by Louis Nowra
But the Italians kept on coming. In 1930 sixty-one Italian men were prevented from disembarking because there had been a tightening up of Australian migration rules, which required each Italian to be nominated by someone already living in Australia, and to possess £40. The result was an attempted mass escape from the guarded vessels. Many Italians were stopped at the gates to the wharf, but others were more determined. Local Italian fishermen used their boats to smuggle their compatriots off the ships during the night and hid them in the houses of sympathetic countrymen around the streets of Woolloomooloo.
As the 1930s rolled on locals became used to the noisy and emotional scenes on the wharves when ships arrived with Italian immigrants and brides married by proxy. Italians paid no heed to the closed gates but would storm the wharf, shouting to friends on the vessels. Husbands and wives embraced, and ‘migrants of both sexes rushed into each other’s arms, kissing fervently’. By the late 1930s as the situation in Europe grew worse, ships arrived with an extraordinary range of migrants who spoke ‘a bewildering babble of tongues’. One ship in 1938 had Italians, refugees from Germany, Yugoslavs, Poles, Maltese, Greeks, Czechs, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Albanians and a handful of English migrants. The Jewish refugees were a pitiful lot, arriving with little but the clothes they were wearing.
Many of these had friends or relatives pick them up and take them out into the suburbs. The Jews flocked to Kings Cross, one of the few places in Australia to accept them, and the Italians and Maltese merely walked up the street to stay with their relatives in Woolloomooloo or East Sydney.
Constructed, between 1911 and 1913, the Finger Wharf had changed the ecology of the ’Loo. Cargo ships carried our wool to the world, and passenger ships brought the world to Woolloomooloo in the form of seamen and migrants. The sailors and wharf workers populated the brothels and pubs, and with them came punch-ups, venereal disease, drugs, impregnated local girls and drunken killings. The term ‘Jack Ashore’ was given to those sailors and ship’s crews who disembarked at Cowper Wharf and partied until they were broke or had drunk themselves senseless. Once back on their ships, the intoxicated men might topple over the gangways into the bay and drown, or kill their mates over perceived insults.
The wharves and the nearby streets and hotels were sites of savage brawls between workers. It was a hard life being a wharf labourer. One of the causes of poverty in the area was that there was no permanence to the job. Sometimes the men were employed for a week and then unemployed for a fortnight. The fights between striking waterside workers and the scabs were ferocious. One time in 1924 over a thousand locals, men, women and children, watched brutal and bloody clashes on the wharves, which continued outside the Frisco Hotel and then on through the streets of Woolloomooloo.
The political divisions in Australia could be played out on the wharves. In 1932 a delegation of six unionists embarked for the Soviet Union. More than a hundred communists and their sympathisers gathered to send them off. When a large banner saying ‘Greetings to the workers of the Soviet Union from the Australian Workers’ was taken on board, the communists on the dock below sang the ‘Red Flag’. The song drowned out the farewells of the other passengers until a woman seized a bunch of streamers and led the more loyal passengers in singing ‘God Save the King’.
All this was part of Woolloomooloo life, but something was subtly and permanently changing the area. Governments may have forgotten their promises to tear down the slums, but one essential feature of modern life did the job for them: the car.
By the early 1920s, terrace houses were being demolished to make way for factories and warehouses but it was also becoming an important place for motor car assembly, showrooms and repair shops. It was Woolloomooloo’s close proximity to the wharves that attracted the car trade. Cargo ships imported cars in huge, heavy cases and it made sense to save transport costs by having warehouses close to the wharves where it was quicker and easier to unpack and assemble the cars. The most sought after street was Dowling and the most enticing section was where it sloped down to the bay. The advantage was that a building of two floors could be erected with an entrance to the lower floor from a lane and the top floor from street level, thereby avoiding an expensive lift.
On the eastern side of Dowling Street was Dalgety’s huge showroom, which later shifted to a huge motor-car showroom on a block bounded by Bourke, Griffiths and Palmer streets facing onto Sir John Young Crescent. Nearby was a car workshop for repairs, generators and motors, and blacksmith’s forges. The firm also dominated the corner of Dowling and William streets with a building three floors high for use as car body building and painting.
Warehouses also replaced rows of terraces. A newspaper article in 1939 thought these buildings would, in a few years, ‘solve the slum question’, and went on to suggest that the government should resume all the land lying between William Street and the wharves and add the area to the Domain. No thought was given to what would happen to the residents of Woolloomooloo.
THE FINANCIAL WIZARD
IT’S HARD TO PUT A DATE ON ERIC’S ARRIVAL at the Old Fitzroy. It seemed he was always near the doorway that led into the kitchen area, standing ramrod straight and sipping a beer. He had a toothy grin and an ability to ingratiate himself into any social group and talk about anything at a remarkable pace without pausing for breath. Sometimes the verbal gush became an incoherent blather. His face had the clean smoothness of a baby’s, and always smelt of toiletries as if he had just showered. Mostly he wore casual trousers and shirts that often seemed too tight for him and exaggerated his slight beer gut. At times he wore a suit, a sign he was travelling interstate, mostly to Melbourne, or once to Adelaide, where he was to deliver the keynote speech at his elite private school’s reunion. Yet his suit and his shirts seemed slightly out-of-date, as if his fashion sense was more Kmart than Hugo Boss.
Eric always seemed to have money and had an optimism that was in contrast to the cheerful pessimism of many of the Crew. It was said he worked in finance, a term so vague it meant nothing to me. What was odd was that he didn’t have any regular hours of work, which meant he was always available to help out laying a carpet, shifting furniture for the locals or bumping in a show. In fact he became indispensable in the neighbourhood as he fitted seamlessly into the life of the hotel.
On my travels around Woolloomooloo during the day I would come upon Eric strolling through the streets, hands in his pockets, as if he had all the time in the world. He was a flâneur without knowing it. He knew all the cafés and restaurants and when I came upon him he’d recommend places where I’d get the best breakfast or lunch. He liked to dine out at expensive restaurants on the Finger Wharf and was a connoisseur of red wines. He seemed to notice everything in the area and knew what houses were being torn down and where apartment blocks were going to be built. One time I remarked on how little time he seemed to spend in his office.
‘I can do anything on my phone that I can do in my office,’ he replied. ‘Anyway, my job is not one for office hours.’
I was curious why someone like him had shifted into Woolloomooloo. He said he had been through a divorce and with the money he had left he had bought a small terrace in McElhone Street. ‘I know a lot of men would be bitter about losing so much money in a divorce but my wife and I were very civilised about it and still talk.’ He seemed to have thought deeply about relationships and was proud of the fact that if ever an argument was brewing with his wife he would just walk out of the house.
Still, he must have realised that I was puzzled about his job, given that I was always running into him during the day and sometimes, when I was at the Old Fitzroy having lunch, he was there too. One day I was having lunch when he came over and sat opposite me.
‘You must think I have a strange job,’ he said. I nodded and he launched into a rapid-fire description of it. He was an upmarket debt collector for a multinational company that made huge loans. When millions were owed he would meet or telephone the defaulter and either try and recove
r the loan or find out when it would be repaid. I asked how he knew when a person was lying to him about repayment.
‘You know when they’re going to weasel out because they talk too much and too quickly,’ he said in his characteristic rapidfire delivery.
One evening he arrived with Brad. Both were wearing work clothes and were covered in dry mud and clay. It turned out that Eric was working with Brad digging backyard swimming pools for a week during his holidays. This amazed me because I couldn’t conceive of unfit Eric using a spade and a pick. Although exhausted, he beamed when I asked him why he was doing it.
‘Brad asked and I wanted to help out a friend. Besides,’ he added, tapping his belly, ‘I need to lose weight.’
His cheerful demeanour seemed to invite luck. I heard that he had won $5000 at another Woolloomooloo pub. He had picked out the Joker from a pack of playing cards pinned face-down to the wall. The competition had only been going for a few days and Eric seldom drank there. There was talk that he had inside information about the location of the special card, but I put this down to envious gossip. A few days later I saw him in the Old Fitzroy and congratulated him on his win. For the first time since I’d known him, he seemed momentarily flustered and even uneasy.
‘I don’t want you to spread this around. You know, others might want some of the money.’
The second-last time I saw Eric was when we went to the theatre downstairs. I had heard good things about The Aliens, a play by Annie Baker, an American who had won the Pulitzer Prize. My visits to the theatre were rare. It was such a small space that I felt claustrophobic, but young, charming Andrew Henry, one of the triumvirate who had taken over the Old Fitz, not only recommended the acting but the unusual configuration of seats, which meant I could sit in a small row of chairs on the stage itself, without having to squeeze into the usual cramped rows.
As I was about to head in, clutching my glass of wine, I found that Eric was also coming to see the show. ‘I heard you were going, so I thought this might be good,’ he grinned. It never occurred to me that Eric would be interested in the theatre. I knew that he had assisted Curly Cole building sets for some productions (Cole was also part of the team that built the extravagant sets for the Australian Opera’s outdoor spectacles), but I had never heard him mention the arts, books, paintings or the theatre.
He followed me in and sat next to me on the stage. The set was the shabby backyard of a Vermont coffee shop, where two slackers and a teenage kitchenhand discuss music, poetry and exgirlfriends. The acting and American accents were convincing, but the play itself was banal. When the guys were reverently discussing the alcoholic writer Charles Bukowski I assumed it was satire, but Baker meant every word, and the play ended with one of the slackers playing the dreary Pete Seeger song, ‘If I Had a Hammer’.
As Andrew promised, the acting was exceptional, but The Aliens was a typical American play — a verbose, melancholy slice of life about the failure of the American Dream. I may have had my problems with it, and tried to stifle my yawns, given the actors were within touching distance, but Eric seemed to find it difficult to sit through it. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed him gritting his teeth and, in order to stop his body from writhing with impatience, sucking on his empty bottle of beer, pretending to drink from it. The theatre seemed more like a torture chamber to him than a place of enjoyment. At the end he turned to me, produced his celebrated grin and said, ‘That was a weird show.’
We walked back into the bar where we downed a few quick drinks to recover. When the actors came out Eric was profuse with extravagant praise. As usual he was propped up against the brick wall, his trademark smile (or as some said, his smirk) on display, his elbow and Grifter beer resting on the narrow shelf beside him. He looked like he was preparing to stay until closing.
The last time I saw him he was coming through the front door of the hotel, his face ashen, his eyes wary. A few minutes later when I went to get another drink I noticed he was missing. No-one knew where he had gone, but perhaps he had slipped out the back entrance by the pokie room, as he had once admitted that he liked ‘a flutter’. In fact, we never saw him again.
His financial acumen was obvious, and he told locals that if he invested their money the profits would be higher than normal. He even advised some of us to invest in cyber money, bitcoins, which he predicted would be the money of the future and would make ‘a motza’ for those who invested early. It was a confusing story to the financially illiterate (i.e. most of us), but as Eric said, soothing any anxiety, he had a friend in Singapore who would buy the bitcoins because it was much easier to cash them over there.
A few days after he disappeared his phone was found and it revealed his method. He had proved his credentials by showing letters of recommendation written on bank letterheads on his smartphone. But a closer inspection revealed that the letterheads and the recommendations were fake. It was easy for him to convince his victims because no-one looked too closely at his phone screen. Someone rang the firm he said employed him and discovered he had been fired two years before; the firm made it clear they didn’t want to talk about him. Then a stranger arrived at the pub asking if we had seen Eric. It turned out that he was his landlord. Eric didn’t own the house and owed $14 000 in unpaid rent.
The Motley Crew had taken his honesty and financial wizardry for granted because he had become one of us and was a mate. His victims had given him thousands of dollars, $7000 there, $7500 here, and there were also a few who had handed him money to invest in bitcoins, which were now worthless. But had he actually invested the money? Or did he know the bitcoin bubble would burst and simply pocket the original sum and convincingly commiserate with the losers? Or was he always intending to do a runner with real money?
He had ripped off many people. Not only that, but an internet search revealed that a decade before he had been sentenced to four years’ jail for fraud. It was hard to believe, especially for those who had liked and trusted him, that he had forged friendships in order to steal their money.
And that’s what bothered us. Had he planned all this from the moment he arrived? Was his smirk that of a man who thought we were all schmucks? Was his obsession with drinking Grifter boutique beer a way of flaunting his disdain towards his victims? He had grifted people who now would like to thrash him within an inch of his life, and there was also his girlfriend, whose credit cards he had stolen and used when he vanished from Woolloomooloo. She was so traumatised by what he had done she went into therapy.
Most of his victims went to the police station and signed forms detailing how much money he had stolen from them, even though they knew they had little chance of seeing a penny. What hurt more than any financial pain was that he had been trusted. Over the following months some people told me they had had their suspicions about Eric from the start. Garry, the publican, was one and had always been unsure of him when he couldn’t get a straight answer from Eric about his job. ‘He only gave a smirk,’ he said (though Eric did manage to run up a bar tab of $1200 which he never paid, of course).
For most of us, reviewing Eric’s actions over the previous two years, it was a sobering experience to realise just how easily he had grifted people when there were glaring inconsistencies in his story, from his job that didn’t require him to be in an office, his vagueness about what he actually did, his elusive background, his pedestrian suits with their cheap striped shirts and last year’s garish ties.
He managed to tick most of the boxes in Edgar Allan Poe’s description of a swindler: interest in the victim, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality and the grin. Maria Konnikova, in her book The Confidence Game, seems to be describing Eric when she writes that con men are indifferent to the pain they cause, have no remorse, are driven by narcissism, trade on superficial charm and ingratiate themselves. Following on from this is the feature that particularly disturbs me: the con man is an exceptional judge of character.
Risk takers are more likely to be victims (like some
of the regulars he cheated), and if you’re feeling lonely or isolated you are a vulnerable target. It’s interesting that he didn’t try to con me, Mandy or anyone else who was happily married or in a stable relationship. There was one time, however, and this is retrospective, when he came and sat at my table and we talked about marriage and women. We seemed to have so much in common, but now I realise he was mirroring my words and opinions. Like a true con man, he made me think we agreed on everything. As I was to discover, he had done this to everyone in the pub.
Another man who said he had been wary of him from the start was Brian. Months after Eric had disappeared Brian had a drink with me. He hadn’t been at the pub for a while and his face and manner seemed to have become even more choleric and his head had sunk even deeper into his shoulders so he seemed to have no neck. He had something on his mind.
‘You know a lot of people Eric ripped off are still angry with him. And boy, if they catch him, he’s dead meat.’
I asked him why he hadn’t trusted Eric. ‘Me and the missus thought he laughed too much.’ Then he leant forward and began to whisper, in that saliva-throated voice of his, ‘Louis, we’ve got to do something about the cunt.’ When I said I didn’t know where he was he gave me a grim smile. ‘Oh, we can find the fucker. I’ve got connections. The thing is, mate, what do we do when we find him?’ I had no idea and Brian ran his finger over his lips as if brooding about it and then jabbed his finger at me. ‘You’ve got money, Louis. I’ve got some stashed away. Now, he let down a lot of people and they’re sick to the guts. He pretended he was a mate. In other words he behaved like a real woman’s vagina. Isn’t that true?’
I nodded and wondered where Brian was going with this. ‘One thing’s for certain, Louis, he’s never going back into the jammer, the cops won’t do anything. They’re fucking idiots. We have to do things ourselves. See, if we whack him, we’re up for assault.’ Brian took a sip of his beer and let his words sink in. ‘You understand what I’m saying? The only thing a con artist understands is physical pain. Now I know plenty of blokes that would do the job for not too much money. It all depends on what we want done to him.’