The Great New Zealand Robbery Read online

  We called him ‘Three-finger Pete’. He had come over from Australia in 1955 and the Jacks must have been suspicious because, well, he was this fuckin’ ornery little guy with three fingers on one hand and the side of his face was permanently scarred and burnt from a safe job during the war back in Sydney when he was younger, and things hadn’t quite gone according to plan [chuckles]. He lost a fair bit of blood and almost died, but it didn’t deter him; he just modified his methods and became reasonably successful in his craft. But he stood out like dogs’ bollocks, and he was always fucking caught because the Jacks all knew it was him. Someone would welch and tip-off the Jacks that Three-finger Pete was back and whenever there was a job they’d bloody pick him up. He always stayed at Zelda’s [Zelda Nicolson’s notorious beer-house or sly-grog in Franklin Road] so they’d know where to go.

  Similarly, former Auckland Mayor John Banks once accompanied his safe-breaker father, Archie, on a job where it became plain that Archie had miscalculated the quantities required to blow the safe at United Meats when John, who was standing lookout, saw the entire shop front explode in a cascade of masonry and glass towards the pavement. When they got home, John watched as a rather sooty Archie tipped the contents of his bag on to the kitchen table. Some of the banknotes were still smouldering.18

  Brady told his audience that the authorities had made giant strides towards getting the safe-breaking epidemic under control. Gelignite, which had been relatively easy to obtain, could now only be sold to those with a licence to use it for such legitimate purposes as quarries and public work schemes, and those who received it were required to keep minimal stock and to maintain very high standards of security. And, quite apart from that, Brady reassured his sceptical audience, police had lately scored a number of successes in identifying and locking up Auckland’s most skilled safe breakers. One sad indication of this was that desperate crooks, unable to crack safes, were turning to violence.

  Many in his audience doubtless nodded. They would have read the reports in their newspapers.

  At 2.50 am on 25 March 1956, two masked men had surprised the cleaner at the Auckland Bus Company depot in New Lynn, then bashed him with a large wrench and tied him up, before stealing the safe containing £287. It was the first report of a robbery involving violence for many years.

  Then, as recently as the evening of 2 June, two staff from Newmarket Wines and Spirits were ambushed while walking down the passageway to their offices carrying the day’s takings of £1000. Both were knocked unconscious—although not before one of them had registered a pair of women’s shoes on the feet of his attacker. The offenders had thrown a blanket over the high barbed-wire fence at the back of the building and scaled it. From there, they had entered the rear office to lie in wait for the staff. Once they had what they wanted, they walked right out of the front door.19

  ‘What about the Costume Jewellery job?’ one of the businessmen called.

  Brady grimaced. While he knew this was why he had been invited to address the group, he’d somehow hoped it wouldn’t be brought up.

  During the early hours of Sunday 15 July 1956, thieves broke into Costume Jewellery, a shop situated in the Security Building at 198 Queen Street. A large array of jewellery, watches, small clocks, rings, gems and an assortment of marcasite bracelets, to the combined value of £6000, was taken.20 The owner, Mr Gillespie, had just returned from a three-month buying trip to Europe and hadn’t even had time to catalogue it all. When he arrived at work on Monday, he found the place looking as if a tornado had hit it. All the drawers had been pulled out and papers were scattered all around the shop. Boxes were ripped open and the contents strewn across the floor. Wall displays had been pulled down and their glass windows shattered.

  But it wasn’t the fact the office had been ransacked that shocked the city businessmen; it was the manner in which the crime had been committed. Costume Jewellery was on the fourth floor of the Security Building. The robbers accessed the rooftop of the building next door and gained entry to an office in that building. Then, risking a 60-foot plunge to the alley below, they reached across and opened the fourth-floor window to the Security Building. Climbing across into this allowed them to drop right into the factory area of Costume Jewellery. Once inside, they lifted a door connecting the factory with the display room off its hinges and set about ransacking the place and loading their booty into sugar sacks. After they had loaded up, they secured a rope across a section of wall between two sets of double-bay windows and lowered the sacks down four storeys to the alley. They then abseiled down the building after the loot and left. Poor Gillespie was insured but, as he told the papers, he had nothing whatsoever to show for his trip away.21

  Informants told detectives the offenders were Australian gangsters who had ring-bolted back to Australia on board a vessel that Sunday and would have been well out to sea when the robbery was discovered. New Zealand was an easy target and, without strict customs security, it was popular for Australian gangsters to pop across and blow a few safes before heading home.

  Brady told the meeting that it was only a matter of time until the Costume Jewellery thieves were apprehended, and in the meantime he gave them a few tips for crime prevention.

  — — —

  Who knows whether the local businessmen who heard Brady that day believed his reassurances. Who knows whether he believed them himself. Four days later, in reply to a ‘please explain’ memo he sent to one of his senior detectives, Detective Sergeant Les Schultz of the Shop-Breaking Squad, he learned that police had few leads on the Costume Jewellery heist. Schultz had heard through informants that an Australian crew—perhaps even notorious gangster Robert ‘Jacky’ Steele—were behind it, and that they had skipped the country with their haul within a day or two of the robbery.

  Schultz reported that his team were struggling to keep up:

  . . . the recent spate of counting-house breaks has been rampant and it is clear the offenders are utilising new methods and it is difficult to keep ahead of the game. For the past two months there have been on average four breakins per week, and detectives are stretched to capacity.22

  Schultz didn’t receive the extra resources he was seeking, but Brady diverted manpower to the effort to catch the Costume Jewellery thieves. It was doubtless seen by police top brass as vital that the perpetrators of that crime be brought to justice, for the sake of maintaining public confidence in the force. Woe betide anyone who committed a similar or—God forbid—bigger crime.

  CHAPTER 2

  PRELIMINARY ENQUIRIES

  Detective Ivan Hoy sighed as he contemplated the pile of case files teetering on his desk. He was an old-school detective of the gumshoe Dick Tracy variety: methodical, diligent and hard-working. He was always in the office early in the morning and was often last to leave, but he could never be accused of excessive devotion to his paperwork. Consequently, his plan was to spend the last week of November catching up on overdue court paperwork so that everything could be filed by Christmas.

  Squaring his shoulders, squinting at his typewriter, he began stabbing at keys with his two index fingers. This was going to be a long day.

  The clock had just ticked over 7.30 am when a call came in to say that someone had blown the safe at the Waterfront Industry Commission on Quay Street. Hoy looked around the office, but there were few bodies, and none of them suitable. He walked through to the Fingerprint Bureau, where Sergeant Harold Lissette had just arrived for work.

  ‘Harry, grab your kit. Someone has blown a safe downtown.’

  Lissette rolled his eyes. ‘On a Wednesday?’

  Safe-breaks on Wednesdays weren’t unheard of, but they didn’t fit the usual pattern. Mostly, safes got broken on a Friday or Saturday night, when there was less likelihood the offenders would be caught. As businesses did not begin trading until Monday, a weekend job also gave them the benefit of a full day’s head-start to get out of town or launder the dough before the crime was discovered.

  Hoy and Lissette hustl
ed down Queen Street. The pavements were now filling up with people on their way to work. The bus terminal was packed with passengers who had disembarked or who were awaiting connecting services. Few noticed or seemed curious about the uniformed police officers stationed at each corner of the Northern Steamship Company building. Hoy spied Detective Sherwin standing in the doorway of the back entrance, waiting. Sherwin waved him and Lissette over.

  ‘What’s the story?’ Hoy asked as they bounded up the stairs.

  ‘They’ve made one hell of a mess up there,’ Sherwin replied. ‘They’ve blasted the safe and taken the entire payroll. I think in the region of thousands of pounds. It’s a beauty big one, all right.’

  Hoy whistled. ‘They’ll want the big guns in on it, if that’s the case. I suppose we’d better secure it and do what we can.’

  Inside the main office on the first floor, commission staff were milling about. Some were trying to make a start on their workday, in spite of the fuss going on around them. Others offered to help in any way they could. It all struck Hoy as a bit chaotic, with no one apparently taking control or providing direction.

  Fire Chief McKenzie and Constable Baguley were standing guard outside the closed door of the fourth office. Hoy opened the door and looked inside. There was still a light haze of smoke. The room appeared to have been ransacked.

  ‘What a bloody mess.’ Hoy gestured to Lissette to get started.

  ‘When the office guy went to phone his boss, he found all the phones were dead,’ Baguely said. ‘They must have cut the wires.’

  Lissette meticulously recorded the scene as he found it. In the right-hand corner of the office was a heavy Security-brand safe constructed of steel, 30 inches high, 24 inches wide and 24 inches deep (76 centimetres high and 60 centimetres wide and deep). It had been partially pulled from its position inside a large wooden cupboard. There was a keyhole and a brass handle on the door of the safe; Lissette saw traces of plasticine around the keyhole, and the fragments of a detonator with the crumbled remains of burnt wires still attached lying on the floor nearby indicated that an attempt had been made to ‘blow’ the safe. This had been unsuccessful, because the door was still locked tight.

  In fact, the safe had survived the blast virtually unscathed. Entry had been effected instead by means of an oblong hole, 8½ inches by 6 inches (22 centimetres by 15 centimetres) and with ragged, scorched edges, that had been cut in the top. Some of the sawdust and asbestos that had packed the space between the two steel skins of the safe was scattered around the floor and a smaller hole, 7 inches by 5 inches (18 centimetres by 13 centimetres), was cut through the inner skin. Between them, the holes would allow a person to insert their arm and reach through to the interior of the safe.

  Beneath the burning cushion that McKenzie had extinguished, there were two steel gas cylinders—one for oxygen, the other for acetylene—and these were connected by hoses and regulators to a Cut Master gas-cutting torch. There were two other oxygen bottles, evidently empty, close by. The gauges on the regulators showed that the oxygen was adjusted to 50 pounds of pressure and the acetylene to a pressure of 18 pounds. The offenders clearly knew what they were doing: a combination of these two gases supplied at this ratio would burn with a fierce flame that would easily cut the carbon steel of which the safe was constructed.

  An assortment of other tools was found: a 9-inch adjustable spanner, a 10-inch pipe wrench with a threaded end where its original wooden handle had been removed, a hacksaw blade and handle, a short screwdriver, a red-handled bread knife, a 4-inch Brades brick bolster (a broad chisel used by bricklayers to chip, scrape and cut bricks and masonry blocks), a gas cylinder drill, an oxygen key and box of Beehive matches. There was also an empty canvas bag with the Bank of New Zealand’s logo emblazoned upon it. It was split open, and many dozens of banknotes, some burnt, were lying scattered amongst the debris on the office floor.

  Two large sheets of green rubberised sheeting had been pinned over the windows of the office, evidently to conceal what was going on within from the outside world. Office furniture and chairs had been stacked in a semicircle and covered with towels and smocks, presumably to protect the window from the explosion.

  Inside the wooden cupboard that had housed the safe was a tangled mess of wiring. This was associated with an alarm that was designed to sound if the cupboard was opened or any attempt was made to tamper with the safe. The alarm was powered by a battery that was in turn connected to a mains-powered battery charger, and it would sound both in the office and also through a louder Klaxon car horn attached to the front of the building above the Quay Street entrance. The six-volt car battery and its charger were under a table near the safe, and the wires that had been connected to the detonator led to the battery. It had clearly been used to try to blow the safe.

  ‘Cheeky buggers,’ muttered Hoy.

  — — —

  As Lumley had discovered when he went to phone Captain Christopher Stanich, the Auckland branch manager of the Waterfront Industry Commission, the telephone lines in the office were dead. An electrician was brought in to repair them, but he soon found that the damage was extensive and not restricted to the first floor. Phone and power cables in the ceiling of the ladies’ restroom adjacent to Gill’s office had been exposed and severed, apparently in an attempt to baffle the alarm. The electrician also found that two wires above the main electrical switchboard near the main doors had been cut—the power supply to the main alarm on the exterior wall—and the main telephone and power cables on the ground floor had been severed, too. This seemed significant, because these wires had been accessed through a trapdoor discreetly hidden under a square of linoleum near the entranceway to the Northern Steamship Company office. Just as strikingly, not all the wiring had been targeted. Only the power to the Waterfront Industry Commission’s four side offices had been immobilised; the power in the general office and that of the Northern Steamship Company on the ground floor and that of the Transport Department, on the second floor, remained intact. Somehow, amongst the snarl of wiring and probably by torchlight, the offender knew exactly which cables to cut.

  Lissette, meanwhile, was concluding his scene examination. ‘I can’t find any evidence whatsoever of fingerprints in the office, or on the safe or any of the equipment left.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘These guys were professionals. All I could find was a heel mark on the back stairs.’

  ‘I suppose everyone uses the stairs?’ said Hoy.

  ‘Apparently not,’ Lissette replied. ‘The staff tell me they almost never use those stairs, and anyway they were cleaned some time last night. The offenders probably got in and got out this way, so it’s likely to be the heel of one of their shoes that left the mark. But it’s a pretty faint mark in light dust. I can’t get a decent photo—certainly nothing that will be any use in court.’

  — — —

  Detectives Hoy and Sherwin tracked down the commission pay clerks where they had regrouped to a spare office on the ground floor and were in damage control. With 900-odd wharfies due to show up expecting their wages, options were being discussed as to how to get the cash necessary to pay them. Gill and the senior accountant, Mr Buckley, were deep in conversation with their bank and insurance company. Not all of the payroll had been deposited in the safe; another large sum was due to be withdrawn from the bank at nine that morning for distribution in the afternoon to the late shift of cargo workers. It was decided to collect that sum and use it to buy the commission time while it sought to gain access to emergency funds through the insurance company.

  A messenger was despatched to the wharves with a notice apologising for a slight delay in delivering the pay. Cargo workers were asked to report to the Port Building at 10.15 am.

  The detectives were introduced to Captain Stanich, who was having a bad day. Upon arrival, he had been told the news and there had been some concern that he was taking a turn. A seat was found for him, and a glass of water produced—but someone who knew him better fetched him a stiff
whiskey, whereupon he revived enough to begin to take charge of the situation and to slip out across the road to telephone Commission Chairman Arthur Bockett.

  They were also introduced to Ronald Vincent, who was a senior cashier for the commission. The day before, he had made two trips to withdraw money from the Bank of New Zealand on Customs Street—one at 11 am and the other at 2.45 pm—for the office staff and the early shift of waterside workers respectively. In the presence of two other staff, he had cashed a cheque for the sum of £42,432 and returned with the money to the commission offices. From 3 pm, pay clerks and tellers under Vincent’s supervision had counted the exact money required for the wages of the early shift on the waterfront and those who worked the other wharves in greater Auckland. This amounted to £22,667.86s. The total was then divided and allocated to individual employees, the pay packets bundled and placed into seven white canvas bags, which, when sealed, were signed by the seven tellers responsible. Vincent then placed the seven bags in the safe in Mr Gill’s office, locking it with one of two special keys (the other was held by Mr Buckley, the senior accountant), and secured further with a special locking screw plug to thwart anyone who might have an unauthorised copy of the key. Vincent made a third trip to the bank to deposit the balance of £19,764.14s., intending to collect it at 9 am that Wednesday morning for sorting and distribution to the late shift in the afternoon.

  Vincent told the detectives that it was close to five in the afternoon when he returned from the bank. Before leaving work for the day, he tested the alarm, sounding it three times before closing the wooden cupboard.