On New Year’s Eve 1987, while Sydney partied into the bicentennial celebrations, a gang of thieves was quietly breaking into the National Australia Bank in the city’s Chinatown district. The holiday weekend ran from Friday to Monday, so the raid went unnoticed until employees arrived for work that Monday morning, and the press didn’t catch wind of it until Tuesday. When investigative reporter Adam Shand got a quiet phone call that day, he knew something significant had happened. Within half an hour, journalists were standing outside the Haymarket branch, watching dozens of cars from the Criminal Investigation Branch pull up.
Locals soon gave the job a memorable nickname: the Great Chinese Takeaway, after rumors spread that the thieves had gotten hungry mid-heist and sent someone out for a meal. The gang’s method was audacious and clever. Adjoining the bank was a construction site, and they climbed the scaffolding, then used a ladder to reach an upper floor of the bank. One person walked down and opened a door to let the others in with their equipment.
They lifted the roof of the lift and descended into the basement vault area, then used explosives to blow a hole into the chamber housing the safety deposit boxes. Police believe they stayed on site for more than 24 hours, taking their time to clean out the boxes before exiting the same way they came in. The scale of the loss was impossible to determine. Bank officials admitted they couldn’t estimate the value of what was taken, and many box holders were reluctant to disclose what they had stored inside.
Some in Chinatown suggested the robbery easily ranked as Australia’s largest, not just because of cash and jewels but because the boxes may have held far more compromising contents. In the 1980s, Sydney’s Chinatown was a hub for heroin importation and distribution, illegal gambling, prostitution, and extortion rackets controlled by Triad gangs. Investigators suspected that many safety deposit boxes contained black money and black goods, the proceeds of criminal enterprise. Lead investigator Kevin Parsons found himself hitting a wall of silence as he tried to identify box owners, many of whom had registered their boxes incorrectly or were simply unwilling to cooperate.
It was, as one observer put it, a case of crooks robbing crooks. Regardless, it was a major crime that had to be solved. The precision of the operation pointed to inside knowledge. They had to have intimate details of the bank’s layout and security system.
Former detective John Davidson, who was second-in-command on the investigation, described what the thieves had done when they tried to break into the main vault. They put a hole in the top of the thermic lance, which was advanced equipment, but then made a critical error. They filled the lance with water so it wouldn’t burn the money, but the force of the blast pulverized the cash inside and blew it out through the cracks in the door. The noisy, dirty work triggered an alarm on the Sunday morning of the long weekend.
A security guard attended and entered the main banking hall one level above the basement, searching all the entry points. But he never went down to check the vault. He assumed the alarm had gone off accidentally, not realizing the thieves had entered from an upstairs floor and taken the lift down. It was a close call, but the gang got away clean.
The press was scathing in its criticism of the bank. The thieves left behind oxyacetylene equipment and explosives, but the assault on the cash vault appeared to require more specialized tools than they had brought. Investigators noted that this was not the first attempt on the bank. In July 1982, a gang using magnetic drills had tried to rob the same branch but fled empty-handed.
Media speculation quickly pointed to the only crew deemed capable of such a raid: the magnetic drill gang from Melbourne, led by Graham Kinnear. But the equipment left behind gave Parsons doubts. The magnetic drill gang used expensive diamond-tipped drills clamped to the side of a safe. The Haymarket thieves had used oxyacetylene cutters and explosives, a different approach altogether.
Parsons couldn’t eliminate Kinnear, but he refused to tunnel-vision on one suspect. Attention shifted to a Sydney connection, and at the top of the list was Michael Hurley, leader of what was known as the Friendly Gang. The nickname came from their habit of being friendly with police, particularly corrupt ones. Hurley had risen from an impoverished childhood in the working-class suburb of Pyrmont, the son of a family with seven or eight children crammed into a small two-bedroom house.
He was self-taught, a numbers man who could calculate anything in his head. As a teenager, he faked his identity to get a job at the Darling Harbour docks, where theft was common and accepted as the price of doing business. He built a network of informants among security officers and stole by the container-load, with receivers and storage set up before the theft so the goods vanished quickly. There were missteps along the way.
Hurley was arrested after a tip-off over a raid on a watch store where he stole over 5,000 watches. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and it was later said that one juror had been persuaded through a connection at their shared Catholic church to hold out. He was retried and jailed for four years but released in two. He then surrounded himself with a new crew and moved into the drugs trade, which made sense given his contacts at the docks.
Kevin Parsons began thinking about their potential involvement in the Chinese Takeaway robbery. Hurley was importing drugs, which meant he also had the ability to export property, such as the valuables stolen from the Haymarket bank. Police never recovered any of that property, and Parsons believed it was likely melted down or shipped overseas where it couldn’t be identified. The Friendly Gang’s connections with corrupt police were well known.
Parsons could nominate at least one policeman who ended up in jail: Roger Rogerson, who had left the force in disgrace two years before the Haymarket job. Rogerson was known as a violent officer, and he had crossed paths with another suspect in an earlier famous Sydney robbery, the theft of the Golconda diamond in 1980. That diamond was snatched in broad daylight at Sydney Town Hall, replaced with a worthless piece of brown glass. Hurley and his brother Jeffrey were both placed at the scene but released without charge because witnesses couldn’t positively identify them.
Another career criminal named Bruce Stanton, who had flown into Sydney that same week with a team of international jewel thieves, was also investigated. Rogerson confronted Stanton and one of his associates, threatening to throw the man off the top of the police station if he didn’t reveal the stone’s location. When Stanton learned who Rogerson was, he left the country within seven hours. Stanton later said he believed Hurley was definitely involved with the diamond somewhere along the line and that Rogerson was probably in partnership with him.
By the time of the Chinese Takeaway, Rogerson was out of the force, so if Hurley was paying for police assistance, someone else would have had to be on the payroll. John Davidson knew Hurley from his days on the special breaking detail. They trained at the same gym, and both used those encounters to extract information from one another. Parsons described it as fencing, parry and thrust.
Hurley was seen near the Haymarket bank several times before the robbery, he had Chinese connections, and the scale and ingenuity of the job fit his profile. But Davidson said Hurley never admitted to it, and there was simply no physical evidence tying him to the raid. He was never arrested, never even formally questioned. Hurley was never charged, but the word in the Sydney underworld was that the Chinese Takeaway was definitely his job, his last major heist before he went deeper into drug importation.
By the 1990s, he was committing to the drug trade in very substantial ways. In 1992, he organized an importation of 12 tons of cannabis that cost him $20 million and made him far more when the dope hit the street. He was swimming in cash, living in a lavish house in Glebe, not far from his childhood home. Newspapers called him Sydney’s head honcho of crime, but he told people he was just a garbage collector.
His generosity was legendary, and his funeral in 2007 drew more than 400 mourners, with the procession leaving the church to Frank Sinatra’s My Way. Before he died of a rare form of cancer under police guard, Hurley shared a prison cell with a man named Bertie Kidd. They talked about the Chinese Takeaway, and Hurley told him the total he got out of the safety deposit boxes was only $350,000. The folklore claimed tens of millions, but Hurley insisted it never happened.
Kevin Parsons, however, had a different estimate, closer to $10 million. Only around $3 million was ever reported stolen. Michael Hurley is buried in Waverley Cemetery in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, close to the grave of another crime legend, George Freeman. The master thief may not have gotten the full banquet in the Chinese Takeaway, but decades later, people are still talking about the job.
For a thief, that was what mattered.