The alcohol Kate sold was not the adulterated swill — notably ‘pinkie’, new wine fortified with cheap spirits that hospitalised many imbibers — on offer in so many other sly-groggeries. As stated previously, hers was premium-quality beer, wine and spirits purchased from breweries or hotels. In David Hickie's biography of the criminal John ‘Chow’ Hayes, Chow Hayes — Gunman, the old lag recalled how when he knew her in the ′30s and ′40s, Kate would buy beer in 200-dozen lots. If the beer cost one shilling and twopence a bottle, she'd pay the supplier one shilling and sixpence and this would include delivery of the beer to her sly-grog shops in Surry Hills. Her customers would pay her three shillings for the privilege of buying a bottle after hours. Drinkers obviously didn't mind the mark-up, because, as Hayes told Hickie, cabs and cars would be lined up for blocks around her grog shop in Lansdowne Street, their occupants waiting to gain entry. Hayes claimed that Kate paid off police to leave her alone. As former policeman Lance Hoban recalls: ‘If it suited the police, they'd raid her, confiscate the liquor from the premises, and charge her. Then when she was released, it would start all over again.’
Kate was fearless and always carried a small pistol in her handbag in case she landed in strife. Although she would assault an enemy with whatever was handy. ‘She wouldn't think twice about hitting a bloke over the head with a tomahawk,’ laughs Ray Blissett. She was also known to use bricks and sticks on her victims’ skulls. She often resorted to her fists, and was said to have a punch like a mule's kick.
Her favourite spectator sport was attending trials. She would sit in her seat at the front of the public gallery, sometimes peeling vegetables, and, like Madame Defarge in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, heckle the judge and prosecutors, and comment noisily on the defendant's chances or a witness's veracity. Her asides and bawdy quips occasionally led to her ejection, but more often reduced the courtroom to gales of laughter. Offensive behaviour was second nature to Kate Leigh. As policewoman Lillian Armfield recalled in the ′50s, in Vince Kelly's Rugged Angel:
She was one of the toughest to be found in this or any other country. She grew up hating the police, and particularly policewomen after we were appointed, but I must say she was invariably polite to me. She was particularly sour on the Drug Bureau men because they spent a lot of time trying to catch her in possession of cocaine, which they knew she was handling, and cocaine was a dreadful social menace at the time . . . she was so cunning and experienced in every police tactic that it seemed we would never catch her with cocaine.
Kate Leigh's gang in the late 1920s was a colourful crew. Her team included Gregory ‘the Gunman’ Gaffney, Bernard ‘Barney’ Dalton, Leigh's bodyguard and lover Wally Tomlinson, Mona Woods, May Seckold, Ivy Ryan and Vera Lewis, all of whom had been in trouble for prostitution, drug and sly-grog selling, offensive behaviour and robbery. Bill Flanagan (aka the Octopus) was her knuckle-man and chief ‘chucker-outer’ when sly-grog customers became unruly. Another acolyte was Bruce Higgs, a nattily dressed, baby-faced, hapless youth, who was her errand boy and chauffeured her around in her tanklike Studebaker Director car. Some said Kate had a crush on Higgs.
In November 1928, Higgs and his brother Hubert had been charged with being accessories to the murder the previous month of retired grazier Ronald Leslie near Valley Heights in the Blue Mountains. The pair's other brother, William, was charged with shooting Leslie in the back with a revolver. The siblings, who denied the charges, had been seen with Leslie on the day of his death and William Higgs's bloodstained jacket was found hidden in a log. William claimed he had lost his coat the day before. Because nobody witnessed the shooting, the charges could not be proved and the brothers were discharged.
The following February, when Bruce Higgs appeared in court to face a vagrancy count, Kate, in what would seem a dubious favour indeed, spoke up for him. Higgs was her chauffeur, she said, and for that she paid him £7–8 a week depending on any overtime he worked. He had no knowledge of her business, Kate went on, but simply drove her where she instructed him. He was a respectable young man and, she wanted the court to know, he respected his parents. When the prosecutor accused Higgs of living off the proceeds of crime, Kate exploded: ‘Don't you say that! If you do, I'll stick a knife right through your heart. He's my boy.’
Higgs was let off in spite of Kate's colourful advocacy — but warned by the magistrate to find a different occupation before he found himself in truly serious trouble. But Higgs had no intention of seeking other employment, for days later he and Kate were arrested after police found them with loaded revolvers in Kate's car at 1 a.m. in Palmer Street, Darlinghurst.
On 9 February 1929, Kate, Higgs, Woods, Seckold and Flanagan were arrested in a property rented by Kate (27 Kippax Street, Surry Hills) and she was charged with ‘being the keeper of houses frequented by thieves’. These houses included nos 25, 27 and 31 Kippax Street, and a house in Barcom Avenue, Darlinghurst. In court, police accused Kate of luring men to 27 Kippax Street on the pretext of selling them alcohol then doping them with spiked drinks and robbing them. (Flanagan would live up to his nickname of ‘the Octopus’ by picking up the slumbering men bodily and dumping them in a nearby lane.) Kate, said the police, was caught in the act when they raided no. 25 on 9 February, and she and the other accused attempted to flee by running out the back door and climbing through a hole in the fence to no. 27. As the gang piled into the house, police were waiting and nabbed them. Constable Fischer said that when he surprised Kate, she had said, ‘What do you fucking-well want in my place, Fischer?’ When Fischer reminded her that he had warned her many times about having undesirables such as Seckold and Woods on her premises, Kate snapped, ‘It is my place, and I will have who I fucking-well like here.’
At her trial in June, as she was wont to do all her life, Kate made her accusers work hard for a conviction. ‘You will admit that you are a reputed thief?’ said a Sergeant Dennis.
‘No, I am a person of good repute,’ Kate insisted, whose criminal convictions were now approaching sixty. ‘No one can say that I am a woman of ill-fame.’
Dennis tried again. ‘Are you a truthful person?’
‘I know what you are going to say, that I once did five years for perjury,’ Kate declared, ‘but anybody could make that mistake.’
In spite of her Bradman-straight bat, she was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, and Woods, Seckold and Flanagan to three. Kate appealed, but although represented by the astute and expensive Clive Evatt, Mr Arnott SM upheld the sentence and she took up residence in Long Bay Gaol from June until September.
Phil Jeffs ignited the so-called ‘Battle of Blood Alley’ in Eaton Avenue, Kings Cross, on 7 May 1929. Jeffs had long been tempting fate by heavily cutting cocaine with boracic acid, while charging customers the full price of the pure drug. When one Woolloomooloo gang realised Jeffs was robbing them, they challenged him and his gang to fight.
Like some wild west showdown, the two heavily armed groups gathered for battle soon after 10 p.m. in Eaton Avenue, an ill-lit lane off Bayswater Road. Locals referred to it as ‘Blood Alley’ due to the many muggings that took place there. (These days Eaton Avenue serves as an enclosed courtyard between blocks of flats.) For a hair-raising thirty minutes, until the police arrived in force, the gangsters went at each other with guns, razors, clubs and boots.
No brawler escaped unscathed. Jeffs's friend William Archer, proprietor of Archer's Hot Bath House in Crown Street, Woolloomooloo (where Jeffs claimed to tend baths to escape a vagrancy rap), fared worst. He was shot in the leg by one Charles Sorley and when, bleeding profusely and weakening fast, he tried to flee the melee by leaping onto the running board of a passing car, Sorley dragged him off and kicked him unconscious. At that, Jeffs and his men leapt upon Sorley and battered him. Archer was later treated at St Vincent's Hospital but when interviewed by police said he had no idea who shot him, nor did he recognise a single one of the combatants in the Eaton Avenue rumble.
When police finally arrived, Jeffs
was one of a number of men arrested. At Darlinghurst Police Station he was charged with assaulting one Frederick Johns then released on £100 bail. He caught a cab to his luxurious Kensington home and went to bed.
At dawn next morning, passers-by heard groans and found Jeffs sprawled on his front lawn, bleeding from bullet wounds in his shoulder and chest. Near death in St Vincent's Hospital, he was grilled by police. Convinced that his remaining hours were few, he broke the code of silence and told the officers he had been shot by a man named Jim Taylor. Taylor and one Bill Clark, said Jeffs, had smashed in his front door while he was in bed at about 5 a.m. and demanded money. When Jeffs had refused to pay up, Taylor shot him twice. Jeffs told the police he had chased the men but collapsed on his lawn from his wounds. Taylor, short and heavy-set, and Clark were quickly arrested. But by the time of their trial, in June, Jeffs had recovered and now had a different tale to tell.
He took the stand, a jaunty gamecock in a purple suit topped by a blue overcoat. No, he swore, he had never named Taylor as his attacker to police. Those police had lied. Neither Taylor nor Clark was at his home on 8 May. What really happened, he said, was: ‘I arrived home at 3.30 a.m. after being held at Darlinghurst Police Station. I went to bed and later was awakened, and I could just see the vision of a man standing over my bed. Two shots were fired at me, which doubled me up, and I rolled over in bed. I saw the man jump through the window. I could not say who he was, but he was tall and thin.’
Inevitably, the case was dismissed and Jeffs retreated to the New South Wales Central Coast town of Woy Woy, where he had invested in property, to recuperate from his bullet wounds. One local policeman noted wryly that since Jeffs's arrival in the holiday burg, the streets and pubs had been filled with sinister-looking men with thick necks, bent noses and dark suits.
Two months later, bullets again ricocheted on the streets of Razorhurst, this time in Darlinghurst. As far as the police could determine, a small-time crook named Joe Messenger was caught stealing from one of Kate Leigh's sly-groggeries and Kate exacted harsh punishment. A group of her gorillas, including Wally Tomlinson and, for some reason, Phil Jeffs's friend William Archer (just recovered from his Eaton Avenue licking), cornered Messenger and beat him up. With Messenger curled on the ground, trying to ward off the kicks of a dozen men, a young police constable named Jackson waded in and grabbed two of Messenger's assailants. One was Tomlinson, who did not resist arrest. The other man pulled free, drew a gun and shot at Jackson. Still gripping Tomlinson, the policeman drew his own gun and returned fire, narrowly missing William Archer, who was quickly arrested by Jackson's partner Constable Naylor. The mob, which had turned tail when Jackson arrived, now doubled back and advanced on the two constables. Jackson fired again and Charles Thompson, another of Kate's thugs, fell to the ground, his shoulder shattered. A red mist had descended on Razorhurst.
12
Madam
The shrewd (and shrewish when she had to be) Tilly Devine was continuing to buy and rent premises in Palmer Street, Darlinghurst, and thereabouts, then installing hand-picked sex workers in them. In her heyday in the 1930s, she would preside over between twenty and thirty bordellos.
Typically, she'd sublet the basement, the ground floor and bedrooms upstairs to her prostitutes as places of business, but also rent at least one room to a law-abiding person so that, in a pinch, she could claim that she and her employees were not vagrants with no lawful income, but landladies. Because of the violence that regularly erupted as a result of customers’ drunkenness, unfulfilled sexual expectations and gingering, Tilly had the doors and ground-floor windows of her brothels steel-reinforced to stop forced entry, and she insisted that there be at least one loaded gun at each brothel to discourage protection-mongers and aggrieved customers.
The latter included a labourer from Bathurst named Robert Powell, who told the police in January 1929 that Tilly had gingered him at a brothel in Alberta Street, Surry Hills. He claimed that while he was having sex with one of her employees, he saw Tilly sneak into the room, take his wallet from his trousers and open it. He called out to her to drop it and she fled, but later Powell discovered three £5 notes missing. At Darlinghurst Police Station, Tilly lost her temper when she heard Powell's charge. ‘Do you say I robbed you?’ she howled at him as he stood dumbstruck. ‘You dirty, greasy mongrel! I never robbed you, and I'll not stand being pinched for it!’
Darlinghurst policewoman Maggie Baker knew Tilly and Kate. ‘Kate tried to get on with Tilly,’ she says today, ‘but Tilly was a spiteful person. Tilly would lie. Kate never lied. If you found her out, she'd admit it. Tilly never admitted anything.’
Tilly Devine swore inventively and incessantly in a South London accent she never lost in fifty years in Australia. She was a gaudy dresser who sported twice as many rings as she had fingers. ‘Aunt Til was never one for sartorial subtlety,’ recalls George Parsons. Once or twice a week, she would have her hair permed into an elaborate curlicued confection that sat atop her now-hard face like a fluffy animal. She chain-smoked and consumed large amounts of liquor. Although never an alcoholic, she often drank straight from the bottle in the street and at the races at Randwick.
Tilly and Jim lived together in their Maroubra home at the corner of Torrington and Malabar roads, which was protected at all times by an armed bodyguard and Tilly's squad of yappy Pomeranian dogs. The handsome brick home was richly appointed with expensive dark wood furniture and sumptuous lounges, chairs and beds. Australian landscape paintings festooned the walls, and a chandelier sprayed sparkling showers of light on the dining table. A sideboard yawned with myriad bottles of spirits and sweet wine and cut-glass decanters, bowls and wine and spirit glasses. There was fine china in the chiffonier and the lounge room boasted a gramophone, grand piano and a £200 wireless.
Tilly's beloved Pomeranians had the run of the house, and one guest recalls seeing her blow cigarette smoke into the animals’ mouths. The language she used when at her Maroubra residence was considerably more restrained than in her other, less lovely, Razorhurst haunts, where the banshee in her personality prevailed. At Torrington Road, she affected refinement and style, living out her Camberwell childhood dream of wealth and sophistication. As a boy, George Parsons often visited his aunt there and says he never heard her swear.
Today, the bones of Tilly's house remain on that corner block, but over the years subsequent owners have renovated it until it now bears no resemblance to the dwelling of Tilly's day. The original bungalow has grown a storey and the whole structure has been encased in cladding. It is almost as if the old house has been sentenced to wear a hairshirt as penance for the sins it once hosted.
As well as their Maroubra home, Tilly and Jim owned a terrace house, 191 Palmer Street, which, while never used as a brothel then, was a convenient headquarters and depository for the night's prostitution takings. At the end of their shifts her sex workers would come to Tilly's terrace to pay their boss her percentage. The prostitutes entered the backyard of 191 Palmer Street from a lane, took a key from a secret hiding place and entered what was to all intents and purposes an airlock. Not until the reinforced outer door was shut and locked behind a sex worker, would the cockatoo or lookout open the door leading into the house proper. This system ensured that police or standover men could not gain entry to Tilly's house by barging in with one of her employees.
Although not a heavy woman until late in life, Tilly was physically strong and did not shy from physical violence. Good with her fists, boots, razor and, on at least one occasion, scissors, she was arrested many times for brawling in the street with other criminals — male and female — barrow men, fish sellers, police officers and passers-by guilty of nothing more than letting their eyes linger upon the notorious Tilly a little too long. In a vicious fight with Kate Leigh's friends Elsie Kaye and Vera Lewis in a courtyard off Central Criminal Court early in 1929, she all but bit off one of her adversaries’ fingers. All three women were arrested, charged and fined.
Anot
her dust-up, with her local butcher in Maroubra, also ended with Tilly before a judge. After William Ashcroft inadvertently sold one of her lackeys rancid meat in February 1929, Devine went to his shop, plonked the chops or sausages on the counter and demanded the return of her three shillings. ‘What do you mean by sending me this stinking meat?’ she cried. Ashcroft insisted there was nothing wrong with the meat. Devine was not placated and threatened to take the offending produce to the Board of Health and have the butcher gaoled or fined.
Ashcroft toughed it out. ‘Then bloody-well take it to the Board of Health!’ he retorted. ‘Now, get out of my shop and don't make a scene here.’
By now, Tilly's temper was sizzling and sparking like a loose power line in the night. ‘I'll clean your place up!’ she shouted, and hurled the meat at Ashcroft. She then grabbed a large, sharp knife from Ashcroft's chopping block and jabbed it at his chest. ‘Give me my fucking money back, or I'll put this knife through your fucking heart.’
Ashcroft, now white with fear, handed over the three shillings but by then that was never going to save him. ‘She retreated to the door,’ he later told police, ‘then threw the knife that struck the ice chest two feet from me.’ When Tilly left the premises, the shaken shopkeeper called the police. Tilly was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The case never came to court.
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