Gangland Robbers (12 page)

While in prison, he wrote to a friend, ‘I've been told that, if the King dies, all long service men in prison have three years taken off. What more could a good Irishman hope for?' The King did not die and Martin served out his sentence. He was due for release in February 1947 but then the deputy governor informed him he would remain in custody, pending an order under the
Immigration Act 1901–40
. It provided that a person not born in Australia who committed a crime within the first five years of his arrival, and for which he was sentenced to twelve months or more, was liable to deportation. As Martin had arrived in 1926 and was not convicted until March 1932, the provisions did not apply to him. He was finally released in June 1947, but not before having to apply for a writ of habeus corpus.

Even without Martin, bus hold-ups had continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Between March and November 1930, nine armed hold-ups took place in Melbourne. In New South Wales in January 1946 a man wearing a gasmask and carrying a tommy gun held up the Cronulla–Caringbah bus as it was returning to the depot.
He stole 30 shillings but missed
£12 that had been hidden on the bus.

Traditionally, safebreakers have always been the cream of the underworld; with technical ability triumphing over brawn. And the cream of Queensland boxmen in the 1920s was James Short. The tall, handsome, well-dressed—and that was the police description—Short, a man who ‘spoke cultured English', was without doubt ‘The Mastermind of the Northern Gangs', and even, according to the prosecutor in his last case, ‘The Al Capone of Australia'.
Charged fifteen times and convicted
only twice, he was thought to be behind a number of highly profitable bank raids in north Queensland between 1926 and 1933, as well as a £30,000 robbery of the Brisbane–Townsville mail train in April 1931.

James Short had a bad start in life. His mother burned to death—she had set fire to the bedclothes—when he was less than a month old, and his father died a week later. He lived with his grandmother, and began running wild, starting his criminal career in 1919.

In May 1924 he and his offsider, Joseph Grealy, were charged with a burglary at Mareeba. In November 1925 he and Grealy were acquitted of blowing a safe belonging to Donald McInnes, who ran a combined tobacconist's and billiard saloon. In December the next year, he and Hugh J Carroll were charged with the theft of £5000 in Treasury notes from a mail bag. Short was taken ill and the case was remanded. In May 1927 he, James Bain and John Morrissey were charged with breaking and entering at the Miners' Hotel in Duchess. They were arrested when their car was stopped at Winton, and initially charged with vagrancy. Nothing came of any of the prosecutions.

In December that year, Short, Grealy and Bain were arrested for a break-in in Lismore, and in January 1928 Grealy was charged with shop breaking at Gin Gin. In March, Short was, at last, convicted of breaking and entering the store at Gin Gin and blowing the safe. Along with Victor Plint and Grealy, he was sentenced to seven years, but the conviction was quashed when
the Court of Appeal
ruled the trial judge had not given proper directions as to how recently after the theft stolen goods needed to be in someone's possession to be evidence of the theft. All three were acquitted after a retrial. The loser in the whole affair was the editor of a local paper who had pointed out that the trio had all recently been acquitted of a burglary at Tweed Heads. He was summoned to show cause why he should not be dealt with for contempt.

In May 1930 duplicate keys were used to obtain £300 in notes from the Townsville branch of the National Bank of Australasia. Although the numbers of the notes lost in these robberies were known to police and were circulated throughout Queensland and in the southern states, at least some of the money found its way into circulation again.

In 1932 £10 881 was stolen from the Queensland National Bank (QNB), and £3398 from the Bank of New South Wales at Cloncurry. Early in April, the QNB's manager was swimming at the Two Mile Waterhole when someone took a wax impression of the strongroom key he had left with his belt on the grassy bank, and made a duplicate. On Saturday 11 June, having opened the QNB strongroom and helped themselves to the money, Short and his team found the key to the Bank of New
South Wales. (It was common practice for an absentee manager to leave his bank's keys with another manager.) The robbers also helped themselves to the money in that bank. Everything seemed to be in place on Monday morning when the banks opened, but when the strongrooms were unlocked, practically all the money in notes and a good deal in silver was gone. The amount alleged to have been stolen was £14 000, and, despite the two banks offering a £500 reward for information and despite numerous detectives being flown up from Brisbane to investigate, no arrests were ever made.

However, the matter did not end there. In July 1933 the banks brought an action against their insurance companies to reclaim the money that had been lost. The action was hotly defended, with the insurers claiming the policies did not cover any theft by a member of staff acting independently or in concert with anyone. They also claimed that the premises had been left unattended, with the doors open for about four hours every Saturday and Sunday, which would have allowed anyone to come in and make impressions of the locks. The banks won the case. In February 1934, acting on a tip-off, the police found some of the silver—around £23—that had been stolen from one of the banks buried in an empty carbide tin.
Of the notes, there was no trace
.

Short's downfall came after a raid at the post office at Oolbun, near Townsville. It had been regarded as due for a visit from Short and his team because, every week, the Alligator Creek meatworks' pay, in the region of £1000, was held there overnight. The police had arranged with the postmistress that she keep a list of the numbers of notes in her possession, but nothing happened for several months and the police lost interest. However, she continued with her list, so that when the safe was blown in June 1933 she had a record. Within days, Short deposited £66 at the Commonwealth Bank and the notes were identified as coming from Oolbun. He should have told the police he had won the money gambling, as had he done so it would have been extremely difficult to prove a case against him. Instead, he sat silent. He was acquitted on a charge of breaking into the post office but promptly rearrested and charged with receiving.

On 20 September 1933, the day before Short's trial on the charge of receiving, the Sussex Street, Townsville, house of the prosecutor, Jack Quinn, was bombed. A 10-metre fuse was placed under the veranda on which Quinn and his wife were sleeping. The veranda collapsed but the
only casualty was a prize hen, which was decapitated in the explosion. At one time, the bombing was thought to have been a Black Hand, or Italian gang, attack but, although Short was never charged and, up to his death in 1934, always denied he had been involved and claimed his enemies had done it to frame him, the better view is that it was done on his behalf.
After Short's death,
Truth
published
a story that his gang had also had an aborted plot to blow up the home of Detective Hermann Raetz, who was being a pain in Short's side with his proactive policing.

Before the receiving case was heard, Short, John Morrissey and James Wilbourn Lee were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice when Morrissey was seen to hand a jury list to a man in a hotel. Morrissey was remanded in custody and cut his throat on the morning of his trial. After his death, Short was discharged but the case against Lee continued until the charge was dismissed on 21 March 1934.

On trial for the receiving charge, Short belatedly claimed a Tom Hartley from Rockhampton had given him the notes in repayment of a debt. Why hadn't the police produced Hartley in court? Well, said the prosecution, Short was only just mentioning him now, rather than when he was first questioned. This time, Short received six years and was sent to Stewart's Creek penitentiary. Threats to free him reached the ears of both the authorities and the
Truth
, which happily trumpeted both those threats and one to bomb their offices. Three days later, Short was moved to Boggo Road, where he worked in the tailoring shop.
Now came threats to blow up that gaol
.

In early January 1934 one of Short's lieutenants, John Bates, and his girlfriend, May Johnson, were charged with breaking and entering the warehouse of Thomas McLaughlin & Co in East Street, Rockhampton. They had been under police observation for some five hours after they left a house in Derby Street. Bates was found coming out of the premises, and the prosecution's case was that Johnson was the lookout, albeit clearly not a very good one. From the start, Bates did his best to row her out of the case, and succeeded when she was acquitted. He was convicted.

When Bates pointed out there was only one Supreme Court conviction against him, Judge Brennan retorted:

 

Yes, and how many times did you get away with it when there was no evidence against you? I will remand you for three months and consider your case if you can prove to me that you worked in the last five years.

 

Bates replied that he had been buying drapery from a warehouse. It was not an answer that appealed to the judge:

 

Yes and buying gold and taking it when you could not buy it. I think you had better have a spell of five years with hard labour. It is no use tolerating people of your kind.
You will not be tolerated in my court
.

 

The following month Bates appealed, and was rewarded by two years being knocked off his sentence. In March, he escaped. He was recaptured a week later, received an extra year, and was sent to Boggo Road, where, it was said, he was in control of the prison. The same month, Short organised a strike, with prisoners refusing to go to the workshops.

But throughout the winter of 1934, Short seems to have lost heart, and he simply pined away. He died aged thirty-nine, after an operation to treat appendicitis in November. Shortly before his death, when a relative came to see him in hospital, he once more denied he had blown up Quinn's house or had it done, saying yet again it was the work of his enemies.
He then more or less turned his face
to the wall, saying, ‘I am very tired, uncle; I think I will go to sleep now.'

Criminals rarely seem to learn that splashing money about after a robbery is almost certain to lead to a pull, and probably to a conviction. In April 1931 George Kenslow, a fish and chip shop owner in Wharf Street, Spring Hill, went on trial for a robbery at the Commercial Bank in George Street, Brisbane, in which £950 was taken. Three months earlier, three men had held the staff at gunpoint, with Kenslow, who had clearly been seeing too many American films, telling the staff, ‘Some of you are married men; you've got nothing to lose. We have everything. You've got yours; we want ours. If you make a move you'll surely get it.' At first, it was thought a southern gang had done the blag but then Kenslow was seen betting big time at the races and his girlfriend was suddenly sporting a new dress. The week before the raid, he had been so hard up he had borrowed £1 from a detective.

The case against his co-accused, Raymond Whitfield, was that he was found at his lodgings with £101 in £1 notes, which he explained by saying a sailor named Thomas had given it to him to buy a hotel. The third man, known as Big Mick and believed to be from Melbourne, was never caught. He was thought to have gone to South Africa.

Apparently, while on remand Kenslow conducted mock trials in Boggo Road, practising his defence on the other prisoners. They regularly found him guilty but either they were cynical old lags or practice makes perfect. In a move the crown prosecutor sportingly described as ‘brilliant', Kenslow's cross-examination cast strong doubt on any man's ability to recognise from a few moments' observation the face of a man who was menacing a witness with a pistol, and who had a great deal of his face covered by the brim of his hat and a pair of dark glasses. Kenslow himself put on glasses and a hat to demonstrate his theory to the jury. He also asked one of the witnesses to put the hat on, but when he requested that a pair of dark glasses be added, the witness refused. Kenslow drew from witnesses a positive statement that the man they took to be himself had a day or two's growth of beard. Kenslow brought in a barber to swear that he had shaved him on the morning of the robbery. The jury disagreed and he and Whitfield were promptly retried. After a four-day hearing, with a different jury and the same evidence, it was the same result.

At their third trial in August, the jury convicted them both. Kenslow, having by now thoroughly upset the judge, received twelve years' hard labour. Whitfield, who had no previous convictions, went down for four years. Kenslow, still representing himself, was more fortunate with the Court of Appeal, which, in October, ordered a retrial, ruling that the trial judge had unfairly limited the scope of his cross-examination. Whitfield's conviction was upheld.

It was not until December that Kenslow gave evidence, saying his correct name was Garth and that, while he had a number of previous convictions and had been on the run since 1923, he had not been involved in this particular robbery. This was probably not his wisest move—he was again convicted, and received ten years. Before this, Kenslow had spent sixteen of his forty years in prison but, curiously, he had never been convicted in Queensland. When he had been convicted in 1920 of house breaking and declared an habitual criminal, Mr Justice Cussen, sitting in the Victorian Court of Appeal, told Kenslow, ‘I cannot forbear to congratulate you on the skill with which you have conducted your appeal. It is a pity that such talent has not been put to a better use.'

Curiously, in the trial for the George Street robbery, the jury had added a rider, ‘exclusive of actual violence'. Kenslow's advocacy practice
in prison must have continued to stand him in good stead because in March 1932, still acting for himself, he had another three years knocked off his ten. He had argued that he should only have been found guilty of stealing, because robbery was defined as stealing with actual violence, something the jury had specifically excluded. He wanted more of a reduction, saying that because of time served he was only benefitting by two years, but now he had pushed his luck too far. ‘You are very fortunate in not having been sent to gaol for life,' said Mr Justice Henchman.
‘I cannot understand why the jury
brought in a verdict excluding the count of violence.'