Gangland: The Great Escapes

GANGLAND

THE

GREAT ESCAPES

James Morton and

Susanna Lobez titles

Gangland Sydney

Gangland Melbourne

Gangland Queensland

Gangland North South & West

Gangland Australia

Gangland Robbers

Gangland Oz

Kings of Stings

Bent

Dangerous to Know

GANGLAND

THE

GREAT ESCAPES

JAMES MORTON &

SUSANNA LOBEZ

VICTORY BOOKS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

mup-contact@unimelb.edu.au

www.mup.com.au

First published 2018

Text © James Morton and Susanna Lobez, 2018

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design and typesetting by Typeskill

Cover design by Nada Backovic

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522870237 (paperback)

9780522870244 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction: The third way

1Early bolters

2Row the boat away

3The killers

4Dying with their boots on

5Breaking out or in is (sometimes) hard to do

6Just as deadly

7Up and away

8In and out of court

9Taking hostages

10 Comers and goers

11 Again, and again, and again …

12 One step ahead

13 Staying and still out

14 The last great escapes

15 And still they try

Notes

Acknowledgements

Select bibliography

Index

The third way

I do not blame a prisoner for escaping from prison, as long as he does not use violence. Although the law says it is a crime it is the duty of the prison officials to see the prisoners do not escape, and when prisoners do escape the officials are the persons who should be punished. It is only natural that a convicted person would be anxious to be free.

Mr Justice Chubb, quoted in Townsville Daily Bulletin, 24 November 1903

On 19 June 2017, with only a few weeks to run on his twelve-month sentence for a passport offence, Australian Shaun Davidson tunnelled his way out of Kerobokan prison in Bali. With him went three others, two of whom, Bulgarian ATM scammer Dimitir Nikolon Iliev and Indian drug smuggler Sayed Muhammad Said, were arrested in East Timor’s capital Dili three days later. Davidson, along with Malaysian drug trafficker Tee Kok King, remained at large. Almost immediately Australian social media sites were littered with messages of support and a $50,000 fund was quickly raised for him. This may be put down to a bit of jingoism with the plucky Aussie outwitting his foreign captors but possibly there is something more deep rooted at play. Because of its heritage, the nation has long had an ambivalent attitude to escapees.

There has always been a degree of sympathy and indeed admiration for prisoners who, provided they do not kill or injure anyone on the way out—and sometimes even if they do—make it over or under the wall. In some cases there is a curiously ambivalent view about law and order itself. At Uralla in New South Wales, where the bushranger Frederick Ward, ‘Captain Thunderbolt’, was killed by the police officer Alexander Walker, there is a plaque in commemoration of Walker’s bravery but that tribute was overshadowed in 1998 when a statue of the Captain, paid for by the NSW Government, was unveiled at the spot.

Then there was Cyril Pegg, later one of Australia’s great criminal exports, who escaped from Darlinghurst Gaol in Sydney with an offsider in January 1911. Passengers on a tram who watched them come down the wall cheered them on their way. Over the years other members of the public have both inadvertently and intentionally hindered the authorities and helped the escapees.

Part of the misplaced admiration for ‘Australia’s favourite larrikin’, Joseph Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor, who ran Melbourne crime in the 1920s—not too many criminals in modern times have had a hotel even temporarily named after them—comes from the time when he jumped bail after being found in a bonded fur warehouse, where goods on which duty has not been paid are stored. He then carried on a cat and mouse game with the police, writing self-exculpatory letters to the newspapers for almost a year until he graciously agreed to surrender.

While Les Simmonds was on the run in the spring of 1959 after killing Cecil Mills, a prison officer at Emu Plains Training Centre in Sydney’s south west, public support actually seems to have grown for him. A young girl set up a fan club and the crowds who watched him driven to the magistrates court after he was captured months later cheered him rather than his captors.

The escapee doesn’t even have to be Australian to be feted. Some years after the French-born coiner Pierre Douar, serving six years for forgery, escaped from Victoria’s Pentridge jail in 1890, ‘Murkah’ reported his dash in the World’s News as ‘velvet-footed’, and included these lines in his praise:

From cage so strong, o’er wall so steep,

With fearless heart, and fearless leap.

Douar had made himself a set of keys and part of his popularity came because he neatly locked the doors behind him as he left. Unfortunately, his story did not have a happy ending.

He had only nine months to serve when he made his break, something he seems to have done because he was likely to be extradited to France to complete a sentence in New Caledonia from where he had also escaped. He was dobbed in and returned to Pentridge with an extra two years in solitary, which meant he was only allowed out of his cell for an hour out of every twenty-four and during that hour he had to wear a cowl made out of canvas pierced with holes for the eyes and the mouth. He also had to wear seven-pound (3.2-kilogram) irons. He committed suicide in the July.

The irony was that a French detective had failed to recognise him as the escapee and so without his Pentridge escape he would have been a free man. At least the coroner ordered that a stake should not be driven through his heart as was customary for suicides.¹

There are three ways to undergo a prison sentence. The soft way, in which the prisoner obeys all the rules, working off their time as quickly as possible; the hard way, in which they cause the authorities as much aggravation as possible; and the third way—to escape.

This is an account of escapees from the time of the First Fleet to the present day. It is an account of those who have rigorously planned their escape and those who have jumped on the spur of the moment. Indeed, sometimes the kindest explanation of an escape is that the officers were simply not concentrating.

On 2 July 1982 one of the more prolific escapees of his era, Peter Patrick Clune, at the time serving nine years for armed robbery, walked out of Pentridge. He had been taking part in the theatrical group’s production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when he snatched up a wig and coat and walked out with the visitors. Commenting on his escape he said, ‘It was hardly an escape. Those clowns that run Pentridge gave me a visitor’s pass and I walked out with the rest of the visitors.’ Captured seven months later, his excuse for his escape was that a prisoner to whom he owed $2000 had said he would be killed. Why had he not gone to the authorities? ‘He was not the type of person you would inform on,’ was the reply. This time he went to Jika Jika—the high-security jail within the jail at Pentridge.

It is the story of those who have escaped from prison, police stations, courts, hospitals and dentists’ chairs, and prison vans; of those who have swum or sailed away; of those who have killed or been killed; of those who have ‘committed suicide by police’ and warders; of those who had sailed away in bath tubs, escaped in bathing costumes, and failed when disguised as a kangaroo; of those who have tried and failed and tried again until they have succeeded; of those who have gone abroad or escaped from foreign prisons and those who have stayed undetected at home; of those who have been recaptured within hours or even minutes and those who have got clean away, never to be seen again.

James Morton and Susanna Lobez

Melbourne, March 2018

Early bolters

1

Probably the first bushranger, even if he was not that successful, but certainly the first black person to bolt was John ‘Black’ Caesar, possibly born in Madagascar in around 1763. He had been transported for seven years for the not inconsiderable theft of 240 shillings and arrived with the First Fleet. From the time he landed in Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, Caesar was known as a good and conscientious worker. That is until he was again convicted of theft, this time of £12, and was then sentenced to transportation for life on 29 April 1789.

A fortnight later Caesar was off into the bush with a stolen gun. He was caught in early June and sent to work in chains at Garden Island in Sydney. Again he must have proved a satisfactory worker because the chains were taken off just before Christmas and Caesar repaid the kindness of the authorities by stealing a canoe and another gun. He lasted just over a month stealing from gardens and the Aboriginal people in the vicinity, until at the end of January one of them speared him and he returned to the prison camp.

This time he was sent to the penal settlement on Norfolk Island where, by the winter of 1791, he was allowed his own parcel of land and a pig to go with it. He then married and had a daughter but in July 1794 he made another short-lived break. The next year, after what was described as ‘severe punishment’, he was thought to be trusted enough to be sent to Port Jackson from where he made his last escape in the December. By now, as with many another after him, every theft and robbery in the locality was put on his shoulders and the somewhat curious reward of five gallons (23 litres) of spirits was on offer for his capture. On 15 February he attacked another settler and this time he was shot and died at Liberty Plains, Strathfield in Sydney.¹

Black Caesar is credited with wounding another great escaper, an Aborigine named Pemulwuy, who in December 1790 killed Governor Phillip’s gamekeeper. Pemulwuy led a series of retaliatory raids on settlers who were suspected of kidnapping Aboriginal children. He was shot and captured in March 1797 in what was known as the Battle of Parramatta but, despite having seven pieces of buckshot in his head and body and being in leg irons, he somehow escaped. According to the Eora people, the first Australians from the Sydney area, this seemingly impossible feat was achieved by his turning himself into a bird—he was known as ‘Butu Wargun’, which means ‘crow’. He continued to carry out attacks on the settlers and was eventually shot and killed on 2 June 1802. His head was cut off and, preserved in spirits, sent to England.²

It did not take long for other convicts to start bolting. At the end of September 1790 William Harris and Edward Wildblood escaped from the stockade and began to rob the huts at night. They were caught after killing a Dr White’s goat on his farm at White’s Creek, near Sydney. The governor had them chained together and sent back to Rosehill to hard labour on bread and water. During the overseer’s absence they escaped again and after attacking a settler stole three pounds (1.4 kilograms) of beef, one pound (half a kilogram) of flour, a frock and a book from his hut. Recaptured, they were tried, found guilty and sentenced to death by the Sydney Criminal Court. The next day, on 20 October, they were rowed out to Rosehill where they were hanged from a tree in front of an appreciative crowd of settlers.³

Initially bushrangers may have been driven by the need for survival. The bush surrounding the settlements was unexplored, but this did not deter the convicts from escaping with the idea of making their way to what is now Jakarta or to China. The Irish convicts were principally the ones who believed that:

At a considerable distance to the northward existed a large river, which separated this country from the back part of China; and that when it should be crossed they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people, who would receive and treat them kindly.⁴

In 1791 comforted by this knowledge, twenty male convicts and a pregnant woman set off on foot to build themselves a new life. One died of exhaustion, four were speared by Aborigines and the remainder stumbled back into Sydney a week later.

The belief that China was somewhere north of Sydney lasted for some years until, in 1803, Governor Philip King had two escapees hanged and fixed the punishment for bolting at a savage five hundred lashes and double chains for the remainder of the bolter’s sentence. After that the concept was less appealing.

Not all tried to make it to where they thought China might be. Many bolters died but others survived by joining up with Aboriginal tribes or by robbing the settlers of what little they possessed. One of the survivors and a man who might be described as one of the few success stories of early escapees was William Buckley. Convicted of receiving a roll of cloth and transported for life, he was taken to Port Phillip in April 1803 in the Calcutta with a party under Lieutenant-Governor David Collins. He and two other convicts promptly absconded from the camp. Later his friends tried to return to the vessel but were not heard of again. At first Buckley fed on shellfish and berries; later he met and was accepted by members of the Wathaurong tribe from the Bellarine Peninsula, who believed him to be a reincarnation of their dead chief. He learned their language and their customs, and was given a ‘wife’, by whom he claimed to have had a daughter. He lived with the Wathaurong for over thirty years until he gave himself up in 1835. By then he had forgotten how to speak English and was identified by the tattoo WB. Buckley was pardoned and given the position of tracker. After this he settled in Hobart and became a gatekeeper until he retired in 1851 with a pension of £52 a year. He had married Julia Eager in 1840, had two children, and died in 1856. Buckley’s life is said to be the origin of the phrase Buckley’s Chance.⁵

Another who escaped slightly later, in 1827, this time from the brutal conduct of the tyrannical Captain Patrick Logan, commandant of the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, was Irishman John Graham, who bolted north. In a story similar to that of Buckley, when Graham meet a tribe he also was fortunate in that one of the Aboriginal women thought he was the white ghost of her dead husband. He lived with them for five years before returning to Moreton Bay and surrendering to the rather more sympathetic James Clunie, who had succeeded Logan as Commandant after Aboriginals killed him in 1830. Graham petitioned unsuccessfully that, because of the privations he had suffered at the hands of the tribe, nothing should be added to his sentence. In 1836 he guided the party that rescued Eliza Fraser from the Badtjaka (Butchulla) people after she had been shipwrecked when the Stirling Castle foundered on what is now known as the Eliza Reef, 250 kilometres north of present-day Gladstone, and claimed to have been captured by them. Other survivors in the group claimed they had been well treated but Fraser’s myth-making tales eventually led to the massacre and dispossession of the island’s local people. Graham was given a ticket of leave in 1837.⁶

The idea was that the transported did not return to England without completing their sentence and obtaining a ticket of leave. So far as officialdom back in Britain was concerned, even if prisoners escaped from the stockades they could rape and pillage as much as they liked. It was too far for them to find their way back to Blighty, which was all that mattered. In the eyes of the British government, the whole of Australia was one huge maximum-security prison. In Western Australia, Comptroller-General Edmund Henderson was one of many who believed the Australian bush was a ‘vast, natural gaol’ that would discourage convicts dreaming of escape.

In the 1840s and 1850s some escapees did make their way to the west coast of America. They set up gambling dens and brothels on the waterfront in San Francisco, where they were known as the Sydney Ducks, but they never returned to England.

On 7 December 1835 an eighteen-year-old petty thief, Charles Adolphus King, was sentenced at the Manchester New Bailey for burglary in the city to fourteen years’ transportation. He arrived in Australia on the Lord Kennedy in 1836 and worked as a gentleman’s servant until his master left the colony eighteen months later, at which time King was returned to barracks. He worked on the roads and then as a shepherd at Appin, south of Campbelltown, not far from what is now the Hume Highway. In 1838 he helped a bushranger and for this was sentenced to twelve months on a chain gang. He was then sent to a new master, but when the man left for Perth he again went back to the convict barracks. He escaped, was caught in Sydney, given a modest fifty lashes and sent to an up-country estate.

Four months later King and a John Carney escaped from that estate. They returned to Port Jackson and hid in a ship’s hold. When they were discovered while out to sea, the captain intended to take them back to New South Wales but they jumped ship near one of the Fijian islands. Attacked by natives, Carney was killed but the daughter of a native chief saved King. He had been in Fiji four months when he and the young woman got away on the Angelique, a French whaler. They landed four months later in New Zealand. Fearing he would be arrested, he abandoned the chief’s daughter after a missionary promised to return her to Fiji and he then shipped on the Elizabeth to London.

King made his way to Salford in Lancashire where in 1840 he was dobbed in. In a long speech to the judge he begged to be hanged rather than sent to Norfolk Island, but on 23 March 1840 he was sentenced to penal servitude for life, the first ten years to be in chains. King was fortunate. Public opinion was with him and his sentence was commuted to five years’ penal servitude in London’s Millbank.

How much of King’s story was true is another matter. It smacks of the stuff of convict memoirs—the escape, the romance, the penitence—all of which sold well to the public. Indeed a booklet appeared in 1840 and another version followed in 1845. After his release King seems to have made something of a living lecturing on his experiences.⁷

It is hardly surprising that escapes were thick and fast in the early days. In June 1837 Thomas Smith was appointed jailer at the prison at Batman’s Hill, Port Phillip. The jail consisted of wattle daub walls and a thatched roof surrounded by a 2.43-metre timber fence. Smith had one assistant, a part-timer who carried out floggings. On 24 July Harry Smiley escaped by cutting through the roof boards during the night but, far worse, Thomas Clarke, who was being held in irons, escaped during the afternoon of 22 September. The irons were found in Smith’s office and he was promptly dismissed. Some years later the jail was burned down by Aborigines.⁸

In a breakout from Fremantle in Western Australia on 25 January 1859, John Williams, Peter Campbell, Henry Stephens, John Haynes and Stephen Lacey escaped soon after construction of the convict establishment had been completed. The five convicts, who were on a work party, absconded into the bush and made their way up river to Melville Water. With the aid of Aboriginal trackers, the police immediately followed in pursuit. At Point Walter the convicts seized a dinghy and returned down river, keeping to the cover of trees along the riverbank. Once reaching Fremantle they rowed past the harbour lookout and out to open water. The next morning they landed at Garden Island and robbed James Reid and his wife, stealing food, pistols, water, a sword and a compass. They loaded up the family’s whaleboat and set out to sea heading north. Meanwhile, the pursuit had been delayed. While the convicts were rowing out to Garden Island, the water police boat was being used to ferry Governor Edward Kennedy to Rottnest Island, where Comptroller-General Edmund Henderson was also on holiday. By the time the water police retrieved their boat and sailed to Garden Island, the five had vanished.

The convicts landed ten days later near Port Gregory when their food and water had run out and were immediately seen by the water police and chased into the country. By this time Lacey was regarded as the weakest link in the party and suspected of stealing their rations. When the other four returned from a night-time fishing trip he was nowhere to be seen. When Lacey finally returned to camp, Williams gave him a beating and later fatally shot him. Lacey was buried on the beach.

Some weeks later, again out of food and water, the four men surrendered to George Clinton in command of a government schooner Les Trois Amis. On 14 July Haynes was acquitted of Lacey’s murder and Williams found guilty. They were all sentenced to death for the robbery and other crimes but were reprieved.⁹

On 29 May 1867, William Graham used a duplicate key to unlock his cell and free Thomas Scott and George Morris in another escape from Fremantle. With heavy rain muffling the sound of their footsteps the three men made their way to the East Workshops, where they stripped leather drive belts from the machinery, tied them together and used them to scale the perimeter wall. Their escape was not discovered until muster the next morning.

The trio soon began bushranging, stealing rifles and food as they moved through farmlands north east of Perth. Police and Aboriginal trackers caught up with them two days after their escape and, during a night-time shoot-out, George Morris died after being hit in the neck. Graham and Scott escaped by crossing the Causeway and it was not until several weeks later that four police officers and three Aboriginal trackers discovered the fresh tracks they had made east of Kojonup, south west of Perth. One tracker found Graham standing sentry outside an abandoned hut and he returned to the police camp, reporting where the men were. The police made a decision that was later said to ‘cast shame on the whole force’.

The trackers were ordered to return to the hut and open fire on the building ‘without challenge’. In the morning the police found that both men had escaped, albeit wounded. William Graham dragged himself twelve miles (just over 19 kilometres) through the bush until, believing he was about to die, he surrendered to a shepherd. Scott was captured a few days later near the Blackwood River. Both were returned to prison. The police involved were dismissed from the force for what was described in the Perth Gazette as a ‘disgraceful affair’.¹⁰

An escape too many also saw the end of Bernard Wootton, aka MacNulty, transported in June 1856, who absconded along with James Holmes and Henry Davies from a working party at the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum on 23 April 1863. Wootton had been serving a nine-year sentence handed out the previous January for rolling a drunk in York, 97 kilometres east of Perth. The escape was short-lived. The three men returned to York where they bailed up an Elizabeth Martin, stealing three firearms, food and ammunition. They were tracked down and marched back to Perth.

The question was whether the robbery had been ‘with violence’. Henry Davies had placed his hands on Mrs Martin’s shoulders and it was asked whether that was sufficient to establish the charge. The jury, possibly sympathetically, decided it was not and the men were discharged after His Honour Chief Justice Burt lectured them about future escapes and the probable consequences. If Wootton actually listened to the judge, he did not heed His Lordship’s words.

A much more serious escape took place on the evening of 8 August 1867 when, after the working gangs of convicts including Wootton had been marched into prison for the night, the door of one of the wards was opened and from it emerged a party of eight men, apparently under the charge of another warder. In fact it was fellow convict John Smith dressed in a warder’s uniform. He halted his party while he reclosed and locked the door, and then, giving the order to march, took them to the gate of the work yard. On the way they passed a sentry just relieved from duty who, seeing an apparent colleague, took no notice of the party. The escape was a great success but for some it was relatively brief. Fremantle’s Herald was up in arms:

There can be no doubt that the successful evasion of the police by these men tends to encourage escapes. It certainly does not give us a high opinion of the efficiency of the police for these men, unarmed and half starved perhaps, to remain so long at large. The supposition that they are harboured by companions does not in any way account satisfactorily for their non capture. Let us hope that by the speedy capture of these nine runaways the police will endeavour to restore confidence in their activity and intelligence, which we can assure them is becoming somewhat shaken.¹¹

Four of the men were captured without a fight near Pinjarra, south of Perth. Another was taken after a shootout with the police. Another two were captured near Beverley, attempting to make their way east towards the desert. However, after Wootton was captured Sergeant John Moyle released him from a handcuff so he could eat breakfast. Wootton repaid his kindness by hitting him on the head with a red-hot iron bar. Moyle’s Aboriginal assistant stepped in and disarmed Wootton. When Moyle asked Wootton why he had attacked him Wootton replied, ‘Would you not have done it? To get your liberty?’

The final two escapees headed south towards the ports of Bunbury and Busselton in the hopes of catching a boat. One was caught near the Murray River and the last, John Williams, drowned trying to escape from the pursuing police.

On 3 October Wootton was sentenced to death for attempted murder and when he was hanged a week later the Perth Gazette summed things up:

The condemned convict Bernard Wootton suffered the penalty of his crimes on Tuesday morning. This man was undoubtedly one of the most desperate and dangerous characters we have been indebted for to the mother country, and continued hardened to the last, rejecting all offers of religious ministrations. On the scaffold his last words were a shout for the Irish Republic.¹²

In Van Diemen’s Land in 1842, convict bushranger Martin Cash and two offsiders, Lawrence Kavenagh and George Jones, escaped from Port Arthur by swimming across the shark-infested waters, their clothes tied in bundles above their heads, to avoid the guard dogs at the isthmus Eagle Hawk Neck. Cash, who later had his autobiography ghosted, was an educated young man from a well-off Irish family. In 1828 he had been transported to Botany Bay for housebreaking or, by his account, rather more romantically for a crime of passion when he saw a man embracing his mistress. In 1840 in the Port Arthur jail he ganged up with Kavenagh and Jones, and Cash and Company was formed.

Their escape led to some twenty successful months of bushranging. Generous rewards for their capture went unclaimed as local support for Cash and Co. far outweighed the popularity of the authorities. Then on 29 August 1843 Cash was seen in Hobart Town where he shot