Gangland Robbers by James Morton Page B

1907 robbery at the Victoria Mint—when some £1300 of gold was taken—particularly after well-known fence and putter-up Thomas Glanville admitted that he had bought the gold from them. It had been stolen hours after a local businessman, EM Pascoe, had deposited it at the mint. Glanville said that the robbery had been executed with a duplicate key taken from the original supplied by a police constable but the locksmiths said this was impossible. On 13 June Senior Constable Barclay was fined £2 for not taking sufficient care to guard the safe. He had, it appears, failed to lock the door to the office containing it. Glanville had offered to sell Pascoe’s gold back to him at a reduced price but this had been refused. However, in October the government refused to compensate Pascoe. When depositing the gold, he had signed an indemnity absolving the mint for any losses.
    In early 1912 Jackson and Hegarty were again arrested, this time for a robbery at the jewellers Webster & Cohen in Little Collins Street. Now,in accordance with the new procedures, on their arrest their fingerprints were taken. On 14 February no evidence was offered against Jackson but Hegarty was not as fortunate. His fingerprint had been found on a ginger beer bottle at the shop. Detective Sergeant Lionel Potter gave evidence that the print matched Hegarty’s. Potter, who claimed to have already examined 29 000 fingerprints, was given a thorough going-over regarding the reliability of his tests.
    Hegarty was found guilty, and Judge Johnson sentenced him to seven years’ imprisonment, to be followed by detention in a reformatory prison. Hegarty appealed and the chief justice held that, while he believed Potter to be honest, he could not accept that no two people’s imprints could possibly be alike. The other two justices dissented and Hegarty’s conviction was upheld.
    In May 1912 Jackson went on trial for a jewellery robbery in January 1905 at Ayres, Henry and Co in Swanston Street. Three safes had been cracked and some watches stolen. On the face of a watch that had been left behind was a thumbprint, which Potter and Inspector Childs, the New South Wales fingerprint expert, said was Jackson’s. However, Jackson, with no previous convictions, produced a magnifying glass for the jury to examine the prints, telling them that he made his money gambling and had never set foot in the shop. He also did well with the judge, who told the jury that they had to be sure that Potter was right about the print. It would, he said, be very hard to convict a man on a print taken seven years earlier. Jackson was acquitted.
    His last great success was probably the ‘Eight Hours Day’ robbery at Melbourne’s Exhibition Building. The takings from a union carnival, said to be between £300 and £400, deposited in a safe at the Trades Hall on 26 April 1915, were stolen during the night. The thieves had also helped themselves to biscuits, cheese, wine and stout in the secretary’s office. No charges were brought but it was generally thought that Jackson was involved, and that, with his regular offsider Hegarty doing time, his new helpmate was Richard Buckley.
    Quite what induced Jackson to go on the October Trades Hall robbery in which Constable McGrath was shot is a mystery. He should have been comfortably off for the present and he was always the number one suspect in any similar job that went off in the city. He should have called it a day while he was ahead and, indeed, his solicitor Napthali Sonenberg had offered to invest Jackson’s savings in a newsagency forhim but he had declined. Perhaps he had come to believe that, at the age of fifty-one, he was untouchable.
    This time Jackson’s offsiders were Alexander Ward and, once again, Buckley, who had a long record of violence. Buckley had been sent to the Jika Reformatory at the age of fifteen and from then on it was one sentence after another, until in December 1883