Gangland Robbers (34 page)

But things are not always as they seem at first. Nguyen had been in a sexual relationship with the man for nearly two years; and on this occasion, while they were having sex, she pushed a syringe into his arm, telling him she was doing so for his health. In fact, it contained a
cocktail of at least five different drugs. She then cut one of the cords to the shop's CCTV but there was still sufficient footage to link her to the robbery. The next day, a search of her house produced jewellery worth around $268 000. Other jewellery and cash totalling around $130 000 was not recovered.

Nguyen had owed around $40 000 to two women she had met at a casino when she developed a gambling habit after the breakdown of her marriage in 2007.
In February 2016 she was
ordered to serve a five-year community corrections sentence and to complete 300 hours of unpaid community work.

Some robbers still try their hand at the blag, though. On 26 July 2010 a security guard shot Nathan Brodbeck dead as he tried to rob a Brink's cash-in-transit van outside Dee Why RSL on Sydney's northern beaches. He and his friend Russell Holmes had both worked for Brink's but left to set up their own security company in April. Apparently in financial difficulties, Brodbeck needed information about Brink's runs, and Franjo Santalab, a former New South Wales policeman who worked for the company, provided it, including that the takings on a Monday were likely to exceed $700 000. Santalab also provided him with a gun, which he claimed he had only done under pressure, threats having been made to his family.

The attempted robbery happened at about 1.30 p.m. A messenger and guard were in the Brink's truck, which, as expected, picked up the money from the RSL. There was construction going on next to the club and many of the workmen wore fluro vests. Brodbeck, standing nearby, was wearing sunglasses, gloves, a hood and a similar safety vest. As the guard and the messenger were coming towards the truck with the money, Brodbeck stepped onto the footpath, loudly yelled something and ran towards the messenger. The messenger dropped the money and ran for cover in the direction of the truck. At the same time, he pulled out his weapon and fired three times.

One shot hit the ground, one hit Brodbeck in the chest and the third hit an innocent bystander in the ankle. The whole incident apparently took only two seconds. Brodbeck died shortly afterwards from the chest wound. In 2013 the coroner exonerated the messenger.
The year before, Santalab
, who received five years with a minimum of twenty-seven months, had supplied the gun, which was unloaded at the time of the attempted robbery.

Why is what might be called professional armed robbery in decline? First, there are now easier ways of making money, with far less risk of being shot by a police officer or security guard, or of receiving a very lengthy sentence. Worldwide, when illegal drug use became widespread, professional criminals publicly denounced drugs, saying they would have nothing to do with their import or distribution, but as the years have gone by their resolve has weakened. At first there was only investment but again as time passed, more and more, such as Michael Nicholas Hurley, who was credited with the Chinese Takeaway bank robbery, took a more active part.

In 1975 Peter Alan Tilley was convicted of armed robbery in Queensland and at the end of his sentence was extradited to Victoria. In June 2005 he was sentenced to seven years, with a minimum of five, for his part in an attempt to import heroin-filled condoms that had been swallowed by a courier. Down with him went Murray James Perrier, who received a second life sentence. In 1981 Perrier had been on death row at Changi while his charges of possessing heroin were plea-bargained so he could avoid the death penalty. After his release, Perrier then served thirteen years of a life sentence for importing 1.6 kilograms of heroin into Victoria. Six months after his release, he joined Tilley's enterprise.
He appealed his life sentence
but died in prison before the hearing.

Of course, other forms of crime were not always safer for former robbers. On 29 December 1975 Robert Patten, known as Bob the Butcher, received eight years after pleading guilty to robbing the Randwick branch of the Bank of New South Wales. He then moved to the Mid North Coast town of Port Macquarie, where he was involved in a prostitution ring before he disappeared in January 1987. It was believed he vanished due to his participation in the commercial growth of marijuana.

Overall, the path for the intelligent professional must surely be white collar crime. There, penalties can be substantially less—if, that is, the prosecution can actually prove its case in the first place.

In 2003 two members of an unsung Kings Cross family, ‘Teflon' Tony and Jamie Vincent, nearly made it to the big time. On Christmas Eve, phone lines at the Testra phone exchange were hotwired, and co-conspirator Ernst Hufnagl attempted to transfer $150 million from an account number relating to federal public servants' funds. It all came undone when ‘Ltd' was added by mistake to the personal account of Georgios Stylianou, a potential recipient in Greece. His bank refused to
accept it, alerting the remitting bankers, JPMorgan, to the error. By now, the scam was unravelling, and this account and those of other worldwide recipients in the Far East were frozen.

In the wash-up seven years later, sentences of between thirty months and six-and-a-half years were imposed. Hufnagl received a minimum of three years, Tony Vincent's three-year sentence was made concurrent with the six years he was serving for supplying drugs, and Jamie Vincent received twenty months.
The trend towards this sort
of crime will continue, with the cases perhaps taking longer to unravel.

But some career robbers have still been going for what they have traditionally seen as easy targets. On 29 May 2011 Detective Senior Constable Damian Leeding died after he was shot in the face at close range when he and a female colleague attended a triple-0 call about a robbery and hostage-taking at the Pacific Pines Tavern on the Gold Coast. Robbers had stormed the premises shortly before closing time, and were holding two staff and four patrons hostage. Two of the suspects were caught in nearby parkland. Later, Leeding's family would agree to turning his life support machine off.

That year there were around 100 armed robberies on the Gold Coast, including seventy in the three months to August, and five shootings. Bottle shops, chemists and a Chinese takeaway were targeted.
However, the total of 159
in the twelve months was only seven more than there had been in 2001. Leeding's killing was just part of the spate of armed robberies and killings in the region. At the time a stolen gun, such as a Glock 9mm, could be obtained in around two hours for about $2000.

In 2014 Phillip Abell and Donna Lee McAvoy went on trial charged with murder for the Pacific Pines Tavern armed robbery, along with the getaway driver, Benjamin Power. Abell ran a defence that dated back to John Jackson and the Trades Hall robbery in Melbourne nearly a century earlier. He accepted that he was at the Pacific Pines, engaged in a robbery, and that he had fired the shots that killed the detective. His argument was, however, that they were fired in self-defence, something many might—and the jury did—think specious. He claimed that Leeding had not called on him to stop, so, after the detective had fired a shot at him, he was entitled to shoot him.

Abell was sentenced to life imprisonment, as was McAvoy. He applied for leave to appeal out of time against both the conviction and
his sentence. It seems he was advised that there was no likelhood of a successful appeal but he pushed on nevertheless.

In November 1990 Abell had received four years for the armed robbery of a convenience store in company, with actual violence. In 1997, during a bank raid, he had fired a shot from a high-powered weapon, which passed through a wall and easily could have struck an employee in the next room. On 11 July he received eight years. He had also been involved in a series of home invasions, for which he received eight years in 2010. He appealed unsuccessfully against his sentence, arguing he had not been given credit for his pleas of guilty—other than to the murder charge. The appeals were dismissed.
Benjamin Power received a nine-year
sentence for manslaughter.

In February 2012 Victoria Police offered a $50 000 reward for information leading to the apprehension and subsequent conviction of persons responsible for a series of armed robberies on gaming venues in Melbourne's north-west suburbs. It was thought that up to thirty-three armed robberies since June 2011 had been linked to this series.

And still they come, albeit not as regularly. An elaborate armed robbery on a cash transport van, ‘the largest in Victoria in the last few years', said Detective Senior-Constable Paul Jones of the Armed Crimes Squad, went off in December 2014. The robbers, using a stolen car and motorbike, netted a record haul of almost $290 000. After the guards had picked up the takings from several McDonald's restaurants, including two on the Calder Highway and one at Sunbury, they were held up at gunpoint. A burned-out Commodore was discovered at Little River, and the police later seized a cache of high-powered weapons, including fully automatic M16 and Thureon machine guns.

Have any robbers made good, and turned their backs on crime and prison? London detective Nipper Read, the ‘man who nicked the Krays', thought a high-class robber only gave up when his legs gave out or he could no longer face a long prison sentence. Read was perhaps being too cynical.

Mad Dog Cox seems to have gone straight, and New Zealand-born bank robber Brett Collins, released from a 17-year sentence in 1980, certainly did, becoming a noted campaigner for prison reform and heading Justice Action, an organisation aiming to redress injustices in the judicial system.
Red Rat Pollitt became a successful painter
, as did
Tim Guider from Sydney's western suburbs, who served five years of a ten-year sentence for conspiracy to rob a bank.

Nathan Jones, who at the age of eighteen served a sentence for armed robbery, became a strongman and professional wrestler, and appeared in
Mad Max: Fury Road
.

On 10 February 1999 former international model Tovah Ismini Cottle, then a heroin addict, and her then boyfriend robbed a newsagent's in a Brisbane suburb, and were foiled during a robbery at another newsagent's when the cashier slammed the drawer on her hand. She had threatened them with a blood-filled syringe. (She later said that it was her own blood and she did not have AIDS, which must have been a comfort to the staff member who was sprayed.)
She claimed she had been forced
into the robberies because she owed $18 000 to her heroin supplier. Cottle avoided a prison sentence on that occasion but eventually went down on a drugs offence. She later credited her time in prison, when she studied to become a designer, for turning her life around.

One-time solicitor Tubby Alford, a recovering alcoholic who served sixteen months for embezzlement and then five years for a botched bank raid in Chapel Street, Prahran, in 1982, wrote
Never Give Up
and became an inspirational speaker and agent. In 1997 he organised the first-ever World Masters of Business, which returned a profit in excess of $1.2 million. Later, he brought the likes of Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev to the Australian speakers circuit.
When Pentridge, where he had been imprisoned
, was redeveloped, he purchased Cell 43 in D division to house his collection of fine wines.

But the list of those who continued with crime, to what has often been a bitter end, is far longer. Sometimes it may seem to a robber that it does not pay even to try to reform or to clear the books. In 1998 Barry Matt Stuart, also known as Barry Crutch, then a heroin addict, was sentenced in Western Australia to eighteen years for nine armed robberies that netted him more than $63 000. ‘A series of offences which are so serious that it is almost impossible to imagine a worse situation,' said Justice Michael Murray. Stuart served ten years and was released in 2007.

In January 2013 Stuart went to a police station in Perth and confessed to robbing a Bentley chemist at gunpoint in November 1994, saying, ‘The guilt gets to you.' He pleaded guilty in December and was
sentenced to a further thirteen months. The court was told that Stuart might also face extradition to New South Wales for a breach of parole and for an even earlier robbery in 1992.

He was found dead in his cell at Hakea Prison on 16 November 2013.
The authorities said he had committed
suicide, something his family bitterly disputed.