At a few minutes past twelve on Wednesday 21 April 1976, the secretary-manager of the Victoria Club in Queen Street, Melbourne, went to let the barman go for his lunch. The barman did not move. On the other side of the bar, a small man in a red and black ski cap was pointing a long-barrelled pistol at his nose.
It was the start of the Great Bookie Robbery, and nobody has ever been convicted of it.
The over-ripe plum
The Victoria Club was where Melbourne's bookmakers settled up after the races, in cash, on the first day the banks were open. Easter 1976 gave them three meetings in four days, Caulfield twice and Moonee Valley, and the banks did not open until the Wednesday. So the club would hold three settling days' money at once. The head of the Criminal Investigation Branch called it an "over-ripe plum".
The cash came up Queen Street that morning in eight metal boxes in a Mayne Nickless armoured van, the same company whose van had been robbed at Guildford six years before. Read about the Guildford robbery.
The door nobody knew about
Next to the cash room was a door that hardly any member knew was there. It opened onto a back stairwell, eighty-six steps up from a side entrance at 131 Queen Street. Before that morning someone had worked on it: the top bolt sawn through and put back to look whole, a spyhole drilled through a screw socket, the concrete under the bottom bolt dug away.
There were thirty-one people on the second floor when six masked men came through it. One guard went for his gun and was knocked down with the butt of a machine gun. The reporter Evan Whitton, who reconstructed the morning for The National Times, wrote that "machine guns were used for the first time in the cause of a robbery". One man cut the locks on the boxes with bolt cutters. The small man vaulted the bar and tore out every telephone on the floor. A bigger, older man with a machine gun had everyone lie face down on the carpet. "Nobody move," he said. "I'll be watching you for the next five or ten minutes."
They were so disciplined that $15,000 lying on a bookmaker's table was not touched. And they did not go down the stairs. They carried the money up, to an office they had rented in the same building, and left it in a safe while the police put roadblocks all over Melbourne.
How much?
The insurers paid out $1.28 million on what the bookmakers declared. The real figure was probably many times that, and the bookmakers had every reason to keep it small: a true number would have told the Taxation Office how much untaxed cash crossed that table every week.
Ray Chuck
The man behind it was Raymond Patrick Chuck, who went by the name Bennett. He had been a minder on the Melbourne waterfront, then fell in with the Kangaroo Gang of Australian thieves in London, and served his sentence in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. The men he did time with treated a robbery as a military operation, with rehearsals, timings and a plan for every door, and Bennett brought the method home.
Only one man was ever charged, with laundering $110,000 of the money, and a magistrate refused to send him for trial.
The Toe Cutters stayed away
Men from Sydney came asking about the money too. An anthology of 1993, Australian Crime, has a gang known as the Toecutters who "also started making inquiries". Then Bennett's name "started being bandied around". As Morton and Lobez put it, "it spoke enormously well of the regard in which Bennett was held that the Toecutters decided to leave him alone".
It cannot have been the original gang. By April 1976 Kevin Gore had been missing for four years, Jake Maloney was dead and Linus Driscoll was in prison appealing his conviction. It was the name that frightened people now, not the men. Read who the Toe Cutters were.
The war that followed
Others did not leave the money alone, and the robbery set off a feud on the Melbourne waterfront that ran for years. On 12 November 1979 Ray Chuck was brought up from the cells of the Melbourne Magistrates' Court and shot dead on the stairs by a gunman in a blue suit and false beard, who escaped by an unused back staircase and a gap someone had bent in a sheet of corrugated iron. The crime reporter Andrew Rule wrote that "impeccable sources say Brian Kane was the trigger man". Kane himself was shot dead in the Quarry Hotel, Brunswick East, in November 1982. Nobody has ever been convicted of either killing, and Victoria Police still offer a reward over Kane's.
A story told in both cities has Jimmy the Pom brought down from Sydney to kill Bennett. It does not survive the dates. Driscoll was in custody for most of the 1970s and was deported to England in 1979, and every detective in Melbourne knew his face. The Toe Cutters' legend picked this one up on its travels, like so much else.
The full story
The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott tells the Great Bookie Robbery from the bar of the Victoria Club to the Magistrates' Court, with the undercover sting that nearly caught Bennett's crew and the feud that outlived them all.