Gangland Robbers (32 page)

 

This time, Jensen received ten years and six months, with an eight-year pre-parole.

He escaped from custody and robbed yet another bank. Released in 1987, he had, said the police, resumed his profession.
At the time of his death, he was suspected
of being part of a team that specialised in bank robberies in the inner western suburbs, and the police wished to question him over the Hefti killing.

Around 4 a.m. on the day after Jensen's death, a newsagent on the way to open his shop saw a Commodore parked in Walsh Street, South Yarra. It was empty but the lights were on, the doors open and the windows smashed. He telephoned the police, and Constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre were sent to investigate. While they were examining the damage, they were attacked. Tynan was shot in the head at almost point-blank range; and Eyre, who had had an instant's notice of the attack and tried to struggle with the gunman, was shot three times. The double killing of the police officers was the first in Victoria since Ned Kelly's gang shot three officers near Mansfield, north-east of Melbourne, in 1878.

The police search that followed the double shooting was, not unexpectedly, massive, with the Victorian Government posting a $200 000 reward. With a hundred police drafted to comb the underworld, the crime rate dropped. One of the men whose name came into the frame was Jedd Houghton, known to be a friend of Jensen. He was traced to Bendigo, where he was staying in a caravan park with his girlfriend.
A listening device was planted, which Houghton discovered. The police, listening in before he dismantled it, realised their cover was blown and moved to arrest him. He was still in the caravan park when the police opened fire, and two shotgun blasts hit him. He died instantly, and his friends believed that he had been shot in reprisal for Walsh Street.

Seventeen-year-old Jason Ryan, an accomplished little thief and a nephew of Dennis Allen, scion of the notorious Pettingill family, had been convicted of a drug-dealing offence and decided cooperation was the best way towards daylight. He became an informant and named Gary Abdallah as involved in the Walsh Street shootings. On 22 February 1989 Abdallah went to see the police with his solicitor, and was told all they had against him was rumours. Six weeks later, on 9 April, he was killed when police, not connected with the Walsh Street inquiry, shot him. They said he had threatened them with a firearm. The weapon turned out to be an imitation one and, once again, friends of the man who had been shot refused to accept the official version. Abdallah died after forty days in a coma.

Jason Ryan, it appeared, had been trying to deflect interest from himself but, on 31 October, the police arrested him over the Walsh Street attack. They also arrested two of matriarch Kath Pettingill's sons, Victor George Peirce and Trevor Pettingill, as well as Ryan's best friend, Anthony Leigh Farrell, and Peter David McEvoy, who lodged with Ryan's mother. The police named Houghton as the sixth man involved. All those arrested were acquitted.

Later, when a man from a different team was arrested, it became clear that Jensen and his firm had not been involved in the murder of Dominik Hefti that had begun the chain of events.
The actual robbers are now alleged
to have included Jason and Lewis Moran, both killed in the long-running Melbourne gang war of the 1990s, and Santo Mercuri.

By the time of his death in a police shoot-out, 35-year-old Turkish-born Hakki Bahadir ‘Tim' Atahan, who had arrived in Australia in 1970, was thought to have robbed at least seventeen Sydney banks, netting more than $175 000. He did this in just under nine months. Atahan first lived in the western suburbs and opened a takeaway in Parramatta Road in Auburn. He was a heavy gambler and, as a result, lost his business, and his marriage broke up. He then became a cab driver. After turning to crime, Atahan lived in style in a sixteenth-floor Manly apartment and had a number of sports cars.

His robbery career ended on the afternoon of 31 January 1984. Around 3.15 p.m., after robbing two other banks, Atahan was chased into the Commonwealth Bank in George Street by police and staff from the two banks. Undaunted, he fired a shot and demanded to be given all the $50 notes the bank had. By now the Commonwealth Bank had been surrounded.

Atahan took the staff hostage, believing he was now in a position to bargain. Over the next two hours, the police did try to negotiate with him and he told the manager, Graeme Stewart, ‘It's just like the movies', a reference to the Sidney Lumet film
Dog Day Afternoon
. Around a quarter to six, using five of the staff as a human shield, he walked out of the bank's front doors and, hijacking a Datsun car, bundled the hostages inside, forcing Stewart to drive.

Followed by police marksmen in a chase-cum-surveillance involving thirty-nine police cars, a police helicopter and four Water Police launches, after two hours he freed one hostage and collected his 23-year-old girlfriend, telling her he was doing it all for his daughter. He was finally trapped on the Spit Bridge, which connects the northern suburbs of Mosman and Seaforth, during one of its regular raisings to allow boats with long masts to pass beneath it.
As Detective Constable Stephen Canellis
approached, Atahan shot him and was himself then immediately shot and killed. Canellis survived the bullet, which entered his face and lodged in his chest.

Although generally the courts have had little sympathy with criminals injured during robberies, the Victorian courts have ruled that injuries to criminals are relevant to their sentences, but have declined to say to what extent. However, on 7 April 1971, dismissing the appeal of a man named Owens who had blown part of his foot off and argued that should lead to a reduction in his sentence, the New South Wales Court of Appeal was much firmer:

 

It is, of course, rather sad to think that this man suffered this injury but it was the luck of the game. He indulged in a dangerous practice and got the worst of it.

 

Sometimes victims will fight back and, occasionally, triumph. In the late summer in 2000, a man had visited Paul Visentin's shop in Nerang on the Gold Coast, saying he was a prison warder and wanted to buy a bracelet for his daughter. It seemed to Visentin and his wife, Maxine,
that the man was more interested in talking about a robbery that had taken place at the shop seven years earlier. Visentin had been explaining the new security he had had put in until Maxine pressed his foot, indicating he had said quite enough.

The earlier robbery had taken place on 18 November 1993, when Visentin was out of the shop, and Maxine and their 20-year-old son, Hayden, were minding the business. In burst Mark Thomas Noble and Paul Francis Verheyden yelling, ‘Don't fucking move!' and ‘Get on the fucking ground!'. Instead, Hayden Visentin picked up a shotgun and fired. Verheyden, who had a previous conviction for armed robbery, was badly injured, and had his colon removed and a colostomy fashioned. He and Noble each received four years. Verheyden argued he should have a lesser sentence because of his injuries, and Noble argued he should have a reduction as well, because he had no previous convictions for robbery.
The Court of Appeal disagreed
.

It seems that the soi-disant prison warder was John Stephen Cole. When, just after 3.30 p.m. on 24 May 2000, he, Brett Randall Griffith and Peter Anthony Knox robbed Paul Visentin's shop, they found him in an intransigent mood. The trio blasted their way into his shop, firing hollow-point cartridges from an M-I carbine at head height. Undeterred, Visentin fired back with a shotgun he kept hidden under the counter, killing Knox as he was grabbing jewellery. The remaining men fled, leaving DNA in the shop, on the getaway vehicle and on dumped balaclavas.

Queensland has generally a robust view of the rights of shopkeepers and householders to defend themselves against robbers, and Visentin did not face any charges. Convicted of attempted murder, Cole and Griffith received twenty years apiece.
They were refused leave to appeal
.

In a home invasion in June 2011, four masked men who were said to be from Sydney raided the home of Kane Cook, in Gilston, Queensland. One invader, Victorian career criminal George Gioiello, was shot in the leg with his own gun. His femoral artery was severed, and he died in the street, 50 metres away. Cook was charged with his manslaughter, and it was two years before the DPP offered no evidence.
At the time of the robbery, veteran lawyer
Bill Potts, echoing many people's opinion, said of his client, ‘he is the real victim'.

A relatively new trend in robberies has been the ‘home invasion', the worst form of robbery for a victim. It is one thing to be robbed in the workplace or on the street; it is quite another not to be safe in one's home. Home invasions run the gamut of violence.
At the relatively low end
is an invasion such as the one by Schapelle Corby's half-brother, James Kisina, in 2006, which resulted in a beating for the victim. Then there is the horrifying attack on Spiro Grafu, who, with a worker's compensation payout, had bought himself a small farm near Ballarat. In August 1985 he was tied up, doused with petrol and set on fire. He died two days later.

There is no legal definition of home invasion. The term seems to have been coined by New South Wales police in Task Force Oak, which investigated a series of home raids in which Asian families were threatened by weapon-carrying gangs of three or more people. Actually, it is merely a new name for an old crime.

Home invasions began taking place shortly after the First Fleet arrived, and in 1790 William Harris and Edward Wildblood were hanged for a home invasion at Rose Hill. A century and a half later, the Sydney Razor Gangs of the 1920s adopted the practice with enthusiasm. It had then become so prevalent in New South Wales that it was dealt with there by the
Crimes Act 1924
.

The Act did not, of course, stop such invasions. On 27 March 1930 a number of men made an attempt on the Riley Street, Darlinghurst, house of the redoubtable Kate Leigh. They were looking for her chauffeur, Walter Tomlinson, who was considered to be a dobber. There had
been a similar attack a week earlier, after which Leigh had bought herself a pea rifle and fifty cartridges. During the second attack, she shot and killed John Prendergast, known as Snowy because of his cocaine habit, and was charged with murder. The coroner acquitted Leigh and she would later say charitably, ‘I've never stopped saying a prayer of repose for the blackguard's soul.'

Home invasions resurfaced as a major problem in the 1990s, and John Newman, the Cabramatta MP who was shot and killed in his driveway in September 1994, had suggested that Vietnamese youth gangs were responsible for their increase. But home invasions were not wholly an Asian crime. That year, bookmaker Lloyd Tidmarsh had been shot and killed in his home by masked and armed robbers, one of whom was said to be the notorious Jockey Smith. Chief Inspector Alan Leek thought home invasions were common among the Anglo-Saxon drug-taking community, which often did not report it. There had, he said, also been outbursts in the Greek and Lebanese communities.

About 10.30 p.m. on Thursday 24 October 1985, a five-strong gang invaded Jeff Lang's 32-hectare property outside Yarra Glen. Sixty-one-year-old Lang ran a string of late-night chemists, and over the years he and his wife had collected antiques, gold, silver and a considerable amount of jewellery. Their four young children were asleep in bed, and Lang and his wife were in the living room, when the armed bandits, dressed alike in overalls, gloves and balaclavas, burst in. They carried shotguns and sawn-off rifles, and ransacked the house. The telephone was smashed and the telephone lines cut, and a gun held to Lang's head as they demanded the keys to his safe.

Lang hesitated, and the robbers then woke the children. They brought Lang's 12-year-old daughter into the living room, telling her that her parents would be shot in front of her if her father did not hand over the keys. Lang gave in, and the thieves stuffed their loot into thirty sausage-shaped bags and several of Lang's briefcases. Before they left the property, they slashed the tyres on Lang's Rolls-Royce, so no one could leave the premises and raise the alarm.

Amazingly, it turned out that the Langs had neither security nor insurance. The estimated resale value of the items stolen was a staggering $14 million—said to make it the single biggest robbery in Australian history—of which only $12 500 worth was recovered. The police believed the robbery was the work of a team they had dubbed
the Collector Gang, or the Locusts, which had netted millions of dollars' worth of goods in sixteen big east-coast robberies over the previous thirty months.

The gang had started by getting information from antique and philately circles, and stealing stamp and coin collections. They quickly moved on to stealing jewellery, paintings, antique clocks, ceramics, gold, silver and ivory. At first they seemed happy with hauls of $20 000 to $30 000, but after their information networks were established, they aimed higher, with the later hold-ups worth more than $1 million each time. Police believed the Collector Gang was headed by masterminds who organised local and overseas buyers ahead of a raid, and then farmed the jobs out to various minor gangs to conduct the robberies.
At the time of the Lang robbery
, a team of detectives was said to have been working with antique and philately associations for six months in an attempt to corner the gang. Seven months after the robbery, Mrs Lang heard noises outside the house and thought, wrongly, that her family was being burgled again—they were perfectly legitimate callers. She had a heart attack and died. She was aged thirty-six.

In 1988 Neville Mackley, his daughter Jennifer, her de facto, John Bannon, and Leon O'Garey were convicted of the robbery. Mackley, who turned informer and pleaded guilty, received ten years, with a minimum of seven, reduced on appeal to eight and six years respectively; and his daughter and Bannon received three years, with a pre-parole of two years. O'Garey pleaded not guilty, and after his conviction, his application for leave to appeal against a twelve-year sentence, with a minimum of nine years, was dismissed.
He had claimed the sentence
was excessive and that the judge had wrongly treated him as the ringleader.