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    Towards the end of 1888 Millidge carried out what was described as ‘the most wonderful piece of criminal organisation that Australia has seen in the last half-century’. This was the formation of the famous Tobacco Gang, whose depredations proved so profitable that, according to the estimates of Melbourne detectives, Millidge’s own share amounted to more than £1000 a year for three years. He was a stylish but not a flash dresser, and always looked like a gentleman. His one weakness was diamonds. He was said to love them so much, he would even pay for them. The Tobacco Gang profits allowed him to do so, and during this period he was known as ‘Diamond George’. He also set up and ran a team for robbing bookmakers on their way home from the races—that is, until the beginning of February 1894 and his visit to Sydney.
    And the third man who tried to blow the safe at the Union Steamship Company and who got away in the Domain? He was an Englishman, known as Henry Gilmour or Edward Smith, as well as Seymour, Palmer and George Sweeny, born in 1856. In 1882 he had received three years forhousebreaking, and in 1890 three years for bank robbery. After the abortive Union Steamship robbery, he sailed from Newcastle on a wool ship to Callao in Peru. He was thought to have then made his way via America to London, but nothing was heard of him in Australia for nearly ten years.
    He did reach London because, on 19 November 1894 at the Old Bailey, he received seven years for two housebreakings carried out with an offsider, James Ward. In April 1901, now using the name Gilmour, he was arrested in 39-year-old Louisa Kolb’s flat, in the Avenue Henri Martin, Passy, a smart suburb of Paris. Around 3 a.m. Mlle Kolb, a one-time actress at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, had woken while he was trying to rob her and she was badly beaten in the struggle that followed. In all, she received forty-three wounds. The concierge heard her screams and ran to get the police. When they arrived, they found Gilmour in another room, bandaging his hand. During the scuffle, he had severed an artery in his wrist.
    He was identified not through the new science of fingerprinting but through the almost outdated Bertillonage system, which measured a criminal’s features. He also had a hat with the name of a London hatter, H.M. Stanley of Eastcheap, which helped in his identification. He appeared for trial at the
cour d’assises
in Paris in late November, described as small, hard faced and with a small stiff moustache, dressed in a black frock coat and a blue cravat. The jury did not find any mitigating circumstances and there were reports in the Australian newspapers that he had been guillotined. In fact, in December that year he received a sentence of penal servitude for life, which meant transportation to French Guiana.
    After Millidge’s execution, captaincy of the team, so to speak, passed to Billy O’Neill, but he and his colleagues did not last long on the outside. On 25 January 1895 he, along with John Mulligan, Alfred Marks and William Carrah, went on trial, charged with stealing tobacco on Melbourne Cup Day the previous year. Against them in the witness box was a former gang member, Robert Colquhoun, charged with a separate offence of stealing a horse. It seems that when none of the others would give him an alibi for that, he turned Queen’s Evidence. Mulligan and Carrah were acquitted, Marks was convicted of receiving, and O’Neill had pleaded guilty, as had Colquhoun.
    Very sensibly, O’Neill, who had been convicted nine times in the previous fifteen years, wrote to the judge, saying he wanted to become a decent member of society. However, his Lordship would have none of it:
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    Looking at your past life, no amendment is to be expected in the future. Society must be protected from rascalities of this kind.
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    O’Neill received eight years’ hard labour with periods of