The Great New Zealand Robbery Read online

  First published in 2017

  Copyright © Scott Bainbridge, 2017

  Images copyright as credited.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Allen & Unwin

  Level 3, 228 Queen Street

  Auckland 1010, New Zealand

  Phone: (64 9) 377 3800

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.co.nz

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  ISBN 9781877505768

  eISBN 9781760638900

  Design by Kate Barraclough

  Front cover photograph (courtesy of the Tattley family): Flouting the consorting law, a group of crooks gathers to celebrate a successful heist in 1956, several months before the Waterfront payroll robbery. On the left is John Rupert Coles, an Australian safe-breaker and mentor to many of Auckland’s crooks; third from the right is Ronald Tattley; on the far right is George Newman, who was arrested for a string of robberies in the months before the Waterfront heist and was found stockpiling equipment to be used on a ‘big job’.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  ON THE WATERFRONT

  CHAPTER 2

  PRELIMINARY ENQUIRIES

  CHAPTER 3

  THE USUAL SUSPECTS

  CHAPTER 4

  FOLLOW THE MONEY

  CHAPTER 5

  CASTING THE NET

  CHAPTER 6

  THE WHOLE SIX YARDS

  CHAPTER 7

  BREAKTHROUGH

  CHAPTER 8

  BUILDING A CASE

  CHAPTER 9

  TRIAL

  CHAPTER 10

  DOING IT TOUGH

  CHAPTER 11

  A CLEAN PAIR OF HEELS

  CHAPTER 12

  MANHUNT

  CHAPTER 13

  FALSE TRAILS

  CHAPTER 14

  CAPTURE

  CHAPTER 15

  ON THE RUN

  CHAPTER 16

  WHO AND HOW

  EPILOGUE

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PROLOGUE

  WEDNESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 1956

  Eric Thomas steps off the bus along with two or three others. Outside the Auckland Bus Terminal, he checks his watch. It’s around 6.20 in the morning. Early for work; there’s time to sit and have a smoke and read a bit of the paper.

  He ambles into Tyler Street and finds a bench. He sits, rolls a cigarette and lights up, then pulls a copy of The New Zealand Herald from his knapsack. He takes a deep drag and ponders the long day he has ahead—he’s a seagull, a casual stevedore, and his gang will likely be unloading the Maud Pomare, which is tied up at Hobson Wharf. He hopes they won’t be on the collier Kaimanawa, along the quay at Jellicoe street, but at least if they are he’ll get dirt money.

  Thank Christ it’s payday.

  Thomas opens his newspaper and has a quick scan of the situations vacant. Nothing catches his eye. He flips a couple of pages further on to the news. There’s a story there—one of a growing number in recent times—about the increase in crime rates in New Zealand, under the headline ‘Alarming Rise in Car Crime: 460 Taken This Year’.

  Thomas’s eyes skate over the world page. The news there is unsettling, as it has been for many months. The Suez Crisis is over, but the international order is in disarray, with a deep rift between the United States and Great Britain. The cartoon by Gordon Minhinnick depicts the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, as a ‘Gulli-Gulli man’—an Egyptian con-man—and the West as his dupes.

  There’s a picture advertisement for a three-bedroom house in One Tree Hill. Thomas snorts at the asking price: £5100. Five thousand quid! How’s a working man to find that sort of money?

  He reads the advertisement announcing the winners of the three principal Art Union prizes. The first-place winner—lucky blighter—would be able to buy that house with his £5000 swag. The lesser prizes—£1000 and £500 for second and third respectively—wouldn’t go amiss, either. Better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.

  Amongst the other advertisements for razors, pills, potions, fake-tanning lotions and early delivery of a new Mark II Ford Consul (‘if you have any overseas funds’, the ad from John W. Andrew Ford reads), there’s one for Clement’s Tonic. ‘They call me Mr Gloom,’ it reads. ‘Now I’ve zip, zest, zoom!’

  Maybe I need a dose of that?

  The sports headlines make for more cheerful reading. New Zealand is doing well at the yachting in the summer Olympics across the ditch in Melbourne.

  A noise makes Thomas glance up. Two men have appeared from nowhere—must have come from the Northern Steamship Company building, the back door of which is about 20 metres away and directly opposite.

  ‘One was European,’ Thomas will later tell police. ‘I’d say he was about thirty-five, and quite tall. Six feet, I’d say. Not heavy, but not skinny, either. Yes, medium build would be a good description. His hair was fair, quite short and sort of, you know, brushed back so that it stood up in bristles. His face? Oh, he wasn’t a bad-looking bloke—fresh complexion, friendly sort of face, I’d say. He was wearing a dark suit, yeah, a tie, a light-coloured shirt… Yes, the suit was light coloured, and two-piece. Nah, no hat. He had a bag, one of those doctor bags—yes, Gladstone, that’s it. About this big—’

  The interviewing constable will note that Thomas indicates a bag around 16 inches (40 centimetres) long.

  ‘And it looked heavy. Like, stuffed full.’

  The men walk towards Thomas, deep in conversation. Thomas doesn’t hear what they’re saying, but he fancies the second man is speaking in a foreign accent.

  ‘Well, he was a foreigner. A darkie, like some sort of wog. A Dallie, maybe, or an Eyetie…’

  A Dalmation, the policeman will write. Possibly an Italian.

  ‘He was older than the other rooster. Maybe forty? And he was shorter—about five-ten, I’d say. He looked pretty fit. You know, strong. He had big, flashy eyes and these dirty great eyebrows. He had a suit on, too—two-piece, dark, with a light-coloured shirt. Nah, no tie. Yes, I reckon he had a hat. It was sort of brown, yeah, fawn coloured, with a large brim. He had a bag, too. It was another one of those Gladstone things, but it was smaller than the other bloke’s.’

  The men walk unhurriedly past Thomas. The shorter is speaking fast, and Thomas catches a couple of swear words, but the other man is listening impassively. Just after they pass him by, Thomas stands, folds his newspaper and follows. He fancies getting a copy of the Sports Edition from the newsagent on Customs Street so that he can read about the Olympics in more detail.

  The men walk past the tearooms on the corner of Galway Street and Commerce Street. Any flicker of curiosity Thomas might have felt has passed—until the men reach the corner of Customs Street and Commerce Street, whereupon he hears a rapidly approaching car engine.

  ‘There’s the sound of a horn. Two big toots—Beep! Beep! like that—and this car pulls up. These two blokes climb in and the car takes off fast. It might have left a bit of rubber on the road. That’s why I remember. I thought it was bit odd at the time.’

  There’s bugger-all traffic on Commerce Street: an Austin Seven chugging from the direction of Queen Street, and a shiny new Volkswagen Beetle comi
ng the opposite way. A Bedford bus bound for the bus terminal turns into the street with a grunt of its engine as the driver double declutches. The sound of the workers ripping up the tram tracks on Queen Street comes to him on the westerly breeze. Auckland is slowly waking up. The sun has found a hole in the cloud above Bastion Point, away over there beyond the roofs between Thomas and the railway station.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Thomas will tell the policeman. ‘Not the make or model, but I reckon it was a Yank job of some sort. It was big and flash. Dark blue, maybe even black. I definitely remember that. Dark blue, and quite new.’

  — — —

  Ten minutes later, at 6.30 am, George Nicholls is walking to work along Tyler Street, eyes lowered, deep in thought. A hand grabs his upper arm. He looks up, startled, at the man who has accosted him. It’s a young bloke in the kind of clothes an office worker would wear: two-piece suit, shirt, tie and hat.

  ‘Does that look like smoke to you?’ the man asks, before Nicholls can speak.

  George looks where the other is pointing, at a window on the first floor of the Northern Steamship Company building just above them. The window is open a few inches, and there can be no doubt about it: a plume of white smoke is streaming through the gap from within.

  ‘Blimey!’ Nicholls says. ‘I reckon that’s smoke, all right. The place is on fire!’

  ‘But that’s the accountant’s office,’ the other man mutters. ‘There’s nothing in there to catch fire…’

  He stops abruptly. Nicholls sees the colour drain from his face.

  ‘Shit,’ the man says. ‘Where’s a bloody cop when you need one?’

  ‘There!’ Nicholls points to a policeman, in his distinctive high, rounded helmet, who has fortuitously appeared strolling down Gore Street towards them.

  ‘Hey! Police!’ the young man yells, and he and Nicholls wave their arms.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the policeman asks, and looks to where they’re pointing.

  ‘Someone’s set the building on fire!’ the young man says. ‘They’ve jammed the bloody lock so no one can get in!’

  ‘You—’ the policeman points at Nicholls—‘find a phone and call the fire brigade. You—’ he points at Edward Lumley, the agitated young man—‘wait here while I fetch the watchman. He should have a key.’

  He’s off before Lumley can explain that his own key won’t work in the lock, even though it seemed to work just fine the previous evening. The policeman, Constable C. R. Baguley, locates John Sharp, the 64-year-old night watchman, in his shed on Marsden Wharf. Sharp is vigorously scrubbing what looks like soot from his hands and looks up, startled. Baguley fleetingly wonders what he’s up to.

  ‘Come on, John,’ Baguley tells him. ‘It looks like something’s on fire inside the Northern Steamship Company building. I need you to get me inside.’

  ‘But I’ve only just been through there,’ Sharp says in bemusement. ‘I would have been there not an hour ago. I didn’t notice anything unusual.’

  ‘Well, it’s on fire now.’

  When they arrive at the Northern Steamship Company building, they find the main entrance open.

  ‘I’m not going to be much good to you, I’m afraid,’ Sharp tells the policeman. ‘I can open this door, but I don’t have keys to the actual offices.’

  Nevertheless, he follows the policeman. On the first floor, they find Lumley frantically trying the handles on the doors to the offices.

  ‘Shit, you can smell it now!’ he shouts, and sure enough the smell of smoke is plain to the nose.

  The clatter of a bell announces the arrival of a fire engine. Soon there are several firemen pounding up the stairs.

  ‘George McKenzie,’ the chief introduces himself to Constable Baguley. ‘Where d’you reckon the fire is?’

  ‘This way,’ Lumley replies. There is a haze of smoke in the front office that serves as a reception. They pass the main desk and, behind it, the desks for the typists. The smoke grows appreciably thicker as they move cautiously along the narrow passageway, and past the offices of Mr Smith, the assistant manager, and Captain Christopher Stanich, manager of the Waterfront Industry Commission. The fourth door along belongs to the office at the rear of the first floor, the south-western corner of the building. The name on the door is that of Garth Gill, the commission accountant. Smoke is folding out from beneath the door, and McKenzie signals to his men. They all don oxygen masks, then a burly fireman drops his shoulder into the door. It gives with a splintering of the jamb, and smoke billows out.

  McKenzie enters. The smoke is opaque. He quickly locates the fire in the middle of the floor: it’s a smouldering seat cushion, and it’s plain to him that it is in the process of burning out. He relaxes somewhat, and when a bucket of water is passed to him he dumps it on the embers and they die with a subdued hiss. The fire is out.

  McKenzie waves his arms to try to clear the smoke, and moves to where the window must be. He begins to register how strange the scene is. The floor is littered with objects, and out of the gloom an obstruction looms. It turns out to be furniture—desk, chairs, a filing cabinet—arranged in a sort of barrier before the window.

  Wriggling past the barricade, McKenzie finds there is a sheet of heavy material over the window. He pulls it aside and struggles for a moment to try to raise the sash. It’s quite stuck and won’t budge. But, as the smoke clears and a little light is admitted, he sees that the objects on the floor are an assortment of tools and several steel gas bottles. Beneath where the cushion had been set alight, there is a pair of bottles still connected to regulators, hoses and a torch.

  McKenzie has already guessed what has happened here before he notices the banknotes—some charred, some still smouldering—carpeting the floor, and a safe sagging from the cupboard that enclosed it and with a jagged, rectangular hole cut in the top.

  Returning to the door, McKenzie removes his oxygen mask and calls, ‘Looks like your safe has been blown.’

  There is a short pause, then a groan from down the hall.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ says Edward Lumley.

  — — —

  The first Eric Thomas knows of the crime to which he is a material witness is when he goes to report to the Northern Steamship Company building to collect his pay from the office of the Waterfront Industry Commission. There is a bunch of other wharfies milling around outside, and a policeman at the door who seems to be forbidding entry.

  ‘Some drama or another,’ a man tells Eric. ‘They reckon pay’s late today. They’re telling everyone to head over to the Port Authority at quarter past ten. Must have been a fire, is my guess.’

  There is a fire engine parked in Gore Street, and firefighters and more police are having some sort of conflab.

  Eric shrugs and wanders off. It’s not until that evening, when he opens his copy of the Auckland Star, that he reads about the morning’s Waterfront heist. ‘£20,000 Stolen from City Office’, the headline declares.

  Thomas reads all about it, his eyes widening.

  The theft was noticed at 6.35 am by a Waterfront Commission office messenger, who arrived to find that his key wouldn’t work in the door to the commission’s office. When he walked around to the rear of the building to see whether there was any prospect of getting in by a window, he noticed that smoke was coming out of the office window. He and a passer-by alerted a policeman, and the fire brigade was summoned. When they entered the offices, they found that the smoke was issuing from a smouldering ‘settee mattress’ that had likely been set alight by the oxyacetylene torch with which the robbers had cut a hole in the safe, after their attempts to use gelignite to blow it open had failed. The amount of money that they had got away with was estimated to be a little under £20,000.

  ‘Twenty thousand nicker!’ Thomas whistles. ‘Strewth!’

  The hole burned in the safe was still hot, the article notes, indicating that the robber or robbers had left not long before the heist was discovered. The police were anxious to hear from anyone who saw anyone behavi
ng strangely around the rear of the Northern Steamship Company building on Wednesday morning.

  I did, Thomas suddenly realises. I saw those two jokers. I reckon I saw the crooks!

  — — —

  The 1956 Waterfront payroll robbery, as it came to be known, ought to be one of the most famous episodes in New Zealand’s criminal history. Seven years later, when Buster Edwards, Bruce Reynolds and Ronnie Biggs committed Great Britain’s Great Train Robbery, they became instant cult heroes of the Robin Hood variety, household names and immortalised in film and literature. The Great Train Robbery netted its perpetrators the equivalent of £26 million in today’s money; the Waterfront heist saw £19,875 stolen (roughly a million dollars in today’s terms*), making it far and away the biggest single theft in New Zealand’s history at the time, and one not to be surpassed for 50 years.1 It was our very own ‘crime of the century’, as the Great Train Robbery was hailed in Britain, but it has largely been forgotten. When a man was arrested, tried and jailed for the offence, it hardly rated a mention in the press and, although there was a flurry of public interest—even admiration—around his dramatic escape and the subsequent manhunt, few people would be able to name him today.

  There were a number of reasons for this. There was no aggravated violence involved; it was done in the dead of night, with the robbers escaping quickly and as quietly as they came. The haul was huge, but the headlines few, largely due to the tight control of information by the authorities, embarrassed as they were by the heist and the shortcomings in security it exposed.

  Even at the time, it was regarded as virtually certain that more than one person committed the robbery, but official curiosity all but ended with the arrest. The identities of the others involved have never been known—until now. Because, while there are few of the old guard of New Zealand criminals left to tell the tale, many of their stories have survived and come to light. I became aware of them in the course of my research into the 1963 Bassett Road machine-gun murders, the subject of my previous book. Some of the names of the mugs, big-shots and Jacks2 who crop up in these pages will be familiar to readers of that book, too, because in those days New Zealand’s criminal fraternity—and especially Auckland’s—was relatively small and tight-knit. It was more or less inevitable that many of those who graduated to the more sophisticated crimes of the 1970s were mixed up in any dodgy goings-on that were on offer ten or so years earlier.