Michael Adams

already close to a million dollars or more.

But even back then it was a lot of money.

So the gold thieves would go to great lengths to

evade the cops.

And that could include actually monitoring the cops and also even breaking into the cops' huts to look at their records.

So the cops operated completely on a need-to-know basis between each other.

They didn't make notes that were intelligible to anyone else.

They didn't tell anybody what they were doing.

So yeah, they would often go out on these stakeouts in the bush for three or four days at a time.

No one knew where they were.

And then they'd bust guys because people would set up these smelting operations in the bush.

How do you do that?

You're building a kiln out there.

You've got roasting pots to roast the ore, crack it open, et cetera.

It's a real little industrial operation.

There's plenty of scrub land out there.

Basically, they're hiding out in the scrub doing this and going out for a night and doing it in the nighttime and then coming back in the day in the morning.

And it was 1926 in Kalgoorlie.

There weren't a lot of cars and there was no real reason to be out of a nighttime.

So these cops saw a car out after dark.