Everything went as planned. Just before closing time, the informant hid himself inside a wardrobe in the furniture department and at seven o’clock precisely the wicket door opened to let us in. After securing the door, we went straight to the cashier’s office to check out the safe. One look was enough: this was no ripper. It was a modern Chubb safe, about six feet high by four feet wide, with two locks on its massive steel door. It’s always exciting when you are prying and poking around a safe and it’s really frustrating to think that there, just a few inches away from you, is the prize.
Just in case, I tried the handle, but there was nothing doing with this box unless we found the keys. The office was turned upside down on the off-chance that the keys were hidden away somewhere – you’d be surprised at how often they are. But although we found several bags of coins in different drawers, we blanked on the key. Finally we gave up our search and reverted to the original plan, heading downstairs to the manager’s office for a look at the safe in there.
It was indeed an old ripper, but the seams on its square edges had been covered by angle iron, making it a very much more difficult proposition to tear open. We had, as a matter of course, brought explosives and detonators with us in case we ran into any difficulty, so rather than take hours sawing out the angle iron, we decided to blow it open.
We tumbled the safe on to its back and dragged it into the carpet department, our enthusiasm growing every time we heard the rattle of keys tumbling about inside. It took us about ten minutes to prepare and pack the keyhole with gelignite and we covered it with so many carpets that we didn’t even hear the blast when we closed the circuit with our battery. It took two shots at the old safe before we could open the door and when we did get it open things looked very encouraging.
There were literally dozens of key rings hanging inside the safe, each ring tagged with a number and a location and we felt really confident that the keys we were looking for were there. Although we checked every key in the safe, there was no sign of any duplicates for the cashier’s Chubb. Disappointed, we searched the manager’s office, looking under the carpet, behind pictures, even moving his desk. It was no good, we never found a thing.
Five minutes later, we were back at the giant Chubb, poking and prodding at the keyholes, trying to figure something out. There was no way we could blow it open. Even after removing the keyhole covers, the keyholes were still too thin to admit a detonator. Besides, most of these modern safes were fitted with anti-explosive devices that jammed the door if any attempt was made to blow it open. It was very frustrating to be so close to the prize yet still be so far away and I was loath to call it quits and go home.
John was all for clearing out the store’s gift department; there were loads of watches, lighters, pens, gold chains and cheap jewellery in there, but it was just junk and I wasn’t going to settle for that. I had come for money and money I was determined to get. After all, I had a workshop full of tools and we had all weekend to work on the safe. If there is anything strong about my character, it is that I am a very determined person; once I make up my mind and commit myself to a course of action, I will see it through to the end. I decided that we were going to have a go at cutting open the cashier’s safe. After all, there were lots of things in our favour. We had a good clean entry and the duplicate keys in the manager’s safe would allow us to come and go as we pleased. We had all day Sunday to get the tools into the store and we had until about seven o’clock on Monday morning to get into the safe. It had to be tried.
It was still fairly early when we left the store on Saturday evening and I stuck a strip of Sellotape over the rim of the door so we could tell if anyone had entered during our absence. On the Sunday afternoon, I picked up the burning gear from Forbes Street and later on we slipped back inside the store with our equipment.
The safe was quite close to the windows of the third floor, so we made a huge tent out of carpets to prevent any light from the burning torch drawing attention. I reckon that between muffling the explosions downstairs and damage done by burning we must have ruined thousands of pounds’ worth of their carpet stock.
It took only minutes to cut the outer skin from one side of the safe and expose the next layer of protection. The solid material underneath was revealed to be a type of concrete filling and it turned out to be every bit as hard as it looked. About two inches thick, it took hours of patient digging, but eventually we chipped away a section about eighteen inches by twelve. Now we found a layer of cast metal that turned out to be an inch thick and used up almost all of our gas before exposing yet another layer of concrete.
By now it was well into the night, but I knew we were nearly there. This time the concrete fell apart like plaster work – I think the heat of burning the cast metal had destroyed its texture. Within minutes, we had dug it out and I could tap upon the inner box. I knew the gas was on its last legs and I was lucky to cut a hole just large enough to get a hand inside. We got about £2,500 from the safe, but there were other compartments we could not get into and we had to be satisfied.
It was frustrating to read in the papers the following day that we had missed several thousand pounds, but I had to laugh at the headline: BUNGLING ROBBERS MISS MONEY! True, we had missed most of the cash, but then again we had spent a weekend roaming about a city store, blown one safe apart, torched open another and got clean away with the equivalent of over £20,000 in today’s terms. Hardly bungling – and there was no mention of bungling city cops wandering about shining their torches hither and thither and arresting innocent drunks while all this serious villainy was going on right under their noses!
Of course we would have been much happier to get all the money, but considering that at one stage we had almost abandoned the job, we thought that we had come out of it quite well. And, just as importantly, I had learned a very valuable lesson: I now knew that any modern safe could be broken into as long as I had the proper tools and time to do the job. All in all, I considered it a fair weekend’s work.
Chapter Eighteen
Better Safe, Then Sorry
The cash from the store job, although not a fortune, was enough to give me the taste for extra money again and from then on I began to take a bigger interest in villainy. I still continued to work with Nat in Forbes Street, but I had started another man there and that meant I could spend more time hanging about the High Street shop, or gallivanting about the town with my pals. By this time, I had met most of the crooked element in Springburn, finding out in the process that I was a bit of an odd man out with my ideas on villainy. My repeated enquiries about sorting out a decent payroll robbery raised as much interest among the lads as an invitation to watch a game of cricket.
Being a working villain is a bit like training for a sport: you’ll only be as good as the men you work with. As none of my associates seemed to be willing or able to raise their game to serious levels and I had no one else to play with, I found myself falling into their ways. Instead of setting up blags or looking for decent places to screw, I found myself breaking into pubs and licensed grocers to blow or rip open their safes and make off with the stock. But I was beginning to find out why there was so little real villainy going on.
As soon as anyone I worked with got their hands on any money, it was down tools until they were skint again. Not one of them thought about looking ahead and certainly it was unheard of for anyone to keep money back to buy tools or finance the next job. To a man, they would wait until they were skint before deciding to make another effort, then they would be scratching around borrowing tools and stealing some old banger for transport.
The only thing I can say in favour of doing these small pub jobs and the like was that they carried little risk. Entry was nearly always made through the adjoining wall of a toilet, or from a cellar entered from the close next door to the premises. On some luckier occasions, a sleeper could be used, who would gain entrance to false ceilings via the toilets or by lifting the bench-seat upholstery and hiding in the hollow framewo
rk underneath. We would signal that the staff had locked up by phoning the pub and letting the phone ring out an agreed number of times. The sleeper then emerged from his hiding place to open the doors. When we had slipped inside with the tools, the doors could be locked again and once safely inside the pub, the safe would be ripped or blown while accomplices stacked the spirit and cigarette stock just inside the doorway. When we were ready to leave, we would carefully unlock the door again, allowing the driver, usually me, to slip out and bring the car or van round to the doorway.
A few frantic moments of loading and we were off, leaving the pub doors loosely pulled over. By the time the tobacco and spirits were sold we could reckon on sharing about £1,500 between us. Not bad money really for a couple of hours’ work.
Because I had the tools and transport, it meant that I could pick and choose whom I worked with and what I did. Most of the guys that I did work with were what I would call sporadic operators, only grafting, as I have already mentioned, when they were skint. As a result, I worked more often than anyone else and with several different guys. This meant that I made more money and this, together with my income from Crafts & Curios, meant that I was doing very well indeed.
I was also leading a very active social life at that time. I had two or three girlfriends and shuffled around a lot, trying to entertain them equally. Then I went out and bought a Mk II 3.4 litre Jaguar, causing a great stir among my pals in the pub and making windows rise the first time I parked it in Palermo Street. Yes, Mrs Crosbie’s boy was doing very well for himself with his wee factory and fancy shop in the High Street!
I had taken up my cycling again, going out on the regular Tuesday and Thursday evening training runs. After several weeks of getting burned off the back, I started getting fitter and, although I never got really competitive, began staying with the bunch.
I had always enjoyed dancing and started going to the Albert Dance Hall on a regular basis. In those days it was all live big-band music and it was at the Albert that I met my first wife, Margaret Walker of Townhead. I always went to the dancing on my own, preferring to dance with different partners in the course of the evening. Then one night I spotted this lovely, Scandinavian-looking blonde standing among the ladies. She looked really classy and I wasn’t sure she would dance with me because, although there was an unwritten rule at the Albert that it was bad manners to refuse a partner, some girls would still shake their heads, leaving you conspicuously embarrassed. But when I approached Margaret and asked her to dance, she smiled and led me on to the floor.
I could hardly believe my luck. This lovely blonde was definitely the best-looking girl in the Albert that night, or any other night for that matter. Things got even better when it turned out she was a good dancer and we spun around the floor like a couple of professionals for several dances. We enjoyed each other’s company and stayed together for the rest of the evening, ending up with me driving her home in my impressive Jaguar. Margaret lived in Taylor Street, which was on my way home, but I wouldn’t have cared if she had come from the other end of the country. I had met my love.
When Margaret left my car after a chaste kiss or two, I sat there for a long time just thinking about her. I had told her a lot about myself, perhaps exaggerating the size of my business, but the car was flash and I was pretty sure I had made an impression. Margaret had certainly impressed me. She told me that she was a model and worked for a company called Alice Edwards. The name meant nothing to me, but Margaret certainly looked every inch a model with her tall, perfect figure and lovely blonde hair. Later on, when we started going together seriously, she showed me a folio of newspaper photographs where she was modelling dresses and hats. She actually worked from a city-centre showroom in Queen Street, where buyers from the quality dress shops would come to see her modelling new designs. And about four times a year she would travel round Scotland with her boss, modelling new-season creations for the buyers of big stores.
I often wondered why she liked me so much. It wasn’t as if I was a great prize to her, even with my business and fancy car. At the time we started going together, Margaret had two or three guys running after her, sending flowers and asking to take her out. One of these guys was Davie Wilson, a Rangers and Scotland football star. Another was a whisky heir who was always sending her huge bunches of roses. I think Margaret could identify better with my background and that’s what swung things in my favour.
I seemed to have everything a man needed for happiness. I was fit and healthy, owned my own business, ran a luxury car and had a very beautiful girlfriend. Judging from all normal standards, I had found my rainbow, but my nature being what it was, I still wasn’t satisfied. I was still looking for that elusive pot of gold. Frustration began to bother me. These small jobs were all very well and did bring in some money, but I knew I was never going to become rich on them. It was all very well getting a thousand pounds here and there between two or three of us, but getting money in dribs and drabs made it very difficult to actually accumulate a large amount.
My mind kept harping back to my experience with the new Chubb and the knowledge that, given the right tools and time to do the job, I could open any safe. I dreamed about doing a bank and went in and out of numerous branches checking out the possibilities. Certainly I saw plenty of safes that I knew I could open, but they were never in a position where they could be worked on. Every bank kept their safes in plain sight and had a small security light fitted above them so they could be checked at night by looking through the window. It became almost an obsession with me to find and open a safe in a bank. After all, as I said to anyone I worked with, if we wanted booze we would do a pub or a licensed grocers. And if we wanted cigarettes, we would do a tobacconist, wouldn’t we? Well, didn’t it follow that if we wanted money we should do a bank? To me it was all so obvious.
Then one day I was passing along Riddrie Road, just below Barlinnie Prison as a matter of fact, when I spotted a small branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland sitting on its own like an isolated cottage. Although the bank was on the main road, it stood at the bottom of a hill about a hundred yards further on than the nearest shops or buildings. A further attraction was that a projecting wall blocked the pavement a few yards past the bank’s front door, which meant that any passing pedestrians were on the opposite side of the road.
This bank was so temptingly situated that a few years later, when the Glasgow crooks had managed to raise their ideas, it achieved an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the most robbed bank in Britain! When I spotted it in 1965, it was still virgin territory.
When I went into the bank for change, I was surprised to see that, instead of the usual large safe, this bank had two smaller safes sitting one on top of the other. Even placed together like this, the top of the upper safe was well below my eye level. These were the smallest safes I had ever seen in a bank and I immediately decided the place was worth a closer look.
That same night I revisited the bank, climbing over a six-foot gate to gain access to the rear of the premises. Once behind the building, I saw that there was no way I could be seen from the road and a steep embankment protected my rear. It was an ideal situation for working on the rear of the premises.
The more I looked at it, the more interesting this little bank became. Like all the banks I had looked at, there was a security light on above the safes and I knew that it would be impossible to work on them in their present position. But because of their size, I thought it would be possible to topple the top one to the floor then lift it on to a barrow and wheel it out the front door into the back of my van. Instead of having to bring my tools to the safe, I could take the safe to my tools. Well, that was the general idea, but as old Rabbie Burns once said, ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley’.
I estimated I could be in and out of the place with the prize within fifteen minutes at the most. We wouldn’t even be in there long enough to worry about the security light. The job looked good to me and with my reputation I had no
difficulty in recruiting an accomplice. Indeed, my old pal Jim Thomson was delighted to be asked.
It would be great if all plans worked as easily in deed as they do in idea. But I’m sorry to say that my first big bank job was, in modern criminal parlance, a total bust. The first phase, getting round the back of the bank with the tools and removing the window bars, went well. But within minutes of making the entry we discovered that getting the safe out of the place was impossible. Despite its small size, the safe was just too heavy. I had estimated it to be a couple of hundredweight, but as soon as we tried to pull it away from the wall, we realised that it must have weighed at least two or three times that. We could certainly nudge it to the edge of the safe it was sitting on and let it topple to the floor, but we were equally certain that had we done so the metal cube would have crashed straight through the floorboards, joists and all. And even on the off-chance it didn’t plunge through the floorboards, it was obvious that its weight would be far too much for us to lift on to the barrow. It was really very disappointing. My first attempt at real money in Glasgow and we were foiled! We scoured the entire premises desperately hoping to stumble on some money or the keys to the safe, but of course we failed. It was terrible to know we were within inches of a fortune in cash and unable to touch a penny piece of it. The game, as they say in Glasgow, was a bogey!
It so happened that about a couple of hundred yards up Riddrie Road, close to where we had parked the van, there was a post office. From the pavement it was possible to see inside and spot the safe nestling under the counter. It was a type I was familiar with and I knew for sure that between us we could lift it into the van. There was no pavement gate and just two mortise locks secured the shadowed recessed door. Well, there we were, all keyed up and looking for something to compensate us for our earlier failure.
Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery Page 19