The international cat burglar who hit eight Toorak homes in seven days

His social media profile showed him to be a middle-aged tourist, posing with Australian wildlife, on ocean beaches and at well-known spots of interest. In reality, he was setting up an alibi. He was an international crook and one of the best at his craft.

He commanded a crew that would fly into Australia under assumed names to hit selected targets in Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland – then disappear.

Liudas Valiusaitis, the burglar who would wing it.

It followed an international pattern by Irish, Albanian and Colombian gangs – fly in, hit an area then move interstate before police saw the pattern. Fly out before they joined the dots. Rinse and repeat.

In July 2020, Detective Sergeant Sean Schimizzi from Stonnington CIU (Prahran really) saw the pattern – eight Toorak homes hit over one week.

The crooks entered through a second-storey window, often disabled CCTV, knew the residents were away during the school holidays, hit the master bedroom and didn’t ransack the house.

Valiusaitis, the fake tourist.

“They would ignore electronic gear and only took designer goods, cash and jewellery,” says Schimizzi.

It would take a year-long investigation, codenamed Oceans, to discover a sophisticated gang, mostly of Albanian descent, with its leader regularly visiting Australia (DNA would later prove his first Melbourne job was in 2016). Later, they would find he had been jailed in Iceland for six months for similar offences.

Best guess is that he pulled up to 70 burglaries with the biggest haul from one job around $650,000.

His planning was immaculate. To compare him to most opportunistic and impulsive burglars is to compare caviar with a seafood extender.

This gang conducted detailed surveillance, often lying in bushes for hours to observe targets, used CCTV jamming equipment, earpiece communicators, and had men positioned outside the house in radio contact with the main burglar. “Our man would walk the streets taking detailed notes,” says Schimizzi.

Their method was specific. The target time was 6pm to 9pm, usually during dinner hours and school holidays. Quiet enough not to be noticed but still busy enough to walk the streets without suspicion.

They did not strike during daylight savings, wanting the cover of darkness but also to select houses where the lights were off.

The chief burglar would jump neighbours’ fences, find tools to break open windows, then use a ladder or jump on water heaters to gain access to the second storey.

Most were next to a vacant block, derelict house or building site, giving them further security.

The breakthroughs came slowly as Oceans investigators collated a list of Melbourne jobs from Sandringham to Balwyn that fitted the pattern. Schimizzi reached out to colleagues in NSW he worked with in the bikie-busting Echo taskforce to find similar jobs.

Eventually, CCTV from some of the street surveillance captured a middle-aged man appearing to conduct surveillance in the area of the burglaries. For obvious reasons, he was dubbed Baldy.

Then he was picked up talking near a surveillance camera. “A translator said he was speaking Albanian and possibly came from the Kosovo area.”

Albanian crime gangs are so notorious they often travel on fake passports from other countries to avoid suspicion. It would later be found Baldy had five fake Lithuanian identities.

On October 2, 2022, Baldy was caught on CCTV about to enter a house in Mosman, Sydney. “The camera had been painted black on the wall, and he must have missed it,” says Schimizzi.

When he spotted it, he bolted, but it was too late. Police finally had a usable image.

Knowing his cover may be blown, he flew out of Australia two days later.

Using facial recognition data, Home Affairs identified him as Liudas Valiusaitis.

His only daughter lived in Melbourne, and he had been here so often he had his own Commonwealth Bank account. On each trip, he would use between one and three associates as support staff, but he was always the break-in artist.

Valiusaitis nabbed at the airport.

Valiusaitis was born in May 1973 in Kaunas, Lithuania, and was of Albanian descent.

In 2000, he bought a farm to raise goats, sheep and chickens, but he was not the average goat farmer because he embarked on a university course in his middle age. He would later tell the courts he took up crime because his farm had plunged into debt.

“When we finally caught him, he asked, ‘Who will feed my livestock?’” Schimizzi says.

Once police knew the identity of their main suspect, they could backtrack.

He arrived in Australia on May 21, 2022, under the alias Luidas Juzikis and rented a car at Tullamarine.

His first job on this trip was eight days later, on a house in Brighton. For the next three months, there was a spike in top-end burglaries around Melbourne where the offender was so discreet the victims often didn’t know they had been robbed for days. The discerning Valiusaitis was not only a thief but a snob. He would discard jewellery that was not top-end, then send his A-grade haul home in shipping containers.

None of the houses were soft targets with most having state-of-the-art security systems and high fences.

Local burglaries were dealt with by local detectives, and it took time to see the pattern in Balwyn, Sandringham, Kew, Moorabbin, South Yarra and Toorak.

Then the burglaries stopped – at least in Melbourne. On August 15, Valiusaitis’ girlfriend flew in, the couple headed north where the break-ins continued in NSW until he was caught on camera in Mosman and flew out.

Paulius Juzenas, the willing apprentice pinged at the airport.

By minimising the risks and playing the odds, the elite burglar had got away with it but like so many crooks, greed would get in the way.

Eight months later, believing he had been forgotten, Valiusaitis slipped back into Melbourne on June 8, and six days later, his accomplice, Lithuanian Paulius Juzenas, dressed as any other budget tourist, gave a backpackers’ hostel in St Kilda as his address. There are no records of him staying there.

They were both pinged at the airport.

Operation Oceans detectives from three districts worked with investigators from NSW, the Australian Federal Police, Border Force, Home Affairs, the UK National Crime Agency, Interpol and the Australian Crime Intelligence Commission to close in.

‘They rented different cars from different outlets and took to staying in short-term rental accommodation.’

Detective Sergeant Sean Schimizzi

Within days, the burglaries started again. Schimizzi says they had perfected a system. “They rented different cars from different outlets and took to staying in short-term rental accommodation.”

For the Oceans investigation, the tide was turning as investigators began to track Valiusaitis’ phone pinging off one tower in Mentone. They also knew he had a rental car, which had a small white sticker on the rear windscreen.

A surveillance cop remembered seeing one when they swept the area. It was parked outside a short-term rental address in Levanto Street, Mentone. A sneaky online check by Schimizzi showed the property would be vacant in a few days. What investigators didn’t know is they were running out of time. Valiusaitis was planning one more job before flying out.

On July 12, police followed the two to Royal Avenue, Sandringham. Police couldn’t be sure the pair were about to commit a crime, but they soon had a pretty good clue. They watched Valiusaitis climb down a ladder with a safe on his back.

Juzenas is snapped unloading a truck.

Police raided the Mentone flat and arrested the two, finding burglar gear and a receipt for an international transport company. Schimizzi says that when police visited the cargo business, one of the staff had accidentally taken a picture of one of the customers unloading four boxes he was sending to Kupiskis, Lithuania. (It has a most excellent horse museum, apparently.) It was Juzenas.

He paid for his property to be shipped, giving Levanto Street as his home address.

But the ship had almost sailed – literally. The boxes were in a container already loaded onto the Maltese container ship, Tancredi, at South Wharf bound for Europe.

Schimizzi was convinced the Lithuanians had stashed their haul in the container but in policing, there is no such thing as a free hunch. If they delayed the ship leaving, they would have to pay a fine worth over $200,000. The hope was it would be one of the top containers, and it could be a quick job.

“They had to remove 44 containers to get to it,” he says.

Once inside, they found boxes 1344, 1345, 1346 and 1347 that contained 80 kilos of designer handbags, luxury watches, jewellery and even bottles of Grange – valued at $2 million.

“There were earpieces, gloves and other burglary equipment, which indicated they were planning to leave in days,” says Schimizzi.

How much Valiusaitis stole will never be known. He was eventually charged with 46 burglaries. Most were worth between $50,000 and $200,000 with the smallest about $25,000. Police estimate the total is more than $7 million. Not bad for a struggling goat farmer.

Valiusaitis pleaded guilty in court to 15 counts of burglary and was sentenced to a minimum of 18 months. He is expected to be deported in the next few weeks. His mate, Juzenas, received a minimum of three months and has already been deported.

The 80 kilos of hot goods have been returned to the owners, and the Victoria Police received a bill for removing the container from the Tancredi.

Schimizzi still has the receipt. “It was for $20,274.16.”

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