Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  On the drive to Maroubra, Green explained that the trouble had started two days before when Nellie Cameron had brawled with another woman in the grounds of Central Police Court. Green had stood up for his lover and found himself in a fist fight with Leigh's man Gaffney, who happened to be the boyfriend of Cameron's adversary. The fight had been broken up by police and the combatants dispersed, but not before Green and Gaffney vowed to take vengeance on the other. Gaffney had struck first, ambushing Green and Sid McDonald in Woolloomooloo that evening. As the pair had walked along Nicholson Street, a car stopped beside them. Gaffney and another man sprang out. Gaffney had shot Green at point-blank range while his partner had knocked McDonald to the ground and kicked him in the stomach.

  En route to Torrington Road, Jim Devine stopped at an associate's home and emerged with a short-magazine Lee Enfield .303 service rifle and a handful of steel-jacketed bullets. His own arsenal, that he kept cleaned, oiled and loaded at Torrington Road, had been confiscated just the previous day by the police (who fined him £50 for having no firearms licence).

  Meanwhile, Gaffney had learned that Green had gone to the Devines’ home to recuperate. Knowing that as soon as Green was able he would come gunning for him, Gaffney collected Kate Leigh's lover and bodyguard, the tall, horse-faced, mushroom-haired Wally Tomlinson, and Bernard ‘Barney’ Dalton, another Leigh gang member, then hailed a taxi and set off for Maroubra to finish the job.

  At about midnight, Tilly and Jim Devine, Green and McDonald were talking and drinking and listening to the wireless in the Devines’ living room, waiting for the attack they knew was coming. Suddenly the Pomeranians howled. Then a gruff voice rang from the street: ‘Come outside!’

  Jim Devine grabbed his gun and said to McDonald, ‘Switch the lights off. This might be the team now.’ McDonald did so. Grasping his loaded and cocked rifle, Devine stepped onto his front verandah and peered under its canvas blind, straining to see who was outside. As Devine's eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw a figure, whom he recognised as Gregory Gaffney, brandishing a pistol.

  Gaffney bawled, ‘I want Green's blood,’ and started to clamber over the front fence.

  Devine shouted, ‘Don't climb over that fence or I'll shoot.’

  ‘Go on, shoot, then,’ retorted Gaffney. ‘I've got plenty of mates with me.’ He kept coming.

  McDonald would later tell the Coroner's Court: ‘Devine fired and I looked under the canvas blind and saw a man stagger away from the fence. He had a pistol in his hand and he fell down on the road.’

  Gregory Gaffney lay groaning, a pool of blood widening around him. Tomlinson or Dalton shot at Devine who returned fire, ripping off another seven shots in their general direction. The street resounded with the pops and cracks of revolver and rifle fire. There was another cry, followed by pained cursing. Devine had hit Tomlinson in the arm. Dalton fled.

  When it seemed safe to do so, Jim Devine and Sid McDonald went outside to inspect the carnage. ‘Don't go,’ cautioned Tilly. ‘[Gaffney] may be kidding, and let one go at you when you get close.’ Still, the two men, with Tilly and Frank Green at their rear, ventured out of the front gate.

  They found Gaffney with a gaping wound in his chest. McDonald told the police later that he offered Gaffney a sip of brandy. Gaffney thanked him and said that he wouldn't tell the police who shot him: ‘I'll be solid.’ The police arrived, summoned by the Devines’ terrified neighbours, and found Gaffney mortally wounded. True to his word, he told officers neither his name nor who had gunned him down before he slipped into unconsciousness. In a house down the road, Wally Tomlinson lay on the kitchen floor with a bullet in his arm. Tomlinson recovered. Gaffney died in hospital at 4.30 that morning.

  The broadsheet Sydney Morning Herald, then a staid newspaper of record, had never reported crime in Truth's florid style, but its account of the 2 August inquest into Gaffney's death, at which both the Devine and Leigh factions gathered to glower and catcall at each other, could have been ripped straight from the yellow pages of the tabloid. Under the heading ‘Scenes at Gang War Inquest’, the Herald reported:

  Evil-looking men with battered faces rubbed shoulders with bejewelled women in fur coats at the Coroner's Court yesterday when Mr May inquired into the gang duel which occurred at Maroubra on July 17. Seldom have so many criminals convicted of serious offences, some of them with a notorious police history, assembled in the public portion of the Court. Factions between them were noticeable. Belligerent glances were freely exchanged.

  Tilly Devine stole the show. She took the stand dripping with jewellery and decked in rich shades of brown. Giving evidence, she gesticulated showily to ensure that the throng got an eyeful of her ring-laden fingers.

  ‘What was the state of your nerves at the time of the shooting?’ one lawyer asked her.

  ‘I was excited, more than frightened,’ she beamed, as she recalled the mayhem.

  Coroner May found Jim Devine had a case to answer and had to stand trial for slaying Gregory Gaffney. But at his murder trial, Big Jim was found not guilty on the grounds that he was defending himself, his wife and his home. He, Tilly, McDonald, Green and Nellie Cameron and more than 100 well-wishers partied at Torrington Road that night. They consumed chicken, ham, beer and French champagne, then danced and sang till dawn.

  August 1929 was not an auspicious time for Kate Leigh. She was still languishing in Long Bay Gaol after the Kippax Street bust, and was seething over the murder of her man Gaffney and the wounding of Tomlinson by the Devine mob. With their enemy on the back foot, the Devines went for Kate's jugular.

  On the afternoon of 8 August, members of Tilly's gang armed with guns and razors converged on one of the Leigh stamping grounds, Kellett Street, Kings Cross, then a reviled strip row of hovels, dingy tenements and bawdyhouses. The opposing forces eyed each other in a goading way. They lurked in doorways, and sat in the gutter drinking from bottles and snorting cocaine.

  As the chilly afternoon turned to a freezing night, the tension mounted. Tilly's mob's jibes and threats were returned by Kate's men. Bottles and rocks were hurled. By 10 p.m. a pitched battle between the drunk and seething gangsters, now spitting and snarling at each other like alley cats, was inevitable. One gutsy Kellett Street resident, J.C. Bendrodt, called from his first-floor window for the men to kindly stop their vile language and breaking bottles and to please go away. Bottles rained upon him. Bendrodt ducked away from his window then returned with a revolver which he fired over his tormentors’ heads. The mobsters shot back. Their gunfire lit the fuse, and the forty-odd mobsters of the Leigh and Devine crews then tore into each other with razors, guns, fists, boots, bottles and rocks.

  In a premeditated attack designed to hit hard at Kate Leigh, a bunch of Devine men ganged up on Kate's young driver and confidante, Bruce Higgs, during the skirmish. Two held Higgs by the arms while others sliced him with their razors. Higgs received slashes over each eye, four on his forehead, one on each cheek, and his arms and hands were shredded. The injuries he received were so bad he would carry them for the rest of his life, but still he refused to name his attackers when later questioned by police in hospital.

  Higgs was the major casualty but in all more than a dozen, from both factions, were badly wounded in the Kellett Street riot. Not one, however, identified their assailant to police. In the wake of the battle, one senior detective opined, ‘The police force would welcome a solution of the problem of how to break down the wall of silence that invariably surrounds underworld crimes.’

  15

  1929-1930:

  The War Gets Personal

  As they licked their wounds after the battle of Kellett Street, the Leigh and Devine camps continued to exchange threats and insults. Both sides stockpiled firearms and itched for an opportunity to use them. The word on the street was strong that Kate Leigh had offered Wally Tomlinson and Barney Dalton many thousands of pounds to kill Jim Devine and Frank Green as payback for the murder of Gregory Gaffney.

  On 5 Septem
ber 1929, the police, fearing new bloodletting, raided the Devines’ home and confiscated a cache of revolvers and rifles. The Devines’ bodyguard, Sid McDonald, was still in situ, shacked up on the verandah of the Torrington Road house. Frank Green was living in a back bedroom. The streets of Razorhurst crackled with the anticipation of gangland Armageddon. The inevitable happened on 9 November, and the instigator was Frank Green, who, having recovered from being shot by Gaffney, had made it his mission to destroy Kate Leigh's gang.

  At about 4.30 p.m., Tomlinson (whose own arm wound from the Torrington Road shootout was also on the mend) was drinking with Dalton, and their cohorts Edward Brady and a razor-man named Charles Connors, in Sharland's Strand Hotel on the corner of William and Crown streets. Also in the bar were Phil Jeffs's friends the bath-house proprietor William Archer and Tom Kelly, Razor Jack Hayes's nemesis. Green entered the saloon alone. He sauntered up to the bar and ordered whisky. Then, with a murderous leer, he rounded on Tomlinson and Dalton and declared loudly that he was happy to accommodate trouble if anyone cared to give him any. Furthermore, he said, Big Jim Devine was outside and ready to back him up. The Leigh men were unsettled by Green's bravado and backed off. Green left.

  At closing time, the drinkers were shunted out onto the footpath. When Tomlinson and Dalton emerged, Green, who had been lurking outside with Jim Devine in the early-evening shadows, walked briskly to within a metre of Kate's men and yelled, ‘Cop this, you bastards!’ He fired his long-barrelled revolver three times at Tomlinson and Dalton.

  Dalton, shot through the heart, screamed and crashed to the ground, where he sprawled dead. Tomlinson did not seek cover but ran to where Dalton lay, making himself an easy target for Green. ‘You cop this, too!’ snarled the Little Gunman and shot Tomlinson, who, once more, took a bullet in his left arm. He went down. Green wasn't finished. He stood over Tomlinson and levelled his revolver at him. Tomlinson looked up at Green from the gutter and gasped, ‘Have another go.’ Green obliged, and shot Tomlinson in the chest. Tomlinson, his right lung punctured, spluttered blood and lay still.

  Green and Devine tore from the scene, Green throwing his gun over the back fence of a house in Palmer Street. Police arrived, and took Tomlinson's dying deposition. Believing himself mortally wounded and with reprisals the least of his worries, Tomlinson named Green as the man who had shot him and Jim Devine as his accomplice. Tom Kelly drove Tomlinson to St Vincent's Hospital where, to the amazement of all, he pulled through. For the next weeks, Kate Leigh was often at St Vincent's, clucking over her recuperating henchman.

  Barney Dalton's wake was held at his Woolloomooloo home a couple of days after his death. Family and friends gathered to eat and drink to his memory. There was little show of sadness as the mourners convivially helped themselves to bottles of beer and port, and sandwiches. Their children sat around eating corned beef and drinking lemonade. In an adjoining bedroom, visible from the lounge room, Dalton lay in an open coffin, his face rouged a weird pink.

  The day after the Strand Hotel shooting, Jim Devine was arrested on the Princes Highway, near Waterfall, south of Sydney. He denied involvement, ‘I'm not mixed up with gangsters. I come from a respectable family,’ he protested, but allowed that he did know the shooting was ‘on’. Devine was charged with the attempted murder of Tomlinson and refused bail. A police dragnet scoured Green's haunts, but he had gone to ground.

  One officer was detailed to follow Green's lover Nellie Cameron, and the shadow was on the job when, on 3 December, Cameron, carrying a suitcase, caught a train to the southern Sydney beach suburb of Cronulla and stumbled furtively through scrub to a shack at Boat Harbour where she remained for some hours. When the police tail reported her movements to headquarters, detectives surmised she'd been taking provisions to Green. That night, a squad crept through the undergrowth to the shack. They banged on the door. ‘Open up! It's the police,’ shouted Inspector Lynch.

  ‘Don't shoot, we have no guns,’ called Green from inside.

  Moments later, Sid McDonald opened the door, and he and Green were hurled to the floor and handcuffed.

  While Green was in Long Bay Gaol awaiting the January coronial inquiry into Dalton's death, Guido Calletti, as if unwilling to be upstaged by his sworn enemy, muscled his way onto Sydney crime's centre stage. In the early hours of Christmas morning, 1929, a prostitute named Maisie Wilson was walking in Palmer Street when she was approached by a group of men who asked her to accompany them to a nearby house for a drink. When the tiny blonde refused, the men dragged her into a derelict house, beat her, then raped her.

  When they had gone, Wilson staggered out of the house into a lane and collapsed. A cruising taxi driver saw her lying on the ground and rushed her to hospital. Witnesses to Wilson's abduction identified Guido Calletti, Sid Kelly and a young crook named Aubrey Cummins as her attackers. The trio was rounded up, charged with indecent assault and faced court in the first week of the new decade.

  By then, however, Maisie Wilson, the chief prosecution witness, had vanished. In her absence, the case collapsed and Calletti, Kelly and Cummins walked free. As the trio left Central Criminal Court, a newspaper photographer tried to take their picture. Calletti, and Sid's brother Tom grabbed the photographer while Sid tore the man's expensive camera from his grasp, threw it onto the footpath and jumped upon it. A photo, snapped by another pressman, captures Calletti and the small, sharp-featured Kellys wearing well-cut light-coloured suits, high collars and snappy fedoras, manhandling the photographer in the clear light of day in busy Oxford Street.

  When the intrepid Truth tracked down Maisie Wilson, lying low in Brisbane, she left its reporter in no doubt that Calletti and Kelly had warned her of the consequences of testifying against them. ‘I came to Brisbane to be out of the way,’ she said when doorstopped by the reporter. ‘I don't want to be slashed. I know a certain mob, and you don't. I don't want to go back. They'll kill me. Oh God, they'll get me if I say anything. Before the case I got whispers of what they'd do to me if I gave evidence.’

  Unfazed, Calletti and Sid Kelly continued on their nefarious way. The Kelly brothers’ dealings took them to Melbourne and it was not long before they were in more strife, the consequences of which left Sid Kelly wishing he'd never ventured south of the border. On 30 August 1930, Kelly's lover Poppy Kirdy argued with a man named John Penfold in Albert Street, Melbourne. Penfold slapped Kirdy's face and she told Kelly, who went after Penfold. The two men fought, and Penfold knocked Kelly down. Picking himself up off the ground, Kelly snarled, ‘I'll fix you for this!’

  And he did. That night, just before midnight, the Kelly brothers, a musclebound friend named Joe Sinclair and two other men broke into Penfold's home in Young Street, Fitzroy. The Kellys beat Penfold and held him down. Sinclair then razor-slashed a twelve-centimetre gash across his face.

  Penfold reported the Kellys and Sinclair to police. Tom Kelly and Sinclair were convicted of assaulting Penfold and fined, but the instigator, Sid Kelly, said Magistrate Book at the men's trial, had committed ‘one of the cruelest outrages that has ever come before the Criminal Court. Having been worsted in a fight with Penfold, you threatened to “fix” him later. What you did was not in the heat of passion. After calm and deliberate thought you went with other men to the house in Young Street for the purpose of seeing Penfold.’ As the magistrate lambasted him, Kelly grinned defiantly. But what Book said next cracked the criminal's composure: ‘Sidney Kelly, I sentence you to five years hard labour . . . and fifteen strokes of the lash.’ The gangster swayed in the dock, his face suddenly parchment-white. Had police not seized him and led him away, he would have fallen.

  At the inquest into Barney Dalton's murder at a packed Sydney Coroner's Court in January 1930, Wally Tomlinson nervously confirmed to Coroner E.A. May that Frank Green had killed Dalton. But Devine, he had now decided, was not at the scene. From across the room, Green fixed Tomlinson with his trademark laser glare, the one he usually reserved for those he was about to maim.

 
; Inevitably, Coroner May announced, to whoops of joy from Tilly Devine (dressed in vibrant green, her fingers a-flash with diamond rings) that because Jim Devine could not be positively placed at the scene of the shooting, he must go free. Why other witnesses of the shooting were not called as well to place Devine at the scene is unexplained.

  Not all the sensations were confined to the courtroom. During the hearing, as Tomlinson left the court for a lunch break, he was attacked by Green and Sid McDonald. Green was furious that Tomlinson had squealed only on him and not Devine. Police dragged Green and McDonald away before they could do much more than inflict a few bruises on Tomlinson's face. The Leigh henchman, however, knew that from now on he was a marked man.

  The coroner found that Green must stand trial for murder. Things looked grim for the Little Gunman because as well as Tomlinson's incriminating evidence against him, a Constable Mills had overheard Green bragging to another prisoner while in custody on 3 December. ‘That bastard Tomlinson picked me today,’ Green had said. ‘He never hesitated. It's a pity I didn't get him as well as Dalton while I was at it.’

  While Green, scowling in handcuffs, was returned to Long Bay Gaol to await his trial, Jim Devine strutted from the court grinning broadly, Tilly clinging to his arm. One reporter noted that Big Jim had an angry crop of boils on his thick neck.