Gangland Robbers (7 page)

They also latched on to William Ellis, variously described in the newspapers as ‘an Australian sportsman', ‘a horseman' and ‘a crooked jockey'. Married with three children, he was known as Friday because a pony he either trained or strapped was named Robinson Crusoe. At the end of the couple's Sydney stay, he went with them back to San Francisco.
Whether, as some suggest, he was initially besotted
by Nulda, whether they intended to pull off some horseracing or poker swindle, or whether it was a version of the old seduction con the Ginger Game, they attacked him viciously—Andrews had a different version in which Ellis tried to rape Nulda. In another version of the story, the heroic Ellis disarmed the pair after they attacked him one lunchtime while he was eating marmalade, and went to the police. In yet another, they left him for dead and took £1000. When he came to he told the police ‘in his quaint cockney accent' where they could find Andrews, who was
wanted over the death and robbery of Eugene Bosworth in Connecticut, and the death of Bessie Boulton in a quarrel over Nulda in Colorado.

On 6 November 1905 the police went to McAllister Street, San Francisco, where they found both Nulda and Andrews dead.
He had shot her and then turned the gun on himself
.

In the early days of the pearling industry, there was the usual illicit trade in stolen gems. Just as a great deal of gold never reached the mine owners' tables, snide (or fake) pearls never reached the lugger owners' decks but instead provided a handsome second income for the divers. By 1910 it was estimated that only one in three harvested pearls reached their rightful owners. At the beginning of the twentieth century, filched pearls were traded in the Continental and Roebuck hotels in Broome, and one of the bigger traders was Mark Leibglid, who sometimes described himself as a jeweller. In 1905 Broome was buzzing with rumours of the discovery of a valuable pearl, a rosea pink-tinted one, which came to be known as the ‘Ill-fated Pearl'. It was said to have been lost and it eventually did for Leibglid. His body was found, with a ring on his finger that had been flattened as though he had had a severe blow on the hand. Curiously, his boots were unbuttoned. Early reports claimed that he had been ‘speared by blacks'. It was thought he had been attacked when taking an evening walk on the beach.

After his killing, on 31 August, much was made of his interest in snide pearls but he was generally a popular man, who traded in the ‘Foreign Quarter'.
His friend JJ Wilkinson wrote
to the Boulder
Evening Star
, ‘The fact is, sir he did no more than what is being daily done up there and if he went out to see a “stone” he did only what hundreds have done and will do'. Perhaps Leibglid was overgenerous, or perhaps the standard method of pearl buying in Broome was to go late at night to a disused junk moored in the bay.

Quite who devised the scheme to lure Leibglid to the junk, called
The Mist
, and rob him has never been made wholly clear. Certainly, Charles Hagen, a Norwegian bushman who had once run a billiard saloon in the town, was in need of money. He was unable to repay a loan and had been talking of skipping. Some accounts have him persuading his drinking companion Pablo Marquez, a ‘fly, half sovereign barber' who had considerable property interests in the area, to help him. In turn, Marquez recruited Simeon Espada, described in the politically
incorrect manner of the time as ‘Full blooded Filipino savage and desperado', who nevertheless described himself as being part of the crew of the
Tanikotoko
, in whose dinghy Leibglid travelled to
The Mist
. Other accounts have Espada as a much more prominent player.

In any event, Leibglid was fed stories that the pearl had been found and that he could buy it for around £500. On 31 August the trio had gone with Leibglid in the dinghy to the
The Mist
, with a view to his buying the pearl. It was his third appointment to do so. On the first occasion, Hagen had failed to appear; and on the second, Espada was late because he had ‘dallied with a Delilah of the coloured bars'. According to the not necessarily wholly reliable Marquez, when Leibglid boarded
The Mist
, Espada produced a glass stopper from a lemonade bottle, wrapped in a handkerchief, which he said was the pearl. Leibglid had asked, ‘Why do you make a fool of me?' Espada had then hit him with a slingshot and when he fell in the water, calling for help, jumped in after him and tried to drown him. Hagen and Espada had then battered the unfortunate man, and Hagen had wiped his bloodied hand on his trousers. They tried to drag the body into deep water, but there was a crowd gathering on the beach, so had pulled the dinghy into the mangroves. On the night of the killing, Leibglid's shop was looted.

The inquest opened on 5 September in Perth, and the coroner excluded the press unless they gave an undertaking not to publish the evidence until after the inquiry had finished.
Fremantle detective Harry Mann was sent
north and, on 18 September, the first of the trio to be pulled in was Marquez. Under questioning, he stood his ground for some hours but then told Mann that he had been on the boat merely as an interpreter for Espada. He said he had not had any part in killing Leibglid. Indeed, he had been so horrified he was quite prepared to give evidence against the pair, in return for an indemnity against prosecution, and, no, he did not want any reward money.

Although all the counsel for the defence were convinced that had their clients been tried separately there would not have been a case to go to the jury, Mr Justice Burnside ruled they should be tried together. Collectively, the evidence was fairly strong. As Marquez had told the detective, Hagen had blood on his trousers the morning after the murder, something he had explained as being paint. A publican's wife had heard Hagen and Marquez concocting an alibi. Hagen had also suddenly come into money, which he could not explain. Hagen maintained
he had been drunk in a Chinese gambling saloon when Leibglid was killed. However, crucially, he was unable to give a satisfactory explanation of how the bloodstains came to be on his clothes. He claimed he had been lured into a trap by Marquez, who had turned against him when he, Hagen, had given some information to the police.

Marquez more or less stuck to the earlier statement he had made to the police. Espada admitted that he had struck Leibglid, but claimed that both Hagen and Marquez had done the same thing. He said Marquez had told him that he had lost £1000 at gambling and needed money for his wife. Espada said that Marquez had used the slingshot to kill Leibglid. He added that Marquez had told him he had sold to a Japanese man most of the gold that he had taken from Leibglid. He claimed Marquez had also told him, ‘I don't care. I've no relations in this country. Don't care if I'm dead or not. I killed a man in Hong Kong before, and was not caught. I'm not afraid of anyone in Broome.'

Despite the judge summing up in favour of Hagen, it is easy to see how a jury convicted them all on 21 November. A week later, Marquez made a statement that Hagen had had nothing to do with the murder and that it was another white man who had been involved. The appeals were the first to be heard by Western Australia's new Supreme Court, sitting in Perth, and were dismissed.

The executions on 14 December were a disaster. The official executioner, Burrowes, who had hanged the last five men to be executed, had died in late 1903. At the January 1904 execution of Ah Hook, a Chinese man convicted of killing a number of men in Carnarvon in a row over a Japanese prostitute, the new executioner had been visibly upset and declined to undertake any more work. Yet another executioner had to be found.

On the scaffold, Hagen, as the white man, was given the privilege of going first and he made a fifteen-minute speech professing his innocence. He blamed his defence lawyer RS Haynes, father of the great 1920s barrister Arthur Haynes, for failing to call, presumably as an alibi, a Chinaman whose name he did not know, and complained that Harry Mann had rigged the case against him, breaking his alibi. He concluded, ‘Not too tight, gentlemen, I am going, goodbye.'

Things went from bad to worse. By the time Espada and Marquez were brought to the scaffold, they were quarrelling. All this thoroughly unnerved the hangman. He failed to properly secure Espada, who now
managed to work his hands free, and tried to clutch the rope to haul himself up it. Nor did the hangman notice that Chief Warden Webster, who was acting as his assistant, had his foot on the trapdoor, so that when it opened he fell through, seriously injuring himself.
By now, the hangman, who
had also put the knot in the rope under Espada's chin instead of under his ear, was ‘terribly affected and cried like a child'.

In December that year, a diver from Manila, Victor Nabor, was sentenced at the Broome Sessions to three years' imprisonment for receiving a pearl knowing it to have been stolen. The pearl was found on a lugger and weighed 41 grains. Almost a perfect pearl, Nabor hid it in a coil of rope when the police searched the lugger, and afterwards it was stolen from its hiding place by some other person unknown. It is believed that this was the gem Leibglid had expected to buy the night he was murdered.

The story goes that the pearl then passed into the hands of a Chinaman who committed suicide and then into those of a Rabbi Davis. He drowned when the
Koombana
went down in a storm off Port Hedland in March 1912, and so the pearl acquired its nickname.
It was never seen again
.

In the autumn of 1914 Samuel ‘Jewey' Freeman and Ernest Joseph ‘Shiner' Ryan began to plan what would be one of New South Wales's most famous crimes—the Eveleigh Railway Workshops robbery, a wages snatch at their factory in Redfern. This would be the first time in Australian criminal history a getaway car was used. Prior to that, escape had been on foot, on a racehorse or with a horse and buggy. In America in 1909 a car had been used in a robbery for the first time in Santa Clara, California, the men having hijacked a car and fled. Members of the public chased the car in their own vehicles, and when it broke down, the robbers were captured. In France, the anarchic Bonnot Gang had used motor cars from 1911 and there had been sporadic use of cars in England. Now it was Australia's turn.

Both Ryan and Freeman had rich criminal pedigrees. The dark-haired, blue-eyed, 5-foot-4-inch Ryan, robber and safecracker and undoubtedly South Australia's greatest criminal of the early part of the twentieth century, was born around 1885. Women who found him attractive thought his face glowed; less spiritually, he had body-wide tattoos, including a cross, an anchor, a pierced heart, the word love and a flag. In 1902 in Adelaide he was convicted of larceny, and sentenced to a birching and to being kept in a reformatory until he was eighteen. He escaped within a month but was recaptured at Broken Hill and received three months for vagrancy.

The idea of detaining him until he was eighteen must have foundered because, convicted of housebreaking at Gladstone, he was
released on a £100 bond the next year. He then went east and was in Sydney when, in 1904, he served three months for theft. Back west, in Fremantle, in August 1905 he received two years and four months for stealing and receiving. This time, he had been convicted with New Zealand-born Henry Lewis, also known as James ‘Jewey' Mackay. The 5-foot-2-inch bootmaker had been in Western Australia since 1902, and had already served two sentences for theft and assaults on police.

In 1909 Ryan was one of the suspects in the murder of Constable William Hyde, shot and killed on 2 January at Marryatville while he was investigating a series of break-ins in the area. In the preceding weeks, there had been a number of armed robberies in which shots had been fired, and Hyde approached three men said to be acting suspiciously near the branch office of the Municipal Tramways Trust. Unfortunately, he was not carrying his service revolver.
In the first twenty-five years
of the twentieth century, Hyde was one of only two South Australian police officers killed on duty. The gunman was seen resting his hand on a fence during the shooting, and a tracker was brought in but a rainstorm had wiped out the men's trails. Two hats and black Chesterfield coats with velvet collars that were thought to belong to the men were found but no charges were brought.
There were also suggestions that the killers
might have been members of the King Hit Push, which, at the time, was in the business of robbing tramcar offices.

In March 1909, two months after Hyde's shooting, Ryan went to a Sydney prison for three months on an idle and disorderly charge. He tried to escape, for which he was given a sentence of three years. Then, while being moved from Adelaide to Gladstone Gaol, Ryan jumped from a train going at speed between Hoyleton and Kybunga. Despite falling heavily, by the time the train had been stopped and a search commenced, he was clean away.
He was out for more than a year
before he was acquitted of gaol breaking on a technicality and then promptly arrested for stealing a bicycle. It was time to move east again and who should Ryan meet up with in Sydney but his old friend Mackay, now known as Samuel ‘Jewey' Freeman and running the Riley Street Push.

The Eveleigh Railway Workshops robbery was executed on 10 June 1914, four days after Freeman shot nightwatchman Michael McHale in the face during a robbery at the Paddington post office in Oxford Street. A bystander, Edward Heagney, was also shot but both he and McHale survived.

On 10 June two Eveleigh employees arrived by horse and cart at the factory, bringing the payroll, which totalled slightly more than £3300. They unloaded the first chest of money and, as they were taking out the second, Ryan drove up in an old grey car with Freeman in the passenger seat. Freeman put a gun to the head of one employee, Norman Twiss, and threatened to blow his brains out. He and Ryan loaded the second chest into the car and the pair drove away.