Gangland Robbers

by James Morton

  The idea of detaining him until he was eighteen must have foundered because, convicted of housebreaking at Gladstone, he was released on a £100 bond the next year. He then went east and was in Sydney when, in 1904, he served three months for theft. Back west, in Fremantle, in August 1905 he received two years and four months for stealing and receiving. This time, he had been convicted with New Zealand-born Henry Lewis, also known as James ‘Jewey’ Mackay. The 5-foot-2-inch bootmaker had been in Western Australia since 1902, and had already served two sentences for theft and assaults on police.

  In 1909 Ryan was one of the suspects in the murder of Constable William Hyde, shot and killed on 2 January at Marryatville while he was investigating a series of break-ins in the area. In the preceding weeks, there had been a number of armed robberies in which shots had been fired, and Hyde approached three men said to be acting suspiciously near the branch office of the Municipal Tramways Trust. Unfortunately, he was not carrying his service revolver. In the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century, Hyde was one of only two South Australian police officers killed on duty. The gunman was seen resting his hand on a fence during the shooting, and a tracker was brought in but a rainstorm had wiped out the men’s trails. Two hats and black Chesterfield coats with velvet collars that were thought to belong to the men were found but no charges were brought. There were also suggestions that the killers might have been members of the King Hit Push, which, at the time, was in the business of robbing tramcar offices.

  In March 1909, two months after Hyde’s shooting, Ryan went to a Sydney prison for three months on an idle and disorderly charge. He tried to escape, for which he was given a sentence of three years. Then, while being moved from Adelaide to Gladstone Gaol, Ryan jumped from a train going at speed between Hoyleton and Kybunga. Despite falling heavily, by the time the train had been stopped and a search commenced, he was clean away. He was out for more than a year before he was acquitted of gaol breaking on a technicality and then promptly arrested for stealing a bicycle. It was time to move east again and who should Ryan meet up with in Sydney but his old friend Mackay, now known as Samuel ‘Jewey’ Freeman and running the Riley Street Push.

  The Eveleigh Railway Workshops robbery was executed on 10 June 1914, four days after Freeman shot nightwatchman Michael McHale in the face during a robbery at the Paddington post office in Oxford Street. A bystander, Edward Heagney, was also shot but both he and McHale survived.

  On 10 June two Eveleigh employees arrived by horse and cart at the factory, bringing the payroll, which totalled slightly more than £3300. They unloaded the first chest of money and, as they were taking out the second, Ryan drove up in an old grey car with Freeman in the passenger seat. Freeman put a gun to the head of one employee, Norman Twiss, and threatened to blow his brains out. He and Ryan loaded the second chest into the car and the pair drove away.

  The Sydney Morning Herald was both enchanted by the robbery and able to use it as a stick with which to beat the state’s administration:

  The Eveleigh holdup is surely unique of its kind in Australia. For audacity of conception and cool effrontery of execution it could hardly have been surpassed but had there been a policeman about, the robbers may have been apprehended. We commend to the Government’s notice the increase of the police force.

  Unfortunately for Freeman and Ryan, the number of the car had been taken. Even more unfortunately for them, they had not bothered to steal a car. They had simply used one belonging to Arthur Tatham from Castlereagh, who had duly reported it stolen. When interviewed, though, he seemed to know a suspiciously large amount about the robbery. Also, the man in charge of the payroll told the police that Twiss had been unusually cool in the face of a gun being put to his head. Indeed, it seemed almost as if he had expected the attack.

  Then Freeman was shelved. He delayed leaving Sydney for too long, and on 24 June the police arrested him as he was boarding the Melbourne Express. Though he claimed he had been at the races on the day of the robbery, he was charged, which left Shiner Ryan very much on his own. For the moment, things went well enough for him, while he stayed in Sydney and sent his share of the proceeds to his friend Sam Falkiner in Melbourne. Then, however, things began to unravel. First, Falkiner took some of the takings—which he would later tell the jury he had been entitled to do—and then, after sending the remainder to Ryan’s girlfriend, Mrs Edith Kelly in Adelaide, decamped to Tasmania. When Ryan, who had gone to Melbourne disguised as a woman to collect his share, found out what had happened, he told Kelly. The sound of reward money ringing in her ears, she went to the police.

  Ryan was in bed with her in Richardson Street, Albert Park, when the police arrived. They found £300 in a glass jar stuffed into the chimney, all that was ever recovered from him. Ryan was sent back to Sydney, where he was charged, along with Freeman, Twiss and Tatham. The quartet went on trial at the Central Criminal Court, Darlinghurst, in September that year, with mixed results. Twiss was acquitted and Tatham received a mere three months for being an accessory.

  Ryan’s case was hopeless. Falkiner had been retrieved from Tasmania and gave evidence against him, as did Mrs Kelly, despite her saying she still loved Ryan. She was a woman who certainly had a complicated love life: she was married with children, claimed to love Ryan, and lived with a third man, who came to court to watch the entertainment. Did she still love Ryan? Yes. Had she arranged his defence? Yes. Why was she giving evidence against him? It seemed the right thing to do. And no, there was no question of trying to get him to confess so that she could have a share in the reward money.

  Ryan claimed the reason he had left Sydney was because he had seen a drawing in the newspaper of one of the robbers that resembled him and, because of his criminal record, he knew no one would believe he was innocent. Totally unable to explain away the money in the chimney, as well as the evidence of an informant and the fact he had admitted to the crime on his arrest, he was right.

  Jewey Freeman’s alibi changed slightly, principally because the races were not run in the morning. He said he had been in bed with Kate Leigh, who was called to give evidence and confirmed it. In fact, they had gone ice-skating together at the Exhibition rink, and then gone back to Frog Hollow in Surry Hills, where they had been living in connubial bliss for two days. As Truth pointed out, many years later:

  Her admission, made in public and on oath, a woman’s confession of her own lack of virtue, would have gone far to swing the scales in favour of Freeman. It seemed unbelievable that a woman would publicly parade her shame unless the facts were correct.

  Many accounts have Leigh living in a ménage à trois with Freeman and Ryan, but there are other claims that Freeman had no idea who she was when she came to the police station. In those days and, indeed, for some years afterwards, police evidence was not wholly reliable. One officer said that when she came to the lockup, she asked which one of the men was Freeman, while, in turn, Freeman asked, ‘Who’s that ginger cunt?’.

  In any case, the jury did not believe her or Freeman. Both he and Ryan received ten years. For Freeman, this was followed immediately by a life sentence for shooting McHale.

  At first, Ryan and Freeman seemed to take their ten-year sentences well. Saying that he would make a good soldier, Freeman asked to be sent to the Front. Mr Justice Sly appears to have had some admiration for the pair:

  I believe you are right. Both of you are bold men apparently afraid of nothing and you would make very good soldiers. Still I cannot send you to be a soldier.

  Freeman asked that one of the arresting officers, Detective Robson, be given his revolver as a souvenir, while Ryan said he wanted his to be given to the war effort. Ryan later told a warder he would see the sentence out in twenty-four hours. The next morning he was found in bed in Parramatta Prison, soaked in blood. He had tried to commit suicide, by cutting his wrists with a piece of tin.

  Freeman was a model prisoner and became something of a forgotten man until, in January 1935, there was a press campaign
for his release. He had now served twenty years, and complained about other men who had been convicted of murder, or attempted murder, during a robbery having been released. These included Allan Main, who had shot laundry proprietor Ernest Overton in Manly in 1913. He had left behind his hat, clearly marked Allan Main, Belltrees. Then there was Herbert Shaw, who, in April 1917, had beaten George King to death at the California, a boarding house at Katoomba. Shaw claimed he was innocent and had been fitted up. There was also Alfred Smith, known as ‘The Masked Burglar’, who had shot at John Thompson in February 1912, and David Galloway, known as Scotty McCall, convicted of the attempted murder of builder William Dettman during a burglary in Rose Bay in September 1919. Much of the evidence revolved around the burglar having a Scots accent, as McCall did. At an early identification parade, Dettman picked out four men, including McCall, whom he said resembled his attacker, who was known to head a gang of burglars. It was not until five months after the attack that the now-recovered Dettman was in court to hear the case against McCall of stabbing two men and claimed to recognise his voice. McCall could only call one witness, Black, who said he had been with him at a picnic, but the man had a bad criminal record himself. At first, McCall had been a prisoner whose cell a warder would not enter alone, and the ringleader of riots in prison, but over the years he had calmed down and, championed by the Seamen’s Union, was released in 1933.

  Freeman was finally released in 1939 and it seems he gave up his criminal career, with one minor exception. In May 1950 he was fined £10 for stealing a blow lamp from a shop. He had been drinking at the time. There is no evidence he ever saw Kate Leigh again.

  Not so Ryan, who over the next forty years was regularly in and out of the courts, and almost as often in and out of jail. Released in under four years, in June 1918 he was found not guilty of a Sydney bank raid when the clerk refused to give evidence against him and his co-accused, Gilbert Purvis and Neil Gant. Back in South Australia, he soon went down for eight years, this time for receiving cloth. On 12 July 1922 he managed to get out of Yatala with Edward Watts and William Shaw. Locked in their cells at night, they had opened the cell doors and climbed over iron grilles and then the prison walls. They soon split up and took off, but after black trackers were brought in, they were all caught within the week. The jury strongly recommended mercy but not much was on offer. Ryan received two years, and the others eighteen months apiece.

  At his committal proceedings, Ryan, it was reported, displayed close interest in the number and character of the locks, and requested that a number of keys be produced at his trial. The police were so impressed with his escape they asked if he would explain his methods but he declined, preferring instead to sell his story, which was smuggled out of the prison, to Smith’s Weekly to raise some money for his mother. He also made a set of skeleton keys and presented them to the Yatala governor. In July that year there were unfounded rumours he had died from complications following a bout of pleurisy.

  There was no question of reform on his release but sometimes his luck held. In 1928 he was acquitted in Brisbane of having stolen gelignite and a fuse with the detonator attached. The next year he was charged with a burglary in Rundle Street, Adelaide, but in August his conviction and a three-month sentence for failing to give a satisfactory account of himself to a police officer were quashed, due to insufficient evidence.

  In February 1930, while still in Adelaide, Ryan was charged with shopbreaking and the first jury disagreed. He had been able to explain he had a torch with him because he was looking for a key he had lost. As for the gloves … well, he always carried then to wear when he was repairing his car. The instrument that the prosecution said was for opening safes was his own invention and as he had taken out patent rights, while he did not feel obliged to explain what it was for, he would say that it was not intended for dishonest purposes. He thought the story that Constable Donald Beatty had been shot at and that a bullet had struck his police whistle was quite wrong. Ryan was, however, convicted at a retrial, and the prosecutor indicated he was considering applying to have him declared an habitual criminal. Instead, he received a twenty-eight month sentence.

  In October 1932, however, Ryan, now called Cleman, was sentenced to five years after shooting at a man who tried to stop him when he attempted to drive off without paying for petrol in Subiaco, Perth. In September 1938, along with Thomas Wood and Ernest Dawson, he was charged with the robbery of a Gingin store. He was also suspected of being involved in more robberies and to be quite prepared to shoot if he saw fit. Claiming he had been fitted up, not by the police but by the prosecution’s other witnesses, he received three years.

  By the outbreak of World War II, Ryan was now in his fifties and had racked up sentences totalling forty-three years, believed to be an Australian record. Then, thirty years after the Eveleigh robbery, he returned to Kate Leigh’s life. He had been making models of ships to be raffled for the war effort and sent them to her in Sydney. One of them raised £150. He and Leigh, now the brothel-owning Queen of Darlinghurst, began corresponding and in 1942 he sent her a painting he had done, showing Christ outside Fremantle Gaol, holding a black lamb named Shiner. The same year it was announced he would be marry ing Mrs Kate Leigh, described in the Daily News as a ‘prominent social worker’, which was one way of putting it. The wedding was scheduled to take place at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. ‘Nothing but the best will do for the wedding.’

  Unsurprisingly, since Ryan was still in prison, nothing came of this, and it was not until his release in 1947 that he went to Sydney, where his and Kate’s engagement was announced shortly after she and the press met his plane. The wedding took place in Fremantle on 18 January 1950; he in a fawn double-breasted suit and green fedora; and she in a delphinium-blue gown with silver beading, with a black veil, white gloves and nylons.

  It would be pleasant to record that these two old villains found happiness but this would not be accurate. They returned to Sydney, where Ryan pined for Western Australia. He stuck it out for three weeks and was off back west. A short time later, she tried to claim £3 a week maintenance, a gesture he resisted, saying he would rather go to prison, where he would at least get treatment for his asthma.

  In semi-retirement, Ryan ran a radio repair shop in Fremantle; threw parties for children, at which he blew up condoms to serve as balloons; repaired instruments for the Salvation Army band; and provided trainers with ‘jiggers’ to improve the running of their horses. He died on 27 June 1957, and the mayor of Fremantle, Sir Frederick Samson, was one of his pallbearers. On his death, Kate Leigh paid him his due tribute. He was, she said, a brilliant man who could open any lock with a wire coathanger and his hands behind his back. A little poem also appeared for him in the Sydney papers:

  Shiner, we cannot clasp our hands sweetheart

  Thy face I cannot see

  But let this token tell

  I still remember thee.

  He was buried in the Anglican division of Fremantle Cemetery. The plot and the grave were also paid for by Kate Leigh.

  Squizzy Taylor’s Cohorts

  5

  Quite apart from minor hold-ups—such as the time he organised the bail-up of a poker game and then doublecrossed the victims in the negotiations for the return of their stolen jewellery—the bludger police pimp, thief, putter-up, drug dealer, jury fixer and, for some unaccountable reason, Australia’s ‘favourite larrikin’, Joseph Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor was involved in three, possibly four, robberies that ended up involving murder charges.

  A failed jockey—both too heavy and, even for the time, too crooked—Taylor began his criminal career as a member of the Bourke Street Rats, the most famous of Melbourne’s pushes in the early years of the twentieth century. There he was taught pickpocketing, shoplifting and blackmail, until, by 1913, he was moving into bigger, if not always better, things.

  For the first of his major jobs, he had a partner from Western Australia. Of a ‘quintette’ named as ‘bad’ by the Perth police
in 1903—in reality they were all fairly small time—there was only one, Harold ‘Bush’ Thompson otherwise known as Bairstow, who really made the headlines in the east. After his skirmishes in Western Australia, Thompson travelled to Adelaide, and then gravitated to Melbourne to join up with Taylor.

  He was charged with assault and robbery in July 1912, when he and another man, who was never charged, were alleged to have knocked down a Samuel Boland and his friend Dougall McDougall in an alley off Flinders Street. Boland said he and McDougall had been drinking in the Westernport Hotel when Thompson approached them, and that when they left the hotel, he and a second man followed them. Thompson was granted bail after the committal proceedings but fled to Perth, where he was arrested at Goodwood races. Sent back east in September 1912, Napthali H Sonenberg, solicitor of choice for any halfway decent criminal of the time, defended him. At his trial in November, Thompson had an alibi that in the afternoon he had been at the races and was in a billiard hall at the time of the robbery. He was acquitted.

  There were much bigger things to come. On 6 January 1913 commercial traveller Arthur Trotter was robbed of £215 and shot dead in the bedroom of his home in George Street in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. It was thought he had been drinking in a sly-grog shop and brothel that Taylor’s wife, blonde Dolly Gray, ran, and had been boasting of the money he carried. That evening he was followed home. His wife, Beatrice, told the police:

  We saw two men in the room and my husband called out, ‘What’s your game?’ The taller of the two men replied, ‘We want the money.’ My husband said, ‘What money? There’s no money here. This is murder.’ One man said ‘Shoot the—!’ Suddenly my husband jumped out of bed and hit the man who was pointing the revolver at him. The burglar then fired and when my husband fell he said to the other man, ‘Get the — money.’ The smaller man ran to the bed where Mr Trotter had been sleeping and turning over the mattress, he took the money. The other man covered me with a revolver and told me to keep quiet. They then ran away out of a back door.