Gangland Robbers (30 page)

On 16 August 2000 Nylander was about to take down another one or two in Port Road, Hindmarsh, when police were alerted that a man had been seen acting suspiciously there over a number of days. Two police patrol officers went to a section of the Port Road median strip that was near two banks. As the officers closed in on Nylander, they saw he was wearing sunglasses and a cloth cap similar to a baseball cap. Both officers noticed that the undersides of his fingers, thumbs and palms were completely covered with a skin-coloured medical-type adhesive tape. They also noticed a bulge at waist level at the back of Nylander's clothing.

When they spoke to him, he gave his name as John Graham Palmer, along with an address, and said that a friend had dropped him off in a car, in which he had left his identification documents. The officers seem to have been satisfied, at least to an extent, as they returned to their car. They next saw Nylander in Port Road, driving a blue Nissan in the opposite direction. When they started to follow him, he accelerated. They followed him into a cul-de-sac, where they found him outside the car, squatting at the open driver's door.

As the officers got out of their car, Nylander stood up and shot at them twice, missing both times. In return, they shot him. One bullet lodged in his chest. Despite this, Nylander managed to escape, catching a train from the local station, and telephoning an offsider to come and collect him. Like so many others, Nylander had had his sights set on a new life in the Far East, but was caught in Victoria when he applied for a new passport.

In 2002 Nylander received a thirty-two-year sentence, with a twenty-four-year non-parole period, then the longest South Australian sentence for a bank robber. It was reduced on appeal to twenty-six years, with a twenty-year minimum, to give him the opportunity of some supervised parole. In 2007 he sued the State Government, claiming he had caught hepatitis C from unsterilised clippers when being given a prison haircut. But even had he won the action, Nylander did not live long enough to benefit from the spoils or, indeed, the Appeal Court's kindness.
In 2008 he died in a hospice
, where he had been sent from Yatala, suffering from cancer.

Those who think armed robbery is just a question of choosing a bank, getting hold of a gun and pointing it, might profit by studying the case of Craig Robert Beale, known as the Polite Bandit because he wrote
apologies to his victims. Beale took his profession seriously, and practised shooting at the VIP Club, Browns Plains, south of Brisbane, both before and after robbing a bank at Sunnybank Hills. This was one of six robberies he carried out over a two-month period in 2000, while still on parole from a seven-year armed robbery sentence given to him in 1994. He also bought a semi-automatic pistol from a Brisbane gunshop for a little under $700. In 2004 he received twelve years.

While on remand, Beale sent a message to the police that he would be prepared to discuss his crimes. When the police officers arrived and went to shake Beale's hand, he punched a detective in the face, and picked up an additional nine months for the assault. When Beale learned the officer had won a criminal injuries compensation claim, he sent a threatening letter with coded remarks such as ‘Say hi to JFK', warning that he, Beale, had means of watching him.
For this, he received another three months
.

In the 1990s 45-year-old Peter Patrick Clune and Andreas Gergis carried out a series of interstate robberies, until they were captured after a 1996 one in Marion, South Australia. At about 10.45 a.m. on 14 November 1996 two men, wearing obvious disguises including wigs, dark glasses and false moustaches, and armed with hand guns, held up the Commonwealth Bank branch at Marion shopping centre. Cash in the amount of $355 000 was taken, and three hand guns stolen from the Armaguard personnel, one of whom was shot. The men ran to a stolen white Ford Meteor sedan, which had been parked close by in the shopping centre car park, and drove off. It was traced within a matter of hours.

Gergis, using a false name, packed the money, guns and disguises in a case and airfreighted it to Melbourne, where it was to be collected the next day. The police intercepted the parcel and repacked it, and the pair were arrested when they went to Tullamarine to collect it. ‘Meticulously planned, brazen and calculatedly dangerous', said Judge David, sentencing them to sixteen years each, with thirteen to be served. The pair were also suspected of a 1995 ACT robbery of two Brambles guards, which netted $200 000. Clune and Gergis had been scared off when they waited in a stolen car in Perth for a cash drop-off in a shopping mall.
Their guns and disguises had been sent to Perth Airport
.

One of the odder Queensland robbers was Darby Patrick Brown, the so-called Mr Cool, who was charged with eight armed robberies in 2002,
and earned his nickname from standing patiently in the tellers' queue, so that many were unaware that he was robbing the bank. Before he was sentenced, he wrote to the
Gold Coast Bulletin
apologising for his conduct. He also claimed he was raising money to finance the contract killing of Jonathon Kaye, a paedophile who was organising Asian sex tours. Brown seems to have dobbed Kaye in, something for which, along with his apology, he was given credit.
In May 2003 he received a relatively modest nine years
.

On 23 October 2003, 61-year-old Kevin Hyder, a pensioner from the Melbourne suburb of Coburg, robbed a paint store while wearing a Santa hat fashioned into a balaclava by slashing two eye holes near the hat's peak. Armed with a claw hammer, he confronted the 67-year-old owner of Leo's Decorators at McKinnon and escaped with $852 in cash. Then, though, exhausted by his efforts, he suffered an angina attack, and was forced to knock on the doors of several nearby homes, trying to find someone who would drive him to a doctor or the nearest railway station. He was taken by ambulance to Monash Medical Centre, where he was arrested. In May 2004 Judge Nixon, handing down a suspended jail sentence and a two-year community-based order, told Hyder that he had created ‘a Basil Fawlty-type atmosphere … The hat was out of season and more likely to draw attention than obscure you.'

Cross-dressing criminals are nothing new worldwide or, indeed, in Australia. The men who raided the
Nelson
in 1852 wore dresses. In Florida in the 1900s, the Ashley-Mobley gang robbed a string of banks with its members dressed as women. In 2009 three men dressed as women cleared the equivalent of $108 million in jewellery from the Harry Winston boutique near the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

After World War II, robber Antonio Martini bleached his black hair and wore powder to hide his dark skin. Back in November 1937 he had shot at William Munro at the White Bay service station in Redfern, Sydney. Police security seems to have been lax, because while Martini was at the station after his arrest, he pulled out another gun. Asked what he was going to do with it, he unwisely replied that he was going to shoot his way out. This was something he tried to do regularly throughout his career. The same month, he pulled yet another gun on a police officer when he was being put in the dock at Redfern Magistrates Court. For that, he was fined £100, which the newspapers described as an ‘exemplary sentence'. He had only been out of prison for one day
before setting off to rob taxi drivers. For his service station robberies, he received four years.

In recent years, Australian cross-dressing bandits have generally had fairly modest targets. In February 2015 48-year-old Leon Evangelistis, wearing a blonde wig, pink shawl and fishnet stockings, entered a McDonald's in Laverton, Melbourne, and allegedly threatened to blow up the restaurant unless $200 was handed over. In August he was sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to serve a three-year community corrections order.
The judge was told
that Evangelistis suffered from bipolar disorder and had wanted sufficient money to buy heroin so he could overdose.

In April 2015 another cross-dressing thief was filmed carrying out an armed robbery of a service station in Watervale, Taylors Hill, in Melbourne. CCTV footage showed the robber wearing a blonde wig, black dress and wide-brimmed hat, and carrying a fake gun when he entered the service station. After looking around the shop for a few seconds, the robber walked calmly over to the cashier's desk, pulled out what looked like a machine gun and pointed it at her. The footage then showed her handing over a wad of cash as other shoppers began to queue, apparently unaware that a robbery was taking place in front of them. After being handed the money, the robber put the cash and the gun in a black shopping bag and walked out of the shop. Three weeks later, a 23-year-old local man was arrested.

A robber with one of the longest careers of recent years has been a pushbike bandit believed to have robbed sixteen banks in South Australia and New South Wales over ten years and netted hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was first caught on bank security cameras in the South Australian town of Mannum in 2004, and struck ten banks in the state over the next five years, before disappearing from view.

It is suspected that the same man reappeared suddenly in 2011, robbing banks in Sydney. In one piece of CCTV footage, the bandit calmly arrives outside a Westpac bank in the city and parking his bike before walking into the branch with a gun. Other reports have him bringing his bike inside the bank, wearing sunglasses and a helmet or hat to obscure his face. During one robbery, of an ANZ bank at Balaklava, South Australia in 2008, he used a rifle to threaten a police officer who had responded to the hold-up alarm. In one of his most recent robberies, in
September 2014, the man fired three shots during a raid on the Mount Pleasant branch of the ANZ Bank. On at least five occasions, he has been seen leaving the scene of a robbery on his bi cycle, and on five occasions leaving by foot. In some of the raids, he has ridden his bicycle to a nearby getaway car. By 2015 there was a $100 000 reward on offer for information leading to his arrest.

Over the years, Australia has exported some high-class criminals—notably, confidence tricksters and jewel thieves. Of course, not all the exports have been successful.

In 2005 19-year-old Luke Carroll and Anthony Prince, from Byron Bay, were having a working and snowboarding holiday in Colorado when they came up with the brilliant idea of robbing a bank and then, as on-screen thieves have done for a century, fleeing to Mexico. Armed with BB guns that appeared to be pistols, they went to the WestStar bank in Vail and threatened the cashiers, pushing one to the ground and injuring her elbow. Escaping on a chairlift with their snowboards, they made off with US$132 000.

Unfortunately for them, they left such a trail of clues that police established their identities in literally eight minutes, and the pair made news headlines as the ‘Dumb and Dumber' robbers, a reference to the Jim Carrey film about two idiots on a road trip. Carroll and Prince's blunders included choosing to rob a bank where they were known; not disguising their Australian accents; buying a fancy Rolex watch with a pile of $5 notes from a nearby jewellers just after the robbery; giving a taxi driver a $20 000 tip; and, worst of all, forgetting to take off their work name tags before going into the bank. They served nearly five years in a correctional facility before being deported in 2009.

After his release, Prince joined the growing list of literary bank robbers, with his
Bank Robbery for Beginners
—‘a story of criminal stupidity and its very serious consequences'. Unsurprisingly, the book did not go down well with the bank teller, Jessica Gunther, who had been robbed at gunpoint.
She had already
written to Prince to say she had forgiven him but now said, ‘It made me feel incredibly violated and disrespected. I feel almost like I did the day it happened … as if my own progress has been undone.'

Hardly more successful
was 23-year-old Zachary Cronin, whose case highlights the necessity of proper research and planning when
robbing a bank. Cronin, on holiday in Thailand, had spent all his money in Bangkok's brothels and needed more to fly home. In October 2015 he cased the Thanachart Bank in Saphan Kwai, a Bangkok suburb, and noted it was not usually busy in the morning, but failed to research his getaway route. Wearing goggles and a Guy Fawkes mask, he pointed a toy gun at the cashier, yelled ‘Money' and took $6600 worth of baht. An off-duty policeman was in the bank, and he and a security guard chased the fleeing Cronin, who ran into a dead-end street. He faces up to ten years.

Eight years after the ‘Dumb and Dumber' Vail robbery, one of Australia's long-term exports, chubby, bearded 40-year-old Corey Donaldson, the author of a self-help book who had lived in the United States for twenty years as a green card holder, was sentenced to a minimum of seventy months for robbing a branch of the US Bank in the ski resort of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on New Year's Eve 2012. His reasoning behind the raid was, he said, to hand out money to America's poor and to show how exploitative banks were.

Wearing a driver's cap, blazer, tie and sunglasses, and speaking with a South African accent, he terrorised the bank's manager for ninety minutes. Among his many threats, Donaldson said that Mexican drug cartel members had placed bombs in the snow outside, and would blow up the bank and then hunt down and kill the unfortunate man if $2 million was not handed over. The manager emptied out the bank's safe and tellers' drawers, giving Donaldson $140 700. Following the incident, the bank manager, not unsurprisingly, needed psychiatric treatment.

How much of Donaldson's take went to the homeless in Nevada, California and Oregon and how much charity began at home is a matter of speculation, although at his trial his defence team produced a receipt for $15 000 he had given to the Salvos in Nevada. That, plus another $30 000, was all that was recovered. When Donaldson's chauffeur-driven SUV was stopped in Utah the day he was arrested, $11 000 was found in envelopes addressed to his relations in Victoria. He had been staying in a US$347-a-night Salt Lake City hotel where the staff knew him as Doobie Zonks.