The art of the heist

I'm Andrew Rule. This is life and crimes. Well. One of the interesting crime stories this week was the brazen theft of forty five brand new unregistered cars or motor vehicles from an open yard, an open storage yard I think you would call it in Salmon Street, Port, Melbourne. Now this happened on Sunday afternoon, about mid afternoon, and sometime between that time and six thirty next morning on

the Monday morning, these cars were driven out. Now what we think happened is two chaps rolled up in a vehicle and they were wearing of course high viz vests because when you want to be invisible, you must wear high vis and because they had the orange high viz sleeveless vests on, they were able to wander over to the gate of this big open yard where these cars are stored after being brought off ships, and I think they were able to just cut the chain or otherwise

open it fairly easily. And interestingly, there was a big enough gap behind the gate that they opened for cars to come in and out. There were not lockable bollards in place or anything like that, so as soon as they opened those gates, I think probably just opened with bolt cutters. I might be wrong something like that. They were able to go inside and pinch cars. Now, it would appear that when these cars are brought in from

the ships they have to be driven off. They obviously have their keys in them, which they must leave in them either in the ignition or on the floor or somewhere, and they have a little bit of fuel, not much. It turns out that some of these cars were found not far away because they had such little fuel in them that they had to abandon them. But most of

them disappeared. That is forty five cars, including twenty odd Honda Civic late model Honda Civis brand new, and various types of van and various scoters and so on and so forth. I'm not sure which ones they thought were

the most valuable or the most resaleable. But I suspect that if the thieves get away with these cars, they will end up probably shipping them into state, you would imagine, and they're doctoring them up with false identities from other vehicles, maybe wrecked cars or whatever it might be, or maybe they stripped them for parts. They might be all sorts of ways of profiting from this crime if you have

so many brand new cars to choose from. It took quite a long while for the thieves to do this because in effect there were about ten people involved, and the police believe that what happened was having got into the car yard this handful of people, they then jumped on their mobile phones and called in their mates and mates of mates to turn up quickly and come along and help move cars. So they'd drive them out through the gate and then somebody else would jump in one

and head off, and they scattered all over Melbourne. Now the balloon has gone up on Monday morning, that is Monday morning, October the twenty first, I think it was, And by the middle of that afternoon the police had arrested one forty two year old woman who I think is from Paran, and that woman was arrested at broad Meadows, so I think she's a Pran resident arrested at broad Meadows. And there's relatively clear CCTV footage of a woman that we would presume is the arrested woman at the scene.

She's standing outside a vehicle that clearly these people have driven to the car yard. She's wearing big dark sunglasses surprise, surprise, and a black top and some fairly sort of dirty looking tracksuit bottoms. No surprises there. At the time of recording our podcast, it would appear that at least seventeen of these cars have been recovered, so not all of them got where they were going because they didn't have enough fuel or the crooks decided that some of them

they didn't want on. Presuming that some of these scooters that were easy to get out of the place may not be as profitable an item on the black market as some of the other vehicles, I think some of the others, like the Hondas and others, were a better

proposition for criminals to profit from. In effect, of course, the crooks had a convoy of cars leaving Salmon Street and then heading out into the urbs that would give police a bit of an idea which way they were heading, because they would be able to pick up some other security footage from different businesses along the way, and presumably there are traffic cameras and so forth set up that would give police a bit of an idea of where many of these cars went. Now, they are unregistered, which

means they've been driven off without number plates. So the giveaway for anyone who thinks they've seen this is brand new cars, no number plates, and some of them in fact still had the plastic sticky sheeting that they use to cover cars when they are being transported by ship. Some of them still had that stuff on them, so

they would stand out a bit. If you're out on a Sunday drive and you saw a couple of cars go past with no number plates, being driven by furtive looking people wearing black hoodies, sunglasses and possibly high vis vests, you would now know that you witnessed the aftermath of a very cheeky, brazen crime. But this is not the first time that such a thing has happened in that area. This reminded veteran reporters of other events, and one that comes to mind is the story recounted to this reporter

many years ago by David McMillan. Now, McMillan is someone that our listeners will recall is the man we dubbed mcvillain. Mcvillain is David McMillan, who I think was actually born in London to Australian parents. And some of you will recall that he grew up here in Melbourne and went to Caulfield Grammar with people like Nick Cave and others, and Christopher Scase I think also went there and various other people. And mcvillaan was always a very naughty lad.

I think he might have been expelled from Corfield Grammar for being bad. There was always talk that he was a person who would steal credit cards and cash, and that he would buy and sell drugs, et cetera, et cetera. He was always a clever, cunning, plausible kid, quick with a joke, quick with a smoke, and a good line of patter, and headed from an early age towards a life of crime. And David McMillan would go on to

become an international drug runner. He would go on to become someone who was locked up in Australia for a lengthy period of time and locked up in what we call the Bangkok Hilton, which is the biggest, baddest jail in Asia probably and he notably escaped from the Bangkok Hilton in Thailand using a very very ingenious method to get over the wall, and probably also using some of his ill gotten gains from drug running to bribe the very bribeable guards who were looking after him in the

Bangkok Hilton. And so having reminded ourselves about who David McMillan was, we will go back to his early days in Melbourne. Now when he's in his early twenties, this young fella, he's been kicked out a school, he's picked up the odd job in advertising in cinemas and other places, but he's starting to hang around with crooks. He's running

Heroine into the country. He was smart, he was cunning, he was clever, and he was a guy who took advantage of the system as it then was, and the system back in the seventies was open to exploitation and corruption. What he was able to do back then, and what cunning crooks did then, was to equip themselves with false passports that were absolutely genuine to look at and in a sense they were genuine passports, but they were made out to people in the wrong names. They were real passports,

but the names and photographs in them were false. And what he'd do is go to the death notices from around the time, say he was born, say he was born in nineteen fifty six. He go to death notices from around that time, and he would find the odd young child that had died, or baby a stillborn birth,

or a young child that had died. He would then find the details of that child's birth, often by going to cemeteries and writing down the details of their birth and so forth from the headstones, and that would equip him to go to birth, death and marriages and get himself a birth certificate in that person's name. And in that era, before computerization, the records weren't all linked up together, and so if you got a birth certificate, you know, basically typed up in hand written and all the rest

of it from the appropriate government office in Melbourne. I think one was in La Trope Street, it doesn't matter where it was. You could go there and get them and then he would take that and he could set up bank accounts and set up other means of identity, and that would be able to be used or abused manipulated to get a passport in that dead kid's name as if the child had lived and was now an adult.

And so there our friend McMillan would be with a passport that said Michael Jones or whatever it might be, and he was able to use that technique to get multiple passports for himself and others, and they would use those passports to travel the world and bring back Heroine.

The beautiful thing about the passports scam was that he could fly into highly suspicious destinations in Asia, such as Bangkok and places in Vietnam, perhaps the Middle East, India wherever places were known sources of cheap drugs, he could obtain the drugs. He could then fly out of those places using a different passport and go to somewhere like Sweden or something like that. Then he would fly into

London from Sweden. Then, depending which passport he'd used, he would then have established himself as having traveled to Sweden, then to London back to Australia. And so when the Australian authorities looked at whichever passport he produced, there was no sign of that guy having been in the Middle East, and therefore he would not be flagged for a search of his luggage. But of course what he had in his luggage was large amounts of heroin, and that meant

that mcvillain was bringing in a heap of stuff. His couriers were bringing in a heap of contraband heroin, selling it for tens of thousands of dollars a week. And he had so much money, so much cash, money that he wouldn't even count at all. He described once to me that he would jam it all on a table

with a weight on it. And he worked out that if you measured what he called nine inches, inches were what we used to measure things in the old days, and nine inches is roughly a man's handspan, and that amount of paper money in certain denominations, whichever, say, fifty dollar notes, was one hundred and forty thousand dollars or whatever it was, And so he had a rough idea just by looking at a pile of notes of particular

denominations how much money it was. But he didn't bother counting it too much, because it didn't really matter within a few thousand if he was missing some or had more just didn't matter to him. This is the man who, at the age of twenty two, was making his way in the criminal underworld of Melbourne, an underworld he'd never grown up in. He'd grown up in middle class in a suburban eastern suburbs. As I said, he'd gone to

court for grammar. His mother was a beautiful, stylish, fashionable woman who happened to live with one of the leading society abortionists of the era. So there was a bit of law breaking going on. But he wasn't a kid who had rubbed shoulders with bank robbers and all the rest of it. But now he started to do that because that was the way he rolled, really and he got mixed up with a really good little armed robber and truck hijacker, a low called Danny McIntosh who was

particularly good at those dark arts. And Danny McIntosh and some others have heard that they can pull a massive high in not Port Melbourne, but right next door in South Melbourne. The target is a place called Guthrie Trading. Guthrie Trading in those days in the seventies used to import guns, among other things, and worded leaked out this is the thing about guns, guns, cash and drugs. They

attract people. They attract a lot of attention. And the thing about guns is they attract the attention of not just crooks as in criminals. They attract the attention of people who like guns. So you'll get prison guards, you'll get police, you'll get ex soldiers, you'll get hunters, you'll get you know, possibly farmers. Guns are something that a lot of people are quite interested in, not necessarily because they want to rob banks or something, but they just

fancy them. And therefore it's wise not to talk about where they are, or where they might be stored, or where they might be imported. But someone somewhere had leaked that Guthrie Trading had a brand new consignment straight off the boat of something like one hundred and eighty brand

new pistols. There. This is Colts and it was Barretta's and it was a whole heap of brand new stuff worth good money on the legit market, worth good money, but worth a hell of a lot more on the black market, because people will pay for that sort of stuff. And what happened was Danny McIntosh was running the show, but one of the guys wearing the balaclavas with him we think was probably David McMillan, and I think there

was Danny McIntosh plus five others, six altogether. They go into this warehouse, the gun warehouse, with Balaclav's, with bags and with guns of their own. The gunman hold up the gun business or the gun place, the gun warehouse, and they fill all their bags with so many pistols that can hardly carry them. And then they leave wearing their bella clavers, and they I think threw them in

the backs of cars and things, and the way they went. Now, the police was so unhappy about this, so distraught that this had happened, that they sent out word to the underworld. In those days, the police were inclined to rub shoulders with certain members of the underworld. The consorting squad would consort with known criminals in order to find out information

and possibly even pass on a bit. And the word went out from the police who couldn't find these guns, they raided places, couldn't find them, and said, we want you blogs to make sure that those guns don't end up on the street in the hands of idiots where they will endanger the public, or be used for random crimes, or endanger police. So basicly, the coppers put the crooks on notice not to be selling those guns in pubs to lunatics, which was very nice of them really, and

indeed they were fairly careful. According to David McMillan, who did not want to incriminate himself, but he did say this, he said, they were broken up into seven different cases of guns. I think there might have been a total of seven people involved in this, and each case they stripped them down, pull them apart, coated them in oil so that they wouldn't rust or otherwise be harmed by the elements or anything else or moisture, and then each person stole away into the night with their cache of

stolen guns. And what happened to all of them we won't know. Probably most of them are still out there somewhere. It's possible that some of them ended up back in police hands and that some didn't. But the bit we do know is that if we trust David McMillan, and I don't know why you would, but anyway, this is his story. McMillan, who was a very flashy, pretentious character, as he later admitted, he had a beautiful leather suit mate and in this leather suit. He had leather pockets

inserted in this sort of a long top coat. So he was like some sort of cross between Batman and Wyatt Earth or something, or bat Masterson maybe, And he had these long leather lined pockets and he would use those instead of holsters. And what he had were two matched pistols, twenty two pistols with silences on. Now, the combination of a target pistol with a silencer ended up about eighteen inches long, which is in the modern money is around the forty centim say, are a bit more,

and that made them quite a clumsy item. And he had one on each side of his body in his coat, and for a little while there he said he used to wear this thing around. But he also on one occasion he wanted to recover some money from a fellow called Jacob, who owed some cash to David's girlfriend, Clelia Vigano. Clelia Vigeno was the daughter of a very famous and much loved Melbourne restauranteur, and Clelia ended up dying in a fire in fairly women's prison, which is very tragic.

But this is back before the tragedy of the fire, and David is trying to impress Clelia with his sort of criminal no how and all the rest of it, and as well as he's two silence pistols in his coat pockets. He carried a big heavy handgun, something like a three point fifty seven I think it was, and in it it had the heaviest load of copper jacketed bullets. These are the ones that will go through anything except an engine block. They're made for stopping cars when police

shoot at cars whatever. There he is in Clelia's parents restaurant building. It's a big building. It's got multiple floors. He is in the floor above where the restaurant area is and the pub area the bar area right. And it is about ten past ten in the evening, which was very lucky because if it had been ten minutes to ten, the bar below would have had quite a lot of people in it. It was ten after ten, which meant theoretically it should have been clear of people.

And that matters because while he's mucking around in the bathroom upstairs, as can happen, he accidentally triggers the trigger on the three point fifty seven, the big heavy handgun and the copper jacketed bullet ultra powerful heavy load et cetera. Goes straight through the floor. It goes off like a cannon. It goes straight through the floor, that wooden floorboards into the bar below. Now, as he pointed out later when he told this, had it been earlier, it probably would

have killed somebody. But no one was there and so it didn't hurt anybody. But the rest of the family got to know all about it. And when he came down for breakfast next morning, Cloudlya's father, mister Vigano, said, no more guns. If there's any more guns, well you won't be coming back here. And he was right, and for once in his miserable life, David McMillan took the hint and he gave up walking around carrying guns. As

he set himself, it wasn't really his go. Had he been even smarter, he would have given up running drugs, but he didn't, and in the end he would end up arrested and in jail in several countries around the world, and now in his late sixties, approaching seventy. In fact, it's hard to know whether he's inside or out. But he will die broke, and he will die with a very long criminal record. And that is the story of another heist south of the Yarra in Melbourne Town. 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 harold'sun 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 podcast's sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description