They got the lot

Andrew Rule. This is life and crimes. This month we've got a couple of anniversaries, both for the same man. That man is the monster. The late Graham Allan Kinneborough, one of the most popular gangsters who ever breathed in Melbourne. When he was shot twenty years ago on the thirteenth of December two thousand and three, he was probably more genuinely mourned by more people than any other well known

victims of the Gangland War. And this is because, over a long life, a long and productive criminal life, Graham Kinneborough had managed to make a lot of friends, and he'd often been a peacemaker and a negotiator when other people reached for their guns first. He had friends from Little Italy in Carlton to little Chicago down on the waterfront, and he was respected by old school police and old time paters and dockers, and by people in the fight game.

In fact, he owned the city building. I think it was Flinders Lane, I reckon I went there once where Barry Michael trained for fights leading up to his world title challenge in the early eighties, and the Munster bet big on Barry in several of his winning fights. Barry claims he never knew that the Munster, his patron and landlord and very good friend, was a safe cracker. But that's a matter for Barry. We're not in the business

of arguing with former world champion boxes. Man. They call the Munster new politicians and priests, punters and publicans, bookmakers and shoplifters. But he was especially fond of jockeys. Jockeys are pretty handy in his line of work. And the problem was no one knew exactly what his line of work was. Once in a coroner's inquest, when he was asked what his profession was, he said, um ah, and he hummed and hard and he said, oh that's right,

I'm a rigger. I'm a rigger. But he'd forgotten what he was saosed to be, But in fact he was a career criminal. He was once and this is why we're talking about him today. He was once one of the finest safe crackers in the world. That didn't mean he wouldn't dabble in other things, but safe cracking. He

was good. He wasn't the only good safe cracker. I've heard the names of some other people who worked at the same time, and some of them worked with him, But he was part of a small group known as a magnetic drill gang, who perfected a technique of cracking safes that were regarded as fairly well impregnable to normal safe cracking methods, and these things that you couldn't just stick a stick of jelly knite under, these big chubb safes that banks and other places started to put it

in the seventies because they were too big and too strong. And what Graham Kinneborough and his closest allies came up with was a mixture of medical and mechanical technology, and they used a magnetic drill which could be clamped to the wall of a safe or the door of a safe, so that the drill would enter precisely where you wanted it to without slipping or moving. And the other thing

they used was medical gear. They used a fluoroscope which could be inserted in the whole adrill to detect any movement. And a fluoroscope is like a portable X ray which can show you in real time movements inside a solid object. And fluoroscopes are used in medicine for doctors to poke them into parts of your body to see what's happening inside you, and are used in security applications at airports and places like that to scan luggage to see what's

inside the luggage. And Kinnebar and his mates used them to scan safes to see how the tumbler mechanisms worked in the locking mechanism. And having done that bit, they would take out a fluoroscope and then they would insert a thing called a sistoscope. Now a sistoscope or surgeons use it. It's a very fine, long, thin thing like a worm, which can be inserted into various parts of the human body to give the surgeon a picture of

what's happening inside your body. Classically used for bladder operations and things like that. These guys adapted that medical equipment so they could poke it in a hole in a safe and look down it and see the tumbles that they had to manipulate. And then they had tools that they could use to manipulate the tumblers and get the giant doors to open for them. And they'd learned to do this. I was self taught, and they'd learned to

do it. They say this is unprovable, but it's widely held to be true, by obtaining sophisticated safes at probably great expense, and setting them up in an empty warehouse or factory somewhere in Melbourne, and then they would go there with all this equipment practice cracking these safes until they got good at it. And this I find to be a remarkable thing. I think these are the aristocrats

of crime. Safe crackers, a breed that is almost extinct now because of technical advances that make safe cracking a bit of a no go zone for crooks. But even after most of his contemporaries decided that safe cracking was too hard, Graham Kinneborough made a big thing of it

back in the late seventies and early eighties. I think he and his mates pulled something like fourteen safe jobs, or similar to safe jobs some of them were strong boxes and safety deposit boxes, things like that, but they did a total of about fourteen different raids in less than two years in that era. Now, the big one, the granddaddy of the mall, was the Murwillumba bank job, and this is the one that happened on the twenty third of November nineteen seventy eight, which is pretty well

forty five years ago. Murwillumbar in those days and to some extent now, was one of those country towns that's the hub of a farming district, in this case the Tweed Valley area of the Northern Rivers region of northern New South Wales. Pretty productive region, I think, probably dairy farms, maybe some sort of subtropical cropping, a pretty productive area, particularly in that era. A lot of smaller towns dotted

around the district. And in those days, of course, banks were central to the lifeblood of any town, any district, and all dealings were in cash, and that meant that every fortnight, when government employees were paid and pensions were paid fortnightly, there would be a big influx of money fortnightly that would come in to Mwillumbar as the big central town in that area every second Wednesday, and so it was that on Wednesday, the twenty second of November,

a armored truck turned up and they unloaded quite a bit of money, as they did every second Wednesday, but because of the timing this is late November, there was even more money than usual because there was holiday pay loadings for all these public servants and government employees, and there was extra cash being brought in as you'd imagine, for banks and for businesses, shops and all the rest of it to handle the Christmas rush, the Christmas shopping. So it was a bumper crop of cash, and it

was unusually large. And it appears that crooks like God in mysterious ways, and that word of this big bunch of cash going into the Bank of New South Wales branch in Mcwillumbar had trickled down to little Old Melbourne far to the south, where Graham Kinterbory and his merry band of safe crackers were tipped off about it. Now we'll get to how that happened a bit later, but it is suspected that it was almost inside information from a rogue police person possibly, but obviously they knew that

there was good money to be had there. They knew that it was a country bank that was fairly easy to break into, that did not have an alarm system, and yet it had a big enough safe that all the local money would go into that safe or strong room before it went out to the smaller country towns.

It's a Wednesday night Thursday morning situation, and so on that Wednesday night, there's a few drinkers across the road at the Imperial Hotel, and down the road one hundred meters is a police station that's supposedly manned all night, but of course the probably one policeman in the doing the crossword, having a sleep in the cells or something. And I think there was an all night postal worker at the post office on the other corner, sorting mail or something. But you don't have to be told. No

one heard nothing. And what happened is that sometime that night, let's guess around midnight would make sense, because they needed most of the night to do what they did. Let's say around midnight, when the last drinkers have probably gone home and everybody's home in bed, someone has four door opened the back door of the bank, a back door of a bank in the bush, probably didn't present many

problems for expert safecrackers. They'd be able to open it with a skeleton key or whatever, and they got access,

and then they set to work. I used, as I listed before, the magnetic drill, which had a diamond tipped drill bit which would go through really hard metal and it would go in a precise spot, so they could go exactly where they wanted and to the exact depth that they wanted, so that they wouldn't actually screw up the tumblers that work the lock mechanism, but get them so close to it that they can manipulate the lock mechanism the tumblers, and then of course they used the

fluoroscope and the cistoscope and did their trick. All this takes time. It's very complex and exacting and precise work. I suspect it's really much like surgery that the guys doing this, we're doing something as complex and as delicate as most forms of surgery when you think about it, and that's not too den a great surgeon. So it just shows you how good these guys were at what they did. And in this case the operation was a success, but the patient, in the form of the bank died,

the bank lost its money. The robbers were able to empty the strong room, the vault, and they got one point seven six and change a million, which in nineteen seventy eight was a lot of money. It was the equivalent in twenty twenty three of more than ten million dollars, and it was in untraceable notes, mostly fifties and one interestingly, and so they were able to load all this cash, which would be a lot of cash, into bags or whatever.

And I think some took that there was a panel van parked in the side street that night, somebody noticed one, and so you'd think they probably did have a panel van, and they loaded it with money and the way they went, and no one knew anything until seven thirty next morning, when a passing security guard noticed that the back door of the bank was a jar. I think, and when aarn had looked, I found that's interesting. And then the bank people came in and they realized that there wasn't

much wrong. They didn't leave a great mess. They cleaned up after themselves, they didn't leave any clues. There were some things they looked up, and they saw there was a square hole in the ceiling where they'd removed perhaps tiles or something from the ceiling. Not sure why that was, except it might have been a potential escape route if

they heard somebody coming. Maybe they thought they could use some sort of rope ladder or something to get themselves up into the roof and get out that way, which would tell you, with their careful methodical way of doing things, didn't leave tools lying around, didn't leave anything that could

be used as evidence against them. And what they also did, and this bit is just delicious shebericking for the bank, is that they close the door of the vault and then they screwed up or removed a couple of the tumblers so that the door could never be opened again. They effectively sealed it shut. And so when the bank people get there after the security guards called them, they can't actually open the vault and check if the money's there,

so they don't actually know they've been robbed. They can see that something's happened, that there's a little net hole in it and there's been a little bit go on, but they don't actually know they've been robbed, and so they get local locksmith's there. They've got no chance. They fly in four Chubb safe experts, Chubb being a brand of safe from Brisbane, Brisbane to the local airport. They bring them in, these guys and the locksmiths spend five

hours trying to open the safe, no chance. In the end. In desperation, they get the local workmen from the tweed Shire. These are the guys that use bulldozers and dynamite and sledgehammers and chisels and all that stuff, and they get in there with jackhammers. They break open the wall of the bank, the actual wall of the bank, and they get to the back of the strong room which is

reinforced concrete. We're still reinforcing in it, and they smash it open and smash it open with machinery and then with jackhammers, and then with oxy welding equipment to cut the metal, and finally at four point thirty that afternoon, Now this is about twelve hours after the crooks have left, let's say, or eleven hours after they have left. They make a hole just big enough for the local police inspector,

chief inspector to poke his head through. So it's a hole about as big as of football and he pokes his head in and he pulls it out and he sees these immortal words, they got the lot. All the money was gone. It wasn't one dollar left in the vault. That phrase, they got the lot, became instantly famous because it went out on front pages everywhere, not only around Australia but overseas because it was just a great heist. It was a magic story. It was real Hollywood stuff.

No one hurt, no guns, no fear, no horror, just a lot of money vanishes. So it's the sort of crime that people can't help being fascinated by and sort of admiring. Really, that phrase then becomes quite well known around the district because a local shop owner got straight onto it and made details T shirts, caps, coffee mugs,

beer glasses. They used that phrase they got the lot, and they had it everywhere and it became the souvenir item former Willembar, much to the disgust of the local mayor and other people like that, who thought it was not a great way to promote the wonderful district. Meanwhile, the boys with the money have vanished. Now there's no proof who did this. There is not actually any forensic evidence that links Graham Kinneberg or Graham Kinniburg's tight knit

crew of safe crackers to this crime. However, it was acknowledged by police that a gang they called the Magnetic Drill Gang had pulled some fourteen jobs in quick succession, pretty big job some of them, and this included a massive jewelry heist in Lonstar Straight in Melbourne, and we talked about that job before on the episode called mister Munster,

the very good Crook. All these different jobs, another one with strong boxes, another one I think Bullion in Queensland, and interestingly and probably significant, inter Pol, when contacted about this, stated that no other safecrackers in the world used that modus operandi, that the use of the magnetic drills or something that no other gangs were doing in the way that this Australian gang was. And so it was fairly clear to the police and of course to other crooks

who was responsible. No one else knew how to do this, no one else was doing it. It didn't have their fingerprints all over it, but it was their signature crime. No one was hurt during the robbery, but the jungle drums were beating right through the underworld, and the jungle drums were saying, oh mate got one point seven plus million that in nineteen seventy eight was a startling amount.

It was a time when you know, most people running between one hundred and two hundred dollars a week, and a time when a lot of houses could be bought for between ten grand and fifty grand, depending where they were. So it just was a lot of money enough to set these guys up pretty well, maybe for life. And this attracted the sort of attention of people that we will call toe cutters. Now, toe cutters can take several forms.

One form would be jealous and violent criminals who are not much good at pulling robberies themselves, but feel that they could track down those who are good at it and extract money from them by torture and other means. It would also attract a particular brand of police, not only legit police who want to catch the crooks and arrest them, but rogue police who want to catch the crooks and extract the money from them before charging them, and so on, or maybe just extract the money and

bolt with it. So Graham Kinnibur and his mates were very aware of these dangers because people they knew in the Great Bookie Robbery in Melbourne of two years earlier. Many of them had come to sticky ends. It did not end well for a lot of the bookie robbers because they became targets of these toe cuts as well

as of the police. Kinnebarrough was always a thinker and well connected, and apparently he knew that a former associate of his, a very well known all around crook and pretty good crook, called Steve Sellers, that Stephen Sellers was dirty on him for not including him in the big mcwillem barr heist. And it would appear that Kinnerbarrough thought

that Sellers was a cop magnet. He was a cop bita and a cop hater, and he was getting involved in a lot of fairly public opposition to police and prison officers and stuff like that, and had a very sort of political twist to his activism this. Sellers, as well as being absolute kruk and Kinniburough didn't agree with any of that and thought it just attracted attention and caused trouble, and so he left him well out of

this robbery. Sellers resented that and was deeply unhappy, and Kinniborough, although he was usually a peacemaker, usually he played Kissinger rather than Dillinger. This time he realized that this would only have one ending. And early in the new year of nineteen seventy nine, either late January or early February, doesn't matter which. Stephen Sellers is in the Domain motel in South Era and comes out to answer a phone

call in the lobby of this motel. And someone must have known he was going to do that, because as soon as he picked up the phone and bent his head to talk, he was shot three times in the back with a twelve guard shotgun. Now that would be enough at point blank range to kill a buffalo, but

it didn't kill Stephen Sellers. He was rushed to hospital, where he was joined by fearsome criminal defender and advocate Robert Richter, among others, and various police who wanted to ask him if he had any words of wisdom to tell them about who might have shot him. He refused to got anybody in or speculate about who shot him. Wouldn't help the police because he was a police hater.

But it was widely held and indeed has never been really denied specifically by anybody, that Graham Kinneburough had pulled the trigger in order to ongoing bloodshed and violence and troubles for his own family, which showed that when it came to the point that this technical and analytical and tactical genius of a crook, a bloke who probably could have made a very fine commanding officer in the military, or probably could have made some sort of captain of

industry in business, that he had made a decision that Sellers was going to be dangerous for him and for his family. And interestingly, I draw this conclusion because we can get away with it. It's interesting to note that Sellers had upset a lot of police over the journey in Victoria and notably in Sydney, and perhaps the police didn't chase it as hard as they might have. That's possible.

As it turns out, more than twenty detectives from three states worked on the Murwillembar case, but they got exactly nowhere. No one claimed the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars reward on offer a lot of money in those days, and the robbery became part of folklore, criminal folklore. Of course, in more recent times, most of our listeners recognized Kinnerborough because of his association with the big players in the

underworld war. He was a guy that knew most people and was on good terms with most people in the Melbourne underworld. He was a figure who bridged the old fashioned waterfront painters and dockers crime times when organized crime in Melbourne was run out of Port Melbourne pubs by old guys wearing braysom bib overalls. And he linked that world with the world of Lygon Street and the smoothies driving around in black Mercedes and all that sort of stuff.

And he was respected and to some extent loved by a lot of people. Alfonse Gangitano, the old Marand brothers and the younger Morand brothers. He knew them all and was widely liked. Even some of the old time police couldn't help liking him, because there was always that grudging admiration for a safe cracker. He was an old fashioned sort of bloke who loved a bit of opportunity and if he got a chance to fix a race to shorten the odds on his way through, you know, cultivating jockeys,

he would do that. He was sometimes seen at places like Choice out in Hawthorne talking to a favorite jockey or two, often seen at the Flower Drum, the expensive Chinese restaurant in the city, favored by wealthy people, but particularly by crooks. And famously somebody said to him, once you know all that money you made over the years, Graham, what you do with it? And he said, well, you know, a lot of it gets wasted. He said, I reckon, I've eaten fifty grands worth of fried rice at the

Flower Drum. He kept his eye and he kept his hand in. He had an associate that will call Byron. He's dead now, so it's fine. And what they do they'd load up with a bit of hot stuff from the boutiques and shops. This would be high end clothing that had been stolen to water, a lot of it, and the thieves would get I think half its ticket value from the receivers, and then the receivers had sell it out at something like two thirds of its ticket

value to clients. And I know people who should be ashamed of themselves who can recall going to a motel I think in Port Melbourne or South Melbourne and there'd be the monster in his car out the front with his mobile phone waving them up so you can go up to room nine or whatever it was up an upstairs room. You had to walk up a flight of stairs to get to it, which added to the security

element of it. Made it harder for anybody to surprise anybody, and you couldn't get to the windows easily and you'd get waved up. You go up, you knock on the door and say, you know, Brian sent me, and Byron would let you in and you would be able to peruse at your leisure silk shirts, beautiful tweed jackets, that sort of thing, shoes sometimes and I know people are very well dressed who got their clothes from this method

the Monster traveling boutique. And once you'd finished, they'd pay cash to the man and they'd walk out, and then someone else would be sent up, and of course the Monster would be outside with his mobile length there was any chance of any body turning up who might be undercover police or something, he'd be able to warn or made upstairs and then be able to drive away and

himself from the scene of the crime. The Munster was a man who knew how to behave in almost any occasion, so it's no surprise to know that one of his offspring married the grandson or granddaughter of a Victorian state minister. So here is somebody whose family married into the family of a fairly prominent and very respectable I think liberal minister. And this was quite fascinating to some of the people at the wedding because they came from very different worlds.

And someone said when a monster gave a speech as the bride's father or wherever he was, it reminded them of Marlon Brando in his role as the godfather. And another couldn't help noticing that there were always four chaps wearing sunglasses standing around the munster, even though it was ten o'clock at night. It's just highly unusual for those circles.

But of course, as most of our listeners know, it ended badly on the night of the thirteenth of December two thousand and three, when Graham Kinilborough came home I think driving his second hand Ford Falcon. He wasn't one to drive flashy cars because they attracted attention, and he drives home to his substantial and prosperous house in a very prosperous street in QW Belmont Avenue, which is actually full of big Victorian double story houses, but his was

not the fanciest house in the street. It was just a good house. And if you're interested, it's just on where the little bend comes in the road in Belmont Avenue, down towards the cemetery end. He gets home late at night, I think sometimes between eleven and midnight, and on his way home because his wife, I think her name was Sybil, I think she got in touch and said, look, we

need bread and milk and whatever. And he's got an armful of groceries and he steps out of the car and he walks towards the front door, and sadly, there were I think two hit men waiting for him, and they opened fire. He got some warning that it was going to happen because he managed to pull out a pistol himself, drop his groceries, pull out a pistol and get off one shot. But he was too late and they shot him dead. A lot of people blamed the

little crook Andrew Venomon for this. Andrew Venamon, known as Benji, had killed many people during the Underworld War, and it was known that he would kill anyone on a contract basis if he were paid. And there is no doubt that close to Kinnerborough were very angry and very grief stricken, and they blamed Andrew Venamon, and it probably led to

Andrew Venamon's death. He, of course, was shot dead in a Carlton restaurant in a heated discussion with Mic Gatter and at the time Mick Gaddow quite understandably blamed Venomon for shooting his good friend Graham Kinnerborough. It turns out that it wasn't Venomin after all. The police soon worked that out. The police had actual surveillance tapes and bugs and all that which showed that Venamin at the time of the shooting was on the other side of Melbourne.

He was over in the Northern suburbs, and so they knew it wasn't Venamin. There's no doubt that two men were involved in killing Graham Kinnerborough, but only one of them was finally arrested and convicted of it was Stephen Asling, and he was convicted. But the other hitman, a man called Terence Blewett, was not arrested and convicted because he

was already dead. The underworld moves in mysterious ways, as we said, and he had been killed and buried in what was more or less a waste dump out in Thomastown because of some internal upheaval in the underworld, and quite possibly because he had knowledge of the death of Graham Kinneborough and it could be that he's co accused Asling decided to rub him out first. There is no honor among thieves, or very rarely, some would say that Graham Kinneborough had a little bit of honor more than most.

Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heraldsun 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.