Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly by Sue Bursztynski Page A

jail. In 2001, he had finished a degree in military strategy and weapons – at taxpayers’ expense!
    Over the years, he also went to court many times to complain. He didn’t like being in a high-security prison. He was angry when he got into trouble for having sharp things in his cell and computer disks with information about the prison staff. He considered it an abuse of his human rights when they took away his Ku Klux Klan and Nazi collections.
    In 2004, after he had spent about $250,000 worth of taxpayers’ money on his many complaints, he was declared a vexatious litigant – someone who was wasting time and money on silly protests. He was not allowed to take any more legal action in Victoria for ten years, except with special permission.
    In 2007, he complained that the prison authorities were interfering with his rehabilitation when they wouldn’t allow him to send a letter of apology to a victim. He wanted to be gradually moved to lowersecurity prisons and have access to programs that would help him after release.
    Unless he has changed a lot, it’s unlikely his wish will be granted in the near future.

THE SIGMA BREAK-IN

    I t was like something out of a Hollywood thriller. The team of burglars had been practising for months. They had been checking out various chemical companies in Victoria and South Australia and decided on a Melbourne company called Sigma.
    Sigma made drugs to treat such problems as ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder, a behaviour problem suffered mostly by young boys), but the ingredients could be used to make speed, a dangerous street drug that would be worth a fortune to the robbers. George Lipp, Paul Elliott, Brian Zerma and Mark Wills weren’t professional criminals. They just wanted to be rich.

    There were two factories in Melbourne’s southeast, one in Clayton, the other in Croydon. They were going to merge and there wasn’t much time for the burglary to be carried out. The burglars broke in 25 times over the nine months before the real thing. During these practice runs, they looked up the company’s records to see what was in the safe. They checked the security systems and found their way around the huge complex. They had $30,000 worth of equipment to help them in their heist.
    What they didn’t have was someone who knew how to get into the safe where the containers of drugs were kept.
    Lipp remembered a man he used to know in the early 1980s who worked in the security industry. He was an expert on safes. Let’s call him ‘Fred’.
    One night in August 1996, Lipp visited the safe expert. First he asked him if he could help open a safe for his mother, who’d lost her key. Fred agreed and went with him. After he’d opened it, Lipp asked him if he could open a much more complicated safe. He showed him a photo of what was obviously not a home safe. He offered him $100,000 to open it.
    Fred knew he’d been asked to help with a robbery. To give himself time, he asked for a clearer picture of the safe. Next day, he told Chris Gyngell, the state manager of Chubb Security, what had happened. Gyngell rang the police drug squad.
    But they couldn’t just arrest the burglars. They had to catch them in the act. There was an undercover agent, ‘Dave’, who would be able to take over as the safebreaker, but Fred had to introduce him.
    Chubb Security gave Dave a crash course in safe-breaking. He would have to convince the burglars that he knew what he was doing.
    Fred rang Lipp and pretended to be interested in the robbery. Lipp met him in a pub and discussed the matter. It soon became clear that he wanted the expert to come with them on the night and actually open the safe. Even when he introduced Dave, Lipp wasn’t interested unless Fred also came along.
    It was going to be horribly dangerous for the civilian, but it was the only way.
    The two undercover men recorded a number of planning sessions, to incriminate the burglars later.
    On 15 September, police set up a surveillance team near