by Mark Dapin
I believe that time ironed out some of McCoy’s worst character flaws, Anthony, but, in the past, his biggest problems were jealousy and greed. He found it hard to share a woman, a friend or even a boss. When I came back from Vegas, he was jealous of my relationship with Izzy Berger, which was a joke, since I couldn’t stand the silly-hatted cunt. But we had made a truckload out of Sinatra, and Deborah was keen to see me move into areas of business that she could discuss with her friends in the newly established Hakoah Club, so I called a meeting of the boys and announced my intention to dominate the fields of music management and concert promotion. Berger and I had identified a number of Australian singers and bands with the potential to become as big as Sinatra. Berger was going to manage most of the acts in the new business, which would employ our existing skills in nightclub administration, licensing variation, debt collection, crowd control and creative advertising. The idea was that the same heads that rechristened the Filipina Picasso ‘Tina’s Talking Tits’ could be used to generate ideas to improve the fortunes of my wife’s cousin Arnold Zwaybil, ‘the Eastern Suburbs Frank Sinatra’.
We also had on our books Giuseppe Milano, ‘the Western Suburbs Frank Sinatra’; Alf Cockburn, ‘the Sinatra of Sydney’s South’; Col Tanner, ‘the Aussie Tony Bennett’; and Freddy Freed, ‘the Dover Heights Dean Martin’. I gave Milano to Big Stan, Tanner to the Little Fish, and Freed to McCoy. This last decision was a terrible mistake, since Freddy Freed, like Dean Martin, had a limited vocal range, and was compelled to fill out his sound with two back-up singers who went by the stage names Ada and Ava.
Ava was not much of a vocalist either, but I auditioned the female vocalists with the same rigour I had brought to choosing hostesses for the Patton, and I realised immediately that Ava’s throat would be better deployed in more traditional areas of our business. McCoy, of course, was in love with her. He took her out to dinner three times a week and kept her up all night talking about his childhood, but not the bit where he fucked Rachel what’s-her-name after three of us had already been up her, because he knew it was ‘now or never’, as Elvis sang that same year.
When McCoy was not boring Ava with stories from Balmain Boys, I was introducing her to various important jacks, who would take her for a tour of their beat and return an hour or so later a little lighter around the balls. Eventually McCoy found out and came crying to me that he and Ava were going to get married and how could I do this to him and all the usual shit I’d been hearing since he was fourteen years old. I said, ‘Mad Dog, if you want a back-up singer, why don’t you take the other one? She’s a better singer, and she fucks like a statue, which means (a) she’s no good to me and (b) she’ll stay still while you tell her about the fucking kelpie your mother wouldn’t let you keep in nineteen-thirty-fucking-three.’
I thought I was doing him a favour in letting him know that Ava had leaked his lame pillow talk. I hoped it would make him understand that she didn’t care about him the way he cared about her. But McCoy didn’t think, I’m better off without that little slut. He thought, I’ll knock my best friend, then I’ll knock her, then I’ll neck myself. He was always looking for a woman to kill or to die for. He should have been born an Italian, or one of those psycho Yids that hang around the wops for so long they go wop themselves, like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, or Jack Spot in your own unwashed and wintry homeland.
I don’t know if you’ve ever killed anyone, Anthony, or if every time you come under fire you run towards the gunnies throwing your piece in the air, but let me tell you this: if you are going to knock a bloke, you don’t go around telling his mates and the jacks because this will eliminate what we call ‘the element of surprise’. Once you’ve made up your mind to do it, the next step is the planning, followed by the execution. McCoy added a redundant stage that we might call ‘the skiting’, in which he informed anyone and everyone that he was going to shoot me at my private table in the Patton. I heard about his plan from the drunken magician, Morrie the Magnificent, and asked the Little Fish to sort him out for me.
What do you mean by ‘sort him out’?
I mean what I say, Anthony. I don’t go around saying I’m Jewish, or I’m a journalist, when I’m not.
McCoy had been one of my best mates all my life, and my lieutenant since the war. I didn’t want to hurt him – although, I must admit, he’d always grated on me a bit – but I needed to warn him off, and all the others too. They all knew he was coming after me – the wops, the Malts, the Paddies (Christ, they were useless) and the jacks – and they all had to see that he couldn’t get away with it.
The problem was that McCoy was the Little Fish’s mate too. Not a close mate, because the Little Fish didn’t get close to people after the war, but the two of them went back a long way. So the Little Fish persuaded me to give McCoy a chance, and just warn him off.
I sent a pair of nobodies around to his apartment in Malabar. They delivered their message, and McCoy threw one man off the balcony – luckily, it was only a second-floor unit – and hit the other across the face with an iron, which was red hot and still plugged into the wall, as they had surprised him while he was ironing his best shirt for his regular date with Ava the Swallow (I chose that name because a swallow is a noted songbird).
When he saw what McCoy had done to the imbeciles, the Little Fish packed a cricket bat in his kitbag and got Big Stan to drive him to Malabar and wait outside while he did what needed to be done. He told me afterwards that McCoy had treated him as a friend, invited him in, sat him down and offered him a drink. When the Little Fish had agreed to a malt whisky, McCoy tried the clothes-iron trick again. I don’t know what it is with people: something works for them once – when they have surprise on their side – and it becomes the thing that defines them. If I hadn’t cut short his career then and there, McCoy would have been known as Moshe the Iron for the rest of his life.
As soon as the Little Fish saw the iron but no shirt, he figured out McCoy’s plan, and was ready to duck and slip as the appliance came flying at his head. McCoy couldn’t control his swing and ended up tangled up in the cord and toppling over the board, like a hammer thrower who had forgotten to let go.
He had knocked himself down and tied himself up, which made the Little Fish’s job considerably easier. He took to his old friend with the cricket bat, careful not to damage the fine features that had attracted so many prostitutes in the past. He worked on McCoy’s legs, breaking his femur, tibia and metatarsals, but leaving his patella intact. Before he left the unit, he called an ambulance.
This was the end of McCoy’s underworld career. You may have seen a series of newspaper articles based on McCoy’s ‘revelations’ about my ‘organisation’. I let them pass, because he was saying nothing that was not already known, but it saddened me that a trusted friend could turn on me that way.
With McCoy gone, I had a vacancy for a lieutenant. I was wary of promoting the Little Fish, but he’d done a careful and controlled job on McCoy – one year later, he didn’t even limp – and I thought perhaps he’d mellowed as the war had become a more distant memory.
‘You’ve got to think about what you want to do in the future,’ I said to the Little Fish. ‘You can’t keep on shooting Gozo Joe in the face. You need a career. Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’
The Little Fish said he wanted a club of his own, but he was prepared to work for me until he had enough money to buy one. I liked his ambition – and the fact that he had no fucking chance whatever of realising it – so I made him my right-hand man, although I didn’t use him in an advisory capacity the way I might have consulted McCoy.
I realised we were heading in the wrong direction with the music. We weren’t going to get anywhere copying international acts. The Eastern Suburbs Frank Sinatra might go down well at the Hakoah Club (although, as it happens, he didn’t), but we were never going to be able to sell him overseas, or even in the western suburbs. It would be like the Yanks sending over the Connecticut Crash Craddoc
k. What was the point?
We needed to develop Australian talent to an international level, or keep on bringing stars like Sinatra over here. I took a long look at Giuseppe Milano and Freddy Freed and the rest, and realised that Ava was the only one with star quality, and even she didn’t have anything you could set to music.
I split the business into two divisions. I gave local to that imbecile Berger and kept international for myself, but with an agreement that if any of the local acts became big enough to tour overseas, they would revert to joint control, and Berger could keep a hand in organising the big stars’ visits to Australia.
What happened to McCoy?
He died. In Maroubra. A couple of months ago. You were there, at the funeral, pretending to be Jewish, and robbing him of the minyan he needed to consecrate the ceremony. My guess is that he currently languishes in purgatory, unable to enter either heaven or hell, cursing your name – or, rather, the name of a hero you stole from the Jewish War Memorial for opaque and imbecilic purposes of your own.
I mean, what happened before that?
You were dishonourably discharged from the British Army, and your girlfriend started fucking your best mate behind your back. To McCoy.
Oh, he made his way, as we all do. He employed the sympathy gambit to prise Ava away from me and rob her of a lucrative and satisfying career. He attempted to use his nonexistent expertise to launch her as a solo artist, but I put the word out that she was never to play a gig at any club in the Cross, whether it was owned by me, the Malts or any other imbecile. After a couple of years doing weddings – but no bar mitzvahs; I saw to that – she went back to sucking cock, but her looks had faded and she had lost the enthusiasm that had made her famous in those circles where enthusiastic cocksuckers are evaluated and compared.
McCoy moped for several years, as was his custom, then took off for the Philippines with an imbecile junkie called the Human Dartboard. There was no bad blood between us. In the early 1970s I flew out twice to the Philippines with the US Mafia’s man in Australia, Jack the Cat, to look at a business proposition put to us by McCoy and the Dartboard. It was just like the old days. We drank, we laughed, I fucked his wife. Not Cecilia Preciosa Bong Bong, but another bar monkey with similar tits.
When he came back to Australia in the 1980s, I lent him some money to get himself set up as a property developer with the late Hymie the Bookie and Plastic Sam, but I didn’t see much of McCoy socially. He was a very jealous and suspicious man.
Was music promotions a legitimate business for you?
Yes, it was. Within reason. I’m not saying we always met our tax obligations, but it was no more crook than the average squarehead enterprise.
We didn’t just do musicians either. We also handled athletic amusements, such as professional wrestling. And what a fucking crock of shit that is. Personally speaking, I would rather watch you fuck a fifteen year old up the arse than sit through two hours of fat imbeciles jump about pretending to blue. What a pathetic shambles. What a squalid excuse for entertainment. But the mugs loved it. And so did my silly-arse son.
The biggest promoter in Sydney was a poofter who went around telling everyone he was a millionaire when he was just a crim robbing the wrestlers. He used to stage his cuddling matches at Sydney Stadium, on the nights when there were no real fights. He had a bunch of local actors, mainly Greeks, Italians and Turks, who jumped around the ring sticking their noses into each other’s cracks and copping a feel of wog cock. Old people and kids used to scream, ‘I’m gonna kiiiiiiiill you!’ like Mad Dog McCoy yelling at a friend who had fucked his wife. The Yank wrestlers were better, but not by much. They had more of the showie in them, and they were a bigger draw. So I did a deal with the poof to bring out the Yanks for a tour. You wouldn’t’ve known it, but in some parts of Australia these cockjockeys were bigger than Sinatra.
I took my son along to a couple of shows at the old tin shed, and the one thing I enjoyed was the midgets. They had these two little fellas – one of them could wrestle, the other couldn’t – who got the biggest cheers out of everyone. It was funny to watch them run around on their little legs and wriggle about on the floor. I could see why people would pay for that.
After every show, the poof held a party and tried to get in the arse-sniffers’ pants, but most of them were cunt-hounds and there were always a few girls who would grapple with them in the changing rooms. Sometimes they’d do tag team. I had a camera installed in the showers and I got some passable movies. They were no good for blackmailing the wrestlers, obviously – what sort of a reputation have you got to lose when you make your money pretending to be an athlete? – but I’d show them at smokos and they went down well.
The thing that surprised me, though, was the midgets got as much action as the big boys. You’d see them at the parties, scurrying around, ducking under some moll’s skirts, and then they wouldn’t come out for half an hour. I’m not saying they had universal appeal, but every woman loves a man whose cock is as long as his forearm. That was another thing about them: their hands were in proportion to their legs, but their cocks were in proportion to their heads. Maybe God didn’t hate them, after all.
When I showed the midget movies to a bunch of jacks, they enjoyed it so much they threw money at the screen. It was like a miracle. I don’t think I’d ever seen a jack open his wallet before. I didn’t even know they carried them.
Years later, I borrowed a midget from Jeremiah Cain’s World Famous Boxing Troupe, where he used to wrestle cowboys and other bush imbeciles, and I put him on with the strippers at Aphrodite’s – but I’m getting ahead of myself. It seems, Anthony, I am doomed to forever be ahead of my time. Today I asked you here to talk about the Ligato Club, which I opened in Orwell Street, just a few buildings down from the Patton, when I got back from Vegas in 1959. That was the year I invented striptease.
Don’t smirk, Anthony. The smirk is the province of the knowing fool and, although you are certainly a fool, you know fuck all about anything. I’m not claiming to have to been the first man ever to persuade a woman to get undressed, or even to get undressed in public, but I brought the art of striptease from the US to Australia and have never received the plaudits I deserve.
They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that’s only true if you don’t have the imagination to bring it home with you. I saw shows that straddled the border between what I could do with the showgirls in the Patton and the whores at the smokos. I realised that society was moving on – I foresaw the sixties at the end of the fifties – and public tastes were changing.
They say striptease is all about the tease, but that’s garbage, of course. It’s all about the strip. According to the letter of the law, I still couldn’t display woman in the way God intended, ie, with no pasties over her nipples and nothing between her smile and the sunshine. According to Sergeant Fred Carol, however, I could do whatever the fuck I wanted, so long as I paid him his cut. Carol had drifted away from the Malts when he saw they were a spent force, relying on the reputation of Gozo Joe – which only seemed to become enhanced every time I had him shot – rather than strength in terms of numbers and ideas.
At the Ligato we began with burlesque but quickly moved on to naked erotic dance shows, often incorporating elements of the vegetable kingdom. I knew this shift in focus was likely to antagonise Deborah, who affected to believe that I ran all my business for my own gratification (but that didn’t stop her from spending all the fucking money that flowed out of them). She asked to visit the Ligato, to see for herself if there was any truth in the rumours that were circulating among the poisoned perms of the eastern suburbs chapter of the Women’s International Zionist Organisation.
She was my wife, I had no secrets from her and, in addition, I was proud of my pioneering work. I was happy for Deborah to attend a night at the Ligato and witness everything that went on – albeit, of course, in modified form. Deborah hoped to take in dinner and a show but the listed chef was the Little Fish, who couldn’t
cook to save his life, although this was not generally an issue because the Ligato didn’t actually have a kitchen. We only nominated a chef to fit in with licensing requirements. Luckily, I was able to prevail on Jimmy Bend, the proprietor of the floating restaurant in Rose Bay, to float his silly fucking boat to Woolloomooloo so I could use his chef – Deborah’s favourite – for the evening. Bend protested that he would lose thousands of dollars’ worth of business if he did so. I explained he would lose his entire fucking business if he didn’t do so, as I would use skills learned in the navy to sink his ship.
The merchant navy?
Yes, Anthony, the merchant navy. How many times do I have to fucking tell you? I served my country both on land and at sea. My only regret is that I was not also able to join the air force and shoot down Hitler from the skies.
Bend reckoned he was a tough guy – which is a fucking laugh, since he made his living as a roller-skater – and he told me all the things he was going to do to me if I so much as touched a plank on the deck of his bathtub. The Little Fish pulled out his gun and Bend talked to that for a while until, between them, they settled the matter.
It was at this same time that I had the idea of becoming a patron of the Jewish community. At first, you see, I didn’t have many friends at the synagogue. Many squarehead Jews resented my prominence, particularly when it came to royal commission time, when I was invariably named as ‘Mr Big’ or ‘King Sin’, and slurs were cast in the press as to the trustworthiness of my coreligionists. There were people who felt that I gave the community a bad name, although it is not as if it was a particularly popular group to start with. I tried to remedy this by performing acts of philanthropy, which displayed to the public the generosity of the Jews. This mainly took the form of donations to police charities, but I also gave from the start to the state of Israel, despite my misgivings about that particular enterprise. As Lenin said, the state is an armed body of jacks, and I couldn’t see why the Jews needed a state when we already had the one we were living in. It seemed to me that, if you had two states, you’d have two lots of jacks to pay off. I had the idea that all Jews everywhere would be answerable to Israel and, if you did anything that wasn’t one hundred per cent kosher, you’d be deported to face a court of rabbis or communists or some other such crap. But I got Israel upside down. It wasn’t a trap, it was a hideout. You could do whatever you wanted in a goyisher country and, as long as you could demonstrate that your mother cooked chicken soup, they’d let you into Israel and never give you up. In fact, their beaks would protect you from your own fucking beaks!