Gangland Robbers

by James Morton

  Morris also told the police that he had been on the Mudgee robbery, flashing a torch on and off until the box was thrown out. He had collected it and then driven off with the robbers, Harold Ryan and Arthur Collins. However, the guards on the Mudgee train failed to identify two suspects—Ryan and a railway porter, Roy Edward Wilkinson. Now it was a question of relying on the dobbers, one of whom was indeed Arthur Collins. James Caffrey and Collins were charged with receiving from the Canberra mail theft, and also with the well-planned and executed robbery of Sydney jeweller Solomon Cohen in May 1931. The charges against Collins were quickly dropped and he became a Crown witness.

  In June, Allen and Squires, escort and guard from the Mudgee train, were both dismissed. They appealed against their dismissals, and Squires, who had thirty years’ service, was reinstated in October but not Allen. In late June 1931 Ryan was charged with both the train robberies. Both Morris and Collins had already dobbed him in.

  At the committal proceedings on 10 July, Collins said that on the night of the robbery, he, Ryan and Morris had met, and Morris drove them to the Emu Plains railway station. He gave evidence that Ryan had said to Morris, ‘You shake it up and go to the viaduct.’ Collins said, ‘Ryan and I waited in a paddock near the rail station. When the Mudgee mail came along we got on the guard’s van opposite the platform. When the train moved, Ryan climbed into the guard’s van. I saw the guard and escort standing in front of Ryan, who had an automatic and a nickel-plated revolver. I said, “Put them in the other compartment.”’ Collins claimed the guard turned round, and Ryan slapped him on the ear and said something about dead men.

  Then it was Morris’s turn and he said that, after the robbery, Roy Wilkinson told him, ‘Mick Collins is one of the men I put the Mudgee mail robbery up to. I was to get £500, and got wiped off with £50.’ Morris also accepted that he and the others had buried £7600, part of the proceeds of the Canberra robbery, on his farm.

  Everyone was given bail, and Ryan made the most of this opportunity and absconded. Truth was at its most eloquent, writing of his elderly, grey-haired mother sitting in her darkened room, awaiting her son’s return. Over the years, there were various sightings of him in and around Sydney, and on one occasion he gave a statement to the press saying he had absconded because the police had smoked his principal witness.

  In the meantime, on 27 November 1931, Wilkinson received three years for concealing knowledge of a felony, two years for receiving and two years for being an accessory after the fact to the robbery. All the sentences were made concurrent.

  Then, in June 1935, a firm of solicitors received a letter from Ryan, asking them to arrange a meeting with a Detective Inspector Quinn so that he could give himself up, and at 7.15 p.m. on 19 June he was rearrested. ‘I have come back from abroad to give myself up to the police to meet the charges against me. I have always had a complete defence,’ Ryan told Quinn, adding that a man who had owed him money had failed to come through and he had been left without funds to pay for his defence. By then, another man, Lancelot Lynch, had been acquitted and Arthur Collins had pleaded guilty to concealing knowledge of the Canberra robbery. Ryan, somewhat optimistically, thought that having done the decent thing by giving himself up, he might be granted bail again. It was an argument that cut no ice with Judge Curlewis.

  The Canberra robbery was tried first and much of the Crown’s evidence came from another informer: this time, thief and forger Percy Jacobs, who in 1928 had received two years for a £1200 fraud. He gave detailed evidence of Ryan’s pre-planning. When it came to it, and crucially, he denied he personally had been involved, although Ryan had promised him £1000. This produced an outburst from Judge Curlewis: ‘Why you were to get £1000 I do not know. You did nothing to earn it.’ Then he added, ‘I do not know if the jury will convict on this man’s evidence alone.’

  Morris backed up Jacobs. He again said he had driven Ryan and his one-time friend Collins from the Mudgee robbery and had buried the cash on his farm. He claimed that Ryan had been standing over him because of a conviction some eight years previously, which, if it came out, would lose him his job as a part-time postmaster. But Morris was clearly better connected than was apparent at first glance. Under cross-examination, he agreed that, yes, he knew a man Jenkins but, no, he had never shot him and nor had he placed a bomb in his car. Jenkins was receiver Percy ‘Snowy’ Jenkins who had been shot and whose shop was bombed in a Melbourne gangland feud, possibly over car rebirthing; that, or drugs. Morris also accepted he knew Alexander McIver and Francis Delaney, convicted of bombing the Greek Club in Melbourne in 1928.

  Ryan’s counsel, mixing his metaphors nicely, made a splendid attack on the evidence: ‘The rotten house the Crown has built, you would not hang a dog on.’ The Crown, on the other hand, pointed out with some justification that Jacobs and Morris ‘had been described as men of mud. Wretches as they might be, sorry as their characters were they were the very type employed by a mastermind when carrying out a criminal enterprise. And it is a mastermind who is now on trial’. But when it came to it, the jury did not like the prosecution’s dogs and declined to convict Ryan.

  On 8 October he went on trial for the Mudgee robbery. This time, Arthur Collins, who had done amazingly well for himself in plea bargaining—a bind over for the Mudgee robbery, and an order to leave the state for his part in the attack on Cohen the jeweller—was there to put his old friend away. Morris was again on hand to give his usual evidence. Collins was in the witness box reluctantly, demanding before he said a word that he be given assurances he would not be prosecuted. By the end of his evidence, he was being treated as a hostile witness.

  The prosecution’s case then took another serious denting when another witness, Ernest Rowlands, said his memory was now a complete blank. Ryan, making a statement from the dock, which meant he could not be cross-examined, claimed that Morris and Collins were lying and trying to put their crimes on him to save themselves. Invited to account for his wealth, he ingeniously did so. His savings in the name of George Brown had been assembled years earlier and were used for betting purposes; those in the name of Thompson were given to his mother. Whoever Thompson was—or, as it turned out, had been—he had kindly allowed Ryan to use his name. Ryan also called alibi evidence that he had gone to the funeral of a taxi driver—the same Thompson—at Waverley Cemetery and he had been at the widow’s home with two other drivers on the night of the robbery. After deliberating for twelve hours, the jury announced they could not agree.

  By the time of the retrial, Collins evidently had had enough, and failed to appear. On 2 December 1935, after the jury had retired for rather less than an hour, Ryan was finally and triumphantly acquitted.

  In an article in Steam Scene on the Mudgee train robbery, the author muses on what happened to Ryan and Morris, and whether there was a post-trial scheme between them. If there was, it was certainly not to Morris’s advantage. On 29 March 1944 he was found shot to death in his car, parked by a block of flats in High Street, Millers Point, almost directly above the spot where Reginald Holmes had been shot in the Shark Arm case a decade earlier. Six of the bullets had been fired into Morris’s head. He had, said the papers, ‘been put on the spot’. A man had apparently telephoned him and asked him to be at Millers Point at 9 p.m. At first it was thought he had been killed in a dispute over proceeds of crime, rather than as revenge for some of his earlier misdeeds. At the time, along with Cyril Humby and Arthur Jordan, Morris was on bail, awaiting trial on a charge of having stolen a safe containing about £2500 in jewellery, coins and cash.

  Nevertheless, the name in the frame for Morris’s killing was none other than Harold Joseph Ryan. In fact, so far as the police were concerned, his was the only name in the frame. He was duly charged, and at the inquest, Jean Evans, a girlfriend of Morris, told the coroner that Ryan had wanted him to help out with bailing up a baccarat game that Sydney identity Siddy Kelly was holding to raise funds for the defence of crooked financier John Walcott Forbes, then awaiting
trial on fraud charges. Kelly had put a fair amount of money into Forbes’s companies and realised the only way he might get it back was if Forbes was acquitted. He wasn’t.

  By this time, however, Ryan was associated with the waterfront, and produced an alibi to say he had been doing a night shift on the docks when Morris was shot. Although the coroner committed Ryan for trial, the attorney-general issued a nolle prosequi, which entitled him to charge Ryan again if more evidence became available. It never did.

  Afterwards, Ryan claimed that Kelly had sooled Jean Evans to give the evidence against him and he was most probably right. In due course, Humby and Jordan were acquitted of the charge of stealing the safe. By then, Ryan had slipped away into the twilight of the underworld, as any self-respecting Grey Shadow should.

  Death and the Ginger Game

  8

  Over the years, the danger of going to strange rooms with strange women has been demonstrated to hundreds of thousands of men, possibly even millions. And one of those dangers is the Ginger Game—known in England and America as the Badger Game—a con trick as old as the hills, which often turns into blackmail or robbery.

  Basically, a girl or boy offers to have sex with a man and when they are stripped to their underwear, into the room comes his or her so-called father, brother, uncle or social worker, who points out he or she is under the age of consent and takes money not to report the matter to the police. If the person who offered to have sex is an older woman, the ‘husband’ may be the one to come knocking.

  A variation is that the mark is allowed to have sex and while occupied, the prostitute’s friend or bludger will go through his clothing, looking for his wallet and any jewellery. In some brothels, panels could be slid back so the accomplice could remove money and jewellery from the man’s clothes, which had been placed on a chair the prostitute had put conveniently near the panel. But when played roughly, the Ginger Game can be dangerous and even fatal, not only for the mark but for the prostitute and her bludgers in the long term.

  In Spring Hill, Brisbane, the English (or perhaps German, or perhaps Dutch) George ‘Tich’ Brett, who was said to have served a sentence in England for counterfeiting, was regarded as ‘a modern Buffalo Bill’. ‘There are few more romantic figures in the annals of Queensland crime than this little man’, simpered Truth.

  In 1925 Brett, who ran a string of girls, had been acquitted of the attempted murder of his one-time offsider Wallace Murphy. In November that year, farm manager Gustav Langerfeldt was found unconscious in Wharf Street, Spring Hill. At first it was thought he had been shot, but when Langerfeldt regained consciousness, he told the police he had strayed into a saloon in Boundary Street, where Brett was playing the pianola. There, Amy Rose Germain, Brett’s mistress and one of his working girls, robbed him of £5. When Langerfeldt complained, Brett hit him over the head with a claw hammer.

  Three days later, Brett was granted bail in the sum of £100 and a surety of a similar amount. Another of his girls, Vera Jones, drove him to Sydney, where he was retrieved from Randwick racecourse in January 1926. Unusually for a case involving Brett, the victim could not be persuaded to change his evidence. On his way back to Queensland, Brett told his police escort he thought he would get three years but, the next month, he received ten. He was, said the judge:

  a brute in human shape, utterly regardless of the life of others—a terror to the community in which you live and a desperado and dangerous criminal.

  Truth now thought Brett had ruled ‘Brisbane’s gangsters with a bar of iron’, or maybe a claw hammer.

  In May 1935 the Victorian-born George ‘Spadger’ Bray, described in police files as 5 foot 7 inches with ‘numerous scars [which] decorate his nose, jaw, temple, chin, cheek and wrist from scraps and fights’, was lucky not to face a murder charge in Queensland when running a Ginger Game with Vera Moore. When he and Moore appeared, charged with an assault on John Grezbala, the court was told that ‘only a miracle could save his [Grezbala’s] life’. Fortunately for him, miracles were not in short supply in Queensland that year. Grezbala survived and a no bill was presented when he declined to give evidence. It was, however, time for Bray to head south to Adelaide.

  Langerfeldt and Grezbala had been relatively fortunate. Ernest Hoffman was less so when, at the beginning of World War II and down south, the Ginger Game was fatal to his health. At 5 foot and 15 stone, Sydney’s Barbara Surridge would not, at first sight, seem to have been many a punter’s immediate choice. However, on 4 May 1942 Surridge, who worked under the unfortunate name of Stella Croke, was involved in the death of Hoffman, variously described as a sporting man and as a chef at the Royal Sydney Golf Club.

  She took him to a ginger joint in Langley Street, Darlinghurst, and while Hoffman was there, he saw another woman going through his pockets. While he struggled with her and Surridge, two men, Surridge’s husband, William, and his offsider, James Harris (known as Skinny Jones), rushed in and beat him unconscious, almost tearing the side of his hand off with a broken bottle, and breaking his nose and seven ribs on one side and two on the other, before dumping him in his shirt and singlet in a nearby allotment. Hoffman died in St Vincent’s Hospital sixteen days later but not before identifying Surridge from his bed. Detective Brian Doyle, regarded as an incorruptible officer at a time when corruption was rife, had already interviewed him. Hoffman had told the detective:

  A fat sheila took me into the house. She told me to take off my clothes and get into bed. There were six or seven pounds in the pants. A skinny sheila came upstairs and was going though my pockets. I called out, and the fat sheila hit me on the head. Then a bloke came in and hit me and kept on hitting me.

  Initially, four people were charged with Hoffman’s murder but Betty Harris, also known as Edna Thomas, was discharged when the coroner said he could not connect her to the killing. The Surridges and James Harris were left in the dock. All three pleaded not guilty to murder, and the trial got off to a bright start, with the defence challen ging sixty jurors. A witness, described as a ‘foreigner’, then refused to give his name to the court until he had an undertaking it would not be published. He said he had been watching the house in Langley Street because he was suspicious when he saw two women go in with a man. He heard noises, and saw the two women leave before two men carried a third man out.

  As her alibi, Surridge said she had been in bed in Palmer Street from around 5.30 p.m.until the police knocked on the door about twelve hours later. She knew the house in Langley Street because she had a cleaning job there and that was why her fingerprints might have been found. William Surridge accounted for the blood on his shirt, hat and hand by saying he had had a fight with a man on the afternoon of 4 May. He had, he said, been in the house when the Hoffman fight took place but he had not taken part. Indeed, he had picked up Hoffman and helped him outside to the vacant lot. As for the statement he was alleged to have made that his wife was at the Langley Street house, this was a police invention and, additionally, Detective Boswell had knocked him about. James Harris said he had been in a Kings Cross residential, where he lived with Bonny Dent, the whole evening of the assault.

  The jury retired for less than two hours before convicting them. Harris called out to the police witnesses, ‘You are lying bastards. May God strike you dead.’ The trio were sentenced to death and their appeals failed. On 15 December they were reprieved and given life sentences. For a time Barbara Surridge was in the next-door prison to her husband and they were allowed to meet once a year in the men’s chapel. In 1952 the Sydney brothel madam Tilly Devine offered to take Surridge to England if the authorities would release her early. They would not. Devine had tried to visit her regularly during her sentence, on one occasion throwing a chicken at the prison gates when she was refused admission. As for Surridge’s behaviour in prison, she was regarded as a ‘considerable influence’, usually getting her own way.

  Surridge apparently lost considerable weight over the years and in 1954 was said to be addicted to the weight-
loss drug Dexedrine. That year, Devine was alleged to be behind an attempt to smuggle tablets into Long Bay for her. A former inmate rather dismissed this, telling Truth, ‘She’s a lot thinner now but who wouldn’t be after two years with those Long Bay cooks?’ After her release from prison in 1956, Devine gave her a coming-out party. It was not the happiest of events because, although she denied it, Surridge was shot through the buttocks by another guest. The wound healed, and she returned to prostitution and the Ginger Game. She died on 3 October 1957 in St Vincent’s Hospital—ironically, the one in which Hoffman died—when a cut on her finger became infected. Her husband died in 1964.

  Jean Lee, the last woman to hang in Australia, was another exponent of the Ginger Game. In her case, it is difficult to say whether she was simply the lure, or the leader of a trio whose other members were Robert David Clayton and Norman Andrews. At the time, Lee (known also as Smith, White, Brown, Duncan, Marjorie Brees and Marie Williams) was an attractive red-headed, 32-year-old woman from a respectable working-class home in Dubbo. After leaving school, she worked for a milliner, then as a waitress, as a clerk and, finally, in a factory.

  At the age of eighteen, Lee married a man from Sydney and had a daughter, looked after by her parents. When her marriage broke up at the beginning of the war, she became a prostitute, working the Kings Cross area of Sydney and also in Brisbane. At the end of the war, she looked after an American serviceman who had been badly wounded but, after his parents took him back to the States, she returned to the streets and acquired a number of convictions. It was then she realised she needed a minder and teamed up with Clayton, a known house-breaker and bludger, but most of her earnings were donated by him to bookmakers. It was only a matter of time before the pair latched on to the Ginger Game as being an easier and more profitable form of work.