The Great New Zealand Robbery

by Scott Bainbridge

  In conclusion, Speight conceded the evidence linking Nash to the crime was circumstantial, but he argued that it proved the accused was guilty at least of receiving, and that this made it likely he was far more deeply implicated in the crime itself.

  There was a slight procedural anomaly, in that Detective Hoy had neglected to identify the brick bolster amongst the 89 exhibits. The bolster was the only thing that tied Nash to the robbery, as, without placing it at the crime scene, the evidence of Ryan and Burgoyne identifying Nash as the man who presented the bolster to them for modification was irrelevant. Although the prosecution had already made their closing argument, Speight sought leave to recall Hoy to the box to correct the oversight. Against Davison’s protests, His Honour granted the request.

  For the Defence, Davison had done his utmost under cross-examination to expose flaws and inconsistencies in the testimony of Crown witnesses, but he told the court that the Defence had no intention of calling witnesses of its own. Instead, Davison intended to show up the inadequacies in the Crown case.

  Davison argued that the Crown hadn’t produced sufficient evidence to prove Nash was the person—or even one of the persons, he added significantly—who broke into the Waterfront Industry Commission and stole the payroll. While he acknowledged Burgoyne and Arnold Ryan had positively identified Nash as the man who had brought them a brick bolster for modification, there was no evidence to put it beyond doubt that Nash’s brick bolster was the one found at the scene of the crime.

  The testimony of John Sharp, the night watchman, was criticised. For the Crown, Sharp had told the court he first noticed the fire on the first floor at 6.15 am. Davison seized upon this in his cross-examination.

  ‘You told my learned friend that you first noticed smoke coming from the first-floor window at six-fifteen am. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘What action did you take, Mr Sharp? Did you raise the alarm? Did you call the Fire Brigade? Or did you do nothing until Mr Lumley arrived and noticed the smoke at six-twenty-five am? Which is it?’

  Sharp opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water.

  ‘Because the Fire Brigade’s records show they were not notified of the fire until six-twenty-five. Do you still say you first noticed smoke at six-fifteen?’

  ‘Oh, well, look,’ Sharp spluttered. ‘Whatever I told the police when they asked, that’s the time. I just got a bit muddled, didn’t I?’

  While Davison succeeded in drawing attention to this minor inconsistency in Sharp’s evidence, if he was hoping this would be the opening salvo in a campaign of raising doubt he was disappointed. The other Crown witnesses were confident and consistent in their evidence.

  In his closing, Davison seized upon some of the evidence produced to link Nash to the crime with relish, which would have come as no surprise whatsoever to Graham Speight.

  ‘The Crown would like you to believe that the fact the accused had a box of Beehive matches in his car at the time of his arrest is terribly significant, because a box of Beehive matches was also found at the scene of the crime ten months earlier. With all due respect, this is laughable. I expect that brand is one of the most popular—if not the most popular—brand of matches in the country. There is no more reason to suggest that Mr Nash was at the scene of the crime just because he had a box of Beehive matches than there is to connect anyone else who has a box of Beehive matches in their pocket or their car to the crime. Thousands of people have those matches. I dare say there are a number of people in the court today who have a box of Beehive matches. So why does the Crown want you to see significance in this trivial coincidence? Because the Crown has no real evidence to link the accused to the scene.’

  The heel impression found on the rear staircase, Davison argued, was equally useless. It was barely visible and could not even be photographed or measured for evidentiary purposes. He submitted that it ought to have been ruled inadmissible, as with no record taken and nothing to indicate what it looked like or that it even existed beyond the testimony of the police it was akin to hearsay.

  ‘There is no certain proof that the shoe that made the print in the dust in the stairwell at the scene of the crime belonged to Mr Nash,’ Davison told the jury. ‘What do we know about the shoe that made the print? It was described as round and average size. That’s about all. How many people do you see around you wearing average-sized shoes? I dare say there are a few average-sized shoes in this very courtroom. I might be wearing a pair myself!’

  No attempt had been made to compare the shoe print with shoes belonging to any other criminal, Davison pressed on remorselessly, and to say it definitely belonged to Nash was nonsense. The Crown couldn’t even prove the shoe imprint was left by an offender. It could have been left by a cleaner or, if the cleaners had overlooked it, it could have been made by an employee of any one of the offices on the three floors. The police made no attempt to check the sizes of the shoes belonging to the cleaners or any of the office workers.

  ‘And at the risk of labouring the point,’ Davison said, definitely labouring the point, ‘the Crown has done a very good job of portraying this robbery as the work of careful, meticulous operators. But they are also asking you to believe that Mr Nash—that careful, meticulous criminal—carelessly left the shoes he wore during the robbery in his wardrobe for ten months. How likely is that?’

  As for the evidence of the neighbours, Davison pointed out that neither of them were in the habit of socialising with Nash and had no other way of gaining an intimate knowledge of his movements. Yet both miraculously remembered not only exactly what they were doing eleven months previously, but also what Nash was doing at the time.

  ‘Remember,’ Davison cautioned the jury, ‘neither of those witnesses claims to have actually seen Nash leave or drive away. All they heard was a car leave. They couldn’t say who was driving the car. Nor did they prove hearing the car on the night of the robbery. They recall it being around that time. If they harboured suspicions about Nash being the robber, why didn’t they come to tell the police much sooner?’

  Davison conceded that Nash had taken a great deal of time off work over the past year, but he pointed out that there were explanations not explored by the Crown. Maria Nash was pregnant and had been ill for months; Nash had been obliged to stay home to care for her and their three preschool-aged children, who had also been sick during the year. Perhaps Nash had taken out time payments in lieu of missing wages due to his absences, which might explain his alleged newfound affluence?

  ‘Again,’ proclaimed Davison, ‘this possibility was not explored by the police because they were intent on blaming Mr Nash for a crime which they were embarrassed to find they could not solve.’

  In casting about for any weakness in the Crown case, Davison raised a point that probably had not occurred to the police. Nash had a number of £10 notes in his possession, he reminded the court, but while many £5 and £1 notes had been stolen, none of these had been found in Nash’s possession nor had any of the notes of these denominations that Nash had tendered been positively linked to the robbery. Davison’s point was that Nash might have acquired the money by secondary means. Perhaps he had been given the £10 notes by the robbers and asked to launder the cash on their behalf, because his relative lack of a criminal record would make him less likely to arouse suspicion? That would make him an accessory and a receiver, but not actually responsible for the robbery as charged. Perhaps he had just been given the money to hold, but after keeping it in his possession for nearly a year he panicked and decided to get rid of it by spending up large in Newmarket?

  To strengthen these possibilities, Davison asked the jury to consider the likelihood that a gang of criminals had been involved. The heist had all the hallmarks of being the work of experienced, professional criminals. Nash was a petty crook from South Auckland with only three or four convictions to his name.

  Davison invited them to think logically about the proposition that one man could h
ave committed the robbery alone. He gestured towards the exhibits table.

  ‘Look at the four gas bottles. Filled up, they would be reasonably heavy to lift. Do you think one man would be able to lift and carry all these bottles, plus the rest of the equipment, up the stairs all by himself? He would have to have achieved this in several trips, at great risk of being caught.’

  Davison added the task of searching for and cutting all the telephone cables was a job for more than one man, and only one with no mean amount of electrical experience would know exactly which wires to cut. Nash had neither the qualifications nor the experience.

  — — —

  Summing up, Mr Justice Finlay told the jury that they had to decide whether all the circumstances negated the possibility of innocence. If it were decided that this were so, then the jury must be driven to the conclusion that Nash was a party to the robbery. Unless they were satisfied that Nash was a party to the robbery, there was nothing to associate him with the additional theft charges or of breaking and entering. The most crucial feature of the case was his possession of 165 £10 notes in particular sequence and which bank witnesses testified had been amongst those notes given to commission payroll clerks on 27 November. In Finlay’s view, the Crown had not established that the notes found on Nash had come from the robbery. The jury was reminded that Nash was not obligated to explain how he came to have possession of the notes. However, there remained the fact that the notes had been altered and that Nash had in his car the means by which to alter the notes; there was also his ‘extraordinary conduct’ in Newmarket in September.

  Remember, Finlay told the jury, that witnesses Ryan and Burgoyne positively identified the accused as the customer who ordered modifications to a brick bolster, decidedly similar to that which was found amongst other burglary tools on the floor beside the safe. Nash was not a builder or block layer. Why would he have such a tool and what purpose would he have in mind in order to have it modified to such specifications, unless it was to use it to commit a crime? It was the contention that the bolster had been modified to commit a crime, that Nash had commissioned the modifications and that it was this bolster that was found at the scene that was the Crown’s strongest grounds for placing Nash at the scene of the crime.

  — — —

  The jury retired at midday on Wednesday 30 October. Two hours later, they filed back into court to ask His Honour a question.

  ‘Is it possible for an accomplice who did not enter the building to be guilty of breaking and entering?’

  It was.

  At 3.10 pm, they returned and delivered a unanimous verdict: guilty on all four counts. Nash heard the verdict with no display of emotion beyond a widening of his eyes, perhaps in surprise. He had given nothing away throughout the trial, and he gave nothing away now. He didn’t look back at the public gallery as he was led towards the door leading to the cells, even though his wife was wailing loudly.

  CHAPTER 10

  DOING IT TOUGH

  When the verdict was handed down, Crown Prosecutor Graham Speight suppressed his delight and relief. He reached across and extended the hand of sympathy to Ron Davison. For his part, although he felt he had done his best to draw attention to how weak the Crown case was, Davison wasn’t entirely surprised at the verdict.

  Nash returned to the Auckland Supreme Court two weeks later, on 14 November 1957, for sentencing. Before he handed down his sentence, Mr Justice Finlay asked if Nash had anything to say. Nash remained silent and stared straight ahead.

  Finlay sighed and began his address.

  I must confess that what I am to do has caused me a great deal of anxiety and I have given it a good deal of thought. It is quite true that there is nothing to indicate whether this was an adventure by you alone or whether you had cooperators with you in it. It is consequently quite uncertain whether you got the whole of the money or whether you only got part of it. In that state of doubt I leave that question of how much money you have got entirely out of consideration.

  But the fact remains that the main crime—that is, the crime charged in the first count—was of singular gravity. It was singularly remunerative. There can have been few burglaries in New Zealand in which so much as £19,000 or thereabouts has been taken. It was carried out with deliberation and foresight; indeed, with so much deliberation that I regard the second, third and fourth counts as representing merely expeditions ancillary to the commission of the main crime—expeditions designed to enable you to commit the main crime—and so one is faced with a singular crime of singular gravity, and in those circumstances, having regard to its deliberation and character, one can only say that the seriousness and the gravity of the crime must be matched by the seriousness of the penalty. This is chiefly because, in the interests of the public, everybody with a predisposition to commit this kind of crime must be deterred, and deterred effectively from embarking upon any adventure of the kind.

  Unfortunately, you have a tendency to do this kind of thing. In 1946 you were given three years’ probation for shop-breaking; there were four charges then. At the same time you were given three years’ probation for shop-breaking with intent. Two years later, roughly in 1948, you got two years’ borstal for warehouse breaking. And then in 1955 there was this last conviction in connection with the TAB property at Otahuhu, which is indicative of a tendency towards the commission of this same type of crime.

  Taking all those things into consideration, I should not feel that I was doing justice to the public or to the circumstances of the case unless I imposed the sentence I am about to impose. You are sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment; on the second count, to seven years imprisonment; on the third and fourth counts, to two years imprisonment on each count. All the sentences are to be served concurrently.

  Those in the public gallery let out a gasp, but Nash remained quiet, fixing the judge in an unwavering, steely stare. He gave no indication of what emotions he was feeling. Speight rose, asking for an order that all money held over from when Nash was detained be paid immediately to the Waterfront Industry Commission, which was granted.

  Mr Justice Finlay then turned a sympathetic eye on Ronald Davison. ‘Both at the trial and here you have said everything that it was possible to say for this man. He lacks nothing that could be said in his favour.’

  It was a compliment, and Davison, who would go on to have an impressive career in law—he would be appointed a QC and serve as tenth Chief Justice of New Zealand (from 1978 to 1989), and would go on to be knighted GBE, CMG—later recalled the R v Nash case as one of the most frustrating he had ever had to defend.

  Years later, Graham Speight—also Sir Graham by then—was to reflect:

  There was a clear space between 11.34 pm and 2 am whereby the robbers left the premises, having unsuccessfully blown the safe. One or more of them had perhaps known Nash and asked him to participate at the last minute.

  I don’t believe Nash was savvy enough to have planned the whole thing. I don’t think he or any of the robbers realised exactly how much money there was, but being the one with the least credential for this type of caper, he may have been given the £10 notes as his takings, because this amount back then would be very hard to shift without arousing some suspicion. He certainly was the first to crack with his spending spree in Newmarket. After Nash was imprisoned, I know police wondered whether the criminal fraternity would relax and we would see the £5 and £1 notes start turning up. I know that there was hope Nash might talk in prison and give up the other fellows, if anything to try and negotiate a more lenient sentence, but to my knowledge he stayed silent.33

  Speight was right. For Auckland detectives it was an end of a long and frustrating investigation, but it wasn’t the end. The conviction satisfied the powers that be, but there were some—Les Schultz, for one—who wanted detectives retained on the case to catch the others, because others there must surely be. With Nash sent down, there was a possibility that the other robbers would relax their guard and carelessly start spending their
share of the stolen loot. Walton declined to continue to pursue the case, but recommended a further memorandum be sent to all banks instructing them to notify police if they came across suspicious-looking £5 and £1 notes. There is no evidence that such a memorandum was ever issued. Mount Eden Prison Superintendent Haywood was asked to instruct his guards, known informants and ‘trusty’ prisoners to listen and speak out if Nash started to sing.

  — — —

  A seven-year stretch. This was the most severe sentence ever handed down in New Zealand for a robbery. The earliest release date was 31 October 1964.

  Trevor Nash was placed in D Block, the roughest part of the prison, in the company of New Zealand’s most violent and notorious murderers and rapists. He had nothing in common with such people. He was a petty criminal and now a convicted robber who, so far as anyone could tell, had always shied away from violence. He did not fit in. But the achievement of the Waterfront payroll robbery—the skilled execution of the crime, the record amount stolen, the fact he had held out for so long and (perhaps most importantly) the fact that he had declined to implicate anyone else despite pressure to do so—meant that he entered D Block as a minor celebrity and was given a high ranking in the hierarchy of inmates. Whether or not he wanted the notoriety, it would help him to get by in prison.

  After Nash had been in prison for a month, Superintendent Haywood wrote to Bob Walton: ‘Nash keeps very much to himself. A lot of the younger prisoners look on him in awe, but he clearly has no time for them, nor others I would deem to be uncouth.’