What would unfold in the next few minutes would go down as the third biggest heist ever in Victorian history. He says, I've seen a photo, obviously implying that other bad guys took the gold and buried it. But he thinks he knows where it might be. In a big antique desk in the house at Hawthorne, officers find a semi automatic handgun, a couple of pieces of gold, and more cut up number plate. This is where listeners the plot thickens. I'm Andrew Ruhle. This is life and crimes
right back at the start of the COVID pandemic. A very good heist unfolded in Melbourne, in the heart of the city. It didn't get a lot of attention until arrests were made and the truth was discovered. Now, I'm not here to say that every heist of money or gold or whatever or jewelry has an inside man. I don't want to claim that because that might be wrong in some cases. But in this case there clearly was an inside man, but it wasn't obvious at the time.
What happened was on a Monday morning, April or twenty seventh. I think it was of twenty twenty, so he just a few weeks into the pandemic, which began in March. A man pushing a trolley comes to a building in Colin Street in the city. That very ordinary looking building houses the Melbourne Gold Company. He's pushing a trolley. He's
dressed in tradey gear. He's wearing a COVID mask, which was a given of course at that time, perfect for stopping infection or cross infection, but even better to mask you from other people so they can't tell who you are. He presses the intercom and says he's got a delivery. Once he gets inside, he pulls out a pistol and he orders the gold company employee that has opened the door to take him into the office. Now, the man who let the fake tradeing in was Daniel Ead who
was employed by the Melbourne Gold Company. He takes him up to the seventh floor where they've got gold and cash stored. What would unfold in the next few minutes would go down as the third biggest heist ever in Victorian history. And what Daniel ad would tell the police a little while later was that this man tied him up, pointed a gun at him, threatened him said, show us where the money is, showing me where the gold is, and then the robber proceeded to get hold of the
cash and the jewelry and the gold. There was something like twenty eight key loads of gold. It's a lot of ounces, at about three and a half thousand dollars an ounce. There was also more than seven hundred thousand dollars in cash, and I think there was also jewelry. He loads all that up and he leaves, and of course he leaves Daniel D, the employee, still tied up
in the building on the seventh floor. It's only when two customers come to the store a little while later that Daniel D is untied and can raise the alarm. Initially police thought about three million dollars worth of gold and cash had been taken. Of course, it was a little bit more when armed crime squad detectives arrived on the scene. Uniform police were already there, but they were dealing with another incident just nearby. There'd been an incident
at a bank just down the street. Now it just shows you you can have good luck or you can have bad luck. And in this day April onod twenty seventh, twenty twenty. The crooks, who had almost the perfect wrought had some bad luck. You can imagine what would happen when our offender pushes his way out of the building with his with his trolley, with his high of his vest and goes over towards a white ute that he's got. When he sees police around the street, he must have thought,
oh my god, they're already onto me. But apparently he kept his cool and he just walked over to a white ute and he calmly unloads boxes and bags or whatever into it, and then he heads off. But this other incident was a stroke of luck for the police because fearing that the other bank incident might escalate, safe city cameras were moved to the location, and that provided
Crimes God detect this with a fortunate breakthrough. So the incident down the street meant that some of the cameras that are used for security around the streets were swung into that area, and this gave them footage of cars
and movement that they otherwise might not have had. Now I'm in debted to my colleague John Kaylor, who has written this story recently was published in the Sunday Herald Sun, and I thought it was one of the more interesting high stories we've seen for a long time, and I proposed to steal some of John's most excellent material with his blessing, because he's explained it very well. Now, the police officer who's ended up telling this story in retrospect
to John Kaylor is Detective Sergeant Mark Walsh. Clearly one of the most interesting cases he's worked on. So Detective Sergeant Walsh says this to Kaylor, it just happened to be the same time that this offender was doing the arm robbery. The camera captures the offender going back to his car. Sergeant Walsh said, we wouldn't have had identification on the car straight away if the other job, that is,
the other bank job hadn't happened. So we look at the CCTV and it is of this man getting into a white hold in Colorado and it's completely stock standard. I thought it had to be a fleet car or a higher car, and then we noticed two little stickers in the windscreen on the side window. I took a guest they were likely to be bar coats, and I knew Budget scan in and scan out their higher cars. So we contacted all the higher car companies because the car had stolen plates on it, and all of them
said they didn't use hold In Colorado's bumma. So hitting a dead end, the detectives headed out to where the number plates were stolen. Another dead end. There were no fingerprints and no CCTV footage. This is at premises where people have had their number plates stolen. Detective Sergeant Walsh says, I just thought, humor me, We'll go to a few of the higher car companies around here and double check.
So the first one we go to is Budget in Camberwell, and I'll pull into the driveway and sure enough there's this Holden Colorado sitting there being cleaned. The person we spoke to initially just made the call off their own knowledge without properly looking into it. They only have four of them in the country, and three of them are used in the minds. What he means there is that when they'd initially checked with Budget, the person they took into a Budget said, oh, no, we haven't got any
of those Holden Colorados, which was almost true. Basically in Melbourne they don't have any hold In Colorados. There's only four of that particular model in the country. Three of them are up in the mines and only one is in Melbourne, so that answer was almost true, but not quite. There was one in Melbourne and guess what, the crook had hired it and that's where the crook came undone.
So once the police had established that this was the case, Budget told the police that the carab been hired out the afternoon before the robbery and have been brought back about two hours after the time, so basically it has to be it. So the police start looking closer. The car had been hired out in the name of an Asian female, but inquiries hit another dead end. She's got no involvement, she's got no criminal history. She's out in a really nice house in Hawthorne, Sergeant Moss said her partner,
Karl Kachami. He's a finance teacher at Deacon University. He owns a second house on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, which is a mansion, and he owns an antique shop. He just doesn't fit the profile of an arm robber at all. So the police have got nothing, but the pressure is on due to the fact that this is Victoria's third biggest heist in history. It's worth millions, and they know that they've got to get hold of somebody for doing it.
They know that the cash is going to vanish and that the gold can be quickly melted down, so the pressure is on to act. They follow this Carl Kachami because they can. There's no other lead that they've got. It seems that the Colorado car ute leads to him, so they follow him. They just want to see if he talks to anybody or what he does. Now, if you're out there planning a heist, maybe learn from this what not to do. He goes to Bunnings and he buys some long PVC pipes, which police think is a
little bit strange, but it's hard to know. Depends what he wants to do with it. Then he stops near his mansion in Fitzroy and he dumps some stuff in a rubbish bin, which of course always interests police or private detectives or anybody else. The investigators go and look in the bin and the only thing of value was a cut up number plate, which would seem to be of great value, you'd think. Sergeant Welsh says, there was the letter S on each of them. We just thought
it was a bit dodgy. The letters matched where the letters on the stolen number plates would be. Then we watched as he took these PVC pipes into his mansion in Fitzroy. We just thought we're going to have to grab him because we have nothing else. The trailer is going to go cold unless we try and do something to try and get back the cash and the goal. So they grab him, and Carl Kachami quite calm. He's a lecturer, he's forty eight years old. He's a cool customer.
He denies any involvement. The police are puzzled because this guy's really well spoken, he's smart. He's sitting there saying, yep, I hired that car, but I just moved some antiques from my store. I'm not sure why you've arrested me. I just want to be as helpful as possible. So we're sitting in this interview room and he's giving us a story that was plausible but still a bit odd. Well you would think that, wouldn't you. If he's dropping cut up number plates around the place, that would be
a bit odd. During the interview, police execute a search warrant on Carl's house in Hawthorne. The nice house with the nice partner, the one who hired the ute. She's probably totally innocent, I have to say. And in a big antique desk in the house at Hawthorne, officers find a semi automatic handgun, a couple of pieces of gold, and more cut up number plate. This is where listeners the plot thickens. Detectives have their tails up, do they what? Carl then tells them a story that yes, I hired
the car. I did it for money, and when they finished doing the arm robbery, they gave me bits of gold and told me to hang on to the firearm and return the car. So his story is one of those classic things with a few touches of truth in it, just enough to skate over the big porky. He's saying, I got the car, but I did it for other people, and they did all the bad things and they just gave me a little bit of pocket change for my help. It's basically what he's saying. I'm just a chump, is
what he's saying. And the police are like, nah, this doesn't make sense. The police said, you're probably going to jail for this, and people are going to know you've got three or four million dollars and you might know where it is. And if we don't get it back, these issues with safety and people in jail are going to know you've got access to this money. Now that is a very real threat. You are some sort of soft squarehead customer, no friends in jail. You get put
in jail. Everyone in jail knows why you're there immediately, and if they think you have a lot of money buried somewhere, it's not going to be very good for you because they're all going to be standing over here to get the money, and they're going to say, not only we're going to break your fingers one by one and throw boiling water over you and pull your teeth out, whatever it takes, but we'll find out where you live and we will make life very difficult for your family
or your loved ones. And this is a very real threat, and that is why the police pointed it out. They pointed out the truth to Carl Kacharmi that if he went to jail, he was in a world of pain. But anyway, for the meantime, he sticks to his story, but he's starting to twist things around a bit, and he says, look, I've seen a photo of where the gold is buried, and I can take you there. His memory is starting to come back. He says, I've seen a photo, obviously implying that other bad guys took the
gold and buried it. But he thinks he knows where it might be so he can take them there. So by this time the police are away. It's ten o'clock at night and the boss has had to call the detectives back in after a twelve hour shift and tell them that they're going for a drive. So they all get in a police card, they get maps on their
iPhones and he leads them to a place called Dollar. Now, when he said that, the police thought he was having a joke with them, because you know, it's a robbery that's worth millions of dollars, and he says he's taking them to a place called Dollar. Little did they know then that there is a tiny little place in South Gippsland called Dollar, and it's up in the hills out the back of you know, leaning Gathriell, Cranborough or where.
When they get there, it's a fair way. When they get there, it's one am, it's raining and all they've got is their phone, torches. They didn't have real torches, which is surprising. You'd think police would have those great, big, long, heavy duty torches that they can hit people with. But anyway, they've got one shovel and a robart because that's all
they could rustle up in time. They walk five hundred meters across farmland and Carl Kachami points to a rock, So the police start digging, and they're on their hands and knees and trying to pull away the dirt. They're taking it in turns, but they're soaking wet and covered in mud. After two hours and about one hundred and twenty centimeters down out in the old money that's four foot one hundred and twenty centimeters one point two meters.
That's a pretty deep hoole. They find a toolbox, the same toolbox as the offender used in the CCTV footage of the robbery. When they found the toolbox, the police were expecting it to be like the movies, and they thought that'd be all full of going gold. As news spread about the police being in town, another local contacted detective.
The locals described a man that they had seen looking puzzled and staring into a malways looking for directions to Dollar and when one of the locals asked this guy why was going there, he replied to do some digging. Now the police checked CCTV and realized that the mystery man that is described them and that they then saw on CCTV in South Gippsland was in fact the gold dealer manager Daniel Ead. Now this is the guy who at the start of our story is the poor chap
who's been robbed. He's been tied up and robbed at the gold company in Colt Street. Guess what he's out there looking to dig up the gold, which would suggest that he knew all about it. Was not only a party to the scheme, he was the author of the scheme. The police knew that Parol Karl Kochami wouldn't have done this alone. But it was only at this point that the police are able to link Daniel d into the
cunning plot. And Sergeant Well says this, when you first look at c c t V, you're looking at the offender and stuff. But when we looked at the footage back again, we noticed what Daniel was doing. That is this time the police are looking at the victim, the supposed victim of the robbery, and when they study his actions during the robbery, they say it's only slight. But as Carl comes through the door, he meaning Daniel motions for him, meaning Karl, to pull the firearm out. He
just makes a slight tilt of his head. And then there's another point where he's emptying out the cash and Daniel motions his head pointing to the other side of the room. And where was he pointing and Carl doesn't pick up on it. He's pointing at a safe where there's another six million dollars in cash and gold. Or can you believe that they haven't rehearsed their plot properly? And our mate, our amateur robber, our amateur fake robber, has managed to miss six million in gold and cash
and get away with about half that much. Dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. So a raid on Karl Kuchami's Fitzroy property revealed the PVC pipes. They contained three hundred thousand dollars in cash. Another three hundred and thirty three thousand dollars in cash, believed to be Daniel EAD's share, remained missing. When the game was up, the police went back to Carl and asked him why he did it, and he said it
was all to do with COVID. He said he turned his Fitzroy mansion into a twelve bet accommodation that he was renting out to UNI students and when COVID hit, all international students went home. So then his rental income was lost and the house needed a lot of renovations and stuff. And his part in this plot, this fake
robbery was the fund renovations of that old place. When it finally went to court in twenty twenty one, the inside man, Daniel Ead was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison with a non parole period of three years and nine months. That's almost four years. But the fake bandit, Karl Kachami was clearly thought to be the minor partner in this wrought, and he was sentenced to four years in prison with a non parole period
of two years. And so Karl has been out and about for quite a while, a sadder and wiser real estate vs Because presumably he lost his excellent job of teaching at Deacon University. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew Rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all
one word news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.