Hazelbrook Bowling Club manager Marlene Hay is furious about the sentences meted out to the two robbers who held up the sports club for several hours in May last year leaving staff and patrons terrified.
Parramatta District Court Judge Deborah Payne found there were "special circumstances" when sentencing South Coast robber, Paul Goodfellow, 45, and accomplice Maxwell Derek Garnett, 29, to minimum jail terms of four years and eight months and three years and two months respectively.
The court heard the masked Goodfellow, who stole $10,000 and terrorised staff and patrons for five hours with a tomahawk and a sawn-off shotgun, had held up the club twice previously and had just been released from jail a fortnight before the robbery.
Club manager Marlene Hay called their jail terms "disgraceful".
"They were sentenced to a very minimum term which we thought was disgraceful. It was insufficient for the trauma it's caused."
Wearing balaclavas and carrying the axe and sawn-off pump action .22 Winchester rifle, Goodfellow and Garnett, both of Vincentia Avenue in South Nowra, held up the Bonnie View Avenue club in the early hours of May 4, 2013.
They lay in wait for 63-year-old greenkeeper Les Brett and threatened to shoot him if he didn't open the club. Police said Mr Brett was also a victim of a 2001 robbery at the club by Goodfellow in a similar modus operandi.
Seven people were held hostage and threatened with an axe during the ordeal and the duo later fled the scene in the greenkeeper's car with takings from the safe, poker machines, Keno and the ATM.
Goodfellow, who had travelled around as a child, spent some of a "dysfunctional" childhood in the Mid Mountains and ended up being sentenced in Katoomba Local Court to spend a year in Cobham Juvenile Justice Centre.
Appealing for leniency in sentencing Goodfellow, legal aid lawyer Peter Guirguis said there was an "absence of physical injuries [of the victims], he [Goodfellow] had not discharged the firearm and indeed the firearm was not loaded... and the execution and planning was unsophisticated".
The younger co-offender Garnett - "a follower not a leader" - had been "affected by ice or meth" and "woke up in bushland in Nowra with very little knowledge of what he did".
Goodfellow pleaded guilty to detain for advantage, robbery whilst armed with a dangerous weapon and possessing a prohibited firearm. Maxwell Garnett had pleaded guilty on just one charge - robbery whilst armed with a dangerous weapon. Both have been in custody since their arrest in June, 2013.
The court heard the greenkeeper has since retired and will not speak about the robberies but in a victim impact statement to the court, another long-term staff member Sharon Snelling, said she had had to quit her 25-year career in the club industry, had counselling and medication and the event had also put financial strain on her marriage. She has not returned to the club and has flashbacks about the event.
Police said Goodfellow robbed the club once in the '90s and again in 2001 as well as the most recent occasion.
He had just been released from jail on April 23 - two weeks before the robbery - after serving 12 months for unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition.
The pair was sentenced on August 20. Goodfellow's maximum term is seven years and two months. He will be eligible for parole on February 5, 2019.
Garnett's was sentenced to seven years and two months jail and will be eligible for parole on September 5, 2016.
