Terrence Leigh Blewitt was a violent man in a violent trade. Wherever he went, bad things happened to others. That’s how it was until the day a bad thing happened to him.
But it wasn’t the law that finally caught up with the armed robber, drug dealer, hit man and all-round evil doer. It took another outlaw to do that.
Blewitt’s death is still officially unsolved, though what happened to him is hardly a mystery to the Victorian detectives who have worked on and off for years to uncover what happened after he vanished in early 2004.
When they dug up his remains in a junk yard on Melbourne’s northern fringe last month, it confirmed their already strong suspicions about who put Blewitt in the hole.
The junkyard bones highlighted another unsolved murder — of Melbourne gangland figure Graham “The Munster” Kinniburgh, shot late one night in front of his home in an otherwise quiet street in the Melbourne suburb of Kew in 2003.
Kinniburgh’s killing, in turn, led to the fatal confrontation just four months later between Mick Gatto and hyperactive hitman Andrew “Benji” Veniamin in a Carlton restaurant.
Gatto (later acquitted of murder on self-defence) had wrongly believed “Benji” was responsible for the death of his great friend Kinniburgh. But the Carlton showdown between the pair triggered another revenge killing when Lewis Moran was shot dead in Brunswick days later as payback for Veniamin’s death.
That series of three “gangland war” hits over four months was front page news whereas the fatal shooting of a security guard in suburban Sydney in 1995 is not as well-known. But it probably deserves to be.
The guard’s name was Robert Jones — a brave man a judge once praised for saving a woman and child from a burning car.
Some compelling evidence would later emerge about who killed Jones. Meanwhile, his family endured almost two decades of knowing the identity of the unnamed bandit who got away with murder.
More than 600 people came to Jones’s funeral, half of them fellow security guards who showed respect by forming a guard of honour. The murdered man’s fiancée Brenda Norman could not contain her grief. And Jones’s mate John Barry, another Brambles guard, told the mourners they had lost someone “compassionate, understanding and particularly unselfish, and a man of great integrity.”
“Rob gave his life to protect one of his mates,” Barry said. “Nothing greater can be given than this.”
Three days later, an Armaguard officer was shot three times at Warringah Mall. Again, the gunman escaped. Another unsolved crime on the books.
There was no inquest into Robert Jones’s death until 2009 — 14 years after the shooting. The coroner could not fill the gap the police left, so the inquest became the blind leading the bland. The useless finding was that an “unknown person shot [Jones] in the course of an attempted holdup.”
In other words, no one knew any more than they had the day Robert Jones died. Officially, anyway.
In Victoria, investigators worked on the Kinniburgh and Blewitt cases for years, and are confident they know the truth about what happened in each. Facts will be aired at the trial of Stephen John Asling, Blewitt’s alleged co-offender in the Kinniburgh hit.
Asling’s arrest is a testament to Victoria Police’s determination to pursue murders from the underworld war. But it doesn’t alter the fact that at least three such murders might have been prevented if Blewitt had been prosecuted for shooting Robert Jones — not to mention a terrifying “run through” of a private house at Coffs Harbour the year before.
But the police didn’t prosecute the trigger-happy Blewitt and he was let to run loose. Reasons for that are hidden behind a smokescreen that has spread over his criminal escapades for two decades.
The question is whether the Blewitt crew had “a green light” — underworld slang for a secretive arrangement whereby favoured crooks go unpunished in exchange for something certain police want: usually information about rival criminals or other police, occasionally a cut of the action. Sometimes both.
Blewitt & Co might not have had a green light but, as one reporter wisecracked later, “it might have been amber”.
Robert Jones was 34, fit and strong but had no chance. A sawn-off shotgun blast to the chest at point-blank range usually ends with a funeral.
Shotguns fired at close range are brutally effective: even light pellets are tightly clustered enough to blow a hole in any flesh, blood and bone they hit. And heavy loads — “buck shot” or “pig shot” — don’t bear thinking about.
Because shotguns are such intimidating weapons, police tended to use them when raiding armed robbers — and armed robbers tend to use (sawn-off) versions to rob armoured cash vans or other targets under armed guard.
Shotguns have other advantages: even an adrenaline-charged shooter can hit a barn door with one. And because they have a smooth bore, there are no rifling grooves to mark pellets and identify a particular weapon. The lead projectiles are as anonymous as ball bearings and can’t readily be linked to a particular weapon or previous crimes.
A shotgun is calculated to intimidate armed targets so they don’t reach for their weapon. But Robert Jones was instinctively brave. When he saw a masked bandit menacing his fellow Brambles guard outside the Westpac Bank in the Sydney suburb of Miranda on that winter day in 1995, he jumped in to protect his colleague. He almost certainly reached for his pistol, a fatal error when facing a killer with a “scatter gun”.
The bandit fired then ran to a getaway car in the nearby Westfield carpark. When he jumped in the stolen red hatchback, the sawn-off still reeked of cordite. The driver had heard the shot and knew the heist hadn’t gone to plan. When the gunman spoke, the driver realised just how terribly wrong it had gone.
“[He] said something along the lines of ‘I struck a cowboy; I had to put one in him’,” the driver would tell gun Sydney crime reporter Neil Mercer many years later.
It was a strikingly detailed story, told over a cold drink in a country pub a long way from Sydney in 2013. But what gripped Mercer was the fact that it had been told before — to certain police, some 14 years before.
The getaway “wheelman” described meeting with members of the secretive NSW Crime Commission and telling them what he swore were true stories on condition he could not be charged over crimes he revealed.
The wheelman said that in 1999, working undercover for the Commission, he had been fitted with a listening device and sent to meet police who had five years earlier apprehended him, Blewitt and a third man over the Coffs Harbour home invasion.
The manager of the Coffs Harbour RSL club and his wife were woken by two pistol-wielding men wearing balaclavas and gloves. The pair demanded to be taken to the club to get cash but they left after being told a time-delay system meant the safe could not be opened.
Blewitt and the other two were charged. Astonishingly, given his already lengthy criminal record, Blewitt was bailed. And the charges subsequently failed in court because of the wheelman’s allegations against the Coffs Harbour investigators.
The Crime Commission investigators’ idea of sending the wheelman (in 1999) to renew acquaintance with the police involved in the Coffs Harbour episode was designed to prove they had allegedly acted improperly. But the sanctioned set-up fizzled without nailing either the robbers or any supposedly dodgy police.
So it seems that Blewitt’s crew not only got away with the Coffs Harbour outrage, and the subsequent shooting of Jones the security guard, but the police who had let them go stayed a step ahead of the posse, too.
Such “accidents” seemed a throwback to an era of law enforcement, as made notorious in various royal commissions and the cult television series Blue Murder and Scales of Justice.
The wheelman told the reporter several things he’d already told police years before. He identified the third man in the crew that attempted the Brambles armoured van robbery at Miranda. He said he was amazed the law enforcement agencies had not arrested any of them.
“They had admissions,” he reportedly said. “I was there on the day when a bloke is murdered in the street. It was pretty heavy shit at the time. It amazes me it went only as far as it did.”
He also insisted he had not even been aware of the inquest into Robert Jones’s death, let alone been called to given evidence at it about his involvement and Blewitt’s admission he’d “struck a cowboy.”
It was as if the wheelman had been let slip through the cracks in the criminal justice system because his evidence might pose too many tricky questions for too many police.
Conspiracy or stuff-up? Either way, he and Blewitt got lucky.
On first appearances, Terry Blewitt’s extraordinary run of luck began with his remarkable dodging of a conviction over the Coffs Harbour crime. In truth, he was lucky to be there at all because on form he should have been behind bars — or dead.
Perhaps it was the Victorian’s keen survival instinct that led him north of the Murray in the first place. It was the early 1980s and at the time Victoria’s heavy crime squads had hard-earned reputations for shooting armed robbers.
It was the era when a Sydney cop quipped to a Victorian counterpart: “I’ll do a deal with you … we won’t take any bribes and you don’t shoot anyone.”
The interstate rivalry extended to a northern distaste for “Mexican” crooks. A former NSW armed robbery detective told the Sunday Herald Sun described Blewitt this way: “He was a major, notorious armed robber, a nasty bloke … a typical Victorian.” He was only half joking.
By 1985, Blewitt had flown onto the radar of Sydney’s police. In February that year, he and two accomplices ambushed an Armaguard van in a shopping centre car park in the beachside suburb of Dee Why.
They shot and wounded a security guard, Joseph Jirman, then took his van and drove it to a nearby block of flats. Two of the trio were arrested after being spotted loading cash into a station wagon.
Blewitt was sentenced to a non-parole period of 13 years, which makes it puzzling that he was free to commit serious crimes in the mid-1990s. He must have been released much earlier than his original parole for reasons that remain unclear.
When Blewitt wasn’t actually pulling robberies or dealing drugs, he was well-known in the underworld for his hobbies: grog and gambling. One criminal acquaintance says this made him unreliable.
“We gave him the nickname ‘Bradman’ [because] once he got into a pub you could never get him out.”
Blewitt’s weakness for gambling meant that, at times, he and others were put in the awkward situation of being unable to pay for drugs from traffickers higher up the tree.
Blewitt had for a time worked at the Steyne Hotel on Sydney’s north shore, a job that combined work, pleasure and leisure. Some police believe he was the inside man when the pub was hit by armed robbers in the 1980s. He certainly knew enough of them.
At some stage, he met Melbourne identity Stephen John Asling, who was charged last November with Graham Kinniburgh’s murder. Asling subsequently told a court that Blewitt fired the fatal shots.
In certain circles dead associates are posthumously credited with an astounding number of crimes, but some police actually believe Blewitt was the trigger man and have said so in court. It is possible his willingness to pull triggers led to his own demise a few months later. In the meantime, he indulged his love of boozing and betting.
Blewitt would sometimes be spied drinking at the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale with crime patriarch Lewis Moran, whose family and friends had patronised the pub for many years.
Moran, later executed at the Brunswick Club, was supplying Blewitt with amphetamines by the pound. Drug squad detectives would in fact film Blewitt and another criminal picking up packets of “speed” from Moran in a Kensington park. He also bought ecstasy and LSD from Lewis Moran but that is not the only reason the Morans were useful to him.
Over several months, Blewitt bought eight stolen cars from Moran’s stepson Mark, who masqueraded as an unemployed pastry chef. The cars were tools of trade for Blewitt, who used them for armed robberies.
The last person to see Blewitt alive killed him and most likely buried him, too. Before that a friend had dropped him off in a Melton street on April 12, 2004, to meet someone he might not have known quite as well as he imagined.
After his carefree Sydney years, he might have thought he was a “koala” — a protected species. But in Victoria he wasn’t.
This time, Terry blew it.
His friend saw him walk towards a Hyundai sedan and never saw him again. Police would eventually trace the car to another (totally innocent) owner in a country town in 2013 but it would take investigators more than two years after that to crack the case. After a false lead at Yarrawonga they dug up Blewitt’s bones in a junk yard at Thomastown.
Every junk yard has its dog. This one had been owned by the late Jeff Reading, a successful crook heavily associated with the “Carlton crew”. Reading was, in fact, one of the crew with Mick Gatto the day Gatto shot Andrew “Benji” Veniamin — in self-defence, of course — and even offered to get rid of the pistol Gatto later swore he took from Veniamin.
It might be a coincidence that the body of the gunman now blamed for killing Gatto’s good friend Kinniburgh was buried on a property then owned by another close friend of the Carlton crew. It is possible that Carlton identities realised soon after Veniamin’s death that “Benji” hadn’t killed Kinniburgh, after all.
But if Carlton identities didn’t arrange Blewitt’s disappearance, it could have been a pre-emptive strike by someone close to him — someone spooked by the possibility that a careless reference to the Kinniburgh hit could leak back to Carlton through Blewitt’s Ascot Vale drinking buddies.
Blewitt drank with the Morans but it seems that didn’t stop him taking a contract to kill their great friend, “The Munster”. Business is business.
All further proof of two propositions: that there is no honour among thieves — and that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. The same goes for sawn-offs.
- Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler, Sunday Herald Sun
February 27, 2016
But it wasn’t the law that finally caught up with the armed robber, drug dealer, hit man and all-round evil doer. It took another outlaw to do that.
Blewitt’s death is still officially unsolved, though what happened to him is hardly a mystery to the Victorian detectives who have worked on and off for years to uncover what happened after he vanished in early 2004.
When they dug up his remains in a junk yard on Melbourne’s northern fringe last month, it confirmed their already strong suspicions about who put Blewitt in the hole.
The junkyard bones highlighted another unsolved murder — of Melbourne gangland figure Graham “The Munster” Kinniburgh, shot late one night in front of his home in an otherwise quiet street in the Melbourne suburb of Kew in 2003.
Kinniburgh’s killing, in turn, led to the fatal confrontation just four months later between Mick Gatto and hyperactive hitman Andrew “Benji” Veniamin in a Carlton restaurant.
Gatto (later acquitted of murder on self-defence) had wrongly believed “Benji” was responsible for the death of his great friend Kinniburgh. But the Carlton showdown between the pair triggered another revenge killing when Lewis Moran was shot dead in Brunswick days later as payback for Veniamin’s death.
That series of three “gangland war” hits over four months was front page news whereas the fatal shooting of a security guard in suburban Sydney in 1995 is not as well-known. But it probably deserves to be.
The guard’s name was Robert Jones — a brave man a judge once praised for saving a woman and child from a burning car.
Some compelling evidence would later emerge about who killed Jones. Meanwhile, his family endured almost two decades of knowing the identity of the unnamed bandit who got away with murder.
More than 600 people came to Jones’s funeral, half of them fellow security guards who showed respect by forming a guard of honour. The murdered man’s fiancée Brenda Norman could not contain her grief. And Jones’s mate John Barry, another Brambles guard, told the mourners they had lost someone “compassionate, understanding and particularly unselfish, and a man of great integrity.”
“Rob gave his life to protect one of his mates,” Barry said. “Nothing greater can be given than this.”
Three days later, an Armaguard officer was shot three times at Warringah Mall. Again, the gunman escaped. Another unsolved crime on the books.
There was no inquest into Robert Jones’s death until 2009 — 14 years after the shooting. The coroner could not fill the gap the police left, so the inquest became the blind leading the bland. The useless finding was that an “unknown person shot [Jones] in the course of an attempted holdup.”
In other words, no one knew any more than they had the day Robert Jones died. Officially, anyway.
In Victoria, investigators worked on the Kinniburgh and Blewitt cases for years, and are confident they know the truth about what happened in each. Facts will be aired at the trial of Stephen John Asling, Blewitt’s alleged co-offender in the Kinniburgh hit.
Asling’s arrest is a testament to Victoria Police’s determination to pursue murders from the underworld war. But it doesn’t alter the fact that at least three such murders might have been prevented if Blewitt had been prosecuted for shooting Robert Jones — not to mention a terrifying “run through” of a private house at Coffs Harbour the year before.
But the police didn’t prosecute the trigger-happy Blewitt and he was let to run loose. Reasons for that are hidden behind a smokescreen that has spread over his criminal escapades for two decades.
The question is whether the Blewitt crew had “a green light” — underworld slang for a secretive arrangement whereby favoured crooks go unpunished in exchange for something certain police want: usually information about rival criminals or other police, occasionally a cut of the action. Sometimes both.
Blewitt & Co might not have had a green light but, as one reporter wisecracked later, “it might have been amber”.
Robert Jones was 34, fit and strong but had no chance. A sawn-off shotgun blast to the chest at point-blank range usually ends with a funeral.
Shotguns fired at close range are brutally effective: even light pellets are tightly clustered enough to blow a hole in any flesh, blood and bone they hit. And heavy loads — “buck shot” or “pig shot” — don’t bear thinking about.
Because shotguns are such intimidating weapons, police tended to use them when raiding armed robbers — and armed robbers tend to use (sawn-off) versions to rob armoured cash vans or other targets under armed guard.
Shotguns have other advantages: even an adrenaline-charged shooter can hit a barn door with one. And because they have a smooth bore, there are no rifling grooves to mark pellets and identify a particular weapon. The lead projectiles are as anonymous as ball bearings and can’t readily be linked to a particular weapon or previous crimes.
A shotgun is calculated to intimidate armed targets so they don’t reach for their weapon. But Robert Jones was instinctively brave. When he saw a masked bandit menacing his fellow Brambles guard outside the Westpac Bank in the Sydney suburb of Miranda on that winter day in 1995, he jumped in to protect his colleague. He almost certainly reached for his pistol, a fatal error when facing a killer with a “scatter gun”.
The bandit fired then ran to a getaway car in the nearby Westfield carpark. When he jumped in the stolen red hatchback, the sawn-off still reeked of cordite. The driver had heard the shot and knew the heist hadn’t gone to plan. When the gunman spoke, the driver realised just how terribly wrong it had gone.
“[He] said something along the lines of ‘I struck a cowboy; I had to put one in him’,” the driver would tell gun Sydney crime reporter Neil Mercer many years later.
It was a strikingly detailed story, told over a cold drink in a country pub a long way from Sydney in 2013. But what gripped Mercer was the fact that it had been told before — to certain police, some 14 years before.
The getaway “wheelman” described meeting with members of the secretive NSW Crime Commission and telling them what he swore were true stories on condition he could not be charged over crimes he revealed.
The wheelman said that in 1999, working undercover for the Commission, he had been fitted with a listening device and sent to meet police who had five years earlier apprehended him, Blewitt and a third man over the Coffs Harbour home invasion.
The manager of the Coffs Harbour RSL club and his wife were woken by two pistol-wielding men wearing balaclavas and gloves. The pair demanded to be taken to the club to get cash but they left after being told a time-delay system meant the safe could not be opened.
Blewitt and the other two were charged. Astonishingly, given his already lengthy criminal record, Blewitt was bailed. And the charges subsequently failed in court because of the wheelman’s allegations against the Coffs Harbour investigators.
The Crime Commission investigators’ idea of sending the wheelman (in 1999) to renew acquaintance with the police involved in the Coffs Harbour episode was designed to prove they had allegedly acted improperly. But the sanctioned set-up fizzled without nailing either the robbers or any supposedly dodgy police.
So it seems that Blewitt’s crew not only got away with the Coffs Harbour outrage, and the subsequent shooting of Jones the security guard, but the police who had let them go stayed a step ahead of the posse, too.
Such “accidents” seemed a throwback to an era of law enforcement, as made notorious in various royal commissions and the cult television series Blue Murder and Scales of Justice.
The wheelman told the reporter several things he’d already told police years before. He identified the third man in the crew that attempted the Brambles armoured van robbery at Miranda. He said he was amazed the law enforcement agencies had not arrested any of them.
“They had admissions,” he reportedly said. “I was there on the day when a bloke is murdered in the street. It was pretty heavy shit at the time. It amazes me it went only as far as it did.”
He also insisted he had not even been aware of the inquest into Robert Jones’s death, let alone been called to given evidence at it about his involvement and Blewitt’s admission he’d “struck a cowboy.”
It was as if the wheelman had been let slip through the cracks in the criminal justice system because his evidence might pose too many tricky questions for too many police.
Conspiracy or stuff-up? Either way, he and Blewitt got lucky.
On first appearances, Terry Blewitt’s extraordinary run of luck began with his remarkable dodging of a conviction over the Coffs Harbour crime. In truth, he was lucky to be there at all because on form he should have been behind bars — or dead.
Perhaps it was the Victorian’s keen survival instinct that led him north of the Murray in the first place. It was the early 1980s and at the time Victoria’s heavy crime squads had hard-earned reputations for shooting armed robbers.
It was the era when a Sydney cop quipped to a Victorian counterpart: “I’ll do a deal with you … we won’t take any bribes and you don’t shoot anyone.”
The interstate rivalry extended to a northern distaste for “Mexican” crooks. A former NSW armed robbery detective told the Sunday Herald Sun described Blewitt this way: “He was a major, notorious armed robber, a nasty bloke … a typical Victorian.” He was only half joking.
By 1985, Blewitt had flown onto the radar of Sydney’s police. In February that year, he and two accomplices ambushed an Armaguard van in a shopping centre car park in the beachside suburb of Dee Why.
They shot and wounded a security guard, Joseph Jirman, then took his van and drove it to a nearby block of flats. Two of the trio were arrested after being spotted loading cash into a station wagon.
Blewitt was sentenced to a non-parole period of 13 years, which makes it puzzling that he was free to commit serious crimes in the mid-1990s. He must have been released much earlier than his original parole for reasons that remain unclear.
When Blewitt wasn’t actually pulling robberies or dealing drugs, he was well-known in the underworld for his hobbies: grog and gambling. One criminal acquaintance says this made him unreliable.
“We gave him the nickname ‘Bradman’ [because] once he got into a pub you could never get him out.”
Blewitt’s weakness for gambling meant that, at times, he and others were put in the awkward situation of being unable to pay for drugs from traffickers higher up the tree.
Blewitt had for a time worked at the Steyne Hotel on Sydney’s north shore, a job that combined work, pleasure and leisure. Some police believe he was the inside man when the pub was hit by armed robbers in the 1980s. He certainly knew enough of them.
At some stage, he met Melbourne identity Stephen John Asling, who was charged last November with Graham Kinniburgh’s murder. Asling subsequently told a court that Blewitt fired the fatal shots.
In certain circles dead associates are posthumously credited with an astounding number of crimes, but some police actually believe Blewitt was the trigger man and have said so in court. It is possible his willingness to pull triggers led to his own demise a few months later. In the meantime, he indulged his love of boozing and betting.
Blewitt would sometimes be spied drinking at the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale with crime patriarch Lewis Moran, whose family and friends had patronised the pub for many years.
Moran, later executed at the Brunswick Club, was supplying Blewitt with amphetamines by the pound. Drug squad detectives would in fact film Blewitt and another criminal picking up packets of “speed” from Moran in a Kensington park. He also bought ecstasy and LSD from Lewis Moran but that is not the only reason the Morans were useful to him.
Over several months, Blewitt bought eight stolen cars from Moran’s stepson Mark, who masqueraded as an unemployed pastry chef. The cars were tools of trade for Blewitt, who used them for armed robberies.
The last person to see Blewitt alive killed him and most likely buried him, too. Before that a friend had dropped him off in a Melton street on April 12, 2004, to meet someone he might not have known quite as well as he imagined.
After his carefree Sydney years, he might have thought he was a “koala” — a protected species. But in Victoria he wasn’t.
This time, Terry blew it.
His friend saw him walk towards a Hyundai sedan and never saw him again. Police would eventually trace the car to another (totally innocent) owner in a country town in 2013 but it would take investigators more than two years after that to crack the case. After a false lead at Yarrawonga they dug up Blewitt’s bones in a junk yard at Thomastown.
Every junk yard has its dog. This one had been owned by the late Jeff Reading, a successful crook heavily associated with the “Carlton crew”. Reading was, in fact, one of the crew with Mick Gatto the day Gatto shot Andrew “Benji” Veniamin — in self-defence, of course — and even offered to get rid of the pistol Gatto later swore he took from Veniamin.
It might be a coincidence that the body of the gunman now blamed for killing Gatto’s good friend Kinniburgh was buried on a property then owned by another close friend of the Carlton crew. It is possible that Carlton identities realised soon after Veniamin’s death that “Benji” hadn’t killed Kinniburgh, after all.
But if Carlton identities didn’t arrange Blewitt’s disappearance, it could have been a pre-emptive strike by someone close to him — someone spooked by the possibility that a careless reference to the Kinniburgh hit could leak back to Carlton through Blewitt’s Ascot Vale drinking buddies.
Blewitt drank with the Morans but it seems that didn’t stop him taking a contract to kill their great friend, “The Munster”. Business is business.
All further proof of two propositions: that there is no honour among thieves — and that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. The same goes for sawn-offs.
- Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler, Sunday Herald Sun
February 27, 2016
Terrence Leigh Blewitt was a violent man in a violent trade. Wherever he went, bad things happened to others. That’s how it was until the day a bad thing happened to him.
But it wasn’t the law that finally caught up with the armed robber, drug dealer, hit man and all-round evil doer. It took another outlaw to do that.
Blewitt’s death is still officially unsolved, though what happened to him is hardly a mystery to the Victorian detectives who have worked on and off for years to uncover what happened after he vanished in early 2004.
When they dug up his remains in a junk yard on Melbourne’s northern fringe last month, it confirmed their already strong suspicions about who put Blewitt in the hole.
The junkyard bones highlighted another unsolved murder — of Melbourne gangland figure Graham “The Munster” Kinniburgh, shot late one night in front of his home in an otherwise quiet street in the Melbourne suburb of Kew in 2003.
Kinniburgh’s killing, in turn, led to the fatal confrontation just four months later between Mick Gatto and hyperactive hitman Andrew “Benji” Veniamin in a Carlton restaurant.
Gatto (later acquitted of murder on self-defence) had wrongly believed “Benji” was responsible for the death of his great friend Kinniburgh. But the Carlton showdown between the pair triggered another revenge killing when Lewis Moran was shot dead in Brunswick days later as payback for Veniamin’s death.
That series of three “gangland war” hits over four months was front page news whereas the fatal shooting of a security guard in suburban Sydney in 1995 is not as well-known. But it probably deserves to be.
The guard’s name was Robert Jones — a brave man a judge once praised for saving a woman and child from a burning car.
Some compelling evidence would later emerge about who killed Jones. Meanwhile, his family endured almost two decades of knowing the identity of the unnamed bandit who got away with murder.
More than 600 people came to Jones’s funeral, half of them fellow security guards who showed respect by forming a guard of honour. The murdered man’s fiancée Brenda Norman could not contain her grief. And Jones’s mate John Barry, another Brambles guard, told the mourners they had lost someone “compassionate, understanding and particularly unselfish, and a man of great integrity.”
“Rob gave his life to protect one of his mates,” Barry said. “Nothing greater can be given than this.”
Three days later, an Armaguard officer was shot three times at Warringah Mall. Again, the gunman escaped. Another unsolved crime on the books.
There was no inquest into Robert Jones’s death until 2009 — 14 years after the shooting. The coroner could not fill the gap the police left, so the inquest became the blind leading the bland. The useless finding was that an “unknown person shot [Jones] in the course of an attempted holdup.”
In other words, no one knew any more than they had the day Robert Jones died. Officially, anyway.
In Victoria, investigators worked on the Kinniburgh and Blewitt cases for years, and are confident they know the truth about what happened in each. Facts will be aired at the trial of Stephen John Asling, Blewitt’s alleged co-offender in the Kinniburgh hit.
Asling’s arrest is a testament to Victoria Police’s determination to pursue murders from the underworld war. But it doesn’t alter the fact that at least three such murders might have been prevented if Blewitt had been prosecuted for shooting Robert Jones — not to mention a terrifying “run through” of a private house at Coffs Harbour the year before.
But the police didn’t prosecute the trigger-happy Blewitt and he was let to run loose. Reasons for that are hidden behind a smokescreen that has spread over his criminal escapades for two decades.
The question is whether the Blewitt crew had “a green light” — underworld slang for a secretive arrangement whereby favoured crooks go unpunished in exchange for something certain police want: usually information about rival criminals or other police, occasionally a cut of the action. Sometimes both.
Blewitt & Co might not have had a green light but, as one reporter wisecracked later, “it might have been amber”.
Robert Jones was 34, fit and strong but had no chance. A sawn-off shotgun blast to the chest at point-blank range usually ends with a funeral.
Shotguns fired at close range are brutally effective: even light pellets are tightly clustered enough to blow a hole in any flesh, blood and bone they hit. And heavy loads — “buck shot” or “pig shot” — don’t bear thinking about.
Because shotguns are such intimidating weapons, police tended to use them when raiding armed robbers — and armed robbers tend to use (sawn-off) versions to rob armoured cash vans or other targets under armed guard.
Shotguns have other advantages: even an adrenaline-charged shooter can hit a barn door with one. And because they have a smooth bore, there are no rifling grooves to mark pellets and identify a particular weapon. The lead projectiles are as anonymous as ball bearings and can’t readily be linked to a particular weapon or previous crimes.
A shotgun is calculated to intimidate armed targets so they don’t reach for their weapon. But Robert Jones was instinctively brave. When he saw a masked bandit menacing his fellow Brambles guard outside the Westpac Bank in the Sydney suburb of Miranda on that winter day in 1995, he jumped in to protect his colleague. He almost certainly reached for his pistol, a fatal error when facing a killer with a “scatter gun”.
The bandit fired then ran to a getaway car in the nearby Westfield carpark. When he jumped in the stolen red hatchback, the sawn-off still reeked of cordite. The driver had heard the shot and knew the heist hadn’t gone to plan. When the gunman spoke, the driver realised just how terribly wrong it had gone.
“[He] said something along the lines of ‘I struck a cowboy; I had to put one in him’,” the driver would tell gun Sydney crime reporter Neil Mercer many years later.
It was a strikingly detailed story, told over a cold drink in a country pub a long way from Sydney in 2013. But what gripped Mercer was the fact that it had been told before — to certain police, some 14 years before.
The getaway “wheelman” described meeting with members of the secretive NSW Crime Commission and telling them what he swore were true stories on condition he could not be charged over crimes he revealed.
The wheelman said that in 1999, working undercover for the Commission, he had been fitted with a listening device and sent to meet police who had five years earlier apprehended him, Blewitt and a third man over the Coffs Harbour home invasion.
The manager of the Coffs Harbour RSL club and his wife were woken by two pistol-wielding men wearing balaclavas and gloves. The pair demanded to be taken to the club to get cash but they left after being told a time-delay system meant the safe could not be opened.
Blewitt and the other two were charged. Astonishingly, given his already lengthy criminal record, Blewitt was bailed. And the charges subsequently failed in court because of the wheelman’s allegations against the Coffs Harbour investigators.
The Crime Commission investigators’ idea of sending the wheelman (in 1999) to renew acquaintance with the police involved in the Coffs Harbour episode was designed to prove they had allegedly acted improperly. But the sanctioned set-up fizzled without nailing either the robbers or any supposedly dodgy police.
So it seems that Blewitt’s crew not only got away with the Coffs Harbour outrage, and the subsequent shooting of Jones the security guard, but the police who had let them go stayed a step ahead of the posse, too.
Such “accidents” seemed a throwback to an era of law enforcement, as made notorious in various royal commissions and the cult television series Blue Murder and Scales of Justice.
The wheelman told the reporter several things he’d already told police years before. He identified the third man in the crew that attempted the Brambles armoured van robbery at Miranda. He said he was amazed the law enforcement agencies had not arrested any of them.
“They had admissions,” he reportedly said. “I was there on the day when a bloke is murdered in the street. It was pretty heavy shit at the time. It amazes me it went only as far as it did.”
He also insisted he had not even been aware of the inquest into Robert Jones’s death, let alone been called to given evidence at it about his involvement and Blewitt’s admission he’d “struck a cowboy.”
It was as if the wheelman had been let slip through the cracks in the criminal justice system because his evidence might pose too many tricky questions for too many police.
Conspiracy or stuff-up? Either way, he and Blewitt got lucky.
On first appearances, Terry Blewitt’s extraordinary run of luck began with his remarkable dodging of a conviction over the Coffs Harbour crime. In truth, he was lucky to be there at all because on form he should have been behind bars — or dead.
Perhaps it was the Victorian’s keen survival instinct that led him north of the Murray in the first place. It was the early 1980s and at the time Victoria’s heavy crime squads had hard-earned reputations for shooting armed robbers.
It was the era when a Sydney cop quipped to a Victorian counterpart: “I’ll do a deal with you … we won’t take any bribes and you don’t shoot anyone.”
The interstate rivalry extended to a northern distaste for “Mexican” crooks. A former NSW armed robbery detective told the Sunday Herald Sun described Blewitt this way: “He was a major, notorious armed robber, a nasty bloke … a typical Victorian.” He was only half joking.
By 1985, Blewitt had flown onto the radar of Sydney’s police. In February that year, he and two accomplices ambushed an Armaguard van in a shopping centre car park in the beachside suburb of Dee Why.
They shot and wounded a security guard, Joseph Jirman, then took his van and drove it to a nearby block of flats. Two of the trio were arrested after being spotted loading cash into a station wagon.
Blewitt was sentenced to a non-parole period of 13 years, which makes it puzzling that he was free to commit serious crimes in the mid-1990s. He must have been released much earlier than his original parole for reasons that remain unclear.
When Blewitt wasn’t actually pulling robberies or dealing drugs, he was well-known in the underworld for his hobbies: grog and gambling. One criminal acquaintance says this made him unreliable.
“We gave him the nickname ‘Bradman’ [because] once he got into a pub you could never get him out.”
Blewitt’s weakness for gambling meant that, at times, he and others were put in the awkward situation of being unable to pay for drugs from traffickers higher up the tree.
Blewitt had for a time worked at the Steyne Hotel on Sydney’s north shore, a job that combined work, pleasure and leisure. Some police believe he was the inside man when the pub was hit by armed robbers in the 1980s. He certainly knew enough of them.
At some stage, he met Melbourne identity Stephen John Asling, who was charged last November with Graham Kinniburgh’s murder. Asling subsequently told a court that Blewitt fired the fatal shots.
In certain circles dead associates are posthumously credited with an astounding number of crimes, but some police actually believe Blewitt was the trigger man and have said so in court. It is possible his willingness to pull triggers led to his own demise a few months later. In the meantime, he indulged his love of boozing and betting.
Blewitt would sometimes be spied drinking at the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale with crime patriarch Lewis Moran, whose family and friends had patronised the pub for many years.
Moran, later executed at the Brunswick Club, was supplying Blewitt with amphetamines by the pound. Drug squad detectives would in fact film Blewitt and another criminal picking up packets of “speed” from Moran in a Kensington park. He also bought ecstasy and LSD from Lewis Moran but that is not the only reason the Morans were useful to him.
Over several months, Blewitt bought eight stolen cars from Moran’s stepson Mark, who masqueraded as an unemployed pastry chef. The cars were tools of trade for Blewitt, who used them for armed robberies.
The last person to see Blewitt alive killed him and most likely buried him, too. Before that a friend had dropped him off in a Melton street on April 12, 2004, to meet someone he might not have known quite as well as he imagined.
After his carefree Sydney years, he might have thought he was a “koala” — a protected species. But in Victoria he wasn’t.
This time, Terry blew it.
His friend saw him walk towards a Hyundai sedan and never saw him again. Police would eventually trace the car to another (totally innocent) owner in a country town in 2013 but it would take investigators more than two years after that to crack the case. After a false lead at Yarrawonga they dug up Blewitt’s bones in a junk yard at Thomastown.
Every junk yard has its dog. This one had been owned by the late Jeff Reading, a successful crook heavily associated with the “Carlton crew”. Reading was, in fact, one of the crew with Mick Gatto the day Gatto shot Andrew “Benji” Veniamin — in self-defence, of course — and even offered to get rid of the pistol Gatto later swore he took from Veniamin.
It might be a coincidence that the body of the gunman now blamed for killing Gatto’s good friend Kinniburgh was buried on a property then owned by another close friend of the Carlton crew. It is possible that Carlton identities realised soon after Veniamin’s death that “Benji” hadn’t killed Kinniburgh, after all.
But if Carlton identities didn’t arrange Blewitt’s disappearance, it could have been a pre-emptive strike by someone close to him — someone spooked by the possibility that a careless reference to the Kinniburgh hit could leak back to Carlton through Blewitt’s Ascot Vale drinking buddies.
Blewitt drank with the Morans but it seems that didn’t stop him taking a contract to kill their great friend, “The Munster”. Business is business.
All further proof of two propositions: that there is no honour among thieves — and that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. The same goes for sawn-offs.
- Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler, Sunday Herald Sun
February 27, 2016
But it wasn’t the law that finally caught up with the armed robber, drug dealer, hit man and all-round evil doer. It took another outlaw to do that.
Blewitt’s death is still officially unsolved, though what happened to him is hardly a mystery to the Victorian detectives who have worked on and off for years to uncover what happened after he vanished in early 2004.
When they dug up his remains in a junk yard on Melbourne’s northern fringe last month, it confirmed their already strong suspicions about who put Blewitt in the hole.
The junkyard bones highlighted another unsolved murder — of Melbourne gangland figure Graham “The Munster” Kinniburgh, shot late one night in front of his home in an otherwise quiet street in the Melbourne suburb of Kew in 2003.
Kinniburgh’s killing, in turn, led to the fatal confrontation just four months later between Mick Gatto and hyperactive hitman Andrew “Benji” Veniamin in a Carlton restaurant.
Gatto (later acquitted of murder on self-defence) had wrongly believed “Benji” was responsible for the death of his great friend Kinniburgh. But the Carlton showdown between the pair triggered another revenge killing when Lewis Moran was shot dead in Brunswick days later as payback for Veniamin’s death.
That series of three “gangland war” hits over four months was front page news whereas the fatal shooting of a security guard in suburban Sydney in 1995 is not as well-known. But it probably deserves to be.
The guard’s name was Robert Jones — a brave man a judge once praised for saving a woman and child from a burning car.
Some compelling evidence would later emerge about who killed Jones. Meanwhile, his family endured almost two decades of knowing the identity of the unnamed bandit who got away with murder.
More than 600 people came to Jones’s funeral, half of them fellow security guards who showed respect by forming a guard of honour. The murdered man’s fiancée Brenda Norman could not contain her grief. And Jones’s mate John Barry, another Brambles guard, told the mourners they had lost someone “compassionate, understanding and particularly unselfish, and a man of great integrity.”
“Rob gave his life to protect one of his mates,” Barry said. “Nothing greater can be given than this.”
Three days later, an Armaguard officer was shot three times at Warringah Mall. Again, the gunman escaped. Another unsolved crime on the books.
There was no inquest into Robert Jones’s death until 2009 — 14 years after the shooting. The coroner could not fill the gap the police left, so the inquest became the blind leading the bland. The useless finding was that an “unknown person shot [Jones] in the course of an attempted holdup.”
In other words, no one knew any more than they had the day Robert Jones died. Officially, anyway.
In Victoria, investigators worked on the Kinniburgh and Blewitt cases for years, and are confident they know the truth about what happened in each. Facts will be aired at the trial of Stephen John Asling, Blewitt’s alleged co-offender in the Kinniburgh hit.
Asling’s arrest is a testament to Victoria Police’s determination to pursue murders from the underworld war. But it doesn’t alter the fact that at least three such murders might have been prevented if Blewitt had been prosecuted for shooting Robert Jones — not to mention a terrifying “run through” of a private house at Coffs Harbour the year before.
But the police didn’t prosecute the trigger-happy Blewitt and he was let to run loose. Reasons for that are hidden behind a smokescreen that has spread over his criminal escapades for two decades.
The question is whether the Blewitt crew had “a green light” — underworld slang for a secretive arrangement whereby favoured crooks go unpunished in exchange for something certain police want: usually information about rival criminals or other police, occasionally a cut of the action. Sometimes both.
Blewitt & Co might not have had a green light but, as one reporter wisecracked later, “it might have been amber”.
Robert Jones was 34, fit and strong but had no chance. A sawn-off shotgun blast to the chest at point-blank range usually ends with a funeral.
Shotguns fired at close range are brutally effective: even light pellets are tightly clustered enough to blow a hole in any flesh, blood and bone they hit. And heavy loads — “buck shot” or “pig shot” — don’t bear thinking about.
Because shotguns are such intimidating weapons, police tended to use them when raiding armed robbers — and armed robbers tend to use (sawn-off) versions to rob armoured cash vans or other targets under armed guard.
Shotguns have other advantages: even an adrenaline-charged shooter can hit a barn door with one. And because they have a smooth bore, there are no rifling grooves to mark pellets and identify a particular weapon. The lead projectiles are as anonymous as ball bearings and can’t readily be linked to a particular weapon or previous crimes.
A shotgun is calculated to intimidate armed targets so they don’t reach for their weapon. But Robert Jones was instinctively brave. When he saw a masked bandit menacing his fellow Brambles guard outside the Westpac Bank in the Sydney suburb of Miranda on that winter day in 1995, he jumped in to protect his colleague. He almost certainly reached for his pistol, a fatal error when facing a killer with a “scatter gun”.
The bandit fired then ran to a getaway car in the nearby Westfield carpark. When he jumped in the stolen red hatchback, the sawn-off still reeked of cordite. The driver had heard the shot and knew the heist hadn’t gone to plan. When the gunman spoke, the driver realised just how terribly wrong it had gone.
“[He] said something along the lines of ‘I struck a cowboy; I had to put one in him’,” the driver would tell gun Sydney crime reporter Neil Mercer many years later.
It was a strikingly detailed story, told over a cold drink in a country pub a long way from Sydney in 2013. But what gripped Mercer was the fact that it had been told before — to certain police, some 14 years before.
The getaway “wheelman” described meeting with members of the secretive NSW Crime Commission and telling them what he swore were true stories on condition he could not be charged over crimes he revealed.
The wheelman said that in 1999, working undercover for the Commission, he had been fitted with a listening device and sent to meet police who had five years earlier apprehended him, Blewitt and a third man over the Coffs Harbour home invasion.
The manager of the Coffs Harbour RSL club and his wife were woken by two pistol-wielding men wearing balaclavas and gloves. The pair demanded to be taken to the club to get cash but they left after being told a time-delay system meant the safe could not be opened.
Blewitt and the other two were charged. Astonishingly, given his already lengthy criminal record, Blewitt was bailed. And the charges subsequently failed in court because of the wheelman’s allegations against the Coffs Harbour investigators.
The Crime Commission investigators’ idea of sending the wheelman (in 1999) to renew acquaintance with the police involved in the Coffs Harbour episode was designed to prove they had allegedly acted improperly. But the sanctioned set-up fizzled without nailing either the robbers or any supposedly dodgy police.
So it seems that Blewitt’s crew not only got away with the Coffs Harbour outrage, and the subsequent shooting of Jones the security guard, but the police who had let them go stayed a step ahead of the posse, too.
Such “accidents” seemed a throwback to an era of law enforcement, as made notorious in various royal commissions and the cult television series Blue Murder and Scales of Justice.
The wheelman told the reporter several things he’d already told police years before. He identified the third man in the crew that attempted the Brambles armoured van robbery at Miranda. He said he was amazed the law enforcement agencies had not arrested any of them.
“They had admissions,” he reportedly said. “I was there on the day when a bloke is murdered in the street. It was pretty heavy shit at the time. It amazes me it went only as far as it did.”
He also insisted he had not even been aware of the inquest into Robert Jones’s death, let alone been called to given evidence at it about his involvement and Blewitt’s admission he’d “struck a cowboy.”
It was as if the wheelman had been let slip through the cracks in the criminal justice system because his evidence might pose too many tricky questions for too many police.
Conspiracy or stuff-up? Either way, he and Blewitt got lucky.
On first appearances, Terry Blewitt’s extraordinary run of luck began with his remarkable dodging of a conviction over the Coffs Harbour crime. In truth, he was lucky to be there at all because on form he should have been behind bars — or dead.
Perhaps it was the Victorian’s keen survival instinct that led him north of the Murray in the first place. It was the early 1980s and at the time Victoria’s heavy crime squads had hard-earned reputations for shooting armed robbers.
It was the era when a Sydney cop quipped to a Victorian counterpart: “I’ll do a deal with you … we won’t take any bribes and you don’t shoot anyone.”
The interstate rivalry extended to a northern distaste for “Mexican” crooks. A former NSW armed robbery detective told the Sunday Herald Sun described Blewitt this way: “He was a major, notorious armed robber, a nasty bloke … a typical Victorian.” He was only half joking.
By 1985, Blewitt had flown onto the radar of Sydney’s police. In February that year, he and two accomplices ambushed an Armaguard van in a shopping centre car park in the beachside suburb of Dee Why.
They shot and wounded a security guard, Joseph Jirman, then took his van and drove it to a nearby block of flats. Two of the trio were arrested after being spotted loading cash into a station wagon.
Blewitt was sentenced to a non-parole period of 13 years, which makes it puzzling that he was free to commit serious crimes in the mid-1990s. He must have been released much earlier than his original parole for reasons that remain unclear.
When Blewitt wasn’t actually pulling robberies or dealing drugs, he was well-known in the underworld for his hobbies: grog and gambling. One criminal acquaintance says this made him unreliable.
“We gave him the nickname ‘Bradman’ [because] once he got into a pub you could never get him out.”
Blewitt’s weakness for gambling meant that, at times, he and others were put in the awkward situation of being unable to pay for drugs from traffickers higher up the tree.
Blewitt had for a time worked at the Steyne Hotel on Sydney’s north shore, a job that combined work, pleasure and leisure. Some police believe he was the inside man when the pub was hit by armed robbers in the 1980s. He certainly knew enough of them.
At some stage, he met Melbourne identity Stephen John Asling, who was charged last November with Graham Kinniburgh’s murder. Asling subsequently told a court that Blewitt fired the fatal shots.
In certain circles dead associates are posthumously credited with an astounding number of crimes, but some police actually believe Blewitt was the trigger man and have said so in court. It is possible his willingness to pull triggers led to his own demise a few months later. In the meantime, he indulged his love of boozing and betting.
Blewitt would sometimes be spied drinking at the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale with crime patriarch Lewis Moran, whose family and friends had patronised the pub for many years.
Moran, later executed at the Brunswick Club, was supplying Blewitt with amphetamines by the pound. Drug squad detectives would in fact film Blewitt and another criminal picking up packets of “speed” from Moran in a Kensington park. He also bought ecstasy and LSD from Lewis Moran but that is not the only reason the Morans were useful to him.
Over several months, Blewitt bought eight stolen cars from Moran’s stepson Mark, who masqueraded as an unemployed pastry chef. The cars were tools of trade for Blewitt, who used them for armed robberies.
The last person to see Blewitt alive killed him and most likely buried him, too. Before that a friend had dropped him off in a Melton street on April 12, 2004, to meet someone he might not have known quite as well as he imagined.
After his carefree Sydney years, he might have thought he was a “koala” — a protected species. But in Victoria he wasn’t.
This time, Terry blew it.
His friend saw him walk towards a Hyundai sedan and never saw him again. Police would eventually trace the car to another (totally innocent) owner in a country town in 2013 but it would take investigators more than two years after that to crack the case. After a false lead at Yarrawonga they dug up Blewitt’s bones in a junk yard at Thomastown.
Every junk yard has its dog. This one had been owned by the late Jeff Reading, a successful crook heavily associated with the “Carlton crew”. Reading was, in fact, one of the crew with Mick Gatto the day Gatto shot Andrew “Benji” Veniamin — in self-defence, of course — and even offered to get rid of the pistol Gatto later swore he took from Veniamin.
It might be a coincidence that the body of the gunman now blamed for killing Gatto’s good friend Kinniburgh was buried on a property then owned by another close friend of the Carlton crew. It is possible that Carlton identities realised soon after Veniamin’s death that “Benji” hadn’t killed Kinniburgh, after all.
But if Carlton identities didn’t arrange Blewitt’s disappearance, it could have been a pre-emptive strike by someone close to him — someone spooked by the possibility that a careless reference to the Kinniburgh hit could leak back to Carlton through Blewitt’s Ascot Vale drinking buddies.
Blewitt drank with the Morans but it seems that didn’t stop him taking a contract to kill their great friend, “The Munster”. Business is business.
All further proof of two propositions: that there is no honour among thieves — and that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. The same goes for sawn-offs.
- Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler, Sunday Herald Sun
February 27, 2016
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Explore more
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
