One of Delaney’s tasks was intercepting letters containing marijuana sent to women by US soldiers after they returned to Vietnam. Each week a mailbag of bulky envelopes detected by mail sorters would be delivered (quite illegally) to the Bureau’s office in Customs House at Circular Quay, where Delaney and his colleagues would decide whether to deliver the envelope and arrest the recipient. That would depend on whether there was evidence (for example, a letter in the envelope) indicating the woman had asked for the drugs – usually joints – to be sent. Eventually there were so many of these envelopes the police did not bother to follow them up unless they contained heroin.
Over the next few years, even after R&R stopped at the end of 1971, the drug trade slowly grew. ‘Narcotics kept on flowing into Sydney. Ounces were replaced by pounds, marihuana made way for hashish and LSD, and heroin came onto the scene.’ Delaney was offered his first serious bribe when a state detective sergeant said he would be paid a thousand dollars if he removed details of an accused drug dealer’s prior convictions from the brief of evidence. Delaney said no, but he did not report the offer. To do so would have meant the end of the cooperation – already strained – between the Federal Bureau and the NSW Police Force.42
RAID ON THE 33 CLUB
At 2.45am on Saturday 16 May 1970, Michael Moylan’s 33 Club on Oxford Street was raided by police. This was one of the very few times the police ever disrupted its operation.43
Sixty-four people were arrested, but when their cases came up on the Monday, sixty-one of them didn’t turn up in court. They for-feited their bail, knowing that the 33 Club would reimburse them. They gave false names, aware they would not be seriously pursued by the police over the minor charges they faced.
Moylan was fined $40 for being the keeper of a gaming house, and a croupier and a bouncer were fined $40 each – just the tiniest fraction of the club’s nightly turnover of $200 000–$250 000. Clearly, no one was going to be deterred by such perfunctory attempts to police and punish gambling.44
Moylan continued to aim for a top end clientele, turning away migrant and working-class punters, who were welcomed at Perce Galea’s Forbes Club off William Street. The 33 Club, by contrast, was the haunt of ‘show business personalities, prominent lawyers, knighted businessmen – some reportedly close to the Government ministers’45 – the same sort of people whom Shirley Brifman welcomed to The Reef.
Outside the 33 Club, ‘The sight of people milling in the street and queuing up the stairs to get in became a common one almost every night of the week.’46 The (very remote) prospect of getting raided was doubtless part of the frisson – particularly when it was known the consequences would be negligible.
Moylan wasn’t the only casino owner raking it in. In 1970, Perce Galea – in one of his very rare brushes with the authorities – was named in the federal taxation commissioner’s report to parliament. The commissioner estimated that, over the eight-year period beginning in 1955, Galea had understated his income by £49 964 – about
$1.35 million in 2014 money. And this was when Galea’s Victoria Club offered baccarat only.
Galea was fined by the taxman, but it probably didn’t worry him much. By the mid-1960s, before he had moved on from the Victoria Club to the even more lucrative Forbes Club, he was wealthy enough to place bets of £40 000 on a single race.47
Another successful casino was the Goulburn Club, run by George Ziziros Walker and Christos ‘Harry’ Paizis. It was relatively upmarket, provided roulette, and had many Greeks among its staff and clients.
Paizis, known in some circles as ‘Harry Gorilla’, had come to Sydney from Melbourne in the early 1950s and run a club with Walker and Steve Palonis, above the Sammy Lee premises in Pitt Street that later became the Latin Quarter. Walker and Paizis then opened the Goulburn Club, above a pub on the corner of Goulburn and George Streets, around 1960. The club was entered by stairs leading up from an alley around the back of the pub. There were ‘cockatoos’ (sentries who would give warning of a police raid), doormen and valet parking. Upstairs there was plush red and gold wallpaper, free alcohol and food (mainly spirits and steak sandwiches), and well-dressed staff and customers. It was the place many Greeks went after a dance or a wedding, hitting its straps from 11pm until around 4am. In Sydney there was nowhere else to go.
Harry Paizis married the sister of Dr Nick Paltos, who would become notorious for his friendship with George Freeman. In the 1950s the couple lived in the north Coogee block of apartments owned by Sydney’s other famously crooked doctor, the abortionist and gangster Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones, moving to a house in Lurline Bay after the Goulburn Club became a big success. Paizis would be driven home after the club closed in a large American saloon, another car following him for protection. One morning the milkman noticed a booby trap involving a shotgun had been set up next to the front door. Paizis was advised when he arrived home and boosted his security arrangements. This included replacing the picture win-dows overlooking the ocean with bullet-proof glass.
Paizis died of natural causes in the second half of the 1970s and his large funeral was attended by gangsters including four henchmen wearing dark suits and sunglasses.48 The Godfather had a lot to answer for.
DEATH OF THE GLOVE: ‘STILL THINK YOU’RE WILLING?’
On 22 June 1970, Jim Anderson shot Donnie ‘the Glove’ Smith dead in The Venus Room in Orwell Street, Kings Cross.
Leaving the Latin Quarter after the killing of Ducky O’Connor, Anderson had been hired by Abe Saffron to manage The Venus Room, one of the seventeen entertainment venues in which Saffron had an interest. When The Venus Room first opened in September 1968 Saffron, aiming at an upmarket clientele, had pitched it as a cocktail bar. As his biographer Duncan McNab puts it, ‘women attired in their evening finery and men in the latest lounge suits could swirl around the parquet dance floor to the tunes of a jazz combo’, attributing this to Saffron’s nostalgia for the ‘glamour and prestige’ of the glory days of the Roosevelt twenty years earlier. If so, it was a rare misjudgment by Saffron of a clientele increasingly under the sway of pop music and the rest and recreation boom. Anderson, it seems, sensed the mood more accurately, and under his ‘steady hand, the Venus Room took a dramatic dive downmarket’.49
Soon it had become a strip joint, but this was really only a cover for a bar that sold alcohol at all hours in violation of its licence, and served as a venue for prostitution. Working girls picked up customers in the bar then took them to rooms in adjacent premises, also owned by Saffron. It was the income stream from prostitutes that brought Donnie the Glove to The Venus Room.
On the night in question, Smith came into the bar and, using what seems to have been the language required on such occasions, said, ‘Hello, cunt, still think you’re willing? Have you still got your gun? I’m going to kill you, you cunt. I’ve got something nice for you …’ and thumped Anderson. In fact, Anderson did have his gun and shot Smith three times.50
Duncan McNab says that a Kings Cross brothel madam wanted to muscle in on Anderson’s prostitution operation, and sent Smith to the Venus Room to reinforce her offer. McNab doesn’t identify the madam, but Smith’s partnership with Linda the Vice Queen suggests it may have been her.51 Whoever she was, the fact that she felt sufficiently confident to try to grab a slice of Abe Saffron’s business suggests that he was still, in 1970, yet to achieve the commanding influence later ascribed to him.
No one had much sympathy for Smith. The day after the shooting, police told a court: ‘Smith was known as a stand-over merchant of other criminals in the Kings Cross area, and was at present on remand on a charge of shooting with intent to do grievous bodily harm’. Anderson’s solicitor John Nader, who the previous year had set up the meeting between Shirley Brifman and Commissioner Norman Allan, said that Smith had reduced his client to a state of ‘pure terror’.
‘For some years he has been bringing pressure to bear on the defendant in relation to prostitution and other matters,’ Nader said. ‘This gave rise to a s
ituation of great terror which led to what happened last night.’52
Anderson was charged with murder, later downgraded to manslaughter (despite the fact that he had fired three times), and this charge was in turn ‘no-billed’. The Venus Room episode highlights Saffron’s arm’s-length method of operation. Rather than being a hands-on operator like Richard Reilly, George Freeman and Lennie McPherson, Saffron was more an investor in properties where criminal activities took place. He certainly committed crimes – like tax evasion, for which he was ultimately sent to gaol. But he always left the dirty work to people like Jim Anderson – which helps explain why Anderson would ultimately turn on Saffron, providing the evidence that sent him to gaol.
THE GREAT CASINO
Perce Galea wasn’t the only punter raking it in.
Robin Askin was a keen investor on the stock market, but there are few examples of his trading on the public record. One occurred in June 1970, when he, like other politicians in four states, was criticised for purchasing some of the share issue of aluminium producer Comalco. Mollie Askin bought 1500 shares through the broker Ian Potter & Co., with Askin telling the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘My wife has bought shares on and off for years, with her own money.’ Despite the criticism, there was no suggestion either of the Askins had any connection with Comalco.53
Askin’s main concern this year was the two Moratoriums, mass marches against the Vietnam War through the streets of Sydney scheduled for May and September. Political demonstrations were a new phenomenon, at least in recent times, increasingly popular but still fairly small. In 1969 there had been 72 public demos, the largest involving some 1500 students protesting the war.54
In April 1970, ten of Askin’s backbenchers issued a statement claiming that ‘This country is faced with a danger far greater than it has ever known (the new social movements), and the tragedy of it is that most Australians don’t know or don’t care or are hapless in apathy that blinds them.’55 The first Moratorium in May, which according to police involved 12 000 people, passed without incident. This dis-appointed conservatives looking for proof that the war’s opponents were a radical and violent minority.
Askin proposed a Summary Offences Bill to help the police deal with sit-ins and other demonstrations. When a by-election opportunity arose for the seat of Georges River, he selected as election day
19 September 1970, the day after the second Moratorium was due to be held. The government ran an aggressive law and order campaign, which included launching a prosecution against the editors of the University of NSW student magazine, Tharunka, for obscenity. The hope was to provoke a riot at the Moratorium that would encourage citizens to vote for the government the next day.
The ever-obliging Norm Allan refused to give permission for the march until just before it began, and prophesied that it would ‘take over the city by insurrection’. Thousands of marchers turned up anyway (5000 according to police,56 up to 15 000 according to other accounts). The march was approved at the last minute, but police changed its route and used the ensuing confusion as an excuse to attack the marchers.
One hundred and eighty-two were arrested,57 compared with none at the first Sydney Moratorium and four from a crowd of 50 000 at a Moratorium in Melbourne. But the public did not respond as hoped. In fact, it was a disaster for the government, which suffered a 9 per cent swing against it in Georges River the next day. Askin watered down his Summary Offences Bill and returned to the political centre on the issue of the protest movement, perhaps realising that he had gone too far in condemning students who, even if scruffy and long-haired, were the children of voters.58
A KNOCKABOUT’S YEAR
Arthur ‘The Duke’ Delaney, after his return from the trip to Chicago with George Freeman, was living in the Mile Post apartments across from Randwick Racecourse, with a woman we will call Alexis. Her previous lover, a man named ‘Skinny Fred’, was deeply resentful of this arrangement, and expressed this to the couple. Finally, the two men agreed to have a fight outside the apartment block. But when Skinny Fred turned up, it was in a car, and shots were fired by passenger Kevin Gore, the violent crook who ran a gymnasium in Botany Street, Redfern. The Duke was hit once in the back; he survived, but walked thereafter with a limp.59
Lennie McPherson’s fortunes took a turn for the better in 1970 when the straight-shooter Leslie Chowne was replaced as head of the Consorting Squad by the more amenable Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill, the ‘Silver Fox’. The corrupt McNeill had a chat to McPherson and told him, ‘I know the fellows before me gave you a rough time, but I don’t intend to lean on you.’60 He was to be as good as his word.
By this time McPherson seems to have been making most of his money in Sydney as a protector and debt collector for illegal businesses. Sometimes the relationship was voluntary, in others he forced himself on the operation and took 10 per cent of all profits. In return, he protected them from other criminals and the police, as well as from himself. These businesses included brothels, ethnic gambling clubs, pubs (when liquor licenses were transferred), and illegal casinos including the 33 Club and The Palace in Rockwell Crescent, Potts Point.61 McPherson was also probably engaged more actively, in partnership with Bernie Houghton and some policemen, in the importation of Asian women to work in Australian brothels.62
In 1970 McPherson and his wife visited Joe Testa in Chicago. Like Freeman and Smith before them, they stayed at Testa’s home and were taken to Las Vegas, where they booked into The Sands Hotel, built by gangsters. The McPhersons then continued their holiday in Acapulco.
As for George Freeman, sometime around now, possibly a year or two earlier, he launched what was to be his highly successful phone-based SP business.
‘HEY, MAN’: AMERICAN DOPE EVANGELISTS
In the recollection of many, marijuana and American servicemen appeared on Sydney streets simultaneously. This is not the whole truth, but one can see why the impression became widespread. Tasmanian artist Dale Richards was introduced to marijuana one day in 1970, walking down the street in Kings Cross with a group of friends. They encountered some American soldiers: ‘Hey, Man,’ said one of the Americans, ‘want to turn on?’
Why did they offer such an invitation to total strangers? Richard Hall noted that ‘the Americans were evangelists for drug freedom to anyone who would listen’.63 According to Dale Richards, ‘Not all the Americans were the same. A lot were only interested in girls and booze. But there were some who were actually hippies in uniform, and genuinely interested in meeting like-minded people.
‘These guys wanted to meet locals like themselves, just hang out, relax and forget about the war,’ Richards recalls. ‘So we went back to their hotel room. They pulled out these joints, which they had brought with them from Vietnam. The joints had been made up to look like little cigars … you know, with the plastic tips (to make them easier to smuggle into Australia). The ends were made of tobacco, so the first few puffs were like a cigarette … and then it hit you.’
Richards used to frequent a small place just off William Street, improbably called the Ball Pants Café. Contributing to the ambience were ‘a hundred looped dressing gown cords hanging from the ceiling, ultra-violet light, Draft Resistance signs, a waiter in a black and red army dress jacket and a lot of scruffy-looking kids. And on a stool in front of a microphone, a guitarist is playing and singing a song about alienation’. One customer described it thus: ‘You go to the Ball Pants because it tolerates everything the other coffee shops won’t. Stoned kids, bare feet, noise, anything except fighting.’64
According to Richards, the dividing line between the police and the policed could be a very sharp one – particularly if you looked like a dope smoker. One day he was in the Ball Pants when he was picked on by a plain clothes policeman, paunchy, drunk, aggressive, who shoved him up against a wall and knocked the cigarette out of his hand, clearly hoping to provoke a defiant reaction so he could belt him up and arrest him.65
Others had a different experience of the police. Accord
ing to Michael Fitzjames, ‘The cops were always part of the scene; you had to be really provocative to be locked up’.66 And Elizabeth Burton said, ‘The police may have been corrupt, but they treated you with respect – not like today’.67
The policing of drugs still tended to be the domain of the Drug Squad, which in 1970 increased from sixteen to twenty officers. During the year they made 132 arrests for the sale of ‘drugs of addiction’.68
PHILIP ARANTZ, EARLY ADOPTER
In the Police Administration and Management Research Branch, Philip Arantz had become a computer evangelist. The following account is based largely on his self-published 1993 memoir, A Collusion of Powers, supported by whatever other evidence is available.
The forty-one-year-old detective saw the benefits to be achieved by digitising all crime data from around the state. It would, for example, enable police in one area to see that a robbery they were investigating had similarities with a series of robberies in other areas. Arantz proposed to his immediate superiors that the new digitised system contain all available data, including that now stored in every station in the ‘Paddy’s book’. They demurred, insisting that it should use only the limited data currently collected. Any exten-sion of that would require the Commissioner’s approval, and it was suggested Arantz write a report proposing this. According to his account, he didn’t want to discuss the issue of the ‘Paddy’s book’ system on paper, and suggested his superiors discuss the matter with the Commissioner. They declined.
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