Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  Frank Green's murder trial began in March. It was played out before an overflowing gallery, which included Kate Leigh, released from Long Bay the previous September, and her daughter Eileen, other underworld figures and the curious public.

  Though he feared for his life, Tomlinson, having come so far, had no choice but to testify against Green. He told the court, ‘I heard Green say to Dalton, “Cop this, you bastard!” and he then shot him down in cold blood. I went to pick him up and got shot myself.’ But again he insisted that Devine was not present and added, contradicting the evidence of years of violence between them, ‘Jim and I have always been the best of friends.’

  This was too much for one lawyer defending Green: ‘Tomlinson has been identified as one of a number of men who set out to kill Devine at his home last July, and when he tells the court that he and Devine are the best of friends, he makes such an inroad on our intelligence that it makes us wonder if we are in Callan Park or a court of law.’

  Green's legal team's strategy was to destroy the credibility of the chief prosecution witness. Green's chief counsel, Mr Windeyer, described Tomlinson as ‘a man of low criminal cunning’. And, it seemed, the Devine camp had called in favours or splashed around money on Green's behalf, for appearing for the defence were William Archer, Edward Brady, Tom Kelly and Charles Connors — who wore a high-collared coat in the dock to cover an ugly razor scar on his neck. Though men of the worst character, they managed to impress the jury. Each said he had been drinking in the Strand Hotel when Green stalked in and on the street when the shooting took place. Each swore on the Bible either that the shooter was not Frank Green but someone they couldn't recognise, or that they hadn't seen who had fired the bullets.

  When he took the stand, Green, who would hang if convicted, gave the performance of his life. Like an actor in a high-camp silent melodrama, he wrung his hands and swooned histrionically, and swore to God he didn't shoot either Dalton or Tomlinson. The policeman Mills had made a mistake, he insisted. What he'd told the prisoner on 3 December had not been ‘It's a pity I didn't get [Tomlinson] as well as Dalton,’ but ‘It's a pity they didn't get him . . .’ He didn't know for certain who killed Dalton, but he had seen the murder weapon before.

  ‘Where?’ demanded the prosecutor.

  ‘At the Devines’ home,’ said Green.

  This last-ditch attempt to get off the hook by creating the impression that Jim Devine may have been the shooter had the desired effect on the jury and helped save Green from the noose, but, whether in his desperation he realised it or not, his words made instant and implacable enemies of his old friends. At the end of the trial, the jury, confused by the wildly conflicting evidence, could not reach a verdict. They were discharged and a new trial set for June. It was back to Long Bay Gaol for the Little Gunman.

  Meanwhile, although feeling that Green had double-crossed them, the Devine camp had made it clear that for shelfing the Little Gunman Tomlinson had to die. It was openly acknowledged in Razorhurst that there was a contract out on Kate's man. Even the press knew. Truth ran an article headed ‘Is He Marked For Death?’:

  . . . The chief witness for the Crown is Walter Tomlinson. It has come to the knowledge of Truth and the police that he will be done away with before the trial comes on. As chief witness in a case where a man is arraigned on a capital charge, this must not be permitted to happen. The threats — no idle threats either — constitute such a sensational possibility that the police must take the utmost precautions to ensure his safety in the interests of justice.

  The tabloid's fears were well founded. Just days after the stalemate of Frank Green's first murder trial, a gang began a series of attacks on Kate Leigh's home at 104 Riley Street, where, it was widely believed, Wally Tomlinson was hiding. In fact Tomlinson was elsewhere — at Cronulla in a friend's house. On 20 March 1930, four men burst into Kate's house and demanded that she lead them to Tomlinson. When she replied that he was not on the premises, they punched her and smashed her furniture. Kate did not report them to the police, but did buy a new rifle and twenty cartridges.

  On 26 March, the gang returned. Roused from her sleep by the din of someone trying to kick in her front door, Kate flung open her bedroom window and demanded to know who was there. A voice rang out: ‘I'm going to kill Tomlinson. Fetch him out.’

  Kate bellowed that he wasn't there and furthermore she had a gun, ‘and if you come near me, I'll use it’.

  ‘We want Tomlinson!’

  ‘I won't tell you again. If you come into my house, I'll shoot you. Now, fuck off!’ In reply, the marauders threw rocks at Kate's window and fired a shot into the air. This time, she called the police, who all the next day cruised Riley Street on the lookout for her tormentors.

  It is unknown whether the gang who took on Kate Leigh — John ‘Snowy’ Prendergast, his brother Joe, Ed Runnails and Fred Lee — were in the pay of the Devines or Frank Green. It is possible that they were, because Snowy Prendergast, twenty-six, the leader, was friendly with Green. Yet it is possible, too, that the Prendergast outfit was trying to make a name for itself and ingratiate itself with Green and the Devines by punishing an underworld pariah. Prendergast was a Kings Cross hoodlum who bored his associates rigid with his constant skiting that he was afraid of nothing.

  On 27 March, the young braggart found himself fatally out of his depth. At around 7 a.m., Prendergast and his men battered in Kate's reinforced back door with a large piece of timber, and piled into the kitchen, where they smashed and upturned more furniture. With pistols drawn, they then approached the stairs that led to the first-floor bedroom where they believed Tomlinson was hiding. Suddenly, Prendergast came face to face with Kate Leigh. She was standing on the third step of the stairs in her nightdress, and her rifle was cocked and aimed at Prendergast. ‘If you come another inch,’ she rasped, ‘I'll shoot you.’

  Prendergast laughed at her and advanced. There was no second warning. Kate shot Prendergast in the stomach. He fell heavily. Ignoring their boss's pleas that they take him with them, his henchmen fled into the dawn. Prendergast managed to pull himself up off the kitchen floor slippery with his blood and, clutching his stomach, staggered out the back door and into a lane, where he collapsed again.

  When the police arrived, summoned by neighbours who had heard the rifle blast, they found the gut-shot bandit writhing in agony, gasping that he would murder ‘bloody Kate Leigh’ for what she had done to him. The object of his ire stood calmly by in the lane. She told the officers: ‘This is one of them. I shot him. They tried to get into my place. Look what the bastards did. They broke up all my furniture.’ Then, to Prendergast, ‘I shot you down, and your mates deserted you.’

  Barely conscious now, Prendergast whispered to her, ‘Finish me off, you bastard. I'm dying.’ And indeed he was.

  Kate was arrested and charged with murder at Sydney Quarter Sessions. She pleaded not guilty. It had been a matter of self-defence, she said, she was protecting her life and property. Besides, she'd not meant to kill Prendergast, just incapacitate him by shooting him in the leg, but her aim had been bad. To no one's surprise, the jury acquitted her.

  At the end of her life, Kate would muse: ‘I've never been proud of shooting that chap and I've never stopped saying a prayer for the repose of the blackguard's soul. That's because I'm religious, I s'pose.’

  Frank Green's second trial for the murder of Barney Dalton began on Monday, 9 June 1930. He entered the court thin and sickly looking after his months in prison. In the public gallery was his wife Dolly, mother of his infant daughters Eileen and Norma. Dolly Green had been given the week off from her job at a Woolloomooloo custard-powder factory to provide moral support for her husband. Again, Tomlinson took the stand for the Crown and repeated his version of the events of 9 November. Green's lawyer, Mr Windeyer, told the court he thought it strange that ‘of all the persons in a position to see who did the shooting, Tomlinson is the only one to blame my client.’

  Green, in the dock, contradict
ed Tomlinson's every charge. ‘On my word of honour, gentleman,’ he lied in a strong voice that belied his wasted appearance, ‘I was not in the hotel after 4.30 p.m.’ He went on, his voice quavering with emotion, ‘I don't know why Tomlinson has given this evidence against me. I don't think he knows himself. Unless it is because of a woman . . . a woman with whom he has lived, a woman who hates me. Kate Leigh.’

  Summing up, trial judge Justice James expressed his hope that the underworld war of the past two years would end. Addressing the large number of criminals in the gallery — Tilly and Jim Devine, Kate Leigh, Sid McDonald, Tom Kelly, Nellie Cameron — he implored: ‘Do something to clean this thing up. If you have a quarrel amongst yourselves, then get together and settle it. If it is necessary to fight, fight with your fists.’

  At this, Green, the most lethal gunman in Sydney, piped up, ‘I have always fought with my fists, Your Honour.’

  Justice James, noting that ‘it is very difficult to convict in a case like this,’ acquitted Green.

  Next morning a reporter from Truth called on the Green family at their flat at 21 Harmer Street, Woolloomooloo, where in years past the poet Henry Lawson had lived. With mind-rattling hypocrisy, the reporter from the paper which prided itself on being the scourge of the criminal classes fawned on the killer, razor slasher and pimp of Nellie Cameron:

  Truth found a happy family reunion at the little terrace house in the little side street. The principal figure, the acquitted man, who, if the verdict had gone the other way, would at the hour have been standing at the brink of Eternity, seemed just as much at his ease as anyone else.

  Since his incarceration seven months ago, he has lost considerable weight. In his crumpled morning suit for home wear, collarless, but shaved and groomed, he was breakfasting in royal style on much bacon and many eggs. A veritable swarm of children climbed all over him, and he gave the impression, at first glance, of a young professional man lolling in the seclusion of his home.

  For a few minutes, he got rid of the kiddies when an ‘apple on a stick’ man trundled his cart past the door. He shouted apples on a stick for the crowd, and returned to his breakfast. ‘It's wonderful to be back again with the kiddies,’ he said, ‘and I did not really realise before what a grand little mate I had in my wife who kept her end up all that while on her own. Jobs aren't too plentiful, but I hope to land one soon.’ ‘And they have been wonderful to me at the factory, too,’ said his wife. When Green returned home on the previous evening and the kisses were over, his daughter's first question was, ‘Daddy, are you going to buy me those Zu-Zus [a popular sweet of the day] now?’ At that, Truth left them to their various contentments.

  To the surprise of few, the newspaper's saintly depiction of Frank Green left it, like the breakfasting mobster, with egg on its face. Within months the Little Gunman was back on the rampage.

  16

  The Law Fights Back

  The year 1930 was one of legendary feats, a year when Sydneysiders seemed always to be throwing their felt Akubras into the air. They threw them when British aviator Amy Johnson touched down in Darwin after her epic solo flight from London. They threw them when Australia won the Ashes series against England after a succession of massive scores by Don Bradman. Up went the hats again when the north and south spans of the Sydney Harbour Bridge kissed in August. And when Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup on 4 November despite having been shot at by hoodlums and being loaded with a 9.12 pound (4.1 kilogram) race handicap, he received a telegram from fans: ‘If you could only stand up on your hind legs and talk, we'd make you prime minister of Australia.’

  In January 1930, beleaguered Sydneysiders had something else to cheer about. The New South Wales Vagrancy (Amendment) Act 1929 was passed with bipartisan support and came into operation. To the people of Sydney, perplexed and frightened by the unprecedentedly high level of street crime in general and the tit-for-tat violence of the Leigh–Devine gang war in particular, the Act was welcomed much as settlers in the Old West under Indian attack welcomed the arrival of the cavalry.

  The Consorting Clause, a part of the Act, was formulated to clear the East Sydney streets of gangs. It specified heavy penalties — including six-month gaol terms — for anyone who ‘habitually consorts with reputed thieves, or prostitutes, or vagrant persons who have no visible or legal means of support’. If criminals were prevented from associating with each other, they could hardly form a gang. Villains did not even have to be committing an offence. In effect, a policeman coming upon two or more citizens of proven bad character chatting on a corner or in a pub about Easts’ chances against the Newtown Bluebags on Saturday, or last night's radio quiz, could, if he wished, haul them to gaol. The mere suspicion that a person was a vagrant was good enough reason to make an arrest.

  ‘The Consorting Clause was the best thing ever,’ says former detective Bill Harris. ‘It broke up the razor gangs, because we'd see these criminals going about, see them together or even near each other, and we could say, “I'm booking you for consorting.” But while it stopped the street crime, it didn't stop criminals getting together in private and planning their schemes.’

  The Consorting Clause gave New South Wales police almost unlimited powers to arrest, and judges to imprison, any person who met with associates of whom an officer disapproved. It was one of the most authoritarian measures taken against organised crime in a Western democracy. Under supporting clauses of the Act, police testimony of such associations or lack of lawful income constituted prima facie evidence of illegal activity and could stand as the basis for conviction.

  The government gave the new law bite. Also enacted in 1930 was the Crimes Amendment Bill, which provided for automatic six-month sentences for anyone unlawfully possessing a razor. Those convicted of using that razor as a weapon would be gaoled and flogged. Tom Wickham and Wharton Thompson, the overworked two-man Drug Bureau, got much-needed reinforcements. A special vice unit, which would evolve into Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell's legendary 21 Division, was created to put the boot into sly-groggers, illegal gamblers, drug barons and their distributors, prostitutes and their pimps. At last, the politicians had given the police the ammunition they required to quell the criminal rampage.

  And the Consorting Squad was formed. It was a crack force of streetwise cops who, like Ray Blissett, who would one day head the squad, were hard-headed, hard-fisted policemen, generally as tough as the gangsters they targeted. ‘We'd go out with our notebook and make a note of where the criminals were and who they were with,’ Blissett says. ‘And then we'd come down on them. We could bust them on the spot, but generally, six bookings in a statutory period of six months and they'd go to gaol. It was very effective. We were allowed a lot of liberties in those days. I don't believe in violence, but you met fire with fire. To be a good copper around Sydney then, you had to be able to beat your weight in wildcats.’

  Blissett's partner was Greg Brown, now eighty-three. Brown joined the force in the early ′30s and worked in the gazette room at the CIB in Central Lane where they compiled the criminal registers. ‘We would go through the discharge list of gaols and put together a profile dossier on these offenders. I did that for two years. Then I was posted to Darlinghurst Police Station. I went on to work with Ray Blissett on the Consorting Squad. Being gaoled for doing nothing was the worst thing that could happen to those fellas. Getting six months just for talking! Those blokes were ropable. We could use the new law as a lever to obtain information. We'd see a bloke and say, “Look, you've got six bookings, mate, we could arrest you and put you inside.” Then we'd hit them for information. Intelligence about underworld goings-on was the street policeman's lifeblood. Often these criminals, rather than be charged with consorting, would give us information that we could use against other gangsters in our district or pass on to other police.

  ‘Our threats didn't always work. Many times when I told a fella I was going to charge him with consorting, he'd tell me to go and get stuffed! Occasionally there'd be violence if he and h
is mates had had a few drinks. We didn't mind violence. If we knew there was a mob of criminals in a room somewhere, we'd go in. We didn't worry about the door being closed in those days.’

  ‘The Consortos’, as the Consorting Squad enforcers were known, enjoyed immediate success. In 1930, their first year on the beat, they arrested fifty-four males and sixty-two females, and of these, sixty-eight went to gaol. In 1931, sixty-eight men and eighty-one women were nabbed, and 121 of them were imprisoned. ‘The reign of terror is ended,’ exulted New South Wales Police Minister Chaffey only months after the Consortos set to work. ‘The Consorting Clause gave the police more power than they sought, and the results certainly exceed anything I expected . . . no other Act of Parliament has been of such assistance in ridding the city and streets of undesirables.’

  Chaffey's boasting was justified, to a point. Ostensibly, East Sydney was suddenly a safer, less rambunctious place. The street mobs, such as Guido Calletti's Darlinghurst Push — which had wrought havoc on the streets, defying police, press and public censure — were forced to disband, leaving the likes of Calletti as lone operators. The Leigh and Devine teams tended not to prowl in public en masse any more, though they continued to gather in private. There were fewer prostitutes openly plying their trade (the new laws forced them off the streets and into brothels — which suited madam Tilly Devine). And the traffic in cocaine that fuelled much gang warfare decreased (although by then the Depression was entrenched and many Sydney ‘snowdroppers’ could no longer afford drugs).

  But while Tilly and Kate suffered setbacks because of the police crackdown — each would serve time in gaol under the new laws — their illegalities continued apace, if conducted a little less brazenly than when Sydney was a wide-open crime town. The two women, Calletti, Frank Green, Nellie Cameron and a newcomer to the underworld, ‘Pretty Dulcie’ Markham, and, when he returned from his self-imposed exile in Woy Woy, Phil Jeffs, would all be active for years to come. Consorto Greg Brown recalls: ‘We kept arresting Tilly and Kate, they'd be fined or do some prison time, and as soon as they were back on the street it would be business as usual. While they were [in gaol], their mobs carried on their operation.’