Gangland Robbers (33 page)

In the meantime, on 7 October 1987, Douglas Frederick Robinson and Victor Campbell Loughnan received eleven and eight years respectively, for carrying out a home invasion on an elderly couple at their isolated farmhouse in Narbethong, north-east of Melbourne. The robbery netted $3.5 million of artworks, including a Raphael. It was a thoroughly professional job, with Robinson, who had seventeen priors, casing the farmhouse and cutting telephone links, and the pair equipping themselves with walkie-talkies and shotguns. But Robinson and Loughnan found that selling stolen art, unless it has been stolen to order, is often more difficult than the theft itself, and Robinson telephoned the couple several times, offering to sell their paintings back to them.

One of Australia's worst home invasions took place in Brisbane on 31 July 2003, when 21-year-old university student and saxophonist Phil Evans arrived home. There, he found two men, who tied him up, taped his mouth, and then started hacking off his fingers with an axe. After he screamed when the first finger was cut off, the attackers told him that his flatmates were doused in petrol in the room next door and would be set on fire if he screamed again. Evans lost three fingers during the ordeal.

In March 2006 30-year-old David Ritchie pleaded guilty to involvement in the assault, claiming he had only been the getaway driver. He had earlier been caught in Sydney, after an unrelated high-speed chase, and had confessed to the police regarding the attack on Evans. He told the police that after the assault, one of the other robbers had said that they had attacked the wrong man. He was in trouble with a Brisbane drug lord, and to get himself off the hook had named a number of perfectly innocent university students, including Evans, putting the blame on them for the money he had lost. Ritchie received seven years.
After surgery to reattach his fingers
, Evans joined his parents in France, and while he was abroad, an instrument maker, Tom Sparkes, created a saxophone with slightly different fingering that he was able to play.

Bizarrely, almost to the day eight years later in July 2011 stockbroker Paul Shepherd was attacked after opening the front door of his Bulimba, Queensland, home to two men armed with weapons, who tried to cut off his fingers. Apart from telling the police they were stockily built Caucasians, Shepherd was unable to identify them.

In 2009 there was a spike in Sydney home invasions, with twenty-four attacks in the first three months of the year, but the figure has since remained fairly constant. Sydney Institute of Criminology lecturer Garner Clancey has expressed the view that home invasions may just be a ‘fad' crime. Improving home security systems had made it harder for thieves to stage robberies when the premises were unoccupied, so now the trend was to attack when residents were at home. ‘[As] car jackings increased when manufacturers made cars harder to steal, the criminals evolve and adapt,' he said. ‘The same with homes.
As other types of targets
become harder there can be a displacement of crime.'

In Tasmania in 2013 there was a spike in home invasions, with the invaders often operating in pairs and bashing the victims. In July that year, the Tasmanian Opposition called for more police funding to tackle violent crime after a gunman broke into a house at Mount Rumney on
Hobart's eastern shore and attacked the 65-year-old owner, before fleeing when alarms were activated.

On 29 May 2014 a 69-year-old truck driver and pig farmer, Keith Cini, was bashed to death in a home invasion at Badgerys Creek, Sydney. The target was a large amount of cash believed to have been kept on the premises. Two men have been charged with his killing and with another home invasion the previous month.

Statistics published in 2014 showed that, overall, violent crime in Australia, including home invasions, was down. However, in February 2016, Western Australia was named the home invasion capital, with a rate double the national average.
Given that there are conflicting
definitions of what constitutes a home invasion, this may, however, include simple and attempted breaks-ins.

In the past two years, there has been a disturbing increase in home invasions in and around Melbourne, with the Apex gang, mainly Sudanese and Somalian youths, breaking into houses to obtain the keys of smart cars, which can then be rebirthed.
While at first this was a sneak-thief
operation, the gangs, armed with machetes and baseball bats, are now kicking in doors.

Throughout Australia, sentences for serious home invasions have tended to run into double figures. Aaron Paul Pryce was quickly dis-abused when he thought an eight-year sentence was too much for his offence. He forced his way into a Rockhampton house with his offsider, Lindsay Winslade, on 4 December 2013. They held the residents hostage, cutting them with machetes—including cutting one man's leg to the bone—and threatening to rape the women. At one stage, Winslade used a machete to lift up the towel one of the women was wearing, saying, ‘I haven't had a root in a while and you are a fresh piece of meat, I might take you here and now.'

Pryce claimed he should have received a shorter sentence than Winslade, as he had a lesser criminal history.
Justice Philip McMurdo said although
other offenders had received lesser sentences for similar offences, this did not mean Pryce's sentence was too harsh: ‘The present sentences, in my view, are heavy but ultimately I am unpersuaded that they are manifestly excessive.'

Over the twentieth century things changed in the robbery scene. Gone are racehorses being used for getaways. Gone, to a large extent, are the days of the masked professional, such as Jockey Smith, holding up banks with automatic weapons. The use of cheques and credit cards has made for less cash on the streets. Notes can be marked with exploding dye. Grilles and bullet-proof glass have provided security for bank tellers. Screens that can be activated at the touch of a button can also cause serious problems for the unwary robber.
There is now CCTV
, along with silent alarm systems that can summon police officers within minutes.

On 22 October 1987 a man tried to vault the counter of a branch of the ANZ Bank in High Street, Northcote, a north-eastern suburb of Melbourne, just as the staff pressed the button to raise the screen. He was caught with his legs on the customer side and the top half of his body on the teller's side. Armed with a gun, he pointed it at a clerk, saying, ‘I'll shoot him, I'll shoot myself. I'm not going to gaol.' He then fired a shot as staff tried to lower the screen. He ran out of the bank to a silver Holden, which had been stolen at Albert Park, and hit another car as he drove away.
The car was found soon afterwards
, abandoned about 500 metres from the bank. The man's accomplice also fled.

Not so fortunate was would-be robber Steven Charles Kovacs, thirty-seven, who, in the late afternoon of 22 July 1991, at a branch of the Advance Bank in Sydney's northern suburbs, was strangled when the screen protecting the cashier slid up to the ceiling, trapping his head as he leaned over the counter. The staff had fled the premises, as had his offsider, who took $500 with him, so his cries for help went
unanswered.
Kovacs was identified as a known
petty criminal the police thought was on his first (and last) bank robbery.

ATMs have been the target of ram-raiding, an improved version of the old smash-and-grab, in which gangs driving two-ton four-wheel drives smash ATMs out of the ground. By 2005 there were five or six ram-raids a week in Sydney alone, and Strike Force Piccadilly, combining the resources of the police, the retail sector, the security sector and banks, was set up. Through that, and cooperation between members of the ATM industry, the Raminator was born. This is a dual metal plate that can absorb heavy impacts by tilting an ATM at an angle. Film of one attack shows raiders making twenty-three attempts before abandoning the project. Until 2012 machines fitted with a Raminator had a 100 per cent success rate in withstanding raids.

Robbers' weapons are now very different; for example, pea guns are out of fashion and since World War II automatic weapons have increasingly become the gun of choice. One of the earliest major robberies after World War II was the so-called Cockatoo Docks robbery, the first robbery in New South Wales in which a machine gun was used. At about 10 a.m. on 13 April 1945, three men, armed with a Thompson and automatic pistols, robbed five dock employees of £12 000. The money had been collected from the Drummoyne branch of the ES&A Bank, and the employees, who were armed, had just boarded a motor launch at Wolseley Street wharf to take them to the dock when the machine-gun-wielding masked man and his colleagues held them up. The robbers then disappeared in a stolen highly polished black Buick, which was later found in Kalgoorlie Street, Leichhardt.
Despite a reward of £1000
, and a free pardon to any informant provided he had not actually been on the robbery, the underworld remained staunch and no charges were ever brought.

Researchers believe there are currently three main types of armed robbers: amateurs, intermediates and professional offenders.
They are defined by the risk-to-yield
ratio of the armed robbery, the offender's criminal history and the amount of planning that has gone into the robbery.

By the late 1980s—for the real professional, at least—small armed robberies were out of fashion. There was no really big money on offer from them; if caught doing them, sentences were long, and there was always the possibility of being shot. By then, they were mostly committed
by drug addicts raising money to support their habits. However, in 1989 in Queensland eight Metway branches were robbed in eight weeks, and there were five attacks on armoured cars that year. There was a spate of armed robberies in Brisbane, with Brian Single and Jeffrey Stevens making it into the top ten of the state's most wanted list. Then there was an associate of Raymond Denning, Stuart Harold Tange, who, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, held up at least four, sometimes five, stores on a Thursday night over a two-year period in New South Wales in the early 1980s.
Upon his departures, he would
tell staff, ‘It's for the kids.'

In August 1990 an ambush of a Brambles truck at Toombul Shoppingtown went seriously astray. A guard was shot in the ankle and a bystander in the stomach, and a bleeding robber escaped in a silver Mazda. That year throughout Australia there were 270 reported armed robberies with violence; not all, of course, carried out with guns.

Some of the research conclusions are self-evident.
Amateurs tend to be opportunistic
offenders, with short-sighted intentions, and with little understanding of what to expect from the robbery experience or of the amount of money they are likely to receive. By 2007 Gold Coast Superintendent Jim Keogh was on record as saying:

 

Now the offender is drug affected with predominantly an amphetamine based drug and the weapon is the most immediate he or she can grab.
There's limited premeditation in robberies
.

 

Intermediate armed robbers are generally
more organised and experienced than amateurs but not as dedicated to armed robbery as professionals. They are likely to engage in a reasonable amount of planning and be prepared to use weapons if necessary.
Professional armed robbers have
a higher level of motivation, rigorously plan robberies, are more likely to have firearms as their weapon of choice, and are more willing to engage in violence and to consider armed robbery a means of making a living.

The most common Australian robbery is now—and really always has been—street robbery, which is very often a solo effort. Recent statistics have shown it to be by a solitary knife-wielding male who is after the victim's cash and mobile phone, and more than 40 per cent of the time it takes place in the street or some other public place. An Australian Institute of Criminology survey by Georgina Fuller analysed 627 reports from 2009–10 police files, finding that the second-most-common robbery
took place at what was termed an ‘insecure business', such as a chemist, service station or bottle shop. These accounted for 37 per cent of robberies and took place at night with a high level of aggression but little actual violence, principally because the threatened staff had simply handed over the cash. These were mainly late night robberies, seemingly unpremeditated because the robbers seldom bothered with disguises.

Low on the list, at 12 per cent, but more serious because the victims, who often knew their assailants, received serious and even life-threatening injuries, were home invasions. At the bottom of the table, at 8 per cent, were robberies of secure premises such as banks, post offices and pubs, where there was usually a high amount of cash on offer but this was counterbalanced by increased risk because of CCTV cameras and other security devices.
This type of robbery produced
an average of $6000 and was generally far better organised, with guns commonly used.

A study of female offenders in 2004–10 showed they most often used a knife, or some other weapon, in committing a robbery. Fifty-six percent of incidents in that period that involved only female offenders also involved knives, while 22 per cent involved other weapons. This is similar to the statistics for male offenders, who also usually committed armed robberies with knives (55 per cent) and other weapons (24 per cent). Only 6 per cent of exclusively female robberies involved firearms, compared with 17 per cent of male-only and mixed gender groups, indicating that armed robberies may be qualitatively different when involving only women. However, while only 3 per cent of male offenders committed robbery using syringes, 16 per cent of females who committed armed robberies used this weapon.

In June 2014 37-year-old Truc Nguyen of Ardeer allegedly robbed a jewellery store owner in Footscray, Melbourne. She apparently entered the store in the late afternoon and injected the 63-year-old man with a drug that rendered him unconscious. He woke up several hours later and called his family. A large amount of cash and at least $200 000 worth of jewellery had been stolen. She was arrested the following day and charged with a number of offences, including armed robbery and intentionally causing injury.