Our man on the inside

He said, it seems to him, after many years of writing about crime, that inside information is something that links together a lot of big crimes and successful crimes. Crooks that know how to get it and to use it are way ahead of the rest. And to illustrate that, I'm going to tell a story of a jewel heist

and then some other stories. The man who got away with the jewelry heist of the decade wanted to be invisible, so naturally he wore a bright orange high visibility vest and one of the standard blue paper masks that were still common after the pandemic.

The reality of supplying five hundred and fifty stores and two hundred thousand square meters of floor space on a site bigger than most dairy farms means that behind the glossy shop fronts, there's usually some activity in the basement of the building. So if you wander in there in the middle of the night wearing high visit a COVID mask,

you're probably not going to set off any bells. The intriguing thing about this particular thief was not that he infiltrated the loading bay on the lower ground level, but that he clearly knew his way around obscure corridors that led him upstairs to the back door of Kennedy. Now, Kennedy is nothing to do with the late American president. Kennedy is the name of a luxury goods boutique that specializes in elite jewelry and Swiss watches. It's a little

bit sort of like our local version of Tiffany. Maybe. At the front, the Kennedy store is imposing, well lit and secure. It has all the glittering stone, metal and plate glass that gets people in to buy jewelry watches by appointment for close to six figures, in other words, the price of a good new car. We're talking watches worth between fifty and ninety thousand dollars, many of them. But it was the back door of the store that

this thief knew how to navigate. In less than four minutes, according to security cameras, our man had got into the store, grabbed thirty high end watches worth about two million dollars retail, and bolted the hall. Included eight rare Rolexes and several very valuable Frank Mueller timepieces.

again into Kennedy. So the chadgten. External security had obviously not improved much, but inside the store, new procedures ensured that the most expensive stock was now locked away in heavy safes overnight. The result was that these second wave thieves got away with far less. Interestingly, nobody has been charged with either crime, so in two years the police have not laid a glove on either the first highly

successful thief or the bunch of four. Now for high profile entrepreneur James Kennedy, who owns the business, and his glamorous wife, Jamie Bell Kennedy, the defts were a stepback in what had been a meteoric rise after Kennedy Junior revolutionized the business that his father Louis had started in the late nineteen seventies. For the first time in a decade, the Kennedy couple learned that it's not true that any

publicity is good publicity. As some observers pointed out, the first Chasten heist followed Jamie Bell's eye catching display of wealth on social media, modeling designer clothes and accessories. One Gossip columnist noted, many have said former waitress Jamie Bell's decision to flash her cash may have prompted the robbery. An insider said of the same young woman, She's had a bit of a scare. It's made her think twice about.

watches to grab. If the difference between good crooks and bad thugs is inside information and shrewd preparation, then the mystery man in the high viz vest is one of the best in the badness business that his identity is still unknown own more than two years later, indicates the skill and discipline of the sharp minds on the dark side. There's no evidence that the Kennedy Watch thief is connected with what we crime reporters have dubbed the Gym Gang.

When we say the Gym Gang, we mean the Gymnasium Gang, a group of longtime martial artists and boxes known to have pulled a series of heists in the quarter century after they debuted with a big Victorian Railway's payroll stick up from a train at Ascott Vale back in nineteen eighty two. They've been with us a while, these guys in that one and each of their other heists over

about twenty four years. The gang members were as patient and well prepared as commandos on a mission, often posing as harmless workers by using clothes, props, and disguises.

knowledge of Chadstone. Is this one of the Jim Gang kingpins has always lived in the area, which makes him favorite for two unsolved robberies at the shopping center in one hectic period nearly thirty years earlier, thirty years before this Kennedy Watch theft, there were two robberies at Chadston. In February ninety four. There was an armored van robbery of one hundred and seven thousand dollars plus the security

guard's pistols. It was followed just three months later by an eighty thousand dollar robbery in eight people were coolly shot in the legs for daring to disobey orders not to resist or not to follow the robber. Investigators back then soon wondered if one or both of the nineteen ninety four Chadston robberies were in fact practice runs to pull together cash and guns ready for a really big heist.

The audacious two point three million dollar fake road crew robbery of an armor guard cash fan near the freeway entrance at the Cremorn end of Richmond just weeks after the second Chadston robbery. So what we've got here is too smaller robberies with guns of money at Chadsten shopping Center, followed within weeks by this great big one, which we've

often talked about on the podcast. The Gym Gang were and are hardened armed robbers capable of extreme violence, but investigators believe they were also happy to use sleight of hand and specialized in cultivating insiders to set.

the loot. In a notorious nineteen ninety four fake road gang heist at Richmond we just mentioned, an armored van was opened by a robber miraculously supplied with the right key, a plot device worthy of Hollywood and sort of Ocean's eleven stuff. Then there was the fire one hundred thousand dollars robbery at Meyer's City Store in nineteen ninety three. Every one of these crimes demanded nerve and timing, but each depended totally on inside information, just like the biggest

heists and hits in Australian crime history. A big reference point for the power of inside information is the great bookie robbery at the Victorian Club in Melbourne in nineteen seventy six. As most listeners will know, the very well rehearsed robbery crew had pulled together several layers of inside knowledge. One was that the first bookmaker's settling day after three Easter race meetings would be a bumper amount of cash, far more than at any other settling up that year.

Second was the fact there was a forgotten and unused side door to the settling room, linking it to an unused air landing in the building next door. A marvelous piece of inside knowledge, this door that was painted over was still there and could be accessed if you knew

where to do it. Third was that a bent senior policeman, the late Eric Jenetsky, it is said, could ensure that crime squad detectives who usually turned up for settling day acting as unofficial armed security for the bookies, were diverted at the last minute. They were sent on a wild goose chase down to Frankston or somewhere, leaving big bags of cash delivered by armored car virtually unguarded once it was taken into the settling room in the Victorian Club.

So all these three factors were at play. They were all inside information and that is what made the bookie robbery the perfect crime. But it didn't protect the robbers from underworld reprisals or from each other. When the ring leader Ray Chuck also known as Raymond Patrick Bennett, appeared in Melbourne Magistrates Court on minor chargers in nineteen seventy nine, his enemies knew he would be.

with his brother. In other words, the robber who had exploited inside information to stage the bookie robbery was in turn executed by enemies with inside information. Raychuck lived by the sword and died by the sword. The shooter, although widely suspected, was never charged over the brazen courtroom hit. His name was Brian Kane, and exactly three years later, perhaps not a coincidence, he was ambushed by two masked men in the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick in nineteen eighty two.

The hit team obviously had good information. When drug baron Tony Mockbell was flying high in the late nineties, he cultivated people who could provide information from pizza deliverers to friendly police and of course certain lawyers. No names, no pack drill, but Nicola Goobo comes to mind. It was a lawyer who warned him in two thousand and six, he would soon be charged with murder, a tip that let him stage his audacious escape on a yacht to

hide in Greece. I don't believe it was actually Nicolagobo that tipped him off, it was another lawyer. Mockbell might have remained a free spending fugitive for years if one of his gangs insiders, a man known as the Musician, had not switched sides and handed skeptical detectives a USB stick full of secret telephone numbers and bank details revealing Mockbell's Athens hideaway. So the drug baron who escaped using

inside information was caught the same way. The Mockbell equivalent of a previous generation, Robert Ossie Bob Trimboli, was also tipped off by a corrupt cop to flee the country in early nineteen eighty one to avoid being forced to testify at a looming royal commission.

escape from a much deadlier enemy cancer. When Trimboli died in Spain in nineteen eighty seven, with his long term lover Anne Marie Preslent at his bedside, legendary News Corp correspondent Bruce Wilson wrote words to the effect of if Robert trimbaally was our most wanted man, the second most wanted can sleep very soundly. Indeed, Wilson might also have made a crack about tracking elephants through snow, something that upset the Federal police, as I recall. But history is

on Bruce Wilson's side, of course. The truth is there's nothing quite as useful to a crook as inside information.