The True Crime behind 11 MINUTES
As featured in
THE AGE
Weekend NAKED CITY Crime Feature by John Silvester
“A cracking read and a cunning blend of inside information, fact and imagination.” - John Silvester, The Age
11 MINUTES
A Crime Novel of Melbourne’s 1976
Great Bookie Robbery
by Gregory M Carroll
About 11 Minutes
Six men. Eleven minutes. The perfect crime.
As featured in The Age – Weekend Crime Feature by John Silvester.
Melbourne, 1976 – a crew of masked gunmen storm the Victoria Club and vanish with what would now be worth $80 million. No one is convicted. The money is never recovered. Within a decade, every man is dead.
11 Minutes is a gritty Australian noir crime novel inspired by the real-life Great Bookie Robbery. Told with sharp, fast prose and insider authenticity, it follows the rise and fall of the crew behind Australia’s most infamous armed heist. What begins as a perfect plan becomes a slow, unavoidable collapse.
From the 1970s Melbourne underworld to the shadowed world of crooked cops and violent unions, the story dives into the Painters and Dockers and the Waterfront Wars that left dozens dead. It’s a world of loyalty and betrayal, where silence has a price and no one truly walks away clean.
Told through the eyes of Ian Carroll’s younger brother, author Gregory M Carroll exposes the true cost of ambition in the Australian underworld. He knew these men. He stood beside them. He buried one of them.
For readers of George V. Higgins, Don Winslow, and Peter Temple, this is historical Australian crime fiction at its rawest — part Australian true crime, part moral reckoning, and wholly grounded in lived experience.
What reviewers have said about 11 Minutes
“It is a cracking read and a cunning blend of inside information, fact and imagination.”— John Silvester, The Age (Weekend Crime Feature)
“Brilliantly written and impossible to put down. Fast-paced, authentic, and gripping from the first page. I experienced everything through the robbers’ eyes and learned so much from the detailed, powerful storytelling.”— Readers’ Favorite (Alma Boucher, ★★★★★)
“11 Minutes is a sharp, tense, and deeply personal dive into one of Australia’s most daring crimes. Carroll brings not just research but heart, insight, and lived experience. A bold, honest, and haunting story — a masterful blend of suspense, history, and personal reckoning.”— Goodreads (Katrina M, ★★★★★)
S y n o p s i s
The novel opens in a raw, industrial 1970s Melbourne. Six men pull off the biggest heist in Australian history – the Great Bookie Robbery. In just eleven minutes, they rob the bookies of the equivalent of $80 million in untraceable cash. No one is convicted. The money is never recovered. Yet within a decade, every man is dead.
Ray “Chuck” Bennett and Ian “Fingers” Carroll aren’t just thieves. They’re products of the docks, raised on violence and shaped by the Painters and Dockers Waterfront Wars that left forty dead. The world that forged them becomes the engine of their ambition – and the trap they can’t escape.
The crew evolve from street-level operators to men who command fear and respect. The plan is brilliant: conceived in Pentridge, refined in the UK, executed with military precision. Strike after a long weekend of racing, when the Victoria Club’s counting room is full of cash. Hit fast. Disappear faster. The perfect crime.
For a brief time, they live the Life of Riley. But it’s not just the police looking for them. The Kane brothers — Australia’s answer to the Krays — and Sydney’s Toecutters want their share. Pressure builds from the outside, while inside the crew, old wounds and buried resentments begin to surface.
In the aftermath, greed and paranoia take hold. Small mistakes made during the heist set off a chain reaction of violence. As the body count rises, Ray and Ian fight to hold onto control. Their wives wrestle with love, fear, and the inescapable gravity of the life they are tied to.
With enemies circling and trust eroding from within, one truth becomes clear: no one truly gets away. The stolen fortune disappears without a trace, and so do the men who took it. In the end, 11 Minutes isn’t about the heist. It’s about what came after — the price of power, the weight of greed, and the illusion of control.