Fugitive father and son Gino and Mark Stocco not even close to modern bushrangers
NO one knows why weirdo father-and-son combo Gino and Mark Stocco went on the lam, although it might be interesting to talk to Mark’s mum.
Andrew Rule
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NO one knows why weirdo father-and-son combo Gino and Mark Stocco went on the lam, although it might be interesting to talk to Mark’s mum.
She is the one who knew Gino well enough 35 years ago to produce baby Mark.
She’s also the one Mark robbed in a carpark in 2004.
The former Mrs Stocco must have suspected the story would end badly.
Maybe that’s why she divorced Gino in 2003.
Stocco & Son have hit the headlines after eight years of being fairly low-profile fugitives from the law.
Until Friday last week they were just thieving drifters roaming around rural backwaters of the eastern states picking up a bit of cash work — and anything that wasn’t nailed down, apparently.
They also picked arguments, which isn’t smart for men on the run.
Rule 1 of the Robbers’ Rulebook says you should always walk away from an argument if you’re on the wanted list — as good crooks say, “don’t red light yourself’’.
But these are not good crooks, even if they are cunning and, so far, extremely lucky the posse hasn’t caught up with them.
Our heroes assaulted a country cop in St George in outback Queensland in June, which was unwise.
Not that the authorities took much notice of them until they took pot shots at police near Wagga last week.
That was an extreme tactical error. Using an illegal semiautomatic military carbine to resist arrest tends to get the law’s undivided attention.
In this case, the result is police forces in three states are on high Stocco alert.
The “big blue gang” will get them, dead or alive.
After crossing the Murray in a stolen Toyota LandCruiser and stirring up a hornets’ nest in northeastern Victoria, Stocco & Son managed to get to Bairnsdale, 250km east of where the search has centred around Yea all week.
Last night there was an unconfirmed sighting at a service station on the Hume Highway at South Gundagai in New South Wales.
The manhunt was also under way in South Australia, which is a better advertisement for Toyota than for the police air wing.
But every hour that passes is one hour closer to their capture — if they’re lucky.
People who shoot at police and make fools of them are inviting a robust response.
Just ask Malcolm Naden, the sexual deviate who bolted from Dubbo after murdering a neighbour and his cousin, both young women.
Naden was hailed some sort of latter-day bushranger because he skulked around the bush, out of sight and out of mind, scavenging mouldy potatoes, tinned peas and pornography from huts and holiday houses.
This went on for almost seven years until he, too, made the mistake of taking a shot at a policeman with a stolen rifle in 2012.
Then the heavy artillery came in — helicopters, electronic bugs, tracker dogs and serious firepower.
From that point it was just a matter of when, not if, he’d be shot or captured.
When Naden was arrested he was clearly relieved it was all over.
Police privately said afterwards he stank so much they deserved danger money just for escorting the prisoner, let alone catching him.
It might not have been diplomatic to point out this failing, as the Stoccos are reportedly prone to take offence.
They not only steal but are paranoid and argumentative and have a bizarre vengeful streak.
After falling out with whichever unsuspecting “cocky” had hired them to do casual work on remote properties, they would go on a rampage of revenge.
Their favourite trick was to use an electric drill to wreck the tyres of every vehicle on the place.
With tractors, combine harvesters, motor bikes and four-wheel drives, this is ruinously expensive as well as massively inconvenient, because the replacement tyres and tubes are several thousand dollars and several hours drive away.
But tyres weren’t their only targets.
They smashed water troughs so livestock would die, cut fences, torched buildings and broke open gun safes to get hold of weapons.
That would be why they have, as well as a shotgun, a Chinese-made SKS military carbine, a semiautomatic outlawed after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
The sort of weapon once sold in their hundreds from the backs of trucks in rural Queensland for as little as $89, and heavily in Tasmania, where the half-witted Martin Bryant got his from a gun shop as easily as buying bread and milk.
The Stoccos ran off the rails after Gino’s divorce
in 2003.
It was revealed they had stolen the identity of a priest and of a soldier serving in Iraq, among others, and parlayed stolen money and property into three years of sailing a yacht up and down the coast.
It’s one way to stay off the radar, but it didn’t stop them being jailed in 2007, an indignity they resented.
Since then, presumably while on either parole or bail, they headed into the bush and “off the grid”.
They are low-tech crooks in a high tech world — no mobile telephones, no bank accounts or electronic transfers, no names or addresses on databases, always using back roads.
By living the way everyone did in the 1970s, the pair have been hard to trace.
But even they couldn’t stay out of the modern world all the time.
CCTV caught them at a Euroa service station on Monday night, fuelling the four-wheel-drive ute they stole in NSW a little earlier.
It’s more Dad and Dave than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but there’s nothing funny about a father and son so close they share the same delusions.
Shrinks have words for people like these dangerously odd couples, in which each loser reinforces the other’s belief they’re above the law because the world is “against them”.
The French call it “folie a deux”, meaning “a madness shared by two”.
England’s moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, had it.
So did the evil David and Catherine Birnie, who killed four young women in Western Australia.
And Valmae and Barrie Watts, who abducted and killed a 12-year-old girl on the Gold Coast.
The jury is still out on whether Ivan Milat had help from another family member in the string of murders for which he was later convicted.
So much for shared psychosis.
There are also precedents for crooks good at blending into the landscape.
There’s the “After Dark Bandits”, twins Peter and Doug Morgan, who used anything from horse floats and trail bikes to canoes to stage creative getaways from armed robberies, until they tried to shoot a policeman at Heathcote.
Alexander Robert MacDonald, a Vietnam veteran, bomb maker and armed robber, would camp in the bush for weeks after pulling interstate bank robberies in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Then he would slip back to Victoria where he lived, almost invisibly, on a boat moored in Western Port.
MacDonald advertised a bogus job and “employed” a man who looked like himself so he could murder him and take over his identity, right down to a new passport, bank accounts and suchlike.
He was getting ready to escape to the Solomons when police caught him in 1997.
The Stoccos aren’t in that league, of course. And everyone knows they are innocent until proven guilty.
As for them being “modern day bushrangers”?
That humming sound you can hear is Ben Hall and Ned Kelly spinning in their graves.
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