Australia tells career criminal, 81, to go ‘home’ to Britain
By Flynn Murphy in Sydney A VIOLENT career criminal who has lived for nearly seven decades in Australia has pledged to fight his forced repatriation to Britain when he is released from prison in August.
Robert “Bertie” Kidd, 81, who is described as “criminal royalty”, migrated to Australia from England in 1948 aged 14.
Kidd has spent much of his life in prison and is cur- rently serving a sentence for his involvement in a series of armed robberies and burglaries in Sydney. He was 71 at the time of sentencing.
Brian Bourke, a barrister who has represented Kidd, has described him as “one of the most complete criminals I ever knew”.
In a letter obtained by the broadcaster ABC, Kidd described himself as a “£10 Pom” and said he would fight deportation “boots and all”.
Kidd described being enlisted into the Australian army, saying he was prepared to fight for the country in wartime. “No one has ever said to me, ‘be careful they may send you back to London’, I would have laughed at that, as I am an Aussie.”
In the 1960s he was jailed for two years for possession of forged bank notes.
In 1970 he was shot in the stomach at his home, and was later jailed for five years after stealing $240 from a factory safe in Melbourne.
Another safe robbery followed, before in 1982 he was caught hiding in a wooden crate on a plane that was carrying $1 million in notes.
Weapons belonging to Kidd were used to shoot dead two underworld figures in Sydney in the 1990s.
In 1997, Kidd shot a plain clothes policeman during a botched robbery in Brisbane and was jailed for 11 years.
Clive Small, a former New South Wales assistant police commissioner, told The Daily
Telegraph he had no sympathy for Kidd, whom he suspected had not worked “one honest day in his life”.
“The way I see it, as Australians we’ve been paying for him ever since the 1960s – as victims of his crimes, when we’ve held him in jail – and now we’re being asked to pay for his pension?”
The Foreign Office said it will not object to Kidd’s deportation, adding: “We do not interfere in the judicial processes of other countries, just as we would not expect them to interfere in ours.”