I Tripped Once Tripped Again Special Victoms
There was a cruel, smirking boy at my school who later became a murderer. He was fearsome and fearless. We tussled once – or, rather, he tussled me – and I still remember the violation of his touch. I've known a few criminals, but I've rarely taken the opportunity to write about them. They seemed to lack empathy and often there was something creepily oversexualised about their behaviour.
Then there are the statistics: hardly anybody gets murdered. Unless you form a relationship with a violent partner – or become friends or acquaintances with a potential killer – you are fantastically unlikely to fall victim to homicide. Almost all murders in Australia are domestic or acquaintance homicides. Strangers kill only about 20 people each year, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology. That's fewer than one in a million.
The surest way to engineer your own murder, then, is to spend a great amount of time in the company of violent men. Which is partly why I had not, until now, researched a "true-crime" book.
However, I've just spent almost two years writing Public Enemies: Russell "Mad Dog" Cox, Ray Denning and the Golden Age of Armed Robbery. Like jumpsuits and flares, hotpants and big sunglasses, institutional corruption and spray-can radicalism, the armed hold-up trade flourished in Australia in the 1970s and '80s. To a soundtrack of AC/DC, Cold Chisel and Rose Tattoo, bank robbery in particular grew from a lucrative niche for a handful of desperate pioneers to a practical alternative to safe-breaking for professional criminals on the lookout for a regular earn.
Throughout Australia there was a growing number of bank branches, handling an increasing amount of money – which was often in motion between one place and another, such as a night safe and a wallet.
Banks were easy to reconnoitre – anybody posing as a customer could case a branch, identify the risks, pinpoint the busy periods and form a plan. And an armed robber – unlike, for example, a drug dealer – needed no criminal connections, just a weapon or something that looked like a weapon. An operator could be in and out of a bank in 30 seconds. Even if they chose not to wear a disguise there was little risk of identification, since staff and customers would be looking at the gun barrel, not the gunman.
In the days before CCTV cameras, it was difficult for police to gather evidence against an armed robber, since bandits tended to have no connection with the premises and leave nothing behind. And it wasn't just the banks. Commercial life in Australia was changing. There was more cash handling after dark as service stations and pharmacists stayed open later, offering isolated, undefended targets. As other entrepreneurial criminals noticed the hold-up men were not getting caught, they figured they might chance their hands, too.
Armed robbery's extended high season ended in the 1990s. Although the occasional reckless criminal still attempts to rob a bank, security is tighter, there's less cash on premises, DNA evidence can tie an offender to the scene – and it's difficult enough to find a bank if you want to make a deposit, let alone if you're looking to rob one. The underworld today is largely the drugs trade and the men who protect – or prey on – the dealers.
Raymond John Denning, left, and Russell "Mad Dog" Cox. Credit:
The Queenslander who became known as Russell "Mad Dog" Cox was neither a Russell, nor mad, nor a dog, nor a Cox. But he was – in the judgment of many police and much of the criminal milieu – the most intelligent, resourceful and successful gangster Australia has produced. Cox became a hero to the underworld when he broke out of Sydney's maximum-security escape-proof jail at Katingal in 1977, then, incredibly, attempted to break back in and free his mates in 1978.
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Like many offenders, Cox – born Melville Peter Schnitzerling in September 1949 – grew up in boys' homes and juvenile detention. His robberies across NSW, Victoria and Queensland netted him hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1970s and '80s. He specialised in target surveillance and disguise. He knew his way around weapons and vehicles and, as he demonstrated with the Katingal breakout/break-in-again, it was difficult to hold him once he'd resolved to leave.
Raymond John Denning, born in 1951 in Port Kembla, NSW, cut a more pathetic figure. At the age of 10, he'd watched his mother burn herself to death in front of him. He took part in a failed escape attempt from Parramatta Gaol in September 1974, leaving prison officer Willy Karl Faber with his brains bashed out. Four years later, Faber died from his injuries. Understandably, this left Denning wildly unpopular among prison officers. He was stripped and bashed and flogged time and again.
His aunt told the ABC, "He was crying, screaming, hurting, and he was praying that the nightmare would end. And he actually used to look over my head when he spoke to me. He used to laugh uncontrollably when I went to visit him, speak incoherently, and sometimes he was crying a lot."
In April 1980, Denning escaped Grafton Gaol hidden in a garbage bin. According to legend, he spent a few weeks living off the land and foraging for food before he surfaced in Sydney, where he was safe-housed by a network of middle-class supporters who kept him hidden from the police for the rest of the year.
The post-Vietnam War Left, informed by the experience of draft resisters in jails, felt that Australia's violent, punitive prisons were in desperate need of reform. Prisoners were among the most oppressed of the oppressed – the children of poor and broken working-class families, who suffered more beatings behind bars than some of them had ever meted out in the streets.
Denning at his brightest was the man the system could not break – a handsome young outlaw who made fools of the police, danced circles around the authorities. While he was on the run, he shot a video shown on 60 Minutes; reviewed a prison movie (and recorded a call sign) for radio station 2JJJ; left a message with his handprints stuck to the door of the Sydney headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Branch; and fired a shotgun at the watchtower of Parramatta Gaol.
He was a political soldier and an armed robber, a guerrilla fighter for prisoners' rights, a chic, confused hybrid of Ned Kelly and Che Guevara. He said he would give himself up if the prison system was reformed, if those prison officers who systematically bashed prisoners were brought to justice.
Denning in 1977. In April 1980, he escaped Grafton Gaol hidden in a garbage bin. Credit:
When Denning's last safe house was blown, he descended back into the underworld and went to "work" with Cox in Victoria. On September 22, 1981, Denning and Cox, unmasked, walked into the Railway Centre on Edward Street, Brisbane, and waited in the foyer with the morning crowd until an armoured truck delivered the payroll. The guards climbed out of the truck and stacked onto a trolley four metal boxes containing a total of $327,000.
Denning and Cox drew their guns and warned, "This is a stick-up." One grabbed the money and the guards' guns and radio while the other pointed a pistol at a guard and ordered everyone to lie on the floor. Cox and Denning left the back way, warning ticket collectors to "keep their f...ing mouths shut" as they passed.
They fled to a nearby getaway vehicle, a stolen ute fitted with Commonwealth government plates, and made it out of the city centre before the 10 police cars in pursuit could catch up with them: Denning was wearing an earpiece attached to a pocket radio, probably tuned to police broadcasts. It was the biggest payroll robbery – and the second-biggest robbery – in Queensland's history. After the raid, Denning blew $110,000 at the races.
Both men were once held to be heroes. But of course they weren't. Real heroism is about saving lives.
Denning was recaptured in Manly, NSW, in November 1981. Cox remained on the run for almost 11 years after the Katingal escape. Denning broke out of jail – this time at Goulburn – for the last time on July 15, 1988. Unlike every police force in the country, Denning was able to find Cox, and the two men were ultimately captured together by the Victorian Armed Robbery Squad in a daring, almost cinematic swoop at Doncaster Shoppingtown on July 22.
Ray Denning died of a heroin overdose in 1993; Russell Cox is 70 years old and living in Queensland. Both men were once held to be heroes, of a sort, in the underworld. But of course they weren't. Real heroism is about saving lives; armed robbery is about threatening lives. Innocent people get traumatised, injured and killed.
Cox (in singlet) during his arrest in 1988. Credit:
So why did I want to write my book? In a way, I saw it as a continuation of my recent two books on Australia's Vietnam War. I guessed that the same people – or at least, the same kind of people – hid both the fugitive Denning and draft resisters on the run. But interviewing retired gangsters and Vietnam veterans revealed some similarities I hadn't expected.
The best of both groups of men were gentlemanly, respectful, articulate, expansive and, sometimes, badly damaged. They had both inflicted and suffered violence and found comfort in close comradeship with other men. They had lived a long time and had the chance to think about what they'd done and what had been done to them. Maybe some ex-prisoners and former soldiers also have a shared experience of post-traumatic stress disorder.
As different as they are, the worlds of criminals and veterans are both generally held to be difficult to penetrate and, to different degrees, hostile to outsiders. But I found deep reservoirs of friendliness and, more surprisingly, trust in both groups. Perhaps it was simply that they were the same age – in their 70s and 80s, the mellowed, contemplative years.
They were clever, complicated men. They understood the damage they had done to their victims.
None of the sometime stick-up men I met were the sexualised sociopaths I'd feared. I was helped with the book by former career-criminals-turned-writers Bernie Matthews (who survived the supermax regime at Katingal with Denning and Cox), and John Killick (who was broken out of Silverwater jail by his girlfriend in a hijacked helicopter).
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Like many of the other armed robbers I talked with, they were clever, complicated men with a hard, dry sense of humour. They understood the damage they had done to their victims.
Former prison officers were very helpful too, as were the few police I could track down. The least co-operative of all – with a few stellar exceptions – were former prisoners' rights activists, who sometimes met my advances with the kind of icy refusal more readily associated with, say, Paul Keating or Bob Dylan.
I was told nobody wanted me to write my book. I don't think that's true, but some people certainly didn't. And, more than once, I asked myself if it was the right thing to do. I wouldn't want to memorialise the boy at my high school who became a murderer. He doesn't deserve to be remembered. The woman he killed, who picked him up as a hitchhiker and gave him a job, before he bashed her then cut her throat, is the person who led the exceptional life.
Dominik Hefti, 35, murdered by Cox's accomplice Santo Mercuri in Cox's last armed robbery in July 1988, cries out to be remembered. I write that the killer was a devoted family man, but Hefti's widow said after his trial, "My son hasn't got a dad at all. 'A family man', so what? So he's a good murderer because he's a family man? He didn't think of his family when he was doing that." She hoped Mercuri would rot in hell.
The scene of the Hornsby NAB robbery in 1987. Credit:Victor Colin Sumner
A survivor's story
Daniel Hanna, one of the last lawyers in Ray Denning's life, was a particular help to me. Hanna, in his early 50s, is now a barrister based in Parramatta, specialising in insurance law. Denning was his first and only criminal client, but the gangster's ghost still haunts Hanna's high school reunions.
"People say, 'You acted for the famous bank robber!' " Hanna tells me. " 'Have you acted for any more robbers recently?' "
One school friend, Richard Ruppas, was particularly disturbed that Hanna had represented Denning.
"It's been a bone of contention between him and me," says Hanna. With great courtesy, Hanna introduces me to Ruppas, and we have lunch at the cafe at the State Library of NSW.
Like Hanna, Ruppas is candid, eloquent and engaging, and still seems a little surprised that any of this could have happened to him. At 18 years of age, Ruppas had been living in Gosford, NSW, and working as a junior bank clerk at the National Australia Bank in Hornsby. "I loved it," he tells me. "It was my first full-time job." On August 4, 1987, the day after the bank holiday weekend, "everyone was pretty happy", he says.
All the business customers who did their banking on the long weekend had deposited their takings in locked wallets in the bank's night safe. "Not everybody was in," says Ruppas, "because it was still quite early." The main safe had been opened, and his 19-year-old colleague, Jason, was about to service the Flexi Teller. Suddenly, "I heard this tremendous crash," says Ruppas. "I turned around and a car was coming in! I saw all this glass and everything coming in and I was stunned for a moment. I'm going, 'What's going on here?' Nothing made sense."
All Ruppas could think was that it must be an accident, so he moved to help the driver. "The next thing you know, the car door flies open and this guy gets out with a gun and tells me to get on the ground or he'll f...ing kill me. He's got a balaclava on. He has a pistol taped to his hand. I didn't know what to do. I hit the carpet like everybody else. I crawled forward and tripped the alarm button under the counter, and then I've gone, 'Ah shit, Was that the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do?'
"I thought I was going to die … He said he was going to shoot everybody."
"This guy was yelling, absolutely going off his nut, swearing and carrying on. It seemed to go very, very quiet. I could hear him walking around on the broken glass, and then I could hear Jason – and he was drowning in his own blood. Because when Jason was servicing the Flexi Teller, he had the door open – he was behind the door and he had his head down inside the machine. As the car came through, that steel door slammed into his head.
"He was on the ground and the idiot was yelling at him to get up and give him the money. And I thought I was going to die. I thought I was a goner. Because he said he was going to shoot everybody. I was panicking, just going, 'Oh shit! Oh shit! Look what's happened.'
"All I could hear was Jason trying to breathe, and people started to look around a bit. We were having the branch painted at the time, and the painter came around and said, 'They've gone. You can get up.' Nobody moved for probably a couple of minutes, then we got up. The first thing I did was run around to Jason and he was in a very bad way. So we rolled him over onto recovery position so he could breathe – because blood was coming out everywhere – and we called an ambulance. The next thing we know, police come barrelling in with their guns drawn, going, 'Where is he?'
"And we're like, 'He's gone! He's gone.'
" 'Which way did they go?'
" 'We've got no idea.' "
The bandit took all the night wallets. Ruppas saw only one gunman, who threatened, "My mate's outside and he's going to come in and kill you all."
The raider wore a black balaclava, but police guessed who it might be. The headline in the next day's Daily Mirror was "Mad Dog" Cox Link to Raid.
"It was a very professional job," Detective-Sergeant Dennis O'Toole of the Armed Hold-Up Squad told the newspaper. "He was in the bank for about 60 seconds."
Later, at a training course, Ruppas was told the other bandit had been Denning. It wasn't him – and the ram-raider probably wasn't Cox either – but their names had become synonymous with hold-ups in the 1980s. Ruppas returned to work within a day of the robbery.
"There was a big patch of red carpet with blood everywhere," he says. "It was very sombre and very sad. Everyone was worried if Jase was going to be okay because they didn't think he was going to survive. Thank god, he did. He got deafened in one ear permanently and cracked his skull. One eye was turned, as a result of it.
"I saw him many years later, and I said, 'Do you remember that day?' And he said, 'No, not at all. I can't remember anything.'
"For a little while," says Ruppas, "I was very jumpy about a lot of things. In that time, bank robberies were very, very common. Before we got hit, pretty much every branch down the North Shore had got hit ..."
For a short time after Denning's 1993 release from jail, Hanna was often in the media talking about his client.
"When Dan came on television, I've gone, 'I went to school with Dan! What the hell?' " says Ruppas. "I crossed paths with Dan again about three years later. And the funny thing was, Dan was going, 'Ah, he was an all right bloke.' And I said, 'I don't think so. I'll have to sit down and talk to you about what happened to me that day I met him.'
The survivor's story is an edited extract from Public Enemies: Russell 'Mad Dog' Cox, Ray Denning and the Golden Age of Armed Robbery by Mark Dapin (Allen & Unwin, $33), out August 18.
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Source: https://www.smh.com.au/national/stick-em-up-how-crims-made-the-80s-a-special-kind-of-hell-for-banks-20200626-p556j8.html