Gangland Robbers (15 page)

When the train arrived at Mount Isa at 7.15 a.m. two mail bags were found to be missing. The locks on the mail van had been changed to locks for which the thieves held the keys and they evidently had plenty of time to carry out their plan. They had carefully cut the string around the neck of the bag under the seal, and then retied it so skilfully after removing the notes that it was not until the string was examined very closely that the cut was discovered. One theory was that two men on horseback had carried out the robbery. It was thought that it occurred after Cloncurry, as the locks on the mail van were apparently intact when the train reached the station there. Those responsible for the robbery evidently knew the Townsville—Mount Isa line, the train's schedule and the train crew's duties.

A month later, the guard, Francis Walsh, was arrested but the prosecution case was hopeless. For a start, and finish, there was evidence that the keys were regularly left unattended in the guard's van. Walsh said he had left the van to hunt down a jumper, and in the October the magistrate refused to commit him for trial. Walsh later sued the detectives for £50, his legal fees, and £2000 general damages, claiming the police had told him they were sorry but they were under instructions to arrest someone and he was that someone.
At the end of Walsh's case
, it was submitted that he had failed to show an absence of reasonable cause for the arrest, and his claim was dismissed with costs.

Earlier, in the late 1920s, Sydney had been plagued by an influx of lone Grey Shadows.
The name derived from the original robber
who wore a long grey coat, but very soon there were a number of Shadows
on the scene, including Owen Glyndwr Evans, who was deported to England in 1931 after serving two years for a series of around 100 burglaries. There were also wannabes, such as Herbert Granville, who pleaded guilty to a number of burglaries and left behind a note in a car he had rifled.
It read ‘Beware of the lone wolf
and the grey shadow', but no one believed he was the man himself. Another claimant was Clarence Jones, who told one victim, Ethel Molloy, that he was the real thing and the man the police had just arrested was not the Grey Shadow. The magistrate was not impressed.
‘Grey Shadows and Blue Shadows
are becoming so common that they are a nuisance to the public,' he told Jones, sentencing him to three months for stealing a motor car.

Black Shadows were also becoming a menace, and one anonymous Black Shadow bailed up at gunpoint two taxi drivers in quick succession in Leichhardt and Darlinghurst on 8 September 1929. He seems to have run inordinate risks for little reward, since the total haul was £3. What was peculiar was that the robber, who used the same words, ‘Bail up for the Black Shadow,' in both robberies, wore different coloured clothes for each.
It was thought he had an accomplice
who drove behind the cabs and provided the change of clothing, which made the proceeds even more risible.

But as one Shadow disappeared, another emerged. In August 1929 a man claiming to be the real Grey Shadow held up Arthur Hunt, the licensee of a Darling Road wine saloon, his wife and a friend, stealing a little under £20. Hunt would later tell the police that the man had boasted, ‘There was not a detective clever enough in Australia to catch him and that he was itching to shoot someone'.
If it was indeed the Shadow
, he was remarkably indiscreet because he also told Hunt he was a timber worker and was married with four children.

Hunt's attacker may have been putting down a false trail because the man considered most likely to have been the real Shadow was a 29-year-old salesman, Thomas Herbert Skinner, who was arrested after robbing shopkeeper Richard Woods in Rozelle in early 1930. Chased by the police, he shot one constable in the groin and got away, but was caught after a fingerprint on the lens of a pair of spectacles, dropped after the robbery, was identified as his. Skinner fought it, claiming he had been at the cinema with a Vera Lee and that the whole case against him was a frame-up, but was he sentenced to ten years' penal servitude.
Whether he was the real Shadow
or whether the fad had run its course, the Shadows faded away into the night.

Another man suspected of being
the real Shadow was New South Wales career criminal Joseph Harold Ryan, who in August 1929 was acquitted of beating and robbing 80-year-old Henry Wheale of £27 and another man, James Stewart, of £15. Ryan may not have been the real Shadow but was certainly in the frame for what became known as the Mudgee train robbery.

On 8 April 1930 the Mudgee mail train left Central Station, Sydney, as usual a bullion box in the guard's van containing a bag with £4600 in cash and around £13 000 in cheques and securities. In the van along with the guard, Albert Squires, was Kenneth Allen, an armed porter acting as an escort. About 11 p.m. the train left Emu Plains station, with Squires closing the door on the platform side and Allen sitting in a corner. It was then two masked men with slouch hats and duster coats entered the van from the opposite door and held up the guards—some reports have Squires being bound and gagged. They then broke open the iron strongbox.

As the train approached the tunnel on the Glenbrook side of Sydney, they slid the strongbox across the floor of the van and threw it off the train through the open door. Then, with the train approaching a speed of 30 miles per hour, they jumped off as it entered the tunnel. Squires had the train stopped as soon as possible but the robbers were long gone. The police at Penrith set out for Glenbrook but it was another hour before the Criminal Investigation Branch officers were informed. A search of the area the next morning produced nothing. The guard's van was detached from the train and sent back to Sydney to be finger-printed. The bag was not found for another six months, by which time, from a forensic point of view, it had been ruined by water.

Squires and Allen gave as much of a description as they could of the robbers—young, agile and that, from the way they dealt with the box and their escape, they clearly knew what they were doing. At first it was thought no Australians were capable of such a daring robbery and that American criminals were involved. For a time it was even suggested that the D'Autremont brothers, who in 1923 had robbed a train in Oregon, had been responsible. This was always highly improbable, even given lax prison security, for, at the time, the brothers were serving
life sentences in America. Others in the frame included the, always suspect, Italians—the guards thought the men had Italian accents—but when it came to it, it seemed to be good old Australian planning.

Then, on the night of 30 April–1 May 1931, the Canberra mail train was robbed at Queanbeyan and £10,000 was stolen. The Commonwealth Bank had sent the money with an escort to Central, where it was put in a mail bag in the guard's van. The train stopped at Queanbeyan at 4.15 a.m., the bag and other sacks unloaded and left on the platform for transfer. They were then put on a truck and driven to Canberra, where it was found that the Commonwealth sack was packed with old telephone directories instead of the money. It was clear the bag had been swapped. It had at times been left unattended; for example, when a changeover took place at Goulburn. However, detectives decided that there had been insufficient time for the exchange to take place there and thought it had taken place before the train left Sydney. This time, though, the numbers of the stolen banknotes had been taken.

‘Round up the usual suspects' may be a cliché but generally the police know that there is only a limited number of people who are capable of committing a sophisticated crime. Remove from consideration those in prison and there is a relatively small pool for detectives to fish in. In addition, there are always a number of dobbers who will pitch in for the reward money, and for immediate or future favours.

Following this philosophy led the police to a farm near Mulgoa belonging to George Morris, known as the Ambling Ape because of his resemblance to boxer Primo Carnera, was dug up and £6000 of the Canberra money was found. But something curious happened. The money was placed on a blanket and counted. It was then left, and when the police returned, there was another hundred in different notes on the blanket. No one ever explained how it got there.

Morris also told the police that he had been on the Mudgee robbery, flashing a torch on and off until the box was thrown out. He had collected it and then driven off with the robbers, Harold Ryan and Arthur Collins. However, the guards on the Mudgee train failed to identify two suspects—Ryan and a railway porter, Roy Edward Wilkinson. Now it was a question of relying on the dobbers, one of whom was indeed Arthur Collins. James Caffrey and Collins were charged with receiving from the Canberra mail theft, and also with the well-planned and executed robbery of Sydney jeweller Solomon Cohen in
May 1931. The charges against Collins were quickly dropped and he became a Crown witness.

In June, Allen and Squires, escort and guard from the Mudgee train, were both dismissed. They appealed against their dismissals, and Squires, who had thirty years' service, was reinstated in October but not Allen. In late June 1931 Ryan was charged with both the train robberies. Both Morris and Collins had already dobbed him in.

At the committal proceedings on 10 July, Collins said that on the night of the robbery, he, Ryan and Morris had met, and Morris drove them to the Emu Plains railway station. He gave evidence that Ryan had said to Morris, ‘You shake it up and go to the viaduct.' Collins said, ‘Ryan and I waited in a paddock near the rail station. When the Mudgee mail came along we got on the guard's van opposite the platform. When the train moved, Ryan climbed into the guard's van. I saw the guard and escort standing in front of Ryan, who had an automatic and a nickel-plated revolver. I said, “Put them in the other compartment.”' Collins claimed the guard turned round, and Ryan slapped him on the ear and said something about dead men.

Then it was Morris's turn and he said that, after the robbery, Roy Wilkinson told him, ‘Mick Collins is one of the men I put the Mudgee mail robbery up to. I was to get £500, and got wiped off with £50.' Morris also accepted that he and the others had buried £7600, part of the proceeds of the Canberra robbery, on his farm.

Everyone was given bail, and Ryan made the most of this opportunity and absconded.
Truth
was at its most eloquent, writing of his elderly, grey-haired mother sitting in her darkened room, awaiting her son's return. Over the years, there were various sightings of him in and around Sydney, and on one occasion he gave a statement to the press saying he had absconded because the police had smoked his principal witness.

In the meantime
, on 27 November 1931, Wilkinson received three years for concealing knowledge of a felony, two years for receiving and two years for being an accessory after the fact to the robbery. All the sentences were made concurrent.

Then, in June 1935, a firm of solicitors received a letter from Ryan, asking them to arrange a meeting with a Detective Inspector Quinn so that he could give himself up, and at 7.15 p.m. on 19 June he was rearrested. ‘I have come back from abroad to give myself up to the police
to meet the charges against me. I have always had a complete defence,' Ryan told Quinn, adding that a man who had owed him money had failed to come through and he had been left without funds to pay for his defence. By then, another man, Lancelot Lynch, had been acquitted and Arthur Collins had pleaded guilty to concealing knowledge of the Canberra robbery. Ryan, somewhat optimistically, thought that having done the decent thing by giving himself up, he might be granted bail again. It was an argument that cut no ice with Judge Curlewis.

The Canberra robbery was tried first and much of the Crown's evidence came from another informer: this time, thief and forger Percy Jacobs, who in 1928 had received two years for a £1200 fraud. He gave detailed evidence of Ryan's pre-planning. When it came to it, and crucially, he denied he personally had been involved, although Ryan had promised him £1000. This produced an outburst from Judge Curlewis: ‘Why you were to get £1000 I do not know. You did nothing to earn it.' Then he added, ‘I do not know if the jury will convict on this man's evidence alone.'

Morris backed up Jacobs. He again said he had driven Ryan and his one-time friend Collins from the Mudgee robbery and had buried the cash on his farm. He claimed that Ryan had been standing over him because of a conviction some eight years previously, which, if it came out, would lose him his job as a part-time postmaster. But Morris was clearly better connected than was apparent at first glance. Under cross-examination, he agreed that, yes, he knew a man Jenkins but, no, he had never shot him and nor had he placed a bomb in his car. Jenkins was receiver Percy ‘Snowy' Jenkins who had been shot and whose shop was bombed in a Melbourne gangland feud, possibly over car rebirthing; that, or drugs. Morris also accepted he knew Alexander McIver and Francis Delaney, convicted of bombing the Greek Club in Melbourne in 1928.

Ryan's counsel, mixing his metaphors nicely, made a splendid attack on the evidence: ‘The rotten house the Crown has built, you would not hang a dog on.' The Crown, on the other hand, pointed out with some justification that Jacobs and Morris ‘had been described as men of mud. Wretches as they might be, sorry as their characters were they were the very type employed by a mastermind when carrying out a criminal enterprise. And it is a mastermind who is now on trial'. But when it came to it, the jury did not like the prosecution's dogs and declined to convict Ryan.

On 8 October he went on trial for the Mudgee robbery. This time, Arthur Collins, who had done amazingly well for himself in plea bargaining—a bind over for the Mudgee robbery, and an order to leave the state for his part in the attack on Cohen the jeweller—was there to put his old friend away. Morris was again on hand to give his usual evidence. Collins was in the witness box reluctantly, demanding before he said a word that he be given assurances he would not be prosecuted. By the end of his evidence, he was being treated as a hostile witness.