As long as there has been gold mining in Western Australia people have been trying to steal it.
That temptation has reached fever pitch with prices for the precious metal in March surpassing $3,000 an ounce for the first time in Australian dollar terms.
Some of the historic gold theft cases in WA could be out of Hollywood film scripts, like Ewan McGregor's 2013 action movie Son of a Gun, which was filmed in Kalgoorlie-Boulder and at nearby gold mines.
The city was home to the biggest gold rush in Australia's history, sparked by the metal's discovery in 1893 by Irish prospectors Paddy Hannan, Tom Flanagan and Dan Shea.
Gold stealing was rife and commonly regarded as a miner's privilege, which led to a royal commission in 1906.
According to The West Australian newspaper on September 14, 1906, Oroya-Brownhill mine superintendent Mr J. Mitchell told the commission that gold-stealing was "going on pretty constantly".
The commission heard only 12 convictions for gold stealing had been obtained in Boulder in two years.
The Western Argus newspaper on September 25, 1906, quoted Inspector Robert Connell, who had been stationed as a detective at Coolgardie in 1896, at Kalgoorlie as inspector in 1899 and who later served as WA Police Commissioner.
"I believe it exists as a regular custom or habit," Inspector Connell reportedly told the royal commission.
"It is impossible to say what amount is stolen.
"The police force at Kalgoorlie and Boulder is not sufficient to deal with gold stealing and is barely sufficient to cope with ordinary crime."
The royal commission led to the establishment of the WA Police Gold Stealing Detection Unit in 1907.
The police were funded by the WA Chamber of Minerals and Energy for the specific purpose of tracking down gold thieves, traffickers and illegal smugglers.
In the early days, WA's official gold escort was attached to scheduled trains from Kalgoorlie to Perth on a fortnightly basis.
According to the Perth Mint, the special carriage included a strongroom for the gold, often containing up to 15,000 ounces, and police or bank officers locked inside with a supply of beer and sandwiches.
A horse-drawn cart met the train at Perth station where the gold was accompanied by armed police the few blocks to the Perth Mint where most WA gold has been refined since 1899.
Murder of gold detectives
In April 1926, the mutilated bodies of Gold Stealing Detection Unit officers John Walsh and Alexander Pitman were found in a mine shaft at Millers Find, about 10 kilometres south-west of Kalgoorlie-Boulder.
Detective Inspector Walsh and Detective Sergeant Pitman were ambushed and killed by gold thieves William Coulter and Phillip Treffene and their charred and dismembered bodies dumped in the shaft.
Police were alerted after two men passing in a sulky noticed a swarm of flies and dreadful smell emanating from the shaft.
Evan Clarke, the publican of Boulder's Cornwall Hotel, witnessed the killings and claimed the two murderers roped him into helping dispose of the bodies.
After he turned king's evidence, the killers were found guilty and hanged while Clarke was given a new identity and sent into hiding.
Railway workers stole gold
In November 1952, as reported by The West Australian, a strongbox containing about £14,000 worth of gold bullion disappeared from Kalgoorlie railway station.
Most of the gold was from the Sons of Gwalia mine and a bank at Leonora, about 240 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie.
Police carried out extensive inquiries that took them to Leonora, Southern Cross and Widgiemooltha to interview about 100 people.
Three railwaymen — Victor Stanley Clark, 63, Wilfred Gilmore, 52, and 47-year-old Alan Paddle — were charged over the theft.
The gold was recovered.
1982 Perth Mint swindle
The biggest gold theft in Australia's history involved a swindler using three fraudulent cheques to have 65kg of gold transported from the Perth Mint by courier.
Perth's three Mickelberg brothers – Ray, Peter and Brian – were arrested weeks after the swindle in 1982 and convicted of the theft the following year.
Ray Mickelberg, a Special Air Service and Vietnam veteran, served eight years in prison.
Peter was locked up for six-and-a-half years and Brian served nine months before winning an appeal. He died in a plane crash in 1986.
Most of the gold was recovered after an anonymous tip-off in 1989 – the same year gold, allegedly from the swindle, was left outside a television station in Perth, alongside a note proclaiming the brothers' innocence.
In 2002, retired police detective Tony Lewandowski signed an affidavit admitting he and former CIB chief Don Hancock had beaten Peter Mickelberg and fabricated his confession.
Hancock was dead, killed in a car bombing by bikies in 2001. The Mickelbergs' convictions were quashed in 2004.
In 2008, Ray and Peter Mickelberg were granted $500,000 each by the state government as compensation for wrongful convictions, on top of $658,000 to cover the legal expenses of appeals in 1998 and 2004.
Kalgoorlie gold shipment disappears
The same year as the Perth Mint swindle, detectives investigated the disappearance of 1,000 ounces of gold being transported from a Kalgoorlie gold mine to the mint.
The 1982 shipment was flown to Perth but when it arrived at the mint, the gold had been replaced with five painted lead bars.
The gold, worth about $300,000 at the time, has never been recovered.
Suspicion quickly fell on gold room workers at the North Kalgurli mine on Kalgoorlie-Boulder's world-famous Golden Mile.
But another theory has developed over the years among locals who believe the theft was the work of a gang caught out in an attempted audacious mid-air heist on the east coast.
Ex-SAS soldier's heist plan
Former Special Air Service soldier David Everett was once one of Australia's most wanted criminals.
Everett had fought with the Karen rebels in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and made it his mission back in Australia to raise funds for the cause.
The former commando went on a crime spree, kidnapped people from their homes, robbed movie theatres and set off what he claims was the biggest explosion in Australian criminal history.
In his autobiography Shadow Warrior, published in 2009, Everett revealed he spent a week casing the Youanmi gold mine, near Sandstone in WA's Midwest.
Everett had stolen explosives for the heist but in August, 1992, the day before he was due to leave Perth for Youanmi with an accomplice, tactical response police swooped and arrested him without a shot fired.
His autobiography details how he had spent five days "moving in and around the site in the dark, getting familiar with the routine of the place and endlessly rehearsing the different scenarios that might occur during the job".
Everett wrote that "the night before the arrival of the gold plane was the obvious time to do the job".
But his arrest ended that plan.
Jundee gold-in-the-bucket sting
Also adopting military tactics, the Gold Stealing Detection Unit in 2011 launched an operation in the remote northern Goldfields when a pastoralist noticed suspicious tracks and found a bucket of gold concentrate hidden behind a tree.
The concentrate, worth about $90,000, had been stolen from nearby Jundee gold mine.
When the thieves came to collect the concentrate police dressed in full camouflage emerged from the bush to make an arrest.
Two men pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 12 months' jail for the theft.
Hunt for gold thieves
The Beta Hunt underground mine at Kambalda, south of Kalgoorlie, has been mined for nickel since the 1970s.
While nickel was the priority in its early years, it is no secret that the mine also has rich deposits of gold.
There are stories among workers about miners burying bags of gold rocks for safekeeping in the event prices for the commodity rose.
In September 2018, the discovery of one rich pocket at Beta Hunt, known as the Father's Day Vein, made global headlines.
It produced the world's largest-known gold rock specimen, dubbed King Henry after miner Henry Dole who found the 94kg specimen about 500 metres below the surface.
It was sold to the Perth Mint for $3 million.
The 2018 discovery helped keep the mine from closing and put it under an international spotlight.
Beta Hunt was the scene of a gold heist on April 24, 2020, when four men, one armed with a sawn-off rifle, made off with about 85kgs of raw gold ore and a two-tonne safe.
Police only recovered 20 ounces of the gold.
Methods evolve over time
Gold thieves' methods have evolved from a simple thermos to more complex schemes, including one involving a sewage truck to suck up gold concentrate from a Kalgoorlie mine.
In 2014, detectives uncovered a backyard gold processing operation involving a cement mixer and treadmill at a house in Kalgoorlie-Boulder.
Most gold thieves are simply opportunists, as was the case with four men dubbed Australia's unluckiest gold thieves in 2017.
The group stumbled across more than a kilogram of gold, worth $62,392, during a barbecue at a mining lease near Coolgardie, stole it and then bragged about it on Facebook, which brought them to the attention of the police gold stealing unit.
The same year Joseph Andrew Cresp was working on the mill at the Sunrise Dam gold mine near Laverton when a pile of dirt containing almost 4kg of gold fell out of a sump.
A court heard he hid the gold, worth more than $200,000, in his locker and envisioned using it to fund a family holiday to Greece. The gold was returned to the company and he later apologised to the mining company.
Some thieves are smarter than others.
In 2019, 28-year-old Joshua Luke Cross was jailed for 15 months after he processed stolen gold in his grandmother's shed using the toxic chemical mercury.
The Kalgoorlie Magistrates Court heard he suffered cognitive impairment because of the mercury exposure, including memory loss and increased anxiety.
That year, in a different case 48-year-old Steven James Paskov told the Kalgoorlie Magistrates Court he found more than half a tonne of gold concentrate worth about $35,000 at a rubbish tip.
And some thieves should just know better, including two former students from the WA School of Mines who faced court in 2019 and 2020 on unrelated matters, one of whom was the son of a police officer.
Mint an obvious target
The Perth Mint remains a constant target for gold thieves.
In 2006, the mint was targeted again in a $14 million gold fraud that had the potential to be bigger than the 1982 swindle.
But it is not only external threats that the mint has to be wary of.
In 1998, an employee was jailed for 18 months for concealing 80 gold coins in his mouth.
The court heard he nabbed the coins over a five-month period, hiding them in a plastic glove initially and leaving the mint with them in his mouth.
The District Court heard he swallowed the last five when confronted by security guards and it took three weeks for the coins to pass through his system.
He pleaded guilty to stealing the coins, which were worth almost $30,000.
In 2018, security guard Matthew Alexander Roussety was jailed for 15 months after stealing a $50,000 gold bar while working at the mint's refinery at Perth Airport.
The court heard he hid it in his underpants.
That same year, IT contractor Joseph Charles Viola was jailed for stealing $55,000 in gold bars and coins and smuggling them out of the mint, which the sentencing judge said at the time was "motivated by greed".
Convenient tunnels for thieves
The Boulder Block Hotel has long since disappeared to make room for the expansion of the Super Pit gold mine.
The famous watering hole was built in 1896 and was well-known for an underground shaft to its cellar where miners would emerge to sell stolen gold in exchange for ale.
In the 2014 book, Gangland North South & West by James Morton and Susanna Lobez, the authors refer to the tunnel as existing for the "convenience of the thieves".
"A former Kalgoorlie publican of the 1970s and 1980s recalls 'gold demons' of the theft squad were despised by miners used to pocketing batches of 'gim' or stolen gold," the book reads.
"Today gold thieves still remain high on the list of Western Australian folk heroes.
"One story, told with admiration but possibly apocryphal, is that a truck driver who for years had carried loads of gold across the Nullarbor Plain, informed he had been made redundant, took off with his last shipment and neither he, the transporter nor the gold were ever seen again."
