Shortcut: The True Story of the Postcard Bandit

This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie.

Brendan James Abbott is one of Australia's most notorious bank robbers.

A figure whose crimes repeated prison escapes and years spent evading capture throughout

the 1990s, turned him into something of an outlaw legend.

It was during this time on the run that the media released photos cementing his nickname,

the postcard bandit.

As his image spread widely and his story took on a mythological quality that blurred the

line between criminal and folk anti-hero.

To unpack the story behind both the legend and the reality we're joined by Abe Madison,

author of the postcard bandit.

This is Australian True Crime.

We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created.

There were Andre, Woi, Warrung people of the Cooling Nation.

And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

With Brendan Abbott's story, one of the tricky things is we still don't know exactly

which robberies he did commit and didn't commit.

There's a handful that he's been convicted of.

There are dozens that he's suspected of.

How many of those did he actually commit?

Well, he's never going to tell us because he doesn't want to serve any more time than

he's already doing.

I know.

So there's a fair bit of mystery there.

The first time he escaped from custody is a very hilarious story about how Australia used

to operate 40 years ago or 50 years ago, whenever it was where basically the cop has took

him to a police station that was just an old house.

The cop who's meant to be guarding him said, do you want a cup of tea?

Brendan said sure.

And while he was making him a cup of tea, Brendan got up and ran out the other door which

he knew wasn't locked.

When's the next escape?

The next escape was from free mantle prison in 1989.

That one was massive.

Free mantle prison.

You also describe evocatively.

I'll just put it this way.

No toilets.

Yeah.

No paint buckets to shit in.

Yeah.

Every pretty stuff.

Every pretty grim.

45 degrees plus in in summer freezing in winter.

You can do tours these days and it's a very stark and unforgiving place.

My favorite story about free matter was when they had a riot, maybe partly so that Brendan

could get on the roof of a building and see the rest of the site, right?

To get a really good look at where the walls were and where stuff was.

I mean, the riot was because of the conditions.

There's no doubt about that.

They were way over capacity.

It was the height of summer in 1988 and it just exploded.

The place literally exploded and they set fire to it.

But when they had the subsequent trial, I have it was one of the ring leaders and they

were able to get a look at aerial maps of the prison, which was perfect for Abbott

because he had been wondering about exactly how he was going to get out.

He needed to know if he could make the jumps from one roof to another.

So as a defendant, the police had to supply him with their evidence, which included aerial

photos of the jail.

They did.

Also during the riot trial, they were, of course, they would wear civilian clothes into court

and he was able to tuck a few of those away that ended up in the prison tailor shop,

which was where the escape began.

I particularly love that story.

I've got this old tailor.

He's not a prison guard.

He's actually a tailor and they distracted him with pornographic magazines.

It's stick books, I called them.

He would go off to his office and get very engrossed in looking at the stick books that

the prisoners had given him whilst Abbott and the other prisoners would be working away

with a hacksaw on the bars of the tailor shop.

And sewing themselves outfits that looked a bit like the guards' uniforms?

Well, you've bought them a bit like exactly like Abbott convinced the tailor to show him

how to make those uniforms that the Metropolitan Security Unit wore.

He also stole a badge from his drawer, but he knew he needed several badges.

So in his cell late at night, he actually was like, he is a bit of an artist.

So he's actually drawn up a few of these badges to go on the caps because they wanted to

look like prison guards because when they got onto the roof, there was the small issue

of guards in towers with guns, which of course is the most off-putting thing about

trying to escape a prison.

So one day, Aaron Reynolds has been one of the fellow Escapades, has been working away

at the bar and it's suddenly snapped and it's bowed because of the pressure.

So the moment anyone's looked up at it, it's going to be seen.

So they realized that they had to make an instantaneous decision to, we either go now or we're going

to get caught.

So they decided to go.

They got into their overalls.

They had $20 cash.

Abbott had a small transistor radio that he'd somehow fixed up to tuning to police frequencies.

Wow.

I saw that he could tell when they were alerted to the escape.

So they got out onto the roof, Abbott Reynolds have made it over and they've high-tailed

it out of there and within 20 minutes, they were on an old MTT bus driving past the prison

and they could hear the sirens going off.

And a short time later, they were eating walkers in a hungry jacks, a few kilometres away,

which was just extraordinary.

What was the big robbery that landed Brendan in there?

Was that the famous through the ceiling, robbery?

Yes.

So that was in Belmont in Perth, suburban Perth in 1987.

So at the time, it was WAs biggest ever bank robbery.

It was Brendan Abbott's first known bank robbery.

And it was innovative, wasn't it?

It was.

We see Brendan's brain at work here.

Yes.

Well, he decided that if they dropped him from the ceiling before the bank opened, he'd

have a better chance of accessing the big money.

And he was spot on $112,000, doesn't seem like very much of these days.

But back in 1987, it certainly was.

Whilst the robbery itself was successful, things fell apart very quickly in the days after.

Did things fall apart because Jackie, his girlfriend, got the shits that she thought he was seeing

someone else and she put him in, is that true?

Correct.

Yep.

100%.

Yes.

And she actually received reward money for that.

Yeah.

So after Freemantle, was that the beginning of the five-year, the long stretch on the run?

It was.

So Aaron Reynolds and Brendan Abbott successfully escaped from Freo.

They knock off a gun shop, they hit a couple of banks, and they set up a bush camp near

Perth.

Aaron Reynolds had himself a little camera and he took a whole bunch of photos.

The pictures really, I think, were intended to be sent to friends, to be sent to relatives,

people like Len.

While Abbott Reynolds were in a stolen car in Perth, the police have spotted them and Abbott

said to Reynolds, we can outrun them.

Reynolds didn't listen to him and started leaning out the window and firing a shotgun at

the pursuing police.

They eventually abandoned that vehicle and that's where the first roles of film were discovered

from that from their bush camp.

So those are the first so-called postcards.

They eventually left Perth on a couple of stolen motorcycles and they headed to Adelaide

where there were some more bank robberies.

Aaron's camera was still working overtime.

There's pictures of them climbing Uluru.

They went to a crocodile farm in Darwin.

Then they go across to Brisbane.

All the while they're doing bank jobs.

Things come to a head between Abbott and Reynolds.

Reynolds was a bit of a loose cannon.

Abbott was very aware that if he was going to stay on the run, they needed to be discreet.

They needed to fade into the background aside from those moments when they were robbing

banks.

There's a sort of final confrontation between them.

Reynolds says he's going back to Perth, which he does.

He was very quickly arrested because he really wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.

That was when the police found another role of film.

This was from, I suppose you'd call it part two of the postcards trip.

This was them traveling across the country and really looking like tourists and these

pictures look like postcards.

He just disappears after Reynolds' arrest.

There was no links to Abbott.

There was no way they could track him down.

That was why the Perth Arm robbery squad actually released the so-called postcards.

At the time, they didn't call them postcards.

They said that they thought the pictures were going to be sent to his associates as a

reminder of how good life on the run could be.

That was accurately reported by the West Australian newspaper.

Unfortunately, the truth was not as interesting as the myth.

As I say, the magazine called in the postcard band, that stuck very quickly.

Once the story got into the media, that was it.

He was the postcard band, it from then on.

Eventually, they caught up with him in Queensland.

This is a great part of the story because now he's in a different jurisdiction.

As one of the old coppers said, from Perth, he said, I just thought, good, now they're

his problem.

Now, he's in custody in Queensland and he's taken into custody and he says, in retrospect,

that was the moment he began planning his next escape.

So they sent him to a special cell.

They put him in chains.

Every time he was a court appearance, he was transferred using a helicopter.

They very much treated him like a super villain.

It was understandable that they were using such tight security because he had shown that

he could not only escape but could remain on the run for a very long time.

He then faced trial on several of the bank robberies in Queensland.

He ended up cutting a deal where I think he played a guilty to three or four of them.

He ended up in Sedavid Longland.

For whatever reason, within two years I've been recaptured.

He's back in mainstream and I'm sure there would have been plenty of questions asked

as to how that was allowed to happen.

He's very focused on escaping again and they were sitting around one day talking about

potential escape plans and habits made the point that you really need some help from

the outside.

That's when a young boy called Brendan Berishon has spoken up and said that he'd be willing

to do that.

He was due for release soon and he'd be willing to organize things on the outside.

In the days leading up to the escape, Abbott had been speaking to Berishon via another

prisoner's phone calls and they were talking in code.

They were saying that a girl is going to come and visit you and she'll give you a flash

and that was actually in reference to using a torch to flash and signal outside the

prison.

He's turned up.

He's given the flash so Abbott and the other four of them have soared through their

bars.

They'd already done work in the days leading up on these bars and they had this diamond

encrosted wire that they were using to cut through the bars that they were then able

to pull back.

My favourite aspect is the weird sort of ladders they built out of the plastic lawn furniture.

They welded them together to help them get over the walls with the razor wire on top.

They built these contraptions to throw over the top, didn't they?

Ingenious again.

The fact that they managed to make it out was really quite incredible.

Berishon tried to throw bolt cutters over and they didn't make it all the way.

You try to try to throw guns to them, they didn't make it all the way.

I think it was only a pair of tin snips that they managed to get their hands on.

Berishon ended up having to shoot his way out of there, didn't he?

Berishon was shooting at the perimeter vehicle that came sort of trundling around the corner

and that obviously had weapons and guards inside.

They had a semi-oamatic weapon which he has fired at the perimeter vehicle and managed

to disable it.

Meanwhile, they've managed to cut through the various perimeter fences and actually make

it out and get to the vehicle that Berishon was waging in.

There's chases, there's how no one was injured or killed in the initial escape or in the

crimes that unfolded afterwards.

It's nothing less than a miracle that no one was hurt.

There were a lot of crimes committed.

Abbott and Berishon managed to get down to Melbourne.

They travelled allegedly, travelled to Perth and pull off another massive bank robbery

in Perth, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That gives them plenty of money to set up a covert life.

Abbott goes straight back to his old tricks of fake IDs, his disguises.

They set themselves up in a cottage in Carlton.

They paid cash for this place.

They used their fake IDs to get the electricity put on.

This is when Berishon's drug habit rears its head.

He started to get back into the heroin and Abbott's not happy about it, but he's tolerating

it.

He's gone out to Box Hill one day to score and some passing police have seen this happen

and they've confronted him.

He's forgotten everything that Abbott has taught him about how to deal with a situation

like this.

Berishon confronted by police, just completely went to water and he has immediately opened

up his bum bag, pulled out a pistol and started firing at these two coppers and how he didn't

kill them again.

Another miracle.

This is it because he dropped the bum bag and the wallet and everything there did

me at the scene.

Yes.

All the cash.

Had to tell Brendan that.

Fancy having to go back and say, oh, mate, there's been an incident.

If Abbott was ruthless, he could have just put a bullet in Berishon right there and

there or just walked away from him, but he took him with him and they went on the run.

Where were they pinched in the end?

They were caught in Darwin.

The Darwin cops became convinced that Berishon and or Abbott were in Darwin and they had

started surveillance and I think they were expecting to find Berishon, but it was actually

Abbott who appeared on a street, the biopetzer and he got into a laundromat to do his washing

after the territory response group descended on him and put the cuffs on him.

He did ask them if they could go back and get his washing out of the dryer for him and

in the days afterwards when he was interviewed by detectors from several states, he actually

signed a wanted poster where he wrote, could have at least let me finish my washing on

one of them.

So since a fumer intact, in the end, what's happened is Brendan Abbott has ended up doing

so much more time than he ever would have had he just stayed in jail the first time or

even the second time.

Is that fair to say?

100%.

Yes.

What's the legal situation that we're at now?

I read a stat, the thing that said he's done more time than any non-murderer in Australian

history.

Is that right?

Look, I think that's a fair estimation.

So he was arrested in 95, then he escaped in 97, he was on the run for six months and then

he was caught in May 98.

Since May 98, he's been in prison.

From May 98 to May 2016, he was in the Queensland prison system, a very large chunk of that time

was served in solitary.

Yeah.

He would often be put in a detention unit on his own.

There'd be no other prisoners in the detention unit, there would just be him and the prison

guards there.

When you say a big chunk of it, we're talking about 12 years, roughly 12 years, imagine

being alone, not even the circumstances of the cell are the beds not comfortable.

Forget that.

Just imagine being alone, with no one to talk to for 12 years.

And that's where we are now.

So Abbott's lawyer has filed documents for his appeal, that will probably go to the court

of appeal about the middle of this year and beyond that is the high court.

If he loses the court of appeal, then there's the high court.

So the question now is, will his appeal actually be successful before he is actually eligible

for parole?

He's not eligible for parole again till 2028, is that right?

Yes.

I want to see him get to spend time with his son.

James is a fantastic young bloke.

I've met him several times and gotten to know him really well.

One way to put it is that James seems to have his head screwed on the right way.

He doesn't...

He really does.

He loves his dad a lot.

But he doesn't idolise his criminal history.

He doesn't seem to me to have unrealistic expectations of his dad or he knows his dad

and what he did.

But he also is his dad.

Exactly.

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contact 1-800-RESPECT.

On 1-800-737-732 or 1-800-RESPECT.org.au.

Indigenous Australians can contact 13-Yarn on 13-92-76 or 13-Yarn.org.au.

The producers of this podcast recognize the traditional owners of the land on which

it's recorded.

They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.