Deadline: Accused bank scammer hits Twitter to complain about police while on the run

There’s a long history of crooks baiting police with cards, letters and — according to urban legend — postcards. An accused bank scammer has brought the tradition into the social media age.

The brother of Socceroo Garang Kuol is wanted by police.

Award-winning crime reporters Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule deliver the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.

Flighty Fugitive fools with the force

It’s not smart to tweet without thinking. This applies especially to a fugitive on the run over a big bank scam.

Kuol Mawien Kuol doesn’t seem to care about any of that and hit Twitter recently — giving the cops added incentive to find him, as he is accusing one of his pursuers of stealing $120,000 from him. He should realise that sort of routine thieving went out with the disbanding of the old-school major crime, armed robbery and drug squads last century.

Kuol’s tweets have since been deleted but the damage has been done. He now has plenty of time to think about the drawbacks of publicly goading investigators — such as never being able to plead the excuse, when arrested, that he was unaware he was a wanted man.

Police believe Kuol is back in Melbourne after a long time interstate, where he has managed to dodge the law while simultaneously acting as player manager for his younger brother Garang Kuol, a young Socceroo destined for big things in Europe.

Kuol Mawien Kuol

Garang Kuol of the Socceroos

A former bank employee, Mawien Kuol is accused of stealing more than $121,000 from customers of a country Victoria branch of the National Australia Bank where he once worked.

Long before the era where a suspect could hit Twitter to bait the cops, Chris “Badness” Binse was doing it the old-fashioned way.

Binse, one of the last of his generation of hard-core armed robbers, spent all his time dodging the law after pulling big jobs in the 1990s.

He would send cards and letters to members of the armed robbery squad, gloating about his life on the run.

At one point, Binse was bold enough to place a newspaper public notice which said: “Badness is back.” He even had a country hide-out he called Badlands.

Christopher “Badness” Binse took out a newspaper ad to taunt police.

Binse’s brashness was one thing. But the supposed boasting of another prolific armed bandit and jail escapee, Brenden Abbott, probably belongs in the mythology file.

The highly intelligent Abbott became known as the Postcard Bandit for allegedly sending happy-snap greetings to investigators from a range of locations.

But the “postcard” yarn is a furphy. It all came about because police found an undeveloped roll of film the fugitive Abbott had accidentally left somewhere, and it included snaps of him and an accomplice in various holiday locations, including a photograph of them outside a country police station.

Cheeky snapshots, yes. But “postcards” deliberately mailed to the police? Sadly, they were not.

Surviving stick ups, scares and all

One bank holdup can leave scars for a lifetime. Try three.

Our colleague Patrick Carlyon recently met former teller Carol Hooper, who was held up three times in a few months during her 15 years with the Commonwealth Bank.

The first robbery was at the Montmorency branch in 1980. The next was six weeks later when Hooper was filling in at Fairfield. The third was the following year, back at Montmorency.

Beefed up bank security have made bank robberies a rare crime.

The scariest holdup was the second, she says, because those bandits brandished sawn-off shotguns and acted as if they really wanted to fire them.

She hid behind a colleague. She squeezed his leg so hard that she left marks.

“Do you think the guns were loaded,” she asked a police officer afterwards.

“Try 99.9 per cent for sure,” he replied.

The manager chased the robbers into the street but stopped when the crooks turned and pointed their guns at him.

There was at least one nervous breakdown among Carol Hooper’s colleagues. No counselling either, just a $250 payment “to go out for tea.”

“You don’t forget any of them,” she says.

State mugged by youth crime bubble

There were huge increases in youth crime statistics last week, underlining the need for the new Cherry Creek youth detention facility but perhaps throwing into question the closing of the one at Malmsbury.

Perhaps remodelling it to make it easier for staff to manage inmates safely would be a better option than scrapping it, given Victoria’s rising population and crime rate.

A spike in youth crime raises questions about the decision to close Malmsbury Youth Justice Centre.

The numbers showed that burglaries by those in the 10-14 age group leapt by 86.7 per cent in the year to March, despite unprecedented police resources being thrown at the problem.

The youth crime issue has been running hot for about eight years, to the point where there is a sense of community resignation to the reality of teenage ethnic gangs committing home invasions to steal cars.

Some police fear it will take an horrific event for the issue to shoot back to the top of the agenda.

Maybe it will be the inevitable tragedy of a carload of kids on bail killing themselves and a bunch of innocent people while rocketing around Melbourne’s roads at criminal speeds in one of the high-performance vehicles that apprentice gangsters steal every week.

It’s a miracle that so far they haven’t yet killed some law-abiding citizens. Which means that probability is coming closer every day.

Just one sheep, your honour

Acclaimed novelist and writer of historical fiction Jock Serong used to be a city lawyer before he persuaded his family they’d all be better off living at Port Fairy where they could surf the Great Southern Ocean.

One of the stories he did not share on stage with the nice folk who attended the recent Woodend Winter Writers Festival last week was about doing a little criminal court work to make ends meet.

Port Fairy author Jock Serong used to work as a criminal lawyer.

Naturally, Serong had his share of representing the bad, mad and the sad. But his most unusual courtroom victory, he admits sheepishly, was representing a man charged with bestiality with a farm animal.

Due to statute law which requires a high standard of proof regarding intent to commit bestiality, the accused walked free without much help from Serong, who wasn’t exactly falling over himself to identify with his client.

The man was pretty happy with himself until Magistrate Lance Pilgrim, an old-school country beak, said that while he was forced by law to direct the man’s acquittal, he was nonetheless convinced “something happened to that sheep.”

Serong is all for underdog but he didn’t rush to stand shoulder to shoulder with his client on the court steps.

Demolish prisons? Right on, bro

WE don’t know much about the Demolish Prisons movement, publicised with a well-designed sticker on a western suburbs wall.

It’s unclear whether this progressive push relates to some or all of our correctional facilities.

You’d have to hope it’s not all of them, judging by some of the inmates.

Surely even the most kind-hearted and soft-headed members of the community might baulk at the prospect of Bandali Debs, Adrian Bayley, Leslie Camilleri and Sean Price being free to roam the streets.

Then again, maybe not.