Cutmore was raised in inner-city Melbourne and was a prominent member of the Fitzroy Push, a lawless gang involved in prostitution, sly-grog and violence.

Throughout his criminal career Cutmore displayed a willingness to relocate to another state to evade police attention, often travelling between Melbourne and Sydney (and occasionally Adelaide).

Cutmore was shot and killed in his mother's home in Carlton in October 1927, in an underworld gunfight that also resulted in the death of his rival, Squizzy Taylor.

[3] On 1 September 1914 John Cutmore (then aged 19 years) stole a number of items from a driver named Francis Davidson in the yard of the Tankerville Arms Hotel in Nicholson Street, Fitzroy.

The items stolen were a gold chain, "a memorandum book, five tram tickets, a pair of spectacles" and five shillings worth of copper coins.

[5] In the early hours of Saturday morning, 31 October 1914, Cutmore and Thomas Hillary, a sergeant in the Australian Expeditionary Force, assaulted two drunken sailors named Albert Florence and Frederick Akin in Bourke Street, Melbourne.

[6][7][8] In February 1916, Cutmore (again under the name 'John Harris') was charged at Fitzroy police station with assault; he was subsequently convicted and fined 40 shillings (in default, seven days' imprisonment).

[13][18] On 25 July a notice was printed in the New South Wales Police Gazette & Weekly Record of Crime requesting "special inquiry" to trace John 'Snowy' Cutmore in connection with the shooting of Charles Cleary.

[21] On 23 March 1918 John 'Snowy' Cutmore (alias Nolan) was found to have goods which were "reasonably suspected of being stolen", namely two sets of harness and one kit bag, at a house in Pelican Street, Surry Hills.

Late morning on Tuesday, 17 December 1918, a gardener, Ling Sing, of McKeown Street in Maroubra, disturbed two men "in the act of stealing from his hut".

[25] At about midday on the following day, December 18, "a disturbance occurred" at a house in Richards Avenue, Surry Hills, in which a man named Vincent Cook was "cut about the head" and a woman, Mrs. Bartlett, "was slightly injured".

Shortly before three o'clock on the following morning a bomb made of gelignite was thrown through the window into the unoccupied front bedroom of the house, "wrecking it, and destroying the contents".

[34][35][36] Shortly after midday on Monday, 12 May 1919, in the busy thoroughfare of Little Collins Street, Henry Stokes shot Slater five times with a Colt automatic pistol.

While searching the house the detectives heard "a curious scraping noise" and, with Cutmore unable to maintain his position up the chimney, "a soot-begrimed, dishevelled individual slid down... into the fireplace".

[39][40] On 3 September 1920, Cutmore was sentenced in the Carlton Police Court to one months' imprisonment "for having had in his possession articles of women's apparel believed to have been stolen from a Johnston Street shop".

[9][44] On Sunday evening, 19 June 1921, groups of men from rival gangs clashed in the vicinity of the corner Nicholson and Palmerston streets in Carlton.

[49] Cutmore's companion, Harry Slater, was tried in Sydney on three separate occasions for Monaghan's murder, but each time the jury failed to agree on a verdict; he was freed in May 1922 after the Attorney-General decided to not proceed with the charge.

[64] In late 1926, Cutmore joined up with Norman Bruhn, a Melbourne criminal who had absconded from bail on a shooting and wounding charge, arriving in Sydney in about November 1926.

[65] Bruhn assembled a gang which included John 'Snowy' Cutmore, George 'The Midnight Raper' Wallace, Lancelot 'Sailor the Slasher' Saidler, and the albino standover man, 'Razor' Jack Hayes.

[70] The modus operandi of Bruhn's razor gang was to specifically target criminals, such as cocaine traffickers and thieves, who wished to avoid police attention.

Their victims were invariably those who wished to avoid the police, such as cocaine traffickers, thieves and prostitutes, who were attacked and threatened in laneways and side streets, and occasionally in their own homes.

[65][71] Bruhn and his gang came into direct conflict with underworld figures such as Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine and Phil 'The Jew' Jeffs as they began to focus on disrupting the established cocaine-distribution business in Sydney.

[72] The first step in the cocaine supply chain were the seamen and dockworkers who smuggled the drug from the ships and out of the docks to the middlemen in the pubs or houses where it was stashed.

[66][74] On Wednesday night, 22 June 1927, Norman Bruhn and three other men, engaged the taxi driver, Noel Infield, near Paddington Post Office.

[79] Cutmore may have been one of the men accompanying Bruhn on the night he was murdered, with some believing he was involved or complicit in the shooting, but ultimately the silence of witnesses or their refusal to provide consistent testimony stymied police investigations.

For the last few weeks prior to his departure he resided in a flat in Double Bay belonging to Phil 'The Jew' Jeffs, a Sydney criminal involved in prostitution, sly-grog and cocaine-distribution.

[30] Cutmore had travelled by overnight train from Sydney with a man named Roy ('Budgie') Travers (alias Herbert Wilson), an ally of Phil Jeffs.

[30] Shortly after 5 p.m. on Thursday, 27 October 1927, Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor and two other men approached hire-car driver John Hall's Studebaker sedan in Lonsdale Street from the direction of the Bookmakers' Club and hired his car.

The room in which the shoot-out had occurred was found to be in complete disarray: Cutmore was lying dead on the bed; the floor was littered with empty cartridge cases, a mirror and a kerosene lamp had been smashed and all four walls had bullet marks.

[30] Later that evening a police constable found an automatic pistol lying inside a fence at an address facing Macarthur Square, close to the house in Barkly Street.