Gregory M. Carroll, younger brother of Ian "Fingers" Carroll, a figure entangled in Melbourne's violent underworld, has released a new novel titled "11 MINUTES." The book is a dark, Australian noir heist story inspired by the infamous 1976 Great Bookie Robbery, where masked gunmen stormed Melbourne's Victoria Club and escaped with a fortune. No one was ever convicted, the money was never recovered, and within a decade, every man involved was dead.
Carroll draws on personal memory, court records, underworld histories, and the brutal Waterfront Organized Crime War to craft a narrative that merges the tension of a heist thriller with the human tragedy of a family caught in crime's undertow. "I didn't hear these stories second-hand," Carroll says. "I grew up inside them." The novel's five-part structure reconstructs the 11-minute heist, the rise of the crew through Melbourne's violent docklands, the aftermath involving corrupt police and underworld rivals, and the final reckoning where greed, paranoia, and betrayal left no survivors.
For more on the Great Bookie Robbery, the novel provides 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 capturing 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, and releases globally on December 1, 2025.
