Weapons thieves seem to know just where to strike
IT LOOKED like any suburban home - an anonymous house in the Geelong suburb of Manifold Heights, but the thieves seemed to know more. They hauled away a safe containing three shotguns and a high powered Ruger hunting rifle.
Andrew Rule
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THE gun thieves knew exactly what they were doing. But how did they know exactly where to strike?
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First they backed a tractor up to a wall of the farmhouse on the Gellibrand-Carlisle Road in the Otways. Then they looped a steel chain around the gun safe inside and drove off, using the safe like a wrecking ball.
After dragging it clear of the splintered wall, they unhooked it and loaded it into a waiting vehicle. In the safe were 15 firearms and heaps of ammunition — but it’s a fair bet the bad guys knew that already.
The bandits could have gone to almost any other property in the district and not found so many guns. The odds that they picked the isolated Carlisle River farmhouse at random are 1000-1 and drifting.
The irresistible conclusion is that whoever hit the farm last Thursday had impeccable information that the family living there are keen sporting shooters. The family is known as reputable and law-abiding, but it seems someone knew how many registered firearms they had.
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The farm heist was the third big gun-stealing raid in Victoria in less than a week. This is either a startling coincidence — or indicates that criminal groups are arming themselves.
It took a week of dogged detective work to arrest a crew of young Middle Eastern males following the brazen robbery of O’Reilly’s gun shop in Thornbury on January 29, which followed the attempted ram raiding (by truck) of another gun store at Tullamarine several hours earlier.
A week is a long time in crime circles because possession of hot property is a “go-to-jail” card. So when police found 37 handguns taken in the Thornbury robbery in a raid on a Docklands apartment last Monday, it implied the weapons were not stolen to sell.
A former law enforcement firearms expert with long-term knowledge of the black market told the Sunday Herald Sun that if the guns had been stolen for sale they would have been passed on immediately to cut the risk of arrest.
If not quickly sold, the cache would have been hidden far from where the alleged thieves lived, the expert says. Instead, they seemed determined to keep the weapons for some other motive than profit.
“Those handguns were not for sale,” he says. “Greed for their market price would have moved them quick (because) the price is too high to have them lying around. They (the thieves) have a cause or a plan.”
But the spate of thefts reflects the swelling demand for black market guns, which has grown as gun laws have got tougher. Handguns, especially, are worth relatively little over the counter and a small fortune under the lap: a secret deal in a hotel car park, an outlaw motorcycle club meet or a “fishing” trip.
The tougher the gun laws are, the more that black-market weapons are worth and the more incentive there is to steal them, fabricate them in backyard workshops or smuggle them into the country. It is the sort of vicious circle — the “prohibition factor” — that gives law makers and law enforcers a headache.
The 37 handguns recovered from the Thornbury raid are worth roughly only $40,000 total to legitimate buyers — but probably more than $200,000 if sold individually in the underworld, where semiautomatic pistols can command more than $5000 each.
Older-style revolvers of the sort police quit using a decade ago bring at least $3000 in deals done on big building sites, one underworld source told the Sunday Herald Sun this week.
And some weapons handed in at police stations during amnesties have found their way back into private hands, says a former armourer.
“I was offered a beautiful elephant gun at (a northern suburbs) police station for $150 but then the senior sergeant overruled the sergeant and sold it to his mate,” the expert said. “At one station anything that looked good was going into a bag on the floor behind the counter — then straight out the back door.”
Big raids like the ones at Thornbury and Tullamarine make headlines — but it is the constant undercurrent of thefts, mostly from rural properties like the one in the Otways, that imply organised crime involvement.
Many legitimate gun owners, sporting shooters and primary producers are convinced that thieves know which houses to target. There is a lingering suspicion the Firearms Registry has a leak — or even that some police stations do.
The Otways theft last week is one of several in the greater Geelong region. A week before that, expert thieves targeted an anonymous house in the Geelong suburb of Manifold Heights, entering the garage through the roof, attaching a chain or cable to the gun safe inside, opening the roller door from inside, then hauling the safe out using a vehicle, shredding the bolts used to fix the safe to the floor.
Geelong shooter “Tony” told the Sunday Herald Sun the thieves had ignored other valuable property in the garage, including a Harley- Davidson motorcycle, and had not ransacked the house. The safe contained three shotguns and a high-powered Ruger hunting rifle legally worth $5000 and capable of being used as a sniper rifle.
In the hands of an outback goat and pig culler, the Ruger poses little risk to society. In the hands of a Middle Eastern gang of the type allegedly involved in the Thornbury heist, it could easily be traded to would-be terrorists — which is what happened when Middle Eastern criminals supplied a pistol to radicalised teen Farhad Jabar, who murdered NSW police public servant Curtis Cheng in October 2015. The same applies to the shotgun used by Lindt Café gunman Man Monis.
Farms in every country district have suffered gun thefts that could be random, but thieves also raid houses that are not obvious targets, prompting understandable suspicions of leaks either from the Firearms Registry or from certain police stations.
This column last year reported the intriguing case of a Surf Coast property in the semi-suburban hobby farm belt being targeted by specialised thieves who knew precisely what they were after.
They struck silently at night, forcing the side door into a little-used garage and stepping over cases of valuable wine to reach the gun safe fixed to the wall.
The safe had an over-size, hardened padlock but the thieves must have brought heavy-duty bolt cutters. They took all five guns — and the broken padlock, the sign of someone skilled in leaving no clues.
The owners are suspicious about the timing of the raid, given that they had lived at the same place 25 years without a break-in. Yet the theft, executed with pinpoint accuracy, happened soon after a police inspection of the gun safe.
The more the owners think about the “coincidence” of theft following inspection, the less they think it was one.
If the thieves had been tipped off by an official using inside knowledge, it wouldn’t be the first time. Crooks love compromising anyone who is useful to them, from judges to janitors. Some, like Perth’s notorious convicted drug dealer John Kizon and the late Abe “Mr Sin” Saffron, made a career of it.
Victoria’s previous chief commissioner had to cope with bent officers who acted as stooges for bikie gangs — and with others tied to well-connected racketeers.
Meanwhile, the spectre of illicit weapons being used in terrorist attacks adds a new and sinister layer to a black market that has been around at least since handguns were effectively outlawed in Victoria in the 1920s.
Colourful legal identities tell the story of a Melbourne criminal barrister who asked one of his clients for a “size 38” leather jacket stolen from the wharves. The lawyer was surprised to receive a brand new .38 calibre pistol still in its box. His painter and docker client had assumed that when he insisted on a size 38, it was code for a pistol.
Notorious heroin importer David “McVillain” McMillan, the gentleman rogue schooled at Caulfield Grammar, describes a gun heist he pulled in the late 1970s with a convicted armed robber and truck hijacker named Danny McIntosh and four others.
It was probably the biggest stash of weapons ever stolen in Australia — more than 100 handguns taken from a South Melbourne warehouse, Guthrie Trading, in the late 1970s.
Crime squad detectives had a fair idea who might be responsible. But they could not find the guns, which had been distributed around the Australian underworld or placed “in storage”. The detectives met key crooks to ask that they not sell the handguns to “idiots” who might use them in the streets and endanger lives.
This did not stop McMillan from carrying a pair of matched pistols in special pockets sewn into a leather suit. He soon gave up carrying guns but not a life of crime that would see him imprisoned all over the world, notorious misadventures that saw him become the only westerner to escape from the Thai prison known as the Bangkok Hilton.
Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read was virtually illiterate but highly knowledgeable about guns. He had learned much of this from his war veteran father Keith Read — and from the deadly painter and docker Bill “The Texan” Longley, who like to carry a .45 Colt pistol.
Longley and Read, despite being despised and feared, both outlived most of their critics. Longley used to practise shooting by sinking beer bottles floating in the Murray River near his sister’s farm. Read also shot bottles — sometimes being held by trusting “assistants”.
Read would later infuriate police by publishing lists of black market guns for sale in the underworld — call it “Guntree”.
And he infuriated a lot of other people, especially Tasmanian politicians, when he exposed the bizarre story of Australian crooks swapping two live Tasmanian devils for a crate of 40 new Colt pistols that American sailors had filched from their aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on its visit to Hobart in November, 1998.
The pistols, stamped with the ship’s name, were instant collector’s items — and most were reputedly sold for big money on the mainland, proof that not every bikie seen sailing on the Spirit of Tasmania is there for the fresh air. That’s a good thing, considering that 16 polo ponies died on board from lack of oxygen two weeks ago.
Meanwhile, a couple of questions stand. Who is tipping off the crooks about where the guns are? And if gangs are stockpiling guns — why?
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