Gangland Robbers (22 page)

The safecracker Bertie Kidd has always had his admirers, including his barrister friend Brian Bourke, who thought:

 

Kidd was one of the most intriguing crims I ever appeared for and he was involved in plenty of stuff, he had policemen who he was very friendly with, he was able to manipulate things …
He was a great safe blower
, a great safe cutter. Bert was the king.

 

Kidd has also had his detractors, including former New South Wales Police assistant commissioner Clive Small. Commenting on the news that Kidd was to be deported in 2015, Small said:

 

He was a well-rounded violent criminal who'd take any opportunity without concern for the welfare of the community of New South Wales.

I don't think Bertie Kidd in his whole 80 years has ever held an honest job for one day. The people of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland have paid for him every day of his life, either as a result of his criminal activity or paying for him while he's being kept in jail, so I don't really feel my dollars and any money I might pay or the public of New South Wales might pay should go toward giving him a pension now.

 

Born Robert Douglas Kidd in July 1933, he came to Australia as a Ten Pound Pom in 1948. By the late 1960s he had become a central figure in the Victorian underworld, and was regularly referred to in the Beach Inquiry into allegations against the police, in connection with abortion rackets. In 1970 he was shot in the stomach one day when he opened the
front door of his home in Beaumaris, Melbourne. That year he received five years for stealing $240 from a factory safe in Cheltenham.

On 21 September 1982 Kidd came unstuck in a raid at Rockhampton designed to net $800 000. Shortly after 10.30 a.m. the police received a call to say there was a bomb at the Commonwealth Bank building in Eastcastle Street, and that all staff except the manager and one senior employee should be evacuated. The building was cleared within ten minutes, but when no bomb was found, it became apparent that the police had been diverted from the real crime.

Had a man stayed motionless for a few more minutes the heist would have been a total success, but, just before 11 a.m., TAA staff went to open the cargo section of a plane that had landed at Rockhampton and saw a set of fingers appear from behind a trapdoor in one of the boxes. Lance James Woolcock, the owner of the fingers, was arrested, and at first he was thought to have been a stowaway until $200 000 in $20 and $5 notes was found in the box with him. Green canvas Reserve Bank bags, still with their official seals intact, were found to hold copies of the Yellow Pages phone books. Similar boxes with other men inside them had been sent on other TAA flights to Mount Isa and Townsville, and the police in those towns were notified. While they were in the semicircular cargo holds, the men had swapped the money for the phone books.

Kidd was arrested at Mount Isa, while Robert Davis and John Bowers were charged at Townsville, and Woolcock was charged in Rockhampton, all with conspiracy and theft. The men were professionals, and no one would admit the source of their information, such as the days on which the currency would be transported. All the boxes had been consigned to JJ Ryan Pty Ltd in the various towns but the one to be sent to Cairns had been left behind in Brisbane. When staff at the airport kicked it, demanding anyone inside to surrender, John Anthony Stewart opened his trapdoor and more or less fell into the arms of a Queensland police officer. In December Kidd received four years after pleading guilty.
The judge, perhaps charitably
, thought he and the others were front-line men, not the organisers.

In 1991 Kidd was suspected of involvement in the 20 May death of underworld figure Roy Thurgar, shot in the head while sitting in his car outside his wife's laundromat in Alison Road, Randwick. The weapon was later identified as the sawn-off shotgun Kidd had used in a series of Sydney home invasions. His alibi was his one-time de facto Christina
Gristioti, a former heroin addict who died of a suspected overdose in Bali in December 1998. She had gone there to give evidence to the National Crime Authority.

When, on 12 June 1992, underworld figure and former boxer Des Lewis was shot dead outside his home in Denison Street, Bondi Junction, the gun was later found at the home of another veteran crim, Eric Leonard Murray, alleged to have been the driver in the series of home invasion raids that Kidd led when he was in his mid-sixties. Surveillance was carried out on the security systems of homes whose occupants had large amounts of cash and jewellery. In July 1997 a raid on a Manly hotelier's home produced $275 000. Two months later, a raid on a motor dealer's home in Burraneer Bay netted another $14 000 worth of gems. Frightening though this must have been for the victim and his wife, the Manly robbery seems to have been conducted with some old-fashioned courtesy.
When the wife expressed distress
at the theft of family heir-looms, the robbers replaced them in the safe, and before they left, assured her the police would be called so she could be released as soon as possible.

It was believed that in the 1990s Kidd had been contracted to do some damage to Ted Sent, boss of aged care group Primelife Corporation, against whom death threats had been issued. Mick Gatto, Melbourne identity and head of the company Arbitrations and Mediations, told the Supreme Court in 2006 that he and a friend, the late one-time lawyer Mario Condello, went to Sydney and contacted Kidd. They believed someone who wanted Mr Sent to be harmed had approached him. Gatto told the court Kidd would have either carried out the job personally or subcontracted it out. ‘The way it works is it's all word of mouth,' he said. ‘We know each other. He was quite happy to pull the plug. He respected me and vice-versa.' Gatto then took Kidd out ‘for a drink'.
When counsel asked how much
that drink cost, Gatto said it was about $60 000.

Back in Queensland, in March 1997 Kidd tried to rob a Brisbane chemical company with two other men, and became involved in a shoot-out with a plainclothes policeman. A bullet from Kidd's revolver hit the policeman's watch and injured his arm. Declared a serious violent offender, Kidd received eleven years.

Towards the end of his sentence, he agreed to be transferred back to New South Wales, where he was charged with the 1997 home invasions, as well as the attempted robbery of the Bank of Australia in Leichhardt
in June the same year. A one-time offsider had given him up in return for indemnity against prosecution and a significantly reduced penalty for a Queensland offence. In July 2004, then aged seventy-one, Kidd was jailed for a minimum of twelve years.
Throughout the trial, he denied
he had ever used the gun linked to the Lewis killing. A 2008 appeal against his sentence for the New South Wales robberies was rejected.

In 2010 Kidd was instrumental in arranging for the public trustee to take over the administration of Christina Gristioti's estate from his ex-wife, Joy. He took things a stage further in 2014, when he applied for leave to appeal out of time against his conviction for the 2004 robbery. Evidence from another prisoner, he claimed, showed that his former wife, now Ms Meagher, had lied because she wanted custody of Kidd's son, which would enable her to loot the boy's inheritance from his mother.
The court decided that the evidence
was not credible and refused the application.

In 2015 it was announced that on Kidd's release, due in August, he would be deported to Britain, something his supporters described as inhumane. In turn he announced he would challenge the deportation order, a procedure increasingly used by the Australian authorities in high-profile cases.

Another of the great, more or less individual, robbers was Bernie Matthews. His first robbery, at the age of nineteen, was of an all-night garage near Guildford, which netted him and his offsider, a man he called Skippy, £1000. The second was at an ice-cream depot and yielded nothing, but his third was of a £30 000 factory payroll. He was arrested on 13 October 1969, and charged with two armed robberies and possession of a submachine gun. Very sensibly, Skippy, who now had enough money to put down a deposit on a house, decided to go straight. For Matthews, like so many others, the prison gates began to revolve.

Matthews escaped from the Court of Appeal in June 1970. In November he escaped from what was then the state penitentiary, at Long Bay. His first bank robbery was of an ANZ on the Hume Highway at Yagoona after his escape. He was recaptured seven weeks later, by which time he had robbed two banks and a payroll office. One of the bank robberies was in Rozelle in early December and was a solo effort. Armed with a sawn-off .22 automatic, he jumped on the counter, yelled at the staff and customers, had his bag filled and was away. He took with
him something in the region of $3000, which would probably be worth ten times that today, and went on gambling, women and liquor. In the wash-up he received ten years, with an additional six months for an attempted escape.

One of the few robbers articulate enough to analyse his actions, later he said of bank robberies, ‘It's an exhilarating feeling. It is an adrenalin rush that transcends emotion. It is a buzz that tops the rush of adrenalin.' Which is a rather more poetic version of how the Irish jockey described winning the Grand National, ‘Better than sex':

He claimed he had never physically harmed anyone during his robberies, and was against ‘have-a-go' heroes: ‘Unpredictability creates havoc and you don't want havoc during a bank robbery.' He added, ‘It is better to be traumatised by dinosaurs like me than be carried out in a body bag because some junkie snapped.' Matthews regarded his raids as merely another form of withdrawing money and to him ‘robbery was a business': ‘If you want a hamburger go to McDonald's. If you want a video go to Video Ezy. If you want money, you go to the bank.'

Years later, interviewed on television, Matthews said of career bank robbers, including himself:

 

They've got no respect for money, you know, because it's easy come, easy go, so you might have $100 000, you might have $10 000, there's no respect there because you haven't earned it—you haven't gone out and earned it with, you know, sweat and toil—it's like you've put your life on the line to get it, but there's no respect for it.
It's just paper—I think
it's the adrenalin rush of getting it—you know you've got something from a financial institution and you've got it for nothing.

 

After a torrid time in prison, including in the notorious Katingal, Matthews was released in June 1980 and got married, a relationship that lasted only eight months. Then, in December 1983, he was arrested and charged with the contract murder of Delys King, the estranged wife of New South Wales policeman Leslie Morris King, who was shot in her bed. The motive was thought to be both financial and revenge. Leslie King was said to have approached a Philip Anthony Siemsen with an offer of $5000 down and $10 000 to be paid out of Delys King's life insurance. Siemsen and his brother tried and failed to poison her and, after his brother's death, Siemsen claimed he had approached Matthews.

Matthews was found not guilty on 18 April 1985, by which time he had served the equivalent of a two-year sentence. King received life imprisonment and the trial judge refused to set a parole term. Matthews was kept in custody, with his parole revoked because he had broken the conditions by not reporting to his parole officer—which, since he was in custody at this time, had been impossible. He was not released until May.

After his release, he made an effort to settle down. He set up a maintenance and contracting business, and was staying out of trouble when, on 3 April 1990, a raid took place on a Brambles armoured car in Sunnybank, Queensland, in which the driver and crew were threatened and doused with petrol, and $694 000 was stolen. In December he was arrested in his Sydney garden by members of Task Force Magnum from the Sydney major crime squad. They said a sawn-off shotgun and two replica pistols, along with several stolen chequebooks, had been found in a shed he rented in Prospect. As well, a former girlfriend, Julia Ann Ellis, had given a statement to the police that Matthews had told her he'd been planning his biggest job yet, robbing an armoured car for more than half a million dollars. She said he had asked her to go on the job but she had declined, saying that ever since her own sentence for conspiracy to commit armed robbery in 1986, she was afraid of being sent back to prison. After the robbery had taken place, she said, he had shown her a briefcase that he told her contained about $400 000.

After Matthews was acquitted for the King murder there was an inquiry by the ombudsman and now, after initially saying he had nothing to say, Matthews allegedly told the arresting officer:

 

My group has made Jacks like you out of date. You can't get nothing in as evidence now unless it's a video. I will have you walking a beat in Wilcannia by the time we finish our campaign on you. You can hang up your handcuffs now.

 

Worse, he allegedly continued, ‘I'll tell you this, all the stuff in the shed is mine and I done the job at Sunnybank. Now you just try and prove I said that.'

And that was quite enough for the officers to whisk him off to Brisbane, where he was committed for trial. He languished in custody for nine months until, on 26 October, a
deus ex machina
appeared in the form of Garry Sullivan, a former rugby league international player.

He and his father-in-law, William Orchard, had been arrested for an armoured car robbery the day before, and admitted to the Brambles robbery. Matthews was released two days later and the charges were finally dropped.
His efforts to obtain compensation
for the wrongful imprisonment came to nothing.

But Matthews simply could not leave banks alone. In September 1996 he and Alan John Weir, said to be related to a major London criminal, were found in Eagle Street in Brisbane's CBD. Matthews later told
Time Out
: