Gangland Queensland by James Morton

Author:James Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 2012-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

11 Robbers

Over the years, Queensland has had a number of quality robbers and robberies. The Beerburrum mail robbery, then the second-biggest in Australia after the Mayne-Nickless, took place on 17 April 1974, when armed bandits, wearing women’s wigs, held up the mail contractor on the Bruce Highway, 40 kilometres north of Brisbane. The contractor’s four-ton truck, driven by Noel Thompson, was forced off the road and the driver bailed up with sawn-off shotguns. He was then made to drive 3 kilometres along a forestry track, tied up hand and foot, and bundled under his truck. Thompson heard the men say they were looking for $25 000 in notes that were being sent for destruction. In all, $488 000 was stolen; $53 000 was dropped by the bandits as they fled.

Jack Edward Wilson, whose record spanned thirty-five years, and Donald Frederick Flanders were arrested on 7 May; Flanders in Brisbane and Wilson in the Boulevard Hotel, Kings Cross, Sydney, where police said they found over $130 000 in cash wrapped in foil in a suitcase and trunk. In March 1975, amid allegations of planting evidence, or ‘bricking’, both men were found guilty and received ten years. Nearly $300 000 went unrecovered. Wilson was released in December 1982 and promptly extradited to Victoria to face charges of burglary and causing an explosion. The next year, in Melbourne, he was placed on a $1000 bond. On 19 July 1986 his body was found in a car in Tarcutta, New South Wales, 20 kilometres east of Wagga. He had been suspected of two robberies in Queensland, in which $300 000 was taken from a Springwood bank and $80 000 from Jupiter’s Casino on the Gold Coast.

In November 1987 Lloyd Murray Reed, referred to as one of South Australia’s biggest drug dealers, was convicted of Wilson’s manslaughter. Defending himself, Reed told the court he had acted in self-defence, shooting Wilson with a .22 calibre pistol in what the prosecution described as a drug deal gone awry. Reed, who had previously spent fourteen years in gaol, explained away $320 000 in cash by saying it had come from successful gambling. He was sentenced to ten years, with a pre-parole period of seven.

The next year, when Reed gave evidence in the trial of another drug supremo, David John Kelleher (the one-time boyfriend of New South Wales whistleblower Sallie-Anne Huckstepp), he told the jury, ‘I shot a swine by the name of Jack Wilson … he killed a friend of mine and his wife’. He said Wilson had told him he had access to about 60 kilograms of heroin, which, at 80 per cent purity, would wholesale at $82 000.

Those who think armed robbery is just a question of choosing a bank, getting hold of a gun and pointing it, could profit by studying the case of Craig Robert Beale, known as the Police Bandit because he wrote to his victims an apology. Beale took his profession seriously and practised shooting at the VIP Club, Browns Plains, south of Brisbane, both before and after robbing a bank at Sunnybank Hills.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.