by Leigh Straw
Cocaine raids required more careful detection on the part of the Women’s Police. According to Lillian Arm-field, cocaine was much harder to find than sly grog because women would conceal it in their clothing or on their bodies. She often found stashes of cocaine tucked into ‘special slits in their corsets and in the top of their stockings’. The young woman feigning illness in the bed in 1925 would have been viewed with deep suspicion, and a member of the Women’s Police would have conducted a full body-search.
Police raids on drug houses brought out the rubber-neckers. At one house in Surry Hills in 1928, more than 1000 people watched the police arrest the occupants and charge two young women with keeping a large quantity of cocaine. While the newspapers worried that the police were losing the battle against the cocaine trade, police made sure they were a visible sight for locals who might be funding the dealers. They wanted people to see how hard the law could be handed down. Offenders found guilty in court faced heavy fines or at least two months in prison in default of payment. The trouble, however, was that as the trade flourished, the dealers made enough money to pay off the fines easily.
Cocaine destroyed many young lives in Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s. Lillian Armfield later recalled the story of one woman she had investigated in the heyday of the drug wars. The daughter of a jurist, she was given an allowance to live in Sydney and was easy prey for the drug peddlers. They cased out cafes and hotel lounges, looking for young people with money, especially young women. The jurist’s daughter was warned off keeping her own ‘store of cocaine’ and told to meet with peddlers whenever she ran out of the drug. Police were unable to arrest her because she was not in possession of the drug but, through close surveillance, they watched her downfall. When the local papers got hold of the story but didn’t name her in the articles, the young woman’s family intervened and took her back home, then placed her in an institution. It seemed for police at the time that institutionalisation was a far better circumstance than the streets of inner Sydney. For Lillian Armfield, too many drug cases involved ‘good’ girls who were lured into addiction by hardened drug dealers. Some used violence and coercion, while others were charismatic enough to offer false promises of glamorous lives in the Sydney club scene.
Some women didn’t live to regret their involvement with drugs. Armfield recalled the case of Dell Hutton, for example. Dell got mixed up with drug peddlers as a teenager and at one party, where the guests included the son of an American millionaire, Dell died of an overdose of Veronal, a barbiturate she used when low on cocaine. It wasn’t always single young women who fell prey to the drug runners, and they weren’t always in the city centre. One young married woman died from cocaine poisoning in country New South Wales in 1929. The drug traffic was travelling further out from the city, and Armfield and other members of the police, particularly the Drug Squad, knew they had to stop the supply coming into Sydney.
By the late 1920s, the cocaine trade was an instrumental part of underworld business, but the police were determined to stamp it out. Using their increased powers under the Drugs Act, police targeted Sydney’s notorious drug dealers. Charles Passmore was the first of many to front the courts as a major player in the narcotics trade. Passmore, who controlled most of Sydney’s cocaine business until 1928, was vilified in court in 1923 for making money off addicted prostitutes. Harry ‘Jewey’ Newman was another cocaine king, but he pushed his luck too far in February 1928 when he tried to bribe the Drug Squad’s Detective Sergeant Tom Wickham. Newman’s shop in Goulburn Street was raided and police turned up numerous packages of cocaine stuffed into a drainpipe. Harry Newman was sent to Long Bay Gaol for nine months and failed to reclaim his hold on drugs after his release. By the late 1920s, other people were willing to move in further on Newman’s territory. One of them was Kate Leigh.
Sydney’s drug traffic flourished at the same time as the sly-grog trade. Sly-groggers began selling cocaine when they realised their grog business offered both the opportunity and setting to take advantage of a rise in drug addiction. Sly-grog shops run out of the back of houses opened onto alleyways, and it was here that drug deals took place. Prostitutes also provided a ready demand for cocaine, and sly-groggers started pushing cocaine in brothels.
The sale of booze and sex from households and the back of shop premises allowed keen criminal business-people such as Kate Leigh to include cocaine in their daily trade. Leigh often paid her prostitutes with cocaine rather than cash. As an intelligent businesswoman, albeit through crime, Kate Leigh recognised the importance of linking the three mainstays of underworld crime: booze, sex and drugs. She could have remained a sly-grog seller and made enough to keep her business afloat, but she knew there was a fortune to be made from combining sly grog with sex and drugs. In doing so, however, she not only established a prosperous empire but marked herself out as high on the list of underworld figures targeted by police.
By the end of the 1920s, police had had enough of what the newspapers called the ‘curse of cocaine’ and the ‘menace’ it posed to society. In August 1929, police secured convictions for ten traffickers who were then given lengthy gaol terms by the court. Narcotics arrests reached more than 150 a year as members of the Drug Squad spent weeks closely watching drug runners in Surry Hills. Having made an example of Harry Newman in 1929, when he was arrested and gaoled for nine months, police placed Kate Leigh under close surveillance and waited for the opportunity to arrest her in possession of a large haul of cocaine. Leigh could pay the fines – she had enough money – so the police needed a long stint in prison to keep her off the streets. They were hoping to break her hold on the drug traffic.
Kate had been very successful in making sure she was nowhere near a house when it was raided for drugs. If she was caught in a house with drugs, she quickly discarded the incriminating evidence or had runners take off with it down the street. Lillian Armfield knew Leigh was smart: ‘We had to match our wits against hers, and she was so cunning and experienced in every police tactic that it seemed we would never catch her with the cocaine.’
On 1 July 1930, Drug Squad detectives had a breakthrough. They stormed into Kate Leigh’s house on Riley Street, Surry Hills. With the house surrounded by officers, Kate had nowhere to run. Seated at a table with male companions, Kate was told she would be searched, and this was when the Women’s Police entered the house. According to the sensationalism of the press the next day, she ‘struggled, kicked, and screamed so loudly that a small crowd gathered in the street outside. When all efforts to pacify her failed, she was seized by the detectives and carried to the waiting police car.’ It was quite a scene and Kate wasn’t going down without a fight.
A few days after her arrest, Kate’s 81-year-old mother died in Bondi. Charlotte Beahan had moved to Sydney to be closer to some of her children and had no doubt been supported by Kate. In court on 16 July, Kate’s lawyer argued for an adjournment of her trial for cocaine possession on the grounds that she was grief-stricken and had ‘collapsed at the graveside of her aged mother’. The loss did, in truth, affect her deeply. Every year she placed a heartfelt notice in the papers for her mother. In 1931, Kate and her daughter, Eileen, inserted a notice in the Sydney Morning Herald for their ‘darling mother and grandmother’. The press often speculated that Kate put on a show at funerals to get more attention, but this wasn’t a former lover or husband. Kate had spent many of her adult years trying to win over her mother and show her she had made good in the city to which she had been sent as a teenager.
The case was adjourned until later in July, but Kate faced a tough battle against the police prosecutors. Police witnesses, including Lillian Armfield, were damning in their descriptions of Kate’s criminal life. Detective Sergeant Wickham, a man who had spent many years watching Kate Leigh and waiting for the opportunity to put her away for a lengthy period, gave this character assessment:
I have known this woman for 15 or 20 years … She is a principal in the cocaine traffic in this city. Not only does she peddle i
t herself, but she is one of the biggest suppliers to other peddlers. She is titled the Uncrowned Queen of the Underworld and there is no doubt that she wields a powerful influence in the underworld of Sydney. She boasts her privilege of obtaining preferential treatment of prisoners in the gaols and of her influence with high political and legal people. I regard her as a menace to the community. She is a low moral type – a most dangerous type – capable of committing any crime in the criminal calendar.
Found guilty of cocaine possession, Kate Leigh was sentenced to twelve months in prison. She also faced a further hefty fine and if found in default, would serve another year in prison. The following year, her ‘right-hand man’ in the cocaine trade, Frederick Dangar, was charged with attempting to ‘obtain cocaine from a chemist’. Dangar was fined and faced a year in prison in default of payment. The police were not only intent on putting Kate away but also anyone associated with her trade in cocaine.
The public was always less likely to support Kate Leigh’s cocaine-dealing business, especially after she was named and shamed by the press. Truth ran a lengthy article in 1931 portraying Kate as ‘one of the most heartless and soulless of the dope traders’. Reporters told their readers that Leigh ‘held the dope game in a grip that was as tight as that of any Midas’. But drug addiction was not always symptomatic of inner-city poor life. As historian and lawyer, Desmond Manderson argues:
While cocaine use by prostitutes and the ‘underworld’ [after the First World War] attracted publicity and penalties, most drug addiction in Australia (in the early 1930s) still conformed to nineteenth-century patterns. Apart from ageing Chinese opium smokers, drug addicts were middle-class, middle-aged, frequently doctors or other health care professionals, and their habituation was most often the result of careless or lengthy therapeutic use.
Cocaine addicts added to a police workload that was already stretched by its efforts to stamp out the trade through sustained investigations into the drug importers. Police faced the rise of organised crime in Sydney and were repeatedly frustrated by dealers making a fortune from the narcotics trade. It would take a bloody period of razor wars and the introduction of draconian legislation before police had any chance of infiltrating and ending Sydney’s traffic in cocaine.
Dismantling the drug trade pitched police directly against Kate Leigh and her underworld of hardened, violent and ruthless associates. By the late 1920s, Leigh was one of Sydney’s most notorious organised crime figures. Her empire was built on sly grog, prostitution and drugs, and maintained through violence and standover tactics. She was instrumental to the growth of the cocaine industry. Kate had made a fortune in crime and wasn’t about to let anyone else step in on her territory. She waged a drug war against the police and was one half of one of the greatest criminal rivalries in Australian history.
WALLY TOMLINSON RUSHES INTO THE HOUSE, shouting for her. Kate Leigh is upstairs and hurries down. She stops dead in the middle of the staircase. Wally is standing in the doorway with his arms around a young man. He seems to be holding the man’s face. It’s then she sees the blood dripping through Wally’s fingers and onto the carpet.
‘Wally! The carpet! What the bloody hell are you doing?’
His face says it all. He’s pure white and sweating. ‘Kate, I need you to call for help. That nurse down the road. Get her over here.’
Kate runs down the stairs, grabs her coat from the back of the door and shoves it quickly over her body. She crouches down close to the bloodied young man and almost gasps when he lifts his head.
Razor cuts to both cheeks. Deep and violent.
‘Wally, you take him through to the kitchen and wrap some bandages around his head. There’s some in the cupboard at the back.’
She rushes out the front door and hurries down the street.
‘Evening, Kate.’
It’s one of the locals. She doesn’t bother looking properly at the woman. Nods her head and keeps on going.
‘Police onto you again, Kate?’
This comes from someone across the street. Normally she would laugh and come back with some cheeky comment but not now. That poor fella needs help. They should take him to the hospital but they can’t do that. The police will be tipped off and start asking questions.
It’ll be the same old story. The kid will have been peddling cocaine in the wrong street and using the wrong contacts. She didn’t recognise his face but he’s probably one of Wally’s lads. He uses young ones to get the drugs and make the deals. Better that neither he nor Kate are involved. They don’t need the extra attention.
She’s spoken with the nurse down the road and they hurry back up to Kate’s place.
‘Bastards just came out of the pub and attacked him,’ Wally says. ‘It was me they wanted but no one’s gonna miss this mug getting cut up. Jack here, though …’
Kate decides to boil the kettle and make them all a cup of tea. Oh Jesus – she crosses herself – how can anyone have a cup of tea? She puts the mugs away and turns to look at the young fella.
Clara, the nurse, is checking his wounds and shaking her head.
‘Kate, I can’t do much here. It’s too bad. He needs to go to hospital.’
‘No!’ It’s Wally who answers. ‘He goes there, cops will ask questions and then he’ll be even more of a marked man.’
‘I won’t say nuthin’, Wally.’
Wally places a hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘I know, mate, I know, but it’s those coppers who’ll twist anything you say. Once Tilly and Jim get wind of it …’
Clara looks down at the table and fiddles with her wedding ring. Everyone’s talking about the razor wars but anyone with any sense in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills ignores anything they hear. Best to remain ignorant. Kate knows it’s not Jim Devine that Clara fears. It’s his wife.
‘Wally, you get him to hospital. Quick smart. We’ll just have to deal with the police.’
Wally hauls the young man up and they all wince as he clutches his face. Wally turns to Kate, watching her march towards the front door. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m off to the ’Loo to see some people.’
He’s next to her now and places a hand on her shoulder. She shrugs it off. ‘Kate, don’t go messing with Tilly now.’
‘I’m going to do something about this. She’ll regret ever takin’ me on.’
Clara hurries past and runs back down the street. She’s having none of it. They want to continue the war, they can do it without her there. Besides, her old man’s at the academy. She hasn’t told Kate that. He’s one of the up-and-coming coppers who’ll have to deal with the likes of Leigh and Devine.
The underworld is at war and those two women might just be the death of each other.
5
RAZORS AND RIVALS
When you see it, know it for what it is – the brand of the Razor Gang of Darlinghurst, a band of hold-up men whose weapon is the razor, and who leave their victims with faces slashed and bleeding, to seek the shelter of the nearest hospital.
Sydney was at a crime crossroads in 1927. Bloodied bodies were strewn across the inner-city streets. Crooks sat mute in hospital beds while nurses patched their faces and police tried to get them to name names. While the newspapers basked in the opportunity to captivate their readers with tales of violence and underworld life, their stories were based in fact. Sydney was a battleground in the late 1920s as rival gangs fought for control of the underworld. For a time the police thought the best solution was to let the crooks fight it out amongst themselves, but soon the violence increased and ordinary people in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills started to fear for their own safety. Police action was needed, and so began one of the most intense periods in Australian policing and crime history. If police were going to win the war on crime, they needed to break up the gangs and put their leaders out of business. That meant putting Kate Leigh out of business.
Sydney was no stranger to gang violence. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, youth gangs – larrikins
– threatened law and order. What changed in the 1920s was that the gangs had become better organised and had taken control of the traffic in alcohol, drugs and women. They were no longer larrikin youth gangs engaging in low-level crime. The crimes were more serious and on a much wider scale. According to Detective Sergeant Tom Wickham, looking back on the 1920s from the vantage point of retirement in 1962, it was a time of ‘street fights, brawls, gang warfare … razor gangs … hooliganism of all types’. Truth newspaper, which was at the forefront of press stories about the gangs, had this to say in June 1927:
These gangs stick pretty close together, and if one falls by the wayside the others do not rest until they have avenged. And so, with the passing days, the vendetta gets fiercer and fiercer. Its climax may come in a wild campaign of shooting any night, as the mystery gangsters, once elusive, shady and unknown, are now easily identifiable by those who have sworn to ‘get them.’
Crime groups develop their own laws, authority and royalties, and operate separately from state authority. This is what happened in eastern Sydney from 1925. In fact, it was almost inevitable that underworld crime would become a problem. Sydney had all the key elements that would sustain organised crime: strong anti-police sentiment; a weak economy creating long periods of unemployment; impoverished slum conditions; a police force unable or unwilling to check organised crime until it was well established; and corruption (enabling organised crime) in the police, government and courts.
The restrictive legislation of the time also laid the foundations for organised crime. Crackdowns on cocaine availability in chemists, the six o’clock swill and prohibition of street prostitution were meant to bring underworld crime into line. Instead, they created a black market for cocaine, booze and sex.
Prostitution and narcotics funded organised crime in Sydney and allowed Kate Leigh to rise to prominence in the underworlds of Kings Cross, Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. In the eight years following her release from prison in 1919, Kate Leigh had remarried and separated, and set up a booming underworld business. She owned a number of houses in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills, and commanded a huge slice of the sly-grog, drugs and prostitution markets. Leigh hadn’t just defied earlier attempts by her parents and the authorities to set her on the straight and narrow; she had fallen completely off the reforming wagon and kept on running through the streets of inner Sydney. By the late 1920s, Leigh was high on the list of gang leaders the police wanted off the streets and locked up in prison.