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Scene of the Crime: On November 26, 1956, an unknown number of crims snuck into an Auckland waterfront building, cracked a safe and got away with the equivalent of $1.2 million, the biggest pile of money that had ever been stolen in New Zealand. All but one were never caught.
For a bloke who was pretty smart, Trevor Nash could be a bit thick.
The usually calculating, apparently small-time crim certainly didn’t engage the grey matter the day he went to Auckland’s Newmarket and started throwing around money from the biggest heist New Zealand had ever seen.
It was the morning of September 13, 1957, a black Friday as bad luck would have it. Nash had driven to the shopping precinct early from his home in Papatoetoe and not long after Newmarket’s storekeepers began turning closed signs to open, he started spending money.
In shop after shop, with £10 notes — the country wouldn’t move to decimal currency for another decade — he bought small items worth just shillings and pence. In store after store, those at the till asked Nash whether he had anything smaller; in 1957, ten quid was a fortune; in today’s money, it was like Nash was buying bread and milk with a $600 note.
As the morning and Nash’s weird spending progressed, Newmarket’s till jockeys and shop girls began gossiping among themselves about this slim, 35-year-old fellow with the dark complexion and the high cheek bones spending big money buying bugger all.
Eventually a couple of confused and confounded store workers spotted a traffic cop, called him over and told him their yarn. He soon told a plain clothes officer, who then called Auckland’s Criminal Investigation Bureau further downtown.
Not long after, as Nash stepped out of J. Henderson and Company, a Khyber Pass Rd electrical goods store, CIB cops Frank Parker and Lionel Hammond cornered him and said they wanted a word.
In the testy exchange that followed, they asked him why he was using big notes to make so many piffling purchases. Nash told them where to go.
Eventually, and inevitably, the cops bundled him to a car and drove him in some excitement to Auckland Central Police Station, where they searched their truculent catch’s pockets.
Nash, who had a few minor convictions but made a living as a dock worker, was found to be in possession of 14 £10 notes, along with another £235 in smaller notes and coins. He was also carrying, in the various pockets of his trench coat, his many chump-change purchases, including a jar of apricot jam. There was his Waterfront Union card, too, which reported his full name was Trevor Edward Nash.
Soon enough, his home and car were searched as well, and about 100 more £10 notes were found. All up, this humble wharfie with a wife and kids was found to have a total of just over £1678 cash in his possession — nearly seven times the average annual wage for a waterside worker.
How had he come by the money, the cops wanted to know? Nash wouldn’t say a word.
In the end it was the 10-quid notes that did the talking. The serial numbers on a good number of them linked them — and therefore Nash — to the biggest, most brazen heist New Zealand had yet seen, one which took place nearly a year before.
It could have been the perfect crime
It was called the Waterfront Payroll Robbery and had netted persons unknown £19,875 — adjusted for inflation, $1.2 million in today’s money — and, to the embarrassment and frustration of the cops, the waterfront authorities and the government, this record-breaking crime had remained stubbornly unsolved.
Now, after 10 fruitless months of a go-nowhere investigation, the cops had finally got lucky. But only because Nash had got stupid.
It could have been the perfect crime. Until Nash’s mad spending spree, it had been the perfect crime. And as true crime author Scott Bainbridge writes in The Great New Zealand Robbery, his deeply-researched examination of the heist from which this story draws heavily, it should now be one of the most infamous, mostly unsolved cases in our criminal history.
Instead, the Waterfront Payroll Robbery was scantily reported at the time, largely due to an authoritarian National government, the port authorities and the cops being keen to suppress details on how easily the heist had been to pull off. And, after Nash’s belated arrest and conviction, wanted to pretend that the crime had been satisfactorily solved when it hadn’t.
So it is no surprise that in the years since, it had become an all-but-forgotten episode until Bainbridge’s book was published in 2017.
Yet nearly 70 years later, who conceived the heist, how many and who was involved, and how all-but-one got away with it, is still a largely unsolved mystery.
In the early hours of Wednesday November 28, 1956, an unknown number of men entered the Northern Steamship Company building, a handsome, two-storey, blonde-brick affair which still stands on Quay St, and broke into the counting room of the Waterfront Industry Commission. Inside its safe was some £23,000 of wages for some 900 waterside workers.
For 10 months, it looked like the crims, with sophisticated planning and a fair bit of luck, really had pulled on the perfect crime.
Using knowledge only insiders could have, the men craftily severed cables to cut the power to the commission’s offices only, disabled an alarm, hung rubber sheets over windows to hide torchlight and an explosion and then they set about trying to blow the safe’s door. This failed.
What happened next is pure speculation, but it is thought the crims left the building, and came back a couple of hours later, possibly having roped in Nash, who then, it was later alleged in court, used the acetylene gas-cutting equipment the crew now brought in to melt a hole in the top of the safe.
It was then just a matter of pulling out the cash, some of it now scorched, shoving it into bags, then quickly and quietly leaving the scene. But not before they attempted to burn up the room and all their equipment by using the torch to set fire to a cushion.
It was this smouldering bolster that first alerted passersby. Firemen rushed to the location of the small, smoky fire, which soon enough was out, revealing it was actually the scene of an audacious, professional crime, one, it became clear in the coming months, that the cops didn’t have the clues or the smarts to solve.
All they had to go on was a sketchy eyewitness account of two men, one possibly foreign, with heavy carry bags being driven off at high speed in a possibly American-built car, a smudged heel mark on a stair, the abandoned equipment and the fact that tranches of the £10 notes taken had known, consecutive serial numbers.
For 10 months, it looked like the crims, with sophisticated planning and a fair bit of luck, really had pulled on the perfect crime. Then Trevor Nash got stupid.
Someone will say something
If there was one thing the cops could always rely on, it was that someone would always talk. Back in the 50s, and for a long time before and after that, Auckland police typically solved crimes through rounding up the usual suspects among the city’s small-if-active criminal fraternity and then squeezing, sometimes literally, until someone sang a song called “I Know Who Done It”.
But not Trevor Nash. Trevor Nash was a vault. He couldn’t be breached. From the time of his arrest until his death, aged 73, on New Year’s eve in 2001, he never admitted his part in the Waterfront Payroll Robbery and never gave up his co-conspirators. For a crim, Nash was as solid as Lion Rock.
And it wasn’t as if the cops, the courts and, eventually, the Waterfront Industry Commission’s insurance company didn’t squeeze him, and squeeze him hard.
After a jury found him guilty on the most circumstantial of evidence, a known hanging judge (one possibly quietly organised to hear the case by National’s hanging Justice Minister Jack Marshall) gave Nash seven years — a huge sentence for a robbery not involving violence or breach of trust.
For a crim, Nash was as solid as Lion Rock.
At Mt Eden Prison, Nash was a model inmate. He also kept shtum. He knew if he played it right, his cut of the payroll robbery that the cops hadn’t found would buy him and his family a better life when his sentence was done.
But then the State Fire and Accident Insurance, like all insurance companies forced to make a big payout on a premium, got snaky. It sued Nash for the outstanding portion of the stolen money, plus court costs, a move that would bankrupt him. There was also a suggestion that if he didn’t cough up names, he might never get out of prison at all.
Faced with spending the rest of his life inside, there was only one thing a smart and resourceful crim would try to do: escape.
So it was that New Zealand’s largest heist led — you couldn’t really make this up — to one of the country’s most embarrassing, at least for the authorities, prison breaks of all time.
On another Friday, this time February 3, 1961, Nash managed to walkout of Mt Eden Prison while on a metal workshop detail and — poof! — disappeared like smoke on a wind. Despite weeks of alleged sightings around the country, the cops couldn’t find their man and once again their case looked likely never to be solved. Again it was saved by luck.
On a July day, in Bourke St in downtown Melbourne, a full five months after walking out of Mt Eden, Nash — now sporting a home dye job which had turned his dark hair carroty orange — was spotted by an Aussie cop with a photographic memory. He was soon on a plane home to prison in Auckland, with an extra two years soon added to his sentence for bad luck.
Nash served the full term, leaving the Big House in 1966, went onto beat a robbery rap down Whanganui way in 1968, before finally disappearing into what passed for a normal, law-abiding life for the only man ever charged with or convicted of one of the biggest heists the country has ever seen.
While there were suspicions about who else was in on the Waterfront Payroll Robbery, no one ever proved in a court of law who had helped Nash do the job. And nobody will ever know what happened to the remaining $1.1 million that was never found.
So ends the story of Trevor Nash. No hero, maybe. But given everything, it’s hard to see how such a rogue, brazen robber, bold escape artist and sometime idiot isn’t widely remembered as a bit of Kiwi criminal legend.
