THE
BASSETT ROAD
MACHINE-GUN
MURDERS

SCOTT BAINBRIDGE

First published in 2013

Copyright © Scott Bainbridge 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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ISBN 978 1 877505 28 7

eISBN 978 1 743433 35 5

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Set in 12/16.5 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

For Raea and Rafael

CONTENTS

Map of Auckland city in the period

Prologue

Introduction

PART I
GANGLAND MURDERS IN REMUERA

CHAPTER 1 Setting the scene

CHAPTER 2 Two bodies found at 115 Bassett Road

CHAPTER 3 Kevin Speight’s background

CHAPTER 4 George Walker’s background

CHAPTER 5 The investigation team

CHAPTER 6 Shaking down the crims

CHAPTER 7 Police get their first breakthrough

CHAPTER 8 Curtis squeals

CHAPTER 9 Police interviews continue

CHAPTER 10 Red herrings and false leads

CHAPTER 11 Johnny’s story

CHAPTER 12 Johnny Who?

CHAPTER 13 Putting the heat on Gillies

CHAPTER 14 The Anglesea Street firm under pressure

CHAPTER 15 Lola’s story

CHAPTER 16 Gillies goes to ground

CHAPTER 17 The missing piece revealed

CHAPTER 18 Jorgensen’s alibi

CHAPTER 19 New Year’s Eve, 1964

PART II
THE TRIAL AND ITS AFTERMATH

CHAPTER 20 Following the arrests

CHAPTER 21 The lower-court hearing

CHAPTER 22 Preparing for trial

CHAPTER 23 The trial begins

CHAPTER 24 Closing addresses, the summing up and verdict

CHAPTER 25 Jorgensen’s appeal

CHAPTER 26 The confession

CHAPTER 27 What happened to Jorgensen and Gillies?

CHAPTER 28 What happened to the other players?

CHAPTER 29 What happened to key police and legal personnel?

Glossary of gangster-speak

About the author

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

PROLOGUE

At about 9am on Saturday, 7 December 1963, Eric Lewis went to 115 Bassett Road in Remuera, Auckland, to collect rent from his new tenants. He had arranged to collect the money the previous evening, but when he called nobody was home.

Opening the front gate, Lewis noticed the newspaper container had been knocked off its ledge and it contained the New Zealand Herald for Thursday 5 December. Friday and Saturday’s papers were in the letterbox. Fearing the tenants had absconded, Lewis let himself inside with his master key. The place reeked.

He opened the door to the front bedroom and found two men, obviously dead—one was lying on his back on the bed and the other was face down on the floor beside the bed. Both bodies were covered with bedclothes, and there were bloodstains on the sheets covering the man on the bed.

Overwhelmed by the sight of two dead men and the stench, Lewis beat a hasty retreat and contacted police.

INTRODUCTION

As a boy growing up in Te Awamutu in the 1970s, I had a morbid fascination with crime. On Sunday mornings, my job was to hop on my ‘Cruiser’ and cycle 6 kilometres to the IGA where I bought the Sunday News and 8 O’Clock for the old man. Once home, I devoured both papers, hungry for every snippet of crime news. At the time, the papers were full of updates on the Thomas case, Mona Blades, Tracey Patient and, as the decade closed, Mr Asia.

I had not heard of the Bassett Road machine-gun murders until 1985, when Ron Jorgensen’s sinister disappearance was covered in a Sunday News weekly serial by foremost investigative journalist Pat Booth. On our next family trip to Auckland, I remember wandering along Karangahape Road trying to imagine what it was like back in the day—big gangsters wearing heavy overcoats, fancy Italian suits and trilby hats menacingly walking past George Courts department store and the remaining, mostly sleazy, shops.

It is 28 years since that visit and K Road, as it is popularly called, is more Bohemian and multicultural than it used to be but, for some reason, when I walk along it, I always think of those men. They were New Zealand’s first real gangsters.

In 2005, my first book, Without Trace, covering unsolved cases of missing persons, was published. I included the mysterious disappearance of one of New Zealand’s well-known criminals, Ronald Jorgensen. That book and its sequel, Still Missing, were developed into the television series The Missing, produced by Screentime.

In 2010, during the second season, acclaimed director Tom Reilly and I delved into the events surrounding Jorgensen’s baffling disappearance from Kaikoura in 1984 after his car was found abandoned and smashed at the bottom of a cliff. Researching Jorgy’s background, I discovered an interesting and complex character and the resulting episode of The Missing debunked some myths and even resolved some of the unanswered questions. However, we never did find out, once and for all, what happened to Ronald Jorgensen. Part of me believes he gave us the slip.

During my research, I learned more about the Bassett Road machine-gun murders, an incident which catapulted onto the front pages of major newspapers in December 1963 and, later, into the history books, making Jorgensen a household name for the rest of his life. The discovery of the bodies of Kevin Speight and George Walker revealed for the first time the seedy and violent underbelly of Auckland crime and vice to a naïve and conservative New Zealand public. The subsequent police investigation took 24 days of hard 18-hour-day graft by 32 of New Zealand’s finest detectives, and an equally large number of uniformed police.

The investigation, the highly controversial trial and its aftermath splashed across the tabloids on a daily basis. Newspaper circulation was at an all-time high during the early days of television in New Zealand—less than half of the population owned a television.

The police case rested on the theory the murders were part of a gangland retaliation or turf war, as reported by the media. However, this is a piece of fiction and the true story is every bit as gripping. It needs to be told. When I found myself reading scant Herald articles announcing the deaths of men like Bert Clapham, Bryce Peterson and Leon ‘Lucky’ White—gangsters of the early 1960s and associates of both victims and the accused—I knew I needed to get on to it while some of the people involved were still alive.

Detectives Bob Walton, John Hughes and John Stevenson and the Honorable Sir Graham Speight all played pivotal roles in solving the case and bringing about the downfall of Auckland’s organised criminal underworld—they, too, have recently passed away. After reading their obituaries, I felt it vital to tell this story from a firsthand point of view before it was too late.

PART I

GANGLAND MURDERS
IN REMUERA

Chapter One

SETTING THE SCENE

The headline is what people remember most: CHICAGO COMES TO AUCKLAND was sensationally blazed across the front page of Truth on 10 December 1963, after the gruesome discovery of two dead underworld figures in a house in the upmarket Auckland suburb of Remuera. In a quiet street of family homes, residents were shocked to learn 115 Bassett Road had been operating as a sly-grog den or beerhouse. The victims had been executed in ‘a hail of bullets’ fired from a machine gun, the type of weapon favoured by Al Capone and other gangsters in the United States (US) during the years of Prohibition. Before then, authorities had no idea there were such guns in New Zealand.

These were innocent times. People were still reeling over the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the President of the United States, on 22 November 1963, just three weeks earlier. Although JFK’s assassination did not have too much of an impact on the daily lives of the average Kiwi, it changed the way they viewed the world.

Murders were rare in New Zealand—there were on average eight murders per year and abolishing the death penalty two years earlier had not increased the murder rate, as some people had predicted—more would have been considered a crime wave.

The disappearance of Wellington model Wendy Mayes in 1961 and the parcel bomb death of solicitor James Ward in Dunedin in 1962¹ had a high profile and received a great deal of media coverage. Many people believed the latest murders were a problem confined to Auckland, which was experiencing rapid urban growth, with Truth regularly reporting sordid details of the burgeoning strip-club industry and its associated scandals.

Still, most New Zealanders kept their doors unlocked at night and retained the trusting wartime sense of community, preferring to focus their worries on other potential menaces, such as those reported in the Herald in the early stages of the Bassett Road murder investigation. For example, the headline BEATLEMANIA, A NEW DISEASE THAT ATTACKS THE YOUNG opened a story about the mass hysteria being created by four lads from Liverpool and the potential frightening influence they might have on the young people of New Zealand.²

The Bassett Road machine-gun murders sent shockwaves throughout conservative New Zealand. Within days of the murders, reports hinted at possible motives, including robbery, drug trafficking and blackmail by shady characters in beerhouses. As Crown Prosecutor Graham Speight concluded in his closing address in the subsequent murder trial months later, ‘the jury might think the case has lifted a corner of the curtain to give a look at the underworld of Auckland’. This was fair comment because the average Kiwi knew little about this sector of society before the double murder at Bassett Road.

This was the era of six o’clock closing, an archaic hangover from the First World War. The law prohibiting hotels to operate past 6pm was originally meant to be a temporary wartime measure in 1917, but was made permanent a year later. Further regulations were imposed during the Second World War and government duties on alcohol rose. As the country entered a period of stability and prosperity following the Second World War, there were increased calls for a referendum to extend closing hours to ten o’clock. This was partly due to a desire to move with modern times; the rapidly growing restaurant industry found it difficult to comply with legislation to sell alcohol with meals, and sports clubs and RSAs sought to extend their opening hours.³

Yet there was resistance to change, even from within the hotel industry itself, with concerns that extended hours would create additional difficulties in overtime pay and general conditions. The average Kiwi drinker had become used to racing to the nearest public bar after clocking-off at 5pm, clutching the day’s Sports Edition, standing packed shoulder to shoulder in a fug of smoke, guzzling beer as fast as they could, as if every drop was their last. No wonder it was dubbed the six o’clock swill. After the bars closed, most drinkers went home, but some went to a café for a meal of fish ’n’ chips, or to a beerhouse to drink more beer.⁴

As soon as 6pm closing began in 1917, sly-grog dens opened, literally overnight, in towns all around the country. ‘Sly-grog shanty’ was a mainly Australian term for an unlicensed hotel or liquor store—usually with the added suggestion of poor-quality liquor and an unlicensed vendor. In New Zealand, sly-grog shanties were called sly-grog dens, but more commonly they were called beerhouses—they are the same thing.⁵

Beerhouses were owned and operated by people flouting the law to make a quick buck. They were enemies of the Liquor Licensing groups, and police regularly conducted raids to shut them down but, for every beerhouse closed, another would open within weeks, often at the same address. For the police, beerhouses were nothing more than an annoyance as many officers viewed the liquor legislation with disdain, and willingly turned a blind eye to the beerhouse operations. There was reluctance to invest time, manpower and resources in what was regarded as petty offending.

THE COMMONLY HELD view that organised crime in New Zealand began with the Mr Asia drug syndicate around 1974 is not correct. The genesis of organised crime in Auckland can be traced back to the 1940s and 1950s, when the operation of beerhouses became more structured and controlled. The old industrial suburb of Freemans Bay and neighbouring Ponsonby were where it all began. At the time, Ponsonby was a slum, as it had been since the 1850s, with a population of largely unskilled workers living in cramped high-density housing and poorly constructed cottages.With the centre of industry located close to the port area, lower Freemans Bay had a higher proportion of prostitution than any other suburb in Auckland in the early twentieth century.⁶ It was a seething hotbed for suburban crime, with beerhouses being sporadically established and closed down over the years. It was not until the Second World War, when US servicemen were stationed at Victoria Park in lower Freemans Bay, that a small group of savvy individuals realised the potential for making a great profit for themselves slaking the soldiers’ thirst for a good time.

Zelda Nicolson opened a beerhouse in her home in Franklin Road in the early 1950s. Soon after, Frank Zimmerman, an ex-heavyweight boxing-champion gangster known as ‘Frank the Tank’ because of his wide girth, opened a beerhouse on Cook Street. Curiously, Zimmerman used his girth to beat a prison rap—his lawyer successfully argued at his fourth trial for operating a beerhouse that, having measured the cell doors at Mt Eden Prison, he could say that ‘the Tank’ was simply too fat to fit through them. The judge sighed and settled on a fine.

Like many before them, Zelda and Frank the Tank formed associations with notorious hotels that would outwardly conform, closing their doors at 6pm but continuing to trade to ‘private parties’ upstairs. For a substantial kickback, the operators of these hotels and other sympathetic wholesalers would supply a crate or two of beer to a sly-grogger to sell at inflated price after hours. GIs would happily pay and, when the war ended, seamen from the Northern and Union steamship companies, paid off from the nearby port, would happily blow their pay at the beerhouses.

Some beerhouses extended their businesses by aligning themselves with prostitution and gambling. The most famous madam was Flora MacKenzie. A successful upmarket Vulcan Lane boutique-owner, Flora was the daughter of Sir Hugh MacKenzie, a wealthy horse-stud owner and chairman of the Auckland Harbour Board, who bought his daughter a block of flats in Ring Terrace, in Saint Marys Bay, as an investment. Classical pianist Billie Farnell inherited Flora’s flamboyant gowns when she died in 1968 and he told me how Flora had got started in the business.

Flora was such a dear, sweet lady. During the war she and a group of girlfriends went out on the town with some senior American Navy personnel who were about to be shipped out to Guadalcanal. The girls were wined and dined and then returned to Ring Terrace where Flora plied them with grog, nothing else. There was no sex involved. Next day when she woke up, the Naval men had gone, and her man, an Admiral, left her a brown envelope containing a thank you note and a large sum of banknotes. It was then Flora figured these men were about to head off to certain death, and there was some uncertainty on her part that she would survive the war, with the threats of a Japanese invasion. Flora lived for the moment and had that ‘well, let’s all have a good time because we all might be dead tomorrow’ attitude. That’s how the famous Ring Terrace brothel started.

Other madams, such as Joan Dan from Mt Eden and Diane Crowe, who operated a brothel which fronted as a dressmaker’s in Greys Avenue, came on the scene in the early 1960s, providing girls to beerhouses who would charge £5 to punters for the use of a bedroom. The cost would be split between the beerhouse and the girl and her madam or bully. Some, like ex-professional wrestler Gary ‘Tiger’ Collecutt, took things further by opening a beerhouse in his first-floor apartment in K Road, where he charged 10/- entrance fee and patrons—mainly high school boys—bought tickets which were exchanged for beer at 4/- a can and 2/- a nip for watered down whisky. During the evening, Collecutt had his girlfriend perform a strip but his enterprise was foiled when concerned parents began complaining, resulting in a police raid. As officers kicked down the door, Collecutt set his Alsatian dog loose on them, causing several nasty bite marks and a short stretch in Mt Eden for Collecutt.⁷ Later, Collecutt expanded his enterprise and opened the Pink Pussycat strip club.

Gambling dens were just as plentiful as beerhouses, many originating in the notorious Greys Avenue, in close proximity to the Chinese opium dens. Traditional Chinese gambling games, such as pakapoo and fantan, had been popular in the underworld for years, and beerhouses offered poker, Crown and Anchor—a traditional game originating from the British Navy—and two-up from Australia.⁸

One proponent of poker and Crown and Anchor was the well-known professional card shark and hustler, Trixie Te Whiu. Trixie was a young Maori woman who dressed stylishly in men’s suits teamed with a captain’s hat. She carried a pocketknife she was not afraid to use. Her elder brother, Cec, was in prison for manslaughter, and her younger brother, Ted, had been hanged for murder in 1955. Trixie was Northland Maori, but could speak Cantonese and Yugoslavian fluently, and was well read in English literature.⁹ Highly intelligent, Trixie also turned tricks. She used her gambling skills in, and supplied girls to, most of the beerhouses in Freemans Bay and Ponsonby in the early 1960s.

In the mid-1950s, one of the notorious beerhouses was run by hustler Nellie Walters and her common-law husband, Tai Raymond—he was a nasty piece of work who consistently associated with thugs and undesirables.¹⁰ John Yelash, a young poet who opened his own beerhouse in the early 1960s, remembers the couple.

Nellie and Tai probably ran the roughest beerhouse. She was violent and shrewd, and Tai was just as bad. One night there were about half a dozen Australian seamen at the house and Nellie was setting up a poker game. It got to a point where there was a fair amount of cash on the table and Nellie all of a sudden shrieks, ‘Get your hand off my cunt!’ to the sailor sitting beside her. Next thing, Tai moves up behind the one she accuses and brings down a huge axe on the table. Well, these guys shit themselves and hightailed it out the door leaving all their money on the table, and Tai half-heartedly chasing them out. And calm as you like, Nellie pockets all the money and moves onto something else. Everyone was scared of her and Tai, but this was a common game they had to rip people off.

John Yelash also remembers establishing his own beerhouse:

Back then it was very easy to establish a beerhouse. You would simply buy your grog from a wholesaler or friendly pub. Of course, you let police know and paid your £50 to a local friendly cop, who would provide individual photographs of the vice squad who would be the ones likely to perform a raid.

I kept the photos on a page of the ‘John Weeks’ calendar I had on the door. If the doorman did not recognise the person asking for entry, he could flip the calendar to November to see if he could recognise the fellow. Of course you might be raided by the consorting group or shop-breaking squad, so it didn’t work all the time. The police would let you operate for six months or so, and then close you down.

The price of a bottle of beer at a hotel was 2/- but could be anything from an extra sixpence to three times as much at a sly-grog shop. Some also offered spirits. At times, these were available only after everyone was drunk and all the beer had been consumed. There was good reason for this—many of the expensive spirits were watered down. While the average Joe probably couldn’t tell the difference, hardened drinkers, like seamen, could. Knowing it was no use complaining to police, they would create a scene, so many beerhouses retained the services of an enforcer.

In 1960, James ‘Diamond Jim’ Shepherd was a 23-year-old on the fringes of the Auckland underworld. He would later be one of the leading figures in the Mr Asia syndicate. He remembers the interesting but little-known period of Auckland’s illegal sly-grogging years in the 1950s and 1960s.

I was only a young man back then, but visited many of these places. They were no places for the faint-hearted. There was always trouble and you had to be able to handle yourself because there were always fights. I cannot remember ever attending one where there was not a fight. In many cases, bottles would be broken over someone’s head. Not nice places to socialise at.

I remember being there one time when Bill Woolsey [light–heavyweight amateur boxing champion of 1957, and grandfather of Sonny Bill Williams] got into a fight with the professional middleweight boxing champion Tommy Kavanaugh. Bill Woolsey was captain of the City Newton Rugby League side I used to play for. After about five minutes of brutal fighting, Bill dropped Tommy and, as he lay on the ground, Bill picked up a concrete post and was going to drop it on Tommy’s head. We had to intervene to stop him doing so, and as we were doing this, Tommy called out, ‘What are you trying to do, Bill? Kill me?’ to which Bill replied, ‘Now you’re getting the message.’ They were tough places, believe me. No knives were used, mainly fists and bottles.

If Zelda or Jack [Niue, who had a beerhouse behind the Ponsonby Post Office] had any trouble they would call bad boys up, like me, Sam and Gary Dufty, Gay-Gay McGlynn or Alan Magoon, and we would just go down and sort out any troublemakers. I am the closest thing to a gangster that New Zealand has ever had, and I do not class myself as one. Barry Shaw was another. Crazy as a cut snake, but if you knew him like I did he was a good guy—could handle himself too as he fought in the ring when he was younger.

The location of established beerhouses was spread by word-of-mouth. The average Joe would spend an hour at a beerhouse before heading off to another one. Some people were loyal to a particular beerhouse, which was seen as a safe haven for like-minded criminals to meet to plan jobs, share information and form associations. Thus, they were where organised criminal factions got started. The criminal underworld of Auckland in the early 1960s was an era before drugs were a problem. Morphine use was associated with fallen doctors and nurses, while marijuana was restricted to the jazz and art sets. In the criminal hierarchy the order of status was safe cracking at the top, then burglary, theft and receiving stolen goods. Armed robbery was rare and regarded as an aberration.¹¹

There were several men at the top of Auckland’s criminal underworld. Trevor ‘Too Fats’ Smith was a large-set man, who made his bones blowing safes but by 1960 he was in a position where he could get others to do his dirty work and take the fall. He was a receiver and an eager tutor to up-and-comers, but not averse to setting them up for a fall if they became too cocky.

Trevor Edward Nash was a folk hero among the criminal underworld. In November 1956, Nash came away with £20,000—an enormous sum at the time—from a payroll robbery on the Auckland waterfront. He was caught and refused to reveal the whereabouts of his proceeds. He was sentenced to a stretch in Mt Eden, but made a dramatic escape in February 1961. It was thought he spent the majority of his time being sheltered by beerhouses, before disguising himself, buying a car and driving to Tauranga, where he ring-bolted to Melbourne aboard the MV Kawaroa on 29 June 1961.¹²

The man respected and revered by all criminals was Archie Banks. His door at 48 East Street, near Karangahape Road, was always open to the criminal fraternity. People would call on him for advice in planning jobs, collaboration or when they needed money, which he would happily give away because he had stolen it himself.

Archie Banks was highly intelligent with a rogue imagination. Qualifying as a pharmacist in the 1930s, his restlessness prevented him settling into the middle-class life of a chemist. With restrictions and higher duties on alcohol during the Second World War, Banks set up a distillery in South Wairarapa selling moonshine whisky to the Yanks in Wellington for £20 a bottle when the usual price for bootleg whisky was £5. He also stole cartons of cigarettes and other supplies for GIs from US Army Storage warehouses, which he would then sell back to them for a tidy profit.¹³

Banks spent the next decade in Wellington in a flurry of illegal ventures—selling moonshine to nightclubs and brothels and ripping off bookies, selling used cars, and being involved in a wide range of other activities, including fraud, forgery, burglary and theft. An adept card-filer, he once ran a nightclub that doubled as a gambling den. Regularly in and out of jail, where he involved himself in every prison racket going, even stealing lead piping from the prison roof, Banks was transferred from Rimutaka to Mt Eden Prison after guards found a home-made key that could lock and unlock the wing grill to his cell. He eventually settled in Auckland with his wife, Kitty, a hairdresser-cum-backstreet abortionist. After being released from prison in 1961, Banks travelled to Putaruru to collect their fifteen-year-old son, who had been raised by relatives since he was a toddler.

That toddler, now the Honourable John Banks, Member of Parliament and former mayor of Auckland, remembers living with his father for the first time.

I didn’t meet my father until I was fourteen, and I moved up to Auckland to live with my parents for the first time. From the ages of fifteen to seventeen were the most exciting, bewildering and frightening years of my life. I lived life in the fast lane.

In contrast to his father, John Banks had a strong work ethic thanks to his firm but loving upbringing that instilled a Salvation Army Sunday School sense of values. But there were times when he was inadvertently drawn into his father’s activities.

One night Dad asked me if I wanted to drive the truck as he needed to pick up some ham and bacon for Christmas. I loved driving trucks so jumped at the chance. I started to feel uneasy when he asked me to park up the road. Minutes later there was a loud explosion and I saw the windows and shop front of the meat factory blow out onto the street. It was then that I realised Dad had gone and blown the safe. He could never get his gelignite quantities quite right. I realised to my horror that I was unwittingly the getaway driver. My vivid recollection of that night was watching Dad and his friend unload a satchel full of banknotes, some still smouldering, on the kitchen table at 1.30am. That wasn’t the life for me and I didn’t want to end up like my old man, in and out of prison with a long criminal record.

During the day, John Banks studied at Avondale College, and after school tried his hand at a number of part-time jobs. It was the resourceful Archie Banks who would secure his son a unique and highly lucrative part-time job.

Dad associated with most of the beerhouses and secured me contracts to collect the bottles. At 3.30am each morning I started the process of cleaning up the beerhouses, going from one to the next gathering up all of the bottles and stashing them in a trailer hitched onto my Morris 8. Sometimes, I would have to clean up inside the houses—mop and clean out the lavatories, that was part of my contract. I was paid by each beerhouse and, before school, I would sell all the bottles I collected to Corbans Wines in Hobson Street for one shilling per dozen. Then I’d drive out west to begin my school day at Avondale College. In the twelve months leading up to Bassett Road, I made an absolute fortune.

The beerhouses and what went on inside was an education for the teenage boy, whose upbringing in Auckland was far from sheltered.

They were well furbished, garishly, with white carpets, black wallpaper, lots of mirrors, dark lights, a sleazy bar and blue movies. Women that would normally be jumping out of cakes stood around being available to help you drink your grog and spend your money and do other things. There were incredible scenes. Numerous women lay around, draped in various states of drunkenness on the sofas, sometimes being bonked. The rooms were just full of smoke—you couldn’t see from one side to the next. But it looked glamorous—good-looking women, cool-looking dudes all ostensibly having a good time.¹⁴

The men [patrons] were tough characters I knew you just didn’t mess with. They tolerated me because of the old man, and if something were to happen, Barry Shaw would break their legs. The women were flamboyant, all painted up, beautiful coiffured hair, high-heeled shoes, adorned with jewellery and exotic perfume. For a young bloke it was pretty mesmerising, and I would have been exposed to more than the average teenager of the day. Several times some of the women would offer to teach me the ways of the world, but I was not interested. I just wanted to get in there, do my job and get the hell out. I knew if I got involved with the women, the guys would not hesitate breaking my bones, no matter whose son I was.

The criminal fraternity stood out in style and dress. This was an era where American popular culture had an influence—the James Cagney and George Raft gangster movies, dime-store detective magazines, Mickey Spillane’s violent crime novels (which had been banned, making them a popular commodity on the black market). Seamen smuggled in and shared around copies of the latest banned novels. Men modelled themselves on tough characters, sauntering around with heavy coats like the American mafia, with the collars turned up and hats pulled over their eyes, smoking or sucking on a matchstick. So, the Chicago-styled underworld in Auckland was born.

There was such a small criminal fraternity—everyone knew each other. Police knew who the crims were and vice versa. There weren’t the organised crime enterprises as we know them today—it was more a case of like-minded crooks united in their criminal endeavours.

The late 1950s to early 1960s was a time of change for Auckland Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB). Older wartime detectives Frank Aplin, Bill Fell and John Overton were coming to the twilight of their careers, retiring or accepting senior political positions. Police superiors recognised the future of modern law enforcement was in the hands of younger, intellectual men like Bob Walton who, in 1950 at the age of 29, was promoted to the detective branch. By the end of that decade, with an exemplary record and high arrest rate, he was ranked detective inspector.

Walton could see strong cohesiveness developing within the budding criminal fraternity and vowed to break them up before their structure and influence grew beyond control. In the early 1960s, safe blowing was at its peak—Ray Brummell was working solo around Auckland, Too Fats Smith usually had an apprentice, and premier safe-cracker Jack West was working with Barry Shaw or Len Evans. Safes were being blown all over Auckland and things were getting out of control. One night, a criminal group heard about a payroll being delivered to a factory in Huntly so they drove south and broke in only to find another firm had beaten them to it and had blown the safe the night before.

Walton and his superiors established the shop-breaking squad, an élite group of young detectives with brilliant investigative minds, including Joe Sheehan, Norm Sowter and John Hughes, who were not averse to physical confrontation with the thugs they were investigating. Among the group were two ex-navy boxing champions and one hard-nosed street fighter. The squad knew most shop-breaking jobs could be linked back to one of the beerhouses. Within months of its formation, the squad had arrested some of the city’s top criminals.

Detectives like Sheehan, Sowter and Hughes were tough and uncompromising and informants were willing to nark.

Detective Joe Sheehan realised that although beerhouses were illegal, they had their uses but recognised the contradiction:

The uniformed police and liquor-licensing group were encouraged to keep the pressure on the beerhouses—close them down and arrest as many as possible—but this was not in the detectives’ ethos. They never gave us any grief. We were kind of supportive because they, in effect, contained the criminal fraternity. We knew where they’d all be most nights. Often on weekends there might be a spate of safes blown, counting-house robberies, burglaries and so forth. Most of the proceeds would be spent up at the beerhouses. On Monday morning, Detective Senior Sergeant Les Schultz would ask what got knocked off over the weekend, and we would start phoning around the beerhouses finding out how much was made, who spent what, and it would invariably lead us to the individual or group responsible.

We set the rules on the streets. We got to know all the barmen, licensees, porters, taxi drivers and so forth. City workers were like the eyes and ears, and would know what was going on and who was doing what. These people were invaluable sources of information.

Detective Sergeant Norm Sowter remembers the relationship between police and the beerhouses from early on in his police career.

From my perspective as a detective in the consorting and shop-break squad, going into the beerhouses was invaluable. Obviously I didn’t like to associate on a social level with these persons, but you had to, to some degree, to get information. We would go in without any force, just to see who was there and try and cultivate informants. I would go inside, have a look around and see who was sitting in a corner talking to whom, find out the alliances. Then later, I might go find one of these people and see what was being planned. I was running 20–30 reliable informants through this method.

The criminals hated us, but there was some respect. When [Detective Inspector John] Hughes died, there was a huge turnout of old crims at his funeral. I have even been to the funerals of some guys I locked up and there was a reunion of sorts. We would have a beer and talk of old times. I doubt that kind of thing would happen between cops and criminals today.

Of growing concern was the presence and influence of gangsters from Australia who would regularly ring-bolt across the ditch, assisted by criminals associated with the Seamen’s Union and the Painters and Dockers Union. Often these gangsters would maintain low profiles dividing their time between beerhouses, but occasionally they would have a public outing, appearing at race meetings where they might be arrested by an alert police officer. Usually, their presence in New Zealand took police by surprise. Melbourne gangsters Brickie Molloy and Walter ‘Jackie’ Steele looked to establish footholds in the nightclub scene and were cautiously friendly with local operators, but they were prepared to take over by force when the time was right. Jack Coles was regularly in and out of New Zealand, aligning himself to Auckland crims and forming gangs to travel around the country blowing safes although, it has to be said, this venture was rarely successful. As Joe Sheehan commented, the Aussie criminals would not last long here because New Zealand was simply not big enough—they’d do a job and be caught because someone would give them up.

New Zealand police had been closely monitoring what was happening in Australia. During 1962, there had been a series of mafia revenge murders in Melbourne, with the victims, Domenico Demarte, Vincenzo Muratore, Vincenzo Angilletta and Antonio Monaco, all being hit by shotgun blasts. The media described the series of shootings as a war of succession between Calabrians and Sicilians. There was a fear New Zealand gangsters with links to Australia might bear arms in the near future, copying the crims across the ditch. There had been a series of gun-related incidents over recent years, which justified these fears.

One well-known case from the time involved Arthur McQuoid, who escaped from Papakura Magistrates Court on 21 December 1960 after being sentenced to prison for assaulting his wife. He made his way to Manurewa shopping centre where he coerced a sports shop assistant to hand over a .22-calibre rifle and a cache of ammunition. After threatening the assistant he raced out of the shop and took up a position on top of a platform at the nearby timber yard where he worked. He then began firing randomly.

Police, including members of the consorting squad, arrived at the scene but they had no tactics or formal training to deal with such an incident. At one point a journalist from the Auckland Star tried to act as negotiator during the tense standoff. Eventually, police and the fire brigade used high-pressure hoses to bring McQuoid down, but he shot Detective Joe Sheehan in the stomach before turning the gun on himself.¹⁵

On Sunday afternoon, 6 January 1963, Auckland CIB were told a man in Waitakere was running amok with a gun and was reported to have shot several people. Victor Wasmuth, aged 52, lived in a bach in Bethells Road. Over the previous year people had been noticing him behaving eccentrically and it was later learned he had been experiencing paranoid delusions. Across the road from Wasmuth’s bach Jim Berry and his wife ran Gorseland Kennels. At about 2.55pm on the Sunday afternoon, the Pettit family, fresh from their holiday, arrived to collect their dog. Mr Pettit was suddenly felled by a bullet to the hand as the family walked towards the Berrys’ house. Witnesses observed Wasmuth walking around his bach muttering nonsensically. As the Berrys and Pettits withdrew from the property, Wasmuth shot a .303 rifle, killing Jim Berry.

Police arrived to place a cordon around the area and evacuate residents. The tactical response was led by Detective Inspector Wallace Chalmers, who probably had a sense of déjà vu that afternoon. As a young policeman, Chalmers had been deployed to the West Coast in 1941 in the manhunt for the armed killer Stanley Graham.

Like the Manurewa incident three years earlier, the police team was not equipped for the situation. After the decades-long public backlash following the Graham shooting, there was some reluctance by police to shoot offenders. Detective Sergeant Neville Power stormed Wasmuth’s bach with a gas gun that failed to operate—it jammed or misfired—and he was fatally shot. As Power lay dying, Chalmers called for Wasmuth to surrender, but tripped and was shot dead by Wasmuth, who was soon overpowered. Wasmuth was found mentally unfit to plead and was committed to a psychiatric institution for the rest of his life. He died in 2008.

The deaths of Chalmers, aged 46, and Power, aged 25, had a profound effect on the close-knit Auckland CIB. Chalmers was a popular senior member of the force and a close friend to Bob Walton and many others. He was a mentor to many younger detectives. Neville Power was a brilliant young detective who was destined to have a stellar career. He was one of three brothers in the police force, the sons of Assistant Commissioner Orme Power, head of Auckland CIB, who had dropped in to visit his troops that Sunday afternoon and ended up listening to events unfold on the police radio.¹⁶

One month later, constables Bryan Schultz and James Richardson were shot dead in their patrol car as they pulled up to an address in Lower Hutt to attend a domestic callout. Bryan Schultz was only 21 years old and son of Auckland CIB Detective Senior Sergeant Leslie Schultz, the hard-nosed head of the consorting squad. These two incidents with the deaths of four officers on duty in less than a month led to the formation of the Armed Offenders Squad.

It took a long time for many in Auckland CIB to get over the deaths of their colleagues—some felt it could have easily happened to them. The majority merely got on with the job, and threw themselves into it with gusto—it was almost as if they had a renewed sense of purpose. For senior police like Bob Walton, the fact that criminals could easily get their hands on heavy-duty firearms was a major concern, and he probably wondered if this was the start of a sinister new era.

IN 1962, A SEAMAN, an ex-borstal boy and petty crim, was released from prison in Christchurch after being locked up for three years. Whiling away his lag he had visions of grandeur, and made up his mind about his future. When he was released he decided he had had enough of the South Island. Walking up the gangway of a USS Company steamship carrying a swag, he told the first mate he was hitching a ride to Auckland.

‘One way, eh? What are you going to do once you get there?’

The seaman winked and touched his nose with his forefinger. ‘I’m going to be the Big Man. Fucking Al Capone the Second. I’ll be running things before too long. Watch and see.’

THE COUNTRY WENT to the polls on 30 November 1963—the Saturday before the murders. Robert Muldoon, was re-elected as National MP for Tamaki. He later became prime minister from 1975 to 1984. In 1963, Robert Muldoon was known as a Young Turk—the term was coined for the maverick MP and two fellow juniors in the National Party known for their outspoken criticism of senior National ministers. With a background in accountancy, Muldoon had just been appointed parliamentary under-secretary for finance following the election. He was a fine debater, who saw attack as the best means of defence. It was clear he had a bright political future ahead, but he was also down to earth and made himself accessible to constituents.¹⁷ It was in this capacity he would later find himself involved in the investigation of the Bassett Road machine-gun murders.

JOHN BANKS REMEMBERS seeing the victims of 115 Bassett Road earlier in the week of the machine-gun murders.

You know I never really thought anything of it at the time. I was at home one day when there was a knock at the door. There were these two huge guys asking to speak to Dad. I recognised one of them as George Walker, who had known my parents for years. In fact, George came out of the same school as my dad—absolutely polite and friendly, but couldn’t go anywhere without stealing something. Kevin Speight was a big guy too. He was friendly towards me. They came in and went to speak with Dad. They sat there, heads together talking in whispers, paranoid about police. I have no idea what they were talking about and I didn’t ask. I figured they were planning a job, like a safe—something definitely illegal. Around the time of my birthday in December, Dad took me to 115 Bassett Road where they had set up a sly-grog. I couldn’t believe that just a few days later those jokers would be dead.

And with the Bassett Road machine-gun murders Barry Shaw remembers the end of an era.

The good times ended with Bassett Road. After that, we were all rounded up and sent to the Big House. By the time I was released, it was a whole new era in crime. Dirtier. It was never the same.

Chapter Two

TWO BODIES FOUND AT
115 BASSETT ROAD

It was early on Saturday morning, 7 December 1963. After the panicked call from landlord Eric Lewis, Detective Inspector Bob Walton and senior detectives from Auckland CIB arrived at the scene. They, too, were overcome by the stench—it was early summer, but it had been a week of high temperatures and it appeared the bodies had been lying there for several days.

Eric Lewis told police he advertised the house to let several weeks earlier and had been contacted by a man named Walters. He seemed like a nice professional fellow, and Lewis immediately agreed to meet him. On 29 November 1963, Lewis met Mr Walters and his business associate Mr Ross, and both seemed to be convivial gentlemen. Walters explained he had recently moved from Wellington, and Ross was his brother-in-law. He said his wife would be joining him soon.

Both of them said they were commercial businessmen, but Lewis did not inquire as to the nature of their business before agreeing to let them rent the house. Walters paid a £5 deposit straightaway and agreed to pay the balance of £7—one week’s rent in advance—later that evening, when Lewis planned to hand over the keys. Instead, that evening Walters had given Lewis a cheque in the name of K.J. Speight. When asked about it, Walters explained a friend of his named Speight, from Onehunga, had written the cheque because he, Walters, had misplaced his cheque book.

With a police officer at his side, Lewis identified Mr Walters as the man lying on the bed and Mr Ross as the man on the floor. Both had been shot and both bodies were covered with a blanket and quilt respectively. There was no weapon at the scene, so the idea of murder–suicide was quickly ruled out.

The house was sparsely furnished. The dining room was simply furnished with a table, upon which were 24 clean beer glasses placed upside down, and a large industrial refrigerator that was later found to have been hired from a city firm. It contained fourteen bottles and 22 cans of beer, but no food. There were 66 empty beer bottles and 72 empty cans lined up at the back door. Police suspected 115 Bassett Road had been set up to operate as a sly-grog den.

Fingerprints taken from the scene established Mr Walters and Mr Ross were not who they said they were. Walters was, in fact, Kevin James Speight, aged 29, a seaman, and Ross was George Frederick Walker, aged 35, a commercial traveller.

Dr Francis Cairns, pathologist, made an initial examination of the bodies where they lay in the front bedroom. Kevin Speight was wearing a white T-shirt and underpants. He was lying on his back in the bed with the sheets thrown back. His left leg was slightly raised and it appeared he had been shot first either getting in or out of bed. His mouth was covered in blood and he had been shot three times—he had one wound in the left upper lip, and two in the chest.

George Walker was lying face down on the floor, but he was slightly raised on his left side, as he was on top of the Herald edition dated 4 December—three days earlier. He was wearing a grey patterned sports shirt with a singlet and underpants. He had three wounds caused by two bullets—one bullet shot through the right cheek with an exit wound behind the left ear, which then caused a flesh wound to his left forearm; and one bullet to the back of his head with an exit wound at the top of his head. This bullet then appeared to have hit the portable radio positioned near his body.

The blanket and quilt covering the bodies appeared to have been removed from one of the single beds in another bedroom. A suitcase containing clothing and personal possessions found in the other bedroom suggested it had been occupied by Walker. Beneath one of the single beds in this room was a Crown and Anchor gaming wheel and cloth.

LATER THAT DAY, Dr Cairns carried out post-mortems on both bodies. He found both men had full bladders and he estimated they had consumed around six bottles of beer each the evening they died. The blinds had been drawn, and Dr Cairns estimated the men died around 2am or 2.30am on the morning of Thursday 5 December, after being shot at point-blank range.