James Morton - Gangland Melbourne

In the early hours of 2 April 1852 a team of mensome dressed as women, and led by James Duncan, James Morgan and John James, who had come together robbing diggersrowed across Hobsons Bay in two boats stolen from a local hotel to the Nelson , a barque being loaded with 8000 ounces of gold worth around 30 000 before sailing for London. Passengers and crew were nailed up in the stateroom, where they remained until a steward found them the next morning. The success of the robbers was short-lived. With a reward of 750 on offer, the leaders were caught within three weeks. Justice was swift and in May the trio received fifteen years apiece on road gangs; the first three were to be spent in irons. Only around 2260 was recovered. The rest was thought to have been fenced through a St Kilda publican, John Dascome. It was this raid that convinced the authorities that they needed a proper detective force, and men from Scotland Yard were brought out.

During the afternoon of 16 October that same year, four mounted and armed men (thought to be survivors of the Nelson raid) bailed up every individual they encountered on St Kilda Road. At sunset they galloped off into the bush towards South Yarra. Three days later John Flanigan and Thomas Williams were caught and sentenced to thirty years. Williams was later hanged for his part in the murder at Williamstown on 26 March 1857 of John Price, the highly unpopular and sadistic inspector of prisons. Flanigan, who gave evidence against his former offsider, was released in 1862.

As Melbourne grew, in came the magsmen, or confidence tricksters, and the three-card merchants. There were also coiners and rather more organised burglars. Thefts, which until the 1860s had been opportunisticfrom the back of wagons, unlocked houses and yardsbecame more professional. The detective division of the police was also on the up. John Christie, a champion boxer and rower and probably the best of the Melbourne detectives of the time, joined the force in 1867 when at the age of twenty-one he walked in off the street with a character reference. Within a matter of months his arrest record far surpassed those of other officers.

One of the more professional jobs in the late 1860s was a series of silk robberies, which for a time went unsolved despite a 250 reward. Then, with information received, in March 1869 Christie arrested a Thomas Griffiths living in Stanley Street, West Melbourne, after he had robbed the firm of Clarke and Adams at the corner of Elizabeth and Collins streets. Griffiths operation, a family business, now unravelled. He had used Thomas jnr, one of his sons, to break into buildings with him, and his wife Ann disposed of the goods, selling them door to door in Toorak. On 22 January 1870 he received eleven years. In 1872 Mrs Griffiths, who worked as a nurse and stole from her patients, was again convicted of theft and receiving and was sentenced to eighteen months. She later opened a small hospital in Carlton.

Garrotting during a street robbery was prevalent, particularly before electric lighting was installed in Hyde Park. In July 1870 John Moore and Thomas Bourke, who worked Little Bourke Street, each received ten years after garrotting the elderly Arthur Harvey while robbing him. Twenty years later the authorities were still keen to show that violence would be severely punished. On 11 May 1888 at the Collingwood Court, Thomas Donoghue and Henry Long Harry Towerson each received twelve months hard labour after being convicted of being suspected persons. Towerson was then hauled off to the Central Criminal Court for bag snatching and the robbery of a watch, and received a further seven years hard labour and fifteen lashes to go with it. There was no question of rehabilitation, howeverat least so far as Towerson was concerned. He was back housebreaking in April 1893 when he received two years to run consecutively with another twelve-month sentence. He was still operatin g a decade later when in November 1902, then aged forty, he was found with a revolver and charged with having housebreaking implements.

The next generation of garrotters and robbers included wharfer Thomas Chopsey Hayes, who received five years for shooting at a policeman in September 1905, and his offsider the diminutive redheaded Allan Ginger Moore, who stood a bare five feet. In 1907 in Sydney, Moore received five years for the burglary of Lady Burton at Darling Point and in September 1912 he was sentenced to death for the attempted murder of householder Geoffrey Syme in a burglary in Kew. His sentence was remitted and in April 1928 he was released into the care of the Salvation Army.