At about half past twelve on Wednesday 4 March 1970, three men in dust coats, cloth caps and sunglasses were crouched behind an armoured van in a bank car park at Guildford, in the western suburbs of Sydney. They were waiting for a guard to put the rubbish out.
The van belonged to Mayne Nickless. Every day it pulled in beside the Commonwealth Bank at about twenty to twelve, so the three guards could eat their lunch before making the delivery. Every day, when they had finished, one of them opened the back door to throw out the wrappers. On 4 March the door opened onto three silenced pistols.
How the robbery worked
Nobody fired a shot. The guards had no time to draw their own pistols. They were told to lie on the floor of the van, tied up with rope and gagged with tape, and the robbers unloaded twenty-four green canvas sacks stamped RESERVE BANK into their getaway car. The only injury anybody recorded was a pair of broken glasses.
The sacks held $587,890, and it was the biggest armed robbery Australia had ever seen. The record until then was $136,400, taken from Mayne Nickless guards at Chadstone in Melbourne the year before, as they wheeled the cash across a footpath. Nobody had ever taken money from inside an armoured van. Mayne Nickless had built a van nobody could break into. At Guildford, the guards opened it themselves.
Why the vans were worth robbing
In 1970 Australia was still paid in cash. On pay day workers queued at the factory or the building site for an envelope of notes and coins, and somebody had to bring that money from the banks. Mayne Nickless brought most of it. At a seminar on armed robbery in Canberra in 1977, one of its directors said that on some days of the week 85 per cent of all the cash handled in Australia went through the company's system.
Armed robbery was new as a serious problem. Victoria's Armed Robbery Squad told the same seminar that it had become a major problem in Sydney and Melbourne only from the mid-1960s. Victoria recorded seventeen major armed robberies in 1965 and a hundred and forty-four in 1970.
The men behind it
The robbers were painters and dockers, members of the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union, which on the Melbourne waterfront had a criminal seam running all the way through it. The dust coats were their everyday work clothes.
- Francis "Baldy" Blair, thirty-four, a bank robber who had moved up to Sydney from the Melbourne waterfront.
- Stephen Nittes, a former lightweight boxer from Melbourne.
- Alan Jones, twenty-nine, also from Melbourne.
The man who planned it never went near the car park. The newspapers later named him as Leslie Woon. He had worked out that the cash sat behind a door that would always, sooner or later, be opened from the inside.
Where the money went
Each robber took about ninety thousand dollars. By Larry Blair's account the planner took about half, "on behalf of the Painters and Dockers", and a slice went to an inside man at Mayne Nickless. Accounts of the split differ. The Daily Mail's sums in 2022 gave the three robbers $270,000 between them and the planner another $270,000.
The police and the guards
The New South Wales police put every detective they could spare on the case, among them Detective Sergeant Noel Morey and his young partner, Roger Rogerson. The guards had looked the robbers in the face from a few feet away and were interviewed again and again, but none of them could pick out a single man. The sunglasses and hats had been half the plan.
Jones was arrested first, at home in Melbourne. Nittes was found on 23 September 1970 at the Randwick House Motor Inn. Jones pleaded guilty, Nittes pleaded not guilty and was convicted, and each was sentenced to sixteen years. "I am not a bad man, judge, really," Nittes said as he was taken down. He died in Victoria on 22 December 2021, at eighty-seven.
The robbers' real danger
A bank can report a theft. A man holding the proceeds of one cannot. There was no policeman he could call and no court he could go to if his share was taken from him, and that made the Guildford money the easiest money in Sydney to steal.
Everybody on the beachfront at Coogee knew who had it. Baldy Blair drank every afternoon on the terrace of the Oceanic Hotel, and some of the men who sat with him there were already thinking about his share. One of them was Kevin Gore, a safecracker known for his skill with an oxy-acetylene torch. Within months, men who would become known as the Toe Cutters were hunting the robbers.
Baldy Blair vanished that year and was never seen again. His stepson, Larry, who became a world champion surfer, was eleven. "With friends like Dad's," he said years later, "who needs enemies?" Read who the Toe Cutters were.
The full story
The Guildford robbery opens The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott. The book follows the money from the car park to the Oceanic Hotel, the hunt for the robbers, their trial, the reprisals and the killings that came after.