Francis "Baldy" Blair was thirty-four when he held a silenced pistol on three Mayne Nickless guards at Guildford on 4 March 1970. A few weeks later he was gone. He is the first man the Toe Cutters are said to have taken, and he was never found.
The robber who couldn't keep quiet
Blair was a Melbourne bank robber who had moved up to Sydney. He lived with his partner and her son, Larry, in Curtin Crescent, Maroubra, and he did his business on the steps of the Oceanic Hotel at Coogee, where his friends met every afternoon to drink.
The Guildford robbery gave him about ninety thousand dollars. A few days later, Larry remembered, he came home in a brand-new Chrysler Valiant V8 hardtop and revved it three times in the driveway, shouting "V8! V8!" That night the whole crew and their families went to the Mandarin Club in George Street for a banquet. On the way home he drove down Anzac Parade at a hundred miles an hour.
The money could not go into a bank, so he hid it. Larry was stood on a table in a friend's betting shop in Lexington Place and told to push the green canvas bags, one by one, into the ceiling. Only later did he learn they were printed RESERVE BANK. Then the family took a caravan to Coober Pedy, where Blair dreamed of buying an opal mine, and on to Surfers Paradise, where he looked over the Pink Poodle motel. One morning at Surfers, Larry woke to find him gone. A friend had come in the night and taken him back to Sydney. It was the last time Larry saw him.
The men on the steps
Everybody on the beachfront knew who had the Guildford money, and a man holding stolen cash cannot report it stolen. By Larry's account, some of the men who came for his stepfather's share were men who had drunk with him for years, among them Kevin Gore, a safecracker known for his skill with an oxy-acetylene torch.
"These were people who he knew perfectly well as individuals," Larry wrote, "but not all together as the group they had just become." In 2020 a New South Wales coroner listed the men "believed to have been" in that group: Linus Driscoll, Andrew and John Maloney, and Kevin Gore. Read who the Toe Cutters were.
The van outside the Oceanic
One afternoon in April 1970, back from Surfers, Blair was sitting on the Oceanic steps when a van pulled up across the road by the bus sheds. The men inside waved him over to look at some stolen goods in the back. It was the most ordinary invitation on that terrace. Larry believed his stepfather was "coaxed – probably pulled – inside".
Nobody saw him alive again.
Where they took him
There are two accounts of the place, and they agree. Graham "Abo" Henry, the Sydney enforcer, told the former homicide detective Gary Jubelin that he heard the Toe Cutters "used to operate from downstairs" in a pub called the Iron Duke, and that they took Baldy Blair down there. The crime historians James Morton and Susanna Lobez put it in the same place, the cellar of the Iron Duke in Botany Road, Alexandria.
What happened there is known only from what Larry's family was told. In his memoir, The Outside, he sets down the story he heard: that his stepfather refused to say where the money was, and was tortured with a torch and bolt cutters until he died. The elders told him the body was dissolved in acid and buried at Sydney Airport, where that autumn the dredges were pumping sand out of Botany Bay to carry the main runway out for the jumbo jets.
The ABC, reporting Larry's book in 2024, noted that what became of his stepfather "has become a mixture of truth and embellished rumour". No one was ever charged, no body was ever found, and the coroner's findings of 2020 say nothing about how Blair died.
The money in the ceiling
One detail settles the question his family cared about most. One version of the rumour has Blair giving up his share before he died. But when the family came home to Sydney, the canvas bags were exactly where an eleven-year-old had thrown them, in the ceiling of the betting shop in Lexington Place. By his family's account, Baldy Blair never told them anything.
The other two robbers
The two men who held the guns with him were both caught. Alan Jones pleaded guilty and Stephen Nittes was convicted, and each got sixteen years. By one account Jones was stabbed in Parramatta Gaol within months of arriving. Nittes served his time and died in Victoria in December 2021, at eighty-seven. Read the full story of the Guildford robbery.
The full story
The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott tells Baldy Blair's story from the Guildford car park to the Iron Duke, and follows the men who hunted the money until most of them had vanished themselves.