Speaker 1: It was real Hollywood stuff. No one hurt, no guns,
Speaker 1: no fear, no horror, just a lot of money vanishes.
Speaker 1: They make a hole just big enough for the local
Speaker 1: police inspector to poke his head through. So it's a
Speaker 1: hole about as big as of football and he pokes
Speaker 1: his head in and he pulls it out and he
Speaker 1: says these immortal words. They got the lot. This time
Speaker 1: he realized that this would only have one ending. I'm
Speaker 1: Andrew Rule. This is life and crimes. This month we've
Speaker 1: got a couple of anniversaries, both for the same man.
Speaker 1: That man is the monster. The late Graham Allan Kinneborough,
Speaker 1: one of the most popular gangsters who ever breathed in Melbourne.
Speaker 1: When he was shot twenty years ago on the thirteenth
Speaker 1: of December two thousand and three, he was probably more
Speaker 1: genuinely mourned by more people than any other well known
Speaker 1: victims of the Gangland War. And this is because, over
Speaker 1: a long life, a long and productive criminal life, Graham
Speaker 1: Kinneborough had managed to make a lot of friends, and
Speaker 1: he'd often been a peacemaker and a negotiator when other
Speaker 1: people reached for their guns first. He had friends from
Speaker 1: Little Italy in Carlton to little Chicago down on the waterfront,
Speaker 1: and he was respected by old school police and old
Speaker 1: time paters and dockers, and by people in the fight game.
Speaker 1: In fact, he owned the city building. I think it
Speaker 1: was Flinders Lane, I reckon I went there once where
Speaker 1: Barry Michael trained for fights leading up to his world
Speaker 1: title challenge in the early eighties, and the Munster bet
Speaker 1: big on Barry in several of his winning fights. Barry
Speaker 1: claims he never knew that the Munster, his patron and
Speaker 1: landlord and very good friend, was a safe cracker. But
Speaker 1: that's a matter for Barry. We're not in the business
Speaker 1: of arguing with former world champion boxes. Man. They call
Speaker 1: the Munster new politicians and priests, punters and publicans, bookmakers
Speaker 1: and shoplifters. But he was especially fond of jockeys. Jockeys
Speaker 1: are pretty handy in his line of work. And the
Speaker 1: problem was no one knew exactly what his line of
Speaker 1: work was. Once in a coroner's inquest, when he was
Speaker 1: asked what his profession was, he said, um ah, and
Speaker 1: he hummed and hard and he said, oh that's right,
Speaker 1: I'm a rigger. I'm a rigger. But he'd forgotten what
Speaker 1: he was saosed to be, But in fact he was
Speaker 1: a career criminal. He was once and this is why
Speaker 1: we're talking about him today. He was once one of
Speaker 1: the finest safe crackers in the world. That didn't mean
Speaker 1: he wouldn't dabble in other things, but safe cracking. He
Speaker 1: was good. He wasn't the only good safe cracker. I've
Speaker 1: heard the names of some other people who worked at
Speaker 1: the same time, and some of them worked with him,
Speaker 1: But he was part of a small group known as
Speaker 1: a magnetic drill gang, who perfected a technique of cracking
Speaker 1: safes that were regarded as fairly well impregnable to normal
Speaker 1: safe cracking methods, and these things that you couldn't just
Speaker 1: stick a stick of jelly knite under, these big chubb
Speaker 1: safes that banks and other places started to put it
Speaker 1: in the seventies because they were too big and too strong.
Speaker 1: And what Graham Kinneborough and his closest allies came up
Speaker 1: with was a mixture of medical and mechanical technology, and
Speaker 1: they used a magnetic drill which could be clamped to
Speaker 1: the wall of a safe or the door of a safe,
Speaker 1: so that the drill would enter precisely where you wanted
Speaker 1: it to without slipping or moving. And the other thing
Speaker 1: they used was medical gear. They used a fluoroscope which
Speaker 1: could be inserted in the whole adrill to detect any movement.
Speaker 1: And a fluoroscope is like a portable X ray which
Speaker 1: can show you in real time movements inside a solid object.
Speaker 1: And fluoroscopes are used in medicine for doctors to poke
Speaker 1: them into parts of your body to see what's happening
Speaker 1: inside you, and are used in security applications at airports
Speaker 1: and places like that to scan luggage to see what's
Speaker 1: inside the luggage. And Kinnebar and his mates used them
Speaker 1: to scan safes to see how the tumbler mechanisms worked
Speaker 1: in the locking mechanism. And having done that bit, they
Speaker 1: would take out a fluoroscope and then they would insert
Speaker 1: a thing called a sistoscope. Now a sistoscope or surgeons
Speaker 1: use it. It's a very fine, long, thin thing like
Speaker 1: a worm, which can be inserted into various parts of
Speaker 1: the human body to give the surgeon a picture of
Speaker 1: what's happening inside your body. Classically used for bladder operations
Speaker 1: and things like that. These guys adapted that medical equipment
Speaker 1: so they could poke it in a hole in a
Speaker 1: safe and look down it and see the tumbles that
Speaker 1: they had to manipulate. And then they had tools that
Speaker 1: they could use to manipulate the tumblers and get the
Speaker 1: giant doors to open for them. And they'd learned to
Speaker 1: do this. I was self taught, and they'd learned to
Speaker 1: do it. They say this is unprovable, but it's widely
Speaker 1: held to be true, by obtaining sophisticated safes at probably
Speaker 1: great expense, and setting them up in an empty warehouse
Speaker 1: or factory somewhere in Melbourne, and then they would go
Speaker 1: there with all this equipment practice cracking these safes until
Speaker 1: they got good at it. And this I find to
Speaker 1: be a remarkable thing. I think these are the aristocrats
Speaker 1: of crime. Safe crackers, a breed that is almost extinct
Speaker 1: now because of technical advances that make safe cracking a
Speaker 1: bit of a no go zone for crooks. But even
Speaker 1: after most of his contemporaries decided that safe cracking was
Speaker 1: too hard, Graham Kinneborough made a big thing of it
Speaker 1: back in the late seventies and early eighties. I think
Speaker 1: he and his mates pulled something like fourteen safe jobs,
Speaker 1: or similar to safe jobs some of them were strong
Speaker 1: boxes and safety deposit boxes, things like that, but they
Speaker 1: did a total of about fourteen different raids in less
Speaker 1: than two years in that era. Now, the big one,
Speaker 1: the granddaddy of the mall, was the Murwillumba bank job,
Speaker 1: and this is the one that happened on the twenty
Speaker 1: third of November nineteen seventy eight, which is pretty well
Speaker 1: forty five years ago. Murwillumbar in those days and to
Speaker 1: some extent now, was one of those country towns that's
Speaker 1: the hub of a farming district, in this case the
Speaker 1: Tweed Valley area of the Northern Rivers region of northern
Speaker 1: New South Wales. Pretty productive region, I think, probably dairy farms,
Speaker 1: maybe some sort of subtropical cropping, a pretty productive area,
Speaker 1: particularly in that era. A lot of smaller towns dotted
Speaker 1: around the district. And in those days, of course, banks
Speaker 1: were central to the lifeblood of any town, any district,
Speaker 1: and all dealings were in cash, and that meant that
Speaker 1: every fortnight, when government employees were paid and pensions were
Speaker 1: paid fortnightly, there would be a big influx of money
Speaker 1: fortnightly that would come in to Mwillumbar as the big
Speaker 1: central town in that area every second Wednesday, and so
Speaker 1: it was that on Wednesday, the twenty second of November,
Speaker 1: a armored truck turned up and they unloaded quite a
Speaker 1: bit of money, as they did every second Wednesday, but
Speaker 1: because of the timing this is late November, there was
Speaker 1: even more money than usual because there was holiday pay
Speaker 1: loadings for all these public servants and government employees, and
Speaker 1: there was extra cash being brought in as you'd imagine,
Speaker 1: for banks and for businesses, shops and all the rest
Speaker 1: of it to handle the Christmas rush, the Christmas shopping.
Speaker 1: So it was a bumper crop of cash, and it
Speaker 1: was unusually large. And it appears that crooks like God
Speaker 1: in mysterious ways, and that word of this big bunch
Speaker 1: of cash going into the Bank of New South Wales
Speaker 1: branch in Mcwillumbar had trickled down to little Old Melbourne
Speaker 1: far to the south, where Graham Kinterbory and his merry
Speaker 1: band of safe crackers were tipped off about it. Now
Speaker 1: we'll get to how that happened a bit later, but
Speaker 1: it is suspected that it was almost inside information from
Speaker 1: a rogue police person possibly, but obviously they knew that
Speaker 1: there was good money to be had there. They knew
Speaker 1: that it was a country bank that was fairly easy
Speaker 1: to break into, that did not have an alarm system,
Speaker 1: and yet it had a big enough safe that all
Speaker 1: the local money would go into that safe or strong
Speaker 1: room before it went out to the smaller country towns.
Speaker 1: It's a Wednesday night Thursday morning situation, and so on
Speaker 1: that Wednesday night, there's a few drinkers across the road
Speaker 1: at the Imperial Hotel, and down the road one hundred
Speaker 1: meters is a police station that's supposedly manned all night,
Speaker 1: but of course the probably one policeman in the doing
Speaker 1: the crossword, having a sleep in the cells or something.
Speaker 1: And I think there was an all night postal worker
Speaker 1: at the post office on the other corner, sorting mail
Speaker 1: or something. But you don't have to be told. No
Speaker 1: one heard nothing. And what happened is that sometime that night,
Speaker 1: let's guess around midnight would make sense, because they needed
Speaker 1: most of the night to do what they did. Let's
Speaker 1: say around midnight, when the last drinkers have probably gone
Speaker 1: home and everybody's home in bed, someone has four door
Speaker 1: opened the back door of the bank, a back door
Speaker 1: of a bank in the bush, probably didn't present many
Speaker 1: problems for expert safecrackers. They'd be able to open it
Speaker 1: with a skeleton key or whatever, and they got access,
Speaker 1: and then they set to work. I used, as I
Speaker 1: listed before, the magnetic drill, which had a diamond tipped
Speaker 1: drill bit which would go through really hard metal and
Speaker 1: it would go in a precise spot, so they could
Speaker 1: go exactly where they wanted and to the exact depth
Speaker 1: that they wanted, so that they wouldn't actually screw up
Speaker 1: the tumblers that work the lock mechanism, but get them
Speaker 1: so close to it that they can manipulate the lock
Speaker 1: mechanism the tumblers, and then of course they used the
Speaker 1: fluoroscope and the cistoscope and did their trick. All this
Speaker 1: takes time. It's very complex and exacting and precise work.
Speaker 1: I suspect it's really much like surgery that the guys
Speaker 1: doing this, we're doing something as complex and as delicate
Speaker 1: as most forms of surgery when you think about it,
Speaker 1: and that's not too den a great surgeon. So it
Speaker 1: just shows you how good these guys were at what
Speaker 1: they did. And in this case the operation was a success,
Speaker 1: but the patient, in the form of the bank died,
Speaker 1: the bank lost its money. The robbers were able to
Speaker 1: empty the strong room, the vault, and they got one
Speaker 1: point seven six and change a million, which in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight was a lot of money. It was the
Speaker 1: equivalent in twenty twenty three of more than ten million dollars,
Speaker 1: and it was in untraceable notes, mostly fifties and one interestingly,
Speaker 1: and so they were able to load all this cash,
Speaker 1: which would be a lot of cash, into bags or whatever.
Speaker 1: And I think some took that there was a panel
Speaker 1: van parked in the side street that night, somebody noticed one,
Speaker 1: and so you'd think they probably did have a panel van,
Speaker 1: and they loaded it with money and the way they went,
Speaker 1: and no one knew anything until seven thirty next morning,
Speaker 1: when a passing security guard noticed that the back door
Speaker 1: of the bank was a jar. I think, and when
Speaker 1: aarn had looked, I found that's interesting. And then the
Speaker 1: bank people came in and they realized that there wasn't
Speaker 1: much wrong. They didn't leave a great mess. They cleaned
Speaker 1: up after themselves, they didn't leave any clues. There were
Speaker 1: some things they looked up, and they saw there was
Speaker 1: a square hole in the ceiling where they'd removed perhaps
Speaker 1: tiles or something from the ceiling. Not sure why that was,
Speaker 1: except it might have been a potential escape route if
Speaker 1: they heard somebody coming. Maybe they thought they could use
Speaker 1: some sort of rope ladder or something to get themselves
Speaker 1: up into the roof and get out that way, which
Speaker 1: would tell you, with their careful methodical way of doing things,
Speaker 1: didn't leave tools lying around, didn't leave anything that could
Speaker 1: be used as evidence against them. And what they also did,
Speaker 1: and this bit is just delicious shebericking for the bank,
Speaker 1: is that they close the door of the vault and
Speaker 1: then they screwed up or removed a couple of the
Speaker 1: tumblers so that the door could never be opened again.
Speaker 1: They effectively sealed it shut. And so when the bank
Speaker 1: people get there after the security guards called them, they
Speaker 1: can't actually open the vault and check if the money's there,
Speaker 1: so they don't actually know they've been robbed. They can
Speaker 1: see that something's happened, that there's a little net hole
Speaker 1: in it and there's been a little bit go on,
Speaker 1: but they don't actually know they've been robbed, and so
Speaker 1: they get local locksmith's there. They've got no chance. They
Speaker 1: fly in four Chubb safe experts, Chubb being a brand
Speaker 1: of safe from Brisbane, Brisbane to the local airport. They
Speaker 1: bring them in, these guys and the locksmiths spend five
Speaker 1: hours trying to open the safe, no chance. In the end.
Speaker 1: In desperation, they get the local workmen from the tweed Shire.
Speaker 1: These are the guys that use bulldozers and dynamite and
Speaker 1: sledgehammers and chisels and all that stuff, and they get
Speaker 1: in there with jackhammers. They break open the wall of
Speaker 1: the bank, the actual wall of the bank, and they
Speaker 1: get to the back of the strong room which is
Speaker 1: reinforced concrete. We're still reinforcing in it, and they smash
Speaker 1: it open and smash it open with machinery and then
Speaker 1: with jackhammers, and then with oxy welding equipment to cut
Speaker 1: the metal, and finally at four point thirty that afternoon,
Speaker 1: Now this is about twelve hours after the crooks have left,
Speaker 1: let's say, or eleven hours after they have left. They
Speaker 1: make a hole just big enough for the local police inspector,
Speaker 1: chief inspector to poke his head through. So it's a
Speaker 1: hole about as big as of football and he pokes
Speaker 1: his head in and he pulls it out and he
Speaker 1: sees these immortal words, they got the lot. All the
Speaker 1: money was gone. It wasn't one dollar left in the vault.
Speaker 1: That phrase, they got the lot, became instantly famous because
Speaker 1: it went out on front pages everywhere, not only around
Speaker 1: Australia but overseas because it was just a great heist.
Speaker 1: It was a magic story. It was real Hollywood stuff.
Speaker 1: No one hurt, no guns, no fear, no horror, just
Speaker 1: a lot of money vanishes. So it's the sort of
Speaker 1: crime that people can't help being fascinated by and sort
Speaker 1: of admiring. Really, that phrase then becomes quite well known
Speaker 1: around the district because a local shop owner got straight
Speaker 1: onto it and made details T shirts, caps, coffee mugs,
Speaker 1: beer glasses. They used that phrase they got the lot,
Speaker 1: and they had it everywhere and it became the souvenir
Speaker 1: item former Willembar, much to the disgust of the local
Speaker 1: mayor and other people like that, who thought it was
Speaker 1: not a great way to promote the wonderful district. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the boys with the money have vanished. Now there's no
Speaker 1: proof who did this. There is not actually any forensic
Speaker 1: evidence that links Graham Kinneberg or Graham Kinniburg's tight knit
Speaker 1: crew of safe crackers to this crime. However, it was
Speaker 1: acknowledged by police that a gang they called the Magnetic
Speaker 1: Drill Gang had pulled some fourteen jobs in quick succession,
Speaker 1: pretty big job some of them, and this included a
Speaker 1: massive jewelry heist in Lonstar Straight in Melbourne, and we
Speaker 1: talked about that job before on the episode called mister Munster,
Speaker 1: the very good Crook. All these different jobs, another one
Speaker 1: with strong boxes, another one I think Bullion in Queensland,
Speaker 1: and interestingly and probably significant, inter Pol, when contacted about this,
Speaker 1: stated that no other safecrackers in the world used that
Speaker 1: modus operandi, that the use of the magnetic drills or
Speaker 1: something that no other gangs were doing in the way
Speaker 1: that this Australian gang was. And so it was fairly
Speaker 1: clear to the police and of course to other crooks
Speaker 1: who was responsible. No one else knew how to do this,
Speaker 1: no one else was doing it. It didn't have their
Speaker 1: fingerprints all over it, but it was their signature crime.
Speaker 1: No one was hurt during the robbery, but the jungle
Speaker 1: drums were beating right through the underworld, and the jungle
Speaker 1: drums were saying, oh mate got one point seven plus
Speaker 1: million that in nineteen seventy eight was a startling amount.
Speaker 1: It was a time when you know, most people running
Speaker 1: between one hundred and two hundred dollars a week, and
Speaker 1: a time when a lot of houses could be bought
Speaker 1: for between ten grand and fifty grand, depending where they were.
Speaker 1: So it just was a lot of money enough to
Speaker 1: set these guys up pretty well, maybe for life. And
Speaker 1: this attracted the sort of attention of people that we
Speaker 1: will call toe cutters. Now, toe cutters can take several forms.
Speaker 1: One form would be jealous and violent criminals who are
Speaker 1: not much good at pulling robberies themselves, but feel that
Speaker 1: they could track down those who are good at it
Speaker 1: and extract money from them by torture and other means.
Speaker 1: It would also attract a particular brand of police, not
Speaker 1: only legit police who want to catch the crooks and
Speaker 1: arrest them, but rogue police who want to catch the
Speaker 1: crooks and extract the money from them before charging them,
Speaker 1: and so on, or maybe just extract the money and
Speaker 1: bolt with it. So Graham Kinnibur and his mates were
Speaker 1: very aware of these dangers because people they knew in
Speaker 1: the Great Bookie Robbery in Melbourne of two years earlier.
Speaker 1: Many of them had come to sticky ends. It did
Speaker 1: not end well for a lot of the bookie robbers
Speaker 1: because they became targets of these toe cuts as well
Speaker 1: as of the police. Kinnebarrough was always a thinker and
Speaker 1: well connected, and apparently he knew that a former associate
Speaker 1: of his, a very well known all around crook and
Speaker 1: pretty good crook, called Steve Sellers, that Stephen Sellers was
Speaker 1: dirty on him for not including him in the big
Speaker 1: mcwillem barr heist. And it would appear that Kinnerbarrough thought
Speaker 1: that Sellers was a cop magnet. He was a cop
Speaker 1: bita and a cop hater, and he was getting involved
Speaker 1: in a lot of fairly public opposition to police and
Speaker 1: prison officers and stuff like that, and had a very
Speaker 1: sort of political twist to his activism this. Sellers, as
Speaker 1: well as being absolute kruk and Kinniburough didn't agree with
Speaker 1: any of that and thought it just attracted attention and
Speaker 1: caused trouble, and so he left him well out of
Speaker 1: this robbery. Sellers resented that and was deeply unhappy, and Kinniborough,
Speaker 1: although he was usually a peacemaker, usually he played Kissinger
Speaker 1: rather than Dillinger. This time he realized that this would
Speaker 1: only have one ending. And early in the new year
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy nine, either late January or early February,
Speaker 1: doesn't matter which. Stephen Sellers is in the Domain motel
Speaker 1: in South Era and comes out to answer a phone
Speaker 1: call in the lobby of this motel. And someone must
Speaker 1: have known he was going to do that, because as
Speaker 1: soon as he picked up the phone and bent his
Speaker 1: head to talk, he was shot three times in the
Speaker 1: back with a twelve guard shotgun. Now that would be
Speaker 1: enough at point blank range to kill a buffalo, but
Speaker 1: it didn't kill Stephen Sellers. He was rushed to hospital,
Speaker 1: where he was joined by fearsome criminal defender and advocate
Speaker 1: Robert Richter, among others, and various police who wanted to
Speaker 1: ask him if he had any words of wisdom to
Speaker 1: tell them about who might have shot him. He refused
Speaker 1: to got anybody in or speculate about who shot him.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't help the police because he was a police hater.
Speaker 1: But it was widely held and indeed has never been
Speaker 1: really denied specifically by anybody, that Graham Kinneburough had pulled
Speaker 1: the trigger in order to ongoing bloodshed and violence and
Speaker 1: troubles for his own family, which showed that when it
Speaker 1: came to the point that this technical and analytical and
Speaker 1: tactical genius of a crook, a bloke who probably could
Speaker 1: have made a very fine commanding officer in the military,
Speaker 1: or probably could have made some sort of captain of
Speaker 1: industry in business, that he had made a decision that
Speaker 1: Sellers was going to be dangerous for him and for
Speaker 1: his family. And interestingly, I draw this conclusion because we
Speaker 1: can get away with it. It's interesting to note that Sellers
Speaker 1: had upset a lot of police over the journey in
Speaker 1: Victoria and notably in Sydney, and perhaps the police didn't
Speaker 1: chase it as hard as they might have. That's possible.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, more than twenty detectives from three
Speaker 1: states worked on the Murwillembar case, but they got exactly nowhere.
Speaker 1: No one claimed the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: reward on offer a lot of money in those days,
Speaker 1: and the robbery became part of folklore, criminal folklore. Of course,
Speaker 1: in more recent times, most of our listeners recognized Kinnerborough
Speaker 1: because of his association with the big players in the
Speaker 1: underworld war. He was a guy that knew most people
Speaker 1: and was on good terms with most people in the
Speaker 1: Melbourne underworld. He was a figure who bridged the old
Speaker 1: fashioned waterfront painters and dockers crime times when organized crime
Speaker 1: in Melbourne was run out of Port Melbourne pubs by
Speaker 1: old guys wearing braysom bib overalls. And he linked that
Speaker 1: world with the world of Lygon Street and the smoothies
Speaker 1: driving around in black Mercedes and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: And he was respected and to some extent loved by
Speaker 1: a lot of people. Alfonse Gangitano, the old Marand brothers
Speaker 1: and the younger Morand brothers. He knew them all and
Speaker 1: was widely liked. Even some of the old time police
Speaker 1: couldn't help liking him, because there was always that grudging
Speaker 1: admiration for a safe cracker. He was an old fashioned
Speaker 1: sort of bloke who loved a bit of opportunity and
Speaker 1: if he got a chance to fix a race to
Speaker 1: shorten the odds on his way through, you know, cultivating jockeys,
Speaker 1: he would do that. He was sometimes seen at places
Speaker 1: like Choice out in Hawthorne talking to a favorite jockey
Speaker 1: or two, often seen at the Flower Drum, the expensive
Speaker 1: Chinese restaurant in the city, favored by wealthy people, but
Speaker 1: particularly by crooks. And famously somebody said to him, once
Speaker 1: you know all that money you made over the years, Graham,
Speaker 1: what you do with it? And he said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of it gets wasted. He said, I reckon,
Speaker 1: I've eaten fifty grands worth of fried rice at the
Speaker 1: Flower Drum. He kept his eye and he kept his
Speaker 1: hand in. He had an associate that will call Byron.
Speaker 1: He's dead now, so it's fine. And what they do
Speaker 1: they'd load up with a bit of hot stuff from
Speaker 1: the boutiques and shops. This would be high end clothing
Speaker 1: that had been stolen to water, a lot of it,
Speaker 1: and the thieves would get I think half its ticket
Speaker 1: value from the receivers, and then the receivers had sell
Speaker 1: it out at something like two thirds of its ticket
Speaker 1: value to clients. And I know people who should be
Speaker 1: ashamed of themselves who can recall going to a motel
Speaker 1: I think in Port Melbourne or South Melbourne and there'd
Speaker 1: be the monster in his car out the front with
Speaker 1: his mobile phone waving them up so you can go
Speaker 1: up to room nine or whatever it was up an
Speaker 1: upstairs room. You had to walk up a flight of
Speaker 1: stairs to get to it, which added to the security
Speaker 1: element of it. Made it harder for anybody to surprise anybody,
Speaker 1: and you couldn't get to the windows easily and you'd
Speaker 1: get waved up. You go up, you knock on the
Speaker 1: door and say, you know, Brian sent me, and Byron
Speaker 1: would let you in and you would be able to
Speaker 1: peruse at your leisure silk shirts, beautiful tweed jackets, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing, shoes sometimes and I know people are
Speaker 1: very well dressed who got their clothes from this method
Speaker 1: the Monster traveling boutique. And once you'd finished, they'd pay
Speaker 1: cash to the man and they'd walk out, and then
Speaker 1: someone else would be sent up, and of course the
Speaker 1: Monster would be outside with his mobile length there was
Speaker 1: any chance of any body turning up who might be
Speaker 1: undercover police or something, he'd be able to warn or
Speaker 1: made upstairs and then be able to drive away and
Speaker 1: himself from the scene of the crime. The Munster was
Speaker 1: a man who knew how to behave in almost any occasion,
Speaker 1: so it's no surprise to know that one of his
Speaker 1: offspring married the grandson or granddaughter of a Victorian state minister.
Speaker 1: So here is somebody whose family married into the family
Speaker 1: of a fairly prominent and very respectable I think liberal minister.
Speaker 1: And this was quite fascinating to some of the people
Speaker 1: at the wedding because they came from very different worlds.
Speaker 1: And someone said when a monster gave a speech as
Speaker 1: the bride's father or wherever he was, it reminded them
Speaker 1: of Marlon Brando in his role as the godfather. And
Speaker 1: another couldn't help noticing that there were always four chaps
Speaker 1: wearing sunglasses standing around the munster, even though it was
Speaker 1: ten o'clock at night. It's just highly unusual for those circles.
Speaker 1: But of course, as most of our listeners know, it
Speaker 1: ended badly on the night of the thirteenth of December
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, when Graham Kinilborough came home I
Speaker 1: think driving his second hand Ford Falcon. He wasn't one
Speaker 1: to drive flashy cars because they attracted attention, and he
Speaker 1: drives home to his substantial and prosperous house in a
Speaker 1: very prosperous street in QW Belmont Avenue, which is actually
Speaker 1: full of big Victorian double story houses, but his was
Speaker 1: not the fanciest house in the street. It was just
Speaker 1: a good house. And if you're interested, it's just on
Speaker 1: where the little bend comes in the road in Belmont Avenue,
Speaker 1: down towards the cemetery end. He gets home late at night,
Speaker 1: I think sometimes between eleven and midnight, and on his
Speaker 1: way home because his wife, I think her name was Sybil,
Speaker 1: I think she got in touch and said, look, we
Speaker 1: need bread and milk and whatever. And he's got an
Speaker 1: armful of groceries and he steps out of the car
Speaker 1: and he walks towards the front door, and sadly, there
Speaker 1: were I think two hit men waiting for him, and
Speaker 1: they opened fire. He got some warning that it was
Speaker 1: going to happen because he managed to pull out a
Speaker 1: pistol himself, drop his groceries, pull out a pistol and
Speaker 1: get off one shot. But he was too late and
Speaker 1: they shot him dead. A lot of people blamed the
Speaker 1: little crook Andrew Venomon for this. Andrew Venamon, known as Benji,
Speaker 1: had killed many people during the Underworld War, and it
Speaker 1: was known that he would kill anyone on a contract
Speaker 1: basis if he were paid. And there is no doubt
Speaker 1: that close to Kinnerborough were very angry and very grief stricken,
Speaker 1: and they blamed Andrew Venamon, and it probably led to
Speaker 1: Andrew Venamon's death. He, of course, was shot dead in
Speaker 1: a Carlton restaurant in a heated discussion with Mic Gatter
Speaker 1: and at the time Mick Gaddow quite understandably blamed Venomon
Speaker 1: for shooting his good friend Graham Kinnerborough. It turns out
Speaker 1: that it wasn't Venomin after all. The police soon worked
Speaker 1: that out. The police had actual surveillance tapes and bugs
Speaker 1: and all that which showed that Venamin at the time
Speaker 1: of the shooting was on the other side of Melbourne.
Speaker 1: He was over in the Northern suburbs, and so they
Speaker 1: knew it wasn't Venamin. There's no doubt that two men
Speaker 1: were involved in killing Graham Kinnerborough, but only one of
Speaker 1: them was finally arrested and convicted of it was Stephen Asling,
Speaker 1: and he was convicted. But the other hitman, a man
Speaker 1: called Terence Blewett, was not arrested and convicted because he
Speaker 1: was already dead. The underworld moves in mysterious ways, as
Speaker 1: we said, and he had been killed and buried in
Speaker 1: what was more or less a waste dump out in
Speaker 1: Thomastown because of some internal upheaval in the underworld, and
Speaker 1: quite possibly because he had knowledge of the death of
Speaker 1: Graham Kinneborough and it could be that he's co accused
Speaker 1: Asling decided to rub him out first. There is no
Speaker 1: honor among thieves, or very rarely, some would say that
Speaker 1: Graham Kinneborough had a little bit of honor more than most.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald
Speaker 1: Sun production true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton.
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