It was billed as the perfect crime, but the Great Bookie Robbery showed there was no honour among the theives

FORTY years ago six men led by the charismatic Raymond Bennett (left) committed what looked like the perfect crime — the Great Bookie Robbery — but the gang soon self destructed.

Undated. Raymond Bennett. Ray Bennett. Chuck Bennett. Picture: Supplied / File Photo

TECHNICALLY it is still an unsolved crime. The 1976 robbery of millions of dollars of bookmaker’s money from the Victoria Club in Melbourne seemed like the perfect crime. None of the six perpetrators of the Great Bookie Robbery was ever convicted. Yet all would meet a nasty end.

The mastermind of the robbery was the charismatic Raymond Patrick Bennett, known as Chuck. Born in 1949, Bennett grew up in Chiltern, Victoria, a country town where he had a reputation for being a thug even as a boy. He later made his way to Melbourne where he worked on the docks, becoming involved with the painters and dockers. One of his early jobs involved “ghosting” — creating fake time sheets so that criminals could be seen to be earning an honest wage on the waterfront.

He graduated to robbery and became known as one of the go-to men around Melbourne for burglary. Ambitious for a new challenge and becoming too well known to police and rival criminals, he moved to England in the 60s where a gang of Australian thieves known as the Kangaroo Gang were making a good living using a simple diversion tactic in low security up-market retail stores. Bennett became friends with Brain O’Callaghan — one of the gang’s most prominent members, robbing country houses together — but Bennett never became a long-term member.

Gang leader and robbery mastermind, Raymond “Chuck” Bennett.

It was while languishing in prison in England that Bennett conceived his plan for robbing the Victoria Club. He returned to Australia and recruited members for a gang to pull off the crime — signing up Ian Carroll, Laurence Prendergast, Norman Lee and the Kane brothers, Les and Brian, some of whom were former Painters and Dockers associates.

Having been a part of the Victorian underworld that included suspect dealings at the races, Bennett knew the Victoria Club would be flush with funds from the Easter races when it opened for business on Wednesday April 21, 1976. The gang rented offices on the fourth floor of the building that was home to the club, which they used for planning and to conduct a dry run when the building was empty over Easter. On the day of the robbery an armoured car arrived to deliver millions in cash. One of the gang entered the club to make sure the money had arrived and then signalled the others, who had come posing as repairmen, carrying weapons in a delivery van.

Several padlocks, which had been cut off the cash-filled strong boxes, at the Victoria Club in Melbourne.

The armed men stormed the club, ordering the bookies to get on the floor, taking their cash and valuables. Meanwhile Lee and Bennett quickly cut their way into a locked cage holding cash-filled strong boxes, using bolt cutters to remove the padlocks, and transferring the cash to bags.

Threatening to “blow club patrons’ heads off if they moved”, the robbers left the club, later vanishing in a van and a sedan. The only person injured
in the robbery was a security guard who tried to go for his gun.

Nobody is sure exactly how they managed to get the money out of the club without arousing suspicion but the club reported that about $1.34 million had been stolen. This relatively small amount may have been to avoid any trouble with the tax office investigating how much money the bookmakers were earning. Some estimates say the thieves got away with as much as $15 million.

Frank Murray, secretary the Victoria Club, with the emptied bookies’ strong boxes and cut padlocks, after the daring daylight the Great Bookie Robbery in 1976.

Lee was the only person hauled in on suspicion after he used notes that were traced to the robbery, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him.

But there was rough justice awaiting some of the other thieves. The Kane brothers wanted a bigger cut of the haul and to prevent them making a violent move to take it, Bennett gunned down Les Kane at his home in 1978 and went into hiding. Again the police lacked evidence to charge him, specifically Kane’s body.

But in 1979, while Bennett was in court for other offences, he was shot dead while being moved to another courtroom. Many believe that Brian Kane was behind the killing, and that he had the help of crooked police.

Kane was also shot dead by an unknown assassin, in reprisal for Bennett’s death, in a hotel in Brunswick in 1982.

Carroll was shot dead during a heist in 1983. Prendergast vanished in 1985 and his body has never been found, while Lee continued thieving up until the day he was killed by police during a robbery at Melbourne Airport in 1992.

Originally published as It was billed as the perfect crime, but the Great Bookie Robbery showed there was no honour among the theives