by James Morton
Driscoll’s criminal record spanned twenty-four years, ending in 1978, when he received two years and three months for possessing a machine pistol. By then, he had been involved in a murder case that changed the law.
After the Mayne Nickless robbery, the Toecutters first attacked Stephen Nittes, who gave up $20 000 to save his digits and probably his life. Next was ‘Baldy’ Blair, who was allegedly tortured in the cellar of the Iron Duke in Botany Road, Alexandria. His toes were cut and testicles torched to persuade him to reveal where he had deposited his $90 000 share. He died from his injuries and his body was thrown into Sydney Harbour in the belief it would be eaten by sharks. It instead washed up in Botany Bay. Blair had not disclosed where he had hidden his money, but when the Toecutters visited his girlfriend, she was only too happy to hand over his share. According to robber Neddy Smith, an attempt to kidnap Alan Jones at the Coogee Bay Hotel failed.
Woon had already left the country, taking with him more than his fair share of the proceeds, and was thought to be in England, where he was sought by the police and by other criminals. Nittes was arrested on 23 September at the Randwick House Motor Inn. He would, he told the police, have been gone in another couple of hours. In the intervening months, he had bought a property in Leichhardt Street, Gorokan; a Valiant station wagon; a skiff and, very sensibly, some rifles. At trial, Jones and Nittes received sixteen years apiece. Melbourne’s Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley—because of his hat and the Colt gun he carried—and Painters and Dockers Union federal president ‘Big’ Jim Donnegan were charged with receiving $6500, part of the proceeds of the robbery. Donnegan died before the trial, but on 1 May 1972 Longley was found guilty and sentenced to three years with eighteen months to be served. Later, he would say there was a contract on his life, and had he been acquitted he would have been killed by two men sitting in the court, one of whom had a hand grenade. Longley served fifteen months before being released in August 1973.
On 21 February 1975, after the jury had retired for less than an hour, Linus Driscoll was convicted of murdering fellow Toecutter Jake Maloney in what the prosecution claimed was the wash-up of the Mayne Nickless robbery. It was alleged that Driscoll had shot Maloney through a bathroom window in Revesby on 24 November 1972. At the time, Driscoll was going out with a Pauline Bradley, and Maloney was going out with her sister. Maloney and Driscoll had been sharing a flat, and the prosecution alleged Driscoll killed his one-time friend because Maloney had planted a bomb in his car.
There was another perfectly good suspect, Phillip Moore, who had also been the victim of a suspected bomb attack by Maloney. But after Maloney’s killing, Driscoll had immediately left for Melbourne, and when he was arrested a year later, was found to have a machine pistol, as well as a sawn-off shotgun and an automatic pistol. He said he felt safer with them.
The High Court quashed Driscoll’s murder conviction on 10 August 1977, ruling the judge had erred in admitting into evidence unsigned statements to the police. This was the time that the Australian courts began to recognise seriously that defendants might have been verballed. A retrial was ordered, and on 29 November Driscoll was acquitted. After serving his two-year sentence for the machine pistol, he was deported to England.
According to the underworld, Maloney was killed by yet another fellow Toecutter, the psychopathic John Stewart Regan, ‘Nano the Magician’, on 23 November 1971. According to legend, just before Maloney was killed, Regan, referring to Baldy Blair’s floating body, said, ‘Sharks; hey, Jake, I’ll give you bloody sharks, you idiot.’
Woon never resurfaced after the Mayne Nickless robbery. It is thought he went to Europe, possibly to England. His legacy is in the Supreme Court case Woon v R which, it has been subsequently and persuasively argued, was bad law when his selective answers in the ES&A case were wrongly admitted in evidence.
Unlike with Woon’s gang, it was never quite clear who was the leader of the Magnetic Drill Gang, or, indeed, who were its members during the two or so years in which a series of meticulously planned and executed safebreakings were carried out in Victoria and New South Wales during the late 1970s. The gang’s early raids included a break-in at the mid-city American Express office in Melbourne on 29 March 1978, which netted around $250 000, and a 20 August attack on gem merchant John Morris’s Lonsdale Street office, which was said to have produced a similar amount. There were also successful raids on night safes in banks in Camberwell, Gardenvale, Elsternwick, Hawthorn and Toorak.
The raids were clearly the work of the same team. Two specialised pieces of equipment were used. The first was a circular electro-magnet that was clamped on the side of the safe, holding in place a diamond-tipped drill used to make a hole just above the tumblers of the lock. The second piece, a medical cystoscope, allowed the boxmen to look through the drilled hole. There was also a special attachment that enabled the operator to move the tumblers and open the safe. The safes themselves were all Chubbs, and the police believed the team had perfected their technique by working on a Chubb safe they had stolen in Melbourne.
There was the occasional failure. On 17 September 1978 they did not succeed in opening the Murrumbeena ANZ Bank’s safe. However, their final touch in Melbourne seems to have been the theft of $25 000 worth of diamonds from DG Buchanan’s in Chapel Street, Windsor, on the weekend of 18–19 November. Again, the gang cut through the ceiling of the floor above the shop and used their precision drilling equipment to open the safe. Buchanan said they stole only the most valuable watches and jewellery.
Three days later, the gang traveled to Murwillumbah, near the border of Queensland and New South Wales, until then best known for hosting the Tweed Valley Banana Festival and for a visit by Prince Charles the previous year. They hit the big time, netting $1.7 million, then Australia’s biggest robbery. A security company had delivered the cash to the Bank of New South Wales on Wednesday afternoon, for overnight deposit. It had been due to be delivered to the Reserve Bank in Brisbane on Thursday.
There were now suggestions the gang could even be flying overseas in their own plane with the loot. It was estimated that their total haul, including Murwillumbah, topped $2 500 000. Certainly, by early December it was known that some of the money had found its way to Hong Kong.
With jobs such as this, the police would know the names of the handful of people capable of such work. It seems incredible that in those less enlightened days of policing no charges were ever brought and the almost inevitable conclusion is that the gang was paying protection.
Over the years, Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh has repeatedly been suggested as the Magnetic Drill Gang’s leader, with Leo Callaghan, also known as Jack ‘The Fibber’ Warren, as his henchman. They had known each other since the days of the Kangaroos. Callaghan had started his criminal career in 1938, with a conviction for riding on the outside of a tramcar, but had progressed far from that modest beginning. He wore a grey toupee, had ‘No 1’ tattooed on his penis and was ranked highly among crims. A virtual kleptomaniac who regarded anything highly coloured as his own, on one occasion Callaghan took a Sung dynasty emerald elephant from Asprey in London’s Bond Street in addition to the diamond earrings the team had stolen, wrapping it in his coat as he left. No fence would cut it down, and so it was painted white and used as a doorstop in his flat in North West London. When he left the country, he left the elephant behind for the unsuspecting landlord.
Kinniburgh, a known and talented safebreaker, often worked with fellow Painter and Docker Les Kane as his minder to prevent unwanted interruptions. Known as The Munster because of his facial resemblance to the television character Herman Munster, over the decades the modest, influential and shadowy Kinniburgh rose to become a kingpin in Melbourne’s crime scene. A man whose career spanned three decades, he was one of the relatively few mobsters who have bridged the gap between the underworld and respectability, and was well known for his discreet connections to Melbourne’s establishment.
Born in a Richmond slum, Kinniburgh was known in hi
s early days for having a razor-sharp temper and the ability to back it up with his fists. Over the years, the lantern-jawed Kinniburgh was seen with barristers and solicitors around the law courts, and with owners and jockeys at Caulfield and other Melbourne tracks, where he was a genial and successful tipster, as well as privately regarded as a race fixer.
Although he claimed to be a simple rigger, he lived in Kew and was seen in fashionable restaurants such as Flower Drum. He was, said one Melbourne barrister who knew and socialised with him, ‘One of the three top crims I ever met.’ Said one friend, ‘Graham was a gentle gentleman, a beautiful quiet soul. I don’t know why they had to kill him.’ On one occasion, he rather diffidently told his barrister after a successful defence, ‘There’s not much a feller like me can do for a feller like you but if you ever need a feller like me …’ In 1994 when his son married into one of the city’s established families, the wedding was held at St Peter’s Anglican Church, East Melbourne, and the reception was at Melbourne institution the Hotel Windsor. A few months before his death, his barrister daughter, Suzie, married the son of a former attorney-general.
In the month before Kinniburgh died, he took to carrying a gun, which he had not done since his early days. Shortly before midnight on 13 December 2003, he was shot in the chest as he got out of his car outside his home, carrying a bag of groceries. It is thought he managed to get one shot off from his own gun. He had been at particular risk after the death of Melbourne identity Alphonse Gangitano, at whose home he had been on the night he was killed. It is believed Kinniburgh was killed on the orders of Melbourne gang leader Carl Williams, in reprisal for Gangitano’s death.
Unkind people thought Kinniburgh’s ability to talk to the police about many topics may have helped to keep him out of prison in the years before his death. The week before he was shot, he held a series of meetings in Carlton restaurants with the cream of the local villains. The day before his murder, he had been seen having coffee in Lygon Street with a detective from Carlton Criminal Investigation Branch. Others would have none of it, believing Kinniburgh, of all people, to be staunch.
It now seems that another armed robber may have killed Kinniburgh. Terrence Leigh Blewitt, who specialised in cash-in-transit robberies, disappeared on 12 April 2004. A friend had dropped him off in Melton, in Melbourne’s western suburbs, around 2.20 p.m. He got into a green Hyundai saloon and was never seen alive again. It was not until January 2016 that his remains were discovered in Thomastown.
During his long and overall none-too-successful career, Blewitt was sentenced in 1985 to a minimum of thirteen years for wounding Joseph Jirman, an Armaguard security guard, in a $253 000 robbery on 8 February that year at a Sydney shopping centre. Then, in 1994, he was part of a team that carried out a home invasion in which a young Coffs Harbour couple were terrorised in their home. The next year, his name was in the frame over the killing of security guard Robert Jones, shot in a robbery outside the Westpac Bank in Miranda, Sydney. According to one of his colleagues on the raid, he had told the police of Jones’s involvement as early as 2000 but claimed the police had not acted on this. In 1996 Blewitt was shot in the back by a guard during a bungled escape from an escort, en route to a Sydney hospital where he was to receive medical treatment. In 2000 Blewitt was jailed for a minimum of three years for conspiracy to commit an armed robbery, having been caught on telephone intercepts. He was released shortly before Kinniburgh was killed. He was then arrested for the armed robbery of a cash handler making a midnight deposit at a Mornington bank.
Ironically or coincidentally, or both, it is likely Blewitt was buried on an industrial site once used by a Kinniburgh associate, Jeffrey Reading, who had been fined $45 000 after using the site for illegal dumping between 2002 and 2006. Former drug boss Reading died in a car crash in August 2009.
Some of the biggest robberies worldwide have caused the greatest falling-outs and, consequently, deaths of gang members, their relations and friends. The 1978 US$5.8 million Lufthansa robbery at New York’s JFK Airport, organised by Jimmy ‘The Gent’ Burke, produced a death toll of a dozen or more. The £26 million Brink’s-Mat robbery in London in 1983 led to at least ten deaths, the most recent in 2015, and the total may still be rising. In Melbourne, Ray ‘Chuck’ Bennett’s 21 April 1976 raid on the Victorian Club, at 141 Queen Street, led to a long–running gangland feud.
Some criminals have allure, some have talent, some pay great attention to detail; some had, or did, all of those things. Like Bruce Reynolds, the leader of Britain’s Great Train Robbery, Bennett had the brains to organise and the charisma to lead a team that would obey him. Chopper Read, himself no slouch, regarded him as not only a top gang tactician but also ‘one of the Australian underworld’s foremost bank robbers’. Apparently Bennett, once a member of the so-called Kangaroo Gang, was serving a sentence in Parkhurst, a high-security prison on the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England, when he devised the Great Bookie Robbery.
Built in 1880, the Victorian Club was where bookmakers would meet to settle up on the first day after a weekend’s racing. By some accounts, in 1975 towards the end of his sentence, Bennett obtained a period of home leave and, amazing as it may seem, flew to Australia on a false passport to case the premises, before returning to complete his sentence.
Although security was incredibly lax for the amount of money floating around—some moonlighting detectives would look in to see things were all right and they invariably were—over the years, a number of individuals and teams had examined the club and decided it was too much like hard work. They included the highly talented James ‘Jockey’ Smith and Leslie Woon. If Woon had decided against it, it must really have seemed too much like hard work.
Bennett, another who had acted as a minder for Billy Longley in Melbourne’s waterfront war of the early 1970s, put together a team and took them out of the city for a period of training away from their wives and girlfriends. His second-in-command was another nominal Painter and Docker, Ian Revell ‘Fingers’ Carroll. Other members included Norman Leung Lee, who ran a dim sum restaurant, Bennett’s cousin Vinnie Mikkelsen, Anthony Paul McNamara and, while he denied it to his death, Dennis William ‘Greedy’ Smith who was always suspected to have been the getaway driver. Although they had worked with him before, neither one of standover brothers Les and Brian Kane was part of Bennett’s team. Neither—and, in particular, Brian—was thought to be willing to accept the discipline required. They were said not to have minded their omission but it must have grated. Another who missed out was Bennett’s great mate armed robber Brian O’Callaghan, but that was because he was in Long Bay at the time. Bennett is said to have given him $100 000 of the takings.
After a weekend dress rehearsal when the club was empty, Bennett chose the Wednesday after the three-day Easter weekend’s racing, when more than a hundred bookmakers were to meet to settle up there. An armoured car delivered the money at midday and, within minutes, at least six men armed with machine guns burst into the settling room, tackled the armed guards and ordered the bookmakers to lie on the floor. The team cut open the metal cash boxes, filled with more than a hundred calico bags containing untraceable notes. Just how much money was taken has never been established, but not less than $1.5 million and possibly up to $15 million are the parameters. The raid was over by 12.15 p.m., when most of the robbers had gone into the office block next door and then into the Queen Street traffic. Curiously, the robbery had happened on a day when the moonlighting detectives were not on their unofficial duty. A reward of $70 000 was promptly offered.
The immediate problem Bennett faced was disposing of the money. In 1998 Philip Dunn QC, who had represented Norman Leung Lee, said his client had told him that the money did not leave the premises for a month. The robbers had rented offices upstairs from the Victorian Club and they removed it at their leisure over the next four to five weeks. ‘When you think about it, that’s very smart, verging on genius almost,’ he said.
If robbers are to avoid getti
ng caught, what they must not do immediately after a touch is spend money like drunken sailors, and this requires communal discipline. Laundering requires care, and on this occasion the racetrack, one of the traditional avenues, was hardly open to the crims in question. The Great Train Robbers had been caught because they splashed out on cars in an endeavour to launder the money, instead of changing it through a trusted solicitor. When Peter Macari ‘Mr Brown’ took $500 000 from Qantas airlines in 1971, he bought a flat and fast cars, which he could not possibly explain satisfactorily.
Bennett was far too astute to allow anything like that to happen. Some of the money went into property. Some money went to Manila with Greedy Smith, who opened the Aussie Bar, which was advertised on a hoarding at the North Melbourne footy ground in Arden Street. Some of the profits went into the purchase of brothels and bars throughout Asia, as well as into racehorses, and to pay off up to fifty corrupt police officers in Manila. Some of the money went to Canada. But Bennett had a nasty scare when, while visiting a solicitor, his mother collapsed and the paramedics found some $90 000 in cash in her clothing. Amazingly, no questions seem to have been asked.
It was not until 1977 that Norman Leung Lee was arrested and charged with the robbery. He was the one man who had been spending conspicuously, having bought $60 000 of dim sum equipment. He was also trying to launder money through a solicitor’s trust account. On 19 August he took $60 000 in a plastic bag to this solicitor, saying he wanted to invest it on behalf of a friend. But Lee remained as staunch as Bennett had expected, and the magistrate ruled that there was no evidence to link the unmarked money to the robbery and refused to commit Lee for trial. Lee was the only one of the team who was ever charged and his acquittal really spelled the end of the investigating squad.
But, just as there were few, if any, continuing success stories among Britain’s Great Train Robbers, so over the years the Great Bookie Robbers had more than their fair share of bad luck. Most of them in fact died early, often violent, deaths. Even before this, there was, however, the danger of other gangs, including the Sydney-based Toecutters, wanting a share of the proceeds; and it spoke enormously well of the regard in which Bennett was held that they decided to leave him personally alone. Another story that floated around after the robbery was that Les and Brian Kane might decide they wanted a slice of the takings, and that Bennett would therefore make a pre-emptive strike against them.