How Melbourne’s criminal masterminds raise the next-generation of thugs

The city’s next generation of criminal masterminds are being bred within gangs from a young age – and it’s far from a new phenomenon.

It’s 2013 and Melbourne gaming venues are hit with a wave of violent robberies.

Two bandits, running hot, menace patrons and staff with a sawn-off shotgun and a handgun. They are well-prepared, fast and ruthlessly efficient. They are in and out of each venue in less than two minutes. They wear balaclavas, gloves and multiple layers of clothing easily shed seconds after leaving their target, a way to confuse descriptions.

They always have a stolen getaway car waiting then drive at high speed to a second vehicle, sometimes obscured with stolen or fake number plates.

Then they retreat to a safe house to cool off — until the next raid.

This high level of preparation and sophistication tells police that a seasoned criminal mind is behind the terrifying “pokies” rampage. But when investigators crack the case they cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt who that mastermind is.

All they have are two teenage offenders, which isn’t much comfort for angry and traumatised victims.

Harry Power, the bushranger said to have taught Ned Kelly all he knew. Picture: Victorian Police Historical Unit

In the eyes of the law, the gunmen were “children”. But there was nothing childish about the way they had gone about their crimes.

Nine years on, the pair are notorious gangsters but they can’t be named over their 2013 crime wave because they went through children’s court — an outcome explaining why they’d been recruited in the first place.

At 17, these dangerous gunmen were minors liable only to light sentences. To the disgust of police and victims, they received less than 250 days in detention, a fraction of what armed robbers would receive in an adult court.

According to a police document seen by the Herald Sun, senior officers protested that the sentences were ridiculously mild, given the “severe psychological distress and trauma” inflicted on the victims.

“No protection has been offered to the public with respect to these sentences,” the document stated.

Stan Taylor, the most evil Fagin-type character of them all.

So much for punishment, or lack of it. Any hopes of rehabilitation also evaporated as soon as the cocky pair swaggered out of custody.

Almost a decade later, both are up to their necks in Middle Eastern organised crime.

Let’s call them “Bill” and “Ben”. Ben is a sharp student of police techniques, an expert at counter-surveillance seen as one of the most dangerous men in the land.

He is suspected of being involved in a homicide, various non-fatal shootings and gun trafficking. He is well-connected in the Sydney underworld and the outlaw motorcycle gang scene.

Bill is a member of one of Melbourne’s most feared crime gangs.

But who called the shots in 2013? Police are certain they know. The man they believe was the mastermind of the “pokies” robberies has finally surfaced. If he is not actually in jail, investigators know where he is.

This older man’s name is suppressed, too, so we will call him Fagin. He is a suspected killer and big-time drug trafficker and has a criminal skill set he passed on to Bill and Ben.

Significantly, none of the money his “apprentices” took at gunpoint was ever found, which suggests Fagin was receiving it.

Manipulative older crooks like Fagin have always been around, often pocketing the lion’s share of proceeds of crimes perpetrated by the young and the reckless.

In Australia, it goes at least as far back as Ned Kelly. As a tearaway teenager, the future legendary bushranger learned his trade from a violent veteran named Harry Power. They teamed up in 1869, when Power was 50 and Kelly not quite 15.

Within 10 years Kelly was in the condemned cell preparing to hang but his tutor Power lived until his 70s. Such is life.

Even Ronald Ryan, the last man hanged in Pentridge Prison, asked Stan Taylor if he wanted to escape prison.

Perhaps the worst example of the Fagin syndrome in living memory was the evil influence that a hardened criminal named Stan Taylor had over Rodney Minogue and his crew, whom he had met in the early 1980s when they were impressionable youths.

Like many unusually violent and cruel criminals, Taylor was the product of a corrupted system that had brutalised him in boys’ homes from the age of nine.

A little-known footnote to a well-known story is that when Ronald Ryan — the last man to be hanged in Australia — planned to escape from Pentridge Prison in 1965, he intended to take the then young Taylor with him. Taylor refused and Ryan took another youngster, Peter Walker, then aged just 23.

At 40, Ryan was a hard man and Walker was a petty thief who had drifted into crime after being sent from England as a tiny orphaned child with his two brothers.

Baby-face Walker’s teacher-pupil relationship with Ryan ended with recapture and Ryan’s execution for shooting a prison officer during the escape. But, in the 19 days they were on the run, it was young Walker who recklessly murdered a tow truck driver they thought might inform on them.

Outside prison, Stan Taylor faked rehabilitation, turning an interest in prison theatricals into bit parts in television serials alongside another supposedly reformed crook, Maurice Marion.

Playing his own part as a reformed character, Taylor sometimes worked on soap opera sets. He got on so well with actors that he built a kitchen for one well-known cast member of the serial, Prisoner. He also volunteered to work with troubled teenagers — which was how he came to get his hooks into the Minogue crew under the guise of mentoring them.

But underneath his calm surface, Taylor seethed with hatred and greed and schooled the youngsters in violent crime. He also joined his young followers in a bank robbery, but he informed on them as soon as police arrested him.

Taylor would die in custody in 2016, aged 79. Few mourned him. He had been treated cruelly as a child — his drunken father forced him to fight other small boys to entertain degenerate pub crowds, and he was abused in boys’ homes.

The result was that Taylor became a monster who inflicted the same cycle of violence on others. In that sense, he was like perhaps the most evil Fagin figure of all — the murdering rapist Bandali Debs, a stone killer whose dark past led him to commit unspeakable acts.