Gangland Robbers (23 page)

 

I became deluded with my own invincibility. The further I climbed the ladder of successful criminality, the more bulletproof I became. It was addictive—a David and Goliath battle of beating ‘the system' and walking away a winner with euphoric adrenalin rush, pounding heart and tingling nerve ends. It left unbridled lust and endless sex sessions for dead. Life was great.

That feeling enticed me to commit my last bank robbery in 1996 when a mate and I took over the NAB in the heart of Brisbane. It was our last big score. The pot of gold at the end of criminality's rainbow. But we learned a valuable lesson—never rob a bank on the last Friday in September.

It's Police Remembrance Day.

While we were making a hefty cash withdrawal, the cream of Queensland's police were attending commemorative marches two streets away. When the alarm went up they literally fell out of the sky. And of course we were pinched.

I got double digits for that little episode—a sentence that underscores the futility of a bank robbing career.

 

Matthews received ten years with a three-year minimum and was released after four years, in October 2006, when his father was dying of cancer. Weir received six years. During Matthews' sentence and after his release, he studied journalism, and graduated from the University of Southern Queensland in April 2006: ‘Nowadays, it's cellophane gangsters robbing old lady's pension cheques. My dues are paid. I'm free to savour the Sydney I lost when they bricked me up so many years ago.' He began a successful career as a journalist and wrote the highly acclaimed
Intractable
, an account of his time in Katingal.
Then, in April 2008, he was
arrested in Sydney on drug and gun charges, for which he
eventually received a sixteen-year sentence with a minimum of eleven to be served.

And what happened to the men who saved him from the wrongful charge in Brisbane? After his retirement from rugby, the softly spoken Sullivan had run a martial arts school while he and Orchard robbed banks and security vehicles of an estimated $3.3 million in fourteen jobs over a six-and-a-half-year period, squandering the takings on gambling. They were quite capable of dropping $100 000 in a single bet. It was, said the prosecution, ‘Banditry on a scale that has not been seen before in Queensland.' They were caught because Orchard bought a second-hand car and the salesman insisted on having his photograph taken with them. It was something he did with all his customers. When the car was later used in a robbery, the salesman recognised both the car and Orchard. He and Sullivan confessed to all offences, and received twenty-year sentences with seven-year minimums.
The Director of Public Prosecutions
appealed to the Court of Appeal for higher sentences but the court said that while in the future it might be necessary to impose longer sentences on the state's armed robbers, this was not such a case.

One of the more violent robbers, and one who regularly tried to shoot his way out of the slightest trouble, was James Edward ‘Jockey' Smith. Born in 1942, the second-youngest of eight children, he was brought up in Colac in Victoria, and known as Jockey because as a teenager he was apprenticed to a trainer. Unfortunately, he grew too heavy to be a jockey and took up garage breaking. Aged nineteen, Smith, until then a cleanskin, was sentenced to eighteen months with a nine-month minimum. His co-accused, who had a criminal record, received less, and it is generally thought that this apparent injustice soured Smith against the system.

It was while he was serving this sentence that Smith met Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Australia after killing a guard in an escape from Pentridge. After they were released, they teamed up and this time it was Smith who tried to shoot a police officer, when he was caught after robbing a branch of Mark Foy's in 1962. Fortunately, the gun jammed. From 1963 onwards, Smith served short sentences for a variety of offences, including breaking and entering, and possession of explosives. There was a story that when Ryan was in the death cell in 1965, Smith intended breaking into Pentridge with gelignite and releasing him.

In 1973 when Police Constable Russell Cook was searching a car, Smith tried to shoot him and, once more, the gun jammed. Smith made his way to Sydney and in December 1974 was arrested there at gunpoint with Marko Motric, Stanley Ernest Jones and Les Kane's great friend Brian O'Callaghan, a man who could be described as ‘a robber's robber', on a charge of conspiring to steal money from the Public Transport Commission at Redfern. All were charged with the robbery of a $75 000 railway payroll.

Smith was granted $10 000 bail but, unsurprisingly, given his track record, he failed to appear in Sydney's Central Criminal Court the next month. He was arrested, again at gunpoint, in December 1974, while sunbathing on Sandringham beach with Valerie Jane Hill and her daughter. Sent to Pentridge, he was there only a matter of days before, on 10 December, he blagged a visitor's pass from a migrant, Todor Jovanovski, changed his clothes in the visitors' lav atory, and walked out. A prison officer chased him towards Sydney Road, until Smith got in a car and was driven off, allegedly by Valerie Hill, who was charged with assisting his escape.

One thing Smith was good at was dealing with horses, and now he combined the names of two of the country's top trainers, Tommy Smith and Bart Cummings, and set up as trainer Tom Cummings. He did well at country tracks but usually the nearest a small trainer's life gets to a bed of roses is running down the field at Rosehill, so it was back to the work he did best.

On 21 January 1976 he shot and injured Constable Jerry Ambrose in a robbery in Kensington, Sydney. On 13 June the following year, bookmaker and crime associate Lloyd Tidmarsh was killed at his home in Kogarah. The prosecution would claim that Smith and others broke into Tidmarsh's home about 11 p.m. on the Monday of a long weekend, the assumption being he would have a substantial amount of cash in his safe. He was working at a desk in his office when the robbers entered the house and demanded the contents of the safe. His son was dragged out of bed, and he and Tidmarsh were forced to lie face down on the office floor, the son being told he would be shot if he moved. Tidmarsh told the robbers there was no money in the house, and his son said he had no knowledge of his father's business or money dealings. Apparently, he did move and one of the robbers assaulted him. Tidmarsh went to his aid and, after a struggle, four shots were fired, one hitting him in the heart. Tidmarsh's
daughter would give evidence that she recognised Smith's voice—when Smith was worked up, it became very high and squeaky—as that of a man she had heard in her mother's bedroom.

By this time, with some justification, Smith was being described as the most dangerous criminal in New South Wales. He was living in Humbug Reach, near the south coast town of Nowra, when the police were tipped off as to his whereabouts. On 14 September 1977 more than sixty police and a naval helicopter searched the area and, after one of Smith's neighbours in Illaroo Street told them he had heard gunshots, the police moved in on a small cottage at the end of the street. There, they found Valerie Hill and Smith's dog, which was shot when it attacked them. Smith had gone.

Later, he was seen running into the bush by the Shoalhaven River. He more or less hijacked a car, telling the woman driver to take him to Bomaderry station, where he was cornered in a telephone booth. He always denied that he then tried to shoot Detective Bob Godden in the stomach. The detective saved himself by putting his thumb between the breech and trigger of the gun.

In court, Smith's lawyer Brian Cash made a fighting statement:

 

The defendant has been the subject of unfair character assassination in the press. He tells me he wonders if there is any sense of fair play. He has instructed me to say he is not guilty of all charges …
Police in this State and
the State of Victoria have found it fashionable to make Smith their scapegoat for their own difficulties in solving major crimes.

 

At the end of December 1977 Smith was committed for trial with O'Callaghan and the others. It was alleged that, following up the good work of Shiner Ryan and Jewey Freeman half a century earlier, they had intended to rob the Eveleigh railway workshops.
The same month he was charged
with Western Australia's biggest hold-up, the snatch of the Taxation Department's $176 000 payroll two years earlier.

At his trial in Sydney for the attempted murder of Constable Ambrose, he told the jury that he had not been in New South Wales on that day. His confession, he said, had been fabricated because, ‘I have been an embarrassment to the police force for making these allegations against them all the time.' Fabricated records of interviews had been used against him previously, he said, and he had been trying to have the
records investigated. The three-woman-one-man jury convicted him after an hour, and on 17 March he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

There was worse to come for Smith. On 27 April 1978 he had a long day in court, defending himself in committal proceedings on a charge that, armed with pistols, a carbine and a shotgun, on 2 March 1976 he assaulted Kenneth Augustine McNamara and others, and robbed them of $71 640. After the court adjourned, he was charged with the Tidmarsh murder and with robbing him of papers and an unknown amount of money. In September 1978 Smith went on trial, along with Francis Montgomery (who, in 1947, had been sentenced to seven years for an armed robbery at the home of jockey Athol Mulley) and Neil Collings, charged with having robbed Daniel Taylor of $180 000 at South Hurstville. Collings allegedly told the police that he had received merely $40 as his share, and had only taken part because he was being stood over by a big bookie to whom he owed $40 000.

Valerie Hill was charged with being an accessory after the fact. It was alleged she had driven Smith to Sutherland, so he could take part in the robbery, and had driven him back to Nowra. She received four-and-a-half years with a two-year pre-parole period. In January 1980 she and Smith married in Long Bay. Collings had collapsed in the cells at Darlinghurst Courthouse while the jury was out, and died following a heart attack.
Francis Montgomery, who pleaded guilty
, received ten years.

It was July 1983 before Smith was found guilty of the Tidmarsh murder. Seventy-eight witnesses had been called in the case, in which he defended himself and which lasted five months, and the jury took a mere two-and-a-half hours to reach a verdict. He was sentenced to another term of life imprisonment on 9 September, for what Mr Justice O'Brien called ‘a deliberate and vicious killing'. In 1986 the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction on the grounds of O'Brien's inadequate directions to the jury and ordered a retrial. It never took place.

Smith was released on 12 February 1992, and the next day was shot in the chest and left for dead outside his home in Curlewis Street, North Bondi. Dr Crozier, who was on duty the day Jockey was brought in to St Vincent's, recalled:

 

When he arrived he had multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen; he was barely alive. We split him from the chest to just above the penis, a big mid-line incision. He'd been shot through the liver and bowel but it hadn't hit the heart or aorta, so he survived …
He left the indelible impression
in me that with the right combination of good luck and good treatment a person can survive multiple gunshot wounds.

 

This is a far cry from the 1920s and 1930s, when a gunshot victim was likely to develop peritonitis, and must be a great comfort to today's wannabes.

There were suggestions Smith included the police among his likely attackers and, in a press release on behalf of the Campaign Exposing Frame Ups and Targeting Abuses of Authority, former armed robber turned prison activist Brett Collins wrote: ‘When Jimmy Smith was shot last night it just continued the long line of abuse and attacks on this gentle person.'

Naturally, Smith declined to help the police, who said that he had so many enemies it would be difficult to say who might have shot him. He was in hospital for a month and then, on 12 June, one of Smith's offsiders, former boxer turned standover man Desmond Anthony Lewis, was shot at Bondi Junction on his way home from the Nelson Hotel, where he had been watching a rugby league test.
The killing was thought to be
linked to Smith's shooting and also to Roy Thurgar's killing the previous year.

For a time, Smith, said to be so mean he would ‘bite the head off a shilling', made good money dealing in amphetamines. But, according to his colourful solicitor the column-writing Chris Murphy, he gradually became something of a recluse. In November 1992 he broke the rule of never shoplifting for oneself and tried to steal kitchen equipment from a Grace Bros at an Erina shopping mall. When the store detect ive stopped him, he yet again produced a gun and hijacked a couple to drive him away. Hiding in the bush, he teamed up with Christopher ‘Badness' Binse—then an escapee from Pentridge—plotting a series of armed robberies.

Smith died on 5 December 1992. About 8 p.m. Senior Constable Ian Harris saw him speeding and followed him to the Farmers Arms Hotel in Creswick, near Ballarat. Asked for identification, Smith pulled a gun on the officer, ordering him to hand over his gun. The policeman kept it just out of reach of the smaller man. Smith fired a shot into the ground and said, ‘I'll give you ten seconds to get your gun out of your pocket and get on the bonnet or I'll blow you away.' When Darren Neil, who had seen the incident, approached, Smith fired another shot into the ground. Neil retreated, drove his car a short way and dropped off his children. He then drove the car at Smith, distracting him. The constable
pulled his own revolver and shot Smith three times in the chest. Former police officer Peter Haddow, appearing on the television program
Tough Nuts
, said, ‘In the pocket of his jeans was a canister of mace.
He could've used that mace rather
than fire shots at Ian Harris and Darren Neil. But he chose what he knew best.'