The old man long ago accepted he will probably spend his last days inside the Port Phillip Prison hospital. His heart is weak, his lungs are failing and he is far too frail to return to a mainstream unit.

Russell Street Bomber Stanley Brian Taylor, 77, is dying. He rarely sees visitors and is no longer the Machiavellian figure who manipulated violent young men to do his bidding. His influence, like his jail tattoos, faded years ago.

He is, prison officers say, "gravely ill".

For the past 29 years, the man who was a home-grown terrorist has been a model prisoner, institutionalised from spending his life locked away. Collectively he has spent more than 50 years in adult jailhts, juvenile detention and boys' homes.

"Stan the Man" was an accomplished actor, first as part of the Pentridge Prison Players and later on the outside, even scoring a small role in a 1979 episode of the television drama Prisoner.

And he used that acting talent to hide his malevolent nature, with virtually no one initially seeing beyond his "good bloke" facade – that is, unless they were victims of his gratuitously violent armed robberies.

Even when he led a team of young gunmen known as "The Boys" or "The Animals" he was popular in the town of Birchip, where locals knew him as John Evans, a likeable retired horse trainer who had decided to head bush.

Keen to be accepted by the small community, he took to selling raffle tickets with the local policeman as a fundraiser for the footy club.

At the same time he was organising armed robberies – tutoring a group of ambitious thugs on everything from car thefts to murder while secretly planning to use them as fall guys if they were caught.

In their armed raids, he wouldn't speak, instructing with a look, a nod or a gesture for he didn't want a victim to recognise his voice. He drilled his team that if they were arrested they were never to talk, omitting to say he would  – to sell them out.

Reviewing one of his "students" after a vicious stick-up, he remarked the young man was "Bloody good, but once he has killed, he will be brilliant. He has got to get that taste of blood, I know how it makes you feel."

One witness told police that when two gang members talked of abducting a woman, "Stan said he does not know why they didn't just go out and take one off the street, do what they want with her and then kill her and dump the body down a mine shaft."

Despite his denials, police believe he was the initiator of the 1986 plot to explode a car bomb outside the Russell Street Police Station that killed Constable Angela Taylor (pictured below) and injured another 21 people.

In all probability, he built the bomb that contained 60 sticks of gelignite and was set to detonate right on lunchtime to kill and wound as many people as possible.

He and his fellow psychos were lucky to survive driving the bomb car to the scene. "The only thing between them and eternity was a Chux Superwipe placed between the detonating device," according to one investigator.

Even now, the real reason Taylor declared war on the Victoria Police is unclear but perhaps the reason for his hatred of authority is buried deep in his past.

He was born on September 28, 1937 and his first conviction was for fishing in a prohibited area. He was 12.

He progressed to stealing motorcycles and then to burglaries before graduating to armed robberies – where he began as a spectacular failure. Young detective Paul Delianis (who would rise to deputy commissioner) recalls Taylor robbing a Clayton milk bar in the 1960s tying a handkerchief over his face in Wild West fashion.

Unfortunately for Stan, the hanky fell off, exposing his face with an obvious missing tooth. The female milkbar owner easily picked him in the subsequent line-up.

Inside jail, he refused to break rocks, escaped twice, led riots in Pentridge's notorious H Division, and allegedly built and detonated a prison bomb.

When Ronald Ryan, the last man hanged in Australia, wanted to escape from Pentridge, he asked Taylor to go with him. Stan refused and Peter Walker took his place.

Taylor did escape with another prisoner, then went on to rob seven banks in five days and was recaptured in Ferny Creek without a struggle. (This may have been because a very large detective chose to sit on him before he had the opportunity to resist.)

And so he served 17 years in the toughest prison before he was released in 1978, declaring he was a changed man.

"I've done my time. There are a lot of young people who are down, who are unemployed, who could be thinking that crime is the answer.

"My message is that crime is never the answer. I have not met one person – not one – who has had a successful life because of crime."

He said he planned to earn an honest living through acting and writing but soon he was working with troubled youths. It seemed a perfect fit; the reformed prisoner who could warn the impressionable that crime was a dead-end journey.

He was given the rather grand title of project officer for the Commonwealth Youth Support Scheme in Mooroolbark. But the truth was the ex-con was just a big con. He was using his position of trust to groom a surly young man with a criminal record and an interest in violence – Craig Minogue.

Craig Minogue, aka as the Russell Street bomber, was a protege of Stan Taylor.

They had plenty in common. As young men they both loved motorbikes and loved to hurt people.

Minogue introduced him to his brother Rod who recruited Peter Reed, a cellmate from an earlier prison stint.

Mother Joy Minogue said, "Craig thought a lot of Taylor and almost revered him, as did all of the kids that had anything to do with him. Craig was responsible for introducing Rodney to Stanley Taylor."

So where did Taylor learn how older men could manipulate the young?

An habitual truant, Stan was sent to the Bayswater Boys Home at the age of eight and  spent two years there, later saying, "that's where I started to learn about crime".

It has now been established that boys at the home were severely abused. Is this the key to his dark side?

He is not the only one. Peter Reed shot two police and was shot himself during a police raid in connection with the Russell Street Bombing.

He was acquitted over the bombing but convicted of one count of attempted murder and sentenced to 13 years.

Using the name Peter Komiazyk, he gave evidence to the Parliamentary Inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations where he spoke of the cruelty he suffered at St Augustine's Boys Home. He said that when he was returned after escaping, "the torture and the beatings were pretty horrific".

After Reed was arrested, on Anzac Day, 1986, it became clear the rest of the gang would be traced. Even then Taylor believed that once he implicated "The Animals", he would be freed.

But his plan had a flaw. Taylor had hopelessly implicated himself to another former inmate named Paul Hetzel who, along with his partner Julie, would become star witnesses for the prosecution.

Julie Hetzel would tell police, "I have never known of anyone as callous as Stan."

She added, "Stan said he knew he could talk his way out of anything [and] wouldn't have any worries."

He would tell the police, "He knew the boys through a youth group" and was trying to help them at the request of the Minogues' mother, "to start a new life and keep them out of trouble".

According to Julie Hetzel, "Stan also said he would cop a belting if he had to, from the police just to make it look good. He went on to say a belting only lasts a little, while jail doesn't and he was getting too old to take jail."

In Paul Hetzel's statement, he said, "Stan said he and the boys were rapt with the explosion but disappointed, 'that it didn't kill more of the bastards,' and that 'next time we will get more'."

When Taylor was arrested, he asked to speak to Paul Delianis, a policeman he trusted, who was then the Assistant Commissioner overseeing the bomb investigation.

He made a statement claiming that while he had seen the bomb car, "I didn't want anything to do with it."

He then offered to give evidence against "The Boys".

"I'm telling the truth. The ones you want are Peter Reed, Craig Minogue and his brother Rodney."

Of course, he was telling nothing of the sort. He was, as Delianis describes, "A low-level criminal hoodlum."

Taylor and Craig Minogue were convicted, with Taylor sentenced to life with no minimum and Minogue to life with a minimum of 30 years.

Taylor always blamed Hetzel and once wrote, "What is not in dispute is the fact that the real Russell Street bomber has gone free."

Police say one of the bombers organised the murder of Julie's 13-year-old granddaughter Prue Bird as a payback for giving evidence.

Julie Hetzel told police, "Stan said if he ever found out he had a terminal illness he would load himself up with explosives and walk into Russell Street and blow himself and as many cops as he could to hell."

Taylor now has that terminal illness. But he isn't going anywhere – except possibly to a hell of his own making.