The After Dark Bandit: A Tale of Two Brothers | Doug Morgan

Doug Morgan, one half of the infamous After Dark Bandit duo, reflects on his life of crime, the impact of his father's criminal legacy, and the journey towards redemption. He shares insights into the thrill of armed robbery, the consequences of his actions, and the fractured relationship with his twin brother, Peter. After serving time in prison, Doug has dedicated his life to mentoring at-risk youth, hoping to deter them from making the same mistakes he did

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Appoche production Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shand. I'm
your host Adam Shand. For two years in the late
nineteen seventies, a cunning and daring armed robber ran rampant
across the Victorian countryside, robbing banks and tab agencies at

(00:27):
a fantastic rate.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
He plunted banks and tabs, terrifying staff and.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Customers, sometimes hitting the same banks twice or three times,
and becoming ever more bold mysterious figure linked to multiple
bank heists with no clear pattern or trace. Police were
amazed that the bandit could pull off two jobs within
thirty minutes in towns dozens of kilometers apart. Authorities are

(00:53):
stumped as the same man appears to be in two
places at once. The brazen gun man often hit his
targets just before closing time, disappearing into the bush under
the cover of dart backness. He became known as the
after Dark Bandit and was the state's most wanted man,
a suspect in more than two dozen armed robberies, outsmarting

(01:15):
police for years, becoming Australia's most wanted men. It began
to dawn that this was not one man, but two.
Twenty four robberies.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Later, all was revealed police had beat out foxed by
not one bandit, but two.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
But what no one realized until the crime spree was
over the pair were identical twins.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Identical twins, Peter and Doug Morgan.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
The spree ended badly, with a cop almost fatally shot,
and inevitably one twin gave up the other and they
both served long prison sentences.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
I've been silent for forty years. There must be a
reason for that.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Doug Morgan turned his life around while in jail and
has kindly agreed to share his story with me. Welcome Doug.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
How are you, Adam?

Speaker 1 (02:07):
I'm very well. How do you reflect on those years
now your age seventy one?

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Well, I was sitting with my grandchildren on the weekend
in a park, chatting about life, and I realized that
a lot of my life was wasted and the damage
I did to my family that still goes on, and
the damage I did to victims and their families. So
I look back and look at crime as a bad

(02:37):
evil and there's no winners. And that's why I do
a lot of work with young people, et cetera, et cetera,
because I don't want other people to waste their lives.
I think I've learned a lot over the journey. I
think it's really changed my outlooks. And the story is
not really about me. I try to look at it
from outside it. I'm not the figure or the hero

(03:00):
or the villain. I try to look at it in
black and white and say, well, this is what happened.
And I always like to think about what can we
learn from today. People ask me if I'm religious. Did
I turn around because I was religious? No, I sat
in the cellon went I think I'm worth a lot
more than this to myself and others, and I just
made that decision. And what I think my philosophy would

(03:24):
be learning from that. I could come out and have
a successful life. But if you don't use your experiences
to help other people, those experiences have little value, which
means all those years in jail would have little value.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Because we often look to our role models in life,
often our fathers, and of course your dad Kay was
also a bank robber back in the nineteen forties. How
did that come about?

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Well, I always try to look at what went wrong.
He was kicked out of the family because he didn't
get on very well with one of his older brothers
who was let's say, not manly, and he went and
lived with his grandparents. So he obviously what I think
with a lot of young people, if they become thrown
out of the unit, they look for something else, and

(04:15):
he became being a burglar. He stole a gun one
night out of a bank in Greensborough when he was
doing a burg trying to find the key to open
the safe and with a gun in his hand that
he found in that bank that night. He then about
a week later said well now I can be a
bank robber. I've got a gun, and he did so
and had the bigger stood out in Australia's history. And

(04:36):
I quite often chuckled to myself. They always talk about
the Ok Corral, and there were seventeen shots fired in
the American legendary Ok Correll and thirty second seventeen shots.
There was more shots fired backwards and force between my
father and two bank staff that had bigger guns than
he had than the Ok Corral. So he's a legend

(04:56):
in criminal statistics for that.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah. Well, certainly it was quite a scene because he
goes into the bank in Elpham there and he jumps
in with his Browning pistol and says the gay and
the two tellers go, well, the game's on here to
they both had pistols.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
And they had bigger pistols.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Now, before we go past that pistol, that was a
Browning twenty five, Like you just said, my brother's first bank.
When he left the bank, they accidentally put it Browning
twenty five in with the money. So now my brother
had a Browning twenty five. Now my brother's called out
a lucky charm when he's been talking to media. That
pistol that he took from a bank would be classified

(05:32):
as evidence. He carried that and ended up shooting a
copper with it two years later, So not a smart
move to carry evidence and then shoot somebody with it.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yes, by the way, listeners, stay tuned for the relationship
between Peter and Doug. I think anyone who's been a
twin understands the rivalry between the two, but particularly when
you're robbing banks and tab agencies. You lost your dad
at forty one, Yes, what happened.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
He was on the run again.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
At the time, I was a bank teller and the
AMZ and thirty dollars.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
I was a bank teller.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
You were a bank teller.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Yeah. I was a very good bank teller too, because
I was very young, and he promoted me to be
a bank teller. And my dad said, one night, we're
going to go on the runn again. I've knocked off
some money from a real estate agency because he'd been
injured and couldn't work in the building trade, so he
was working. He'd put the deposit in his own bank account,
I think for a house anyway. So we're on the
run in Adelaide and Broken Hill building houses and he

(06:28):
has a massive heart attack, basically dies in my arms.
I'm eighteen, and it's like a horrific scene. I've never
heard anybody scream all whale as loud. I could never
get that out of my mind. And he passed away
right there and then. So that was the end of
as far as I was concerned. My dad was a villain,
but my dad was also a great father. When we

(06:50):
played sport, he would become the coach of that sport.
In a strange way, I idolized him. He was very
smart man, but the trouble is he would resort to
crime to prop up his businesses.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Well. He had a piece of advice for you and Peter.
He said, if you need to pursue a certain lifestyle,
it's perfectly okay to get the money however you need to.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
I grew up with philosophy, as were Morgans, and you
do what you want to live how you want, and
that was basically it.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
The other word of advice I never took was work alone.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yes, work alone. That's a maxim that a lot of
crooks should follow, but they don't. Now, this was the
golden era of armed robberies in the seventies where the
counter jumpers as they were called, were idolized in the
criminal world, and there was some very big names who
were involved in that. You weren't a big name. You

(07:45):
and Peter were the guys s from nowhere, and this
was part of your advantage. How did you decide to
go from carpenters and builders son of a bank robber
to actual bank robbers? How did that happen?

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Well?

Speaker 2 (07:59):
At thirteen, I was going along at night time when
my dad breaking his post office in New Zealand and
help him load saves in the back of cars and
stuff like that. So I basically was a criminal at thirteen,
And when he was arrested in New Zealand.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
The next day.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
We loaded safes into a car to get rid of
the evidence because there was many saves that have been
opened up in another house we had. So basically I
was a criminal at thirteen, because once he's not there,
I took over. But the thing is, my brother must
have had this bank robbery stuff in his brain. And
you've got to remember, you're totally right. Newspapers two three

(08:34):
times a week would have an article fifteen twenty thousand
taken by sometimes what they used to call the Blue
Boilersuit gang. And my brother used to say we could
do that, we could do that, and I always fob
him off and go yeah, yeah, whatever, And then he's
more persistent, bought some guns. And what happened was one Easter,
we were waiting on two checks from my builder, who

(08:55):
WO had never worked for before. It was quite a
large amount of money, two houses that we were owed,
and it didn't turn up for Easter. My brother was
shot of money. He says, I got to pull a
job before Easter. I got no cash. So that's how
it really started. So all his talk was put into
action in about three days and he picked a target,
and we went about getting a getaway car by taking

(09:16):
it from a car yard. He already had the guns,
so that's how we actually got into it. And then
three days after Easter the check for the two houses.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
Turned up in a mail.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
So those checks had turned up on the Wednesday, we
wouldn't be bank robbers or tab robbers.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
The die was cast because you've had, let's call it
a difficult relationship with your brother over the years, but
you were so similar looking. In fact, when you look
at pictures of it yourself back in the day with Peter,
you even can't tell each other apart.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
That's right, and it's only God or karma that's made
us look different and I look younger.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
Well, there you go. That's a subtle dig. He's not
here to defend himself, but they'll may become.

Speaker 3 (09:56):
Laywright mind in the saddle digs.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
Different personality is a very different fact. When you were
doing jobs that people would be amazed because you were
doing jobs separate and together in different places, and they'd
be talking about people saying, well, he even had a
different mood. One was stern and aggressive, the other was
cheeky and like alaricm you're pointing to yourself. You're with Alarkim.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
I would say so, because if you knew some of
the things I said to big tough gangsters in jail,
you know I don't have a sensible bone in my
body when it comes to the way I talk to people.
I usually talk has never got no respect. But then
I've worked with homeless people and mentored prisoners and that,
so obviously it's it's just my demeanor. But you're totally right.

(10:39):
My brother would have been more stern. He was carrying
a bigger gun. I was usually carrying an imitation pistol.
Being a bank seller, maybe I was more relaxed in
the style I was using. But you touched on jobs
twenty minutes apart. That was all got up so that
if you do one job, they surround the area with
their roadblocks or whatever. You do a second job just

(11:01):
outside the roadblocks. It causes chaos for them. So what
we wanted to do is cause chaos. So they'd lift
roadblocks in one area and then put the heat on
the other area, and they're not really certain what's going
on here. So we're taking in the upper hand. We're
planning what they're going to do.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
And The reality is most people in their lives have
stolen something at some stage, so they understand the feeling.
I won't go into my theft of a costume jewelry
ring from David Jones in nineteen seventy one. That's another story.
But what's it like to march into a bank with
even an imitation? And you also had a sawn off
shotgun at times too, which was loaded.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
Now never loaded in the bank, never loaded.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
In the bank, important difference. But what's it like? Your
brother talked about the massive adrenaline dump that takes place.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
I actually read that in an article that he was quoted,
and I actually sat there going wonder what that feels like,
because I'm very black and white. If you say to
me we're doing this, I go, okay, we're doing this,
just the same as you tell me we're going to
lift a heavy beam up in the building. Try to
go Okay, it looks pretty heavy, but we'll try and
do it. I've never really felt that. I was quite amazed.

(12:07):
He talked about that being the strongest drug in the
world and how we'd be high for ages, and I went, seriously,
I just don't get it.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Well, other armed robbers I've spoken to over the years
talk about the thrill not just of the job, but
the planning, the meticulous surveillance, working out what you're going
to do, getting away with it. It's a very long process.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
Sure, I'll give you that, but that's the same as
even in the building trade.

Speaker 3 (12:33):
When you're building a house.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
You look at the plans, you decipher what the house
is going to look like, and then you said about
how to build that house. And I think in the
same way, it's the way I look upon our armed robberies.
You'd say, this town has got a good bank, it's
a good target, it's got the things we need that
you can't see into the bank, so people walking past
go and see the robbery going down. So you go

(12:56):
through these checklists and so you then you select a bank.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
So it is like a job.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
So all that planning is quite sort of interest or
keeping you involved. I'll tell you what nobody could ever
understand is when you're going to the bush and you're
carrying a four to ten shot gun with buckshot, and
police and helicopters are all over you, and they're carrying
twelve gay shotguns and thirty eights and forty fives and

(13:24):
they will shoot and kill you on the spot, and
you're carrying a gun that won't even didn't their skin
basically because it's buckshot for birds, it.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Will bounce off a thick jumper or some.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
Sure, So that was I spent three days in the
bush after the Warburdon Bank and very cold and winter
up at the back of Warburton. Now you can't use
the torch because the helicopter might see the torch. So
it's really if you had to say some people enjoy
bush walking or camping or those things, I'm taking that
right to the limit.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Because themo was very clear you would do most of
your jobs in the winter months because the sun will
be down earlier and you'd hit these tab agencies and
banks later noon, so you could disappear under the cover
of darkness into the bush.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
What we used to do is work out a time.
We'd say, all right, we're a certain distance from Melbourne.
It'll take X amount of time for the helicopter to
get here. They only had one helicopter in those days,
so everything was planning around what they could do. We'd go, right,
they're going to take forty five minutes to get the
helicopter here. We must be undercover inside that forty five minutes.

(14:30):
That might mean you're well into the scrub where you
can't be found, or it's going to be hard. The
closer it is to darkness, obviously, the safer it is.
I'll give you an example, when you're a kid and
you're playing hiding. If you run out the front door
in daylight, they can see you running up the street.
You run outside at nighttime and you get behind one
lamp post and you are gone. And what I know,

(14:53):
I shouldn't talk like this, but the art to arm
robbery is doing the arm robbery them seeing you at
some point of time, but then there's a point of
time where you just vanish.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Right. We're not advocating a lift style as a robber
because it's changed a lot. You must walk into banks now,
and it'd be like Butch Cassidy walking into the bank
at the beginning of which casting and sinance Kidney. He goes,
what happened to the old bank? It was so beautiful
and the guard says people kept robbing it, And he says,
small price to pay for beauty. I mean, it's another
thing looking at banks today and you realize that a
lot of the security measures that are there today are

(15:26):
because of people like you.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Absolutely, they kept updating in the seventies and eighties. As
things go down, then you manipulated what you could do
back when the screens for us came in. Because of
my background as a bank teller, I would pick banks
that I knew the security was low.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
I'd be able to tell when the alarms had gone off.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
So my information was probably even better than my brothers
because we cased our own final casing of a bank.
But they had to keep improving things, and they've got
to the limit now that we're all out of business.
Except I'm a bit too old to jump counters anyway.
But that's the same as crime evolves. If you go
through the eras you used to rob saves out of factories,

(16:09):
then you do this, and you do that, and then
a period back you had kids knocking off people standing
at eight ms. Now you have home invasions. It's all
because if the banks weren't as protected, now those kids
might be robbing banks.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
Yes, it's all changed. And when you look at what happened,
you and your brother started off partners in crime. But
the fundamental differences between you quickly began to assert themselves.
Tell us how this happened.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
Well, he became an ego junkie to the robberies. He
also became an ego junkie to the media because he
had read the newspaper and they'd say something like, oh,
the after Bark band, it hasn't struck in three months.

Speaker 3 (16:55):
You go, oh, show them.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
He did one bank three times to show that he
could do getaways in three different directions. So I'll take
it to one very important part of my life. I
was after the warming bank. I was sitting under a
gum tree and I was counting thirty nine, nine hundred
and something while the helicopter buzzed around it, and I went,
Jesus enough to buy two houses in North Danny Long.

(17:18):
And I thought about that for a minute, and then
I thought about my brother's ego. And that was when
I decided not to rob anymore banks, because what I
realized by looking at my brother, if I continued, I
was an ego junkie too, and I didn't like that thought.
It was supposed to be about money, and I'll say
right from the start, I was lured by the money.

(17:40):
Once we got into it, but to think that it
became part of your lifestyle or part of your ego,
that's really bad.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
And I opted out.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
And then we started having some very serious fistfights, even
guns drawn, because I wanted him to stop because he
would get his caught of killed, which is almost what
happened indeed.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
And you were very competitive because that thirty nine thousand
dollars hall that you got was the biggest of all
your jobs. And Peter who fancied himself as the professional
and you as the dilettante who was just doing it
for fun. Almost he said Beginner's luck.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
Well, even when he got caught by the coppers, and
let's say involved a fair bit of our lives in
the questioning room, he even was telling them, I'm my brother,
was just Beginner's luck, and like I'm the main man,
I'm the after Dark Bandit. And he doesn't like Jeff
Wilkinson who nicknamed in the after Dark Bandit, but he
loves to be called it. And he's told press all

(18:37):
over the world that there's only one after Dark Bandit.
And my words to that is you can take it, brother,
because I'm Doug Morgan.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
There you go. And there was a moment which I
think you regret also where you did a lot off
a warning shot with your buck shot. It bounced off
the pavement, I think, and it struck someone in the mouth.

Speaker 3 (18:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
What happened was he kept following this night and yelled
out stop police, and I turned around to face him,
and my shotgun wasn't loaded, so I couldn't fire a
warning shot. I ducked into a lane way and leaned
against the paling fence and had a breather because I
was running pretty hard to keep in front of him.
And I loaded the shotgun which had buckshot in, walked
back out onto the roadway and it was nighttime, so

(19:18):
we just under one lamp post I was under another
with the light on, and I said, if you don't
stop chasing me, i'll shoot you, and he said, we'll
go on your bastard, And I thought, this guy's pushing
me to the limit here, so I aimed at him,
but then dropped the gun to the right and forward,
probably about five meters to one side and about fifteen
meters short. But the buck shot bounced on the bitchman.

(19:40):
One hit him in the chest and one hit him
in the lip. And when I saw his head go down.
I thought, oh my god, what's happened because I know
where I shot at.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
In the newspapers they said I.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Shot a man, and I believe that till the day
I got caught that I'd actually hit him. One hit
his lip and didn't penetrate the lip. But what happened
after that is incredible. That was a talkey I used
to travel through the paddocks of that.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
It took me hours and hours to get back to Geelong.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
When I get back to Geelong, my brother's heard that's
on the radio, somebody's been shot. So he lines me
up with his gun while he was going to murder
you a car park and he's going to shoot me
because I've broken the rules of not shooting. So he,
being the boss, was going to punish me by shooting
me for firing a warning shot. And even now I think,

(20:27):
so I can't fire a warning shot, but he can
shoot me.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
So that shows the sort of partnership we had.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
By this time, the police are getting very very interested
in you, and you are remembered by the Task Force
Operation rim Fire. All the cops are looking for you.
What's that like when you're the state's most wanted man
and there's two of you.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
Well, you don't sleep. I couldn't sleep at the farm
because I had a long driveway, but I also had
a bend in the road right at my driveway, so
every car or truck going from Foster at nighttime to
Toura would slow down on my bend. So I ended
up basically leaving home and ruined my marriage, which I
really regret because that affected my children not so much.

(21:09):
You can always get another wife, but you can't get
new children.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Well you can, but they're expensive, so you stick with
the ones you've got.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
And as I sat on the weekend, I spent time
with my grandchildren. So we've rebuilt our lives and our relationships.
But what it's like is you know your life is ruined.
You know you can't go on a building site and
you can't concentrate. So crime it's sort of a bit
like Heroin in a way, I suppose where it can

(21:36):
ruin your life and it totally takes over everything. And
that's why my theme now, even sitting here, all I
can think about is what a wasted time crime is,
and that what I believe is is putting it up
there and telling people what the consequences are and if
they want to rob banks or do drugs, I can't

(21:56):
stop them, but I'd like people to know the consequences.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
You knew the consequences because by the way, you and
Peter both married women called Pamela, which I think is cute,
and neither one told their wives what they were up to,
kept it away from your families.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Well, people asked me why my wife didn't know, and
I'll be totally honest, I thought, well, what would happen
if we get divorced in five years and she knew
I was a bank robber?

Speaker 1 (22:23):
You know?

Speaker 2 (22:23):
So I really believe I grew up as a ridgie
ditch crook with my father that you shouldn't be involving other.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
People because one day she'll give you up.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Yes, well, if you're a crook.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
It's like I even see movies and they talk about
you've got to be ready to move in fifteen minutes
or something like that. I am a total believer. If
you're going to be a crook, you don't have a
real life as such.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
This could never go on forever, and the bigger the jobs.
Peter was much more ambitious than you. There were times
when you actually pulled out of jobs because you could
possibly see what's going to happen in the future. What
was going on there.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
Well, I'm not a natural arm robber. It's not my
personality to pointing guns of people. If I pick a
gun up, all I'm but is it could go off
by mistake. And I've been shot at by a screw
when I was trying to escape, and one of my
thoughts was, I hope he is a good shot, so
he either aims to miss or aims to kill. And

(23:19):
I've had Peter's gun at the back of my head once.
So I was never really wanting to be an armor robber.
I started off as my brother's assistant. He kept pushing
him and pushing me for me to do the front job,
be the front man, because he said that's what I
had to do. It's almost like saying, you're raiding the pantry,
you've got to eat one of the biscuits. So mom
can't tell me, I feel she'll have to tell us

(23:41):
both off. Look, I'm a stand up guy, and look,
my belief about armed robbers is their bloody laborers. If
they could do anything decent, they wouldn't have to carry
a gun.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
That's right. And in the end it did bring you
to grief because as much as Peter disliked what you
did faring on that policeman, he also did the same thing.
And that was the beginning of then what happened there.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
Well, see when i I'm firing, I'm actually still in
control because I'm twenty yards away. My brother three times
pushed the pistol that was evidence from the first job
into the stomach of three different coppers. One on one
bank shob There was a copper in his car, I think,
and my brother got.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
Him out of the car.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Then on the day when he shot Kosh, he's let
Kosh get right up to him, and when they started struggling,
he shoved the gun into his stomach. Gun went off.
Nobody knows except for remember brother, if it meant to
go off. Then the next day he shoved the same
gun into another policeman's stomach who was unarmed. Look, if
you ask me what's the gun for, it's for shooting

(24:44):
rabbits and warning people. Now, you don't have to stick
it right into somebody if you're going to do a
warning shot in the lane way. The copper was unarmed,
Peter could see was unarmed. He didn't have a belt
on with a gun. Peter should have pulled his gun
fifteen feet before the copper got to him.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Then Peter would have left the area.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
But the whole thing stemmed from over confidence because there
he was in Heathcoat, being the same bank for a
third time, and he's seeing the policeman Kosh lapping in
the block as certain ittable. He thinks, in the interim,
I'll dive in and rob the bank for the third time.
By the way, take the orange dats in that's owned
by one of the tellers as they get away cup
for the second time, and she must have been horrified.

(25:22):
But Kosh turns up earlier than expected, and a struggling.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Kosh was doing laps and he just four point thirty
days last lap and he was going to go back
to the station and finish.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
He decided to do one more lap.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
But I'll give you a example of my brother's ego
taking over, and he's over confidence. He was watching a
tab one night and he was trying to rob it
and the copper was doing laps. We were so hot,
they were doing laps all the time. My brother waited
to the copper ran out of petrol and went to
the local petrol station. As soon as he was filling
his car up, my brother the tab. That's how hot

(25:55):
he was working.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Well.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
The copper obviously couldn't chase him because he was filling
his car, but Kosh could come back. And that's what
got cost shot because my brother let him get too close.
When Kosh did confront him, and even the mask from
my brother wore brought him undone. Once you pull a
full headed mask over your head, you can't walk away.
If you're sitting in the street, you're done. And even

(26:19):
for me, I wouldn't wear that. I used to wear
a sailing jacket and I'd wander around Warbot in the
winter and everybody else had sailing jackets and hoodies on.
And at the last minute, as I'm about to walk
into the bank, I'd pull a scarf up like a cowboy,
because I knew if you're wearing one of those masks
from the vic market or wherever, you can't walk down

(26:40):
a street.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Your relationship with Peter was already very fractured. I think
just prior to this time, you've gone to the races
together in his hot car, he's got the boot full
of guns and money and so forth. He looks around,
you disappear, goes to the car park, finds his hot
car is gone, and you are as well. Gets home
to find the vehicle is there with the doors open,

(27:02):
the briefcase full of money, and the guns are gone.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
What happened, Well, I'd mentioned earlier how he was pushing
me to do more jobs, and what he started saying.
We had an agreement right at the start the person
who was the assistant gets one third of the take
and the person in the arm, Robbie, gets two thirds.
He started saying, you've only done a third of the
jobs I've done.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
You're a parasite. You're living off my earnings.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
And he was really giving it to me because for
the first time in his life he was the master
of the twins. In his opinion, what he was was
an ego out of control. So he kept pushing me
and pushing me. And if you start killing me a parasite,
I'm going to get my back up. And when you're
looking in the man's only calls you a parasite, you
either hit him or you do something to stop him

(27:46):
doing it. So I thought, all right, I'll do a job.
I'm going to take your car for a drive, get
another set of keyscut while I'm driving it, and next
time we go to the races, I'm going to take
whatever's in the boot and show you that I'm not
scared of you and you might not be the master
you think you are. And then after that, when he
was looking for me, I've rung him and I've said

(28:09):
I'll have a meeting with you. I'll give you back
your prize position, a little gun, and I'll give you
back half the money. I met him, I wasn't armed.
I gave him his gun, which proved I wasn't scared
of him, and I gave him half the money.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
And so there you go. He never called me a
parasite again.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
Called the other names though, we'll get to those. But
after the shooting of Kosh, the end was always going
to come quickly. How did it come?

Speaker 3 (28:34):
Well?

Speaker 2 (28:34):
The next day? We had everything planned so well. He
got out of the search area, got past the roadblocks,
and he was supposed to stay out of church and
sleep that night under the church. He's never actually spent
any nights in the scrub. He's always got out that night.
He stayed the first night so it was too cold.
This is what he told people in the media. And
then he hit hiked into Binioh. I questioned all this.

(28:59):
I asked him once, why did you leave our safe
spot where you were and you'd eating the roadblocks? He said,
I shot one of them. They're going to kill me.
And I just looked at him, laughed and said, well
you started it.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
And if he.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
Didn't know, you started though, to be fair, dug didn't
you father?

Speaker 3 (29:17):
First?

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Well he shot somebody. Once you shoot a copper, they're
going to aim you up. So don't act like a pussy.
If you want to do stuff like that, you men
are And if he had a state at that point,
he wouldn't have got it getarrested because I couldn't get
in that morning. I went to roadblocks and had to
turn around, so I couldn't get him out of the
area the next morning, which was my deal. So everying

(29:37):
was planned twenty four hour later, I'll come and get
you if it's still too hot twenty four hours.

Speaker 3 (29:43):
But he was running scared. Now what I question about
his logic.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
He hitchhikes on the main road from Heathcirt to Benigo Benn.
He goes the biggest town, so the police will be
traveling that road, So he's hits you going on the
road the police will be traveling on what I don't like,
and I will never agree to. He gets into a
car with a woman and child. Now what say they
get Paul eddaver because there's another roadblock further up that

(30:08):
he doesn't know about. Does he use the woman and
the child as a hostage? Do they get shot in crossfire?
These are the things that broke our relationship totally up
because he did things that were far beyond what we'd
planned or what morally we could accept.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
So that rift is still there.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
I cannot cope with those things because you put the
public in danger because you were too lazy to carry
out our getaway plan.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Peter was apprehended after a struggle with another police officer,
who people say he tried to shoot. It was only
then that they realized there wasn't one bandit, there was
two and they're identical twins. How did they learn about
your involvement?

Speaker 3 (30:55):
All false?

Speaker 2 (30:56):
What the media thinks and what people have been saying
is they found a photo of me in my brother's
house when they searched his house. Peter never had that
photo on his mantelpiece. I've never had a photo of
Peter on my mantel piece. They must have went to
draws to find that. Why were they looking in draws
for photos when they've got their man. Now I've actually
asked Peter why he gave me up. He told me

(31:19):
he was going to give me up the last time.
We had a fistfight and he put a gun at
the back of my head and he said, if I
get done, you're going And I said, your kid naun't you.
When I was sitting on the run after he got caught,
I didn't believe he would give me up because I
thought he was just giving me a hard time. I
asked him once, why did you give me up? And

(31:40):
this is what he told me, many many many years ago,
not now with.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
A media hype. He said.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
I tried to tell them shooting Kosh was an accident.
Then they said, what about the shooting at Torquay which
was yours which was mine? He said, oh, I can't
have two accidental shootings, can I judge is not going
to wear that one now.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
Peter didn't know that the first one.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
The bloke wasn't hurt, so they use that against him
to scare him, and by scaring him were two shootings.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
He gave me up, and I'm going to say that
him giving you up saved at least one of your lives,
because you fellas were headed for disaster. Like you said,
when you shoot a cop, they all come after you,
and they don't mind if you're carried out in a
body bag at the end of the day.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
What I do know is that if he hadn't given
me up and they found out I was involved, I
would be marked. What I also know through what they
learned from him. I won't say it was him, but
some people were asked, what will Doug do now that
you've got his brother and your brother's on the run.
They wanted to know which banks I would hit next.

(32:48):
They might have got information to know which banks I
would hit to raise money to get out of Australia,
and the word was that if I walked into one
of those banks, I was dead. It's as simple as that.
It got pretty heavy. And what happens is the police
know how to work people. They're good at their job.
When they get you in a room and they'll use
a lot of pressure. My brothers talked about when they

(33:09):
had him in the helicopter that they threatened to throw
him out of the helicopter. He's talked about when he's
been questioned at how petrol in the room, All sorts
of little tricks that they play, and anybody that knows,
and like, there's old stories where they used to hang
people out of the Russell Street windows, and I've actually
asked people about it, and I actually believe it's true
that there was a particular copper that used to dangle

(33:31):
people out of a window and unless you started talking,
but they never dropped anybody, So everybody used to talk obviously.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
That's right. I think there's more than one that used
to do similar tactics. Actually, but then again, it was
a war back then, and you talk to the In fact,
I know a bank teller who has robbed a couple
of times in the early eighties and developed terrible post
traumatic stress from having guns poked in his face twice.
So these were traumatic, big headline crimes. And then you

(34:01):
top it off by having a cop get shot in
one of these. Are they going to get a light sentence?
The pair of you? What happened when you're front of
the magistrate or the judge.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
Well, it's actually very interesting what happens with the legal system,
and it should be shown in educational sorts of things.
Coppers make a deal with me. I won't sign any
statements that they make their statements for me off my
brother's statements, and I refuse to sign. I would sit
there all day and they'd make statements. How that sounded,
I go whatever. Every statement of mine that was made

(34:32):
by a different copper has different.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Wording because it wasn't my words.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
After about ten days, I said, do you give me
back money cars et cetera, et cetera. I'll sign, all right,
but I want to deal. They said, all right, we'll
give you a fifteen with a twelve. And people don't
know this is what really goes on. We'll give you
a fifteen with a twelve. You're happy, Hell, I'm happy.
I'll sign right now.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
That's a fifteen year head sentence with twelve on the
bottom is a minimum.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
Right, So they say to me, this is what's going
to get I gave a court and I get a
fifteen with a twelve. Copper's got me the fifteen with
it twelve. What did Peter get he got about a
seventeen worth of twelve sting. He got a little bit
more for all the things and shooting a copper and
all this sort of stuff, right.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
And he gave you up and didn't get any discount
for that.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Well, he probably should have got a lot more, and
he got a discount maybe.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Now.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
My mother comes in to see me at Penridge and
she says, you know, you can get a smaller sentence
if you work with the arm robbers and give them
some money.

Speaker 3 (35:27):
Now, my mother's never lied to me in my life.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
And I looked her and said, I wouldn't give a
cent to corrupt police. I don't know if it was
true or not. That's what my mother said. And I
have no doubt my mother was telling me the truth.
A lot of corruption and police forces all over the world.
Why should Melbourne be any different.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
Now?

Speaker 2 (35:46):
The thing is, they give me a fifteen or twelve,
they're good for the deal. Jeff Wilkinson and Jeff Is
admitted to this former Herold Sam Journo as well. He's
having a beer with all the top cops one night
and they decided that Dougie Morgan should get a bit
of extra time because he didn't get punished enough. While
they're having a before the Crown's time of appeal runs out,

(36:09):
Jeff Wilkins wrote an article and he admits he deliberately
sat forward to get me a longer sentence. He writes
an article that the public is outcry of my small
twelve year sentence and get out in eight years. They
started carrying on in the media about you shouldn't get remission,
you shouldn't get this. Well, everybody else gets it, why
shouldn't I get it. What happens is the Crown see

(36:32):
all these articles, they appeal and they give me a
twenty over seventeen. So now I'm going to do twelve
years roughly. Now, I asked Jeff when I got out
of jail, Hey, Jeff, so what do you do. Do
you do a public survey? No, we were just having
a drink. We decided you should get more time. So
I said, so, you actually told a lie in the

(36:52):
newspaper that you should have just said it was me
and the boys. That's how the legal system works and
the media works. Now, I'm not saying the media is
bad because I'm the bank robber. Once I become a
bank Robber. It's open slather on poor old Dougie, and
I accept that, and that's part of my responsibility in
rebuilding my life. I have been to Jeff's house, I've

(37:15):
had meals with Jeff. I have no animosity at all.
But at the time that moment he told me that,
I went, I don't think that's fair, Jeff, but such
is life.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
Well, it wasn't as if you robbed a Lully store,
was it. Look, you probably deserve what you've got. But
there you are behind the bluestone walls of the College
of Knowledge Pentridge Prison. You'd never been in custody before,
had no criminal record. You're amongst some of the heaviest
criminals of your generation, and you're the after Dark Beannit
or at least part of the duo. How are you treated?

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Everybody treats me the same. They don't know what they do.
But see, I actually set my jail up by mistake.
When I walked into the yard, there was Chuck Bennett
and the boys, and they're playing cards and made Jack
Bennett and Robert Robber. He supposedly did the bookie robbery
Buck in the seventies. Supposedly, I don't know if he
was convince, I'm not going to put him in anyway.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
So he was one of the boys.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
He had his crew there, and I just walked in
and went, well, I don't need to hang out with
those And I sat on a bench in the sun
and I'm just sitting there, and slowly people came and
sat next to me. Over the next days or so,
so I just had guys and we never talked about crime.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
I'm not into that stuff. My brother used to hang
around with the big boys.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
But my jail thought of went in one direction. I
think it started one day when they were carrying out
a body and I was looking at the body being
carried out. I thought it was Dad, and the screw
standing next to me said it only be one thing
better if it was you or your brother.

Speaker 3 (38:37):
So I king hit him. Not a good thing.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
The king hit the screw after h division. No, what
happened was I moved down to where our meals the
area was. All the screws are at the other end.
Just they had me surrounded. There's nowhere to go in jail.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
After about ten minutes, that screw that I hit came
down and said, I've been told to apologize by the governor. Now,
I don't take myself that I'm that good. What I
realized straight away was we've got a one hundred and
fifty criminals in the yard of body's being carried out.
One guy's fired up and hit a screw for saying
something stupid. What the governor would have been worried about

(39:12):
was a lot more violence during that day towards the screws,
if they beat the crap out of me. So I
think the governor made a wise move. I think people
started to go, well, this brother is a little bit haywire.
But what happened over my journey in jail, I kept
standing up to the system, and I think the heavy
started to go. I got given up a few times

(39:34):
by some of the heavies. So I started building a
reputation and even Jeff Wilks and people like that. Probably
I set myself up that people go, well, he's a
stand up boy, so just leave him alone. And if
you cross me my attitude as well. Today somebody's going
to get hurt, and so be it. Because what I

(39:55):
learned pretty quick was I used to jokingly say to
people my football team was tougher than this. We had
fights that both teams were in like the old days.
I have never used a weapon on anybody, not in jail,
not in anywhere. I'm a stand up boy. If you
say something, I'll punch you, and I'll punch that screw
again today. If you said that again, I didn't give
us stuff. That's what he deserved. What I didn't realize

(40:17):
is I had no respect for a uniform ideal with men.
Just because you've got a uniform on, don't treat me
like trash.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
And that attitude got you put in h division, the
punishment division seven times. It's almost a record, I think.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
Well, possibly, but there was always for investigation. I was
investigated for stealing eight hundred dollars out of a safe.
I was investigated for four sticks of Jelig Knight. So
I actually got the painterwork.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
On four sticks of Jelig Knight inside jail.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
Well.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
I ended up pretty well running my life and air.
I read a book was called King Rat. It was
about prisoners of war in Japanese war cams. And you
know when all the movies there's always a guy who's
got the cigarettes.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
I want to be that guy. I want to be
the mover.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
So I started selling stuff or selling paintings and getting
cigarettes and selling the cigarettes. I helped move escape equipment
around the jail. I helped my brother get a porter power.
We moved a porter power from one part of the
jail to another part of the jail to bend bars
with for his escape. So I very much became the
go to boy. And if people wanted to get all

(41:21):
owned up. Now when the girls are in the annex
right next to B Division, some of the boys had
come Dougie, can you get into the annex because you're
a carpenter and you used to work in one gang.
They had heard that the girls needed shelves to put
their TVs on in the new cells.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
I said, yeah, I'll go and see.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
One gang and get a job there and I'll be
able to get into the annex. So what I did,
I went and got the job so I could deliberately
get into the annex, so I could take drugs into
the annex. What I did was I made myself a toolbox,
like the old fashioned wooden one with a handle across
the top. It had a false compartment, so I used
to get the drugs from the boys, and B Division
put him in my toolbox and take him into the

(41:59):
annex to their girlfriends. Now, one day, one of the
overseers from one gang, I mean his name, I just
remember his name right now. We were walking up to
the annex and put a shelf up for a TV
and the dog squad was in the annex and I've
got drugs in my toolbox. He looked at me and said,
do you reckon? You should have a coffee. I said yes,

(42:19):
I'd like to go into BE Division where I lived. Oh,
I'm going to have a coffee. So I go into
BE Division. Now I can't take the tools to myself,
so I went into the B division to the circle.
I looked at the screw and going, look, I'm just
going to grab a coffee and I'm going in the
annex in a minute. But they're not ready for me yet.
Can you look after my tools for me? So the
screws looked after my drugs and tools while I had

(42:40):
a coffee.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
Nice one. So I think the statute of limitations may
have run out, so you could be safe on that one.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
They can come for me.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
But somewhere in your long stretch, your heart changed. A
lot of guys went into Pentridge particularly h division went
in as a bicycle thief, came out as a very serious,
pathological murderer. What happened to you in there that changed
your life?

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Well, go back to where I said under that tree,
looked at my brother's ego. I decided that day never
to be a bank robbery again. I never carried a
gun after that. I never robbed a bank after that.
I assisted him on the last job. I didn't want to,
and I said, I'm not going to assist you, and
I'll tell you the truth if I assisted him because
a friend of mine wanted ten thousand dollars to buy
a trailer for a semi My brother wanted to do

(43:23):
a job, and that's why I helped him in the
last job. But I did very little, and that's why
he got caught. I always looked upon the jail as
the gap in my life between going back out and
having a life and actually living up to my ability.
So the jail to me was just not part of
the crimes. But I probably had more fun or more

(43:44):
anti social while I was in jail than on the outside,
because I didn't like the system. It was too brutal
for what it was meant to be. Too many young
people hung themselves. Too many young people got raped. Now
people talk about jails, and I'm involved with the National
Trust and tours and stuff like that over the past.
Don't do it anymore. And people say, what's the jail?

(44:04):
Like I go, jail is not a jail. You put
criminals into a room. That's a jail. The creams inside
the jail and the screws with the buttons, the men
on both sides of the jail, they're the violence, they're
the intimidation, they're the stress. Right now, what happens is
am I joking about this? Because most creams will talk, oh, jail,

(44:27):
and they're so bad, and they treat us like this,
And I openly say this to people. They go So
when you reflect, now, what do you see about the jail?
I copped a few buttons and got my heads from
bashed into the concrete a couple of times, but that
wound heals. No button has ever busted me. What busted
me was what I did.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
To my children, correct, But also the things that happened
to other people that you were witnessed too. You talk
about the eight or ten young men who suicided while
you're in there. You talk about when Jimmy Lofton, who
came to fame by stabbing chopper later on, but you
saw him cutch someone's throat and the blood went on you. Yep,

(45:09):
these things are wounds that never heal.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
Yes, but there.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
I spent three years as a volunteer after the Black
sat Day bushfires. I have more feeling for those victims
than the bloker got his throat cut, because if you
weren't in jail, you didn't get the throat cut, because
he was a reasonably big time crew. But the problem
I have with jail was I wear this beard. I
grew that in jail and refused to shave and did.

(45:36):
Then nextra six months jail for that beard because they
told me I couldn't have a beard because of lice,
but I could have five showers, ten hours a day.
That rule was nineteen hundred and one. Now I'll give
you an example. I didn't like jail. They moved me
from D Division. You're supposed to stay there till your sentence.
I got kicked out of D Division. I spent two
weeks in the condemn yard by myself. That held me there,

(45:57):
which was a great time to reflect being in the
condemn yard, knowing Ronald Ryan was the last one hung there.
When I get to a division, I walk into a
di v's and I see the chief and the governor
because they talked to you when you get there. And
I said, oh, can I have a TV? I'm doing
a long time. And they said, no, you can't have
a TV. You've got to be a lifer. There was
a cells on the bottom of a division. On the

(46:18):
bottom tier, they all had TVs and the other one
hundred prisoners had no TVs.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
I went, why are they different?

Speaker 2 (46:25):
So if the public knew that people that had killed
people were getting better treatment than somebody who sold a car,
they'd be amazed.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Do you know, I said the governor. I said, no,
I want a TV. They got TV.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
I want a TV. I believed in equal rights. He said,
you're not doing life. You've got to be doing life.
Said you know, I said toweenm flippantly. I said, give
me five minutes. I'll be back from a TV. He
gave me a TV. But what I learned was the
system was wrong because it made class distinctions. Now I'll
tell you that the A division was run by the

(46:56):
drama group. In those days now. The governor loved the
drama group because it brought in revenue they gave to charity,
made the jail look good. Do you know who had
control anybody who had control of the drama group, the prisoner.
He had God all mighty power over the rest of
the prisoners in a division because he was the top man,

(47:17):
because the governor looked after him. The man that ran
the drama group when I got there was Keith Riary,
a child molester. He had the best selling a division,
a child molester.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
Life is not fair, especially inside jail. But you developed
a fierce disdain for authority in there. You're an ext
bank robber, You've shot some of them on the run and
all that kind of stuff. You come out a lot
of people with your profile, spent about five minutes on
the outside, full foul of the law, and go back
in again. Why didn't you?

Speaker 2 (47:45):
Because I was sticking to what I believed and I
was going to go straight. When I walked out of prison,
I looked over my shoulder, I still remember it, looked
over my left shoulder and said, war was over.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
Boys.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
And I went home and within three days I was
working in the may Max factory. At Daninong on the
two o'clock start shift making us and I rebuilt my life.
I got day leaves. In the last couple of months
of my jail. I didn't go home to have a
party with my wife or girlfriend. I went and did

(48:17):
car lessons. So I get a new license because I
lost it because I was a carfief. So everything I
was doing, even learning to paint and raise money and
selling cigarettes to raise money, everything I did was for
one aim, my next adventure.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
And you've worked with at risk youth as well. You've
tried to give back, You've stayed straight all these years.
How do you reflect on the decisions now? You think
of the wasted time robbing banks and doing all that jail.
What do you think life would have held for you otherwise?

Speaker 2 (48:52):
If I wasn't a banker, HM probably be pretty boring. Really,
I'd just be a carpenter. I'm a very good carton,
better cartoner than a bank robber. But look at it
this way, Adam, what power do I have now? I
have the experience and the stories that young people take
notice of what I say. You have no idea I
have young people even out of pantries. I'll walk up

(49:15):
to a group at school, kids like high school kids
that are having a coffee or whatever, or a donut
or something in the grounds of pantries from the nearby schools,
and I'll go, hey, come and sit down, and they'll
look at me and go, you want to talk to
an old bank robber. They google me straight away and
see I'm being serious, and they ask totally on the

(49:36):
edge of every word I say, and at the end
of every conversation, I'll tell them live up to your potential,
don't waste it. And the other thing is, I'll quote
some footballers in a strange way. I can be a
role model. And I even look at it, even driving
down here today. There's very few crims like that have
done what I've done or been involved with the things
in pentries, that will stand there and go all that

(49:59):
is got to help somebody. So in that case, like
I've done, letchures at vic Uni to the law students
and all I asked from them was that one of
them in that room would think about how they can
change things for the better. I said, then the job
will be worthwhile. Otherwise it's just money. I used to

(50:19):
go to Raven Hall Prison before the pandemic, and I
was the warm up act talking to the prisoners and
tell them what jobs they could give them when they
get out. My opening words to the prisoners was, I'm
very sad. I am really sad today to see you here.
I'm old enough to be your grandfather or your father,
and you are failing. You've got to be better crooks

(50:41):
or stop doing it. I'm not here to tell you
can't be a crook, but if you're a bad crook,
stop doing it. Because what my belief is, I will
never say to somebody, don't do this because you're hurting people.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
That will not work.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
You have to say to people, don't do this because
you're going to hurt yourself.

Speaker 1 (50:59):
You put your life together again, admirably, repaired your relationship
with your children. You're able member of society. There's one
unfinished piece of business. Your ole partner in crime, your
brother you don't talk to at all, and you fire
potshots at each other. Do you think there's a day
where you might be able to patch that one up.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Well, I hadn't spoken to him for two years and
it was going to be a documentary, so they contacted
him and then he rang me to see if he
wanted to do it with me, and I said to him,
only do it if there's something in it for you,
because they're going to take you to town again.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
So I actually gave him advice.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
But during those conversations, for about a week or two weeks,
I realized that I don't want to be involved with
documentaries that highlight only too much on the crimes. And
I actually told my brother, I said, don't worry. We've
had a lot of fistfights. And he hit me on
the head with lumps of timber and tried to stab me.
And I've heard of his bullets whistle past me as well.
So we won't get into all that. And do you

(51:56):
know what I said to him, I said, I'm not
angry at you've forgiven me up, because they would have
shot me anyway.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
So he did you a favor, I reckon, well, I
actually we all carry what we've done now.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
I would imagine the press. Have you mentioned it today?
He gave me up. That must hurt him. I know that,
so deep down I do feel sorry for him. But
all I ever wanted for him was sorry, Doug, I weakened.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
I knew you would, but everyone does in the end.
That's the fallacy of all this staunchness. Eventually, when you're
in custody facing a long stretch, they all do it.

Speaker 3 (52:34):
Well, guess what.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
I've sat in hatavision cells doing time and hastivision for
other people who had actually given me up. And you
know what I thought to myself, Well, I'm above that person,
aren't I.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
I've got a bit of morals.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
Well, maybe maybe he will come to you and say
I'm sorry, ask for forgiveness. What about you forgiving him?

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Well, have I told him that I know? And you've
said it to me, and you've said it now if
they had just got him, he didn't follow the plans
how we were going to beat all this, so he
brought it undone.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
All right, once it's undone, it's gone. Now.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Everybody that knows us knew we worked together on the
building sites. Knew we did everything together except when we
were punching on then we'd have about a week apart.
We had some really good nights on buildings sides. Don't
worry about that. Tried to run over me one night
with his car, so it used to get pretty heated,
but that's life.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
We've been punching on since we'll four.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
And the thing is, everybody would have said if they
once he's was known on TV that he's the after
dark banded, everybody would have been jumping up and ringing
the police and going, you better have a look at
his brother. So I would have been gone, and I
already had the police on my back from when I
was a bank teller. When I left the bank there
was supposedly money disappeared.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
Oh another bank robbery that we can add to your Telly.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Now I beat that. When I'm a good talker, good Doug.

Speaker 1 (53:55):
It's an absolute pleasure talking to you, And I think
next time I have you here, my dream, my wish
is to have the other after that bandit sitting next
to you, think it's a possibility.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
We were like what he would say, What he would
say to me, not to you? Why should I make
those bastards any money?

Speaker 1 (54:14):
Well, you know, the reconciliation is a tantalizing thought though,
my friends.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
Well see the reason. I'll tell you why I do it.
I think that I go okay, the media. What people
have to understand the media. I can live off crime,
and criminals can't live off crime. That's the law. But
what I realize is I've already said it today. My
life was wasted that period, but it came good because
I've now got the power to do something so that
makes my wasted life worthwhile. That's why I'm here today.

(54:44):
I'm not here for dollars. I don't care about the
dollars because dollars will not help anybody else. All they'll
do is I'll probably go to the races tomorrow. And
because I used to joke only, I used to be
a big gambler, but it's a lot harder when it's
your own money.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
Indeed, Well, thanks for your time, Dog really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
It's been a pleasure and I hope that we're open
to a few people or people have listened to us
that will think about living up to their potential.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
That was Doug Morgan, one part of the After Dark
Bandit there were two of them, identical twins. It's one
of the great Australian stories. There should be a film
about it. In my opinion, one day someone will make
a film. In the meantime, it's been an absolute pleasure to
talk to Doug Morgan today. If you have any stories,
please let us know. Send me an email on Adam Shanner,
writer at gmail dot com. If you want to call

(55:31):
crime stop as you can, but call me first. If
you don't mind to send me an email first. I'll
let it had a triple three, triples zero. This has
been a real crime with Adam shann Thank you for listening.
Make sure you subscribe and we'll talk to you next time.
Thank you.