Gangland Robbers by James Morton

thief, putter-up, drug dealer, jury fixer and, for some unaccountable reason, Australia’s ‘favourite larrikin’, Joseph Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor was involved in three, possibly four, robberies that ended up involving murder charges.
    A failed jockey—both too heavy and, even for the time, too crooked—Taylor began his criminal career as a member of the Bourke Street Rats, the most famous of Melbourne’s pushes in the early years of the twentieth century. There he was taught pickpocketing, shoplifting and blackmail, until, by 1913, he was moving into bigger, if not always better, things.
    For the first of his major jobs, he had a partner from Western Australia. Of a ‘quintette’ named as ‘bad’ by the Perth police in 1903—in reality they were all fairly small time—there was only one, Harold ‘Bush’ Thompson otherwise known as Bairstow, who really made the headlines in the east. After his skirmishes in Western Australia, Thompson travelled to Adelaide, and then gravitated to Melbourne to join up with Taylor.
    He was charged with assault and robbery in July 1912, when he and another man, who was never charged, were alleged to have knocked down a Samuel Boland and his friend Dougall McDougall in an alley off Flinders Street. Boland said he and McDougall had been drinking in the Westernport Hotel when Thompson approached them, and that when they left the hotel, he and a second man followed them. Thompson was granted bail after the committal proceedings but fled to Perth, wherehe was arrested at Goodwood races. Sent back east in September 1912, Napthali H Sonenberg, solicitor of choice for any halfway decent criminal of the time, defended him. At his trial in November, Thompson had an alibi that in the afternoon he had been at the races and was in a billiard hall at the time of the robbery. He was acquitted.
    There were much bigger things to come. On 6 January 1913 commercial traveller Arthur Trotter was robbed of £215 and shot dead in the bedroom of his home in George Street in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy. It was thought he had been drinking in a sly-grog shop and brothel that Taylor’s wife, blonde Dolly Gray, ran, and had been boasting of the money he carried. That evening he was followed home. His wife, Beatrice, told the police:
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    We saw two men in the room and my husband called out, ‘What’s your game?’ The taller of the two men replied, ‘We want the money.’ My husband said, ‘What money? There’s no money here. This is murder.’ One man said ‘Shoot the—!’ Suddenly my husband jumped out of bed and hit the man who was pointing the revolver at him. The burglar then fired and when my husband fell he said to the other man, ‘Get the — money.’ The smaller man ran to the bed where Mr Trotter had been sleeping and turning over the mattress, he took the money. The other man covered me with a revolver and told me to keep quiet. They then ran away out of a back door.
    The taller man of the two was about 5’ 6” in height, of slight build and fairly well made. He wore a brown felt hat. The smaller man was 5’ 4” high and of similar build to his companion. He wore a cap but I cannot distinguish his clothes.
    I think I would know the voice of the first man if I heard it again. It was that of a youth just entering manhood .
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    A week after the robbery, with the police saying they had no clues, the sales of guns had tripled. Householders were buying neat little Belgian guns, meaning that, over time, there would be more weapons on the market for the likes of Taylor.
    Western Australian police still regarded Thompson as a relatively minor criminal who was not up to a ‘big job’, but in Adelaide in 1906, he had received a three-month sentence for assaulting the police and his fingerprints had been taken. They were found on a windowsill at Trotter’s home and