Diamonds, toecutters and a scared little boy

his life in crimes. One of the big names in crime back in the day, as we say, back in the sixties seventies, was a fellow called Frank Baldy Blair. His real name was Frank, his nickname was Baldi. All crooks have to have nicknames. Surname was Blair, b l Air. Baldy Blair came from Melbourne. He was one of that crew of inner suburban heavyweights who came out of the

mean streets of Richmond, Port, Melbourne, etc. Collingwood. He ended up on the docks or hanging around the docks, like a lot of heavies did in those days, and in fact, like good Melbourne crooks did. Then he became a painter

and docker. Something like three quarters of the membership of the painters and dockers were people with extensive criminal records, a little bit like the modern day CFMU, some would suggest, but I'd suggest the painters and dockers were more criminal than the CFMU and had a lot of very violent men on its books. And one of them was Baldy Blair. And Baldy Blair in the late sixties he and others

ran some big scams on the waterfront. And what they used to do if they weren't stealing cargo by the container load or whatever or by the shipload, they were running contraband and they would be bringing in in those days a lot of hash and cannabis products from the Golden Triangle, things like that, and selling it on what was then the burgeoning emerging drug market. Baldi was pretty

good at this. They had some good schemes going. They would mark a particular container I think it was with pornographic pictures so they knew which one was the one with the hash in it. They would then load it up onto a truck and take it off the docks and unload it and sell it for lots of money. Too much of a good thing is never a good thing. Because the authorities worked out what they're up to, and then other crooks worked out what they were up to.

And in the end Baldy Blair went to Sydney and there he reinvented himself as a stick up man and Melbourne crooks like him had a bit of a reputation in Sydney for being uncompromising hard guys, and Baldi Blair had with him made of his called Steve Nitty's and Steve Nitty's alias the Bomber, was a former boxer who used to train at Richmond at the late Great Leo Berry's gym. I think Nittys might have had a national

title belt. He was pretty good at it, but he gave up boxing eventually and became a gunman and heavy and he got his nickname the Bomber because he blew

up a nightclub with a bomb or threatened to. And these guys land in Sydney and set themselves up in the robbery business, and it comes to pass that they would sit around at the Oceanic Hotel in Kuji and they'd held up with some Sydney crooks and they'd sit around and plan jobs, and they'd received Stalin Goods and Salem and they'd plan robberies and do them and all the rest of the criminal stuff, and Baldy had taken up. Soon after he went to Sydney, he went to Checkers nightclub.

I think it was called in Sydney. There was also one in Melbourne, I think, but there was one in Sydney. And he went there and he met a most beautiful scallywag woman called Patricia. Now we're going to call her Patricia Blair because they either got married or they had a de facto relationship, but she was known later on as Patricia Blair took his name. She was a very

beautiful woman, and she was very confident. She had a great demeanor, she had great charisma, She was a very fine dresser, and she was a marvelous con artist and also very nimble. She could steal things, and she was quite a high end jewel thief, among other attributes. And Baldy, the sort of rough, tough bulldog of a man, and the beautiful jewel thief became an item. And at this point Patricia already had a little, tiny boy, a little

boy called Larry. Now Larry's batural father was not Baldy Blair. He was someone else. And we don't need to worry about who that is. But Baldy became that little boy's father, the only father he knew, and the little boy, Larry

became known as Larry Blair. And there they were, mister and missus Blair and their son Larry, and the other crooks used to call Larry little Lord Fauntleroy because his mother, Patricia would dress him beautifully, mostly in stolen clothes from high end shops that she'd rob, and he'd have silk shirts and all the rest of it, in beautiful leather

shoes and all this good stuff. And the rough hard arm robbers and others and burglars and stand over men and gunman who drank with Baldy Blair at the OSHI as they call it, the Oceanic Hotel, would laugh at this little boy when he came along to snip dad for five dollars to go surfing or whatever, and they call him thortle Roy and joke with him and buy my raspberry lemonade Da da da da dam. And little did the little boy know, and he's he's seven eight

nine ten, that sort of age group. Little did he realize that the men that his father hung around with these friends of his father's were a very treacherous and violent crowd. But he did sense that they weren't all nice people. He had that child's sense of not only of innocence, but of sensing that some people meant no good. And he sensed that some of them were pretty bad dudes indeed, and that he thought they had false smiles and so on. And he was right, as events would prove.

And one thing led to another, and Baldy Blair and Steve Nittis from Melbourne his mate, and another guy called I think Alan Jones funnily enough common name, isn't it Alan Jones. That's not Alan Jones the radio man, nor is it racing. It's just Alan Jones, who was a gunman who's now dead. They became party to a plot to pull Australia's first armored car cash heist, a robbery of an armored car never been done before. This is

in nineteen seventy. They got the plan for this heist from a very clever crook called Les Woon w n known around the underworld as Wooker Look Woon. You have to have a nickname, and that was his and Wooker Woon was one of these smart crooks who used to get information inside information about money movements and all the

rest of it. And he had information that a main Nicholas armored car would go around the western suburbs on a given day every week and would go to the racecourse to pick up race money from the bookies and to go to the something bank and there's something partman, there's something shops and pick up all cash and take it back to the reserve bank, so on and so forth.

And it appeared that the people in the armored car had grown complacent and lazy, and instead of varying their root and their times, they stuck to a rigid timetable. And it meant that creatures of habit. These fellows, three guys in the armored car creatures of habit. Every day they would stop their armored car full of money, jam full of cash in a particular small park near a bank in the suburb of Guildford in Sydney, and there

they would have their lunch. They'd pull out their sandwiches and their thumus of tea or perhaps coffee, and maybe a drink of water, and they sangers and maybe cut up an apple or an orange, you know, and have their cup of tea, and then very neat and tidy, they'd open the door of their armored vehicle and one of them would trapes across, or maybe two of them would apes across to the bin in the park and

put their lunch trappers in the bin. Very tidy and good citizens, but very stupid because you are driving a van full of cash, you've pulled up and you've opened the door. You are asking for trouble. Well guess what happened. Baldy Steve Nittis and l Jones robbed them and it was the first armored car robbery in Australia, and it was a great success because the robbers all wore mirrored sunglasses.

Then of great novelty mirrored hats. They had these hats with sort of little shiny things on them, which meant that anybody looking at them would see reflections of themselves, which is disconcerting. And they also wore and I love this detail, this is wonderful. They wore full length Butcher's aprons, the Butcher's uniform of the long stripey. Remember the navy and white stripes that Butcher's used to wear. That's what they had on, and it meant that all of them

looks yimla. They looked a little bit odd, but the same as each other, and very difficult to distinguish from each other. You know, in general terms, you co'd say, oh, you know, one was a bit bigger than the others or something, but not much. No colors of eyes, no obvious features. They robbed the armored van of five hundred and eighty eight odd thousand dollars. Now, in nineteen seventy,

ladies and gentlemen, that was a lot of money. In nineteen seventy, I was getting fifty cents a week pocket money, and fifty cents a week pocket money was like getting twenty five dollars a week now, I reckon because for fifty cents, you could make yourself sick on fish and chips for ten cents and they still have forty cents left over. You know, that would keep you going for

all the other days of the week. So five hundred and eighty thousand dollars was probably the price of fifty eight houses in country towns around Australia or forty odd suburban houses around Australia. Good ones, really good ones. Back in the sixties there used to be a raffle held to raise money to build the Opera House in Sydney.

The Sydney Opera House raffle was a big deal, a lottery, it was called, and the house that was the prize in that was advertised back in the pre decimal currency days as something like five pounds, you know, ten thousand dollars. So that does give you an idea of the huge amount of money that these guys got, and in our currency today it'd be worth about ten million, they say,

a lot of dough. Now, half the money was to go to wook A Wound, the mastermind who'd planned it from Afar, and some of that, I think some of that half went to senior painters and dockers in Melbourne who were inclined to sort of clip the ticket of big robberies done by their members that you had to kick some back up the line to the bosses. But the other half pretty went to the three guys who got it. So they took off with about one hundred

thousand dollars each, a lot of dope. And Larry Blair can recall his father coming home, coming home, turning up in a brand new v eight Valiant car. He said, the color of a fresh turd is the way that Larry described it, and blowing the horn, turning the radio full belt and saying party time, Party time. Were all going to dinner because he just pulled this massive robbery.

And so they all friends and family piled into the Valiant and they went around to the best Chinese joint in Sydney and they had a massive feed, and then they had massive amounts of booze, and then they had more food and more booze until they all passed out. It was just a really big party, which was probably not a great way to not draw attention to yourself.

To be buying a brand new vut car and then spending a fortune on a meal and a drink up for all your friends and family, it sort of would stand out a bit, and indeed it did attract attention from various people. And I think some of those people might have been corrupt police who in Sydney were particularly keen on knowing who had robbed anything, because they considered that they should always get a share of anything that

had been robbed. In Sydney in those days, the homicide Squad would organize the murders, the breaking squad would organize the big breakings. I'm going to take a share of any big breakings, and the robbery squad would want a share of any armed robberies. And so it would be obvious that the bent Coppers of Sydney would be very keen to get their finger in the pie and get some of this doe. Now, if these hard headed Melbourne crooks weren't handing money over to their hosts in Sydney,

things could turn nasty. And the bent Coppers in Sydney, notably a fellow called Freddie kray H. He was a detective sergeant. He was a very scary man. He killed people, he stood over people. He would do anything, and he supposedly had a secondhand shop of his own where stolen goods were sold, and he did contract killings. He did whatever it took. It is said. It is alleged that he and a couple of Sydney crooks said, what about

these guys getting this big score? We want some of it or all of it or whatever, And so they were putting their hand out looking for money. Well, Baldy Blair and his two mates did a runner and Baldi Blair said to Patricia, the beautiful jewel thief wife and little Larry on the road, let's go, and they lit out. They first of all dropped Larry's little sister. By this

stage Larry had a baby sister called Kelly. They dropped Kelly with some friends and they had a labrador dog which they took around and dropped off at Jack Sparrow's house. Would you believe in Sydney in those days there was a colorful racing identity called Jack Sparrow, and Jack Sparrow not the one in Pirates of the Caribbean. This is the real Jack Sparrow, who did have a bit of pirate in him. But that's where the labrador was dropped off and the family of three, although I think they

got the baby back on the way somewhere. They might have got little baby Kelly from a friend and picked her up again. So in the end they're in the Valiant and they're heading it to the outback. So Baldy Patricia, Larry who's about eleven by this ten or eleven, and his little baby sister Kelly, and they go to Cooper Peedy, Cooper Petty, the Opel Fields right out in the boondocks roughly where New South Wales hits the South Australian border and all that sort of stuff right out with all

the states meet in the corner country. I think it's out there somewhere, and there is a lot of interesting people at Kuoper Petty. In those days. I think people who were on the run from other places would go to Kuber Peaty and there were a lot of underground houses there, you know, literally houses dug into the earth

because people have been mining there for decades. And they hid out at kuber Peaty and they should have stayed there for longer, and then they should have gone somewhere else and stayed there longer and let everything cool right off. But crooks are risk takers. They want to spend their money, They want a big note. They don't want to be away from the big centers of Sydney and Melbourne because that's you know, that's the center of the world to them.

And foolishly Baldy Blairs every week going back and they went back to Sydney. Long story short. Baldy Blair, cocky, confident, tough little man that he was. He went back to the Oceanic Hotel to where his drinking mates were and you know, shouted everybody a drink and we're all happy families again. And he thinks that all the heaters died down and no one's going to clip him for money. And he was wrong, because you know what they did. They said, oh, Bali, Baldie mate, come over and look

in this van. You know, Harry's got a van here full of hot gear, hot this or hot that, stolen stuff. And of course this is what these guys used to do. We'k in week out they'd be buying and selling hot gear. And then went over to the van and they opened up the door for him to look at the hot gear and then they grabbed him and throw him in it, and somebody put a gun in his ear and they

took him away. And we can't really say where, but it will have been a warehouse or an empty premises of factory, probably around the Botany area out near the airport Kingsford Smith Airport, Sydney. And there it is said that what became known as the toe Cutter Gang got its name because they tortured Baldy Blair with bolt cutters and with a blow torch to get him to reveal where his cash was where the cash robbery cash was.

The name the toe Cutter Gang was coined over that specific incident and the fact that they also did it to his two mates to is too. Mates in the robbery, that is Steve Nitti's and Alan Jones, who actually survived and got away. They probably were able to give some information or some money to the toe Cutters, but for whatever reason, that didn't happen with Baldi Blair. Perhaps he was too tough for his own good and wouldn't divulge, or perhaps they injured him too seriously before he divulged.

But the long and the short of it is that

he died of his injuries or they killed him. And the story that Larry, as an adult twenty thirty years later, was able to put together was that his body was probably dissolved in a vat of acid and then they buried his remains underneath the extension to the I think north South runway of the airport was then being built in nineteen seventy, So they took whatever was left of poor old Baldi and they tipped it out in a trench or whatever where they were building the north South runway,

and that was the end of Baldy Blair, So that left he very shattered, Patricia, his wife, and a very anxious son, Larry, who realized, of course that Baldy, who you know, Larry says, was a bully and a rogue and a womanizer, and you know, a lot of bad things. He wasn't of father of the year, but he was the only father this kid had, and in his own way, he sort of loved him. And they were scared that the bad guys would come for them, and I think

they were right to be scared. Patricia had a very acute sense of self preservation, and she was intuitive and intelligent when she could read the play very well, and she said, right, we're going. As soon as she heard that Bully had disappeared, she grabs her son, She drops a daughter, the little girl, off at other friends, and they go and get on an aeroplane to fly to Melbourne. And they're at the airport at Sydney in an ansett plane.

It taxies out from the terminal to get to the actual strip to take off, and Patricia looks over her shoulder and sees a red guy called Billy Maloney. Billy Maloney was one of the guys from the Oceanic Hotel who used to be a drinking partner, drinking buddy of ballies. And she knows that Billy Maloney is one of the treacherous bastards who has been one of the toe cutters.

And she thinks, and she's probably right, that he's following them to Melbourne because she's trying to go into smoke, she's trying to vanish, and there's this guy four seats behind them. She bolts straight down to the cockpit. She bangs on the cockpit door. She gets the captain of the plane to stop the plane and speak to her.

And because of her vehemence, her articulate nature, possibly because of her beauty, because that doesn't do any harm, she was able to persuade the captain that the flight should not take off until he'd called the police radio for the police to come. That they wheeled the steps back out to the plane, opened the door of the plane and escorted she and her son off the plane, leaving the red haired passenger on it. So this is how she avoided the bad guy on the plane following her

to Melbourne. The police come and escort them off the plane. The plane takes off and goes to Melbourne. Meanwhile, they're in Sydney with the police and the police said, what are we going to do with you? Well, you've got to take her somewhere safe. So the police dropped them off at a dodgy old motel which I think was in Couljiebay Road, but it doesn't really matter. It's a

dodgy old motel on the edge of Sydney somewhere. And that night he can remember this is Larry telling this story because Larry's now written a book, which is why

we're interested. Larry tells the story that that night he and his mother are in this motel room and they're very awake, and they're very nervous, and they fold down this dodgy old joint had these fold down beds that were really squeaky and horrible, and they fold it down and they get on the bed and they're lying there wondering what's going to happen next, and how they're going to get to Melbourne and all that, when they hear something.

They hear in the corridor one of the little trolleys that the maids used to bring the sheets and the meals and the whatever, all the stuff around the shampoo. They hear this squeaking wheels of this trolley. They'd squeak along and then stop. Then they'd hear a voice, a knock on the door, and then a voice. Then it'd move on to the next door, and so on. And Patricia realizes it's after midnight and this will not be a legitimate trolley run. It's too late, she said, quick

she grabs the boy, Larry. She shoves him out the window. They're up a couple of flights, a couple of stories. Climb down, climb down. They both get out the window and they climb down the downpipe. They're guttering the downpipe and they're hoping that the rusty old downpipe won't break. And they get to the ground. They jump over the

fence next door into the next door block. And the next door block is I think it was undeveloped, might have been a building site or something, and it had some scrub on it and some lantana bushes, which is rubbishy, noxious weed. And they hide in the lantana bush. And as soon as they get over that fence. Now a minute after vacating the room via the window, they hear this crash from upstairs, whoever it was, having knocked on their door and no answer, has kicked their door in,

broken their door in, and they realized they'd missed. They'd got away by that much, but they're terrified, so they hide all night in the Lantana bushes, not moving a muscle in case somebody's looking for them. Dawn just starts to break. At whatever five point thirty six. Dawn starts to break and they creep out to the street and they see empty taxi. She sticks her hand up, pushes the son Larry into the caxi, jumps in behind him and says, quick, take us to the city bus station,

the big interstate bus station. Doesn't matter where it was, but I think it was down a five dock or somewhere. And they go to the bus station and they get the first bus to Melbourne, and so by that night, after a very very grueling twenty four hours, they're in Melbourne, and then they take a train down to Frankston and there they meet a couple they call Uncle Elfie and

Auntie Joan, who are not actually their blood relatives. I think they were probably friends or relatives of Baldy Blares, but these were the people that looked after them while they were hiding in Melbourne, and he writes something like Franklin was a great place to hide because no one wanted to go there, which is unkind. But the Artie Joan and Uncle elf Uncle Elfy put up a tall fence around the house, and I used to patrol the tall fence with his old shotgun. And they gave Larry

a different name. He call himself Barry, Barry Brown or whatever, and he went off to the local state school under the false name. Meanwhile, Patricia hung around home and didn't go out much because she was fairly striking to look at, and it's better if she didn't get around. And they hid out there for some time now. I don't know if it was weeks or months, because Larry's memory he's

not that accurate. But they stayed here a fair while until they I think they wore out there welcome naturally, and be thought it might be safe to go back to Sydney, and that things that cooled down. They might have heard that this guy's in jail, or that blokes when shit or so and so has gone to England. That the toe cutter gang had sort of dispersed a bit, and so Larry and his beloved mother, Patricia, the jewelfliff lady, who was his not only his mother, but his best

friend and his great companion and his mentor. They meant everything to each other. They went back to Sydney to their little house that they had up there, and Patricia embarked on a career of jewel thefts with a gang of like minded folk that netted them some worldwide headlines. One of them in nineteen eighty ten, years after the big robbery that had caused all their troubles, she and two companions knocked off the I think it's called the

gold Conondador. It's a famous massive diamond that was mine three hundred years ago in India. It was something like one hundred thirty carrot. It was extremely rare. It was really clean, clear diamond with just a sort of an orange tinge. Extremely rare. It was priceless, and it was exhibited as an exhibit at this exhibition in Sydney. It had armed guards that had all this stuff and they managed to steal it in front of a room full

of people. They created some diversion and said they were there to repair the cabinet that it was in They must have worn the right sort of clothes. And they conned everybody they're there to repair the cabinet or fix the cabinet door or whatever. And they opened the cabinet door and Patricia, this is Larry's mum, because of her deafness, she was able to slide in, slip in a glass copy of this great diamond and steal the real one. And as far as anyone knows, that real one, that's

nineteen eighty, that's forty four years ago. That diamond is still out there. Somebody somewhere in the world will have paid a lot of money for the pleasure of illicitly owning that stolen diamond, because it never came home as far as anyone knows. And that is the origin story of Larry Blair. Now, Larry Blair, anybody out there thinks that name is familiar, They're probably right it is. Larry

Blair became one of Australia's greatest names in surfing. He was one of the first wave of big time surfers who came through in seventies. He made his name during the seventies, particularly the late seventies, and he was a contemporary of the biggest names in the game, and he was a star of the Sydney Surf Beaches along with a few other guys, and he ended up going to Hawaii to sort of polish up his technique and it was there that he won two i think two World

Masters titles. So Larry Blair he went from being the son of the great armored car robber who was a victim of the toe Cutter gang, the son of the great jewel thief and beautiful gangsters mole for one of a better word, to becoming a world champion surfer. He also became an actor, a sort of a small time actor. So Larry Blair left crime behind, never really wanted to

know about it. Seeing what had happened to his parents and to their friends, and seeing the treachery, the brutality, the highs and lows, it meant that he never really wanted to have anything to do with crime or with gambling,

but instead he became a professional surfer. He, of course, you know, gradually faded from view and he ended up living in Southeast Asia, I think in Balley he married, or in Indonesia at least where there are a lot of big waves, and he married a local woman up there, and I think he ended up running a restaurant and became quite a competent chef. He loved cooking and being

a chef. These days, I think he's back in Australia, up on northern beaches of New South Wales maybe or somewhere like that, or southern Queensland, and he's leading a quiet life. But in the last year or two he's produced this book. It's called The Outside. It's written with his surfing friend Jeremy Goring. Jeremy Goring obviously is a smart guy who understands writing and publishing and all that stuff. He probably wasn't as good as surfer as Larry, but

I'm thinking he's probably a better writer than Larry. Hard to tell, but the book, it's not literature, but it's a very interesting insight into the Australian underworld of the sixties,

seventies and eighties from a particular perspective. It's from the viewpoint of a child caught up in it, who doesn't want to be in it, who's caught up in it, who's fearful, who loves his mother dearly, who is angry and upset and scared because his father vanished in dreadful circumstances, and who for years lived in fear that the bad guys that killed his father would catch up with him somehow. And after he got to grow into an adult, he turned over. At the age of sixteen or whatever, he

sort of turned it into a man. He then started to look forward. It's been ale as he's looking over his shoulder. But then when he got to be a young man, he started to look forward and thought, I'd like to catch up with those guys. I want to see Billy Maloney and put it on him. You know, the red hair guy that I reckon was the one that really did the damage to Dad, was a two faced, treacherous varment. I want to catch up with him. And one day he walked into a beer garden in Sydney,

and there he was there all these years later. He saw this man with red hair sitting there nursing a beer and he thought, that's him. What'll I do? And what he did was he thought, that'll do. I'll just leave it. It's not worth worrying about. Look at him. He's pathetic. There's nothing to be gained one way or another. I'm not going to talk to him, I'm not going to glass him, I'm not gonna hit him with a beer jug. I'm just going to walk out. And that's

what he did. And he turned on his heel and he walked away from that whole scene, and he left fantasies of revenge behind and he became a very peaceful, nature loving fellow who tried to put all that traumatic stuff behind him. But you can tell that the book is probably the product of a very wounded psyche. That this guy has been full of fear as a kid, and hatred and all those things and love that the book is his attempt to try and come to terms

with a very dangerous past. The book is called The Outside. It's by Larry Blair and Jeremy Goring. It's published by Penguin Books. And we'll have a link in the description where you can find out more.