Australian fugitives: Mokbel, Abbott and more infamous crooks who tormented police on the run
AS Gino and Mark Stocco’s eight years on the run came to an end today, we take a look at other fugitives who eluded police dragnets — until the law won out.
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THE FUGITIVE life — with its isolation and constant fear of arrest — can be a tough existence.
But, as father and son criminals Gino and Mark Stocco have shown, slapping cuffs on the wrists of the runaways can also be challenging.
Australia has a long line of high-profile runaways who made headlines for their elusiveness.
Here are some of the most famous.
TONY MOKBEL: Fat Tony’s Greek escapade
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.
Mate George Elias 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 four-wheel-drive 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 vessel 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.
THE GREAT ESCAPE: Mokbel interactive in our gangland special
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.
MALCOLM NADEN: Calculating killer had bush skills
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.
The stench he reputedly generated indicated such stays were not spent 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.
RUSSELL COX: ‘Mad Dog’ used false identities
“Mad Dog” Cox’s first crack at the fugitive life was an abject failure.
In 1975, he was shot as he 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.
Cox was a respected figure in the world of crime and he used those networks to get out of Australia and over to Europe.
He returned in 1982, using false identities to carve out a new life of crime as a prolific armed robber.
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 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.
BRENDEN ABBOTT: The postcard bandit
A PROLIFIC stick-up man, Abbott had two stints as one of Australia’s most wanted men.
In late 1989 he busted 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 north heading 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 four-wheel-drive 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.
JOHN FRIEDRICH: Fraudster’s life of fantasy
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 July, 1991.
