At the end of the proceedings, the two accused were committed to stand trial. They were given bail, but Rennerson was so scared of retaliation by Reilly’s large and heavy circle of friends that he refused to leave gaol.2 In July the Attorney-General no-billed the matter and the charges were dropped. As we’ve seen, this usually occurred when the attorney decided there was insufficient evidence for a successful prosecution. In this case you’d think Brouggy’s evidence would have provided a strong chance of success. Arantz heard from a criminal source that one of the accused had paid $30 000 to have the Attorney-General drop the matter, but this might not mean anything. Similar rumours flew whenever a high-profile matter was no-billed.
In those days there was no witness protection scheme, so during the investigation the head of the CIB asked Commissioner Allan if Ray Brouggy and his family could be kept at a police property outside of Sydney. Allan refused. Brouggy’s wife and children fled to an unknown location and the CIB managed to place Brouggy in an army barracks.
Allan also refused to pay Brouggy most of the reward money, giving him just $250. Detective Arantz was bitter about Allan’s behaviour. He would claim it influenced his decision, four years later, to leak information about crime statistics to the Sydney Morning Herald, an act that would end Allan’s career.3
THE GREAT RAID ON THE LANES
On 23 February, the eve of state elections, the police mounted their biggest ever crackdown on The Lanes.
These raids were dramatic events. As one policeman recalled: ‘We’d use two trucks, one blocking each end. We called out “Cops!” and the hoons ran like mad to escape, but there was nowhere to go. They’d pour over the tops of vans and squad cars. We’d be throwing them into the van – “In ’ere you!” You’d stand on the back plat-form of the van and they’d be burning your fingers through the wire grille with their cigarettes.’4 It must have been quite a sight. Detective Sergeant Vic Green of the Vice Squad told the Sun-Herald how he walked through Woods Lane with Detective Sergeant Crest (not his real name) announcing loudly, ‘I am Detective Sergeant Green of the NSW Police Force. I now wish to state that people here without a legitimate reason must move on immediately’.
According to Green no one did and the mass arrests began. One hundred and sixty-eight customers and sightseers were herded into waiting paddy-wagons on charges of ‘offensive behaviour’. The presence of so many gawkers shows just what a Noir spectacle The Lanes were in these, their glory days.
As was traditional, the crackdown was only temporary.5 Unlike the hoons and the punters who were in the street, the bulk of the working girls in The Lanes that night were actually in the houses themselves and evaded arrest.6 A few weeks later The Lanes were back in full operation.
ASKIN’S LANDSLIDE
The same issue of the Sun-Herald that reported the Great Raid announced the return of the government with an increased majority under the Page One headline: ‘Askin Sweeps Back to Power’.
Askin was now one of Australia’s most popular leaders, a conservative opposed to pornography, abortion and homosexuality, and happy on occasion to express his dislike of communism and the Vietcong.7 If the nation was under threat, from outside and within, there was no doubt where he stood. His political reputation continued to soar: he had turned a Labor State into a safe home for the Liberals.
He was prepared to be liberal where the public wanted it. The government issued booth licences for alcohol at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Licensed restaurant hours were extended, and a new category of tavern created that did not have to provide accommodation. The minimum age for membership of the state’s many registered clubs was dropped from twenty-one to eighteen, although you still had to be twenty-one to play the poker machines. There was a strong push for Sunday trading in hotels, but when the churches and temperance groups objected, Askin held a referendum and the proposal was defeated. Many country hotels continued to serve drinks on Sunday and continued to pay the local police to do so.8
While Askin held the political middle ground, that ground was very gradually changing. In the Boyer Lectures the previous year, architect and writer Robin Boyd had identified a new kind of split in society, ‘deeper than the old rift between left and right and brought about by the emergence of an intellectual or cultural opposition to the Australian conservative’.9 The reference was to the growing number of people prepared to question authority in all areas, including religion, politics, sex and drugs. This split would never really hurt Askin politically – it opened too slowly for that – but it would come to affect how he was viewed by posterity.
Many denizens of Sydney Noir would have voted for Askin. Richard Hall knew quite a few criminals during the Golden Years, and his judgment was that ‘most knockabouts are conservative, with an ironic passion for the protection of private property, together with a deep suspicion that the Labor Party wants to tax people too much’.10
SHIRLEY SETS UP SHOP
In 1968 Shirley Brifman set up as a brothel madam with the police as her silent partners. The catalyst for her move came in February when the management of the Rex Hotel, whose lounge bar she had been adorning for four years, denounced her as a prostitute. The hypocrisy infuriated Brifman. ‘We entertained the guests and they spent money for the drinks,’ she later said. ‘Everybody knew what the set up was.’
The Director of the Rex Group of Hotels, the ‘main man’ as she called him, was Gordon Aldridge, whose father Jack Aldridge had been head of the NSW CIB.11 ‘Gordon Aldridge phoned my house-keeper,’ Brifman recalled. ‘He said I was a prostitute and told her I had 24 hours to get out of Sydney.’ Brifman responded by threatening to sue the management for defamation.12
Next, Mick Phelan turned up at Brifman’s flat in Earl Place, Kings Cross. ‘If you take on the Rex Hotel,’ he said, ‘you will take (on) all of us. You know that I have been protecting the Rex for sixteen years.’ Certainly the police – and not just Phelan – strove to keep the Rex’s good name unsullied. On one occasion Brifman had been arrested for ‘offensive behaviour’ – one of the catch-all prostitution charges. She was actually arrested in the Rex, but in the charge sheet the location of her arrest was changed to outside the hotel, in Macleay Street.13
Now came an offer she couldn’t refuse. Phelan said, ‘You sit here (in her flat in Earl Place) and we will procure for you. You set up as a call girl.’ According to Brifman, ‘I took about twenty-five girls from the Rex to work for me as prostitutes. The Rex (had to close) up the beauty salon because I had taken the girls away’.
Brifman ran her prostitution ring out of flats in the Earl’s Court building in Earl Place, Kings Cross, from February 1968 until March 1969. She was required to have her workers vetted by the Vice Squad. ‘There was a girl named Brenda Carr (her working name). Mick Phelan hated her and used to pinch her up at the Rex Hotel, and I wanted her to work for me because she was a good worker. I rang Mick and he came up and I told Mick Phelan I wanted her to work for me and Mick said he hated her. She was in a bedroom at my place. She came out and Mick said to her, “You can work for Shirley but you don’t give (out) Shirley’s address and you don’t do the wrong thing. It will cost you twenty dollars a week”.’14
Sydney or Brisbane, opportunities for graft were all the same to Glen Hallahan. ‘In 1968 Glen Hallahan was at my place at Earl Place,’ Brifman recalled. ‘Leanne Clark was with us. Leanne said that her husband drove the general for the army (that is, he was a career soldier holding a sensitive position as a senior officer’s driver) and she was frightened of her husband coming undone because of her (police) record and being a prostitute. Glen said, “Don’t worry about that, we can get it fixed up if you can pay”.’
‘Her husband came to my place that night and talked to Glen about it. Glen said he would get rid of Leanne’s (NSW Police) file and that it would cost $300. Leanne paid me $300 the next morning but Glen had already gone back so I had to wire him $150 care of the CIB Brisbane. I kept $150 for Fred Krahe. Fred told me that he paid someone in
charge of the file to pull it out and destroy it.’15 Brifman said that she telegraphed money on Krahe’s behalf to Hallahan in Brisbane on ‘six to eight’ occasions. These were the division of bribes paid by criminals in both Sydney and Brisbane.16
By 1968 Brifman was paying Fred Krahe $100 per week. ‘He was always at my place at eleven o’clock each morning unless he hit a bank robbery or something like that.’17 This was on top of the $100 per week she was paying Mick Phelan, because while paying corrupt cops was a form of insurance, there were no comprehensive policies available. As well as the question of which cop to bribe – the mysteries of ‘pull’ – was that of what one was actually paying for. Brifman explained the complexities thus: ‘I was not paying Fred Krahe for protection (from the Vice Squad), it was for everything (general influence within the police, such as the ability to get criminal records deleted) . He was pulling (collecting bribes) for Don Fergusson. At the same time I was paying Mick Phelan for Vice Squad protection’ – which was a separate issue.18
They all paid someone. Gwyneth Nixon, whom Brifman described in her evocative Noir slang as ‘a shoplifter, a break and enter one, a receiver’ was paying Detective Sergeant Fred Smith of the Breaking Squad, with whom she was ‘on’ – and who beat her up.19 And both Linda the Vice Queen and prostitute Susan Barling were paying Detective Sergeant Frank Charlton of the Consorting Squad.20
CHOW HAYES: WORKING FOR THE MADAM
In 1952, thanks to Ray Kelly’s testimony, Chow Hayes had received a life sentence for his murder of William Lee. After fifteen years spent in the Long Bay, Bathurst and Maitland gaols, followed by the Kirkconnell prison camp, Hayes was paroled in 1967.
On the outside he was collecting an invalid pension, but he was also looking around ‘for a few quid to help me find my feet’.21 Two things told in his favour.
One was that Hayes, like Lennie McPherson, had made a life out of intimidating people, and although he was now 55 he hadn’t lost his touch.
The other was a matter of custom: there was a Noir tradition of helping criminals who had just come out of gaol; it was acceptable for someone in Hayes’ position to ask knockabouts whose business was good for a handout. So his path back into life on the outside was smoothed by contributions from crims and SP bookies – who remembered the violence that had put him in gaol in the first place.
As previously mentioned, Hayes joined the gang of gunmen working for Linda the Vice Queen. By early 1968 her partner was the standover merchant Donnie ‘The Glove’ Smith. Smith’s nickname requires some explanation. He was called ‘The Glove’ because he loaded up his punch, although the details are contested. These different versions of Smith’s accoutrement exemplify the elusive nature of Noir history.
According to David Hickie in 1985, at the time of his death Smith’s left forearm was covered with a plaster cast. In 1990, Chow Hayes said Smith had used a lead-lined glove, and gave a slightly different version of the nickname, ‘The Man with the Iron Glove’.
Hayes, who had met Smith when they were both in Maitland Gaol, tells how when he first saw Smith on the outside he couldn’t understand why he was wearing a glove. Hayes didn’t need theat-rical props like gloves or plaster casts to make people scared of him. He asked Smith why he was wearing a glove and the latter mum-bled something about having a sore hand.22
Later, author Duncan McNab (2005) would support the glove theory, while Tony Reeves (2007) reverted to the plaster cast. But being the last person Smith ever hit, perhaps we should give Jim Anderson the final word. Quoted in his own 2003 obituary, Anderson described it as ‘a leather glove with lead lined all through it; when you got hit with that, you stayed hit’.23
One night Hayes and Ratty Jack Clarke were summoned by Donnie the Glove to Linda the Vice Queen’s house in Bronte, to help him deal with a man called Walter Hopegood. Hopegood was causing trouble by trying to stop a woman he knew working as a prostitute.
‘We were all sitting around on lounge chairs and Smith and Hopegood began arguing,’ Hayes recalled. ‘Hopegood didn’t want Linda to employ a particular sheila as a prostitute; he wanted this girl to leave the whole vice scene. But Donnie Smith said no, it was up to her – and if she wanted to work, she could. Clarke and I were sitting there listening and drinking beer when Smith suddenly walked into the bedroom and returned with a little handgun, a .25.
‘Smith said to Hopegood, “I’ll blow your fucking head off, if you come interfering again!” and continued to threaten him. Finally, Clarke could stand the tension no more and yelled out, “If you’re going to shoot him, shoot the bastard!” Smith fired and hit Hopegood in the shoulder.
‘Hopegood tumbled out of the chair and Smith ran over, knelt down beside him and put his ear to his chest,’ Hayes recounted. ‘Then he declared Hopegood was still breathing. So I butted in, “You may as well finish the bastard now! Otherwise he’ll identify the lot of us”. But Smith replied no, he didn’t want to kill Hopegood. Then Clarke yelled, “Come on, kill the bastard and we’ll bury him in Waverley Cemetery!” However, Smith insisted, “No! No! No! I’ll take him away and have him attended to by a doctor”. They took him to a private hospital in Waverley, and thereafter Smith and Linda spent weeks taking him daily bunches of flowers and choco-lates. And they gave him $1000 to tell the police he’d been shot in the street by an unknown man.’24
TONY HANCOCK’S LAST NIGHT OUT
In 1968 British TV Director Edward Joffe was in Sydney to direct a TV series starring the British comedian Tony Hancock. Hancock, one of Britain’s biggest entertainment stars of the early 1960s, had so alienated the TV industry by his alcohol and drug-fuelled antics that he could no longer work in the United Kingdom. So he did what generations of Brits had done in similar circumstances and took himself off to the colonies.
One night in late April Joffe and Hancock took in the sights of the Cross.
‘We were in the famous Kings Cross area near a strip joint called The Pink Pussycat (owned by Abe Saffron),’ recalled Joffe. ‘The owner, a man who basked in the Runyonesque moniker of Last Card Louie (Louis Benedetto, actually the manager) recognised Tony and instantly made us both honorary members. “Henceforth,” proclaimed Louie, a suave character of Italian origin, “henceforth, you are an Honorary Tom Cat,” as he presented us each with a card stating that we had been duly admitted to the inner sanctum of The Pink Pussycat. On Tony’s he wrote, “Admit free any time courtesy of Last Card Louie”.’
The Brits were introduced to the vagaries of Australia’s still restrictive liquor laws: ‘By dint of Tony’s presence we were served a few schooners of beer – an enormous privilege since it was near midnight and it was illegal for them to serve booze after ten.’
But the strippers were as disappointing as the licensing laws: ‘Lovable Lolita, Rose Marie from Little Old New York, Carmen the Cat Girl, Gigi, Suzy the School Girl, the Duchess of Peel and others – proved to be dreadfully amateurish. Hardly surprising really, since they were mainly housewives bumping and grinding, to earn night-time pin money and allow them to mother small children during the sunshine hours …
‘The slightly misshapen lassies had what appeared to be tinsel sprayed over their nipples. Tony complained to Louie. “When I come to see tit,” he announced, “I want to see tit.” Louie found this highly amusing and placated Tony by telling him that as a concession to modesty, or it may have been the law, the girls employed devices known as “pasties” that were small cones attached to the tips of the mammary glands.
‘Louie handled Tony with tactful aplomb, assuring him that next time he planned to visit The Pink Pussycat he should give him a little advance warning and he would arrange things exactly the way Tony wanted.’25 This was an offer to stage one of the ‘full reveal’ shows that the Pink Pussycat put on for special visitors.
That night out may have been Tony Hancock’s last bit of fun. He never made it back to the UK, he never even made it back to the Pink Pussycat. He had another alcoholic collapse and on 24 June he committed suicid
e by taking an overdose of downers. Joffe took an inventory of Hancock’s drug supply. The uppers included dexedrine, the downers an array of barbiturates, benzodiazepines, sodium amatyl, and antabuse. ‘You name it he took it’, Joffe said.26
ENTER ELIZABETH BURTON
Her violent father was a miner. She yearned to be a movie star. When the family moved to western Sydney she would spend the weekends at her aunt’s place at Bondi Beach, dancing along to records of musicals such as Oklahoma. She left school just before her fifteenth birthday and began a hairdressing apprenticeship. Tall, athletic and beautiful, a year or two later she got her first job as a part-time go-go dancer. It was at Redfern RSL, which had two cages either side of the bandstand.
Go-go dancing was a phenomenon of the mid-sixties, involving girls in mid-level shoes and bikinis – usually heavily fringed – and sometimes flesh-coloured tights for modesty – dancing on the spot. That spot was often a well-lit ‘cage’ made of dangling strips of clear plastic. It was sexy but not – as its practice at the Redfern RSL suggests – particularly naughty.
Burton loved go-go and was good at it, obtaining more work at the Here disco in North Sydney, where a minor Yugoslav gangster expressed such enthusiasm for her that she moved to Canberra to complete her apprenticeship. She then returned to Sydney and obtained a job as a waitress at the Whisky a Go Go.
The Whisky had been opened in emulation of the Los Angeles venue of similar name and was the largest nightclub of the R&R period. It was owned by John Harrigan, formerly of Surf City in Kings Cross, and Keith and Dennis Wong, successful entertainment entrepreneurs who also owned (in some cases with Harrigan) Chequers, the Mandarin Club, The Hawaiian Eye, and The Stagecoach.
The Whisky was at 152 William Street, across the wide road from the luxury car sales rooms and next to the Forbes Club, one of the city’s leading illegal casinos. Before long it had two floors, with a lane out back, occasionally used for ejecting drunks and by police coming in to the kitchen to pick up a box of roast chicken and a slab of beer to take back to Darlinghurst Police Station. The club (that had no links to the Brisbane venue of the same name, which later suffered a terrible fire) had well-dressed and attractive staff, red carpet, gold curtains or mirrors behind the dancers, and loud black and white wall paper.
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