‘And believe me, everybody paid. It was stupid not to.
‘If you didn’t you went inside and, by the time Krahe had finished giving evidence against you, the magistrate or judge was wishing he had the power to pull out your toenails as well. I’ve never seen a man lie like him, then or since. …’
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. Kevin Gore, one of the Toecutters, was one of Krahe’s boys.13 Freeman could have bagged plenty of cops, but he chose to single out Kelly – and Krahe.
SHIRLEY AND FREDDIE: THE BRISBANE CONNECTION
Nineteen sixty-seven was the year Shirley Brifman joined forces with Fred Krahe.
Krahe first made contact with Shirley Brifman in 1964, just months after she moved to Sydney. He had heard from Ray Kelly how useful she had been to Queensland Police, and he wanted her to deal with criminals, including receiving bribes on his behalf. In Noir jargon, she was to ‘pull’ for him. Most police who were broken for corruption were arrested at the point where they actually received the money in their hand; if Brifman collected for Krahe, this danger would be minimised.
Krahe arranged to meet her at the Hyde Park Hotel. ‘Now that you are down here,’ he said, ‘if you want to work here you will want to do the right thing.’ Her first assignment was to help Krahe shake down some criminals for a cut of the proceeds from a robbery.
‘We talked friendly and then he explained the three-way split,’ Brifman said. ‘I asked him what he meant and he said there was recently a robbery of pearls from the Japanese Trade Centre and he said he thought (a well-known burglar and his wife) had the pearls.’
Krahe’s proposal was that Brifman would discover when the couple had sold the pearls to a fence, and then tell him when they had the cash at their home so he could raid them. Then he would make an initial offer not to arrest them in exchange for a share of the money, and while negotiations continued, increase his hold over them to the point where he wound up not with a share, but with the lot. In return for her information, Brifman would get her cut.
‘I said I was disgusted with him,’ Brifman recalled. In her code, lying to the Brisbane Royal Commission to protect crooked cops was one thing, but helping crooked cops rip off knockabouts was another. She contacted her Brisbane protector, Glen Hallahan, ‘and told him to get Fred Krahe off my back. I told him what took place. He said he would ring Fred up.’14
As a result, Krahe left Brifman alone for a couple of years. Their next contact occurred in late 1966 when Hallahan was staying at the Rex Hotel and was about to return to Brisbane. Brifman was in his room packing his suitcase for him when Krahe arrived to pick up Hallahan and drive him to the airport. ‘What would Glen do without you?’ Krahe commented, referring to her help with his luggage.
‘I next saw Fred in the Mandarin Club a few months later,’ Brifman continued. ‘Fred was with his wife … (he) introduced me to his wife. I introduced Fred to Susan Barling (not her real name), and (I also introduced Barling) to Mrs Krahe. I wandered off and when I came back Susan told me that Fred had my (telephone) flat number at 16 Earl’s Court.’15
The Mandarin Club, in Goulburn Street in the city, was one of those ambivalent Noir venues where licit and illicit worlds over-lapped. It was nicknamed ‘the Chinese RSL’ by the police because of its owners, the brothers Denis and Keith Wong (also part-owners of Chequers and Whisky a Go Go nightclubs), and its poker machines.
The Great and the Good frequented it: the media grandees David McNicoll and Sir Frank Packer were regulars. It was sufficiently respectable for husbands to take their wives there. The Krahes weren’t the only ones – it was where Abe Saffron took his wife Doreen on Saturday nights to atone for the time he spent with other women.16 It was the sort of place where the prostitute Susan Barling would slip Brifman’s telephone number to Detective Sergeant Krahe under the nose of Mrs Krahe.
‘Fred rang me first thing next day and came up,’ Brifman recounted. ‘From then on Fred came nearly every day.’17 But Krahe’s interests were more than just romantic. He wanted the access Brifman could provide to the Queensland crime scene so that he could control the Sydney end of the Brisbane connection.
As Brifman explained it: ‘Freddie knew I had Brisbane in the palm of my hand and he wanted Glen Hallahan. I had a hold on Glen – Glen would do what I wanted. Glen was always down here. Glen might as well have been in the Sydney Police instead of the Brisbane. I put Freddie and Glen together. They were two top men in different states. Glen knew what was happening in Queensland, Fred knew what was happening in Sydney and trusted me.’18
Krahe used Brifman’s flat in Earl Place, Kings Cross, as a private office. It was from there that he coordinated his scams with Glen Hallahan.
‘Fred was always ringing Glen. It was always about this robbery or that robbery or what they were going to do about sending somebody up here or down there to do robberies. About money, about different situations.’
‘THE DIRTY HALF-MILE’
In the decades following the Golden Years, the view that it was US servicemen on R&R leave who triggered the descent of Kings Cross into a cesspit of sleaze became accepted wisdom. But even before the Americans arrived, the Cross was getting sleazier – without any foreign help.
For example, in April 1967, the Chairman of the Darlinghurst Civic Action Group expressed community concern at the ‘growing incidence of prostitution, causing undesirable and criminal elements to move into the area’. As well as street prostitution, the Action Group complained about the offensive publicity material for the growing number of strip joints.19
Earlier in the year the State government had made one of its feeble gestures to rein in sleaze, threatening to close down strip joints that didn’t comply with fire regulations. Predictable cries of woe from the strip joint proprietors prompted a diligent reporter to visit Darlinghurst Road where he found a total of six stripping ‘palaces’, which between them employed 120 people, 80 of them strippers. One of the proprietors, showing the reporter all the new safety equipment he had installed, commented, ‘It used to be a restaurant but no one worried about fire escapes then.’20
CARDS, DICE AND PENNIES
After SP gambling, the most lucrative Noir industries in Sydney were the so-called ‘schools’ of East Sydney and Kings Cross, the gaming houses that would continue to thrive until the opening of Sydney’s first legal casino in the mid-1990s. From their inception early in the century, the schools had offered mainly two-up and baccarat.
The 1967 novel Cards, Dice and Pennies is an ethnology of Sydney Noir, including a thinly fictionalised guide to the world of illegal gambling. And its author, Lew Wright, knew what he was talking about: he had been the staff manager of a gaming house called Club Enchantment that flourished in Sydney in the mid 1950s.21
The most venerable of the gambling schools described by Wright was Thommo’s, a two-up game established in 1910 by George Guest. During a brief career as a boxer Guest had used the ring name ‘Joe Thomas’, which he bestowed on this, arguably the most famous illegal venue in Sydney’s history. Its patrons included politicians, judges, showbiz celebrities and senior policemen. In the 1930s these had included William McKell, who started out as a blacksmith, would become Premier of New South Wales during World War II and then go on to become Australia’s first blue-collar Governor-General. Another notable patron was the Labor politician Eddie Ward, Federal MP for the Noir bastion of East Sydney until his death in 1963.
Using a number of techniques to avoid being closed down, Thommo’s operated right up until 1979.22 These ranged from paying a hefty bribe to the police (£200 a week in the 1950s),23 establishing ‘set-up’ games for the police to raid – thus leaving the real game unmolested nearby – and constantly shifting locations around the few blocks north and east of Central Railway Station. Thommo’s was so well known that when police commissioners Colin Delaney and Norman Allan denied its exis
tence successively in 1954, 1962 and 1968, they were ridiculed.24
George Guest died in 1954 and Thommo’s was taken over by his business partner Joe ‘The Boss’ Taylor – with whom Hickie accused Askin of colluding. Taylor was well known as a flamboyant restau-ranteur, punter and racehorse owner whose popularity was boosted by his habit of (literally) throwing his winnings around.
In 1965 in Oz Richard Neville described Taylor as a ‘Gentleman Hoodlum’, which seems to have been the common view of him.25 ‘Gentle’ Taylor may well have been, but the ‘hoodlum’ part of the description was also accurate. He employed killers such as Chow Hayes.
Sydney Noir was a feudal system and as a loyal retainer Hayes remembered ‘The Boss’ fondly. Taylor supported Hayes’ wife and children during the fifteen years the latter spent in gaol for murder. The crime barons of Sydney Noir – the well-remembered ones, anyway – didn’t just hoard their ill-gotten gains. They also gave them away: a lot in bribes to police but also a lot in a kind of Noir welfare system to retainers and their dependents, helping public acceptance of their illegal activities.
Throughout the Golden Years, Taylor also ran a baccarat school, the Carlisle Club, at 2 Kellett Street, Kings Cross. George Freeman regarded Taylor as a father figure and spent a lot of time at his club in the 1960s.26 The Carlisle provided a range of services for Sydney Noir. It had a dining room – where Lennie McPherson used to eat – and a mailboard where one could leave messages for other habitués. Gunman Charles ‘Chicka’ Reeves used to send death threats, illustrated with lurid cartoons, to McPherson via the Club mailboard. One such example ‘had a drawing of a man with a dagger in his back and another one in the side of his head with blood running out … There was something like “We’ve got another surprise coming for you” and it said at the bottom “We’ll get you all little by little”.’27
From the 1940s to the 1960s the baccarat schools exuded a considerable allure – it was, after all, the game played by James Bond, whose heyday this was. In the early 1950s the baccarat schools, along with high-class sly-grog establishments like Abe Saffron’s Roosevelt Club and Sammy Lee’s Nightclub in Oxford Street, Woollahra, were about as close to cosmopolitan sophistication as you could get in Sydney.
ENTER PERCE GALEA: THE PRINCE
Unusually for a Noir kingpin, Perce Galea was not of Anglo-Celtic background. He was a Catholic, born in Malta, and his family migrated to Australia about 1912. Like Joe Taylor, by the Golden Years Galea had acquired a genial, patrician air – but also like Taylor and Richard Reilly he had been educated in a rough school: in the 1940s he employed the brutal Chow Hayes as a debt collector.
Galea got his start in baccarat. From 1944 to 1948 Galea worked in the Mont St Clair Club, a baccarat school whose proprietor Sid Kelly emphasised the importance of a luxurious décor. Galea then became a manager of Sammy Lee’s Nightclub in Woollahra, an establishment whose notoriety sprang from sly grog rather than gambling. It was in this connection that Galea wound up in front of the 1951–1954 Maxwell Royal Commission on Liquor, explaining that the markup on sly grog beer at Sammy Lee’s was 150 per cent.28
Following that, Galea set up his own baccarat school, the Roslyn Social Club in Elizabeth Bay. In March 1953, the Vice Squad raided the premises and arrested forty-six people for being in a common gaming house, their biggest catch being radio star Jack Davey. Like Joe Taylor and Perce Galea, Davey had the lordly habit of sharing gambling winnings with fellow punters, a guaranteed way to the heart of Sydney Noir. But now something had gone badly wrong with ‘the joke’, and Galea was fined £75.29
Moving on, Galea next materialised as a partner in the Club Enchantment, where the future author Lew Wright worked. Another of the partners was Charles Bourke, murdered, as we have seen, by Lennie McPherson in 1964.30
Following Sid Kelly’s prescription, the proprietors of Club Enchantment spent lavishly on interior fittings, going so far as to install ‘up-to-date toilets’31 – which reminds us just how relative was the term ‘sophistication’ in 1950s Sydney. But then they could afford such wild extravagances because their profits over the two years of the Club’s operation were an estimated £250 000.
In Cards, Dice and Pennies, where the Enchantment appears as the ‘Excitement’, Lew Wright attributed the club’s profitability and complete immunity from police investigation to the fact that before they even set it up, the syndicate backing the venture obtained the approval of ministers in the state Labor government.32
After the closure of the Enchantment, Galea opened another baccarat school, the Victoria Club. Interestingly he would later claim that he only got out of debt as late as 1957, despite having been involved in the highly profitable baccarat business for over a decade. His shift from the red to the black was the result of a lottery win, he claimed, before which, ‘I was broke. I didn’t have a cent to my name. I went to bed that night not knowing where our next feed was coming from. I woke the next morning with two newspapermen at the door congratulating me on winning the lottery’.33
Given the abandon with which Galea gambled, his claim is not implausible. Indeed, Galea appears in Cards, Dice and Pennies under his own name; Lew Wright describing him as a gambling addict ‘who didn’t know when to stop’.34
Buoyed by his lottery win, Galea concentrated more on the racetrack, where he won his nickname ‘The Prince’ (of punters) by placing astronomical bets. When in 1964 Galea’s horse ‘Eskimo Prince’ won at the Rosehill races, he caused a ‘mini-riot’ by throwing a roll of £10 notes into the crowd.35
There had always been some opposition to the baccarat schools. In February 1962, for example, Sydney’s Protestant churches called for a royal commission into all forms of gambling. The Vice Squad mounted a spectacular raid a on Kings Cross baccarat house, the Kellett Club, and charged around fifty people. Then the police went back to leaving the schools alone in return for weekly payments.36
KNOCKABOUT VERSUS RECIDIVIST: THE DEATH OF DUCKY O’CONNOR
Following Ray Kelly’s retirement in February 1966, Lennie McPherson found more police officers to befriend, and they made sure he suffered no inconvenience after he was present at the death of Raymond ‘Ducky’ O’Connor at the Latin Quarter nightclub.
The Latin Quarter, named after the famous New York nightclub, was an old-style venue with ‘leggy showgirls, loud music, corny local comedians and plenty of (illegal, after hours) liquor’.37 For a nightclub, its inner-city location at 250 Pitt Street was unusual because by 1967 the CBD was on the way to being deserted after business hours. This emptying out of the city was due partly to the advent of big shopping centres in the suburbs, a process that saw the CBD’s share of Sydney’s retail trade drop from about half in 1950 to a tenth in 1980.
The Latin Quarter was started in 1959 by Canadian-born entrepreneur Sammy Lee, who had begun his Sydney Noir career by taking over the Roosevelt Club in 1940. Being a veteran didn’t pre-vent Lee from having new ideas. When four showgirls failed to show up for work one night, Lee put four boys from the sewing room on stage in their place.38 This proved such a hit that Lee opened the drag venue Les Girls in Kings Cross in 1963. Its success indicates there was more light and shade in Sydney in the Golden Years than many people have assumed – at least if you knew where to find it.
The Latin Quarter was a Noir institution, a cut above the strip joints, but a step down from classier joints such as the Mandarin Club and Chequers. Abe Saffron was a regular, as were Shirley Brifman and Mick Phelan. The assistant manager was Jim Anderson who, after completing his apprenticeship in the Sydney hotel trade, had worked for the Chevron group in Surfers Paradise before coming back to Sydney to take a job with Sammy Lee.
In the early morning of 28 May 1967, a trio of knockabouts, Jackie or ‘Ratty Jack’ Clarke, Anthony John Williams and Lennie McPherson, were sitting at one of the alcove tables in the Latin Quarter. Detective Sergeants Maurice Wild (Ray Kelly’s former partner) and Brendan Whelan were drinking at a table 10 metres away. Later, Wild would g
ive evidence that ‘McPherson, Clarke and Williams were all under the influence’.39
The club was packed. Sitting at another table were the manager Reg Boom, Wayne Martin – Abe Saffron’s right-hand man – and Saffron’s son Alan, who had turned eighteen two months before. Three women were part of this party.
At 3.10am last drinks were called, and about ten minutes later Ducky O’Connor materialised at McPherson’s table. We last noted O’Connor when Ray Kelly was trying to frame him for the murder of Robert Walker. McPherson and O’Connor had once been friends – O’Connor had attended McPherson’s 1963 wedding – but they had fallen out when McPherson failed to provide bail for O’Connor after he was arrested in Melbourne over a different matter.
According to Clarke, O’Connor said, ‘How are you, cunt?’, to which McPherson replied, ‘All right, cunt, how are you?’. O’Connor then ‘brought his hand up above the table and I saw a gun in his hand and he said, “This is for you, cunt.”’
Clarke sprang up to grapple with him and a shot was fired, but it was O’Connor and not McPherson who dropped dead, a bullet through his head. The most convenient interpretation was that O’Connor accidentally shot himself in the head in the struggle. No one saw anything.40
Detective Wild went over, told the three men to put their hands on the table, and started asking questions. ‘It’s O’Connor, Mr Wild,’ McPherson said of the body on the floor, ‘The cunt tried to knock me’. McPherson then gave a version of the events leading up to the gunshot. Clarke, who was being questioned separately by Whelan, gave a version identical in all respects to that given by McPherson. It’s just faintly possible they were telling the truth.
O’Connor’s motive in confronting McPherson confused the police. ‘I thought he and McPherson were mates,’ Detective Whelan put to Clarke. ‘No,’ said Clarke, ‘he was dirty with Len over the Melbourne blue (his failure to go bail for him).’
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