Bent Uncensored

by James Morton

  A good detective involved in a number of major cases, such as the first thallium poisoning, like a number of others Krahe organised abortion rackets and armed robberies, as well as standing over prostitutes and bricking criminals. Along with Kelly, he seems to have been particularly set against safebreaker and thief Darcy Dugan, whom he attempted to set up on a number of occasions.

  George Freeman, never lower than No 2 in the criminal hierarchy of the period, thought Krahe was a ‘deadly and evil’ killer who had his own pricing scheme:

  After he’d arrest you, the paying began. You’d pay him to get bail, you’d pay some more later for a reduced sentence, you’d pay more for remands, you’d pay for whether or not he gave verbal evidence against you, and you’d pay again if he decided not to give evidence … And believe me, everybody paid. It was stupid not to … Krahe not only stood over crims once he arrested them, he had others working for him, doing everything from stealing cars to house-breakings and armed robberies.

  Interviewed for Sydney exhibition Sin City at the Police and Justice Museum, Karl Bonnette—known as the Godfather and alleged to have been part of the Double Bay Mob—recalled the Kelly and Krahe era:

  I never had run-ins with them at all. The only thing I knew was that Fred Krahe was known as the Big Till. They said when he knocks at your door, have a handful of money or you’re going to jail. I was lucky enough for him never to knock on my door.

  An incident that backed up Freeman’s assessment took place in February 1972 when Alan Burton, who had been involved in a huge car-stealing racket with the one-legged Reg Varley, vanished. The Varley-Burton combo had stolen cars worth $1.5 million in seven months, the lion’s share of which, said Varley, was received by Krahe. In January 1972 a series of raids began on the Varley chop-shops, and on the night of 7 February Burton disappeared. Varley was accused of paying two New South Wales detectives $5000 to dispose of his partner. Much of the evidence against him came from another member of the gang, Paul Hos, who told the Central Criminal Court that Varley said he went to Burton’s house with some detectives, one of whom hit Burton with a cosh. Varley allegedly then also hit him and the body was taken 200 miles down the coast and dumped at sea. In his defence Varley told the court that Krahe had called on him that night and told him they were going to give Burton a hiding. He had, it was said, swindled the officers out of $20 000. When Varley protested, he was hit on the ankle of his one leg and his aluminium crutches were smashed. Burton and he were taken for a drive and then Burton was taken from the car and Varley heard shots. However, Varley was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to fourteen years. He served nine, and after his release constantly tried to have his case reopened, claiming the kidnap had been organised by detective Cyril Edwards.

  The case had a curious sequel. The next year Edwards was dismissed from the force and although it was recommended that charges be brought against him, none were. Edwards disappeared from view until March 1986, when 1100 Indian hemp plants were found at his chicken farm. He was charged with cultivating and on 31 October, shortly before he was due to appear in court, his body, with legs and hands trussed, was found in the sea at Mackenzie’s Bay near Tamarama. He had been shot in the head. Before he disappeared he told his wife he had information implicating high-ranking officers and was going to see two detectives in Sydney to ‘fix’ the evidence against him. He had also taken out a life-insurance policy and changed his will. A company director, Peter Collis, claimed he could produce evidence showing who had shot Edwards, but he never did. Despite leaning towards a verdict of suicide, the coroner returned an open verdict.

  Journalist and author Richard Hall thought:

  He [Krahe] was a crook all right but he was locking up half the crims in Sydney with the information he was getting from the other half. Krahe had been so close to the Gladesdale Mob, then the dominant group in Sydney, as to be almost a member.

  Hall may have been overly generous to him. Krahe was also said to be a senior member, if not the leader, of the Sydney-based Toe-Cutters Gang, named because of their predilection for snipping off the toes and other body parts of criminals to persuade them to share the greater part of their haul. One of his offsiders was criminal and fellow toe-cutter Kevin Gore, who was thought to have been killed in the winter of 1972 by standover man John ‘Nano the Magician’ Regan. Gore was last seen walking with Regan in Darlinghurst. Krahe was said to have tried unsuccessfully to persuade William Maloney and Linus ‘The Pom’ Driscoll to kill Regan in retaliation for Gore’s murder and that of his friend, another standover man, John Edward ‘Ratty Jack’ Clarke, who was shot and killed while drinking at the Newington Inn at Petersham in August 1974.

  During the last ten years of his career Krahe was involved with Shirley Brifman, a working girl and brothel madam in the Kings Cross area and in Queensland, who said she paid him a regular $100 a week for protection from standover men. He was, she said, always at her brothel, arriving most days about 11 a.m. She claimed he had told her that he had organised about eight robberies and collected money from an abortion clinic. She gave him expensive presents and when she was in Queensland he would ring her daily saying how much he missed her.

  Following a flat-warming party at Brifman’s new brothel, The Reef, in 1968, photos of Krahe and other senior police officers were leaked to The Sunday Mirror. Newspaper stories describing her as the ‘Kings Cross call-girl queen’ followed. Overnight she had become a liability to her police protectors. While it dawned on Brifman that she could be facing some serious prison time, it also occurred to Krahe—and Queensland officers Tony Murphy, Glendon Hallahan and the rest—that she might start to talk. As a form of insurance, Krahe is said to have tortured Brifman twice in Sydney in the latter half of 1970, on one occasion badly burning her feet.

  Despite this, talk she did. When Brifman was arrested for allegedly procuring her fourteen-year-old daughter, something she bitterly denied, she went public, maintaining that Krahe had helped organise a theft of bonds from a bank. She also claimed that he and Queensland officer Tony Murphy had ‘exchanged’ criminals—Donny ‘The Glove’ Smith, shot dead in 1970 by club owner James Anderson in Abe Saffron’s Venus Room, and Donald ‘The Hammer’ Kelly, bashed to death in a motel near Newcastle in 1988—so that they could work in each other’s state without fear of recognition. Given that the police were still getting over a scandal involving massaged crime figures, this was the last thing that was needed.

  Under threat from Krahe, Shirley Brifman fled to Queensland and from July to October 1971 she was interviewed by Brian ‘The Cardinal’ Doyle from New South Wales and Norman Gulbranson in Queensland, both officers of indisputable integrity. She named over fifty officers from both states, the majority in connection with specific crimes—passing forged $10 notes, setting up burglaries—or general corruption such as visiting her brothels and taking money on a regular basis.

  Before she talked, Don Fergusson, then in his late fifties, was in serious difficulties on both a personal and a professional level. He believed his memory was failing and that he was going mad. Despite this he had been successful in his application to become metropolitan superintendent, the fifth-highest-ranked officer. He was also at loggerheads with Kelly and Krahe over taking money from drug suppliers. For him, drugs were one step too far. Made of sterner stuff, in turn they thought that his new position meant he was digging out and he might no longer be willing to protect his former tutors.

  With the abortion business about to break, on Sunday 15 February 1970, Fergusson’s body was found in the lavatory of his personal office at Campbell Street CIB. He had been shot in the right temple and his revolver was nearby. He appears to have left a note indicating that he thought he had a malignant tumour in his brain, but an autopsy found no trace of one. A verdict of suicide while suffering severe depression was returned, but many thought Krahe had held the trembling hand. In turn, Krahe offered a cryptic remark, ‘The silly cunt didn’t have to do it’. At the funeral service in St Andrew’
s Cathedral, Bishop FO Hulme-Moir described Fergusson as ‘a man who never lost his high sense of duty’, which was one way of putting things. The card on one wreath read, ‘With deepest sympathy from Lennie’. Now who could have sent that?

  Shirley Brifman was found dead in her Brisbane flat in March 1972. Shortly before midnight on the night of her death a man had called on her. She died either of a heart attack or a drug overdose, but over the years there have been persistent rumours among the police that it was Krahe, with or without the active assistance of a Queensland officer, who forced the pills down her throat.

  Krahe was allowed to retire that year, at the age of fifty-two, with a thrombosis in the leg. He was later suspected, without any hard evidence to back it up, of involvement in both the murder of Griffith anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay and the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen, who was campaigning against the development of Potts Point. Krahe had certainly been helpful in evicting protesting squatters from the Potts Point site. He was also involved in the Nugan Hand Bank affair and was charged with conspiracy to defraud the group but acquitted on all counts. He died, aged sixty-one, in December 1981 from the thrombosis, brought on, said one admirer, ‘by kicking too many people to death’. Arch villain George Freeman, unsurprisingly, disliked Krahe and in 1988 Krahe’s son failed in an attempt to obtain an injunction against Freeman’s autobiography, which was heavily critical of his father.

  However, Krahe’s champion Bill Jenkings wrote, ‘Krahe, a CIB legend, had his admirers and his critics. I was among the former. And there wasn’t one in the latter group whose achievements came within a bull’s roar of Krahe’s’.

  6

  MACKAY’S LEGACY: COPS AND CROOKS IN CAHOOTS

  When New South Wales Commissioner William MacKay died following a heart attack in 1948 he was succeeded by his assistant commissioner, James Frederick Scott, who does not even merit a mention in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. But, by the time Colin Delaney, the first Catholic appointment, took over four years later in 1952, there were allegations of corruption and brutality in the force, something with which Delaney never came to grips. Instead, since he regarded homosexuals as Australia’s ‘greatest menace’, copious time and resources, which might have been spent on organised crime, were devoted to their entrapment by young, good-looking constables.

  There was a precedent for this. MacKay had been involved in two distinctly dubious cases in which gay men were set up for political reasons, and in general over the years homosexuals have been targets for some officers. One former detective has said, ‘Sport for some coppers was chasing blokes around toilets and either arresting gays, beating them or both’.

  In March 1943 a charge of obscene conduct in a public lavatory against Clarence McNulty, editor-in-chief of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, was dismissed by Stipendiary Magistrate McCullough. It was alleged against police officers Thomas Carney and Neville Grigg that, working with bent solicitor Herbert Munro, they had bricked McNulty and other men over the past year. They then pointed them in the direction of Munro who, appearing for them at a fee of £100, usually was able to persuade the magistrate to record a finding of guilt against them but without recording a conviction. The constables were given half Munro’s fee, and sometimes other money changed hands so that Munro could bribe the press not to report the case. As a result, in April constables Carney, with fifteen years’ service, and Grigg, with five, were dismissed from the force. The officers appealed to a tribunal, which reinstated them in July that year. Backed by the Police Association of New South Wales, Grigg then brought an action against Commissioner MacKay and The Sunday Telegraph, claiming damages for libel over an article in the paper. He lost and was later bankrupted over unpaid costs.

  Such actions and attitudes were not uncommon. Gay activist Gary Burns recalls Sydney officer Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell—a legendary hard man of policing and rugby league, who was alleged to have bitten off an opponent’s ear—taking him to the cells under Darlinghurst police station in the 1970s. ‘He put a phone book against my stomach and beat the shit out of me. He said, “I don’t want poofters in my street”.’

  And it wasn’t always police acting on their own. It was alleged but never quite proved that in 1972 a group of policemen, for evening post-drinking sport, threw gays in the Torrens River near Government Gardens, Adelaide, known as the No. 1 Beat, a trysting place for homosexual men. Homosexual acts were illegal in South Australia at the time, and ‘a ducking’ was considered by some a much easier and certainly more fun form of punishment than the trouble of processing the men through the courts.

  On 10 May 1972 Roger James and 42-year-old law lecturer Dr George Duncan, who had been in the country for less than two months after teaching in England, were victims of what was described in a police report as ‘a high-spirited frolic gone wrong’. Duncan, who could not swim and had only one lung as a result of contracting tuberculosis as a child, drowned. James, who suffered a broken leg, managed to crawl out and onto a road, where he was found and taken to hospital.

  The attackers, whom James failed to identify, were alleged to be three senior vice-squad officers accompanied by a fourth man, a tall civilian, said to have connections in high places, who was never identified. On the grounds of self-incrimination the officers declined to give evidence at the coronial inquest. They were suspended and later resigned.

  Scotland Yard sent over Detective Superintendent Bob McGowan and Detective Sergeant Charles O’Hanlon to scrutinise the conduct of the police investigation, but the report was only made public in 2008, when gay activist Malcolm Cowan described it as homophobic and glib. It took fourteen years for a prosecution to be brought against two of the officers. As was their right, they did not give evidence and, amid allegations—which were never proved—that a juror had been got at to return a not guilty verdict, both were acquitted. At the trial a former vice-squad officer gave evidence that it was common for officers to chase homosexuals, fire a couple of shots in the air and then throw their captives in the river. One result of Duncan’s death was that in 1975 South Australia became the first state to legalise homosexuality. Over the next twenty years other states followed suit.

  Commissioner Delaney did take steps to modernise the New South Wales force at the start of his term in the 1950s, extending the number of four-wheel vehicles and decentralising decision making, but he was another who failed to convince the Crown Employees Appeal Board of the benefits of promotion by merit rather than by seniority.

  He retired in 1962 and what followed was an unbroken seventeen years of systemic corruption. It was not surprising that there was corruption in the senior and lower levels of the New South Wales police during those years, as for twelve of those years corruption went straight to the office of the premier, Sir Robert Askin.

  Sir Robert, who disliked his given name of Robin and changed it by deed poll in 1971, served in the Second World War, and afterwards managed the travel department for a bank while moonlighting as an SP operator. He joined the Liberal Party in 1947.

  For years, particularly after Askin died in September 1981 leaving something over $2 million, the belief was that both Police Commissioner Norman ‘The Foreman’ Allan and Askin were on the take from illegal casinos, abortion rackets and prostitution. Justice Moffitt, who in 1973 conducted an inquiry into the infiltration of New South Wales clubs by organised crime, viewed the premier with some charity:

  There was no evidence against him in my inquiry, never any solid proof. I always thought he got money by being put in on the Stock Exchange. There was a smell about his selling knighthoods but there was no evidence. It’s a false assumption that a person who ends up wealthy has been getting it in a brown paper bag.

  However, as the years have gone by, so much evidence to support the systemic-corruption theory has emerged that it would seem Moffitt was being unduly generous.

  As for Allan, a former assistant commissioner remembered:

  I was a cadet when Fred Hanson was commissioner; he was
an alcoholic and corrupt. So were Norman Allan and Mervyn Wood [corrupt].

  MacKay’s protégé Norman Allan had been the commissioner’s personal assistant and later assistant to both Delaney and Scott, and had designed the police-department crest Culpam Poena Premit Comes (‘Punishment follows closely upon the crime’). Appointed in 1962 at the age of fifty-two, he was then the youngest ever police commissioner. The always well-groomed Allan, a man who favoured the death penalty and admired J Edgar Hoover, was known as The Foreman because of his undoubted administrative abilities. He had been commended for ‘exceptional skill and ability’ in the hunt for Stephen Bradley, convicted of the kidnapping and murder of the small boy Graeme Thorne in 1956.

  In 1967 Allan, or possibly his then assistant Don Fergusson, had the great idea of solving major crimes by using phone taps as a cheaper and certainly more reliable alternative to the traditional method of paying dobbers. The evidence might not be admissible in court, but very often the evidence of informers could not be used either. Allan called in Sergeant DR Williams and three years later, after tests in the United States, a working group was set up. Evan Whitton believed that the group insisted their tapping should not include allegations of police misconduct, but over the years a number of officers could be heard on tape in unfortunate circumstances. By the time they ceased operations, personnel of the unit had undertaken over 200 separate interceptions and Allan was proud of his illegal activity, telling a police conference, ‘There is no reason in the world why every facility, including wire tapping, should not be made available to the police’.

  Perhaps Allan simply lacked judgement. On one occasion he proposed to give young constables time off so that they could have dancing lessons before the Police Commissioner’s Ball. More seriously, in 1968 he made some extraordinary decisions while in command of the siege that followed after mentally disturbed petty criminal Wally Mellish took his girlfriend Beryl and her twelve-week-old son hostage. There have been suggestions that Allan and Mellish had, in some way, been connected. Negotiating techniques were not as developed then as now, but certainly in the twentieth century the head negotiator would not have agreed that Mellish should be given an Armalite rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition. It is doubtful also if he would have arranged for a clergyman to marry the gunman and his hostage, and be on hand himself to provide the wedding ring. Fortunately, the siege ended without bloodshed, but the Police Association rightly complained about Allan giving Mellish a gun. Apparently it had been doctored by Don Fergusson so that it would only fire one shot. The bride left her husband for good after his surrender.