Artful dodger
Sun Herald
Sunday July 5, 2009
He led police a merry dance. Now Keith Hahn has confessed to one of Sydney's most mysterious art thefts, writes LES KENNEDY. The second time petty thief, prison escapee and "notorious fugitive" Keith Hahn was on the run, he was adamant there were two ways he could die.Either a copper's bullet would cut him down or a member of Sydney's underworld would do the deed.But both, he maintained, would silence him for the same reason: to stop him telling what he knew about police corruption and a sensational art heist that electrified 1960s Sydney.Forty years on, Kevin Joseph William Hahn has survived. He is now 73, frail, and says death, due to age and serious illness, is not far off. He's wary but ready to talk about the days long forgotten by later generations when he was among Australia's most wanted men. He is prepared for the first time and for the record to confess to one of Australia's biggest art thefts.At the time of Hahn's daring escape from the cells beneath Darlinghurst courthouse, his disappearance and the manhunt that followed prompted comparisons with the popular television series The Fugitive.He was "vicious", "armed" and "dangerous", the police told the press. Rumours were rife. He was dead, killed in a fire, no, he was "alive and well" and "planned to stay that way".Alleging that he was being set up for death-by-cop, in a Ned Kelly moment Hahn wrote to The Sun to plead for his life."The allegation that I, in particular, am armed and shall resort to violence is nothing short of a well-laid plan the climax of which shall be my death by a bullet," he said."To you the public I submit this plea: Judge me not as they would have you judge me ... I have a father, brothers and sisters, desires and fears in short, I am a human being, not a savage animal to be shot on sight."A career criminal who knocked around Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, he alleged he knew of "savage corruption" among police.This was the Askin era. Organised crime was taking firm root in Sydney with official blessing, police corruption flourished and went right to the commissioner's office.With accusations of police misconduct swirling around the art theft case and the opposition demanding a royal commission into organised crime, Labor leader Pat Hills called for Hahn to be captured unharmed."Hahn, if he is still alive, must be found and protected from those whom he believes are seeking to murder him," Hills said. "And the information he possesses must be placed in the proper hands."After two years on the run, Hahn was captured. "Someone gave me up," he says. He was sentenced to seven years for escaping from lawful custody, a further nine burglary offences, and possession of a pistol and explosives.Hahn says he went straight after his release in 1973 at the age of 38, having served almost 20 years in a succession of prison stints.Today, he sits in the lounge room of a cold and rundown housing commission tenement in the north-west suburb of Lalor Park, wheezing and from time to time weeping as he recalls his life of crime, of bent cops, and his two audacious jail escapes. "But!" he emphasises: "I never murdered, hurt or raped anyone."Hahn's first encounter with the law came in 1946. "I was 10 years old, just a little boy and my father worked as a ganger on the railways," he says. "We had next to nothing and we lived at Burwood."I was walking home one day from school and I saw a horse-drawn brewery cart with crates of beer and wine in the dray and so I reached up and grabbed a bottle of grog for me father because he had nothing, to take it home to him. I didn't think it would cause any harm."Then a man came out of the cellar and chased me down the road and grabbed me. He took me to the police and that's where it began, they put me in jail and sent me to Mittagong [boys home]. I was only 10 years old, just a little boy."For the next 10 years Hahn says he was in and out of juvenile institutions for theft and robbery.In January 1947, Hahn, 21, then a labourer, got his first dose of adult prison and was sentenced to seven years' jail, for an assault at Fairymeadow with a .22 revolver during an attempted robbery. He says the police beat him to extract a confession. The police alleged he wrote a boastful admission in prison.He kept his nose clean in jail but in October 1963, while close to release, he blew it all in an escape from Long Bay that embarrassed prison authorities and made headlines.Hahn, then a "trusted" minimum security prisoner simply walked out through the main gate after changing his prison-green inmate clothes for a white T-shirt and shorts. He was on the run for two weeks before being recaptured in the south-western NSW town of Cootamundra.Hahn now says he made the white T-shirt and shorts in secret and gave the appearance of a prison guard on his way to play tennis during the guards' sports day. To complete the disguise he also made a fake watch from tin foil and carried a tennis racket. He says he walked clean through the gate. His jail term was increased by two years.After his release Hahn disappeared from the radar, at least for a while.On November 6, 1967, the Australian art world was stunned by news of the theft of 37 paintings and drawings from the Canberra Avenue, Wollstonecraft, home of Belgium-born composer, wool broker and art collector Camille Clovis Gheysens. The paintings were valued then at $200,000; today that figure is equivalent to more than $2 million.Newspapers reported the stolen works, many of which were cut from their frames, included 21 Dobells, seven Drysdales, two Nolans, two Norman Lindsays, two Toulouse-Lautrecs, a Gauguin and a Picasso. A record was set for a Picasso oil on canvas in 2004 at $US104 million. The thief or thieves were regarded as professional, possibly from abroad. Police were baffled. The stolen works were too hot to fence in Australia, they believed.With police stumped, Mr Gheysens put an advertisement in The Sun-Herald offering a $10,000 reward for the return of the collection.With that sort of money at stake, members of the Sydney underworld joined in the hunt, hoping to grab the paintings and claim the reward.Then, on the night of January 16, 1968, the paintings were mysteriously recovered from an inner-city location by police.Questions began to surface in the media and in Parliament about who got the reward.By Friday May 17, 1968, Hahn had been busted again by police and was in the exercise yard of the cell holding area of Sydney's Darlinghurst District Court awaiting sentence on charges of car stealing and break and enter.Hahn now claims his arrest was a square-up by police to keep him quiet for what he knew about the theft of those artworks but he didn't intend to stay put. Instead, he and two other inmates pulled off the break-out that elevated him to the state's "most wanted" list.Police said Hahn, then 33, and two fellow prisoners escaped by climbing a rope thrown over the wall. They described the escape as "audacious" and Hahn as "dangerous", saying that on five previous occasions when arrested he was armed. They described Hahn as a tough man, a fitness fanatic with a taste for high living and fast cars.Hahn now says the police account of his scaling the wall with a rope was "bull-dust"."I got a mate to cut the bars on a window the night before. That's how we got out, through the window." Why did he escape? "Because I didn't want to go back to jail. I was terrified at going back inside. I had spent most of my life there. I wasn't a tough man. I was scared. They made me out to be because I embarrassed them with the escape. I didn't want to be locked up."But once outside, he realised he was vulnerable and spent the next two years running for his life.He now claims that he was the thief who stripped some of the biggest names in the art world from Gheysens's walls."It was planned and I was given information about the home and what to take," he says. "But I couldn't get rid of the paintings and everyone was out to get them [for the reward] and kill me."He says he decided to return the paintings. "I planned it and told them [the police] where they could find them. That they could find them behind a wall where I put them." Police said at the time they were found under a bush.His account is partially corroborated by the then opposition leader Pat Hills's words to Parliament. Hills revealed that a prison escapee had reported the whereabouts of the Gheysens paintings."Keith Joseph Hahn, who first reported the whereabouts of the stolen paintings is being sought not only by the police but by criminal elements who he alleges are seeking to murder him," Mr Hills said.Hahn still will not name those he says commissioned him to burgle the Gheysens art collection. But he insists he did not see a cent of the reward."I didn't get a brass razoo ... Nothing."Someone did. Mr Gheysens confirmed to the media in 1968 that he paid a $7000 reward "to detectives at the National Australia Bank in George Street".Hills and the media pursued the payment of the reward doggedly.Under pressure, and eight months after the paintings were recovered, premier Askin finally tabled a report to Parliament revealing that three police officers had been disciplined over the affair. The then police commissioner Norman Allan, later found to be monstrously corrupt himself, said the force had found evidence of "misconduct of a serious nature".Back in prison, Hahn settled down to serve his time and began to take his first steps on the straight and narrow.While employed in the workshop at Parramatta Jail, he realised that inmates could be doing more for children than just repairing and making school desks."I went to the governor and suggested that we make toys, wooden toys and stuffed toys for orphans and he agreed," Hahn says. "That's how the Prisons Orphans Project POP came about, killers and hard men making toys for children. I became POP."Hahn's days on the lam are far behind him now, the end of his days much closer. He's proud of his family: his two daughters, his grandchildren, and proud of his prison work with POP. But regrets? He has more than a few. A life of crime does not get you far, he told Extra. "Take it from me. I know. Give it away. It's your people who pay."
© 2009 Sun Herald
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