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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742690186 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 196 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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King of Thieves
By Adam Shand
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2010 Adam ShandAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-018-6
CHAPTER 1
The scholar and the thief
Sydney, 2009
I was a scholar,' said the Raven, adjusting his fine silk tie in the mirror.
'I went to seven schools by the time I was eight years old. My family were carnival people. I grew up around showgrounds and on the road. But I determined very early that if I had any hope in this life, it would come from education. I could learn to be anything I wanted to be,' he said.
He was bathed in the diamond blue light of a men's bathroom, empty but for us. He was a small trim bald man with lively eyes. At 85, in a $6000 Briony suit, he could have been the retired chairman of a bank. But outside, in Sydney's finest Chinese restaurant, a flouncy 35-year-old blonde was waiting with a table of lobster, crabs and champagne. His life had been better than any banker's.
'But before you can become what you learn, you must first learn to speak,' he said precisely. 'I was always top of my class until I gained entry to a selective primary school. There I met a boy who would later become a Supreme Court judge and he took first place, with me always second. His diction was beautiful. He never showed his back teeth when he spoke.' Not like the 'side-valvers' the Raven knew, the knockabouts and thieves who spoke from the corner of their mouths on racetracks and in pubs to shield their conversations. 'So every night I would stand in front of the mirror and practise speaking the way that boy did.'
And now every other year he travelled to Royal Ascot where he was a guest in the Queen's enclosure, he said, his eyes twinkling. 'In top hat and morning suit,' he said, proudly addressing the mirror.
The Raven never became a Supreme Court judge though he rubbed shoulders with many in his life. He had made his living on the racetrack as a tipster and consort of trainers, bookies and touts. He ran the best organised two-up schools New South Wales had ever seen. Places where barristers and politicians mingled with crooks. He was discreet in all things, counsel and quartermaster to powerful forces in Sydney's underworld of the 1960s and '70s. Short of violence and murder, there was no blue with a cop that couldn't be solved with a quiet word and bribe. And it was to the Raven everyone always turned.
But Arthur William Delaney was getting too hot.
'I said to Arthur, "You are going to have to get away from here for a while. As a thief, you have outgrown the opportunities around you. On the other hand, in regard to the matters of adultery and reckless behaviour, you are still very much a little boy. It's only a matter of time before you get a long stretch in jail or a bullet from a jealous husband." I told him England was the answer — a new frontier for a thief as capable as him. And if anyone could have success there, it was Arthur. There is no limit to what you can achieve, if people think you are one of them,' said the Raven.
He broke into a gleeful smile that exposed his gleaming back teeth.
'Arthur, can you tell me who you believe to be the greatest thief in history?' the Raven asked rhetorically. They were in Andre's nightclub, Sydney. The year was 1962.
Arthur wasn't much for history. He knew some great thieves, men like 'Wee Jimmy' Lloyd, Georgie G, Jack 'the Fibber' Warren or Billy 'the General' Hill. They were 'hoisters' that he admired greatly. They were all stealth and charm. They were never violent and so clever that shopkeepers didn't know they had been hit till much later. Walking calmly away from a job, as opposed to running with a gaggle of store detectives on your hammer, was a mark of success for the professional hoister.
But to the question of who was the greatest on earth, he had no answer. Unlike the Raven, Arthur hadn't taken to school at all growing up in Newcastle, north of Sydney. His parents, solid working-class types, had pushed him through the front gate at school and he had simply run out the back one. And besides, the world was full of thieves and he hadn't begun to explore what it offered. His attention drifted to a buxom cigarette girl passing by.
'It was Queen Elizabeth I,' exclaimed the Raven, not waiting for Arthur's answer. 'She sent her privateers, Francis Drake and John Hawkins, to plunder the treasure ships of King Philip II of Spain as they travelled back from South America to Europe in the sixteenth century,' he said. Arthur's ears pricked up at the mention of treasure. 'And when they got home with the booty, she whacked it up with them, half each,' he cried. 'Then she knighted them for their good work. Imagine that, she knighted those thieves,' the Raven continued.
She spoke six languages, was a master in the art of rhetoric, she wrote her own poetry and inspired the Elizabethan Renaissance that gave us Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe. And the Raven was right, thieves had paid for it. King Philip had put a price on her head, the robber queen of England, the rogue state. He had sent the Armada to square up with Elizabeth, but the mighty flotilla had been devastated by weather and her admiral Drake's superior tactical nous, honed in his years as a pirate of the Caribbean.
'So when you go there, show them no mercy. Those great buildings and pleasant avenues you will see were built with the proceeds of crime. For all the airs and graces, they are no better than you,' said the Raven. 'Behind every great empire, there is always a crime,' he added.
He handed Arthur a wad of notes totalling £1000, the fare for two on a three-month world cruise ending at London's Southampton Docks. He and his offsider Kevin Conway could have made the journey in just four weeks through the Suez Canal on one of the many converted troop ships plying the British migrant trade at that time. But Arthur, despite his modest means, was already accustomed to luxury. He was not made for the crowded lower decks, huge open spaces without cabins crammed with triple-decker bunks. Not for him the communal toilets reeking of vomit and White King bleach. His natural environment was the first class deck, where he would enjoy shuffle board and quoits in the sunshine with the finest people aboard. With their fares paid, Arthur and Kevin could use the three-month voyage to prime their pockets by sneaking into the cabins of their first class chums. Or in port stopovers, they could try their hoisting skills in such exotic locations as Singapore, Penang, Bombay, Aden, Port Said, Naples and Lisbon. For a pair of thieves, this sea cruise was a working holiday, an introduction to the cultures and opportunities they would find in England and on the Continent.
At 32, Arthur Delaney was one of Sydney's best hoisters, but the pickings were slim. There wasn't the wealth in Sydney and Melbourne to fulfil his ambitions. You could knock over all the best retailers in a day's work back then. It wouldn't be long before the shop detectives and the police became very familiar with you. From there, working as a shoplifter got expensive. If they couldn't catch you on the job, the cops just waited for you at home with their hands out. If you didn't buy them dinner, you got nicked. Or worse, informers would shop you and other police would turn up to relieve you of your hard-earned graft. Pretty soon, you were working for cops.
The Raven could see Arthur's dilemma. Arthur was 'a shirts and sheets man' in Sydney, cutting a swathe through the department stores, but he had only a modest fortune and a lot of jail to look forward to.
You had to move up into the next league to make the serious money in Australia back then. The 'tank men' (safecutters) and the 'gunnies' (armed robbers) ruled the roost. But those professions required a man to possess a streak of violence. Without it, you were vulnerable to the other crooks, who would relieve you of your hard-earned. You needed a touch of psychopath in you to survive that life. And Arthur was no psychopath, just a run of the mill sociopath, a thief through and through. He was a naughty boy, the Raven liked to say. Like most criminal activities, thieving is a vocation, a specialised trade even. A tank man cannot be a hoister, no more than a dip (pickpocket) can be a gunnie or a bust man (burglar). There were few true all-rounders like Arthur's great mate the Fibber, but we will speak of him later. Most villains had a single skill they spent a lifetime perfecting.
As a teenager, his father had made him work on the roads with him, but he just ran away. He dreamt of being a jockey, so he stole a horse and rode to Sydney, only to be apprehended upon his arrival. A stint at a boys' home followed. His family disowned him, so he disowned them and set about surviving on the streets of Sydney by the early 1950s. In 1952, he was sentenced to two years' jail with hard labour for robbing the manager's office at a Sydney cinema. This stint was as close to employment as Arthur ever came. He let his light fingers do the work for him.
Now he was the finished article. He was immaculately dressed in suit and tie (stolen of course), with his floppy brown hair side-parted and plastered down with Brylcreem, smoothed to a high sheen. He was always scrubbed clean till he squeaked, clean-shaven and aromatic with expensive lotions and colognes. The only clue to his origins was the tattoos on his forearms he concealed beneath perfectly pressed shirt sleeves. His fingernails were neatly manicured and lacquered. He might have been a male model or a matinee idol, but for those eyes. He had the shiftiest eyes the Raven had ever seen, forever darting here and there, looking for opportunities for enrichment or escape. But for the piercing blue, they were the eyes of a fox and he had the long snout to match, perhaps a little bent from poking it where he shouldn't have. He had slender quick fingers that could open a showcase or the catch of a woman's brassiere with equal ease.
He was mischief personified with a soft cloying voice that drew people to him. You couldn't trust him, but you couldn't help liking him. Who else would shout the bar at Sydney's Rex hotel with his last dollar but Arthur? How many villains in 1962 would park a big American convertible outside the Rex in seedy Kings Cross and drink French champagne with three beautiful girls? Who else but Arthur would lose the convertible later that night playing cards? He couldn't tell an ace from a king but it never stopped him gambling.
In this small criminal realm he was already royalty. The Duke, they called him. There were better thieves than Arthur, but there were none with more dash. So what is this dash? The French call it 'élan', to the English it was 'bottle', the Americans crassly called it 'balls'. But dash, as Australians knew it in the 1950s, was a very special, fleeting thing. It was the confidence of a young country that had been spared the worst ravages of war, now gaining a sense of identity.
The Aussie spirit had been tested during the First and Second World Wars and had survived, even in defeat, from Gallipoli and the Western Front to Tobruk and the Kokoda Track. Dash was the myth of Australia's laconic optimism, the irrepressible belief that all would turn out for the best, if you had the courage to have a go. Dash was thinking like a millionaire when your pocket was empty. Whatever shortage you faced, the world was a place of abundance. There was unlimited money, you just had to go and get it. How you got it would reveal itself.
The Raven didn't expect to see his £1000 again. Many of the bunk-ups he had given blokes over the years had never been repaid but he was a generous man. It would almost be worth the price to see what Arthur Delaney made of his opportunity.
A few months later, a Qantas steward who flew the Kangaroo route on the 707s came to see the Raven. He had a parcel from Arthur. Inside was one of the most beautiful things that the Raven had ever seen. The Vacheron Constantin Patrimony Extra-Plate was among the finest watches in the world, and would later be regarded as a design classic of the twentieth century. Created in 1955 to commemorate the Swiss maker's centenary, the ultra thin 18-carat gold timepiece was purity, simplicity and perfection. No thicker than a shilling, the aesthetic was understated and almost anticlimactic, but there was no mistaking its monumental refinement and elegance. Just putting it on made you feel special; stealing it must have been intoxicating. The Kangaroos were loose in Mayfair, nothing would be safe, he thought.
Each morning, the fine jewellers of Bond Street and Knightsbridge must lay out their precious wares for the day's trading. Today, as you watch from the street, hands in white gloves appear through the heavy velvet curtains bearing magnificent treasures. Working from photographs, the staff fit the glittering rings, necklaces and other baubles into their blocks, each a carefully conceived display. Just a sheet of security glass separates the jewels from the bustling street, but this is unavoidable. A jewellery store is like a bank that must put its money in the window to persuade people these little coloured things indeed have value. Despite the obvious security issues, there is no other way.
Diamonds are not rare, there are enough hidden away in vaults or still in the ground to give every woman in the world a sparkling stone on her finger. The value is not in the super-compressed carbon structures of the diamond but in the longing and desire they create, the myth of value. A man watches his beautiful woman stop at a jeweller's window and linger. Mesmerised by what she sees, the woman exudes the most perfect unguarded sensual energy he has ever felt. The stone becomes infused with the same energy, fluid, bright and crisp, as flawless as an ice castle. He'll do anything to win it now. The 'squarehead' returns to work calculating the years of wages it will take to afford it. The thief is thinking of the quickest way to possess it. The jewellery stores know they are vulnerable: hang around the front window and they will say you are acting sinister and chase you off. But go inside and greet them warmly and they will smile and offer you a cup of tea.
When Arthur and Kevin Conway got to Mayfair, they could not believe the wealth they saw. For every nice store in Sydney, there were five or ten there. You could rob one every day and not run out of jobs for five years. And the diamonds were like none they had ever seen. It was the tail end of the big diamond era, a time when the De Beers Company had persuaded the world that the size of a diamond corresponded to the strength and ardour of a man's love. In 1962, stores all along Old and New Bond streets were offering great glittering rocks; trays of three- to five-carat rings were not unusual sitting right there in the window. As Arthur stood before the window of Asprey, the finest jeweller in the finest retail precinct in the world, he murmured softly, 'How long has this been going on?'
It had been a tough introduction to London. Arthur and Kevin had thoroughly enjoyed the voyage, the other passengers had unwittingly subsidised their fine dining and drinking. It was amazing how many left their cabins unlocked. They had picked up some spending money while in port too, but of course Arthur had lost it all at the card table. By the time they got to London, they were skint, so they spent the first couple of nights in an all-night cinema in Soho and even one in a doorway huddled together. Lucky it was summer, or they might not have survived that first fortnight. Arthur spent the time observing everything. There was no time for sightseeing at Buckingham Palace or posing in front of Big Ben for photographs, it was Mayfair that Arthur was interested in. He watched the comings and goings of the staff in the fine stores like Bensons of Bond Street and Antrobus, which had supplied the engagement ring when in 1947 Philip Mountbatten had proposed to the future Queen Elizabeth. He quickly worked out that the security was almost entirely focused on the street.
A shop detective would be posted on the door to watch for suspicious characters on the street. Once inside, only the shop assistants stood between you and the prize. This was because the favourite method of English villains of the day had been 'the blag'. A gang of blaggers would run up and smash the shop windows with bricks or pick-axe handles and simply reef the jewellery off the displays and run. It was crude, dangerous and often ended in violence against staff. Certainly, it wasn't Arthur's modus operandi.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from King of Thieves by Adam Shand. Copyright © 2010 Adam Shand. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
1 The scholar and the thief,2 A nation of shoplifters,
3 Monopoly money,
4 The Massacre on Bond Street,
5 The Kangaroo Gang,
6 A treat for the eyes,
7 The Fiddler's Elbow,
8 A summer of love ends,
9 A practical affair,
10 An uncle in Manchester,
11 A cold Case of Grace,
12 Double Bay mafia,
13 A dirty weekend abroad,
14 Los ladrones extranjeros (foreign thieves),
15 Raffles in Paris (and Bruges),
16 Asprey, By Appointment to The King,
Glossary,
Acknowledgements,