
— — —
After his car was thoroughly searched, Nash was placed in another police car and driven with Detective Hoy, Acting Detective Hammond and Constables Parker and Faulkner to 8 Bridge Street, Papatoetoe. A heavily pregnant Maria Nash was preparing dinner and her three small children were running around the house playing when they arrived to search it.
‘I was the junior officer at that time,’ recalls Peter Faulkner.
I was instructed to search the bedrooms. Mrs Nash was pretty upset, but Nash was cool, calm and collected. He told her to keep quiet and not utter a word. We took away quite a lot of stuff. We didn’t find any money there at all, which was a surprise. We did uplift lots of materials precursory to what safe-breakers at the time used as tools. We were unsure at that stage whether what we were taking was connected to the Waterfront payroll robbery but thought we might find some connection somewhere along the way. While we carried out the search, they sent a sergeant along from the Army with his mine detector as it was thought he had buried the cash somewhere on the property.
The house, garage and implement shed were searched from top to bottom, but no money was found. In the top drawer of the tallboy at the side of the bed in the main bedroom, three tubes of Singer electric-motor lubricant were located, along with six tins of sewing-machine oil, still wrapped in brown paper.
‘Taken up sewing, have you, Nash?’ Hammond asked. ‘Where’s your sewing machine, then?’
Nash, who was following the detectives around from room to room, refused to answer.
In the laundry, there were eleven packets of Silver-Tex condoms, a package containing a Koromex diaphragm and lubricating jelly, one packet containing two tubes of Koromex jelly, one plastic tan-coloured billfold containing 1d., one gent’s Omega wristlet watch with stainless-steel case and bracelet, one lady’s Ascuro wristlet watch with ‘604’ stamped on the back, one lady’s Elem wristlet watch with ‘142’ etched on the back, and the sum of £18.10s. in banknotes. In the garage were four cold chisels, one marine spike and an engineer’s hammer.
Parker noticed a copy of Luxford’s Police Law in New Zealand in the bedroom, and a copy of Garrow and Willis’s Principles of the Law of Evidence in New Zealand.
Hoy shook his head. He sensed something did not quite add up, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He was on overtime by now: he had been scheduled to end his shift, but he had been in on this one from the start and resolved to put in a few more hours. He headed back to the station ahead of the others to search the various piles for his notebook from December 1956.
Nash was told he was to be taken back to the station for questioning. Maria Nash looked horrified; the children were crying.
As Nash left, he called over his shoulder, ‘Don’t expect me back any time soon.’
— — —
Trevor Edward Nash was born on 28 November 1928 in Whangarei, the middle son of three boys to hard-working, middle-class parents. If he was indeed involved in the Waterfront payroll robbery, then he would have celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday that very day.
Nash left school in Standard 6, as it was then called. (It later became Form 2, and is now known as Year 8.) He secured employment as a builder’s labourer in Auckland before moving for a time to Taumarunui to work on a farm.
He had a criminal record, but it was minimal. He first came to the attention of police in 1946 when he was eighteen. He was charged and convicted on four counts of shop-breaking, receiving three years’ probation on each charge. In October 1948, he was charged with breaking into a warehouse. Sentencing for this offence occurred one month shy of his twentieth birthday, which meant—as the magistrate pointed out—that he’d avoided a stretch at the Big House by the skin of his teeth. Instead, he was sent down for two years in borstal, which was reduced to twelve months for good behaviour. Upon release, he again found work as a farmhand in Taumarunui, but this didn’t last long. By 1951, he had made his way back to Auckland and, while there is no record that he continued to offend, his time in borstal would have given him time to ruminate on where he had stuffed up, and to listen and learn from harder cases. It is likely that all borstal achieved was to give him time to find a skill to build on and hone his craft. At the very least, it is suspected that the number of off-hand remarks that were made about his size and build—he was 5 feet 9 inches, slender and with high cheek bones—gave him a sudden inspiration. By the time, eighteen years later, someone tumbled to what Nash had hit upon, it was too late to connect him to a number of other crimes.
According to the official story, he attempted to go straight when he arrived in Auckland, and when the dust settled after the 1951 Waterfront Confrontation Nash signed on as a wharfie. Around the same time, he met Maria Kerrigan, who had emigrated to New Zealand from Samoa with her parents after the war. Maria worked as a housekeeper for a Herne Bay family connected to the Auckland Cargo Workers’ Union. Nash was a regular visitor, as he was keen on becoming a union delegate. The pair married shortly afterwards, somewhat against the wishes of Maria’s parents, who were religious and didn’t approve of Nash as a palagi—and one with ‘a bad aura’ at that. It’s not recorded what Nash’s parents thought, but in New Zealand of the 1950s, inter-racial marriage was still frowned upon. Nonetheless, it seemed to be working. Maria was already pregnant when Nash raised a mortgage and bought a four-bedroom house at 8 Bridge Street, Papatoetoe. The property was close to his parents and brother in Otahuhu. Maria was vibrant and pleasant and seems to have warmed the hearts of his family. Nash was cautiously welcomed into Maria’s parents’ home in Kingsland. And both of them—a hard-working wharfie and his cheerful young wife—were accepted by the working-class Papatoetoe community.
— — —
On the night of 1 April 1955, Constable Thomas was on his beat in Otahuhu when he heard footsteps in the gravel of the yard of the local TAB. Thomas flicked on his torch and shone it towards the source of the noise and a man quickly scarpered. Thomas was quicker. He tackled the intruder and frogmarched him towards the police station, reading him his rights on the way.
‘Fuck,’ the offender groaned. ‘I’ll really be in the shit this time!’
Then, before Thomas could reply, the offender elbowed him hard in the stomach, winding him. He broke free and ran, with Thomas struggling after him. Thomas managed to catch up as the offender was trying to unlock a car. This time, the man surrendered and went quietly. He volunteered his name as Trevor Nash. No money or implements were found, so Nash was charged with being a rogue and vagabond on the grounds that he was found in the yard without lawful excuse, and with assault on a policeman.
Nash pleaded not guilty. Defending himself, he testified that he had finished work and had a few drinks. He realised he was the worse for the effects of liquor and decided to park his car, as he didn’t want to be charged with driving under the influence. He thought he’d get some fresh air and was looking for a place to urinate when Constable Thomas surprised him. Since he had a criminal record, he panicked and ran. The injury to the constable? Well, that was accidental.
Mr Astley, the magistrate, didn’t believe him and sentenced him to a three-month stretch.
The major significance of this minor conviction in April 1955 was that it placed Nash firmly inside the three-year timeframe within which Bob Walton had stipulated convicted crooks should be interviewed regarding their possible involvement in the Waterfront job.
Nash had been interviewed. Detectives McCombe and O’Connor had called around to 8 Bridge Street, Papatoetoe, at 7.45 pm on 29 November, the evening after the robbery. According to the notes taken at the time, Nash and Maria were both home and seemed genuinely surprised to have the police come a-knocking. Nash said he hadn’t even heard of the robbery. When the police proposed to search the house, he was amenable, and Mrs Nash even went so far as to make the officers a cup of tea.
When asked his whereabouts the
previous night, Nash had replied, ‘Do you want me to give an alibi?’
‘Well, I just asked if you remembered what you were doing.’
‘I have nothing to say about that [the robbery],’ Nash replied. ‘So far as I am concerned, I was with my wife at home.’
McCombe dutifully wrote this down. Mrs Nash added that it had been Trevor’s birthday the day before and they’d had a family celebration. She had been up all night to prepare the food and he never left the house.
McCombe recorded this, too. He also wrote that ‘his home is well and neatly kept and Nash is a very methodical man. Nash impresses with his coolness and he betrays nothing in conversation.’
It was dark when the detectives left, but the very next afternoon, Detectives Hoy, Jones and Glynn returned to check beneath the house. Nash was unimpressed to be under suspicion and clearly resented his household being disturbed again, but he consented to the search. Hoy climbed under the house and, while there, overheard Nash telling another detective that he had dug a hole, 5 feet (1.5 metres) square and 2 feet (60 centimetres) deep, in the front left quarter to store materials. Hoy located a recently dug patch of earth, but there was nothing in the hole.
The detectives thanked Nash for his time.
‘No worries, boys. Just make an appointment, next time,’ he had replied.
Nothing had been found to connect him to the crime and, since he was considered a petty criminal, he was considered unlikely to have the brains or the connections to be involved in so sophisticated a crime as the Waterfront payroll robbery.
— — —
Now that Nash was being detained and it seemed, after all, that he had a definite link to the job, Detective Ivan Hoy had the feeling he was missing something. He located his notebook detailing the search of 30 November. For years, Hoy had been in the habit of drawing a rough sketch of premises in his notebook—much to the bemusement of his fellow officers, who couldn’t see the point. Hoy compared the outline he had drawn ten months earlier to the scene he had visited that day.
The Great New Zealand Robbery Page 11