Gangland Robbers

by James Morton

  O’Neill received eight years’ hard labour with periods of solitary confinement. Marks, who claimed he was of previous good character, received two years. Carrah got the stolen tobacco back.

  For a time, it did not seem that dobbing in his mates had done Colquhoun any good at all. Sentencing him to five years’ hard labour, also with periods of solitary confinement, far harsher than a decent dobber could expect, the chief justice was particularly severe:

  Your conduct has aggravated this offence since it shows you are a treacherous and disloyal person. Your conduct has been that of a man who finding himself in a trap desired to get out as easily as possible.

  Of course, this did not do much to encourage men to dob in their mates but, in the end, it turned out all right for Colquhoun if not for the citizens of South and Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland. The authorities, grateful that he had helped put away O’Neill, released him after a matter of months, gave him a reward and exiled him to Western Australia.

  On 30 December 1896, along with Jens Christian Jansen, he escaped from Yatala Prison, where he was serving six years for burglary. Two years later he was recaptured. In February 1906 he and a George Mahoney were found with dynamite and revolvers in Brisbane, and sentenced to fifteen years apiece. Colquhoun was still wanted in Melbourne for the attempted murder of a greengrocer, Robert King, whom he shot in the shoulder during an attempted robbery when King had found him coming down the stairs with a cashbox. It was thought that when Colquhoun was eventually released, the authorities might have him extradited. It never came to that because King was deemed too ill from his injuries to give evidence.

  In November 1911, along with a John Jones—also known as McIntyre, who was serving a seven-year sentence for robbery and breaking—Colquhoun escaped again, this time from St Helena, an honour prison in Moreton Bay. Apparently suffering from cramps, Jones had been taken to the prison hospital, where Colquhoun worked. The next morning they were discovered to be gone and an officer in charge of the lighthouse reported seeing a small motor boat towing a dinghy. That was a red herring because the pair had failed to get off the island and were captured a fortnight later.

  The best or worst (depending upon one’s viewpoint) of Western Australia’s criminals tended to gravitate east. In 1901 Edward Sutcliffe was sentenced to three years for a robbery under arms when he, along with William James and Angus Taylor, stole a safe containing more than £200 from the Abbotts Hotel, in Murchison, Western Australia. A crowd gathered to watch as they loaded it on to a buggy, and Sutcliffe threatened to shoot anyone who intervened. The three of them later forced the landlord to have a drink with them in the hotel bar before they made off with the money.

  After being apprehended and tried, Sutcliffe, who had seven previous convictions, was not pleased with the verdict or the sentence, telling the judge, ‘You are sentencing us because we‘ve been in gaol before. This is British Justice I suppose.’ William James, who had previous sentences totalling twenty years, received another five, and Taylor three. James and Taylor remained in Western Australia, committing petty thefts, for the next few years, while, in 1902, Sutcliffe led a short-lived riot in a protest over conditions in Fremantle Gaol.

  On his release, in May 1904, he immediately made his way to the goldfields, where he was arrested after trying to rob a camp in Brookman Street, Kalgoorlie. He was caught red-handed, and fractured the skull of butcher Henry Boyt as he tried to escape. He ran an alibi defence, saying he had been in the Home from Home Hotel that night, but in June was sentenced to seven years and twenty-five lashes. He promptly escaped from the Kalgoorlie lockup and, although it was known he had gone east, was never seen again.

  The Kalgoorlie lockup was by no means as secure as it might have been. Another man who got away from it and out of the state was the safebreaker Frank Flood, known as The Hawk and who his contemporaries regarded as reckless. His record was peppered with assaults and offensive behaviour, and on one occasion, after stealing a safe as it was being loaded onto a cart, he said he was cold and returned to the premises to steal the proprietor’s coat. His record also included a 1900 conviction in Coolgardie for shooting at a love rival with intent to maim. When it became clear the jury had been told of his previous convictions, possibly by the jury bailiff, the trial judge reversed the sentence of a year’s hard labour and ordered him to remain in custody for the rest of the day.

  A two-month sentence for possession of a revolver followed almost immediately, and it was then he escaped. Flood was something of a cyclist, said to be able to cover several hundred miles in a day. It was off to Adelaide, where, after a housebreaking went wrong, he stole a bicycle and pedalled away from the pursuing constable. It is doubtful that he pedalled as far as New South Wales but it was there that, now known as Frank Duggan, he was convicted of robbing the well-known Chinese businessman Mei Quong Tart on 19 August 1902.

  An active philanthropist, Tart often provided at his own expense dinners, gifts and entertainment for recipients ranging from the Benevolent Society home at Liverpool, to the newsboys of Ashfield, Summer Hill, Croydon and Burwood. From 1885 to 1888, he provided a series of dinners for the destitute inmates of asylums. He was a spokesman for the Chinese community, often advocating for the rights of Chinese–Australians and working as an interpreter. He also had progressive ideas about Sydney social politics. His tea rooms were the site of the first meetings of Sydney’s suffragettes, and he devised new and improved employment policies, such as paid sick leave. In June 1884 Tart also tried to win support for a ban of opium in Melbourne and Ballarat. In 1887 he presented a second petition to the Victorian Parliament, and produced a pamphlet, A Plea for the Abolition of the Importation of Opium. He was also part of the 1892 New South Wales Royal Commission on Alleged Chinese Gambling and Immorality and Charges of Bribery Against Members of the Police Force.

  It was alleged Duggan had called at Tart’s office at the Queen Victoria Markets, posing as a detective and warning him of a likely robbery, and had then attacked the unfortunate man with a lead pipe and taken £20. The attacker had been seen coming down the stairs from Tart’s office by John James, a civil engineer who drew a sketch of him and later picked out Duggan in an identification parade as having been at the markets. A glass engraver, Frank Webb, also identified him as having been there, as did a Chinese man, Tommy. Truth, in a racist mood, produced one of its more alliterative headlines: ‘Frank Flood. Charged with Tapping Tart’s Topnot Committed for Trial.’

  Duggan had what appeared to be a solid alibi, with a number of witnesses saying he had been watching boxers train at Her Majesty’s Hotel and, in November 1902, the first jury could not reach a verdict. At the second trial, he received twelve years, something the press, with the exception of Truth, thought a heavy sentence but well merited. The underworld thought he had gone down for someone else’s robbery but that that was the luck of the game. There were suggestions that Henry Jones, who had been executed for the shooting of Constable Long at Auburn, 19 kilometres from central Sydney, had confessed to the attack. Truth pointed out that the officer conducting the identification parade had pressed the witnesses either to identify Duggan at Tart’s office or at least to put him at Queen Victoria Markets:

  After perusing the deposition, as we have done, it seems a most extraordinary thing that this man should have been convicted on

  THE BARE WORD OF A CHINAMAN

  whose conscience told him that Duggan was the man who assaulted him.

  Truth claimed there were a number of senior detectives who believed the conviction was wrong, and the paper called for a full investigation. This did not take place. Tart never fully recovered from the attack and died from pleurisy at his Ashfield home eleven months later. By the end of his sentence, Flood, embittered by serving a sentence for a crime he claimed he had not committed, was a broken man. Friends took him to Gippsland, where he worked on a dairy farm, and his whereabouts after that are unclear.

  There may have been something to the the
ory that Tart had been killed by Henry Jones—a man certainly not afraid to use violence. On 19 January 1903 Constable Samuel Long was shot in the head when he surprised robbers at the Royal Hotel in Auburn. Theodore Trautwein, the licensee, chased the two men but they got to a sulky and drove off.

  The job resulted from a conversation in Bathurst Gaol between a safebreaker, Alfred Jackson, then serving a sentence for attempted breaking and also cattle stealing, and Henry Jones, who told him that ‘only fools and horses work’. Jones wanted a man ‘who understood the game and was not afraid to shoot’. His other men for the job were Digby Grand, who would ‘stop at nothing’, and Snowy Woolford, who was a ‘thorough cocktail’. Sensibly, Jackson declined. While Grand may have stopped at nothing, this did not stop him shooting off his mouth, telling a butcher, Joseph Gallagher, that he was tired of getting ‘stuff’ and wanted to go for the ‘ready gilt’, meaning he wanted money. At the time of Long’s murder, he was already on bail for shopbreaking and a big boot robbery.

  Woolford, the lookout, cracked first, weeping at and running away from Long’s funeral at which a police band was playing. This was heard by a servant, who told someone else, who told Trautwein. Woolford admitted making an impression in soap of the key to the hotel safe. Grand was arrested on 24 January, and Jones was arrested later, at 33 Ada Street in Surry Hills. Woolford was allowed to turn Queen’s Evidence, and at the committal proceedings told his story well. By the time of the trial, however, he had been sent to the Reception House, a psychiatric facility in Darlinghurst, and was claiming he had been made to give false evidence against Jones and Grand.

  He was in a state of complete breakdown by the time the trial began on 6 April and the first jury was discharged, in the hope Woolford would recover. At the second trial he was no better, and Grand, whose demeanour had been described as that of an amused spectator rather than that of an accused principal, smiled and gestured to the public gallery. Both men gave alibi evidence but the jury returned guilty verdicts, though adding, curiously, a recommendation for mercy.

  During the sentencing, Grand never lost his composure, somewhat echoing Ned Kelly’s ‘I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there where I go’, when he told Justice Rogers:

  I have to tell you to your face that you have tried this case more like a Crown Prosecutor than a Judge. There was a Judge in this State named Windeyer. Where did he die? Away from friends and relatives where I hope you will die. I shall meet you before our God, and then you will know whether I am guilty or not.

  Both he and Jones were hanged on 7 July 1903. Jones’s neck was broken but Grand was strangled to death. A subsequent medical report assured its readers that he had immediately been rendered unconscious and suffered no pain.

  Grand was correct. Sir William Windeyer had indeed died friendless and away from home, in Italy on 11 September 1897. He was on his way to take up a temporary appointment in Newfoundland. Windeyer was not only deeply unpopular over his conduct in the trial of the Mount Rennie rape case, when a number of youths were convicted and hanged in a case in which consent was alleged, and in the trial of George Dean, charged with the murder of his wife, but also for his part in forcing the resignation of the chief justice in 1886.

  An attack not dissimilar to the one on Quong Tart took place in Melbourne in June 1907, when sometime between 4.30 p.m. and 5 p.m., Bernard Bauer, one of the most expert diamond merchants and pearl dealers in Australia, was robbed and killed in his sixth-floor office in what was the Modern Chambers at 317 Collins Street. The robber stole around £2000 worth of diamonds from Bauer’s safe and his wristwatch but left behind a one-carat diamond on a weighing scale. He then ran down the stairs and escaped. Coming out of the lift at the time was Bauer’s friend Wolfe, who heard a cry and went to Bauer’s room to find him on the floor, his head battered. The doctor who conducted the autopsy thought that he had been struck six or seven times with a small but heavy weapon, possibly with a corner on it, initially from behind. Some of the blows could have been struck when Bauer was on the floor.

  It was not thought to have been a crime of opportunity. Bauer always took precautions, carrying a loaded revolver and sitting facing the door, so he could not be taken by surprise. There was evidence that a man who gave his name as William Anderson had called on another diamond merchant, William Cutler, the day before the murder, saying he wanted to buy diamonds. When Cutler gave him Bauer’s name, Anderson particularly wanted to know his address. He was then thought to have called on Bauer, asking if he could sell him a one-carat stone. Bauer had said he did not have any but would obtain some the next day. Cutler gave a detailed description of the man—about forty-five, with grey eyes, had a light brown moustache, was about 5 feet 10 inches tall and had a slight stoop.

  There was one promising lead. As the man had run down the stairs to the first floor, he bumped into a secretary, Mrs Parker, and pushed her aside, knocking her to the floor. She also was able to give a detailed description, and when she was later taken to a restaurant where the man was dining, she identified him. There were, however, problems with this. She was living in the same lodgings as Cutler and it was thought, although they denied this, that they might have unintentionally influenced each other. Worse, the fearful Mrs Parker also refused to swear an information for assault against the man, which would have given the police the chance to arrest and question him. In October 1907 a £1000 reward was offered, but at the end of November, the coroner recorded a verdict of wilful murder by a person or persons unknown.

  There was some excitement at the end of February 1908, when Adelaide police arrested a William Anderson over the shooting of a young woman in Lansdowne Terrace in the city. A photograph of him was sent to Melbourne, where Cutler told the police it resembled the Anderson he had seen but that this man looked much younger. The inquiry came to nothing. This Anderson was found to be insane and was sent to an asylum, from which he made a short-lived escape in 1913.

  Of course, over the years, there were all sorts of theories, one of which was that this was an amateur theft. The reasoning behind this was that a professional would not kill anyone, given the possibility he would hang. Other theories included that a Sydney criminal had been hired; that the man was known to, and trusted by, Bauer; that the killer had immediately sailed for Europe to sell the diamonds in Amsterdam—but that would surely be the mark of a professional. There was also a theory that the man might have been a member of a gang who, five years earlier, had tied up the 71-year-old father of Melbourne jeweller Alfred Kiss as he was leaving his shop. Another theory was that it could have been the work of a recently released criminal and there was a call for such men to be required to notify the police of any change of address. Finally, it was thought that a woman had been involved. In the corner of Bauer’s room a lady’s black glove was found. Had an earlier visitor dropped it or had a woman been used as a decoy? In any case, no one was ever charged.

  History often repeats itself. At about 5 p.m. on 18 March 1978 three diamond dealers were found shot in the back of the head in the Manchester Unity Building on the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets. The killers had arranged to see $30 000 worth of diamonds. Newspapers described the crime as ‘unprecedented in Australia’; the diamonds would have fetched around $9000 on the black market, or their full value if taken to Europe. It was thought the robbery had been carried out by an interstate gang. No charges were ever brought.

  Sailing Away

  3

  In 1877, a quarter of a century after the Nelson robbery, 5000 gold sovereigns in three sealed boxes were sent on P & O steamer the 1502-tonne Avoca from Sydney’s Darling Harbour to Melbourne. Bank officials supervised their transfer to the RMS China, on which they would be taken to Galle in what was then Ceylon. On the Avoca, only the English-born chief officer, Robert Elliston, held a key to the strongroom on the lower deck, which could only be reached through a hatch directly opposite Elliston’s cabin.

  The journey took just under three week
s and when, on 29 August, the vessel arrived in Galle, the boxes were opened, again in the presence of bank officials, and the seals were broken. All that was in the boxes was sawdust.

  As the man with the key and the cabin opposite the entrance to the strongroom on the Avoca, Elliston was the principal suspect. However, he convinced the police, who were sure the coins had disappeared between Sydney and Melbourne, that he knew nothing about the disappearance of the gold sovereigns. All other members of the crew, from Captain Pockley to the ship’s carpenter Martin Weiberg, were interrogated but they answered all questions satisfactorily. Elliston was given a leave of absence and returned to England. And there the matter lapsed. Some months later, Weiberg told his mates he was leaving the ship, marry ing a barmaid and going to live on a property on the Tarwin River in South Gippsland. And the crime would have remained unsolved except that Weiberg’s in-laws moved in with him and his new wife.

  In the spring of 1878, while cutting up metre-long bars of soap, his sister-in-law Emma found cloth in a bar that had been hollowed out, pulled at it and out came shiny gold sovereigns. She showed her find to her mother, who told her daughter to take it to the police. Initially, in a version of the stock defence to a receiving charge, the ‘I met a man in a hotel’ story, Weiberg told the officers he had been given a parcel by a bearded stranger on the ship, who had told him, ‘Here is a present for you. Keep your mouth shut’.

  When more coins were found in a search of the property on 25 October 1878, Weiberg made a complete confession, implicating Elliston who, he said, during a particularly rough part of the voyage to Melbourne had got him to cut into the strongroom and open the boxes. For his troubles, Elliston gave him £200. What he forgot to tell the police was that as the ship’s carpenter with the full run of the vessel, he had spent months on board amusing himself by making a series of secret doors, hatches and passageways which had enabled him to break into the strongroom on his own. He offered to take the police to a spot where he had hidden more gold for Elliston, claiming he had placed the coins in a kettle that he had lowered into the Tarwin River. He suggested that he and a policeman take a boat out and, when they were afloat, Weiberg hit the policeman and was off.