by James Morton
On 21 September 1982 Kidd came unstuck in a raid at Rockhampton designed to net $800 000. Shortly after 10.30 a.m. the police received a call to say there was a bomb at the Commonwealth Bank building in Eastcastle Street, and that all staff except the manager and one senior employee should be evacuated. The building was cleared within ten minutes, but when no bomb was found, it became apparent that the police had been diverted from the real crime.
Had a man stayed motionless for a few more minutes the heist would have been a total success, but, just before 11 a.m., TAA staff went to open the cargo section of a plane that had landed at Rockhampton and saw a set of fingers appear from behind a trapdoor in one of the boxes. Lance James Woolcock, the owner of the fingers, was arrested, and at first he was thought to have been a stowaway until $200 000 in $20 and $5 notes was found in the box with him. Green canvas Reserve Bank bags, still with their official seals intact, were found to hold copies of the Yellow Pages phone books. Similar boxes with other men inside them had been sent on other TAA flights to Mount Isa and Townsville, and the police in those towns were notified. While they were in the semicircular cargo holds, the men had swapped the money for the phone books.
Kidd was arrested at Mount Isa, while Robert Davis and John Bowers were charged at Townsville, and Woolcock was charged in Rockhampton, all with conspiracy and theft. The men were professionals, and no one would admit the source of their information, such as the days on which the currency would be transported. All the boxes had been consigned to JJ Ryan Pty Ltd in the various towns but the one to be sent to Cairns had been left behind in Brisbane. When staff at the airport kicked it, demanding anyone inside to surrender, John Anthony Stewart opened his trapdoor and more or less fell into the arms of a Queensland police officer. In December Kidd received four years after pleading guilty. The judge, perhaps charitably, thought he and the others were front-line men, not the organisers.
In 1991 Kidd was suspected of involvement in the 20 May death of underworld figure Roy Thurgar, shot in the head while sitting in his car outside his wife’s laundromat in Alison Road, Randwick. The weapon was later identified as the sawn-off shotgun Kidd had used in a series of Sydney home invasions. His alibi was his one-time de facto Christina Gristioti, a former heroin addict who died of a suspected overdose in Bali in December 1998. She had gone there to give evidence to the National Crime Authority.
When, on 12 June 1992, underworld figure and former boxer Des Lewis was shot dead outside his home in Denison Street, Bondi Junction, the gun was later found at the home of another veteran crim, Eric Leonard Murray, alleged to have been the driver in the series of home invasion raids that Kidd led when he was in his mid-sixties. Surveillance was carried out on the security systems of homes whose occupants had large amounts of cash and jewellery. In July 1997 a raid on a Manly hotelier’s home produced $275 000. Two months later, a raid on a motor dealer’s home in Burraneer Bay netted another $14 000 worth of gems. Frightening though this must have been for the victim and his wife, the Manly robbery seems to have been conducted with some old-fashioned courtesy. When the wife expressed distress at the theft of family heir-looms, the robbers replaced them in the safe, and before they left, assured her the police would be called so she could be released as soon as possible.
It was believed that in the 1990s Kidd had been contracted to do some damage to Ted Sent, boss of aged care group Primelife Corporation, against whom death threats had been issued. Mick Gatto, Melbourne identity and head of the company Arbitrations and Mediations, told the Supreme Court in 2006 that he and a friend, the late one-time lawyer Mario Condello, went to Sydney and contacted Kidd. They believed someone who wanted Mr Sent to be harmed had approached him. Gatto told the court Kidd would have either carried out the job personally or subcontracted it out. ‘The way it works is it’s all word of mouth,’ he said. ‘We know each other. He was quite happy to pull the plug. He respected me and vice-versa.’ Gatto then took Kidd out ‘for a drink’. When counsel asked how much that drink cost, Gatto said it was about $60 000.
Back in Queensland, in March 1997 Kidd tried to rob a Brisbane chemical company with two other men, and became involved in a shoot-out with a plainclothes policeman. A bullet from Kidd’s revolver hit the policeman’s watch and injured his arm. Declared a serious violent offender, Kidd received eleven years.
Towards the end of his sentence, he agreed to be transferred back to New South Wales, where he was charged with the 1997 home invasions, as well as the attempted robbery of the Bank of Australia in Leichhardt in June the same year. A one-time offsider had given him up in return for indemnity against prosecution and a significantly reduced penalty for a Queensland offence. In July 2004, then aged seventy-one, Kidd was jailed for a minimum of twelve years. Throughout the trial, he denied he had ever used the gun linked to the Lewis killing. A 2008 appeal against his sentence for the New South Wales robberies was rejected.
In 2010 Kidd was instrumental in arranging for the public trustee to take over the administration of Christina Gristioti’s estate from his ex-wife, Joy. He took things a stage further in 2014, when he applied for leave to appeal out of time against his conviction for the 2004 robbery. Evidence from another prisoner, he claimed, showed that his former wife, now Ms Meagher, had lied because she wanted custody of Kidd’s son, which would enable her to loot the boy’s inheritance from his mother. The court decided that the evidence was not credible and refused the application.
In 2015 it was announced that on Kidd’s release, due in August, he would be deported to Britain, something his supporters described as inhumane. In turn he announced he would challenge the deportation order, a procedure increasingly used by the Australian authorities in high-profile cases.
Another of the great, more or less individual, robbers was Bernie Matthews. His first robbery, at the age of nineteen, was of an all-night garage near Guildford, which netted him and his offsider, a man he called Skippy, £1000. The second was at an ice-cream depot and yielded nothing, but his third was of a £30 000 factory payroll. He was arrested on 13 October 1969, and charged with two armed robberies and possession of a submachine gun. Very sensibly, Skippy, who now had enough money to put down a deposit on a house, decided to go straight. For Matthews, like so many others, the prison gates began to revolve.
Matthews escaped from the Court of Appeal in June 1970. In November he escaped from what was then the state penitentiary, at Long Bay. His first bank robbery was of an ANZ on the Hume Highway at Yagoona after his escape. He was recaptured seven weeks later, by which time he had robbed two banks and a payroll office. One of the bank robberies was in Rozelle in early December and was a solo effort. Armed with a sawn-off .22 automatic, he jumped on the counter, yelled at the staff and customers, had his bag filled and was away. He took with him something in the region of $3000, which would probably be worth ten times that today, and went on gambling, women and liquor. In the wash-up he received ten years, with an additional six months for an attempted escape.
One of the few robbers articulate enough to analyse his actions, later he said of bank robberies, ‘It’s an exhilarating feeling. It is an adrenalin rush that transcends emotion. It is a buzz that tops the rush of adrenalin.’ Which is a rather more poetic version of how the Irish jockey described winning the Grand National, ‘Better than sex’:
He claimed he had never physically harmed anyone during his robberies, and was against ‘have-a-go’ heroes: ‘Unpredictability creates havoc and you don’t want havoc during a bank robbery.’ He added, ‘It is better to be traumatised by dinosaurs like me than be carried out in a body bag because some junkie snapped.’ Matthews regarded his raids as merely another form of withdrawing money and to him ‘robbery was a business’: ‘If you want a hamburger go to McDonald’s. If you want a video go to Video Ezy. If you want money, you go to the bank.’
Years later, interviewed on television, Matthews said of career bank robbers, including himself:
They’ve got no respect for money, you
know, because it’s easy come, easy go, so you might have $100 000, you might have $10 000, there’s no respect there because you haven’t earned it—you haven’t gone out and earned it with, you know, sweat and toil—it’s like you’ve put your life on the line to get it, but there’s no respect for it. It’s just paper—I think it’s the adrenalin rush of getting it—you know you’ve got something from a financial institution and you’ve got it for nothing.
After a torrid time in prison, including in the notorious Katingal, Matthews was released in June 1980 and got married, a relationship that lasted only eight months. Then, in December 1983, he was arrested and charged with the contract murder of Delys King, the estranged wife of New South Wales policeman Leslie Morris King, who was shot in her bed. The motive was thought to be both financial and revenge. Leslie King was said to have approached a Philip Anthony Siemsen with an offer of $5000 down and $10 000 to be paid out of Delys King’s life insurance. Siemsen and his brother tried and failed to poison her and, after his brother’s death, Siemsen claimed he had approached Matthews.
Matthews was found not guilty on 18 April 1985, by which time he had served the equivalent of a two-year sentence. King received life imprisonment and the trial judge refused to set a parole term. Matthews was kept in custody, with his parole revoked because he had broken the conditions by not reporting to his parole officer—which, since he was in custody at this time, had been impossible. He was not released until May.
After his release, he made an effort to settle down. He set up a maintenance and contracting business, and was staying out of trouble when, on 3 April 1990, a raid took place on a Brambles armoured car in Sunnybank, Queensland, in which the driver and crew were threatened and doused with petrol, and $694 000 was stolen. In December he was arrested in his Sydney garden by members of Task Force Magnum from the Sydney major crime squad. They said a sawn-off shotgun and two replica pistols, along with several stolen chequebooks, had been found in a shed he rented in Prospect. As well, a former girlfriend, Julia Ann Ellis, had given a statement to the police that Matthews had told her he’d been planning his biggest job yet, robbing an armoured car for more than half a million dollars. She said he had asked her to go on the job but she had declined, saying that ever since her own sentence for conspiracy to commit armed robbery in 1986, she was afraid of being sent back to prison. After the robbery had taken place, she said, he had shown her a briefcase that he told her contained about $400 000.
After Matthews was acquitted for the King murder there was an inquiry by the ombudsman and now, after initially saying he had nothing to say, Matthews allegedly told the arresting officer:
My group has made Jacks like you out of date. You can’t get nothing in as evidence now unless it’s a video. I will have you walking a beat in Wilcannia by the time we finish our campaign on you. You can hang up your handcuffs now.
Worse, he allegedly continued, ‘I’ll tell you this, all the stuff in the shed is mine and I done the job at Sunnybank. Now you just try and prove I said that.’
And that was quite enough for the officers to whisk him off to Brisbane, where he was committed for trial. He languished in custody for nine months until, on 26 October, a deus ex machina appeared in the form of Garry Sullivan, a former rugby league international player.
He and his father-in-law, William Orchard, had been arrested for an armoured car robbery the day before, and admitted to the Brambles robbery. Matthews was released two days later and the charges were finally dropped. His efforts to obtain compensation for the wrongful imprisonment came to nothing.
But Matthews simply could not leave banks alone. In September 1996 he and Alan John Weir, said to be related to a major London criminal, were found in Eagle Street in Brisbane’s CBD. Matthews later told Time Out:
I became deluded with my own invincibility. The further I climbed the ladder of successful criminality, the more bulletproof I became. It was addictive—a David and Goliath battle of beating ‘the system’ and walking away a winner with euphoric adrenalin rush, pounding heart and tingling nerve ends. It left unbridled lust and endless sex sessions for dead. Life was great.
That feeling enticed me to commit my last bank robbery in 1996 when a mate and I took over the NAB in the heart of Brisbane. It was our last big score. The pot of gold at the end of criminality’s rainbow. But we learned a valuable lesson—never rob a bank on the last Friday in September.
It’s Police Remembrance Day.
While we were making a hefty cash withdrawal, the cream of Queensland’s police were attending commemorative marches two streets away. When the alarm went up they literally fell out of the sky. And of course we were pinched.
I got double digits for that little episode—a sentence that underscores the futility of a bank robbing career.
Matthews received ten years with a three-year minimum and was released after four years, in October 2006, when his father was dying of cancer. Weir received six years. During Matthews’ sentence and after his release, he studied journalism, and graduated from the University of Southern Queensland in April 2006: ‘Nowadays, it’s cellophane gangsters robbing old lady’s pension cheques. My dues are paid. I’m free to savour the Sydney I lost when they bricked me up so many years ago.’ He began a successful career as a journalist and wrote the highly acclaimed Intractable, an account of his time in Katingal. Then, in April 2008, he was arrested in Sydney on drug and gun charges, for which he eventually received a sixteen-year sentence with a minimum of eleven to be served.
And what happened to the men who saved him from the wrongful charge in Brisbane? After his retirement from rugby, the softly spoken Sullivan had run a martial arts school while he and Orchard robbed banks and security vehicles of an estimated $3.3 million in fourteen jobs over a six-and-a-half-year period, squandering the takings on gambling. They were quite capable of dropping $100 000 in a single bet. It was, said the prosecution, ‘Banditry on a scale that has not been seen before in Queensland.’ They were caught because Orchard bought a second-hand car and the salesman insisted on having his photograph taken with them. It was something he did with all his customers. When the car was later used in a robbery, the salesman recognised both the car and Orchard. He and Sullivan confessed to all offences, and received twenty-year sentences with seven-year minimums. The Director of Public Prosecutions appealed to the Court of Appeal for higher sentences but the court said that while in the future it might be necessary to impose longer sentences on the state’s armed robbers, this was not such a case.
One of the more violent robbers, and one who regularly tried to shoot his way out of the slightest trouble, was James Edward ‘Jockey’ Smith. Born in 1942, the second-youngest of eight children, he was brought up in Colac in Victoria, and known as Jockey because as a teenager he was apprenticed to a trainer. Unfortunately, he grew too heavy to be a jockey and took up garage breaking. Aged nineteen, Smith, until then a cleanskin, was sentenced to eighteen months with a nine-month minimum. His co-accused, who had a criminal record, received less, and it is generally thought that this apparent injustice soured Smith against the system.
It was while he was serving this sentence that Smith met Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Australia after killing a guard in an escape from Pentridge. After they were released, they teamed up and this time it was Smith who tried to shoot a police officer, when he was caught after robbing a branch of Mark Foy’s in 1962. Fortunately, the gun jammed. From 1963 onwards, Smith served short sentences for a variety of offences, including breaking and entering, and possession of explosives. There was a story that when Ryan was in the death cell in 1965, Smith intended breaking into Pentridge with gelignite and releasing him.
In 1973 when Police Constable Russell Cook was searching a car, Smith tried to shoot him and, once more, the gun jammed. Smith made his way to Sydney and in December 1974 was arrested there at gunpoint with Marko Motric, Stanley Ernest Jones and Les Kane’s great friend Brian O’Callaghan, a man who could be described as
‘a robber’s robber’, on a charge of conspiring to steal money from the Public Transport Commission at Redfern. All were charged with the robbery of a $75 000 railway payroll.
Smith was granted $10 000 bail but, unsurprisingly, given his track record, he failed to appear in Sydney’s Central Criminal Court the next month. He was arrested, again at gunpoint, in December 1974, while sunbathing on Sandringham beach with Valerie Jane Hill and her daughter. Sent to Pentridge, he was there only a matter of days before, on 10 December, he blagged a visitor’s pass from a migrant, Todor Jovanovski, changed his clothes in the visitors’ lav atory, and walked out. A prison officer chased him towards Sydney Road, until Smith got in a car and was driven off, allegedly by Valerie Hill, who was charged with assisting his escape.
One thing Smith was good at was dealing with horses, and now he combined the names of two of the country’s top trainers, Tommy Smith and Bart Cummings, and set up as trainer Tom Cummings. He did well at country tracks but usually the nearest a small trainer’s life gets to a bed of roses is running down the field at Rosehill, so it was back to the work he did best.
On 21 January 1976 he shot and injured Constable Jerry Ambrose in a robbery in Kensington, Sydney. On 13 June the following year, bookmaker and crime associate Lloyd Tidmarsh was killed at his home in Kogarah. The prosecution would claim that Smith and others broke into Tidmarsh’s home about 11 p.m. on the Monday of a long weekend, the assumption being he would have a substantial amount of cash in his safe. He was working at a desk in his office when the robbers entered the house and demanded the contents of the safe. His son was dragged out of bed, and he and Tidmarsh were forced to lie face down on the office floor, the son being told he would be shot if he moved. Tidmarsh told the robbers there was no money in the house, and his son said he had no knowledge of his father’s business or money dealings. Apparently, he did move and one of the robbers assaulted him. Tidmarsh went to his aid and, after a struggle, four shots were fired, one hitting him in the heart. Tidmarsh’s daughter would give evidence that she recognised Smith’s voice—when Smith was worked up, it became very high and squeaky—as that of a man she had heard in her mother’s bedroom.