The Toe Cutters

Find a criminal with money he can never report stolen, and take it from him.

In March 1970, three men took $587,890 from an armoured van at Guildford without firing a shot. It was the biggest armed robbery Australia had ever seen. Within months one of them had vanished from the beachfront at Coogee, and the men he drank with were hunting the rest.

They were called the Toe Cutters. Their trade was the oldest tax in the underworld: find a criminal with money he can never report stolen, and take it from him. One toe at a time, the stories went, until he talked.

The Toe Cutters is a dark walk through the underworlds of Sydney and Melbourne. It follows the trade back to the razor gangs of the 1920s, then forward through the Painters and Dockers, the Great Bookie Robbery, Chopper Read’s war in H Division and Neddy Smith’s green light, to a storage unit in Padstow in 2014. Along the way it meets the hunters, the men they hunted, and the killers who came for them both.

Built from court records, coroners’ findings and the words of the men themselves, it sorts the myths from the facts, and follows the gang’s name until it became a word. The truth turns out darker than the legend, and now and then a good deal funnier.