Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  A NATION OF GAMBLERS

  Everyone loved gambling. Figures for 1976–77, the earliest national data available and indicative of the previous decade, showed that Australians spent more per capita than any other nation, on average $710 per year compared with $440 in America. And within Australia, the people of New South Wales spent double the national average, both legally – racecourse betting, the TAB, lotteries and poker machines in clubs – and illegally, on casinos and the SP.67

  In 1963 the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Off-the-Course Betting in New South Wales headed by Justice Edward Kinsella had recommended the legalisation of off-course gambling on racehorses, and the then Labor government decided to introduce a network of government-owned betting shops.

  The first six TAB outlets launched in late 1964, and dozens more opened in each of the following years. At first many local SPs shut down, in the expectation that police would be told to enforce the law more rigorously, in order to defend the government’s entry into the field. This rarely happened, for reasons that included bribes, inertia, and a fondness for tradition. Many of the SPs re-opened for business. Others turned to telephone operations, or set up secure betting shops known as ‘fortresses’ in competition with the TABs, which were relatively few and sometimes overcrowded in the early years.

  The No. 21 Special Squad (formerly 21 Division) was responsible for policing gaming and betting laws, and continued to be under-manned. TAB management and staff became increasingly frustrated by the police – and government – inaction in closing down their illegal competition. In some areas, frustrated TAB workers began to record details of their local SP business and forward these to head office, which sent them to Police Commissioner Norman Allan. Nothing much happened.68

  While Askin publicly disapproved of SP betting, he gleefully availed himself of its illegal delights – just like hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens. Once, when the Premier was being driven to Mudgee by his long-suffering factotum Russ Ferguson, they stopped in at a small pub in the village of Capertee. The pub-lican ignored them because he was at the end of the bar listening to the radio and taking SP bets. He was also wearing a police sergeant’s uniform. When he finally realised who his waiting customers were, he grabbed his coat and disappeared through the back door. There’s no record of Askin’s reaction but he was probably content to leave Capertee to its own devices.69

  ENTER ABE SAFFRON, WITH EVENING SUIT AND WHIP

  In June 1966, the Malaysian High Commissioner disappeared from his Canberra office for nine days. It was rumoured that he was spending some quality time with a Sydney stripper named Sandra Nelson, occasional employee of Abe Saffron, one of the most powerful, and unusual, figures in Sydney Noir.

  Saffron had opened the first avowed strip joint in Australia, the Staccato Club in Potts Point, in 1960. Sleaze wasn’t Saffron’s first choice of métier – that was the more refined profession of nightclub proprietor, back in the days when the patrons wore dining suits and evening gowns. But the sixties saw the rout of the old standards of public decorum and, giving the punter what he wanted, Saffron migrated down to the sleaze end of the entertainment spectrum.

  Born in 1919, Saffron grew up in inner-Sydney Annandale. His parents, of East European origin, ran a linen draper’s shop on Parramatta Road. He was intelligent, winning admission to the prestigious Fort Street High School. He left school at the age of fifteen and started his business career. In World War II he spent two years in the Army working in administration in Sydney’s Victoria Barracks, followed by a brief stint in the Merchant Navy, honing his blackmarket skills. In 1947 he took over the Roosevelt Club in Potts Point from Sammy Lee. But the role of classy nightclub proprietor that Saffron so relished was a front for his real business: dealer in sly grog.

  In 1916, the State government had introduced ‘early closing’, which ordained that pubs close at 6pm. The result was a black market in ‘sly grog’: the diversion of alcohol (overwhelmingly beer) from the licensed pubs to venues like the Roosevelt Club that dodged around the licensing laws, charging a hefty markup on drinks as they did so. Saffron paid off the police; as a result, the Roosevelt enjoyed near immunity from raids.

  Between them, sly grog and SP bookmaking nurtured the culture of under-the-counter deals, police corruption, criminal networks and widespread community acceptance of certain types of illicit activity, which prevailed in the mid-20th century. This criminal subculture, declining but still potent, underlay Sydney Noir during the Golden Years.

  In 1955 Saffron closed the Roosevelt and went on holiday to Europe. In Paris, he visited the Folies Bergére and the Lido de Paris. This was the time when the Las Vegas casinos were beginning to stage franchised versions of these famous Parisian cabaret shows. Paris gave Saffron ideas for the future of Sydney entertainment. Like striptease.

  Following the success of the Staccato Club, in 1961 Saffron opened another strip joint, the Pink Pussycat on the Kings Cross end of Darlinghurst Road, which was on its way to becoming known as ‘the dirty half-mile’. As that suggests, the Pussycat and its many imitators would become synonymous with sleaze, but in its early days at least Saffron tried to hold on to the faux-respectability of the Roosevelt. Offering ‘Les Plaisirs de Paris’, the Pink Pussycat aspired to cosmopolitan sophistication. Male patrons wore jackets and ties and it was ostensibly the sort of place they could take a female companion.

  The fig-leaf that striptease was entertainment and not sleaze was kept in place by the prohibition on disrobing completely (‘the full reveal’, as it was known), but by the mid-1960s even this final taboo was under threat. One of the threats was Sandra Nelson, who advertised by walking around the city in a transparent dress. Nelson moved back and forth between Saffron’s Pink Pussycat and another strip joint called The Paradise Club. In 1965 she removed the cones stuck on nipples known as ‘pasties’, thereby breaking the law.

  She got arrested a few times but her employers paid her fines: her notoriety was good for business. More interesting was the reaction of her fellow strippers: they refused to work with her. This was a line they would not cross, the pastie being as much a symbol of self-respect as of public respectability. Their stance on ‘pasties’ mirrored the decades-long, fiercely waged campaign by working girls to keep ‘French’ – oral sex – off the list of services offered by Sydney prostitutes.70

  After the Malaysian High Commissioner disappeared, it was suggested that he had been shacked up with the Sydney ‘striptease queen’, as opposition members in Parliament in Kuala Lumpur described Sandra Nelson. Prime Minister Tunku Abdu Rahman was more measured, referring to her as ‘a person who dresses and undresses in public’. Asked by the press about the diplomat, Nelson played it cool, admitting only to a ‘very, very casual’ relationship with him.71

  Sleaze, like prostitution, created a kind of common space where police and criminals could mix, and Saffron, as one of the largest purveyors of sleaze, exploited this. Author Tony Reeves recalled how in 1965 he attended a pornographic show – strippers and blue movies – that Saffron put on for crooked police and their criminal mates at the Phoenix Hotel in Woollahra. The Sunday Mirror published a story about it, the news editor Brian Hogben choosing the moniker ‘Mr Sin’ for Saffron, the first use of a tag that stuck forever. (Hogben was also responsible for nicknaming Robert Walker ‘Pretty Boy’ and Lennie McPherson ‘Mr Big’.)72 A few days later ‘Bumper’ Farrell bailed up Reeves and demanded he sign a statement saying that he was responsible for the show – in order to deflect the blame from Saffron. It was an odd request and Reeves refused.73

  Farrell, who weaves in and out of this story, embodied the archaic aspects of policing in the Golden Years. Hard drinking, violent and homophobic, he demanded that criminals called him ‘Mr Farrell’ – and beat them up if they didn’t. His treatment of journalists was not much better – ‘I’m Mr Farrell to you,’ he growled at Reeves.74

  By 1966 Saffron had laid the foundations of a sleaze and property empire. His strength as
a businessmen was to reap the syner-gies between licit and illicit activities: the Appin Private Hotel in Springfield Avenue, Kings Cross, being a case in point. As Abe’s son Alan Saffron described it, the Appin ‘was an apartment block with small rooms that were mostly let out on a daily basis to many prostitutes, who not only paid rent but also were required to give a percentage of their business to my father. Everything was in cash and there were no records. In addition, a small number of rooms were available for regular legitimate customers’.75 A few years later a similar system would operate in the rooms adjacent to the Saffron-owned Venus Room in Orwell Street, managed by Jim Anderson.

  Saffron was at risk of prosecution for ‘permitting prostitution’, but he had protection. His flagship property Lodge 44, a motel on New South Head Road, Edgecliff, was both his corporate headquarters and, like the Appin, a place of assignation. Alan Saffron describes how it contained a ‘room used for accounting and counting the cash envelopes that were delivered daily by (Abe Saffron’s lieutenants) Wayne (‘Sir’ Wayne Martin) and Louie (Louie ‘Last Card’ Benedetto) from all the clubs. The motel was also used … by my father’s friends, police and politicians, who were being entertained by arranged girlfriends’.76 The fifteen-year-old Alan, who had inherited his father’s financial skills, came in after school to help count the cash.

  According to Alan, his father also cultivated the Great and the Good at the Kensington house he had bought for his mistress, Rita Hagenfelds. This was ‘a party house with a beautiful pool, numerous girls often sunbathing topless and a constant stream of my father’s friends, including judges and police’.77

  ENTER GEORGE FREEMAN: THE SMART ONE

  In 1966 George Freeman was thirty-two years old, well-connected but not yet a major gangster. He was a safe cracker (a ‘tankman’ in Noir slang) and shoplifter, at a time when such activities were still seriously lucrative. His marriage ended, his wife tired of the infi-delities and the thieving. He spent six weeks in London shoplifting with some of the wildly successful Australians who were soon to be known as the Kangaroo Gang.

  Freeman had a classic criminal background. He grew up in Annandale without a father, skipping school and committing plenty of petty crime, ending up at Mount Penang Training School at the age of sixteen and graduating from there to the notorious Tamworth Institution for Boys. In these places he completed his education, at least in criminal possibilities. He became a burglar and safe-breaker and in Long Bay Prison in 1956 met Lennie McPherson. They had a mutual friend in Stan Smith, with whom Freeman had grown up. Years later the trio would run a significant part of the underworld between them, but for the moment they left prison and went their own ways.

  What began to distinguish Freeman from the other two was his interest in SP bookmaking, an activity that required brains. Some bookies gave credit, so debt collection – and protection of the large amounts of cash they handled – was an important part of their business, whether they did it themselves or contracted it out. Freeman, although not a big man, had no trouble laying on hands himself when needed. But he also had a mind like a computer. The combination would eventually make him possibly the wealthiest of Sydney’s Golden Years gangsters, apart from Abe Saffron.

  Freeman’s first – and only – regular job had been as stablehand to horse trainer Charles McLoughlin for two years, until the age of sixteen. This began a lifelong interest in horses, one shared with many Australians of the time. Back in prison in 1959, Freeman became an SP bookie for the other inmates. Not long after his release, he went into partnership with the house bookie at the Henson Park Hotel in Marrickville, investing money in the business and acting as enforcer for the collection of debts. This was only a hobby, however, and he continued to put food on the family table through thieving. Shoplifting in those days could be very profitable because manufac-tured goods were far more expensive, relative to the average wage, than they are today. Store security was often primitive.

  Freeman would later publish his memoir (something else that set him apart from his contemporaries). Unreliable as it is on many subjects, there is no reason to doubt a lot of what he says, including how his life changed at this point.

  ‘I came to the conclusion in the mid-1960s that I had to change my style. I had to start getting more successful. To be honest, I was a less-than-successful crook. My only reward had been gaol, and plenty of it. I was learning that the length of your prison sentence is not the only status symbol. I needed a different sort of operation.’78

  Freeman had discovered he was what in legitimate business would be called an entrepreneur, with impressive powers of organisation. He proceeded to form an outfit of four or five crooks who robbed safes. ‘The difference was everything was done prop-erly, done professionally. We’d watch the place for a week before moving. We’d work out how to get in and how to get out, and alternative escape routes. For the first time in my criminal career I was leaving nothing to chance. And it was working.’79 So much so that he bought his first house entirely from money extracted from the safe of a big city store one Christmas.

  Freeman had also come to understand the power of silence, realising that most crooks were caught because others gave them up. He created the fiction that he had a regular job as a wharf labourer, even paying another man to do the work so he would show up on the books. He told his former criminal associates he was now going straight, and insisted on silence from his own team.

  By day he continued with the shoplifting, working very hard at it. ‘Harder than the other blokes. I suppose crime is just like other ways of life in regard to work: if you’re willing to put in the hours you’ll get further in life than those who just do the bare minimum.

  ‘We’d go out in teams in the morning and blitz ’em. Suits, jewellery, expensive kitchen items. Then, when the others would go off to the pub or whatever, I’d head back to Roselands or Miranda Fair for a couple of cashmere sweaters here, a pair of Italian shoes there.’

  THE CORSET GANG: PIONEERS OF THE DRUG TRADE

  Illicit drugs were almost unknown in Sydney at the beginning of the Golden Years. The absence of a significant market for heroin in Sydney is demonstrated by the career of NSW Special Branch policeman John Egan and colleagues who, in 1966, became major drug smugglers, later known as the Corset Gang.

  Egan was a police hero who’d joined the force in 1953 and worked with the Cliff Rescue Squad and the Underwater Squad. He had awards for bravery but was also corrupt. For example, when diving to recover gold ingots dropped overboard by Chinese seamen to avoid customs searches, he would tape some to the wharf pylons and recover them later.

  He became involved in the illegal importation of watches and transistor radios (without paying the hefty duty), which he sold to colleagues. Through this he made a contact in Hong Kong with access to an unlimited supply of heroin. Egan did his research and found there was no market for heroin in Sydney, but a booming one in New York, where he also had a corrupt contact. He persuaded a colleague to mortgage his house and used the money to buy two kilos of heroin, which he took to America via London and sold for an enormous profit.80 He then employed couriers to fly to Hong Kong, collect pure heroin that was packed into corsets, and fly to New York. The heroin was sold to black dealers who were fronts for the mafia, which at that stage was still reluctant to be seen to be involved in the drug trade.

  The scam worked well, as at the time the American narcotics authorities were concentrating on heroin smuggled from Europe. Egan made an enormous amount of money in just six months, having up to twenty couriers on the go at any one time. But a clerk in the Department of Customs became suspicious of the gang’s passport applications, and one night in late 1966 when Egan was in Sydney’s Tattersall’s Club, a former police colleague walked by and murmured, ‘They’re on to you’. Egan shut down the business and flew to America, where he was arrested, bailed and he fled to England. There he ran a restaurant until he was stopped for a driving offence and recognised as one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted. Back in
America he was sentenced to eight years but served only one before being deported to Australia, where he set up on the Gold Coast and went into real estate.81 Alfred McCoy says this was the first time a major group was arrested for smuggling heroin into America from Asia.82

  MAKE SYDNEY GAY

  Australia had sent a combat force to Vietnam in 1965, with a tre-bling of the initial commitment the next year. In June 1966, Prime Minister Harold Holt had visited Washington and promised that Australia would go ‘all the way with LBJ’. It was still a popular position, especially after the significant Australian victory at Long Tan two months later.

  As a gesture of recognition for the Australian support, Lyndon Johnson became the first serving president of the United States to visit Australia. Arriving on 22 October, LBJ spent four hours in Sydney, the route of his motorcade lined with red, white and blue bunting, a thousand school children wearing cowboy hats, and people waving some of the free 100 000 American and Australian flags distributed by the government. Askin endorsed the slogan, ‘Make Sydney gay for LBJ’ and when the president arrived at the Art Gallery of NSW, he was welcomed by cages of kangaroos and koalas.

  The visit was a success and gained Askin plenty of reflected glory, and also the reputation for having told his driver ‘Run over the bastards’ when the motorcade encountered antiwar protestors. In fact, as he told a luncheon in 1968, he’d actually said something like ‘It’s a pity we couldn’t run over them’. The comment was embel-lished by a journalist – by then, it would be the sort of thing people expected Askin to say.