Groove Book Report: The Great New Zealand Robbery: How gangsters pulled off our most audacious robbery - Scott Bainbridge (Allen & Unwin $32.99)

It should be remembered as New Zealand's answer to Britain's Great Train Robbery: in the dead of the night, robbers broke into the Waterfront Industry Commission's offices and made off with an audacious loot equivalent to almost $1 million today. This 1956 heist, which eventually came to be known as the Waterfront Payroll Robbery, was executed with military precision and the robbers left nothing but a smoking office and an empty safe behind them.

The crime was eventually pinned on small-time crook Trevor Nash. When four years later, Nash made a brazen prison-escape attempt, he rose to notoriety as a kind of anti-establishment hero.  But to this day uncertainty remains about whether Nash alone was responsible for the waterfront heist. Could he really-cunning as he was-have pulled it off all by himself?   And what happened to the money?

Bainbridge's writing on this is almost forensic at times.  He dives deeply into the case notes, mixes it with newspaper articles and even a few interviews.  But better yet his delivery is far from dry.  He uses a lot of the language of the day in his descriptions.  He resurects long forgotten terminologies (used by insiders of the day).  Terms like 'Soup Job' - the practice of cutting a hole in a safe with a  acetylene torch to get at the contents.

The Northern Steamship Building which
held the Waterfront Industry Commission Offices

The robbery of  the Waterfront Industry Commission's offices was undertaken like no other crime of the time.  It was meticulously planned.  At a time of no internet or even a reliable phone service, Auckland Police did well to learn quickly that the job had been planned using inside information to search and locate electrical cables for specific alarms, to hone in on the location of the payroll safe, to understand the potential contents and even how to launder the money after wards.  Along the way we learn of the intricate details of a string of big and small characters that made up the 'gang' who helped Trevor Nash, if indeed it was him, and what their roles were.

This setting was 1950's Auckland, conservative, yet divided along wealth and class lines, not quite colour, as Auckland didn't seem to have the demographic and ethnic mix that it has today. It also talks of a time, when the criminal fraternity in Auckland, if not New Zealand was "run", by colourful characters, mobsters, enforcers, powerful families, yet so far removed from the aggressive "drug", and gang culture crime of today.