A Crime Story Only an Insider Could Tell: Brother of a Real-Life Heist Figure Releases Novel on Australia's Great Bookie Robbery

November 26, 2025 at 03:00 AM EST

With the 50th anniversary of Australia's most audacious unsolved armed robbery approaching, a new crime novel delivers an unprecedented look inside the $80-million (modern value) heist—written by the younger brother of one of the men involved.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, November 26, 2025 /24-7PressRelease/ -- 11 MINUTES, by Gregory M. Carroll, is a dark, uncompromising Australian noir heist novel inspired by the 1976 Great Bookie Robbery. On April 21, 1976, a crew of masked gunmen stormed Melbourne's Victoria Club and vanished with a fortune. No one was convicted, the money was never recovered, but within a decade, every man involved was dead.

What sets this novel apart is its raw authenticity. Gregory M. Carroll is the younger brother of Ian "Fingers" Carroll, one of the real figures caught up in Melbourne's violent underworld. "I didn't hear these stories second-hand," Carroll says. "I grew up inside them."

Drawing from personal memory, court records, underworld histories, and the brutal Waterfront Organized Crime War that left dozens dead, Carroll merges the sharp tension of a heist thriller with the human tragedy of a family caught in the undertow of crime. The novel's five-part structure reconstructs the rapid 11-minute heist, the rise of the crew through Melbourne's violent docklands, the unforgiving aftermath involving corrupt police and underworld rivals, and the final reckoning where greed, paranoia, and betrayal left no survivors.

Click the link for more on The Great Bookie Robbery

The novel is a timely release, appealing to fans of true crime, historical crime fiction, and Australian noir. It offers a rare, first-hand family perspective never before published, providing a deeply researched narrative that captures the fractured loyalties and brutal cost of Melbourne's 1976 crime landscape.

11 MINUTES is available for pre-order now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booktopia and Dymocks, releases globally on 1 December 2025.

About the Author

Gregory M. Carroll grew up immersed in the same world as the men in his story. His brother, Ian "Fingers" Carroll, was his best man—and the man whose body he had to identify. Now retired and living on the Gold Coast, Carroll writes with the clarity of someone who lived through the chaos, the violence, and the human cost of Melbourne's underworld.

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A Crime Story Only an Insider Could Tell: Brother of a Real-Life Heist Figure Releases Novel on Australia's Great Bookie Robbery

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