by James Morton
Over the years, Queensland has had its share of quality robberies and retaliations. The Beerburrum mail robbery, then the second-biggest in Australia after the Mayne Nickless robbery, took place on 17 April 1974, when armed bandits wearing women’s wigs held up the mail contractor on the Bruce Highway, 40 kilometres north of Brisbane. The contractor’s four-ton truck was forced off the road and the driver, Noel Thompson, bailed up with sawn-off shotguns. He was then made to drive 3 kilometres along a forestry track, tied up hand and foot, and bundled under his truck. Thompson heard the men say they were looking for $25 000 in notes that were being sent for destruction. He told them he had nothing of value and one of them replied, ‘Do you know you’re carrying half a million dollars?’ Thompson said he didn’t. In all, $488 000 was stolen; the bandits dropped $53 000 as they fled. Nearly $300 000 was never recovered.
Jack Edward Wilson was born in Goondiwindi and had a long record for theft, assault and robbery going back. He and Donald Frederick Flanders were arrested for the Beerburrum mail robbery on 7 May—Wilson in the Boulevard Hotel, Kings Cross, where police said they found more than $130 000 in cash wrapped in foil in a suitcase and trunk; and Flanders in Brisbane. The case against Flanders relied mainly on identification, and his solicitor asked the magistrate to stop the prison authorities cutting his client’s thick, greying collar-length hair and large sideburns. Otherwise, he said, acquaintances who might provide an alibi would be unable to recognise him.
In March 1975, amid allegations of bricking, both men were found guilty and received ten years. Wilson was released in December 1982, and was promptly extradited to Victoria to face charges of burglary and causing an explosion. The next year, in Melbourne, he was placed on a $1000 bond. On 19 July 1986 his body was found in a car in Tarcutta, New South Wales, 20 kilometres east of Wagga Wagga. He had been suspected of two robberies in Queensland, when $300 000 was taken from a Springwood bank, and $80 000 from Jupiter’s Casino on the Gold Coast.
One former prison officer remembered him:
Jack Edward Wilson was an old school crim and armed robber. They didn’t come much tougher. The man hardly said a word, he was a dark visaged, brooding type of bloke who kept to himself, he reminded me of a rougher Clint Eastwood to look at. He had a 35-year criminal history and was an armed robber by profession.
With Wilson you knew where you stood, he didn’t like anybody. It was common knowledge that the money still hadn’t been recovered and he would have been something of a marked man inside. Once again it highlights the choices people make with their lives, many criminals would have been great company directors or CEOs. The amount of planning, preparation and persistence they put into the pursuit of their chosen lifestyle, channelled into business would have probably made for a more financially rewarding life. As one crim said to me, ‘Boss, I do it because I love the thrill.’ I guess you can’t argue with that.
In November 1987 Lloyd Murray Reed, said to be one of South Australia’s biggest drug dealers, was convicted of Wilson’s manslaughter. Representing himself, he told the court he had acted in self-defence, shooting Wilson with a .22 calibre pistol in what the pros ecution described as a drug deal gone awry. Reed, who had previously spent fourteen years in gaol, explained away the $320 000 cash found on him by saying it was from successful gambling. He was sentenced to ten years with a pre-parole period of seven. The next year, when Reed gave evidence in the trial of another drug supremo David John Kelleher, one-time boyfriend of New South Wales whistleblower Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, he told the jury, ‘I shot a swine by the name of Jack Wilson … he killed a friend of mine and his wife.’ He said Wilson had told him he had access to about 60 kilograms of heroin which, at 80 per cent purity, would wholesale at $820 000.
The friend and his wife may well have been Terry Basham and his de facto Sue Smith killed at their Murwillumbah, New South Wales, home. A one-time associate of the Melbourne Dockers, the 197-centimetre-tall, English-born Basham, who arrived in Australia in 1956, had bought a milk round in 1962 and sold it seven years later. From then on, he led the flamboyant life of a very successful drug dealer, who, for a time, was a close friend of drug traffickers Snapper Cornwell and Barry Bull, acting as Cornwell’s heroin distributor in Murwillumbah.
Then things soured. In late 1979 Bull left about $30 000 with Basham, and when he went to collect it and found no one at home, ransacked the house, without success. When Bull returned a fortnight later, this time with two heavies, Basham was prepared. While a man with a rifle covered the heavies, Basham, wearing a knuckleduster, gave the physically much smaller Bull a bad beating. He was later acquitted of causing grievous bodily harm to his one-time friend.
On 14 August 1982 Basham and Sue Smith were shot to death. She was knitting and he was watching television when the back door was broken down; both were shot twice with a .38. Their 2-year-old daughter was unharmed and waking during the night and finding her father cold, fetched him a pair of slippers. Her grandfather discovered her the next day, covered in blood. It could not have been Bull who killed Basham and his wife; at the time, he was skiing in New Zealand with his girlfriend, Sylvia Lux. It was suggested that whoever put up the contract had first offered it to the Melbourne Painters and Dockers, who had declined it.
Generally, robbers do not save their money. Ronnie Diamond, a successful London bank robber of the 1960s, commented ruefully:
I must have had a million through my hands over the years and where did it all go? Women, champagne, jewellery, fur coats, cars, the Astor [a nightclub in London’s Mayfair]. I pissed it all out the window.
And there is no evidence to suggest things are any different for the vast majority of Australian bank robbers. In his autobiography, Neddy Smith wrote of thinking nothing of spending $1000 on lunch. What money they have squirrelled away tends to be eaten up by sentences running into two decades.
One of the very few robbers who did put his money away was Ian Revell Carroll, born in the English south coast town of Worthing on 26 August 1941. His father died when he was two, and his stepfather brought the family to Australia. Carroll did not settle in well. At the age of thirteen, he appeared at Footscray Children’s Court charged with theft, and from then on it was a life of crime all the way. In 1965 he joined the infamous Painters and Dockers Union and, seven years later, was shot in a machine-gun attack during the long-running war for control of the union. Two years later, after its secretary Pat Shannon was shot and killed, he was elected in his place. The union’s vigilance officer, Doug Sproule, gave him an encomium for the hard work he had done on the members’ behalf.
After the Great Bookie Robbery, Carroll followed in Chuckie Bennett’s footsteps and became one of the great armed-robbery planners, including an attack on a bullion van in Tooborac, Victoria, in spring 1981. He left nothing to chance, and team members were supplied not only with weapons but also a medical kit. He was suspected of, but never charged with, the Barkly Street, Footscray, gold bullion theft. In 1982, the year before his death, he was suspected of robbing the Nabisco factory and Vic Rail; a branch of the Commonwealth Bank, on 15 February; and WR Grace for its $120 000 payroll, on 9 December, with a receptionist temporarily being taken hostage. He was also a major importer of drugs. He put the proceeds from his activities to good use. His children went to private school, and he had racehorses, a stable of vintage motorcars and a Mercedes. When he died, he and his family had twenty-three bank and building society accounts, and he had started work on a Tudor-style mansion he was building at Wonga Park in north-east Melbourne.
Carroll was a frequent visitor to a safe house that Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox kept at Mount Martha on the Mornington Peninsula. Another frequent visitor was former police officer Colin Creed, then on the run after a series of robberies in South Australia. Five o’clock in the morning tends to be when police begin raids on the unsuspecting, and Cox, a man who took infinite care, was known for exercising his dog on the beach at that time to give himself a chance of escape if the police came
looking.
One version of the start of the criminal career of ‘Mad Dog’ or ‘The Fox’ Cox, born Melville Peter Schnitzerling on 15 September 1947, is that when he won a bicycle in a raffle at the age of eight and was told he was too late to claim it, he then stole a brand-new one, telling people it was his prize. In 1974 he was sentenced to fourteen years for armed robbery. Cox arrived at Katingal after an attempted escape from Long Bay in August 1975, in which he, Marco Motric and another would-be escaper held a gun to Superintendent Steve Tandy’s head and shot another officer. Tandy was then pushed into a five-ton truck and the officers forced to open the gates. The escape failed when they were rammed by two trucks, and Cox was sentenced to life imprisonment, including fifteen years’ hard labour.
In the spring of 1977 he escaped from Katingal, the supposedly escape-proof prison within a prison at Long Bay. There were the usual reported sightings—Sydney’s Randwick and Circular Quay among the locations—but Cox disappeared from view for eleven years.
He spent some time in England and Europe, and later at the Mount Martha safe house on the Mornington Peninsula, where he lived with his girlfriend, the green-eyed, dark-haired vegetarian and trained nurse Helen Eva Deane, Ray ‘Chuck’ Bennett’s sister-in-law, whom he had met a year after his escape from Katingal.
On 3 January 1983 Cox and Carroll quarrelled, and a gunfight broke out. Carroll was killed and Cox badly injured. Deane drove him to New South Wales for treatment, telling the doctor he had been injured abroad and had not trusted the medics there. In fact until the shootings, Cox and Deane had been ideal neighbours. It was only when police searched the house that they uncovered a cache of weaponry, including high-powered rifles and machine guns, as well as police radio scanners, balaclavas, bank bags, security officers’ uniforms, a surveillance van, safes, telephone codes, cash and documents.
After the shooting, Cox and Deane disappeared, and for the next five years they led the police a merry dance. The Sydney Morning Herald quoted a police spokesman saying of Deane, ‘She’s a crook, but obviously she’s doing something right. Like Cox she’s no fool. She hasn’t even been sighted for five years.’ Their nemesis turned out to be another armed robber, Raymond Denning.
Denning had had a bad start in life when, as a child, he had seen his mother set herself on fire while his father was in prison. He threw a saucepan of water over her but she died from her burns. His criminal career began when he was given probation in 1966 for theft. In 1973 Denning received thirteen-and-a-half years, with a five-year non-parole period, for armed robbery. In 1974, during an escape from Maitland, he gratuitously attacked warder Willy Carl Faber, who was so badly injured he never returned to work and died four years later. In 1976 Denning received a life sentence for the attack. On 1 September 1977, along with Roy ‘Red Rat’ Pollitt, Mad Dog Cox and others, Denning made a short-lived break from Maitland Gaol. The next year, he received six years to be served consecutively to his life sentence, and it was off to Katingal.
His life there was a cycle of escapes, bank robberies, recapture and further sentences. On 15 July 1988, his earlier escapes forgiven, he was playing tennis with Robert Carrion, serving fourteen years for armed robbery, at Goulburn’s minimum-security wing, when they jumped a fence. It was known he had contacted Cox during a 1980 escape, and there has been endless speculation that Denning was allowed to flee to find Cox for the police, and, as a result, have years deducted from his sentences. Within hours, Margaret Ann Denton joined him, having left her husband and children to be with him when she heard of his escape. They had been conducting a jail romance, Denton writing to him and then visiting him on a weekly basis. He and Carrion robbed a bank in Zillmere, 14 kilometres north of Brisbane, and then travelled south to make contact with Cox. Together they robbed a Transurety vehicle.
On 22 July 1988 Cox went with Denning to rob a Brambles security van in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster. Margaret Denton was with them, but Helen Deane was apparently uneasy about Cox working with Denning and Denton, and she was right to worry. The trio, in a Holden Commodore with Queensland plates, tailed the security van into the Doncaster shopping complex and, as Cox moved to a second car, the police struck. They rammed Denning’s car, and Cox, making his way out of an underground car park, had his windscreen blown out. He hit a red sedan and then crashed into the car park wall.
It was the end of eleven years on the run. He and Denning were returned to gaol, and Denton was placed on a $500 three-year good behaviour bond. Back in custody, Denning, now a pedigree dog—at one court hearing, a man in the gallery threw a bone at him, saying, ‘You’ve forgotten your lunch’—dobbed Cox in, telling the police that Cox had been on another hold-up eleven days earlier in which security guard Dominic Hefti had been shot. ‘I know it took a long time, but I’m 38 and I’ve been loyal to the wrong side, you know, it’s as simple as that,’ he told the police in 1988.
For this, Denning was given immunity for his part in the Zillmere robbery and Transurety robberies. Admitted into the witness protection scheme, he also gave evidence that Graeme Jensen, whom the police later shot, had not killed Hefti. As well, he dobbed in Roy ‘Red Rat’ Pollitt over the killing of Lindsay Simpson in a botched execution. Denning was working closely with Detective Arnold Tees, and their relationship was the subject of comment by Commissioner Temby in the ICAC Report on Investigation into the Use of Informers. While in prison, Denning had also been involved in a $12 million attempt to smuggle heroin from Hong Kong but this little blip was overlooked. He became a campaigner for prisoners’ rights and wrote an account of his stay in Grafton.
In 1991 when Denning’s release date was being discussed, he was cited as a model of reform. In 1989 the truth in sentencing legislation had abolished remissions, and any prisoner without a fixed sentence could apply to the court for a minimum and an additional term to be fixed. In April 1991 Judge Wood stated, ‘It is exceedingly important to be able to demonstrate to other prisoners that a man once considered intractable and beyond redemption is capable of mending his ways and returning to life in the outside world.’
Denning was released from prison on 21 April 1993, and went into the Witness Protection Security Programme (Witsec) but on 5 May was discharged in controversial circumstances, which the New South Wales ombudsman later described as unreasonable and oppressive. His information was described as ‘consistent’ but it was thought keeping him in the scheme was too risky. Apparently, it was considered likely he would commit further offences and that, once back inside, he would betray Witsec’s workings to other criminals. There had been no indication that Denning was about to fall off the witness wagon and, in any event, criminals probably knew perfectly well how Witsec worked.
On 11 June Denning left his new girlfriend in bed at their terraced house in Paddington and went gambling in a local casino. Returning at 2 a.m., complaining of stomach pains, he climbed into bed and died following a heroin overdose. As is often the case, there were suggestions that those whom he had dobbed in over the years, or perhaps their friends, had helped along his death.
Cox was later tried for the Carroll murder, and acquitted after the magistrate said he could not decide who had fired the first shot. He and the ex-police officer Colin Creed were named as part of a gang operating in Victoria and New South Wales that had pulled off nine armed robberies netting them in excess of $1.3 million. The next year, he received five years for using a firearm to resist arrest, and eventually in 1996 was sentenced to twenty-five years for his robberies.
In September 1988 Helen Deane had been arrested when she went to a remand hearing for Cox and was found with a .25 pen pistol in her bag. She was promptly charged with harbouring an escapee and unlawful possession of a firearm, and received six months’ imprisonment. She was also charged with two armed robberies in Queensland but, after Denning’s death, these charges were dropped.
Amid a political row, but supported by Superintendent Tandy, Cox was released in December 2004 and retired with Deane to Queensla
nd. Thirty years after Ian Revell Carroll’s death, a notice appeared in the Herald Sun on 3 January 2013, naming Cox and Deane and saying, ‘You will both be remembered. We will definitely meet again.’ Three years later, what, if anything, it meant remains to be seen.
A Handful of Professionals
10
The safecracker Bertie Kidd has always had his admirers, including his barrister friend Brian Bourke, who thought:
Kidd was one of the most intriguing crims I ever appeared for and he was involved in plenty of stuff, he had policemen who he was very friendly with, he was able to manipulate things … He was a great safe blower, a great safe cutter. Bert was the king.
Kidd has also had his detractors, including former New South Wales Police assistant commissioner Clive Small. Commenting on the news that Kidd was to be deported in 2015, Small said:
He was a well-rounded violent criminal who’d take any opportunity without concern for the welfare of the community of New South Wales.
I don’t think Bertie Kidd in his whole 80 years has ever held an honest job for one day. The people of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland have paid for him every day of his life, either as a result of his criminal activity or paying for him while he’s being kept in jail, so I don’t really feel my dollars and any money I might pay or the public of New South Wales might pay should go toward giving him a pension now.
Born Robert Douglas Kidd in July 1933, he came to Australia as a Ten Pound Pom in 1948. By the late 1960s he had become a central figure in the Victorian underworld, and was regularly referred to in the Beach Inquiry into allegations against the police, in connection with abortion rackets. In 1970 he was shot in the stomach one day when he opened the front door of his home in Beaumaris, Melbourne. That year he received five years for stealing $240 from a factory safe in Cheltenham.