How Australia’s most famous fugitives were caught
THE fugitive life — with its isolation and constant fear of arrest — can be a tough existence, but Australia has a long list of high-profile runaways who made headlines for their elusiveness. Here are some of the most famous.
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NEW jails are being built in Victoria at an unprecedented rate.
The bad news for those who fill the maximum security jails is that escape is no longer an option.
Technology and superior construction have made the prisons of today so secure that the breakout is a thing of the past.
Helicopters, perimeter snipers, lovestruck guards and disguise were all used to great effect.
But there was a time when the ingenuity and determination of caged criminals made escapes a regular occurrence.
And slapping cuffs on the wrists of the wily runaways was also challenging.
Australia has a long line of high-profile fugitives who made headlines for their elusiveness.
Here are a few of them.
THE ROBBER-TURNED-TOURIST
PROLIFIC stick-up man Brendan Abbott had two stints as one of Australia’s most wanted crims.
In late 1989, Abbott broke out of Fremantle Prison and began a five-year crime and tourism odyssey which would net him millions of dollars.
It is not clear exactly how many armed robberies he pulled off but there were dozens, including one in which shots were exchanged with police during a high-speed chase.
When police arrested his armed robbery accomplice Aaron Reynolds in 1990, they uncovered photographs which showed the pair had clearly been mixing business with pleasure.
There were shots of Abbott on top of Uluru and the robber befriending an unwitting Japanese tourist on a bus tour.
There he was again drinking scotch and soda in a Gold Coast hotel’s swimming pool.
In many of the pictures, he wore an Akubra hat and the look of a man not expecting to be in custody any time soon.
But it did happen, eventually, when Abbott was arrested at gunpoint in 1995 while leaving a Surfers Paradise apartment.
By then, a myth grew that Abbott taunted police by sending them postcards, hence his Postcard Bandit nickname.
In November, 1997, Abbott was doing time in Queensland’s Sir David Longford jail for offences committed in that state.
In a spectacular operation, Abbott and four other dangerous inmates busted out of maximum security, aided by associate Brendan Berichon who fired on guards from outside the prison.
If bookmakers were putting together a market on who would be last at large, Abbott would have been long odds-on.
His buddies were steadily rounded up, some in the most doltish of circumstances, while Abbott vanished without trace in Berichon’s company.
Abbott’s exact movements from there are unclear but, by April the next year, he was known to be in Melbourne.
That became apparent when Berichon shot two police officers at Box Hill.
The pair split up, Abbott heading north to Queensland, then into the Northern Territory.
Police were to nab Australia’s most wanted man on May 2 as he walked into a Darwin pizza shop after washing his clothes at a laundromat.
Though carrying a pistol, he surrendered without incident.
A search of his 4WD revealed the tools which had helped him stay at large, including a laptop with programs for counterfeit driving licences, 100 blank licences, two guns and high powered ammo, wigs and make-up and $27,000 cash.
THE RUNAWAY FATHER AND SON
THOUGHT of as modern-day bushrangers, this father-and-son duo embarked on an eight-year crime-spree that sent them straight to the top of Australia’s most-wanted list.
Gino Stocco, 60, and son Mark, 38, were on-the-run itinerants who roamed the backwaters of Australia’s eastern states seeking work on farms.
Their “anti-authority belief system” saw them take revenge over their employers over any perceived slight.
Their acts of vengeance ranged from using a battery-operated drill to puncture nearly 100 vehicles in one attack to “cold-blooded murder” of a caretaker on a remote cannabis property.
STOCCOS BLAZE TRAIL OF DARKNESS
FUGITIVE’S FATHER DISAPPOINTED IN SON
The pair’s crimes — robberies, arson attacks and assaults — were conducted largely nocturnally with a sick diligence.
They destroyed sheds, machinery and farming equipment, emptied troughs, tanks, pesticide containers and fuel drums, flooded houses, starved stock and contaminated feed, and left millions of dollars in repairs in their wake.
The law finally caught up with Gino, a former sugar cane cutter, and his son Mark, a failed engineering university student and AWOL army recruit, after a headline-making 10-day police chase across two states during which they twice shot at police officers.
It all started to sour when they decided to kill their employer on the cannabis property “Pinevale” 50km north east of Dubbo in September 2015.
They had been there seeking refuge after seeing themselves on the TV show, Australia’s Most Wanted.
The owners allowed the pair to stay if they helped the caretaker Rosario Cimone, 68, with the growing of cannabis hydroponically in a shed on the property.
At first they got along, but inevitably the working relationship unravelled when the pair thought the old caretaker was bossing them about.
One day following an argument with Mr Cimone, Mark pulled out a stolen 12-gauge shotgun from under his bed and handed it to his father saying, “Dad, kill him”.
Mark Stocco told police Gino shot him twice in the stomach before stripping him and dumping his body in the bush.
They fled, and a two-week game of cat and mouse ensued.
A week into it, they were spotted by cops driving a car with stolen number places near Henty, 60km south of Wagga.
‘BUSHRANGER’ FUGITIVES IN MARATHON CHASE
40 YEARS FOR FATHER-SON CRIME DUO
The police engaged in two chases with the Stoccos that day and were dramatically shot at twice by the pair before they got away.
While on the run, they stole another vehicle in NSW and rammed a police car in Victoria, before ending up back at Pinevale where they were finally arrested on October 28, 2015.
The Stoccos were both given a 40-year sentence for murder, destroying property with fire, two counts of discharging firearm to resist arrest and several offences related to guns, driving matters and stolen goods.
Psychiatric reports reveal since the pair has been in custody they have become “model prisoners”.
THE HOUSEHOLD NAME
TONY Mokbel had gone from pizza cook to household name by the time he vanished in March 2006.
He was on trial for large-scale drug trafficking and had heard the whispers police liked him for a number of gangland murders.
It was time to run, phase one being to disappear to a safe house at Bonnie Doon, a sleepy holiday spot northeast of Melbourne.
A mate owned a property on Dry Creek Rd and it was here that Mokbel stayed for months.
Neighbours never suspected that Australia’s most wanted man — more accustomed to a life of luxury — was living in the house just up the red dirt road with its chicken shed and dogs.
Phase two was to get to the other side of the country, his cronies hiring a Nissan 4WD and carting him across the Nullabor to Perth.
Mokbel knew there was every chance he’d be picked up if he tried to get out of Australia via an airport but an alternative had been arranged.
They had trucked a yacht, the Edwena, from Sydney to Fremantle where phase three was to begin.
After customs looked the yacht over before departure, the toey fugitive was brought aboard and it was anchors aweigh on November 11.
Mokbel and crew then sailed 5000km across the Indian Ocean, passed through the Suez Canal and cruised into the Mediterranean Sea.
They berthed in Greece on Christmas Eve.
MOKBEL COULD MOVE FROM SUPER-SECURE UNIT
FAT TONY CAUGHT HORSING AROUND
Mokbel and his lover Danielle McGuire settled in Athens, living the high life and welcoming a child into the world.
It had been a highly expensive getaway but nothing a man who had made tens of millions of dollars peddling drugs couldn’t fund.
In the end, all the cash in the world couldn’t buy a happy ending.
Mokbel was arrested in June, 2007, and later flown back to Melbourne where he was convicted of large-scale drug trafficking.
He remains in maximum-security Barwon Prison.
THE STINKY FUGITIVE
MALCOLM Naden was a ruthless double-killer who would stop at nothing to stay free.
Unfortunately for police, he also had the kind of resourcefulness and will that made him extremely hard to catch.
Naden, a former shearer and abattoir worker, knew how to survive in the bush and used that ability to dodge the law in NSW for seven years.
He was prepared to camp out for weeks at a time, occasionally taking cash-in-hand work under bogus names.
Naden would identify unused properties, steal from them and stay when he thought it was safe.
LONELY LIFE ON THE RUN FOR MALCOLM NADEN
The stench he reputedly generated indicated such stays were not wasted in the shower.
Police were repeatedly able to identify locations where he had been but when they arrived he was gone.
That changed in December, 2011, when Naden shot a police officer in Nowendoc during another intensive search for the suspect.
Two weeks later, he was confronted in a house in the same area but got away again.
A succession of break-ins at properties in the same area followed, including one in which a semiautomatic rifle and ammunition were stolen.
In March, 2012, Naden’s days on the run finally ended in the north of NSW, 30km west of Gloucester.
Police put motion sensors in unoccupied houses in an area where he was suspected of roaming and it did the trick.
Naden activated one and specialist police travelled to the area, trekking the last 2km on foot through bush.
He was arrested and later pleaded guilty to 18 charges, including the murders of his cousin Lateesha Nolan at Dubbo in 2005 and the strangulation killing of Kristy Scholes five months later.
Naden is serving life in jail.
THE ‘ZOO’ ESCAPEE
RUSSELL “Mad Dog” Cox’s first crack at the fugitive life was an abject failure.
In 1975, he was shot as led other prisoners from Sydney’s Long Bay jail using a smuggled pistol and a stolen truck in a spectacular bid for freedom.
He would not waste his next breakout.
Sentenced to life in jail, Cox was moved to Long Bay’s Katingal high-security block, a supposedly escape-proof unit described as an “electronic zoo”.
But, in 1977, using a smuggled hacksaw blade, he cut through window bars in the exercise yard, scaled the 4m perimeter wall and was off.
HOW ‘MAD DOG’ BROKE OUT OF LONG BAY
THE CRIMINALS TAKEN DOWN BY UNDERCOVER COPS
CRIMS’ WAY BACK FROM DARK SIDE
Cox was a respected figure in the world of crimes and he used those networks to get out of Australia and into over Europe.
He returned in 1982, using false identities to carve out a new life of crime as a prolific armed robber.
Cox is a person of interest in two murders during that period.
In 1982, Painter and docker Brian Kane was shot dead at the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick.
Cox was quizzed five years ago over Kane’s death.
The other killing was that of his associate, another Painter and Docker named Ian Revell Carroll who was found shot dead at his Mt Eliza home in January, 1983.
Cox, his partner Helen Deane and their dog Devil, named after the Phantom’s pooch, disappeared straight after the death of Carroll.
The whole thing finally came undone in 1988.
Cox and career criminal Raymond John Denning were preparing for an armed robbery at the Doncaster Shoppingtown, unaware detectives were a step ahead and watching them.
Both were arrested in the resultant shootout and jailed.
Cox is now free from jail and living the quiet life in Queensland.
THE NARCISSIST
JOHN Friedrich was a fugitive with a difference.
While most are career criminals long accustomed to dodging the law, his disappearance was a bolt from the big end of town.
For more than a fortnight, Friedrich’s flight fascinated the public after his massive frauds while at the helm of the National Safety Council were exposed.
Knowing the game was up, he disappeared in March, 1989, sparking one of the biggest manhunts in Australia’s history.
Friedrich somehow made his way to the other side of the nation, lobbing in Geraldton.
He then caught a bus 500km south to Perth and got off at Balvadis before an alert taxi driver raised the alarm.
Sgt Glenn Feeney was the first to approach Friedrich, who was polite and surrendered without incident.
“He looked relieved, shook my hand and jumped into the car,” Sgt Feeney said at the time
Friedrich was ultimately charged with a $296 million fraud relating to the collapse of the Victorian division of the NSC.
It was later to be revealed his true identity was Friedrich Johann Hohenberger, born in West Germany in 1950.
The enigmatic family man was described by a psychologist as delusional, narcissistic and unable to accept challenges to his immense ego.
Police found a web of fantasies about CIA connections to the NSC, espionage, narcotics smuggling and arms deals were without foundation.
Friedrich took his own life in Gippsland in July 1991.
Originally published as How Australia’s most famous fugitives were caught