THE KANGAROO GANG

See Also: DEPARTMENT STORES Harrods

The Kangaroo Gang was a loose collective of criminals that centred upon half-a-dozen gifted Antipodean shoplifters. The group coalesced because its existence enhanced its members capacity to rob London's numerous upmarket shops.

As a youth Arthur Delaney had arrived in Sydney on a horse that he had stolen. He had become one of the city's foremost shoplifters. He supplied its leading criminals with goods for a fraction of their retail price and executed commissions to steal particular items. He developed a taste for good living that earned him the soubriquet The Duke . He proved to be a gambler who nearly always played until he had lost whatever money he had. He was a man who had a fondness for other men's wives and mistresses. This recklessness prompted one of his associates to conclude that it might be judicious if his grace were to spend some time elsewhere and bought him a ticket to London.

Upon his arrival, Delaney soon concluded that the city's shops held a rich harvest that could be reaped. In return for a cash payment, many shop assistants proved to be susceptible to looking the other way at the required moment. There were also some police officers who could be bribed to forget a matter. Shoplifting was not regarded as being a serious crime. Therefore, upon those rare occasions when The Duke found himself in court he was able to plead guilty, give a false name and address, and pay the fine, without being fingerprinted. Thereby, he proved to be able to maintain a low criminal profile. He soon developed a plummy British accent and an accompanying debonair manner.

Delaney did not feel the need to be modest about his achievements. He upgraded his moniker to The King . Knowledge of how he was thriving percolated back to the Antipodean underworld. Other talented shoplifters made the journey over. In an informal manner, they coalesced around him furnishing him with an array of accomplices. Collectively, the Australians became known as the Kangaroo Gang.

Patrick The Fibber Warren had worked in Melbourne's docks as a wharfie. His predisposition towards light-fingeredness had blossomed into a strong and versatile talent for thievery. Among the criminal fraternity he became renowned for his affability and generosity. In 1965, when he was already in his late forties, he devised a new technique for robbing cigarette delivery vans.¹ Its efficacy deeply antagonised the New South Wales Police. Therefore, he concluded that the time had become opportune for him to investigate the openings that the Gang had recently developed in London.

Within hours of Mr Warren's arrival in the city, one of his associates took him to Harrods to help him acclimatise his shoplifting style. Having selected what he was going to steal, the Fibber became uneasy about a fellow shopper . He concluded that the man was a store detective. His associate told him that he was wrong and that his jet lag had left him in a paranoid state. He accepted this counsel and went on to take the item. His suspicions proved to have been correct and he was arrested. By giving a false name and address and by paying the fine promptly, he was able to sidestep any serious consequences that his apprehension could have had.

Uncharacteristically, the Fibber's nabbing in Harrods prompted him to nurse a deep, mean-spirited resentment towards the department store. Subsequently, he executed numerous thefts from it. He would mark each one of these by gratuitously damaging an item that was being offered for sale within it. Examples of this were cutting off the arms of suit jackets and tearing out the final pages of books.

The Gang's skills were supplemented by ring ins , who were often recruited from pubs that were frequented by travelling Antipodeans. These individuals would allow themselves to be drawn temporarily into criminality as a means of raising a large sum of money in a very short time. Usually, they would be employed to distract shop assistants. Often, they would do this by enquiring about items that were stocked at places within a store that were located away from the site of the goods that the shoplifters had targeted. His Majesty held to the democratic practice of there being an equal share of the profit for every accomplice in a crime. This was because despite the varying levels of skill of the participants, the undertaking might have failed if they had not each made a contribution. So many high value items were stolen that containers full of them were shipped to Australia, where the loot was sold.

Personal matters kept Delaney in Australia for much of the early 1970s. A number of his contemporaries who had stayed in the country had become leading figures in its organised crime syndicates. While His Majesty's personal kudos was immense, he was held to be the relict of a gentler, more chaotic era. A medical condition kept him away from thieving for a couple of years. When he returned to his craft, the initial goods that he stole were modest items, such as packets of sweets. His skills had not deserted him and he decided to return to London. In the years that followed he was active both there and in the great cities of Western Europe.

A common factor that had tended to incline the Gang's leading members to specialise in shoplifting had been a disinclination to use physical force when conducting a robbery. During the early years of their operation anyone who had seemed to be likely to resort to violence too quickly had been steered gently away from the group. However, as the 1970s progressed, the band s overall character started to grow nastier. In large part, this development derived from the fact that Australia s underworld had become more savage as, post-Vietnam, the country's market for narcotics had grown up and had proven to be able to generate unprecedented sums of money.

The new pitiless attitude was imported by Antipodean criminals who started to appear in London. They were accepted into the Gang but were more willing to turn against their associates than had been the case previously. The arrivals were prepared to inform upon their fellow criminals. A number of people disappeared. They had almost certainly met unpleasant ends. Police forces in Australia regarded several of the band's transient members as probably being murderers. The shift in the group's culture was underscored by the decision of Fibber and a number of its older members to return south and use the capital they had amassed to involve themselves in the country's burgeoning marijuana trade.²

As the 1980s drew to a close The King appears to have concluded that the time had come for him to return to Australia permanently. He decided to undertake one last major heist. He selected as his target Asprey, the New Bond Street jewellers. The quality of security within upmarket shops was far higher than it had been when he had first arrived in London. However, prospective jewellery customers expected to be allowed to handle items. This meant that sales staff had the discretion to unlock secure cases. Therefore, there was a human aspect to the environment and that was all that His Majesty required for him to be able to leverage a situation. On 22 June 1990 he led a ten-person unit that conducted a major robbery of the store.

The jewellery firm conducted a systematic review of what had happened and raised the quality of its in-store protection. This imparted the business with a degree of confidence. As a result, it placed in its window displays some of the items that had not been stolen. One of the pieces was a necklace that had a ticket price of almost 750,000.

On 16 July a three-ton, flat-bed lorry turned into New Bond Street from Grafton Street. A girder extended out from the back of the vehicle. The bar had been welded to the lorry's frame so that it was effectively part of its structure. The vehicle was reversed so that the beam swung through the reinforced glass of Asprey's store front. Within a couple of seconds the items that had been on display were gone. The total value of the goods that were taken during the two robberies ran into the millions.

The lorry had been stolen from a building site in Moorgate. When its owners, L.& M. Builders (Maldon), were contacted, a spokesman for the firm offered to carry out the repairs to Asprey's store front. He reasoned that they already had equipment (i.e. the vehicle) on-site.

Location: Asprey, 167 New Bond Street, W1S 4AY (red, yellow)

The Crowndale, 10 Ferdinand Street, NW1 8ER. Demolished. The pub was the Gang's principal watering hole. An upstairs room was sometimes used as a showroom where fences could inspect items. Gang members were careful to steal blank price tags so that they could attach inflated prices to the goods. (blue, purple)

Harrods, 87-135 Brompton Road, SW1X 7XL (orange, yellow)

The Monarch, 40-42 Chalk Farm Road, NW1 8AJ. For a period in the 1980s The King was the pub's de facto guv nor. (blue, red)

¹. The technique involved using what was effectively a large tin opener to cut through the vehicles side panels.

². These aging returnee criminals were to be dubbed The Grandfather Mob.

A Simian Transportation

The Gang's activities included stealing specific items to order. There is a story that upon one occasion, a client commissioned some of its members to pinch a young chimpanzee from the Pets Department. The criminals appreciated that in order for them to be able to execute the theft successfully they would have to have a means of transporting the ape during the time that it would take them to walk from the Department to the street outside. There was a real risk that during this passage the animal would draw attention to them by shrieking. They could not gag the beast for fear of killing it. They needed a means to normalise any possible piercing utterances that it might make.

The solution to the problem proved to be simple. The shoplifters started their heist by going to the store's Baby & Toddlers Department. There, they stole a perambulator. This they wheeled to the Pets Department, where they filched the simian, securing it firmly within the pram. They then made a leisurely exit out onto the public thoroughfare.

David Backhouse 2024