Christopher Badness Binse one of Australia’s most brazen criminals
WHETHER pointing guns at police and Armaguard vans in Melbourne or busting out of prison, Christopher Binse is as brazen as criminals come. Here’s why “Badness” is one of our baddest crooks.
Book extract
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CHRISTOPHER “Badness” Binse is as brazen as criminals come.
A master escape artist, a search of his prison cell once uncovered a homemade prison officer’s uniform, weapons and plans to release thirty inmates.
BADNESS IN BIZARRE COURT TIRADE
Robbing an Armaguard truck at gunpoint and holding police at bay in a 44-hour siege are among his exploits in his brief stints out of prison.
The following book extract tells the story of one of Australia’s baddest crims.
Gangland: The Great Escapes
A CONTINUING thorn in the flesh of the prison service has been Christopher ‘Bad Boy’ or ‘Badness’ Binse. By the time he was fourteen Binse, later the short-term companion of bank robber James ‘The Jockey’ Smith, had been labelled uncontrollable and sent to a boys home in Victoria.
From then on his career became another revolving door of crime and prison. At seventeen he was sent to Pentridge and on his release started to commit more serious crimes, including numerous armed bank robberies.
Given the nickname “Badness” by a friend in Pentridge in 1988, his ego was immense. After one bank robbery he took out an advertisement in the Herald Sun that read, “Badness is Back”. His home in Queensland, bought with the proceeds of crime, was named Badness, and that was also his personalised numberplate.
In September 1992 he escaped from Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital using a gun smuggled in for him. He was then arrested in Sydney and almost immediately escaped from Parramatta on 26 October. He was not long on the outside. Hours after his friend Jockey Smith was shot dead, Binse was arrested at a farmhouse close to Daylesford north of Melbourne. The next year he was convicted of four counts of armed robbery, for which he received a total effective sentence of seven years and six months’ imprisonment with a minimum of five years. This time the sentencing judge apparently thought these offences as ‘about as bad as bank robberies can be’.
On 26 October 1993, the anniversary of his Parramatta escape, he tried to escape from Pentridge, planning while he was at it to kill the murderer Julian Knight, not because he had randomly murdered seven people but because he was thought to be an informer, a far more serious crime. By ill chance for Binse, a prison officer was attacked the day before and a security crackdown followed. A search of his cell turned up a homemade prison officer’s uniform, six prison officers’ shirts, insignia and blades and weapons, along with his plans to release thirty inmates. The group to be involved in the escape included John Lindrea, a double murderer, and Paul Alexander Anderson, another noted escapee, who had advised on tactics.
After the discovery of yet another escape attempt in June 1995, Binse was shackled in a body belt, leg irons and handcuffs before he was allowed to leave his cell. The leg restraints came off on 2 August and on 19 September the remainder was removed. Binse would receive no sympathy from the Supreme Court when in August that year he alleged Barwon’s governor had acted unreasonably in having him restrained. Nor did he get any change from the Supreme Court.
In 1996, he was jailed for six and a half years over the 1992 armed robbery of a Commonwealth Bank, a theft of more than $36,000, and for escaping from Long Bay. The next year he lost an appeal against a ruling allowing wardens to put him in leg irons and handcuffs. In 2001 he became one of the first inmates of the $20 million high-security “supermax” jail within the Goulburn Correctional Centre in New South Wales, generally regarded as the end of the line. In 2005, when he was released from there after serving his full sentence, he took the opportunity to begin a campaign calling for improved rehabilitation programs. Sadly, his time on the outside was relatively short-lived because, in December 2006, he was sentenced to a minimum of thirty months for possessing an unregistered weapon after brandishing a gun in the Spearmint Rhino ‘gentlemen’s club’ in King Street, Sydney. He had also left a bullet on the counter. The police alleged he had threatened to kill a woman at the club.
While on remand for the 2006 offences, Binse was the victim of serious assault. He thought that his attackers were recruited by a particular prisoner, Gavin Preston, something that would bedevil his next few years.
For a time, his sentences were shorter. In 2010 there were convictions for possessing cocaine, carrying a prohibited weapon, dealing in property suspected to be the proceeds of crime, and having custody of various false identity documents, for which Binse received a modest aggregate sentence of twelve months. While back in jail in Port Phillip Prison in 2011, he tried to sue Victoria over two alleged jailhouse assaults, claiming they happened at Barwon Prison in May 2006 and at Marngoneet Prison near Barwon in July the next year.
After his release in November 2011 Binse went to live with a former girlfriend and his daughter. At that time he said he was assaulted “by four bikies” and talked of his fears for his safety to biker Toby Mitchell, who would later survive a shooting. Binse then obtained a bag full of weapons to protect himself and his daughter and began wearing a bulletproof vest.
But he could still be seen out and about, attending the same boxing match as former Comancheros boss Amad ‘Jay’ Malkoun and Melbourne identity Mick Gatto.
Following the attack on his friend Mitchell, he decided to have it out face-to-face with Gavin Preston. On 9 January 2012 he drove to an address in the Melbourne suburb of Seaford in a black Land Rover. He parked his car and attempted to steal a nearby vehicle. The attempt failed, and Binse decamped leaving the Land Rover behind. The police were called and in it they found a loaded .22 semiautomatic handgun, fitted with a silencer, located beneath the driver’s seat.
Binse then went for a jackpot. He planned to rob Armaguard security guards delivering money at the Westside Hotel. At about 11am on 19 March 2012, two guards left the van and went into the hotel. They collected $235,090, which was placed in a large blue bag. As they left the hotel and returned to their van Binse, now wearing a hood, mask and sunglasses, climbed a ladder he had brought earlier and placed behind a fence near the hotel, pointed his shotgun at one of the guards and demanded that he throw the bag containing the money over the fence to him. This was easier demanded than done and when the guard threw the bag it failed to clear the fence and landed in the car park.
Undeterred, Binse ordered the two guards to lie face down on the ground, before jumping the fence to recover the bag. Pointing his shotgun at one of the guards he took the man’s service revolver and ordered the other to hand over his. He then collected the blue bag, climbed back over the fence, and rode off to the rear of the Laverton Market, where Binse dumped his motorcycle and shotgun in a nearby dam, changed clothes, and drove away in a white van.
It did not take the police long to think of Binse as a suspect and he was watched as he went on a regular basis to the Atak storage facility in Ballarat Road in Albion. Then on 20 May 2012, two police officers in an unmarked vehicle saw Binse riding a Honda motorcycle along with a man on another bike. Approximately ninety minutes later, two other police officers saw his bike parked outside the La Porchetta Pizza Restaurant in Niddrie. All four officers were outside the restaurant when Binse came out. He saw them as he was walking towards his bike. He turned around and walked back into the restaurant, followed by the police officers. When one officer put his arm on his shoulder, Binse produced a loaded revolver — one of the guns that had been taken from the Armaguard robbery. The officer backed away, dropping his police radio in the process. Binse snatched it up and was off home to Sterling Drive in Keilor East.
At 6.40am the following day, members of the Victoria Police Special Operations Group surrounded his Sterling Drive home. Binse was inside with his partner and was armed. They called on him to surrender but instead he attempted to barricade himself inside the house. The siege ran for forty-four hours, with Binse’s partner still in there with him. From time to time during the day Binse randomly shot at the police, and fired shots from the back door of his house towards the rear fence of the property. Around half-past seven in the evening of 22 May, Binse’s partner left the house. She had not actually been held hostage but was worried that when she left this might escalate the shooting and that her departure might trigger a reaction from Binse.
At approximately 2am the next day the Special Operations Group took action. They fired tear gas into the house, which brought Binse out carrying one of the Armaguard guard’s revolver. Told to drop it he did so but then made a move to pick it up. Several nonlethal beanbag rounds were fired at him. He did manage to pick it up but was immediately hit with further beanbag rounds, fell down and was arrested. By then Binse’s container at the storage unit had been searched and the police had seized what amounted to a small armoury, including a .357 Sturm Ruger revolver identified as stolen from one of the two Armaguard personnel and a .45 calibre Auto Ordinance Corporation brand Thompson model 1928-A1 sub-machine gun, along with ammunition.
In May 2014 Binse pleaded guilty to the robberies, using a firearm while being a prohibited person and reckless conduct endangering persons. The trial judge, Justice Terry, accepted that he had been worried about his own safety and that of his family. Psychiatrists thought Binse was suffering from a form of mixed personality disorder with anti-social and narcissistic traits. Any future imprisonment in a restricted custodial environment (which is what he could expect) would have a significant adverse effect on his mental health. He was sentenced to a further eighteen years with a non-parole period of fourteen, with Terry echoing his colleague of 1993 in describing the offences as “about as bad as robberies can be”.
Days after his sentence Binse revived his lawsuit against the State of Victoria for the stabbing in jail. In December 2014 his application for leave to appeal on the grounds that his sentence was disproportionate was rejected. Justice Weinberg thought that if anything it might have been on the lenient side.
There was further trouble for Binse when, in October 2015, now known as Christopher Dean Pecotic, he was charged with a series of seventeen offences, including seven armed robberies dating back to 1988. On 26 February 2016 Binse/Pecotic pleaded guilty to the 1990s robberies that had netted him around $400,000. In June that year his application for leave to appeal against the 2014 sentences was refused.
Earlier in the year, in August, his long-time enemy Gavin ‘Capable’ Preston had been sentenced to eleven years for killing drug dealer Adam Khoury, after pleading guilty to a charge of defensive homicide. The year ended rather more positively for Binse/Pecotic when he was back in court again in the December, now acting for himself and blaming his legal team for his troubles.
“This is so toxic, it’s so rancid. You’ll be offended,’” he told the judges when he renewed his application for leave to appeal against the 2014 sentence. This time he was given leave to appeal on the ground that he could argue the sentence was manifestly excessive for a man in his middle to late forties.
It appeared Binse/Pecotic had begun to co-operate with the authorities which, fellow crims may fear, did not simply mean behaving better in prison. Their fears were dispelled when in Matthew Thompson’s biography Binse indicated that the only time he had ever been anything remotely doglike was the wholly justifiable occasion when he discovered an Islamic fanatic was threatening to decapitate a female prison officer.
By January 2017 he had converted to Islam. Later that year Binse/Pecotic was sentenced for the robberies to which he had pleaded guilty and received what amounted to a concurrent sentence. Except for the very few success stories, escapes are an example of the triumph of hope over experience but, as Halliday is reported to have said when he was recaptured near Shorncliffe in 1946, “A man’s liberty means everything to him. You can’t blame a man for trying … I am doing life. I have nothing to lose.”
This is an edited extract of Gangland: The Great Escapes by James Morton and Susanna Lobez, published by Melbourne University Publishing, RRP 29.99.
Originally published as Christopher Badness Binse one of Australia’s most brazen criminals