In the first week of May 1972, three men disappeared in Sydney inside three weeks. One was a Toe Cutter. One was a young man who had borrowed the Toe Cutter's car. The third was the man who was said to have burnt it. None of them has ever been found.
The Toe Cutter with the torch
Kevin Gore was a former merchant seaman and a safecracker, a regular on the terrace of the Oceanic Hotel at Coogee, where the Guildford robber Baldy Blair held court. He was known as an expert with an oxy-acetylene torch, the cutting flame safecrackers used to burn through steel. In 2020 a New South Wales coroner named him among the four men "believed to have been" in the Toe Cutters. Read who the Toe Cutters were.
By 1972 Gore lived at Leurn Road, Rose Bay, and drove a 1970 Ford Fairlane, registration AIZ586: long and low, with a V8 and reclining bucket seats. Anybody in Sydney looking for Kevin Gore would have known it on sight.
The young man who borrowed the car
Robert Donnelly grew up in the streets around Redfern and Waterloo. He was a french polisher's son with three brothers, and he had been to kindergarten with Arthur "Neddy" Smith, who would become one of the most notorious criminals in Sydney. By 1971 Donnelly had a record for property offences, but Smith never thought of him as a real criminal. "He didn't know how to do the wrong thing," Smith wrote, "and would rather cut his hand off than do anyone a bad turn."
By 1972 Donnelly was living alone at Bondi and, by the Daily Mail's account, shoplifting for Kevin Gore. He wrote to Smith in Grafton jail about his new friends. One of the two names in the letter was Gore's.
On the evening of 1 May 1972, at about seven, Donnelly borrowed the Fairlane from Gore's house and promised to bring it back by half past eight the next morning. He never brought it back, and nobody who knew him ever saw him again. His brother Viv was at the fights at the Souths Leagues Club when a man tapped him on the shoulder. "Viv, I've got some bad news for you – Robert's been knocked."
Gore disappears
Two days later, on 3 May, Kevin Gore left an office in Paddington with Stewart "Johnny" Regan, the hitman Sydney called the Magician, and said he would be "back in half an hour". He was never seen again. On 7 May the Fairlane turned up burnt out in Osroy Avenue, Earlwood, with a single .38 cartridge case inside it. An anonymous caller told the police who had burnt it, and after 20 May nobody saw that man either. Read about Johnny Regan.
Reprisal from Melbourne
The reason lay a long way south. Half the Guildford money had been taken in the name of Melbourne's Painters and Dockers, and the Toe Cutters had been robbing the robbers. The journalist Evan Whitton, who covered the dock war, recorded that "three Melbourne dockers were believed to have gone to Sydney and disposed of two of the Toe Cutters".
The police came to the same view. Gore's disappearance, the coroner later recorded, "was one of a number of reprisal attacks carried out by figures from the Melbourne underworld on the 'Toe Cutters'". About Donnelly they were blunter: "The consensus was that Mr Donnelly was murdered in mistake of Kevin Gore when he was driving Kevin Gore's car." The men from Melbourne did not know Gore's face. They knew his car.
Forty-eight years without a finding
Nobody filed a missing person's report for Robert Donnelly, and without one there was no file and no inquest. In 2012 his younger brother John read that bones found in the dunes at Kurnell needed identifying, and gave a DNA sample. They were not Robert's. John filed the report anyway.
A coroner found in February 2013 that Kevin Gore had died on or about 3 May 1972. Robert Donnelly's inquest came on 30 September 2020 at Lidcombe. Police had checked every trail a living man leaves: no arrest in any state, no benefits, no bank account, no Medicare visit, no border crossing, no DNA match. Deputy State Coroner Carmel Forbes found that he "died on, or sometime after, 1 May 1972", in suspicious circumstances, and that the evidence did not allow her to say where or how. She referred the case to the Unsolved Homicide Unit.
"The only thing I'm a bit dirty on," Viv Donnelly told the court, "is we don't have a body to bury."
The coroner's findings in that case are the only official words on the Toe Cutters: a definition, four names and two disappearances. Everything else is legend.
The full story
The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott tells the stories of Robert Donnelly, Kevin Gore and the man who walked out of that Paddington office with Gore, and how the Melbourne waterfront came north for its money.