Gangland Robbers Read Online Free

driving a sulky, with weapons unhelpfully secured at the bottom of the trap, along with the gold. Some of these guards were members of the English upper classes out for adventure who were very disappointed not to encounter the Western Australian equivalent of Ned Kelly at Southern Cross.
    One early Western Australian robbery took place on a wages, rather than bullion, run, when in January 1897 John Mitchell and John Paull set out by horse and buggy with £723 to pay the men working at the Burbanks mines. En route, they were held up and tied to trees. A man, Houlihan, hearing the scuffle, came to investigate and he was tied up aswell. The three men managed to release themselves soon afterwards and drove into town, but by then, both the robbers and cash were long gone. Troopers and a tracker found discarded clothing and two rifles, which had been set on fire, but the robbers were never caught. It was thought that miners , rather than genuine bushrangers, were responsible.
    In New South Wales, John Vane was said—incorrectly—to have been the only bushranger to die in his bed. He had met and ridden with Ben Hall in the early 1860s. After the death of his friend Mickey Burke, in a raid at Dunn’s Plains 25 miles from Bathurst, Vane surrendered and was sentenced to fifteen years.
    In Dunn’s Plains, the local gold commissioner, Henry Keightley, had effectively thrown down a challenge to Ben Hall and his gang to attack his property and, on 24 October 1863, they took him up on it. The five-strong gang rode to his station and, in a brief shoot-out, Burke was killed. Keightley was kidnapped and held hostage while his wife, Caroline, rode the 25 miles to Bathurst with a friend, Dr Pechey, following in a buggy, to raise the £500 ransom Hall demanded. There had been a bounty of £500 on each of the gang and Keightley would have been paid that for killing Burke. This was the ‘Neapolitan system of ransom’ to which the
Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal
referred. Caroline Keightley borrowed the money from the Commercial Bank, and Pechey rode to the Hall camp and threw the £500 to gang member John Gilbert to count. Keightley was released and the gang rode away, leaving Burke’s body to be buried by the gold commissioner. The reward money was raised two days later to £1000 each. It was then Vane surrendered.
    With the arrival of the telegraph and the railways, the era of the bushranger was both changing and coming to a close. The Irish-born Andrew Scott, known as Captain Moonlite, was a one-time lay preacher at Bacchus Marsh on the road to the Ballarat goldfields. Some have claimed his father was a Church of England minister and that Scott seduced a young girl, Eveline, who died in childbirth.
    Scott went to New Zealand, where he served in the police force before returning to Bacchus Marsh. Transferred to Mount Egerton, he befriended 18-year-old Ludwig Julius Bruun, the manager of the London Chartered Bank, which Scott robbed on 8 May 1869, leaving a note saying that Bruun had done everything he could to stop the robbery. Bruun was acquitted at a subsequent trial but lost his job, whileScott went to Sydney, where for a time he cut a swathe through society, entertaining actresses and buying himself a yacht. He was jailed over passing a dud cheque, and on his release in March 1872, was rearrested for the Mount Egerton robbery. He appeared before Mr Justice Barry, who sentenced him to eleven years. Released after seven, he first toured as a lecturer on penal reform but was met by a hostile press.
    Now, together with his close friend James Nesbitt, with whom he was possibly in a sexual relationship, he began his career as a bushranger, leading the so-called ‘Moonlite Gang’ of young admirers. One story is that when Scott offered his services to Ned Kelly he was rebuffed, with Kelly replying that he would shoot the increasingly mentally unstable Scott on sight.
    Others suggested that