The Toe Cutters were a Sydney gang with a simple, terrible idea. They did not rob banks or armoured vans. They waited for someone else to do it, then hunted the robbers down and took the money, by any means necessary. According to the stories, that meant blowtorches and industrial bolt cutters. Among the men connected to them was a mysterious immigrant who looked like a 1970s pop star and could build silent machine pistols: Linus Patrick Driscoll, known as Jimmy the Pom. This film begins his story with the robbery that set the gang on its most infamous victim.
Jimmy the Pom
The film is honest about a problem at the start: no one can say with complete certainty who Jimmy the Pom really was. Some accounts describe a polite, well-mannered English expatriate; others suggest he was Irish. In Australia a Pom usually meant an Englishman, but, as the film says, underworld nicknames are not birth certificates.
On paper he looked respectable. Underneath, he was said to have an unusual technical grasp of firearms. He did not simply carry guns; he modified them and built weapons for a purpose, and he gave his creations a name, the silent ones. By the early 1970s he was connected to the criminal worlds of both Sydney and Melbourne: professional armed robbers, standover men, corrupt operators and suspected killers. He would later be convicted of murdering one of his own associates, and his fight to clear his name would expose a controversial police practice and help change Australian criminal justice.
A profession
By the mid-1960s armed robbery had become a serious problem in Sydney and Melbourne. In Victoria, the major robberies investigated by specialist detectives rose from 17 in 1965 to more than 200 a year by the early 1970s, and dedicated armed hold-up squads were set up in both states. The names around this world became infamous: Lenny "Mr Big" McPherson; Stewart Regan, a feared standover man and suspected contract killer; Kevin Gore, whose disappearance would become central to the Toe Cutter mystery; and the Maloney brothers, Billy and John Patrick, known as Jake.
One good job could bring in more than an ordinary worker earned in a lifetime. But once the underworld heard a crew had taken a fortune, other criminals started asking where it was, and how much violence it would take to find out.
Guildford
Frank "Baldy" Blair was a hard, experienced career criminal. With two men from Melbourne, Stephen "the Bomber" Nitte, a former boxer, and Alan Jones, he began watching a Mayne Nickless armoured vehicle in the Sydney suburb of Guildford. They learned the guards' routine, and found that the van stopped in the same car park every day while the men inside ate their lunch. It was carrying $587,890.
The three were allegedly armed with silenced pistols. When a guard stepped out, they moved in, overpowered the guards and escaped with one of the largest criminal fortunes Australia had seen. But word reached Kevin Gore, the Maloney brothers and Jimmy the Pom, the four men believed to make up the Toe Cutters. The first man they wanted was Baldy Blair.
Coober Pedy
Blair's stepson, Larry Blair, was a child then. Decades later he became internationally famous as a champion surfer. He remembered the planning, the watching of the guards, and the sudden change in the family once the money was taken. They fled to the isolated mining town of Coober Pedy, hiding not only from the police but from Blair's supposed friends.
How Blair was found is buried under conflicting stories and dead witnesses. There was no surviving victim, no body and no conviction. What follows, the film says, comes mainly from the account passed down to Larry Blair and published years later. According to it, Blair was abducted and questioned about his share. He refused to say where it was. Larry said Kevin Gore used a blowtorch on him while Billy Maloney held him down, and that bolt cutters were used to remove his toes one at a time. Blair still refused to speak, and died from his injuries.
The film is careful about Driscoll's part. He has often been presented as the face of the gang, but the evidence available does not prove he tortured Blair. It connects him to the group accused of pursuing the money. The film thinks it logical that he supplied the silenced weapons, which would have given him knowledge of the robbery. The stories about Blair's body, dissolved in acid, buried near Sydney airport, his toes sent to criminals as a warning, have no firm evidence behind them, and Larry Blair himself called it a mixture of truth and rumour. In the underworld, the film says, rumour could be as effective as proof.
The hunters hunted
The killing put the family in danger too. Blair's wife Patricia, an accomplished thief herself, tried to leave Sydney with the children. According to Larry, after boarding a plane she recognised men she believed were involved in Blair's death, raised the alarm and took the children off. He believed her quick thinking saved their lives.
The Toe Cutters thought robbers made safe prey because they could never go to the police. But criminal victims could call on criminals more dangerous still. According to police, what followed was retaliation, and one by one, the men around the Toe Cutters began to vanish.