Great Bookie Robbery: The unsolved Melbourne crime that bagged millions
LONG before Sweden’s crown jewels were stolen in a dramatic 007-style heist a gang took just 11 minutes to raid a Melbourne bookies and took off with millions. Four decades on we still don’t know the full story.
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LONG before Sweden’s crown jewels were stolen in a dramatic heist it took just 11 minutes for a heavily-armed gang to steal millions from the Victoria Club in Melbourne.
While it took months to plan the quick robbery made the gang very wealthy and mystery still remains about the Great Bookie Robbery.
Four decades on, no-one has been convicted over the heist and we’ll never know exactly how many millions the gang plundered when they bailed up staff at the Queen St club.
This is their story.
Estimates of the haul from The Great Bookie Robbery vary from $1.3 million to $15 million — a handsome payday today, but an immense sum when the men raided the Queen Street club on April 21, 1976.
A gang of six armed men, dressed in khaki and balaclavas and some with machine guns, stormed the club, the headquarters for the bookmakers, at lunch time.
They hit the Victoria Club’s settling room just as the bookies handed in their takings from race meetings at Caulfield and Moonee Valley over the Easter break.
About 40 people inside the club including patrons, staff and clerks making cash deliveries for the bookies.
DIM SIM MAKER RAN WITH KILLERS, CROOKS TIL HIS LUCK RAN OUT
HOW CHOPS LEE DODGED TIME OVER BOOKIE ROBBERY
They were caught by surprise as the gang flooded in, forcing everyone into the billiards room and down on the floor.
Eleven minutes later, the gang fled in two vans with the cash stuffed in calico bags.
As bookmakers sometimes do, they talked down their losses.
Perhaps fearing future robberies or the long arm of the Australian Taxation Office, they claimed $1.3 million was stolen.
But in the underworld, the talk was of a $15 million heist.
Whatever the amount, it was enough for some in the underworld to kill for.
Only one man ever faced court over the crime.
Dim sim manufacturer Norman Leung “Chops” Lee was in the frame.
Lee was charged with the armed robbery of the Victorian Club and with receiving stolen money.
His de facto wife and a second woman faced a conspiracy charge.
Lee fronted the Melbourne Magistrates Court in 1977.
The court was told that months before the robbery, Lee was desperate for a business loan to expand the factory but failed to secure one.
Soon after the raid, he came into $270,000 in cash.
His accountant, Alfred Acquaro, told the court Lee presented him with $50,000 in a cardboard box, which Lee said were gambling winnings, telling him to again try to secure a loan.
Lee paid $13,000 cash to extend his house and factory and spent $60,000 on machinery, the court heard.
But police were forced to admit they had no direct evidence tying Lee to the heist and, with witnesses unable to identify any members of the gang, the charges against Lee were dismissed.
It’s believed Lee and underworld figure Raymond Patrick “Chuck” Bennett were behind the robbery.
Both men had a string of crimes behind them, and Bennett was a Painters and Dockers hard man.
Others thought to have been involved were drug dealer Dennis William “Greedy” Smith and criminal Ian Revell Carroll.
The sheer scale of the holdup raised tensions within the underworld.
Brothers Brian and Les Kane tried to strongarm some of the take from the robbery out of Bennett.
Les Kane was ambushed, shot dead and his body removed from his Wantirna home by three men in October 1978.
Bennett was charged with his murder but acquitted in September 1979, even though Kane’s wife said she recognised one masked man’s voice as Bennett’s..
Two months later, charged with another armed robbery, Bennett was shot dead as two unarmed police marched him through the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court.
The gunman escaped and was never caught, but it’s thought Brian Kane was behind the bold hit.
Lee, who was a witness in Bennett’s case and was their to give him an alibi on the robbery charge, fled Australia for Singapore and stayed away until 1992.
Kane was gunned down in reprisal for Bennett’s killing in Brunswick’s Quarry Hotel in November 1982.
Carroll was murdered in 1983.
Lee died in 1992 as police chased he and two accomplices from a bungled holdup on an armoured van at the Ansett terminal at Tullamarine airport.
The trio had just robbed an armoured van of more than $1 million.
Dozens of police including members of the Special Operations Group had been lying in wait for them, and pounced.
Lee, armed with a .357 Magnum pistol, was shot dead.
Police said he pointed the gun at them before they fired.
Smith took his secrets to the grave when he died of a heart attack, aged 65, in 2010.
Mark Lee Bennett, a butcher by trade, did not know until he was 29 that Ray Bennett was his father.
He said Bennett was the mastermind of the Great Bookie Robbery and has written a three-part book series on the crime, released in 2015.
Bennett said his dad, “Chops” Lee and the gang made off with about $8.5 million, and initially hid the cash in an abandoned factory next to Lee’s dim sim plant.
He said one of the gang posed as a fridge repairman as the others waited on the fire escape outside the settling room.
The bodgy tradie then produced a shotgun and the others burst in.
Bennett and Lee sliced through the wire mesh clearing cage in the settling room with boltcutters to get to the money before all of them raced down the fire escape.
“My father had brains,” he told news.com.au in 2015.
“To get away with the biggest robbery in Australian history is a pretty good effort.
“The place was going to go off, it was just a matter of when.”
Mr Bennett said he knew Ray Bennett but only learned at 29 that Ray fathered him during an affair with his mother.
“I was only young. From what I heard over the years, my dad idolised me. He took me
places, gave me money. I was only eight when he was shot dead. That’s when things started
going a bit sideways for the family,” he said.
Mr Bennett said he was told that Chuck had left him $6 million in an English bank account.
He said he spent his childhood under secret surveillance by police.
“A lot of people knew who I was, but I didn’t. It was a bit disappointing finding out so late in
life. I’m just happy the story’s out,” he said.
Mr Bennett said each member of the crew took a $500,000 share of the $8.5 million pot and Chuck flew the remaining $6 million to the UK.
Documents snatched with the cash implicated others in race fixing, blackmail, drugs and murder, he said.
Originally published as Great Bookie Robbery: The unsolved Melbourne crime that bagged millions