by Justine Ford
It would come to that, because years later, when Bonnie grew into a teenager, she went through a rebellious phase of her own. By that time, Burke’s parents John and Jenny had moved into a Gold Coast penthouse where they had been looking after Bonnie until their daughter was able to move to Queensland herself. It came as a shock to everyone when Bonnie – who’d seemed so happy and settled – ran away from home and stopped attending school. It was shades of her mother all over again.
The way the Burkes saw it, there was only one person who could save Bonnie: Ron. Upon hearing the worrying news, he immediately flew to the Gold Coast to counsel his goddaughter. ‘I gave her the big dad story,’ Ron says. ‘I said, “School’s the place for you. Your grandmother and grandfather are looking after you and you don’t want to end up like your mother.” ’
Fortunately, Bonnie heeded her godfather’s advice and settled back into a peaceful life with her grandparents. She finished high school and enrolled in a graphic arts course, in which she thrived. Burke knows she has Ron to thank. ‘He stepped up to the plate,’ she says. ‘I already thought he was an awesome bloke but he’s the bomb. He needs to be cloned.’
Louise Burke finally gave up heroin three decades later and has been clean since. ‘The trick,’ she says, ‘is to say no.’
It was Ron’s influence that eventually helped her to do so. ‘The reason I got through all that crap is because of the compassion of one man. Without him, I wouldn’t be here now,’ she adds.
‘Without him, she’d be dead,’ her mother Jenny agrees, adding that Ron’s guidance gave Burke the strength to go on. ‘He didn’t have to do what he did for us; he was under no obligation to do so. It’s embarrassing how much he’s done for us. Our whole family holds him in the highest regard.’
Since leaving her dark days behind, Burke has begun studying psychology at university to help others battling addictions. She even invites the homeless and hungry to stay in her apartment, as another way of giving back to the community. She acknowledges that she couldn’t have helped herself – let alone anyone else – without Ron, and credits him with teaching her the value of random acts of kindness. ‘He’s the most beautiful person on the face of the earth,’ she says. ‘I know we will remain friends forever.’
And whilst Ron acknowledges that ‘Louise was an experiment at the time’, he came across many Louises during his time in the job. Young people who, for whatever reason, had succumbed to the temptation of drugs and become hooked. He had learnt that he could not save every one, but there was something he could do. ‘I could always be there with a listening ear,’ he says.
11
THE ORIGINAL MR SIN
‘This was just fascinating. It was the first major joint investigation for the National Crime Authority. It was around one of Sydney’s best known business people. It involved a lot of intrigue and connections to government. It took me into a totally different world.’
– Ron Iddles
The highly secretive National Crime Authority was set up in 1984 by the Federal Government in the wake of the Royal Commission on the Activities of the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union. The Commission, headed by Frank Costigan QC, initially examined illegal activities involving the Painters and Dockers, but later looked at other forms of organised crime, including complex tax-evasion schemes. While the Commission had its critics, it illuminated the fact that organised crime in Australia was rife, and that a new, national law enforcement agency was needed to fight it.
‘The NCA was initially going to be something like the FBI and sit above the AFP,’ Ron explains. ‘It was set up to be a sophisticated organised-crime-fighting unit.’
The Victorian branch of the NCA was headed by Chief Investigator Carl Mengler, who was empowered to select police for his team from Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales. The Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory were too small to spare any officers for the specialist unit, and Mengler didn’t want anyone from the Queensland Police Force due to allegations of police misconduct, later exposed during the Fitzgerald Inquiry. And while Mengler ultimately employed police from New South Wales, he had to choose wisely. ‘There were a lot of good cops in New South Wales but there were a lot of bad cops too, and they were very high in numbers in those days,’ he says.
At the time, Victoria Police had 12,000 members, and it wasn’t until Ron applied for a sergeant’s position at the NCA that he and Mengler met. ‘I interviewed him and he impressed me,’ Mengler says. ‘I selected Ron and I never regretted it in any way.’
Among the other Victorians to join the team were an inspector, Peter Halloran; a senior sergeant, Bob Ryan; and a senior constable, Ken Collins. The team, spread over three levels of a multi-storey building in Queen Street, Melbourne, was complemented by staff from other government agencies, as well as solicitors who gave legal advice and conducted hearings, and accountants able to provide forensic financial analysis. ‘The investigators mixed with all the other workers and it was a good multi-functional team environment,’ Ron says.
Ron was expected to crack his first case the moment he walked in the door. ‘The first thing I ran was an investigation into an allegation of major drug trafficking in South Australia as a result of the Costigan Royal Commission,’ he says. ‘I spent six months investigating the allegation and ended up charging the person who made the complaint with cultivating a crop of marijuana.’
The unusual result prompted Mengler to ask Ron to go to Sydney with Bob Ryan and a senior constable from Western Australia, Jim Milligan, on another considerable mission: to investigate the affairs of shady businessman Abe Saffron. Nicknamed ‘Mr Sin’, the city’s very own godfather, Saffron was a notorious nightclub owner and property developer, and Sydney’s king of sleaze. Between the 1960s and early 1980s, Saffron reigned supreme over Kings Cross and the nightclubs and strip joints he owned there.
Inspired, it’s believed, by mobsters he met in Las Vegas, Saffron knew how to make moolah out of sex, booze and a good floorshow. Yet these earthly delights came at a price New South Wales could ill afford, and Saffron’s reputation became increasingly tainted with allegations of bribery, corruption, violence and even murder.
‘The national head of the NCA was Justice James Stewart and he wanted us to look at Abe Saffron in relation to tax evasion, Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance in 1975, the development in the early seventies of Victoria Point in Kings Cross, and aspects of the Luna Park fire in 1979,’ Ron says.
‘Everyone in Sydney knew who Abe Saffron was,’ he continues. But Saffron wasn’t quite as notorious interstate. ‘He’d been mentioned in Bureau of Criminal Intelligence reports in Melbourne, but other than that I didn’t know him as much more than a very successful businessman who was well connected and had a lot of influential friends.’
Among those influential friends were hardened criminals, politicians and senior police, so for the next few months, Ron and his fellow investigators would have to tread carefully.
*
As Ron familiarised himself with Abe Saffron’s affairs, he had to familiarise himself with Sydney too, where he’d be spending the next few months living out of a suitcase in serviced rooms in the CBD and Potts Point, a cosmopolitan suburb which backs on to the Cross. The NCA expected it to be a complex investigation, taking between six to twelve months.
‘Sometimes I’d go for three weeks without seeing my family,’ Ron recalls. ‘But I’d fly Colleen and Joanne up for the odd weekend, and other times I’d fly home late on Friday night then fly back again on a Sunday night. It was a lot tougher for Colleen, having to work and look after Joanne all on her own, but we both accepted there would be periods when I’d be away from home, even before I was selected by the NCA.’
The only other time Ron had been to Sydney was on his honeymoon, and he found it very different from the southern mainland capital he knew so well.
Kings
Cross, Ron observed, was even seamier than St Kilda, with cockney spruikers lining Victoria Street outside neon-lit strip joints and peep shows, and street prostitutes with kohl-rimmed eyes touting for business. Like St Kilda, there were male prostitutes too.
‘There was “The Wall”, where young boys were picked up,’ Ron remembers. ‘And there were lots of other problems. There were massive amounts of drugs, and seedy rooming houses. There were also unscrupulous club operators and police corruption. It was one massive cocktail.’
Yet visitors to Sydney were invariably drawn to the seedy spectacle. ‘Everyone who went to Sydney had to go to Kings Cross, even if it was for a look,’ Ron says. Even Colleen and Joanne, on a visit to Sydney, went on a scenic tour. ‘We drove through there so that Colleen could have a look,’ Ron says. ‘She was always so fascinated with the people.’
Ron got to know his new surroundings well, and was quick to find out who was who in town – with the help of key insiders on Saffron’s own payroll. Among those offering assistance was one of Saffron’s most intimidating cronies, James McCartney Anderson, better known as Jim Anderson, but sometimes called Big Jim. A Scottish-born hardman, Anderson was overseer of Saffron’s Kings Cross nightclubs including the Carousel, where anti-development campaigner Juanita Nielsen was last seen alive in July 1975.
Nielsen – heiress to Mark Foy’s department-store fortune and publisher of the community newspaper, NOW – had lived in Kings Cross where she’d vigorously opposed the construction of a $40-million apartment block. The building was to be called Victoria Point and had been proposed by wealthy property developer Frank Theeman, an associate of Saffron’s. While the NCA was never able to gather enough evidence to prove who was responsible for Nielsen’s disappearance and presumed murder, the investigators believed they knew. ‘To this day, Saffron and McCartney Anderson are believed to have been behind her disappearance,’ Ron says.
Yet while he fervently denied any involvement in Nielsen’s disappearance, Anderson did admit to being involved in Saffron’s dirty business dealings and approached the NCA, offering to tell all. ‘Part of his decision to come forward might have been to do with self-preservation and getting ahead of the pack,’ Ron suggests, recalling the first time he and Bob Ryan met their powerful new informer in a hotel room. ‘We knew he was a very influential person in Sydney,’ Ron says. ‘He’d been Abe Saffron’s right-hand man for ten to fifteen years. He was also politically well connected, with strong connections to the Labor Party.’
Anderson, Ron knew, was also dangerous, having fatally shot a violent standover man known as Donny ‘The Glove’ Smith in 1970. (Donny ‘The Glove’ was so named because he wore a leather glove lined with lead to inflict extra damage on his victims. In the end, it was a good thing The Glove was so fond of lead, because Anderson filled him with it after The Glove broke his jaw. Big Jim Anderson was never indicted, but that’s another story.)
The NCA was gathering evidence from others who knew Saffron, but Anderson made their job much easier. ‘He provided us with important background information about how Abe Saffron operated his clubs,’ Ron says. And it was immediately clear that Saffron was a fan of creative accounting. ‘James McCartney Anderson presented us with two sets of books,’ Ron remembers. ‘One showed figures of what the clubs actually made. The other set of books were made for the purpose of defrauding the tax department.’ They were known variously as the ‘black’ books and the ‘white’ books.
It had been a successful scam, just one of several Saffron had been running since the Vietnam War. And Anderson – whose job it was to count the cash – told the investigators Saffron always skimmed the profits and took advantage of his patrons. ‘If you went into one of his clubs and asked for a Jack Daniels, for example, you didn’t get Jack Daniels, you got a pretty generic brand,’ Ron says. ‘Then, as the night went on and people got drunk, the bartenders would just put their finger in some scotch and run it around the rim of the glass, which was just a glass of Coke. Anderson explained how they made massive profits just by doing that.’
Anderson didn’t stop there, showing Ron and Ryan more dubious entries in Saffron’s books, including one that pointed directly to the bent local constabulary. ‘There was always, on the expense side of the ledger, a donation to the Police Boys Club,’ Ron says. ‘But as James explained it, that wasn’t where that donation went. It was put in a brown envelope – and on a set pay day once a week – detectives came around to collect it. It was in return for police allowing the clubs to stay open and have prostitutes on the premises, and had been going on for years.’
Not only did Anderson tell the NCA how the scams were conducted, he also named the book-keepers allegedly in on it. ‘At least three were female book-keepers, and two of them lived in New Zealand,’ Ron says, recalling how he and Ryan subsequently flew to New Zealand at least five times to collect statements. They also tracked down bouncers in New Zealand who’d worked in Saffron’s Sydney clubs and got a firm hold on how Saffron’s business operated.
As the pieces of the puzzle kept falling into place, the investigators discovered another man who would become another important informant. ‘He had previously worked for Abe Saffron for many years,’ Ron says. ‘During that time he became very close to Saffron and his wife, and would often be at their house in Vaucluse.’
Suspecting that the man – to be known here as Mick Long – might have intimate knowledge of Saffron’s business affairs, Ron and Jim Milligan paid him a visit. ‘I knocked on the door and Mick opened it. When we told him where we were from, he invited us in,’ Ron recalls. Long’s response came as a surprise. ‘He said, “Where have you bloody well been? I’ve been waiting for you for a long time”.’
‘I let them know I was glad they came because I was toying with the idea – out of horrible obligation – to do something about the things that were going on because I was disgusted,’ Long reveals. ‘I was privy to a lot of things that were going on and nothing was being done to address it. Blind eyes were being turned to everything and I felt useless.’
Long knew he couldn’t take his information to the New South Wales Police – it was too risky. ‘I knew how corrupt the local police were and I couldn’t have approached them,’ he says. ‘And the people about whom I had these concerns were well in with them. I was in quite an insidious position.’
It was a relief to learn the NCA investigators on his doorstep were from interstate. ‘He said, “I’m glad one of you is from Victoria and one of you is from Western Australia, and I hope the NCA is serious about organised crime”,’ Ron recalls.
Long invited the investigators to come back two hours later, and he began to tell all – besides the how, where and when, he knew the addresses and phone numbers of key players in Saffron’s empire. ‘I was well organised and had an excellent memory and could tell them all these things,’ he says. ‘I think they realised they were on a goldmine.’
When Long first met Saffron, he had no idea of the scope of the small, well-tailored businessman’s illegal dealings. ‘Saffron was a true enigma. He really was. At our first meeting I found him very calm, very polite and very reassuring with no pretension of power or wealth,’ he says, adding that in the many years he worked for him, Saffron was always softly spoken and did not swear. ‘He was totally incapable of getting flustered.’
Others like Anderson got flustered on Saffron’s behalf, employing brutal standover tactics to maximise cash flow and keep mouths shut. ‘To what extent Saffron was aware of these goings-on, I don’t know,’ Long says, recalling how he’d wanted to get away from the underworld but had been in too deep to make sudden moves. ‘It was very hard for me to be among them because I was never of the same mind-set of those people and I had to disguise that. It was peer group pressure; you had to be like them. But Saffron was different, he wasn’t like them. He was civilised compared to them.’
But appearances can be deceptive. Aware at least that Sa
ffron was involved in fraud, Long told the NCA all he knew about his former boss’s bad bookwork. ‘He quickly became an integral part of the investigation and his version of events corroborated James McCartney Anderson’s,’ Ron says.
Yet Long had been around long enough to know that a whistle-blower’s existence is a precarious one. What if Saffron and his henchmen found out Mick Long was no longer staying staunch?
‘That was no easy task, I’ll tell you – to uncover all the things that were going on,’ Long says. ‘I had to fraternise with those people at night. All the while I was conscious that I could have been watched and something could have happened to me.’
Long became so suspicious of those around him that he even had reservations about some NCA members. ‘The only thing that enabled me to continue in this way [being an informant] was my utmost faith in Ron and Jim,’ he says. ‘They were a formidable team. I had nothing but the highest regard for both of them.’
In Ron, Long noticed a calm, matter-of-fact demeanour, and he was impressed by the way ‘he didn’t embellish or make promises’.
‘He was such a reliable confidante,’ Long says. ‘I knew if I told him something he wouldn’t get it wrong or mix it up or mention something he shouldn’t. I knew he was very astute.’
So when Long suggested he tell part but not all of what he knew, Ron was straight with him. ‘He said, “No, I can’t do that”. Not only would he not break the law, he wouldn’t even bend it just a touch,’ Long says. ‘Such was his character.’
Thanks to their informants and the vast intelligence they’d gathered, the NCA was now in possession of crucial evidence about Saffron’s illegal business dealings, and knew they had a case against him. Armed with a warrant, they searched his home and turned up at his bottle shop, Crown Street Liquor, to see if he’d cooked his books there too.