Armed and Dangerous

ARMED AND DANGEROUS – The inside story of Australia’s rash of bank stick-ups, prison breakouts & major heists from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Australia in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Lillee bowling, Australia 2 winning, Hoges joking. But while we bounced down the street listening to ONJ’s ‘Physical’ on a Walkman, there was a crime wave going on. A criminal craze for armed hold-ups & large-scale heists swept the country.

Stick-up men were the kings of the underworld. If you did your banking after lunch on a Friday, the odds were high that you’d end up with a sawn-off shotgun in your face. A generation of bank workers – many young women – suddenly found themselves on the front lines of a wild war between the cops and the robbers. Incredibly, bank tellers were given guns, which only added to the danger and their psychological damage. We hear first-hand tales from the cops, the robbers and the traumatised tellers caught up in this deadly arms race.

The hard-nosed cops of the armed robbery squads caught most of the crooks, but that created a new problem. As the prison cells filled up – a lot of those blokes wanted out, and they weren’t waiting for parole. These swashbuckling escapees unveil how they staged Australia’s most audacious break-outs from our toughest ‘escape-proof’ prisons.

If they weren’t banged up in prison, the canniest crims took their robberies to new heights, by executing brazen heists. Daring attacks involving a criminal mastermind, a trusted team, plenty of planning, and at the end of it all, a truckload of cash. Many of Australia’s greatest heists remain unsolved to this day. The men and women caught up in these dangerous raids reveal their stories for the first time.