He was once driving down King Street, Essendon, and he said to his companion, the smartest criminal in Australia lives in this street. And the other blog said, who's that and he said Stan James, and the other fellow said, never heard of him.
A judge who had.
Been a defense lawyer for a lot of those crims. He said to me that it's hard to be the best standover man in town.
If you've got.
A bitten out of your ear, it's not good for business. I'm Andrew Rule. This is life in Crimes. This week we're going to talk about an old time crook that no one knew was a crook except for a very small circle of people. We can talk about him at
long last, because finally he died. He died on October the twenty sixth, and the only reason we know that is that he's Golf Club, the only private golf club in the Western Suburbs, has put up a nice note saying that thirty year member Stan James has passed away and that he's a much loved husband of Lorraine and much loved father of Linda, which is exactly right. But
Stan James was more than a suburban hacker. Stan James, although he hardly darkened the inside of a police station or a prison in decades, was thought to be one of the cleverest criminal minds this country's ever seen. And the person that used that description of him is a former leading investigator in the arm robbery squad from the past, a person who is currently overseas and who may not even know that his old adversary Stan James.
Has passed on.
But this particular senior detective. When I say a senior detective, I mean an officer, someone towards the top of the robbery squad business. He was once driving down King Street, Essendon and he said to his companion, the smartest criminal in Australia lives in this street. And the other blog said, who's that? And he said Stan James, And the other fellow said, never heard of him. He said, well, he's the time and motion man who helped plan the great
Bookie robbery. And I believe he's been involved in plenty of other robberies as well, probably won every couple of years now. Even if that is overestimating the number of robberies that stan James had some knowledge of, there is no doubt that he was heavily associated with the Great Bookie Robbery, and that has gone down in Australian criminal history as one of the greatest tists since the Bush Rangers knocked off a stagecoach full of gold back in
the bad old days. Of course, most of our listeners will be very familiar with the Bookie Robbery because it's something that.
We refer to.
But just for those who've forgotten, it happened in April nineteen seventy six. It was on a Wednesday. It was at the Victorian Club in Queen Street in Melbourne. The Victorian Club was where traditionally all the big Melbourne bookies or Victorian bookies would meet after race meetings to settle
up money. This particular one was a bumper settlement of cash because it was a Wednesday after Easter and there'd been three major meetings over the Easter break, one on the Saturday, one on the Monday, one on the Tuesday, and those meetings were big. A lot of people had gone to them, and there was a poultice of money bet won and lost, and more than one hundred bookies had gathered at the Victorian Club to settle up and what they.
Would do there was.
The armored car would arrive from the armored car depot in North Melbourne and would bring in all the cash and that would be loaded in cash boxes. The cash
would be actually in canvas bags. The canvas bags would be locked into these big sort of iron cash boxes and they would be trundled in from the armored car below by security guards who would put it on trolleys wheeled in, get on the lift, take it up to i think the second floor, and take it out into the caged area they had in the Victorian Club where the bookies would count their money and pay out people that they owe money to and take in money that
they were owed. It was one of those sort of deals. Now, obviously the settlement day would be attempting target for an armed robbery, but the reason that had never been robbed in history before was that it was a reasonably secure place, or it seemed that way. It was upstairs in the city and there were some arm guards there who helped bring the money in, but also as an added insurance, and this was important. Normally, what would happen is that members of the arm robbery squad and or the major
crime squad would turn up on settlement day. Now, these police would do this not so much as a favor. They'd probably be slung some cash to turn up. They acted as unofficial escorts for the money. They would turn up to the distribution of the cash. They would hang around while it was being done. And of course these guys, large men standing around in cheap suits, they would all be carrying their regulation issue in their belts or under
their jackets or whatever. They be armed detectives there for settlement day normally, but on this particular day, this bumper day, when there's millions of dollars there, Guess what happened, and many people listening will know this. What happened was that a senior policeman, a man called Eric Jenetsky, God bless
his soul, he sent at the eleventh hour. He sent the detectives who would normally turn up to the settlement off on a wild goose chase to an alleged robbery attempt down at Frankston or something like that, a long way out of Melbourne, and they were sent there late in the morning. Off they went, and so they didn't turn up on time for the settlement, and everybody thought, oh, well, that'll be fine. It'll go smoothly as it usually does.
But amazingly, this was the day that the robbery are very well planned robbery Robbie that had been planned for many weeks or many months was enacted and unfolded. It was a brilliant robbery. It was based somewhat on the robberies pulled by the Wembley Gang in London. Over in England, these were the state of the art robbers over there. They would use stop watches, they used commando tactics. They were very organized, very well disguised, fast in, fast out.
Knew exactly what they were doing. Always war gloves, always wore Bella Clavis, the whole thing, no mistakes made. And a very dashing Victorian crook called Raymond Patrick Bennett, but known to his criminal mates as ray Chuck because his original family name was Chuck. When he was born and bred in northeastern Victoria at Chiltern, his family name was Chuck, so most crooks call him that anyway. Raymond Patrick Chuck alias Bennett, probably planned.
This robbery pretty well.
He put together a team of robbers, other good arm robbers from around Melbourne. He had been in England where he had done a lot of jobs with the Kangaroo Gang, famous scallywag Australians over there. He'd in fact come back to Melbourne to tea up some robbers here and then went back to England and then came back and he took all these robbery guys on a training camp up
to the bush outside of Canton. I think it was trained them all one of those areas up there, and he trained them up, got them off the booze, got him on the steak sandwiches or whatever, and water and cups of tea, and did exercises and all the rest of it boot camp stuff. And so it was that this was very well planned and.
Very well executed.
But it required somebody really smart, really organized to help organize this because there are a lot of moving parts in a big robbery. You've got half a dozen guys with guns. You've got to have a nus escape route. You've got to know how to get into the room quickly, swiftly, safely. You need everything sorted out so nothing goes wrong. And that required a particular sort of expertise. And Stan James, i am assured, was just the man. And I was told about Stan James by a racing identity a few
years ago. This racing identity said to me, you should look up the old newspaper cuttings and you'll notice that in the months after the Great Bookie Robbery, a couple of people were charged over the bookie robbery, but they were subsequently acquitted. They were cleared, But three people were charged over the bookie robbery. One was Normy Lee. We've
discussed him here at length. Norman Lung Lee was a very good crook, as they call him, who was also a dim sim manufacturer around Essendon, the sort of bloke that you probably didn't want to eat his dim sims in case they had tattoos. But the other two who charged with Normanly were two women. One was Normanly's common law wife, a woman called Lorraine Shirley Hogan who was thirty in nineteen seventy seven, just so we get this right.
And the other one was another woman called Lorraine, which tells us just how common that name was in that era. And she was guess what she was, Lorraine Mary James. She was the ever loving wife of Stanley Ernest James. And that is the link which shows that the police had found these people with large amounts of cash that they couldn't really explain, and had charged them over handling
proceeds of the bookie robbery. A magistrate subsequently decided generously that there wasn't enough evidence to send this up to a higher court, and so the magistrate discharged normally and
the two and they walked. But it remains a fact, a legal fact, that all three of them were charged over the proceeds of the bookie robbery, and that would suggest that the police, way back in nineteen seventy six seventy seven, suspected that the James gang, that is, Stan and his wife Lorraine, were involved somehow in the Bookie robbery. So hooper Stan James, Well, he's a man of mystery.
We even are having trouble finding a photograph of him because he was very camera shye, like his associate mad Dog Cox Russell Cox, not his real name, was notoriously camera shy. When he went to a wedding underwe wedding, the photographer would come around and photos would be taken, but suddenly his chair would be empty. He would go outside, he would go to the bathroom. He would not be photographed, and so there'd be five people at the table or
thirteen people at the table, whatever. No sign of Russell. Same with Stanley. Very camera shy, and there's every chance that there is no photograph of Stanley Ernest James publicly available. Probably only his nearest and nearest have some snapshots which they're unlikely to.
Make available to us.
The fact that Stanley James died in the last couple of weeks means that we can now talk about him. So frankly, we've had to sit on this information about him for so long. But it's a chance to go back through a story which we've half told in the past. And the story we've half told in the past is about a house at fifty one King Street in Essendon, and that's the house that Stanley and his bride Lorraine.
Bought shortly after the Great Bookie Robbery.
Amazingly, they came up with the money to buy that house in I think early nineteen seventy seven and if not late seventy six, but it was certainly in the months after the Bookie robbery they bought the house at fifty one King Street, Essendon. In those days, King Street tended to have these old weatherboard houses built. I think between the Wars sort of twenty thirties era, and this was one of the older ones. It was a sort of a simple double story house, and double story only
in this way. It had a tall gable and you could get up through a manhole in the bathroom, and when you got up into the roof space, it was revealed that there were floorboards that had been laid over the roof joists, so you could walk around up there. And so what you had was not literally a double story house, but a single story house with a very cavernous roof space with flooring added. So that was like a giant attic or storeroom. And this is the interesting thing.
After the Great Book of Robbery in nineteen seventy six, the Bookie robbers, those who were known to have or suspected to have pulled this robbery. The six gunmen who actually went in and did the robbery, plus their helpers. There was a guy to drive the van that took the money. There was another guy who jammed the lift with a chair in the Victorian club. There were others who know, somebody else supplied a venue to count the money.
There were probably you know, seven, eight nine people heavily involved, plus Stanley. Those guys came under great pressure from other crooks. And we are going to call the other crooks the toe cutters. And they were in no particular order. There was the Cane brothers in Melbourne who were standover guys in Melbourne. Brian Kane, good standover man, golden gloves, boxer, a bit of a gunman, didn't like guns, but carried
one or had one carried for him often. His brother Leslie Kane, who was very violent guy, extremely violent, very tough, very fierce wild. And they had a third brother called Raymond, I think his name was Ray Kane, known as Mussels. He wasn't as well known as the other two, but they were a very tough standover guys around town. And they had a sort of a following in their own circles of painters and dockers and that sort of crowd that went to the boxing and races and two up
and all that sort of stuff. And I think Brian Kane collected money from pubs and speed bookmakers and two up games and all the rest of it, as you might. When the big robbery came off, there was rising hostility between opposing camps of crims and the guys that had
pulled the robbery. They were well known reasonably quickly because while they were pulling the robbery at the Victorian Club, one of them, who was striding back and forth with a machine gun to keep all the bookies lying on the carpet face down, one of them had spoken a couple of times and he said to Ambrose Palmer. Ambrose Palmer was there on that day. Ambrose Palmer was not a bookmaker. He was a former league footballer and former boxer who was a very well known boxing trainer in
Melbourne in the sixties and seventies. And Ambrose Parmer trained, among other people, that great champion Johnny Famershon among others, and he was well known to train fighters at the gym's at Festival Hall underneath Festival Hall, and a lot of that Millieure the boxing gym Millieu.
Rubbed shoulders with crooks.
A lot of crooks went to the fights, and a lot of fighters knew crooks and was one of those things. The guy was the machine gun, who of course had a mask on, is walking back and forth keeping everybody lying down during the robbery while his mates are busy cutting open the locks on the cash tins and stuffing the cash bags into bigger bags and so on, and
he's forcing everybody to keep their heads down. And when Ambrose Palmer looked up, he said something like and that means you too, Ambrose, meaning he knew who Ambrose was, and Ambrose Palma recognized the guy's voice.
Ambrose forgot to mention.
This to the police when the police he breathed them later, but funnily enough, he got his memory back when he was back at the gym a few days later training fighters, and he mentioned to somebody that he thought he heard so and so's voice during the robbery, and of course word leaked immediately.
That it was this guy. This guy, this.
Guy, and the whole underworld would have had a fair idea of who done it, because that's the way the underworld is. It's a village, it's a small business, and only a handful of specialists had the nerve and the ability and a wherewithal to get away with a big robbery like this. There's just not many to choose from. And the guys who didn't do it knew very well it wasn't them, so they knew probably who did do it.
And so we've got this situation where you've got rival gangs eyeing each other off, and the toe cutters, as we'll call them, would include the cane boys, because those stand over guys who probably resented the fact they weren't cut into this crime, that they weren't a.
Part of it.
There would be rogue coppers who we need not name, but let's name a couple. Paul William Higgins. Paul William Higgins, I think would be one who'd be qualify as a standover copper who was a crook and a very tough guy. He would probably count as a toe cutter who'd be very inclined to stand over crooks if he could abduct them and threaten them and put guns in their ears and in their mouth forced them to give up the cash. There would be various robberies and aja crime squad detectives.
The only ones we're talking about would be ones who are now dead. Of course, the ones who were alive, clearly, we're very honest. The dead ones who were crooks. There's a few of those who might have been partial to debriefing crooks and checking out where the money had gone and perhaps trousering some.
Of it for their troubles, probably for charity.
Or for the Policeman's Ball or something like that. And then there was a fellow good Linus Patrick Driscoll, and he was a very nasty piece of work. They Colleen Jimmy the Pom, but he was actually more Irish. But he'd gone, i think from Ireland to England, and from England he'd come to Australia to the colonies to spread his particular brand of ill will. And he was a
very tough, mean man. I think he used to do things like work as a barman in pubs, but meanwhile he would kidnap less a gangster us and torture them to get their money. He was a toe cutter. He literally used to get bolt cutters and cut people's toes off in order to get them to reveal where the money was. And these were the sort of people who came after the bookie robbers. And Raymond Patrick Bennett alias ray Chuck was sort of the leader of the Bookie robbers,
and he thought he would get in first. He could read the play and he thought I'll get in first. And he and a couple of his mates, and I'm going to say it was a mister prender Gaston and mister Michelson, one of whom's no longer with us. They went out to one Turner I believe, to a flat in Monturna or an apartment where Les Kane and his wife Judy and their two little kids were sort of living there quietly, well away from their usual house in
the suburbs. Les Kane knew that trouble was brewing, so he took his wife and kids out to the outer suburbs because there was basically a war had been declared. There had been an incident in a Richmond pub which had really ignited this underworld war on what it was, it was a fight between I think Vinnie Mickelson and Brian Kane. It was certainly Brian Kane on the receiving end because in this barroom brawl, a very savage barroom brawl, Brian Kane, who was a dab hand with his fists,
he was a very good fighter. The street fighter opposing him and I think it was Mickelson bit a piece from Brian Kane's ear, quite a large chunk, which embarrassed Brian Kane. Later he grew his hair down over his ears to cover up the scar, but as a judge said to me many years later, a judge who had been a defense lawyer for a lot of those crims. He said to me, he said, it's hard to be the best standover man in town. If you've got a bit bitten out of your ear, it's not good for business.
He put his.
Finger right on it that once. If you're a big time tough guy who's a standover man, you can't really go around showing people that you've had a piece bitten out of your ear, because it means you are not the toughest guy in the Valley of death. You are the second toughest. And so it meant war, and it meant the Caine brothers were against the.
Bookie robbers, and the bookie.
Robbers got in against les Kin, who was very dangerous, very mean. They went out there to the place in Montana. Les Kane and his wife, Judy, and the little kids, two little kids, had been out for a Chinese meal, which just shows you that Chinese food can get you killed. It's not just the MSG. They got home to the Monturna flat and Judy Kane noticed that their little dog, their little dashound. I think it was a little short legged dog, a miniature dashound. I'm gonna say his name
was Freda. Might be wrong, might be wrong, but anyway, his name doesn't matter. And she noticed that. She thought she'd left the dog in the backyard or in the house, and here it is outside the front door of the house, and it's been put up on a chair that's sitting on the porch or on the veranda beside the front door. And she thought, that's funny. That little dog can't jump that high. He can't jump up onto a chair. His legs are too short. Somebody must have lifted him up
and set him on the chair. And this is sort of going through her mind, but she's not taking a lot of notice. She just thought that's funny. Maybe somebody walking past us seeing me. I don't know. Anyway, they opened the door, they go in and guess what. There's three masked men with automatic weapons. They've actually got twenty two rifles that have been modified so that they shoot
like machine guns. And the two of the guys grabbed Le's cane and dragged him into the bathroom, and the other one gets Judy and the kits and shoves them into a bedroom and slams the door, so they can't hear or see what's happening. They shoot les Cane in the bathroom. They shooting comprehensively in the head and elsewhere, lots of bullets. They dragged him down the hallway, so there's blood and brain matter and stuff all the way down the hallway, and they liim next to the front door.
And then they apparently backed his own car, pink Food Futura. They must have got the keys for it, and they back it in and they drag his body out and put it in the car. I think there was a fourth man out there doing driving for them. And the fourth man may well have been a blow called Dennis Smith alias Greedy Smith, a big fat guy who was a very well known crook, very well liked by certain other crooks around town. And he might have been the fourth guy in the hit team. And here's the thing.
The pink Ford Futura and les Kane's body were never ever found, never seen again. The suggestion is that both the body and the car were taken, possibly to a car crushing plant in the Northern suburbs, where they were crushed up to the size of a bread bin something like half a meter by half a meter by half a something like that. And once that happens to you, there's not a lot left, particularly in those days pre dnaight.
So the smart money says that's what happened. The car was melted down with the body in it, which would mean no sign of anything, and presumably the guns as well, a whole lot never found. Judy Kane woman, I've met, a very impressive woman that most.
People really like. She's well liked.
By all who know her, including police. She was staunched the way that underworld wives and mothers were in that era, and she called up her in laws, the dead husband's parents, and they all joined together and they cleaned up the entire house. They cleaned up the blood and everything else, and they said nothing. They said nothing to anybody. And it was only when police got to hear about it from other sources and came looking for les that she
said anything about anything. But she certainly did not name the perpetrators, although she was pretty sure she knew who a couple of them were, because she mixed in those circles, and she knew some of these guys' voices and the way they walked and the way just the way they looked. Even if they had a mask on, she'd know them. She's pretty sure she knew who they were. It became a parent of the police who'd done it. The police
couldn't nail anybody for it. Meanwhile, Raymond Patrick Bennett, ray Chuck, he thought the best player to be was in jail on a minor charge over the ensuing time. The Leskane murder has happened in nineteen seventy eight, which is, let's say,
eighteen months after the Great Bookie Robbery. Bennett decides that the situation is so hot after that that he'd be safer in jail, and so he knows he's got a little warrant out for him over some relatively minor offense, and he hands himself into his lawyer or whatever, and
he goes to the watchhouse. He goes through the City Court, the old Melbourne Magistrates Court, which is that beautiful old building where ned Kelly was sentenced back in eighteen eighty and its opposite the Russell Street Police Headquarters Russell Street Police Station as it was.
He's led through there.
I think it was November the fourteenth, was the week after the Melbourne Cup, after the nineteen seventy nine Melbourne Cup which was won by Hyperno. And he is led out of the cells into the Court one and then the magistrate, Darcy Durgan says, mister Bennett or mister Chuck, mister Bennett, I think they call.
Him, you've got to go up to Court twelve.
And then two detectives from the robbery squad from Memory accompanied him. I think it was a mister Strang and a mister Glare. With the detectives, they accompanied the prisoner through the body of that court Court one, where I was sitting as a very young reporter, and they led him out and upstairs to I think Court twelve it was called. And I was just about to follow him up there to cover that case when we heard the
shots bang bang bang. Now I think three shots are a fusilated shots at least three, and I knew it was a gun, and I knew it was a only heavy calibar, and I knew it wasn't a car backfiring. You can always sort of forgive one bang. You think it could be a car, or it could be something dropping somewhere, it could be from a construction site. But when you go bang, bang bang, it's different, you know
it's a gun. I got up to go out, and by this stage we'd heard running feet and yells and screams because the man who'd been shot, Bennett Chuck, had run downstairs from Court twelve, covered in blood and police were yelling. People were yelling. Bystanders were yelling. It was a very scary situation, and in fact, I think police downstairs thought it was an escape attempt, that it was a fake shooting to stage an escape, but it wasn't.
He had been shot in the torso he was dying on his feet by the time he got to the bottom of the stairs he collapsed. He was picked up and taken to around the corner to Vincent's I think, which is just nearby, and I think he was either dead on arrival or died on the operating table.
He was dead.
And that was the execution of Raymond Patrick Bennett, alias Ray Chuck. And that execution, without doubt, was carried out by Brian kan the older brother of Les Kane, the man who had been abducted and killed eighteen months earlier.
And Brian Kane made good his escape from court in a way that I've described here before, a very convoluted escape route, but very well planned out to the backyard of the court where there had been a piece of tin bent up so he could jump through the back of the shed where the magistrates used to park their cars and into the r mit car park as it then was waiting for him. I am told on impeccable authority was the other brother, Muscles Caine ray Kine, who
is now dead, so it's not a problem. Who drove him to the airport and they went for a long holiday to Perth and let the scene quiet and down. And as we've said here before, there is no doubt that some police were complicit in that shooting, not a lot of police, but a couple, because somebody bent up the back of the magistrates shed where they parked their cars,
and it was all very beautifully executed. So ray Chuck's execution in the City Court reverberated through the underworld and that had a knock on effect, and that knock on effect was felt immediately by Stan James and his wife in their little house in King Street, Essendon. The remarkable thing about the house at fifty one King Street, the one that was bought by mister and missus James was that they left it very suddenly after the shooting of
Raymond Patrick Bennett in the City Court. So in November nineteen seventy nine, Raychuck Ray Bennett is shot dead at the City Court. This is really up the ante. And that same week Stan James and his wife decide they are leaving their house at fifty one King Street in Essenon and they are going into state, back to New South Wales where they originally came from. And that is why an agent that they appointed rented that house out just before Christmas that year, or in late November that
year to a young fellow called Michael Hinch. Michael Hinch was a trainee train driver and he is a smart, observant young fellow, which is what you've got to be when you're a trained driver, because we don't want people driving trains who aren't observant and they are not smart.
And he was both of those things. And young Hinch remembers it clearly because he noticed how much security was around the house, and the agent, being an agent, told a porky He said it was a little old lady had lived there and she was nervous about things, and so she had bars on the windows, and she had
deadlocks on the doors. But it was a bit hard to explain everything that was there because there was a steel plated door which was up behind the normal front wooden door, so it was an extra door to make it much harder to break into. Not only that, somebody had bolted big brackets either side of that door, so you could drop a piece of steel or a piece of timber across behind the door to basically barret shut against any sort of invasion, so someone would need a
battering ramp to get to you. This is in addition to barred windows and so on. Now there were deadlocks all over the place. The whole place was deadlocked. In fact, young Michael Hints, who I think was just married at the stage, he said he used to take the keys, the house keys to bed at night because he said, I was frightened if there was a fire, we'd be locked in and.
Never get out.
I needed to have the keys where I can use them, get them quickly. Then he noticed something that subsequently he found out the police had not noticed. He noticed that there's a fireplace in this house, in the main living room. It's in a corner. But instead of sort of being at the correct angle. It was out from the wall a bit and it was at a funny angle. He said, it was about fifteen degrees off what it should have been. It just wasn't symmetrical. And he thought, that's weird. And
you couldn't use the fireplace. It wasn't actually set up so you could light the fire because the chimney didn't align with the fireplace. And he must have been told the fire is not working or you can't use it something. Anyway, he thinks, that's funny. He's noticed outside on one of the exterior walls there's an air event event in the wall. That's funny. Why was there an event in the wall. He goes into the bathroom mondaye. He looks up and he notices that there's a man hole, very neatly cut
in the bathroom above the shower or something. He said, ah, there's a manhole. So he gets a chair or bladder, climbs up through the manhole and he gets into the roof. And as we've already explained, the roof is a big space. It's got enough room that you can walk down the middle of the gable. You know, it's at least two meters high in the middle, and somebody has very kindly laid floorboards over the roof joists or ceiling joists, so that you've effectively got a floor to walk on. It's
like a big storeroom up there. Well, that's not that unusual. But when you walk to the front of the house along with these floorboards, to the very front of the house, he saw that it was open to the elements that had large wooden trellis, and you could actually see out the trellis.
It had big gaps.
In it, and he said you could stand up there and you could look out and you could see down the street both ways. You could see people coming in the gate or from the right or the left. You had a really good view of the street and of anybody approaching.
He said.
There was another funny thing. He said, the trellis was open. You could poke something through it, like a gun. And normally it'd be glazed, or to have weather boards, or to have at least flywire or something. It was open so you could poke something through it if you so wanted.
And what gave him the idea of guns was that on either side of this opening onto the street there were U shaped swivels, and the U shaped swivels were a little bit like rolic that you put in a rowboat to row with with the yours, very.
Similar to that.
And he said, what they obviously were, it seemed to him, were perfect things to rest a gun in that you could swivel around from right to left, left to right, and you could cover the driveway and the street. And he said that house was impregnable. If somebody was attacking, you could get up there and you could take on a dozen attackers and clean them up before they could break open your front door, because the front door was very,
very heavily fortified. And he thought, well, that's interesting, isn't it. So he walks back into the big open roof space and he goes over near the chimney, the four said chimney above the a four said crooked fireplace, and he sees beside the chimney, in a very odd spot, a smallish trapdoor, very neatly done, very fine piece of work. You could hardly see it. And he gets a pocket
knife or something. He lifts the trap door and he sees a light switch, and he turns on the light switch and he looks down into the gloom, and he sees it's a shaft. It's a narrow space down beside the chimney, a hidden cavity in the corner of the wall behind the fire that has been moved out. The fireplace has been moved out, and there's his hidden cavity, essentially the size of an open fire, let's say. And in that tiny cavity were two tiny little stools you
could sit on. Only room for one person, he thought, but two stools, And on one of the stools was an ashtray full of cigarette butts. So someone had sat in that space and smokes cigarettes. Hence the air vent that went to the outside of the house. This was a very cunningly contrived piece of engineering so that you could hide in that house, or hide a wanted person in that house so they would not be found and fighting. They had water and some food, they could stay in
that space for quite a while. So our man Michael Hinch is sort of interested in this, puzzled and intrigued. He's busy though he's studying for his next step up in the train driver's exams. He's studying like hell to get his final exams. And it's late in nineteen eighty. So this is one year after he's rented the house and one day there's a knock on the door and to see the agent, the same agent who told him as a little old lady that had had all this security.
And the agent said, oh, look, sorry, Michael, you're going to have to move out the end of next week because the owner and his wife are coming back. Apparently this situation has aulted. They want to come back and live in their house again, and you left, move out and find somewhere else. And oh, he said, well that's not real good. I've got these exams coming up at the end of the week. And you know, anyway, he wasn't happy, but he knew he had to do it.
No sooner the agent has gone. Then two detectives turner from them robbery squad, if not the consorting squad. There heavy heavy duty detectives, and they introduced themselves and explained that the landlord was not a little old lady, but it was a fellow that they were very, very interested in. And they said, we want to make sure we know what he you know, what he's up to. Can you get us some keys? We'll borrow spect of keys from you,
so we can get in and out. Please, perhaps you and your wife would like to go for you know, account to you or a count of lunch or something. Go out for a while. He said, when you get back, I know you're only here for a week or so, but maybe don't say anything that you don't want us to hear. He was giving the tip off they're going to bug the hell out of the place. So the
police have installed bugs all over the joint. Obviously, our man Michael Hinch moves out to a flat somewhere or whatever, and Stan James and his wife Lorraine moved back in. But I understand that despite the fact there was so many bugs, the Jamess never said anything that was worth overhearing. The thing about Stan James, he not only didn't say
anything at home, he never said anything anywhere. He was so good at keeping a low profile and so subtle and so good at it that it's clear that he played a crucial part back in nineteen seventy six in
setting up the Great Bookie robbery. And there is no doubt that the man who did the heavy thinking about how to do it, how to get person A in position Person B somewhere else, was the late Stan James because a few things had to happen in the bookie robbery back in seventy six, and one was you had to know that there was an unused door in the wall of the upstairs room where they did the settlement, that the settling, the settling of the bookie's money, and
that door had been left there as a result of renovations and building works done years earlier, and the builders that had to have access to the building next door, and they had this doorway so they could move from one building to the other through the party wall into a landing and unused landing in the building next door. And very few people would actually remember that that door was there because on the Victorian club side, it didn't
have a knob. It just had a little bolt down at the floor level, and it was all painted over the same color as the wall. It was plastered and painted much like the rest of the wall, and so it was virtually invisible unless you knew you were actually looking at it. But the Roberts knew all about it,
and that was where they hid. They hid through that door on the landing in the building next door until they knew the precise second that they should whip open the door which they'd a prayer range they'd been in, and cut the bolt and were able to force it open swiftly and step into the room, armed and masked, as if they'd arrived in a spaceship. It was just amazing that one second they're not there, the next second
they're there. This took everyone by surprise, including of course the armed security guards who were by this stage sitting down eating their free piles and sandwiches and a cup of tea. And it was a beautiful thing. It's well held that there was an inside man at the club who infiltrated the club, the Victorian Club, which was mostly
attended by bookmakers and racing people and some lawyers. Interestingly, and the former president of the club has told me in recent years that they had noticed that this fellow had sort of insinuated his way into the club. He said, was pretty casual. We didn't force everybody to sign the book or whatever.
He said.
This bloke, he used to wear a suit and send a nice, pleasant bloke, and he was a good listener, and he would come in and attach himself to a group of drinkers and have a chat about this and that, and the weather. We thought he came from Adelaide, said the President. He said he was something to do with transport business from Adelaide, and he'd move around from one
group to the other and chat away. But looking back on it, they think he was the guy that was busy soaking up the atmosphere, soaking up the exact meat mentions of the room, the exact places where the doorways were, and all little facts that the robbers would need to know. And they think that this is the guy who worked out precisely how long it would take to rob the place, what you would need to cover, how many men you'd need, how many guns you'd need, how many bags you'd need,
just all the gear you need. You need the big bolt cutters, you need certain equipment to get away with it. And that Stan James was the brains who did the time and motion.
Study for the Great Bookie Robbery.
I'm told as recently as today by someone who's great and good friends with a former armed robbery boss. When I say an arm robbery boss, an armed robbery detective boss, a senior policeman, I'm told that he was regarded as Australia's cleverest crook.
Who was never.
Caught, Stanley Earnest James Crook, who was never caught, and who never fired a shot in anger. No doubt, some of the things we've talked about today are familiar because some of this story touches on stories we've told before. And if anybody out there feels that they want to know more about it and go back and research it again, they can go back and hear about the Great Bookiey Robbery in previous shows in depth, and we will include the names of each separate episode in this show's description.
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