William 'Joey' Hollebone

William Joseph 'Joey' Hollebone (1917 – 28 September 1960) was a violent Australian criminal and gangster.

William Hollebone was born at St Peters, New South Wales in 1917. His mother died when he was eight years old and by then he was deemed by the courts as an uncontrollable child and spent much of his childhood in boy/youth reformatories. At the age of 18, he and two associates were involved in a gang assault of man named Leslie Archibald Hobson in King Street Newtown, New South Wales.

The three attackers kicked Hobson to death in the street, but at trial it was perceived that Hobson died when his head hit the concrete pavement. This allowed Hollebone and his gang to accept a lesser charge of manslaughter and the three were sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment on 29 November 1935.

Hollebone was released in late 1943. He married Hazel Jean Ryan (née Britt) in early 1944, and lived in Surry Hills, New South Wales. At around this time he also teamed up with John 'Chow' Hayes and the two of them set out to become the two most feared Sydney criminals of the 1940s. He and Hayes were involved in extortion, theft and intimidation on a scale that Sydney's police force had rarely seen since the Razor gang wars of the late 1920s.

Hayes and Hollebone were both instrumental in large scale black-market tobacco scams during the later part of World War II, which made them wealthy at the expense of many deceived customers. Greed destroyed their black market scams when one of their gang, a man named Eddie Weyman, stole a considerable amount of the gang's profit. In a swift show of retribution, Hayes shot Weyman dead on New Year's Eve 1945.

Hollebone was always known to carry firearms, and was a man not to messed with. He was an alcoholic with a vile temper, and was incarcerated again for six months in 1944 on a firearms possession charge. During this short stay in prison, Hollebone learned that his wife had left him for a small-time criminal named Alfred Frederick William Dawes of Waterloo, New South Wales. Upon his release from prison, Hollebone decided to enact revenge on Dawes, and visited Dawes' home on the evening of 29 August 1946. Upon entering the premises, Hollebone fired seven shots from his revolver, killing three people including Dawes and injuring two others.

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