The Toe Cutters were a Sydney gang that robbed robbers. In the early 1970s they went after criminals who had just come into money and took it from them, because a man holding stolen cash has nobody to complain to. Their name promised the method. The money, the story went, came out of a man one toe at a time, until he said where it was hidden.
Half a century later a New South Wales coroner gave them the only official definition they have. At the 2020 inquest into Robert Donnelly, a young man who vanished in 1972, she described the Toe Cutters as "a Sydney criminal gang whose modus operandi was extortion of money from other known criminals".
What does "toe cutter" mean?
In Australian slang a toecutter is a criminal who preys on other criminals. The word grew out of an older trade. Sydney already had standover men, who took money from illegal casinos, brothels and SP bookmakers in return for leaving them alone. A toecutter stood over the men who had the most cash and the least protection: armed robbers fresh from a job.
The earliest printed use the dictionary makers have found is not Australian at all. It is in the Calgary Herald in Canada, on 26 April 1974, which explained to its readers that the Toecutters had "gained notoriety by torturing members of a gang which held up an armored car in Sydney in 1970". By the 1980s the word had a second meaning. Reg Withers, the Liberal leader in the Senate who blocked Gough Whitlam's budget in 1975, was nicknamed "the Toecutter" for his ruthlessness, and the Museum of Australian Democracy says the nickname came from the Sydney gang. In 1979 Mad Max gave the name to its biker villain, and took it round the world. Read what toecutter means.
The robbery that started it: Guildford, 1970
On 4 March 1970 three men robbed a Mayne Nickless armoured van in a bank car park at Guildford, in Sydney's western suburbs, and took $587,890. It was the biggest armed robbery Australia had ever seen, and nobody fired a shot. The guards opened the door themselves, to put out their lunch rubbish. Read the full story of the Guildford robbery.
The guards could not identify anyone, but the underworld knew exactly who had the money. One of the robbers was Francis "Baldy" Blair, a Melbourne bank robber who held court every afternoon on the terrace of the Oceanic Hotel at Coogee. Some of the men who drank with him there began to hunt his share. Read what happened to Baldy Blair.
Who were the Toe Cutters?
The coroner's findings of 2020 name four men. The Toe Cutters "who were involved in this extortion", she wrote, "are believed to have been Linus O'Driscoll, Andrew Maloney, John Maloney and Kevin Gore".
- Linus Patrick Driscoll, an Englishman known in Sydney as Jimmy the Pom. He was convicted in February 1975 of murdering Jake Maloney. The High Court of Australia quashed that conviction in 1977 (Driscoll v The Queen), and a new jury found him not guilty in November 1977. He was deported to Britain in 1979. Read about Driscoll v The Queen.
- John "Jake" Maloney, who was shot dead in a house at Revesby on 24 November 1972.
- William Andrew "Billy" Maloney, whom the coroner calls Andrew Maloney. He was never charged with any of it.
- Kevin Gore, a former merchant seaman and safecracker who was known as an expert with an oxy-acetylene torch. He disappeared in 1972, and the coroner found he died on or about 3 May that year.
None of the four was ever convicted of torturing anyone.
The hunters became the prey
The Toe Cutters did not last long. In 1972 the police investigated the disappearance of Kevin Gore and of Robert Donnelly, a Bondi shoplifter who had borrowed Gore's Ford Fairlane for the night. Their conclusion, as the coroner recorded it, was that Gore's disappearance "was one of a number of reprisal attacks carried out by figures from the Melbourne underworld on the 'Toe Cutters'". The consensus was that Donnelly was murdered in mistake for Gore, because he was driving Gore's car. Read about Kevin Gore and Robert Donnelly.
Jake Maloney was dead by the end of 1972. Stewart John "Johnny" Regan, the hitman Sydney called the Magician because the people he killed were never found, was shot dead in Chapel Street, Marrickville, on 22 September 1974. The police had a theory that he was hired for the revenge killings, or was stealing from the Toe Cutters on his own account. His murder has never been solved. Read about Johnny Regan, the Magician.
The legend and the record
Everything people know about the Toe Cutters' method comes from stories. Bill Hosking QC, who defended Driscoll, wrote in his memoir that fingers and toes were cut off until the hiding place was given up, and that bodies were taken out past Sydney Heads and fed to the sharks. Larry Blair was told by the old men around his family that his stepfather went into a barrel of acid and under the airport. The Sydney Crime Museum tells it as a Melbourne gang that came north and was fought off by Lenny McPherson and his friends.
The record is narrower. The coroner's findings mention extortion and four men who "are believed to have been" in the gang. They say nothing about toes, fingers, a torch or bolt cutters. The men said to have done the cutting were never convicted of it, and Baldy Blair was never found.
Chopper Read and the Toe Cutters
The name outlived the gang because a Melbourne prisoner took it up. Mark "Chopper" Read called himself a toecutter, wrote a chapter called Toecutting in his first book and claimed Linus Driscoll as his teacher. His biographer later concluded that Read never cut off anyone's toes, and that the bolt cutters and blowtorch were borrowed from the Driscoll legend. Read how Chopper Read took over the Toe Cutters' story.
The full story
The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott is the full history: the Guildford robbery and the hunt for its money, the reprisals and the disappearances, Driscoll's trials, the Great Bookie Robbery in Melbourne, the Costigan Royal Commission, Chopper Read and the legend that grew after them. See every book on the Toe Cutters. It is built on court judgments, coroners' findings, the papers of the time and the memoirs of the men and families involved.