CLEVER THIEVES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21552, 25 July 1933, Page 6

CLEVER THIEVES

TUNNEL UNDER STORE ' CONCRETE FLOOR PIERCED TOBACCO WORTH £4OO TAKEN The most remarkably-planned robbery in New South Wales for / many years was completed at Marrickville, Sydney, recently, when the big department store of H. T. Seymour, Limited, was entered by way of underground tunnel and tobacco worth £IOO was stolen. The work was that of a gang of expert thieves. To enter the store, the thieves tunnelled upward for 10 feet from a storm-water channel which runs under the store, and picked through the concrete flooring, eight inches thick, of the company's tobacco storeroom. The gang took their loot underground to the storm-water channel, and carried it for three-quarters of a mile to the channel mouth, where they loaded it into a car. The thieves' tunnelling operations must have occupied weeks, but in the store above there was no indication that they were at work. . , There had been many robberies in the district lately, and the management of H. T. Seymour, Limited, had been taking special precautions against theft. All doors had been fitted with burglar alarms and a special watch had been kept outside the store. On the morning of Monday, July 17, a girl employee had occasion to go into the tobacco storeroom. She noticed that most of the stocks of tobacco had been removed and that there was a roughlycut hole measuring about 18 inches by 12 inches in the concrete floor at the far end of the room. Examination of Channel As workmen had recently been in the building, the girl thought at first that the tobacco might have been removed from the storeroom by the management. She made a casual remark to a senior employee, and Mr; J. Gabel, managing director, was informed. He was amazed when he examined the hole in the floor to find that it formed the mouth of a tunnel that ran downwards ' irregularly. The tobacco, he knew, must have been stolen. Mr. Gabel called in the police, and two detectives made investigations. Knowing that the storm-water channel ran beneath the building, the police and Mr. Gabel went to its nearest entrance, on a vacant allotment about 150 yards away from the store. Groping their way along the channel, in which a few inches of water was running and which was about five feet in height, they reached a spot in the wall from which the bricks had been removed. Two miners' picks, a shovel, a big hammer, and an old pair of trousers were lying in the channel on a heap of earth. The hole in the wall of the channel was adjacent to the roof, l'ho thickness of the brickwork which had been removed was 18 inches, and a , Water Board employee estimated that the making of the hole would have provided a day's work for his men. A tunnel in the earth large enough to admit a man led upward from this hole, and the police found that it led to the hole in the floor of Seymour's store. An entrenching tool was lying in the tunnel. Tell-tale Scraps of String Pieces of string still further along the channel attracted the attention of the police. It proved to be portion of the string used to tie the stolen packages of tobacco. The police crawled along the channel, occasionally seeing more scraps of string, for approximately three-quarters of a mile. The way was winding, and they often slipped in the water and mud on the channel bottom. After they had covered about half a mile, the channel became shallower. The policemen now were bent almost double. The roof of the channel was only about 3ft. above the bottom. Eventually they emerged into daylight. They stretched their aching backs with relief and looked about them. Behind the party was an embankment of the Sydenham-Bankstown railway line, and in front of them the now open storm-water channel ran across an unused piece of ground with scattered houses near by. More pieces of string were seen near the mouth of the tunnel. Certain that the thieves had carried the tobacco from the store through the tunnel, the police were impressed with their thoroughness. They had carried a load of several hundredweight. The thieves' motor-car was probably waiting in a quiet side street about 100 yards away. Expert Tunnelling The police considered the tunnel made by the thieves to be worthy of a mining engineer. The gang, after making the hole in the brickwork of the wall of the storm-water channel, excavated a large hole \vith a diameter of about 4ft. 6in., the floor of which was level with the bottom of the hole in the brickwork. They had then made a narrow opening in the top of this hole, large enough to admit a man. Theft next step was to make a second large hole above this opening and about the size of the first hole. Their excavations had then taken them to the iloor of the building. This tunnelling is thought to have taken weeks, because most of the earth from the excavation had been washed away in the channel by the previous week's rains. Working at night, the thieves are thought to have made a practice of entering the storm-water channel at the mouth nearest to the store. The completion of the hole in the concrete flooring must have taken place either on the Saturday or Sunday night. None of the company's employees was in the tobacco storeroom between Saturday morning and Monday morning. The managing director visited the store on Sunday, but did not enter the tobacco storeroom.