Deadline: Old judge learns new trick on Victoria’s youth crime wave

Lex Lasry once took to social media to mock suggestion of a youth crime issue in Victoria. Now the former Supreme Court judge is on the airwaves speaking of the “horrifying” problem plaguing the state.

Police helicopters, the dog squad and dozens of officers are tied up tackling Melbourne’s youth crime crisis many nights each week. Picture: Victoria Police,

Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest crime buzz.

Judge dread

Former Supreme Court judge Lex Lasry made some strong comments on youth crime last week, and no wonder. There is plenty of it.

Police helicopters and the dog squad and dozens of officers are tied up many nights a week trying to catch tearaway teenage home invaders and car thieves before they kill innocent people in lunatic high-speed escapades.

Lasry told broadcaster Neil Mitchell that youth crime in Victoria was “horrifying” and showing no signs of winding back.

This shows that even old dogs and legal eagles can learn new tricks. Because it was Lasry, back in 2018, who took a far more relaxed view of a problem that he (and others) then far preferred to play down.

Lex Lasry was playing down the issue he now seems deeply concerned by.

That was the time, in fact, when he might well have become so relaxed over a bottle or two of fine wine in a snug Mansfield hideaway that he posted an indiscreet tweet mocking (ex-cop turned politician) Peter Dutton for his take on youth gang crime in Melbourne.

Dutton had told a Sydney radio station that people in Melbourne were afraid to go out to local restaurants because of youth gangs, notably carjackers.

Lasry’s smug response from a location a world (and several hours drive) away from any urban youth crime hot spot was this: “Breaking: there are citizens out in Mansfield tonight and they’re not worried.”

In the real world, the post drew fire along the lines of “What sort of tin-eared, tone-deaf, vintage Porsche-driving, chardonnay socialist would have the nerve to post that from there, of all places?”

Picturesque Mansfield, incidentally, is reputed to have more doctors (and some say more police) per head than any other regional centre in Victoria.

The reason for that is that it’s in the heart of the beautiful northeast of the state, gateway to the snowfields and vineyards that are the natural playground of elevated people who can snip the taxpayer for $2m to run a royal commission. That sort of dough bought a lot of vintage Porsches in 1999, back in the days when roaming youth gangs weren’t stealing them so often.

The Lasry tweet was deleted fairly quickly. But some people have long memories.

Camper judge took back roads

Justice Michael Croucher will soon pass sentence on Greg Lynn over the infamous High Country camper deaths.

As readers will recall, former Jetstar pilot Lynn was last month convicted by a jury of the 2020 murder of Carol Clay but was acquitted of killing her friend Russell Hill.

The sentencing is an onerous task for Croucher in what has been, arguably, Victoria’s biggest trial this century.

So how did Croucher get to his elevated position? His journey has been far different from the stereotypical (and not always accurate) private school-private club-Range Rover route.

When Croucher left school after Year 10 at Myrtleford, he would have been 1000-1 against to end up running Supreme Court trials. In fact, his old schoolmates might joke, he was probably a better chance to be in the dock than on the bench.

When he left school, Croucher had no idea of what a legal career was, let alone that he could achieve one. In fact, he wanted to be a professional dirt bike rider.

Justice Michael Croucher back in his wannabe dirt bike rider days.

He was actually pretty good at it but, by age 19, he was finished. The injuries that accumulate when you ride motorcycles at speed meant he had to give it up.

Meanwhile, he got his hands dirty working around sawmills and timber cutting camps.

Next stop was a stint on the family tobacco farm. It wasn’t until he was 25 that he decided to go back to secondary school.

His Year 12 marks were enough to study economics and law at Monash University and it was from there he took a more conventional career path, more Range Rover than bushranger.

He went into criminal law, becoming a barrister in 1999 and a Queen’s Counsel in 2011.

In 2013, Croucher was appointed a judge in the Supreme Court of Victoria.

This detailed bio information came from the online site of the eastern suburbs-based Shed Door, a group which invites a guest speaker each month.

The Shed Door attracts some unusual and often interesting guests. In the past year, apart from Croucher, they’ve had St Kilda big man Rowan Marshall, veteran magistrate John Doherty and rehab boss John Hopper.

Vale Jack

Jack Karlson became an unlikely internet sensation decades after his 1991 arrest enjoying a “succulent Chinese meal” at a restaurant in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.

Trying to explain footage of the confrontation and the cult hero’s handling of the police could never do it justice.

Suffice to say, the moustachioed scallywag has been viewed many millions of times instructing a perplexed cop to “get your hand off my penis.”

Karlson, who died last week at age 82, even had a handy Sydney horse, Democracy Manifest, named in his honour.

Writer Mark Dapin revealed last year that Karlson had a sad connection with one of Melbourne’s most notorious crimes.

Dapin wrote that Karlson’s one-time wife Eva had been murdered in 1978 by Barry Quinn, viewed at the time as Australia’s answer to Charles Manson, alongside his psychopathic co-offenders Paul Steven Haigh and Robert Wright.

Eva Karlson, then 21, had helped double-killer Quinn escape from custody when he was moved from Pentridge Prison to Fairlea Infectious Diseases Hospital. Her misplaced loyalty was repaid with a bullet to the brain, making her one of a series of people killed by Quinn and his evil mates.

Fate caught up with Quinn some years later when underworld figure Alex Tsakmakis poured glue over him and set it alight in a notorious jailhouse slaying.

Burning Quinn to death won Tsakmakis the macabre prison nickname Barbecue King, something he doubtless enjoyed until he was bludgeoned to death by another notoriously violent image.

That crook is still alive, not a result everyone would have wished for.

Looking for glove

Prisoners regularly show that necessity is the mother of invention.

If there’s trouble brewing, they’ll be ready with a shiv made from some otherwise harmless object like an old toothbrush or a writing implement.

Feel like a drink? How about letting old fruit go rotten in a basin under your bed to create some jailhouse rocket fuel?

Word has reached Deadline about the latest DIY development behind bars.

We’ll spare the details but our source tells us that many inmates have a new companion named Fifi and latex rubber gloves are on the most wanted list.

Fastest, highest, baddest

Now that the Paris Games have run their course, Deadline can gently point out that the unfortunate Kookaburra Tom Craig, who got himself arrested in a blaze of publicity over not much, is a long way short of a genuine Olympic villain.

Fact is, Honest Tom doesn’t get near the champions in the field.

The biggest Australian Olympic villains of all time are elbowing each other in a podium finish.

Murray Riley, who rowed for Australia in the 1952 and 1956 Games in double sculls, winning a bronze medal in 1956, achieved the rare feat of being sacked from the NSW police force for corruption in 1962.

Getting the axe took some red hot villainy, as Riley’s sculling partner in the 1950s was none other than future police commissioner Merv Wood, who seemed to have a soft spot for his fellow oarsman.

Riley kicked on in civilian crime, helping to pioneer heroin trafficking into Australia with the so-called “corset gang” set up by fellow ex-cop John Wesley Egan. Riley also had a hand in big frauds and financial rorts, including involvement in the shadowy Nugan Hand Bank scandal.

He associated with leading figures in the American Mafia, including Jimmy Fratianno of the Los Angeles crime family and corrupt Teamsters official Michael Rudy Tham.

Riley exited in 2020 at the age of 94, more proof that only the good die young. He lived just long enough to see an up-and-coming Olympic villain push him from top spot on the podium.

That was Olympic kayaker Nathan Baggaley, who was jailed for more than 20 years in 2021 with his brother Dru over a $200m cocaine smuggling plot that came unstuck in 2018.

Then there are the crazy bike riders, world track champions Gary Neiwand and Steve Pate, both jailed for family violence. Neiwand and Pate didn’t smuggle drugs but the suspicion is that they were given plenty of “supplements” that didn’t do their mental health any favours.