Sometime between August and early October 1972, McNeill’s attitude to Bally reversed. Subsequent rumours among police said he was paid $30 000 for this by Jack Rooklyn, and used the money to buy a top-floor apartment on the Grand Parade at Brighton-le-Sands. Such flats look out on Botany Bay, where the fleet containing the city’s founders – 759 criminals and their guards – had dropped anchor in this land of opportunity in 1788.
While McNeill was preparing his final report, probably in October 1972, he and Detective Sergeant Doug Knight were invited to a meeting with Jack Rooklyn, who offered them jobs with Bally.
They later said they did not accept the offer, but both men were to act in ways favourable to Bally. Knight’s solicitor signed a form to set up a business in partnership with Rooklyn, and Knight visited a few clubs with Bally representatives saying Bally was clean.
A job offer was also made to Brian Ballard, who actually attended a party Rooklyn put on at the Chevron Hotel for William T O’Donnell, the head of Bally America.
McNeill’s final report was dated 23 October 1972. It was a complete reversal of the first. When forwarded to the Premier’s Department on 6 November, the covering letter from Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police Leonard Newman stated that ‘the investigating Police … have indicated that they are satisfied that the allegations received do not call for any further inquiries by this Department … The Superintendent in Charge, Criminal Investigation Branch, agrees with the opinions expressed by the Detectives. I am satisfied from their report that the matter has been fully and thoroughly investigated’.30
The report itself did not repeat the allegations in the first report of Bally’s mafia links overseas, but did set out at length the denials of such allegations from Bally’s Tomlinson and Rooklyn. ‘Mr Rooklyn concluded,’ it said, ‘by saying he felt it must be most obvious to any sane, clear thinking person that the net result of this investigation could only prove that all the allegations concerning his company were baseless and had been intended to remove their product from the local market at any price. We are inclined to agree with him.’ But there was more: ‘During the interview Mr Rooklyn appeared quite genuine in his assertions. He answered all questions asked without hesitation and one could only be impressed by him.’
If Rooklyn had paid for this, he certainly got his money’s worth. Another absolved of his sins by McNeill’s final report was Murray Riley, sportsman, ex-policeman and hero, who despite spending a year in prison in New Zealand ‘could not even be reputed to be a criminal’.31 Within just a few years of this absolution, Riley would mastermind the voyage of the Anoa, by weight the largest ever single importation of drugs into Australia.
The Premier was puzzled by the contrast between the first and last reports. According to Geoffrey Reading, ‘Askin did not have any opinion on the matter (of Bally’s reputation) one way or the other. When he discussed with me the press allegations of criminal infiltration he was genuinely bewildered. He was not a detective himself, able to conduct his own investigations. He did the only thing possible, and asked what the police knew about it …’32
Askin was still considering the final report when the opposition put more pressure on him. On 9 November 1972, Labor leader Pat Hills drew attention to another recent police report – a product of the new computer – that showed a significant increase in serious crime in New South Wales and a reduced clear-up rate. He linked this to a recent statement by the secretary of the Commonwealth Police Association that the mafia was active in Australia. ‘When,’ Hills asked, ‘would McNeill’s final report be released?’
Askin responded that, ‘It is true that there is a lot of serious crime in the State. It is also true … that the rate of clear-up by the police is not as good as we would like it to be. In fairness to our police force, I should point out that the same conditions apply in every other State in Australia, where the rate of crime is on the increase and the clear-up rate is the same as in New South Wales.’ He went on to say he was still waiting for McNeill’s final report, but that in any case the allegations it was considering were quite narrow, and, ‘One should be careful not to reflect adversely on the big body of clubs throughout the State that provide first-class amenities, good service, and afford a new social life for the hundreds of thousands of their members.’
A few days later Askin wrote, ‘Whilst I am not aware of anything which would justify me querying any section of the latest police report, I am somewhat concerned that in tenor it should be so different to the report dated 1 July last.’ He asked to discuss the report with a senior bureaucrat and then, his concerns presumably mollified, told parliament on 22 November that, ‘I have now received a copy of the final report prepared by the investigating detectives, which reveals that, despite earlier fears, no evidence had been found to indicate that the club industry of this State through either entertainment or poker machines is being controlled by criminals or that there is any move by foreign syndicated crime figures to take over in the industry.’33
The Moffitt Royal Commission would show in 1974 that while there was in fact considerable involvement of local organised criminals in a number of registered clubs in New South Wales, there was no evidence of mafia involvement, although Bally was associated with the mafia in America.
Despite his statement to parliament, Askin was apparently still concerned. On 8 December 1972, John Maddison, the Minister for Justice, and two other ministers, with the informal agreement of the Premier, met with Richard Lendrum, now Assistant Commissioner of Police, to discuss the matter. Lendrum was reassuring. He told them the final report was solid and its principal author, Jack McNeill, had great experience and an unblemished record.34
This was a defining moment in the history of police corruption in Sydney: a premier and some of his ministers misled by the police hierarchy, including a Senior Assistant Commissioner and an Assistant Commissioner, on a matter of enormous public importance. In the coming months, the media and the opposition would turn it into the major scandal that produced the Moffitt Royal Commission and the end of innocence. This was the fulcrum on which the public reputation of the NSW Police Force started to tilt, although it would be decades – and several more royal commissions – before most people learned, as Ronald Ryan had learned back in 1966, about the extent and the character of Sydney Noir.
THE RED BULL
We give the last word to Shirley Brifman, because if any one person can be said to embody the contradictions of Sydney Noir during the Golden Years, it is her. Listening to her tell her story we can feel her fighting to keep her balance, to play the police game without completely giving up her independence. She failed – but her struggle compels our admiration.
To the investigators who’d interviewed her, the main question was: ‘Why? Why did she turn on her police protectors?’ But she saw it the other way round – it was the police who had forsaken her.
‘For a start, I paid all these years for protection. I was protected, now I am not protected. I’m in fear of my life.’
Shirley Brifman came from a small country town. The detectives in Brisbane and Sydney represented a Noir world of power and glamour that she badly wanted to belong to. She relished going to the Mandarin Club and classy restaurants with her detective lovers, rubbing shoulders with the Great and the Good.
She thought she was one of the gang. When asked why Phelan and Krahe spent so much time at her Earl Place brothel she burst out that they ‘were friends, they were always in the flat. It was their second home’.35 But as soon as she became a liability, these ‘friends’ didn’t want to know her. And that’s what drove Brifman in the last year of her life: she wanted her revenge for having been betrayed. And ripped off.
‘I paid all these years’ – clearly, the money rankled. And not just with Shirley Brifman either; many prostitutes who paid off policemen mused sourly on where all the money went. Roberta Perkins quotes Jeanette, a worker in The Lanes: ‘The police were more interested in money (than in sex). There’s a lot of co
ps’ wives whom I’ve helped put fur coats on their backs, and a lot of cops’ kids whom I’ve helped educate…’36
Worse, Brifman was dumped by Fred Krahe. It was a deeply transactional relationship, no doubt about it: Krahe made that bru-tally plain by breaking it off the minute the costs outweighed the benefits. For her part, she freely acknowledged that Krahe helped make her wealthy. Krahe ‘told me the Gunnies would be moving in on me and that he would protect me against them if I paid him. I have to give him credit, he did’.37
And yet ‘Freddie and Shirley’ had all the romantic trimmings. She was ‘on’ with him. There were the lovers’ tokens: the flowers and cards that he sent her – cards that she hoarded even after he had betrayed her. There were the gifts that she gave him, so lovingly listed for the investigators: the briefcase and pen bought from the upmarket Hoffnungs store in Pitt Street and engraved with his initials, ‘the bottles of Scotch and bits and pieces’.38
And then there was the Red Bull.
Q: ‘Have you received presents from any member of the police?’ A: ‘Freddie, naturally. He bought me the loveliest red bull of all times. We christened it the Red Bull. That was a birthday present when I was at The Reef. It’s in the photo taken at my party.’
Like everybody else, Brifman had her Golden Moment: hers was the party in May 1969. And ‘bull’, of course, was slang for ‘policeman’, so Krahe’s present was a jesting promise that he, the Bull, would always be there. She carted it around with her, doting on it even as she denounced its giver to the investigators.
‘Had he stuck (by me) to the end this probably would not have come out,’ she said. ‘He trusted me so well he probably thought I would never do this.’39
AN OPEN QUESTION
WAS ROBERT ASKIN CORRUPT?
NO NAMES
The 1970s was a time of great social and cultural change. So the society in the 1980s that accepted Askin had been deeply corrupt was very different to the society that had elected him premier in the period covered by this book. We suspect the corruption allegations, and the enthusiasm with which they were received, might on occasion have been shaped by that difference. Today, it seems to us, some of the claims are less compelling than they clearly were back then.
As we noted briefly in our introduction, in 1981 the National Times published David Hickie’s claims about Askin on its front page, with the headline: ‘Askin: Friend to Organised Crime’. Apparently the former premier had received $100 000 a year in bribes from casino operators in 1968–75, as had senior cop Fred Hanson. This was the equivalent of $1.18 million each in 2016 dollars. In addition, it was claimed Norm Allan had also been corrupt. All three men were dead.
Hickie said that on Askin’s watch, ‘organised crime became institutionalised on a large scale in New South Wales for the first time’,1 and that Askin was ‘not so much a politician receiving pay-offs as intimately involved in the Galea/Taylor operations, one of those “running the show”.’ (Joe Taylor was the well-known casino operator.)
This article began the destruction of Askin’s reputation, and rarely has a demolition job been more effective. One of Australia’s most successful political leaders became a pariah, not just to the progressive university graduates who began to enter the workforce from the late 1960s but to the general public, and even many members of Askin’s own party. His reputation never recovered and the reputation of the state’s political system suffered collateral damage.
The puzzle confronting anyone trying to understand this today is the absence of compelling evidence for Hickie’s claims. His three sources were unnamed. The first was ‘a reliable source very high in the old Galea empire’, the second worked for Galea’s competition, and the third was described simply as ‘a second source in the Galea empire’.
Others allegedly involved in the racket were also elusive, such as Askin’s bagmen. ‘One,’ wrote Hickie, ‘was a former taxi driver with a reputation as a hit man, another a huge man of some six feet seven inches nicknamed “Tiny”, and another was a man associated with Askin in his political life.’2
A fortnight later, the National Times published another article by Hickie, claiming bookmakers had paid Askin a large gift of money on his retirement. Here too the living sources were unnamed, while the subjects of the allegation – Askin and the bookie who allegedly organised the payment – were dead.
The corruption claims were repeated in Hickie’s 1985 book, The Prince and the Premier, with some extra detail and an interesting change. Hickie now indicated that Norm Allan too had received $100 000 a year in bribes, while Hanson had received that amount only after becoming commissioner.3 It was a significant alteration to the information supplied in the National Times article, where only Hanson had received the annual $100 000, but no one seemed very worried, even though the main source was described as ‘impeccable’ in both versions.
The book claimed that Joe Taylor had been introduced to Askin by Labor MP Lew Johnstone.4 Another MP, the Liberal Stephen Mauger, was named as one of Askin’s bagmen.5 Hickie also claimed that a journalist named Frank Browne had told him Askin had sold knighthoods, one to businessman Sir Elton Griffin.
But there was no point in anyone else asking Taylor, Johnstone, Mauger, Browne or Griffin about Askin. They, like Galea, Allan and Hanson, were dead.
There was nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, whether taken by Hickie or other reporters. Many important journalistic revelations begin in this manner. But the evidence was anonymous, and has remained so for almost thirty-six years, with Hickie never publishing the names of his sources. He did not provide them to us when we asked him, and no further compelling evidence has emerged.
You would think that by 1985 at least some people involved in Askin’s ‘corruption’ would still have been be alive, and that one or two might have safely been named, or might even have come forward to substantiate the claims that Askin was corrupt. But that did not occur, then or since.
It is true that since Hickie’s original article there have been plenty of claims that Askin was corrupt, including plenty of examples. But on investigation, all these examples are either unprovable or capable of alternative explanations. There is no space here to consider all the examples, but here is a representative selection of the most reputable or well-known.
In 1985 former editor and publisher Maxwell Newton said on radio that in 1970 he had delivered $15 000 in a brown paper bag to Askin’s office. This was a donation from Felipe Ysmael, who wanted to introduce Jai Lai, a ball game beloved by gamblers in the Philippines, into Sydney. Newton said the payment was arranged by Neville Wran, who had later become premier and denied the story, describing Newton as a ‘whisky swilling eccentric, with a reputation for unreliability and instability’.6 Jai Lai was never introduced into New South Wales.
In 1986, Richard Hall published his book, Disorganized Crime, and said that his well-placed sources had convinced him that ‘regular payments did take place explicitly to Askin, in the early seventies at least … The Galea organisation and another group under Joe Taylor were each making payments to Askin at about $1000 a week. The suburban casinos in Strathfield and Rozelle passed over something less and Moylan from the 33 Club rather more.’ Hall says Askin’s bagman was ‘a close working associate’, with hando-vers taking place in a car. The police Hall knew were not sure if Norm Allan had been corrupt, but were certain his successor, Fred Hanson, was.7 In 1993, a dozen years after Askin’s death and almost twenty after his retirement, the Sun-Herald engaged former NSW coroner Kevin Waller to assess the results of a ‘Commission of Inquiry’ it conducted, to encourage witnesses to Askin’s corruption to come forward.
When you consider the enormous scale of corruption that had been alleged of Askin and the time that had since elapsed, the response was disappointing. The main new claim involved the unnamed daughter of an unnamed SP bookmaker who had worked for her father and said Askin bet with him for free – he received his winnings but never paid for his losses. She said the amounts he
‘bet’ were not particularly large.
A man named Emile Jansen told the inquiry his father, an architect, had designed a house for the same SP bookie, who told the father he took £2000 into Askin’s office every Thursday in a brown paper bag.
A press officer named Bill McLean said that in the second half of the 1960s he’d been at the races and overheard Perce Galea claim that Askin had just requested $5000 to have a prisoner transferred between two prisons. Galea was upset at the request because of all the money he said he had previously paid Askin.
Some of the new claims to the Sun-Herald were of tolerance of crime rather than of direct financial benefit (although if true, they of course suggest there might also have been such a benefit). A publi-cist named Maggie Jenkins said Askin had taken her to the 33 Club in 1972 and ‘disappeared into a back room. I was given money to gamble with and Moet to drink’. She said Askin had later denied publicly that he had ever been to the 33 Club.
Kevin Waller considered all the evidence for Askin’s corruption and observed that ‘before public figures may be stigmatised as corrupt one must insist on evidence of some strength. Where has this evidence come from? I have read David Hickie’s book, The Prince and the Premier, together with his later comment (that the late Joe Taylor had told him Askin got money) and the further material received at the Sun-Herald. Much of the information is remote hearsay, and in many instances the witnesses are dead, unknown, un-named or otherwise unavailable. No significance at all can be attached to statements by un-named persons’.8
This was in a report Waller provided the Sun-Herald, which did not publish that part of it but did publish his conclusion that: ‘In order to brand (Askin) a dishonest rogue, we need more – informants who were close to the action must be prepared to come forward, sources must be named and the paper trail explored. Until those things happen one cannot be comfortably satisfied that he was the infamous bribe-taker he has been painted.’9
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