Bent Uncensored

by James Morton

  Back in 1934 Miller had already been punished, placed on uniform duties and made to clean out the office. He was then charged with using words ‘subversive of discipline’ to a sergeant who was drunk at the time and Miller was dismissed from the force. On appeal his punishment was reduced to a fine of ten shillings, but as his reward for speaking out he was sent to Coventry by his fellow officers. Efforts were made to show that he was an adulterer and had accepted bribes from a bookmaker and a sly-grogger. There were also allegations that he had pressured defendants to plead guilty. He was placed on light duties, which effectively meant that he cleaned the station’s cars. An inquiry found that the complaints should be dropped, but they continued. Another constable alleged that he had planted false evidence. And there was yet another allegation that he had sold a stolen car. At the age of thirty-three his hair turned completely white.

  Miller was fortunate that Truth took up his defence, arranging for him to have leading barrister J Shand to represent him and substantially changing its position about MacKay. Initially it had approved of him rather than the force itself. ‘Now you have your big chance to clean up the police force in your own way’, the paper had written. Gradually it hardened its attitude and became one of MacKay’s most vocal critics. A second inquiry, again under Markell, began in March 1937, with the terms of reference limited to an inquiry into the Mowlds case, Fergusson’s conduct and an assessment of the various departmental charges that had been levelled against Miller.

  If MacKay thought the limitation on the commission would tell against Miller and Mowlds, he was wrong. Fergusson was hammered in cross-examination by lawyer Richard Windeyer, eventually admitting that he was wrong in concluding that Mowlds was an SP bookmaker on the basis of a hearsay report by one of the man’s enemies.

  There was, however, the question of Miller’s harassment and unfair treatment. From the newspaper reports it appears that MacKay was given enormous latitude by Markell, who allowed him to interrupt the cross-examination of other witnesses. Truth happily reported:

  Last week was revealed the real MacKay, the Hitler of the New South Wales police force, Mr W.J. MacKay, police commissioner. He has become the great I AM since the State Government created him the omnipotent Csar of the New South Wales police force. Mr MacKay has bared his teeth … Parliament must deal with the situation, which is reaching an alarming state. Public confidence in the police force is being sapped, the police commissioner is defiant and the Chief Secretary a complacent and plastic figurehead.

  The commission turned into an attack on MacKay who, clearly suffering from strain, at the end of his evidence offered what amounted to an extraordinary plea in mitigation for both himself and the force, saying that the two commissions had been an ‘awful lesson’. If his officers (not including Miller) had made mistakes it was because of their lack of education and sophistication. In his report, however, Markell found that there was no question of unfair treatment of Miller, nor an attempt to discredit or harass him. However, he recommended that no action be taken against him and that he should be treated as having served a number of years without anything against his character. Miller was eventually appointed a senior constable and retired in 1963. In January 1938 MacKay tried to promote Monkey Fergusson to the rank of superintendent. His recommendation was rejected and Fergusson was transferred out of police headquarters to Darlinghurst.

  MacKay also worked the squad system. On joining the CIB a recruit was sent around to pick up a payoff. If he declined, his papers were marked ‘not suitable for plainclothes work’. It was nearly half a century before Commissioner John Avery began dismantling the CIB in 1987, and by no means everyone agreed with him even then.

  But was MacKay financially corrupt? Recent commentators such as journalist Evan Whitton and sociologist Alfred McCoy seem to think there is evidence that he was. Without doubt he must have known about the brothels in Darlinghurst when he worked from that station in the 1920s, and his efforts to shut down the baccarat clubs run by organised-crime figures such as Siddy Kelly, who had once received five years and a whipping for his part in slashing a rival bludger, and Phil ‘The Jew’ Jeffs in the 1940s were farcical. It was said that Kelly was making in excess of £1000 a night and so well able to pay police protection money that he was only once raided during his career as a club owner. In 1947 the raid on his Mont St Clair club in Kings Cross was not a conspicuous success. Kelly told the officer in charge, ‘You have made a fool of yourself. We are only playing rummy—I had a ring from Darlinghurst about 11.30 p.m. to say that you were out’. As has been said about subsequent commissioners, ‘If he didn’t know, he should have done’.

  Corrupt detective Ray Kelly flourished on MacKay’s watch and so did Kelly’s offsider, the standover man Richard Gabriel Reilly, who at the time of his death in 1947 was probably the city’s leading criminal. Reilly had long had good police connections before Kelly. When in December 1937 Reilly was charged with the murder of fellow gunman Clarrie Thomas, Inspector William Toole was on hand to give character evidence, telling the jury that Reilly was a ‘highly reputable man … of sober habits, an earnest worker and generally a good citizen’. Evidently the inspector did not read Truth, which the year before had labelled Reilly as a man who bashed people in Graham’s, a Hunter Street nightclub, and had once pulled a revolver there.

  On the plus side, MacKay founded the airborne division and the police pipe band (modestly dressing band members in a MacKay tartan), and, after a visit to Italy and Germany before the Second World War, extolled the benefit of police boys clubs. But he also founded the notorious 21 Division, with Frederick Hanson (soon to be known as Slippery) a founding member. At first it was known as the ‘Basher Squad’ and it was designed to prevent gangs from robbing wartime servicemen of their pay. But by the 1960s the division had deteriorated into a McCoy class-four corruption operation.

  The most damaging thing MacKay did, however, was to promote two wholly unsuitable officers, Frederick Hanson and Norman Allan, to positions from where their move to commissioner was, if not inevitable, at least made much more likely. At the beginning of February 1946 MacKay had even promoted Hanson to sergeant in an ad hoc publicity stunt after Hanson piloted the first airplane purchased by the police to a safe landing at Mascot. The reality was, he later admitted, that ‘I jumped 1150 men’.

  * Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, May 2005. We are most grateful to Dr Evans for giving us a copy of his thesis and generously allowing us to quote extensively from it.

  5

  RAY ‘GUNNER’ KELLY AND CO: PRINCES OF THE CITY

  One of the best detectives of the New South Wales police during and immediately after the Second World War was Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly, whose nickname came after he had shot and killed a suspect in 1930. After his retirement, The Sydney Morning Herald thought that ‘he [Kelly] deliberately made friends in all walks of life because he knew that was the way to be a successful detective’. Good detective he may have been, but unfortunately Kelly was also probably one of the most corrupt policemen worldwide. He was a good friend of the prostitutes and madams Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh and ‘Pretty’ Dulcie Markham. Sydney standover man Richard Gabriel Reilly and one-time ‘first among equals’ in the city’s criminal hierarchy Frederick ‘Paddles’ Anderson were more than just his informants; they were his partners in abortion and other rackets, as was the fashionable Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones.

  During the war Bondi was the place for the backstreet abortionist, whose trade had increased substantially with the number of women who had become pregnant by visiting servicemen. The police targeted those abortionists who did not pay them protection money and the women were arrested as they left the clinics. Often there was a police photographer in attendance to complete their humiliation. Obtaining cooperation from the police was therefore a must for the clinic operators. Kelly and fellow officers Fred Krahe and Monkey Fergusson’s son Don were part of
a ring run by Reilly that demanded 10 per cent of all doctors’ fees from abortions.

  For a time Kelly, born in New South Wales in 1906, had worked as a jackeroo, but he craved excitement and moved to Sydney in 1929, where he joined the police. He was on bicycle patrol on 24 August 1930 when he saw three men, eighteen-year-old Joseph Lloyd Swan from Marrickville and housebreakers Reginald Farran and William Garton, in a stolen car in King Street, Newtown, and followed them into a dead end. They tried to run him down and he leapt onto the running board, grabbing the steering wheel. The car crashed into a shop window and the driver again tried to shake Kelly off by reversing at high speed. Instead Kelly shot all three, hitting Swan in the back and another in the head (the third man lost part of a finger). Five days later Swan, already a reputed standover man, died in hospital. In a dying deposition he said, ‘I did not know the man was a policeman. He did not tell me he was or sing out. If he had said he was he could have saved himself the trouble of shooting me. I thought he was a hold-up man’. At the inquest Kelly told the coroner that Swan had tried to run him down and in fact had then reversed over his bicycle. He had been pushed off the running board by the driver and had fired a shot at the back of the car as it drove off. He then fired a further five shots at the speeding car. Other officers gave evidence that the shots must have been fired from some distance, which, given that all three men were hit, showed what a good or lucky shot Kelly was. On 17 September the coroner exonerated him, returning a verdict that he had intended to shoot at the car rather than the passengers:

  Fortunately the police, in the execution of their duty, very seldom shoot a man. There may be an occasion when to shoot a man is justifiable. In this case, I am not going to find that it was justifiable. I find it was accidental.

  On 8 October 1930 Farran and Garton each received a year’s imprisonment for having stolen the car.

  The next year Kelly worked with the riot squad and his skull was fractured in the eviction riots in Newtown. Recovered from his injuries, Kelly progressed onward and upward in his career. He went into detective work in 1936, equally at home, said his colleagues, with bankers and standover men. Although some of the photographs of him appear to show a small, bespectacled, almost dapper little man, in fact he was over 2 metres tall and weighed nearly 90 kilograms. Described as having ‘flat, glossy hair parted in the middle, a slit mouth, and glittering eyes’, he was a keen golfer and surfboarder, a non-drinker and non-smoker. He had ‘power above his rank’, recalled Justice Don Stewart, who had been an officer on the force. ‘He told senior officers what to do and what not to do. And he had killed people. He had murdered people, had Ray Kelly’.

  On 15 March 1953 Kelly killed another criminal, the well-known safe-blower Lloyd Edward Day, who with four companions had spent a weekend dealing with the safe of Marcus Clark in Central Square. Kelly and others had been on a seventeen-hour stakeout. When the men emerged, two got into a truck, said to have been driven by one of Sydney’s Mr Bigs, Lennie McPherson, although he was never charged. The other three got into a car driven by Day. They were chased down College Street, Drummoyne, and Kelly called out for them to stop. When they did not, Kelly leaned out of the window and fired a number of shots, one of which hit Day. The men’s car careered out of control and crashed. The other men ran off but halted under what the newspapers described as ‘a hail of police bullets’. Others in the squad at the time were both Fergusson and Krahe.

  Kelly was also involved in the repeated captures of the gunman and escaper Darcy Dugan, on one occasion in 1958 using his informants to tell him where Dugan was waiting patiently in a 1.3-metre hole in Long Bay prison for the chance to move over the wall. That same year he confronted and disarmed James Hackett, who had shot dead Marlene Harvey in her home and wounded two other men. The next year he was part of the team that tracked down Kevin Simmonds and Leslie Newcombe, who had clubbed an Emu Plains prison warder to death while searching for food following their escape. Kelly was also in the Arthur Street, North Sydney, shoot-out with the cross-dressing Tony Martini and Edward Garland, for which the pair were sentenced to death and later reprieved. That was his public good side, but he was also quite capable of arranging for criminals such as Dugan to take the blame for some robberies he and his colleagues had set up—indeed, that was said to be his speciality.

  Promotion to the detective division was an aspiration for most young policemen. It had kudos and it took the young officer out of the quasi-military structure of the force. And for those so inclined it offered the opportunity of undeclared gains. But the detective division of any force was not for the squeamish. In London in the 1960s, when recruits were known as aides to CID, they were dropped off at one side of a mainline railway station and told to make two arrests before they came out the other side.

  In Sydney Kelly was one of three senior detectives who, when questioning applicants for the plainclothes division, asked them if they were prepared to load a suspect. If the answer was no they would be rejected, and Kelly was apt to remark derisively, ‘Give him back to the Cardinal. He’s no good to me.’ The Cardinal was the incorruptible Catholic officer Brian Doyle. Those Kelly took on and groomed included Murray Riley, another Olympic oarsman, whom he seconded in 1954 to moonlight as bodyguard to Lennie McPherson’s mate the slot-machine manufacturer Ray Smith, after a bomb attack on his car.

  When his relationship with Smith became known, Riley was transferred back to the uniform branch, from which he soon resigned and took up the lucrative, if dangerous, life of a drug dealer. In June 1978 Riley pleaded guilty and received ten years in Adelaide for the importation of 2.7 tonnes of cannabis. He had overloaded his boat the Anoa, which had been unable to make port. He had also been importing heroin bought in Thailand at several thousand dollars a pound and selling it, duly cut with sugar, at several thousand dollars an ounce in Australia. In 1980 Riley received a further seven years on charges of possessing an unlicensed pistol and conspiracy to cheat and defraud the American Express Company of $274 000. Shortly before his release in May 1984 he was made bankrupt, owing over $132 000 to the Nugan Hand Bank, which was by this time in liquidation. In 1985 he was named in an inquiry by Justice Bredmeyer of the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court as being part of a ring to import $40 million of heroin from Bangkok.

  Kelly’s retirement party on 3 February 1960, a £5-a-plate buffet with unlimited drink, was attended by nearly 900 people and included a mix of luminaries such as Premier Robin (who later changed his name to Robert) Askin, Police Commissioner Norman ‘The Foreman’ Allen, judges, horse trainers, criminals and the gambler Perce Galea.

  Farewell dinners attended by politicians and criminals alike were common at the time. In 1950 James Sweeney, a retiring metropolitan superintendent, was feted by 600 vice traders at Sammy Lee’s restaurant, where he received a cheque for over £600. Inspector Noonan, metropolitan licensing inspector, did rather better on his retirement, pocketing £1000 that was presented to him at the Australia Hotel. The 1951 Royal Commission on Liquor Laws in New South Wales found that the practices were simply ‘indiscreet’ rather than illegal.

  Shortly before Premier Askin’s funeral in 1981, attention was drawn to the late premier’s finances and his relationship with Kelly, who in 1975 had received an MBE in Askin’s last New Year’s honours list. The journalist Evan Whitton was told:

  If I was investigating Sir Robert Askin, I would search land titles of land bought since 1958 by Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly.

  Kelly was his bagman. Such land would have been purchased and then sold promptly to Government departments and then held by those departments for long periods of time as it would be land not required by them. A good place to start looking would be land at Ourimbah.

  During his service Kelly approached policeman-turned-reporter Kevin Perkins and offered him $500 a week cash to keep him informed of trends in media views on illegal gambling. At the same time he told Perkins:

  No one can open one (an illegal casino) without the permission of the
Premier and the Police Commissioner (Hanson). If anyone opens against our wishes, we just close them down. They pay for protection and the right to operate … I still collect the money and distribute it. I make sure Bob Askin gets his share and so on down the line.

  He also told Perkins that he had controlled the abortion rackets and reported to Norman Allen and later to Hanson. Perkins turned down the offer. Kelly died on 11 August 1977.

  It was Kelly and his offsider Fred Krahe who nurtured a young officer with a good pedigree, Don Fergusson—son of Monkey Fergusson and described by Evan Whitton as being much in demand at Masonic lodges for his detailed knowledge of the liturgy—to be their bagman in the abortion rackets. It will be remembered that Monkey was watching his son row in the Berlin Olympics during the Markell bookmaking inquiry of 1936.

  Krahe had joined the police as a cadet in 1940 and by the time of his premature retirement was a striking example of the abuse of police power. One fellow officer observed: ‘Krahe was known as a scoundrel within the Force’ and another described him as ‘an evil bloke—a big, brooding bastard with an aura of power and evil about him’. Krahe prided himself on his criminal contacts.