BANK BURGLARY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 1, 3 January 1933, Page 5

BANK BURGLARY.

TERRIFIC EXPLOSION. AUDACIOUS THIEVES. SAFE OPENED IN STREET. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, December 30. A few nights ago, a desperate and audacious attempt was made to rob the Clevedon Street branch of the Commonwealth Savings Bank. The burglars had chosen their opportunity well and had entered the building through the empty rooms of the bank-manager, who had retired a few weeks before. But, either through inexperience or over-anxiety, they put too much gelignite in the holes that they had bored in the strong-room door. There was a terrific explosion, the massive door was torn completely off its hinges and hurled into the room, and the thieves, finding that there was still a safe inside to force, fled in dismay. But these burglars were neither so skilled nor so successful as the men who broke into the Allawah Hotel at Kogarah, a few miles from Sydney, during that same week. The manager of the hotel and his wife went away from the place about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Their little boy had broken his arm, he was a patient at the district hospital, and they went to visit him there Another son and the barman had gone off. for the day on a launch picnic, so that the building was empty. Ihe thieves, who must have watched the movement of the people m the house very carefully, soon found the safe and attempted to blow it open on the spot. But the gelignite exploded outward, shattering the furniture around. Ihe burglars were not to be beaten. They deliberately carried the safe downstairs and out to a waiting motor car, drove round to the back of Madrefield racecourse, near Brighton beach, and there, in broad daylight, in a quiet-by-street, they successfully blew the safe door to atoms.

A Considerable "Haul." This time the noise attracted attention, but when curious neighbours arrived on the scene they found only the dismantled safe and saw the burglars' car vanishing o in the distance. The thieves had got away with £500 in l notes and £400 worth of "jewellery, including a diamond necklace which had been the property of a Russian countess before the Bolshevik revolution and in some mysterious fashion naa found its way to Sydney. The police were soon on the trail of the burglars, and two men whom they arrested were brought to trial. One of them declined to say who drove the car on the day of the robbery, for the sufficient reason that certain men who were recognised by the police as notorious criminals had threatened that they would "get him" if he gave any information to the authorities. The other defendant asserted that he had participated in the burglary to the extent of watching the house, simply because he had been told that if he did not lend a hand, he would "get a bullet through him," so that the investigation into this burglary has not been quite so successful as might be desired. Police Disguises. But it Is at last clear that some of the more experienced criminals who make a profession of burglary here are dangerous and desperate men and the police have often to resort to guile to effect a capture. In thisAllawah Hotel case, one of the suspects was made the victim of an ingenious stratagem. In company with two others, he was wandering through Moore Park, quite unaware that two ra<*<*ed derelicts close at hand were officers in disguise and that two of the loving couples in the vicinity who seemed to be entirely absorbed in each other were policemen and—l am compelled to add—policewomen. At last one of the policewomen gave the expected signal, but the man took' alarm and fled with half a dozen "coppers" on his trail. He was outdistancing them all when suddenly one of the "dead-beats,' whose disguise he had failed to pierce—he was in reality an extremely athletic policeman with a fine football record—flung off his apathy and brought the fugitive to the ground with a magnificent flying tackle" from which there was no escape. But there are burglars with whom it would not be safe to risk such delicate stategy.