Gangland Robbers

by James Morton

  It is always to a criminal’s advantage to delay any court case for as long as possible, as some witnesses genuinely begin to forget details, and the extra time allows the opportunity to get at others as necessary. The MSS case took years to resolve; more or less everything that could go wrong did so, and not always with Turner’s help. In July 1972 the first trial was aborted after a juror said she had been approached. At the second trial, a month later, Turner failed to appear; for his pains, he received a two-year sentence for breach of bail. The third hearing, in May 1973, collapsed after a juror took time off to go to a concert in Sydney. Hopefully he enjoyed it, because he was fined $1500 on his return. In the fourth trial, which began in July the same year, the jury was deadlocked, apparently unable to decide whether it had been armed robbery or only larceny. After nearly thirty-seven hours, then the longest retirement by a jury in Australia, the judge discharged it. ‘The answers given by the lady forewoman reveal a staggering misconception of the issues in the case, which were put with great clarity by counsel,’ he remarked, in support of the belief that jurors should not be allowed within a hundred metres of complicated cases. Finally, on 22 October 1973, Turner and five others were convicted. He and three others were given twelve years. ‘You played for high stakes, you lost. The game is forfeit,’ said the judge, unoriginally.

  Time can be done hard or soft, and Turner knew how to do his sentence as easily as possible. He was also powerful enough to ensure fellow prisoners and screws alike left him alone. He was released in July 1982, at the age of sixty-four, but by then The Combine’s heyday was long gone. Turner gave a series of interviews to reporters from the Sunday Press and then left Melbourne to live quietly on the coast. Bored with that, he went prospecting for opals for a short time. He was killed when his car ran off the road and hit a tree at Nyora in South Gippsland, in January 1995.

  As a result of the raid, Minchin was forced to sell out to Mayne Nickless for £750 000. He later wrote The Money Movers, a fictionalised account of the raid. He died in 2014, aged ninety-five.

  Another robbery in Victoria that was meticulously rehearsed and planned—possibly for up to a year, with the armoured car being followed on more than twenty runs —and the takings from which dwarfed some estimates of the Great Bookie Robbery, was the theft from an Armaguard security vehicle in Richmond on the morning of 22 June 1994. It was a deceptively simple operation.

  At 10 a.m. the armoured car picked up two crates of money at the Reserve Bank in Collins Street, Melbourne, and was heading to a Carrum Downs branch, past the Melbourne Cricket Ground and into Punt Road, when, near the entry to the arterial road, it ran into traffic banked up at Harcourt Parade. It appeared that a council road gang was causing the hold-up. There were four workers wearing hard hats and overalls, with one man carrying a stop sign, and another a broom. The man with the stop sign halted the vehicle. Another of the supposed workers had a skeleton key that fitted the van doors; two of the crew were dragged into the rear compartment and handcuffed. One of the robbers then drove the vehicle into a dead end, and the gang escaped with a haul of more than $2.3 million.

  The team had been seen on a number of occasions rehearsing and carrying out their supposed roadworks, and the operation was believed to have been financed by a series of smaller bank raids in and around Melbourne. About $40 000 was recovered when a security camera filmed a man and a woman, probably members of a second team, trying to exchange the cash at a city bank, some two months after the robbery. None of the robbers was ever charged and the fallout among the players at first seemed to have been negligible. One man, Claudio Burchielli, who had been questioned but not charged, was found dying on the pavement of a Brunswick street in December 1997. He had been struck with a bottle and kicked, in what seems to have been an incident unrelated to the heist.

  Then the police received some help. Glasgow-born Alexander ‘Sandy’ Maclean, who had just served a sentence in New South Wales following a conviction for a mortgage fraud, told them of the robbery and his part in it. He was, apparently, afraid that he was at risk from others on the raid. He later returned to Scotland and hanged himself in his Glasgow flat. Before he left Australia, he supplied the police with his colleagues’ names.

  In 2014 the police in Operation Tideland, their cold-case investigation, believed they had identified links between the armed robbery and a location in the Mossman, Queensland, area, as well as a vehicle believed to have been used during the armed robbery. A rural property on Rex Road, Mossman, was searched, as were several other locations in the surrounding area but, although a number of items were seized and taken back to Victoria for forensic testing, no arrests were made. A $100 000 reward is still on offer.

  Bonnies and Clydes

  12

  From the moment Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty hit the screen in 1967 as the eponymous and murderous duo, whenever there has been a mixed-sex team of robbers, newspapers worldwide have tended to refer to them as ‘Sydney’s Bonnie and Clyde’ and so on. Not so, however, with Julie Anne Lorraine Wright, née Cashman. She was always an ‘Angel of Death’—one of the several women in Australian criminal history whose lovers and husbands have departed life prematurely.

  Born in Melbourne in 1957, one of four sisters, when she was seven her father Ron, a decorated Korean War hero, drove a truck containing a load of washing machines off a road in the Dandenongs. His insurance did not cover the machines and, as a result, their home had to be sold to pay for them. Her parents moved to Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast, where her mother Betty drove the local school bus, and where Cashman’s troubles began.

  She became involved with surfers and the fringe drug market, before moving to Sydney, where she agreed to smuggle marijuana under the guidance of her then boyfriend. The run was the standard Bangkok–Sydney one, and the load was to be $100 000 of Buddha sticks. What she didn’t know was that mules are often sacrificed by their employers so that another, larger, load can go through unchallenged. The police were tipped off with details of her flight home, and it was a short ride from Kingsford Smith Airport to Parramatta Prison. An attempt to plea-bargain by dobbing in the money men failed, and she was sentenced to thirty months, with a minimum of fifteen months, to be served in Mulawa Women’s Prison in Cessnock.

  It was there she heard of a man called ‘Bob’, serving a thirteen-year sentence. He had lent his car to a friend who had killed someone in an armed robbery. Because the friend had a wife and family, Bob had taken the rap and Julie Cashman thought this to be high in the code of the samurai.

  It was well into her time in Cessnock that she began writing to Bruce Kennedy, then serving a sentence for conspiracy to rob. They arranged to meet when their respective sentences were completed, and he was at the prison gates on her release in November 1978. From then on, they became a team of breakers, often into supermarkets. On one foray, she was caught. He escaped over the rooftops but when their car was found, there were firearms inside it. Cashman, now pregnant, took the blame and so, five weeks after her release, she was back inside, this time charged with armed robbery, possession of firearms and car theft.

  On 28 December 1978 Kennedy cut through the Mulawa perimeter fence, having climbed through the dormitory bathroom windows, and the pair were off to Queensland to stay with a friend. But they had been dobbed in. When they arrived, Kennedy went to buy food at a corner shop and Cashman was arrested as she walked into their friend’s house. On his way back, Kennedy realised something was wrong, hijacked a car and drove off. It seems he was on his way back to collect Cashman when he was spotted again. Chased by the police, he crashed the car near the Royal North Brisbane Hospital. He leaped out and ran off, but as he crossed a main road, a driver failed to see him in the dark and hit him.

  The nerves in Kennedy’s spinal column were almost severed and it was thought, correctly, he would not live. Cashman was allowed to see him under escort but he remained in a coma. The charges against him were dropped and he was flown to an aged-care home in New So
uth Wales. After their daughter, Jade, was born on 3 September 1979, Cashman was allowed to take her to see him. He died two weeks later. A prisoner, Ray Wright, organised a whip-round to pay for the funeral, the start of what would be another disastrous relationship.

  On her release, she stayed with Neville Kennedy, Bruce’s brother, with whom she had a brief affair and it was when he came to visit Kennedy that Cashman met Ray Wright in person. By early 1982 they were together in Queensland, a Bonnie and Clyde pair, pulling off a series of very profitable robberies from their base in Coolum. An RSL robbery at Davistown, in which a barman was locked in the safe, netted $5000, and it was off to Hervey Bay, where the police raided them over their cannabis crop. Worse, the police also found evidence of the RSL robbery. Ray Wright panicked, held two officers at gunpoint and fled into the scrub. Cashman was remanded in custody for a week and then given bail. She promptly went to Brisbane to meet up with him.

  The couple—Jade had been left with Cashman’s parents—were on their toes for two years, during which, despite the fact she and Wright were wanted in both New South Wales and Queensland, they were married in a very public ceremony in Sydney in March 1983. Soon after the marriage, she went on a pub crawl in The Rocks area with her sister Michelle, got drunk, and was recognised by a taxi driver who dobbed her in to the police. It was back to prison for breach of parole and to face charges of being an accessory to a robbery, possession of a firearm and drugs, and assaulting police.

  Cashman escaped on Boxing Day 1983. She had deliberately cut her hand and been taken to Auburn Hospital, in Sydney’s western suburbs. As she left after being treated, two men overpowered her guards, and the trio made off in a stolen Holden Commodore.

  Just as outlaws in westerns always look forward to one last job before they retire to Mexico, in 1984 the Wrights planned their one last job before they left Australia with her daughter. They had false passports and had negotiated the use of a yacht. This time, it was to be a $200 000 wages snatch at Brisbane’s Wolston Park Hospital in September. Cashman apparently had misgivings. After Kennedy’s mishap, hospitals and her menfolk did not go together.

  For the job, Cashman wore men’s clothing and a gorilla mask. Wright and his offsider, Lance, wore balaclavas. At first, the robbery went as well as a robbery can. The wages escorts were held up at gunpoint. The money was handed over, two bags were filled, and Cashman held the guards at bay as the men made for the getaway car, Lance at the wheel. A shot was fired at the car, and when she looked round, she saw her husband, not in the back of the car, as expected, but on the concrete, the money bags by his side. She went to him and fired at the security guard but it was clear that Ray Wright was already dead, a bullet wound in the back of his head. She and Lance drove off, heading for Noosa, where radio and television reports were placing the blame on the celebrated robber and prison escapee, and the blameless—on this occasion, at least—Mad Dog Cox.

  Again, worse was to follow. Cashman had sent some of the money from the robbery to her parents and sister, and they were arrested. She planned a ‘final’ heist but this came to nothing. By now she was drinking heavily and, in her drug-and-alcohol haze, decided to give herself up. She was also suffering from the delusion that she had been chased by men in dresses and the Ku Klux Klan—which might, of course, have been the same thing—in the Dandenongs. She was charged with stealing $230 000 and her sister Michelle with receiving $220. Her parents were charged with receiving $25 000.

  One thing that seemed to be in Cashman’s favour was that the secur ity guard who shot Ray Wright refused to accept that the person in the gorilla mask was a woman. But there was also evidence that one of the robbers had screamed when Wright was shot and tugged at his body. Another witness said Cashman had told her that her husband had been shot before her eyes. Finally, after a six-week trial, she was found guilty of the hospital robbery, and on 6 September 1985 she received eleven years, with a non-parole period of half that. On 23 June 1986 the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction and sentence. Her mother was sentenced to twelve months and her father, who had once described his daughter as being as ‘crooked as a three dollar bill’, to two years.

  There were plusses and minuses for Cashman in her sentence. On the plus side, she became more disciplined. This led to her involvement with In Touch, a scheme in which long-term prisoners explain to young and vulnerable people the folly of their impending ways. As a result, her parents were allowed to visit her in Boggo Road, a reunion touchingly filmed for 60 Minutes. She began to study and obtained a teaching qualification. On the negative side, prison officers reacted badly to the new, and apparently improved, Julie Cashman and her resultant publicity, which militated against the message of In Touch. Then there were stories of a short-lived, supervised-visits romance with Gregory James Clark, himself serving life for the murder of a female taxi driver, which the Queensland papers lovingly reported.

  In 1987 Cashman complained about a report in the Sunday Mail that she had fallen in love with the lifer, writing to reporter Peter Hansen:

  My marriage to Ray was and is sacred to me; I do not take my vows lightly. The love I shared with my husband, validated by our marriage, will continue to remain with me for the rest of my life.

  In April 1988 she was transferred from Boggo Road back to Mulawa, where prison officers staged a walk-out protest. As a result, she was transferred to the segregation unit at Parklea men’s prison in northwestern Sydney. And there was still the RSL robbery and the Auburn escape to be dealt with. The Australian criminal justice system sometimes grinds extremely slowly and it was not until April 1989 that all matters—Cashman was never charged with the RSL robbery—were finally dealt with. This left her with an additional five years on her sentence, and an extended non-parole period of three years and nine months. This time, however, the Court of Appeal ruled that Mr Justice Sinclair had not given her sufficient credit for her efforts at rehabilitation, and reduced the non-parole period so that she would be released within the year. She left prison on 22 September 1990, and went to live with her parents in Saratoga, New South Wales, before she rented her own place.

  In 1991 her well-received autobiography The Angel of Death was published. In it, Cashman did not resile from her life with Kennedy and Wright:

  I loved them both very much. I chose to go with them and I went. What I don’t understand is how I got to be in a position where a criminal life was the right choice. I think it’s about allegiances. You go with people who are your friends, whom you understand and who understand you. When there is nobody else, where do you go?

  But she still had not learned to choose her men wisely, and began a de facto relationship with Garrick Joseph Norman, who knew Jockey Smith. After the bank robber visited them in their New South Wales home in late November 1992, the police bugged the premises and taped the pair discussing how they would deal with around 5 kilos of marijuana. It took her and Norman a fortnight to discover the bugs, and within half an hour of dismantling them, they were arrested. Initially, Cashman’s solicitor said she would contest the charge. She was remanded in custody and finally received seventeen months. Her criminal career had come full circle.

  Upon her release, Cashman returned to the coast and resumed her work to stop young people following her into a life of crime. She died on 12 February 2003 in Gosford, where she had been living on the dole since her last release from prison. Aged forty-seven she had contracted pneumonia, followed by a virus, which, in turn, caused kidney problems.

  Police officers who knew her grudgingly admired her. ‘At least she was staunch,’ said one. ‘She never gave up an accomplice. She never even gave up the second man in the Wolston Park payroll heist.’

  A friend delivered her epitaph:

  How Julie lived her life depended on the men in her life. Meeting the quieter ones in these last few years meant she lived a quieter life.

  One of the earliest Bonnies was rather less willing to sacrifice herself than were some of her later sisters. At 4.45 a.m.
on 1 February 1968, Alan Raynor, the manager of the National Bank in the small town of Stratford in Gippsland, was woken by the screams of his wife, to find a masked man standing over him with a gun. Another shorter bandit, also wearing a suit and a long black mask was lurking in the passageway. The taller bandit said he wanted money from Raynor’s bank next door. Raynor explained that the strongroom could not be opened without a key held by the teller. For four hours, the bandits held the family at gunpoint while they waited for the teller to turn up.

  When he did, they forced Raynor to tie up the teller, open the strongroom and unlock the safe. As the taller bandit was stuffing more money into Raynor’s daughter’s schoolbag, the shorter bandit left the building. The teller managed to untie the ropes that held him, and he and Raynor slammed the strongroom door on the taller bandit. The police were called and 30-year-old Geoffrey Anderson Gair was arrested. In a search of a nearby unit, they found the shorter bandit, who turned out to be Lorraine Ann Kleehammer, a 21-year-old mother of two young children Gair and Kleehammer were charged with the armed robbery of $7500.

  Kleehammer told the police how she had met a man she knew as Jeb Bannon in Sale in July 1967. He told her he was a journalist and abalone diver, but neglected to say that he was an escaped prisoner with a number of priors. Although she had a 10-month-old baby boy and was expecting another child, Bannon took her to Melbourne to live with him in Brunswick, before they went travelling around the countryside, staying in his caravan. He occasionally appeared to be doing some writing, but in September told her they needed money and would have to rob a bank.