by James Morton
By this time, with some justification, Smith was being described as the most dangerous criminal in New South Wales. He was living in Humbug Reach, near the south coast town of Nowra, when the police were tipped off as to his whereabouts. On 14 September 1977 more than sixty police and a naval helicopter searched the area and, after one of Smith’s neighbours in Illaroo Street told them he had heard gunshots, the police moved in on a small cottage at the end of the street. There, they found Valerie Hill and Smith’s dog, which was shot when it attacked them. Smith had gone.
Later, he was seen running into the bush by the Shoalhaven River. He more or less hijacked a car, telling the woman driver to take him to Bomaderry station, where he was cornered in a telephone booth. He always denied that he then tried to shoot Detective Bob Godden in the stomach. The detective saved himself by putting his thumb between the breech and trigger of the gun.
In court, Smith’s lawyer Brian Cash made a fighting statement:
The defendant has been the subject of unfair character assassination in the press. He tells me he wonders if there is any sense of fair play. He has instructed me to say he is not guilty of all charges … Police in this State and the State of Victoria have found it fashionable to make Smith their scapegoat for their own difficulties in solving major crimes.
At the end of December 1977 Smith was committed for trial with O’Callaghan and the others. It was alleged that, following up the good work of Shiner Ryan and Jewey Freeman half a century earlier, they had intended to rob the Eveleigh railway workshops. The same month he was charged with Western Australia’s biggest hold-up, the snatch of the Taxation Department’s $176 000 payroll two years earlier.
At his trial in Sydney for the attempted murder of Constable Ambrose, he told the jury that he had not been in New South Wales on that day. His confession, he said, had been fabricated because, ‘I have been an embarrassment to the police force for making these allegations against them all the time.’ Fabricated records of interviews had been used against him previously, he said, and he had been trying to have the records investigated. The three-woman-one-man jury convicted him after an hour, and on 17 March he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
There was worse to come for Smith. On 27 April 1978 he had a long day in court, defending himself in committal proceedings on a charge that, armed with pistols, a carbine and a shotgun, on 2 March 1976 he assaulted Kenneth Augustine McNamara and others, and robbed them of $71 640. After the court adjourned, he was charged with the Tidmarsh murder and with robbing him of papers and an unknown amount of money. In September 1978 Smith went on trial, along with Francis Montgomery (who, in 1947, had been sentenced to seven years for an armed robbery at the home of jockey Athol Mulley) and Neil Collings, charged with having robbed Daniel Taylor of $180 000 at South Hurstville. Collings allegedly told the police that he had received merely $40 as his share, and had only taken part because he was being stood over by a big bookie to whom he owed $40 000.
Valerie Hill was charged with being an accessory after the fact. It was alleged she had driven Smith to Sutherland, so he could take part in the robbery, and had driven him back to Nowra. She received four-and-a-half years with a two-year pre-parole period. In January 1980 she and Smith married in Long Bay. Collings had collapsed in the cells at Darlinghurst Courthouse while the jury was out, and died following a heart attack. Francis Montgomery, who pleaded guilty, received ten years.
It was July 1983 before Smith was found guilty of the Tidmarsh murder. Seventy-eight witnesses had been called in the case, in which he defended himself and which lasted five months, and the jury took a mere two-and-a-half hours to reach a verdict. He was sentenced to another term of life imprisonment on 9 September, for what Mr Justice O’Brien called ‘a deliberate and vicious killing’. In 1986 the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction on the grounds of O’Brien’s inadequate directions to the jury and ordered a retrial. It never took place.
Smith was released on 12 February 1992, and the next day was shot in the chest and left for dead outside his home in Curlewis Street, North Bondi. Dr Crozier, who was on duty the day Jockey was brought in to St Vincent’s, recalled:
When he arrived he had multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen; he was barely alive. We split him from the chest to just above the penis, a big mid-line incision. He’d been shot through the liver and bowel but it hadn’t hit the heart or aorta, so he survived … He left the indelible impression in me that with the right combination of good luck and good treatment a person can survive multiple gunshot wounds.
This is a far cry from the 1920s and 1930s, when a gunshot victim was likely to develop peritonitis, and must be a great comfort to today’s wannabes.
There were suggestions Smith included the police among his likely attackers and, in a press release on behalf of the Campaign Exposing Frame Ups and Targeting Abuses of Authority, former armed robber turned prison activist Brett Collins wrote: ‘When Jimmy Smith was shot last night it just continued the long line of abuse and attacks on this gentle person.’
Naturally, Smith declined to help the police, who said that he had so many enemies it would be difficult to say who might have shot him. He was in hospital for a month and then, on 12 June, one of Smith’s offsiders, former boxer turned standover man Desmond Anthony Lewis, was shot at Bondi Junction on his way home from the Nelson Hotel, where he had been watching a rugby league test. The killing was thought to be linked to Smith’s shooting and also to Roy Thurgar’s killing the previous year.
For a time, Smith, said to be so mean he would ‘bite the head off a shilling’, made good money dealing in amphetamines. But, according to his colourful solicitor the column-writing Chris Murphy, he gradually became something of a recluse. In November 1992 he broke the rule of never shoplifting for oneself and tried to steal kitchen equipment from a Grace Bros at an Erina shopping mall. When the store detect ive stopped him, he yet again produced a gun and hijacked a couple to drive him away. Hiding in the bush, he teamed up with Christopher ‘Badness’ Binse—then an escapee from Pentridge—plotting a series of armed robberies.
Smith died on 5 December 1992. About 8 p.m. Senior Constable Ian Harris saw him speeding and followed him to the Farmers Arms Hotel in Creswick, near Ballarat. Asked for identification, Smith pulled a gun on the officer, ordering him to hand over his gun. The policeman kept it just out of reach of the smaller man. Smith fired a shot into the ground and said, ‘I’ll give you ten seconds to get your gun out of your pocket and get on the bonnet or I’ll blow you away.’ When Darren Neil, who had seen the incident, approached, Smith fired another shot into the ground. Neil retreated, drove his car a short way and dropped off his children. He then drove the car at Smith, distracting him. The constable pulled his own revolver and shot Smith three times in the chest. Former police officer Peter Haddow, appearing on the television program Tough Nuts, said, ‘In the pocket of his jeans was a canister of mace. He could’ve used that mace rather than fire shots at Ian Harris and Darren Neil. But he chose what he knew best.’
After his death, his wife Valerie Hill told Channel Nine’s A Current Affair that Jockey was not a dangerous man and there had been no need for her husband to be shot: ‘He wouldn’t harm anybody, no matter what he’s been blamed for. He’s one of the kindest, most gentle men you could ever meet.’ As for enemies in the underworld, he had none. ‘He was well liked and respected by his friends, so why would he have any enemies on this side?’
Generally, opinions were divided. The police thought he had taken part in a recent armed robbery in which shots were fired and hostages taken. There was also a story circulating that, at the time of his death, he had been contracted to murder a police officer on the Central Coast who had made allegations against his colleagues. Very much his modus operandi, it was said. On the other hand, Chris Murphy wrote that Smith had been a protector of the young and weak in prison, and that after he had been shot at Bondi, prisoners and criminals raised $30 000 with a whip-round for him. Smith had
given it to a friend to hold but the police seized it. Murphy was instrumental in its return. The prisoners at the Metropolitan Training Centre sent a $500 wreath for his funeral. An associate commented that, ‘like so many of us he was getting too old to go back to jail’.
By the time he was fourteen, Christopher ‘Badness’ Binse, short-term companion of Jockey Smith, had been labelled uncontrollable and sent to Turana boys’ home. From then on, it was a revolving door of crime and prison. At seventeen he was sent to Pentridge and upon his release started to commit more serious crimes, including numerous armed bank robberies. Given the nickname ‘Badness’ by a friend in Pentridge in 1988, his ego was immense. After one bank robbery, he took out an advertisement in the Herald Sun that read, ‘Badness is Back’. His home in Queensland, bought with the proceeds of crime, was named Badness, which was also on his personalised numberplate.
In September 1992 Binse escaped from St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, using a gun that had been smuggled in for him. He was then arrested, and almost immediately escaped from Parramatta, on 26 October. However, only hours after his friend Jockey Smith was shot dead, Binse was arrested at a farmhouse near Daylesford. A woman friend was charged with harbouring him.
In 1993 he was convicted of four counts of armed robbery, for which he received a total effective sentence of seven years and six months, with a minimum of five years. This time, the sentencing judge apparently described these offences as ‘about as bad as bank robberies can be’. In 1996 he was jailed for six-and-a-half years over the 1992 armed robbery of a Commonwealth Bank, a theft of more than $36 000, and for escaping from Long Bay. In 1997 he lost an appeal against a ruling allowing wardens to put him in leg irons and handcuffs.
In 2001 Binse became one of the first inmates of the $20 million high-security jail within the Goulburn Correctional Centre in New South Wales, generally regarded as an unhappy place for prisoners. In 2005 he was released from the super max after serving his full sentence, and began a campaign calling for improved rehabilitation programs.
Sadly, his time on the outside was relatively short-lived because, in December 2006, he was sentenced to a minimum of thirty months for possessing an unregistered weapon, after brandishing a gun in the Spearmint Rhino in King Street, Melbourne. He had also left a bullet on the counter. The police alleged he had threatened to kill Cherie Willis and Kosala Jayasundra when he was at the club. While on remand for the 2006 offences, Binse was the victim of a serious assault. He thought fellow prisoner and underworld gunman Gavin Preston had recruited his attackers.
For a time, Binse had shorter sentences. In 2010 there were convictions for possessing cocaine, carrying a prohibited weapon, dealing in property suspected to be the proceeds of crime, and having custody of various false identity documents, for which he received a modest aggregate sentence of twelve months’ imprisonment. While back in jail, in Port Phillip Prison in 2011, he tried to sue the state of Victoria over two alleged jailhouse assaults, claiming they happened at Barwon Prison in May 2006 and Marngoneet Prison in July the following year.
After his release, in November 2011, he went to live with a former girlfriend and his daughter. He said he was assaulted ‘by four bikies’ and talked of his fears for his safety to biker Toby Mitchell, who himself later survived a shooting. Binse obtained a bag full of weapons to protect himself and his daughter, and began wearing a bulletproof vest. But he could still be seen out and about, at one point attending the same boxing match as former Comancheros boss Amad ‘Jay’ Malkoun and Melbourne identity Mick Gatto.
Following the attack on Mitchell, Binse decided to have it out with Gavin Preston. On 9 January 2012 he drove in a black Land Rover to an address in the Melbourne suburb of Seaford, parked his car and tried to steal a nearby vehicle. The attempt failed, and Binse decamped, leaving the Land Rover behind. The police were called, and in it they found a loaded .22 semi-automatic handgun, fitted with a silencer, located beneath the driver’s seat.
Then Binse went for a jackpot, deciding to rob Armaguard security guards delivering money to the Westside Hotel in Laverton. At about 11 a.m. on 19 March 2012 two guards left the van and went into the hotel. They collected $235 090, which was placed in a large blue bag. As they left the hotel and returned to their van, Binse, now wearing a hood, mask and sunglasses, climbed a ladder he had brought with him, pointed his shotgun at one of the guards, and demanded that he throw over the fence to him the bag containing the money. This was more easily demanded than done, and when the guard threw the bag, he failed to clear the fence and it landed in the car park. Undeterred, Binse ordered the two guards to lie face down on the ground, before jumping the fence to recover the bag. Pointing his shotgun at one of the guards, he took the man’s service revolver and ordered the other to hand his over. He then collected the blue bag, climbed back over the fence, and rode off to the rear of the Laverton Market, where he dumped his motorcycle and shotgun in a nearby dam, changed clothes and drove away in a white van.
It did not take the police long to tag Binse as a suspect, and they watched him as he went regularly to the Atak storage facility in Ballarat Road, Albion. Then, on 20 May 2012, two police officers in an unmarked vehicle saw Binse riding a Honda motorcycle, along with a man on another bike. Approximately ninety minutes later, two other police officers saw his bike parked outside La Porchetta in Niddrie. Binse came out of the pizza restaurant and saw the four officers as he was walking to his bike. He turned around and walked back into the restaur ant, the police officers following him. When one of them put his arm on his shoulder, Binse produced a loaded revolver—one of the guns taken from the Armaguard robbery. The officer backed away, dropping his police radio in the process. Binse snatched it up and was off home to Sterling Drive, Keilor East.
At 6.40 a.m. the following day, members of the Victoria Police Special Operations Group (SOG) surrounded the Sterling Drive home. Binse was inside with his partner, and was armed with one of the Armaguard revolvers. They called on him to surrender but instead he attempted to barricade himself inside the house. The siege went for forty-four hours with Binse’s partner in there with him. From time to time he randomly shot at the police, and fired from the back door of his house towards the property’s rear fence.
Around 7.30 p.m. on 22 May, Binse’s partner left the house. While she had not actually been held hostage, she was worried that her departure might escalate the shooting and trigger a reaction from Binse. At approximately 2 a.m. the next day, SOG took action. They fired tear gas into the house, which brought out Binse, carrying the revolver. When told to drop it, he did but then made a move to pick it up. Several non-lethal bean bag rounds were fired at him. He managed to pick up the revolver but was then immediately hit with further bean bag rounds, fell down and was arrested.
By then, Binse’s container at the storage unit had been searched and the police had seized what amounted to a small armoury, including a .357 Sturm Ruger revolver, identified as stolen from one of the two Armaguard personnel, and a .45 calibre Auto-Ordnance Corporation-brand Thompson model 1928-A1 submachine gun, along with ammunition.
In May 2014 Binse pleaded guilty to the robberies, to using a firearm while being a prohibited person and to reckless conduct endangering persons. The trial judge, Justice Terry, accepted that he had been worried about his own safety and that of his family. Psychiatrists thought Binse was suffering from a form of mixed personality disorder, with antisocial and narcissistic traits. They believed that any future imprisonment in a restricted custodial environment—which is what he could have expected—would have a significant adverse effect on his mental health.
Binse was sentenced to a further eighteen years with a non-parole period of fourteen, with Justice Terry echoing his 1993 colleague in describing the offences as ‘about as bad as robberies can be’. Days after he was sentenced, Binse revived his lawsuit against the state of Victoria for his stabbings in jail. In December 2014 his application for leave to appeal on the grounds that his sentence was dispro
portionate was rejected. Justice Weinberg thought that, if anything, it might have been on the lenient side.
There was further trouble for Binse when, in October 2015, and now known as Christopher Dean Pecotic, he was charged with a series of seventeen offences, including seven armed robberies dating back to 1988. The year ended rather more positively for Binse/Pecotic when he was back in court again in December, representing himself and blaming his legal team for his troubles. ‘This is so toxic, it’s so rancid. You’ll be offended,’ he told the judges when he renewed his application for leave to appeal against the 2014 sentence. It seems he had also begun to cooperate with the authorities, which, as fellow crims fear, does not mean simply behaving better in prison. This time, he was given leave to appeal, on the grounds it could be argued the sentence was manifestly excessive for a man in his middle to late forties. On 26 February 2016 Binse pleaded guilty to the 1990s robberies, which had netted him around $400 000.
One of the great non-violent robberies, possibly the biggest ever in Australia, took place on the evening of 2 January 1988, when three tank-men (the underworld term for a safecracker) squeezed through a gap in the wall of a construction site next to the Haymarket branch of the National Australia Bank in Sydney’s Chinatown. A window had been left open and, using a 10-metre light extension ladder, they climbed through it, to begin a systematic raid on the bank’s eighty-two safety deposit boxes. When they tried to blow a vault they triggered an alarm but, fortunately for the thieves, the security guards thought it was a false one and did not check the basement.