Brifman went to see Commissioner Allan and her intervention succeeded. Krahe was safe – for the meantime. But the article and the follow-up in the Sunday Mirror shredded any assurances of ano-nymity Brifman might have been offering customers. The story certainly seems to have got someone worked up: the microfiche copy of the Sunday Mirror for 8 June 1969 in the State Library of New South Wales is missing pages one and two – the ones that carried the story about the ‘knights, pop stars, tycoons’. The pages were removed before the issue was photographed.
But as they used to say in the newspaper industry, it was the story that kept on giving. A week later the Sunday Mirror followed it up: ‘Sydney’s highest-paid call-girl is living in terror behind the locked doors of her luxurious Elizabeth Bay apartment,’ it screamed. ‘She is in fear because a number of her wealthy and powerful clients have made threats on her life’.37
The Sunday Mirror ’s coverage of The Reef episode dwelt on the elite status of Brifman’s clientele: they were ‘businessmen, politicians, graziers and show business personalities’, they were ‘wealthy and powerful’, they were ‘rich and powerful’. ‘Millionaires’ reportedly brought their sons to The Reef for sexual induction. Few punters would have overlooked the gulf between what went on at The Reef and the ‘short-time’, no-frills sexual menu on offer in the street to migrant workers on $70 a week.
The next follow-up article in the Sunday Mirror described events at Brifman’s Earl Place brothel in 1968. The woman quoted as the source for this article (‘a former Sydney beauty queen’) denied having actual sex with the ‘prominent businessmen, sporting figures and at least one politician’ who attended ‘vice orgies’, but did describe taking part in ‘nude beauty contests’. At a time when the average male wage was around $3500 a year, the woman said she received more than $5000 worth of ‘gifts’ during the year she was associated with Brifman. ‘The girl denies that she or her friends were prostitutes,’ the article said, and she was certainly better remu-nerated than the average streetwalker. And she had a lot of fun as well: ‘One of the younger men she met at (Brifman’s) apartment – the son of a millionaire – taught her to water-ski after she had attended a nude poolside party at his Palm Beach home.’38 A nice girl can’t help it if she gets lucky.
On 29 June, the Sunday Mirror went back to the story with a piece entitled ‘Rich Lovers Dumped – Gorgeous Playgirl Vanishes’. The contents of this article were entirely fanciful; according to Brifman ‘they made that up themselves’.39 The sting in this last Mirror story came right at the end: ‘Shirley’s clients included at least one knight …’.40
Just which knight was the Sunday Mirror pointing the finger at? Throughout the saga of The Reef there are some garbled references that may or may not have been to the Packer clan. The initial Sunday Mirror article of 8 June asserted ‘Among the clients she named is a millionaire who is well known throughout Australia. The man’s two sons are also regular customers, and all three are married.’ Sir Frank Packer was a millionaire, well known throughout Australia, he had two sons, and all three were married.
Two years later, police investigators were still sufficiently interested in the subject to ask Brifman: ‘Do you have anything to say to us about any member of the Packer family?’
Brifman replied with a straight bat: ‘The only reference I made to Packer was that I told Detective Inspector Williams that Freddie Krahe was frightened that Packer and the Daily Telegraph might print the photographs taken at the party. That is the only time I mentioned Packer.’41
Despite Brifman having explained his presence at the party, Krahe’s problems continued to grow. One of them was notorious aging career criminal Darcy Dugan, who after leaving prison in 1967 had sold his life story to the Daily Telegraph for the hefty sum of $12 000. He then went to work as a counsellor at the Wayside Chapel and began to talk about police corruption, a subject on which he, like Brifman, was an expert. Before long he was giving talks to reputable groups such as Rotary, Apex and the Returned Servicemen’s League, explaining with plenty of personal detail how the police faked confessions and the CIB ran protection rackets for gambling, prostitution and abortion.
Dugan was now a public figure. He even appeared in a play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, where he got good notices and after the show would speak from the stage about how the police organised crime in Sydney. Some of this was reported in the media, particularly the Telegraph newspapers. Lots of people were starting to get very worried.
THE WHISKY
At the Whisky a Go Go Barry McAskill and the Levi Smith Clefs were exhausted after working six nights a week for eighteen months straight. McAskill asked co-owner John Harrigan if they could have a fortnight off and Harrigan refused, saying there was no other band that could pull in the troops the way they did. There was only one response. ‘Fuck you, John,’ said McAskill, and returned to his home town of Adelaide with most of the band. Singer Inez Amaya stayed behind and Harrigan formed a new band around her.
Elizabeth Burton was back in Sydney but keen to return to Vietnam, despite the horrific nature of some of her experiences there: by now the girl from Captains Flat had become the sort of person who feels more at home on the edge. She dyed her hair, signed on for another tour called What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? and got back into the country. The troupe performed outdoors and in the different clubs the US authorities ran for Officers, NCOs and Enlisted Men. They all liked go-go dancers.
From Vietnam Burton went to Hong Kong, and a series of adven-tures that continued the trajectory that had begun in the go-go cages of Kings Cross, which saw her smuggle heroin into America and work briefly as a prostitute in New York.
The heroin was an accident. A man she fell in love with asked her to smuggle a small package through La Guardia airport, beneath her hairpiece. He said it contained a lady’s diamond watch on which he did not want to pay duty. He put her up in a hotel and disappeared, leaving her in a strange city with no money. Before long she was working in brothels and using heroin.
Back in Sydney, Barry McAskill returned from his short sabbat-ical to the Whisky and reformed the Levi Smith Clefs, now without Inez Amaya, who had joined the cast of Hair. That musical, with its occasionally nude cast advocating the Age of Aquarius, opened on 4 June 1969 at the Metro theatre in Kings Cross, where it was to enjoy a long run.
The Whisky continued to rock, attracting actors such as Sean Connery and visiting musicians from bands like the Who and the Small Faces. Kerry Packer took one of the go-go dancers to Hong Kong for a weekend.
The place was also popular with people who worked around the Cross at night. Wayne Martin, who managed the Pink Pussycat for Abe Saffron, would drop by for a drink after work, as would a variety of detectives. John Harrigan and the Wongs always had good security at their clubs, and perhaps as part of this policy, the police were always welcome.
Two detectives from the Consorting or Armed Hold-up Squad would escort the Whisky’s manager to the local bank after 4am each morning. There he would open the Chubb chute and deposit the night’s considerable takings, packed in a small leather satchel.
Another regular visitor to the Whisky was Abe Saffron’s son Alan, then in his late teens. He was the only patron who was given credit. One night he was involved in an incident and the security men were alerted by the club’s yellow light system – four flashes meant a violent incident. They managed to get Saffron out of the place and he must have complained to his father, because next day Abe turned up in a long black limo for a word with staff. On being told what had happened, Saffron senior said, ‘Fair enough’ and departed.42
One night gangster ‘Paddles’ Anderson was told his fifteen-year-old daughter was working at the Whisky and – clearly a man of certain standards where his own family was concerned – turned up and stuck a pistol in the manager’s stomach. It took a detailed inspection of the premises to convince him he’d been misinformed, possibly by people associated with competing nightclubs, hoping to cause t
rouble.
Some of the grasshoppers were married women. On one occasion a husband carrying an axe arrived from the Blue Mountains looking for his young wife. She’d abandoned their three children to come to Sydney to be with the Americans. It was on occasions like this that the club’s good relationship with the police came in handy.43
DRUGS: ‘PRETTY FLAGRANT’
Narcotics cop Bernard Delaney recalled that by 1969 there was a detectable increase in cannabis use in Sydney. ‘Many, particularly the sensational press, gave the visiting servicemen full credit for this upsurge and obviously [they] did have some influence.’44
On 17 December, two American servicemen, aged twenty-two and twenty, were sentenced for importing opium from Vietnam to Australia while on R&R leave. The older of the two imported a larger amount and admitted he was intending to sell some; he was gaoled for five years. The other, who said his opium was solely for personal use, got two years.45
But it wasn’t just what the Americans were consuming, it was how they consumed it that was making such an impact. ‘They were pretty flagrant,’ recalls Michael Fitzjames. ‘Even among ultra-cool Australians, shooting up was something done furtively. Now all of a sudden every party had a few Americans, and some of them were shooting up quite openly.’46
As Alfred McCoy explained in his 1980 book, Drug Traffic, from the 19th century onwards Australia had maintained a curious double standard towards ‘licit’, pharmaceutical, drugs. In 1969 it was still going strong: while authorities were coming down like a ton of bricks on Americans bringing drugs from Vietnam, abuse of pharmaceutical drugs was rife.
Sydney’s celebrity overdose of 1969 was that of English singer Marianne Faithfull, who survived. Faithfull, visiting Australia with boyfriend Mick Jagger, overdosed in early July while staying at the Chevron Hotel on Macleay Street, just down the road from the Rex. Faithfull’s celebrity status saw her treated with remarkable tactfulness. Sydney cringed with def-erence when her mother, a baroness, arrived from England, and the police adopted a similarly respectful stance. ‘A senior police officer said last night the police interest in Miss Faithfull was purely formal,’ the Sydney Morning Herald reported. ‘Police were obliged,’ he said apologetically, ‘to investigate the circumstances of her ingesting an overdose of barbiturates … but there was no question of hounding her.’47
But another woman who overdosed in Sydney at the same time as Faithfull did not survive. This was the writer Charmian Clift, the wife of George Johnston.48 Alcohol and barbiturates killed her before she was fifty.
SHIRLEY STAYS CONNECTED
By early August 1969, Brifman had moved out of The Reef, relo-cating to a block of flats at 12 Wylde Street, Potts Point, overlooking the Captain Cook Dry Dock. Here, replicating her hive in Earl Place, she took one apartment, number 46, for herself, and used two others – numbers 21 and 22 – as brothels.
Far from being chastened by his close shave over Shirley’s party, Krahe was closely involved in the establishment of her new venture. Though less ostentatious than The Reef, during its ten months’ operation Wylde Street proved every bit as lucrative.
Brifman’s single most important business asset was her telephone number, her unique connection to a clientele she had built up over five years. More important than an actual location, it was such a valuable piece of property that, as we have seen, Linda the Vice Queen tried ‘to buy my number off me’.49 ‘It was the telephone number that I have had all the years. It is a well-known number, known by millions of men, even people from other countries knew the number. They wanted to buy it to get all the trade.’50 So while Brifman might move her operation around Kings Cross, from Earl Place to Ithaca Road to Wylde Street, as long as she kept the same phone number she could take her clientele with her. And fortunately she was able to have the number transferred overnight.
In Australia of the 1960s, this was no mean feat. Telephone connections and the technicians to install and manage them were in short supply. An ordinary citizen might wait months for the Postmaster-General’s Department (PMG, the precursor of Telstra) to connect them to the world. But to stay in business, enterprises like Brifman’s and the bigger SP bookies needed telephone lines, and lots of them. Sometimes they needed new lines – or old numbers transferred – promptly. As a result, there were lots of PMG employees willing to expedite matters – at a price.
Arranging this was all part of a (corrupt) policeman’s work. ‘Mick Phelan (for the move to Ithaca Road) and Freddie Krahe (for that to Wylde Street) pulled the strings to have the number shifted,’ Brifman recalled. ‘It was done in a matter of minutes. Phelan and Krahe brought the telephone papers for me to sign at night and I got the phone shifted next day.’51
After the debacle at The Reef, Brifman was keeping a low profile. There were no housewarming parties at Wylde Street. The Sunday Mirror proclaimed she had retired to Brisbane. But as well as premises and a phone number, Brifman needed staff for her new venture and this caused complications.
She did take some members of her long-term staff (like Sarah Williams) with her to Wylde Street, but she subcontracted some of the recruitment process to the Maltese operators ‘Scar Face’ Joe and Mick Vella (not their real names). Their business, she recorded, had been severely affected by the crackdown on The Lanes in late 1968.
In late October, two months after she had set up shop in Wylde Street, Brifman spent a week in the Sanitarium Hospital in Wahroonga – near her new family home in Westleigh. Krahe demonstrated his continued affection by sending flowers. But the Vellas, seeing how lucrative the Wylde Street operation was proving, took the opportunity of Brifman’s illness to demand she upgrade them from suppliers to full partners in the brothel.
‘Scar Face Joe and Mick Vella came to see me at the hospital. Joe knew that I had the pull. Joe wanted me to get another couple of flats (to run prostitutes in) and to bring (him) in as a partner.’52 Doubtless the ‘offer’ was couched in terms the Maltese thought she wouldn’t be able to refuse.
But she did. She turned to Krahe for help, and he secured the services of ‘Ratty Jack’ Clarke, the gunman and standover man we last encountered backing up Chow Hayes as he put the bite on Joe Borg.
‘Fred arranged with Jackie Clarke to come and he stayed at my place all day. This was so the girls would pass the word around that I had Jackie Clarke the gunnie in. Only for one day, just long enough to spread the word back.’ Brifman paid Krahe for the hire of the gunman and ‘Joe Vella forgot about the partnership then’.53
This was not the end of the connection with the Maltese. They continued to supply women to the Wylde Street brothel right up until the end of its operation.
DEALING WITH DARCY DUGAN
By now the outspoken Darcy Dugan, like all crooks who bucked the system, was a problem the police had to sort out. Detective Sergeant Herbert Talarico, who worked closely with Krahe in the Breaking Squad, was actually threatened with a pistol by Lennie McPherson in the toilets at a nightclub. The big man was concerned that Dugan might mention his name soon, so Talarico threatened Dugan: ‘Shut up or you’ll be shut up.’ But it had no effect, and it seems that Dugan, thanks to his coverage by the Daily Telegraph, was too well known to the public by now to be killed.54
The first step in silencing him was to dispose of his ally at the Daily Telegraph, the paper’s chief of staff Michael Tatlow, who recounts the following events in the book, Bloodhouse, he later wrote with Dugan. The editor in chief, David McNicoll, called Tatlow into his office and sacked him on Sir Frank Packer’s orders. This was a complete surprise. Only years later did Tatlow learn the reason: Fred Krahe had rung Packer and told him Tatlow was in league with Dugan in a plot to kidnap his grandchildren, Kerry’s children James and Gretel. Krahe didn’t have enough evidence to charge Dugan or Tatlow, but he thought Sir Frank would want to know. It’s an interesting insight into the state of public ignorance of police corruption that even Sir Frank Packer, no ingénue, should have accepted Krahe’s unlikely story.
&nb
sp; With Tatlow out of the way and Packer firmly turned against Dugan, the police could act. It was still too dangerous to kill Dugan, but they could shut him up. On 11 November, Krahe or Talarico (depending on which account you believe) led thirty men who sur-rounded premises in Balmain and arrested Dugan and charged him with the robbery of Kleemo’s jewellery store in Pitt Street. The cops claimed to have found some of the diamonds in Dugan’s home, plus a gun with no fingerprints on it.55
Was Dugan guilty? Bloodhouse suggests he was framed,56 but a later book, Rod Hay’s Catch Me if You Can, claimed that Dugan had in fact returned to crime and did rob the jewellery store. Subsequent police actions fit either explanation.
First there was the unsigned confession, sworn to by five detectives. (It must have been a crowded interview room.) Tatlow’s house was burgled and documents relating to Dugan stolen. During the trial, the offices of Dugan’s solicitor were broken into every week.
Judge Harvey Prior was a friend of the police, known among defence lawyers as Fletcher Jones after the clothing store that claimed it would ‘fit any man’. He asked the jury, ‘Who do you believe? These men of impeccable character (that is, Krahe and his fellow police), with scores of years’ service to the community, or this defendant, with a string of convictions, who is trying to save himself?’
Dugan was found guilty and sent away for fourteen years. At least one of Krahe’s problems had been solved.
PROSTITUTION: A NEW BUSINESS MODEL
The year may have had its ups and downs for Brifman, but at the end of 1969 she was still doing well. Sex workers in the downmarket section of the industry were having a rougher time of it.
Despite the police crackdown and the turf wars following the murder of Joe Borg, in 1969 there were still brothels in Darlinghurst. But there were fewer of them, they were more secretive and the way they operated had changed. The process of soliciting customers had been separated from that of servicing them, so sex workers, instead of sitting in doorways under a red light, picked up men on the street and took them back to anonymous premises in the precinct. Madams also solicited men off the streets. And there were new vice queens, women with a reputation for harshness.
Sydney Noir Page 17