Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  Blissett worked from 1 to 9 p.m. every Friday at Central Police Station, and was well located to roust shoplifters at the big department stores that dotted that end of Sydney in those years. He was often summoned to Snows, Mark Foys or Anthony Horderns when the store chose to press charges against a shoplifter, shop pilfering being epidemic in those days.

  ‘Out I'd come to take the shoplifters to the cells. One night, Eileen Leigh, Kate's daughter, was caught stealing a fur coat, so I went down. There was a lane in George Street just below Liverpool Street where all the employees gathered. I took Eileen out there and in the lane in front of all these people she threw herself on the ground and said, “He's assaulting me!” Sydneysiders have always had a natural antipathy towards the police, except when they need us, so these employees all started calling out to me to leave her alone. Eileen wouldn't get up so I grabbed her by the hair and I dragged her across the street on her backside, and I took her to the police station, where she was charged and ordered to appear in court on Monday morning. Outside the court on Monday, bright and early, Kate marched up to me and said, “I want to see you, Blissett. You hurt my daughter, I love my daughter.” “Yes,” I said, “and I suppose that's why you made a moll out of her, Kate. Now, if you don't clear off, I'll lock you up too.” ‘

  The first time Blissett clashed with Tilly Devine was in 1929. ‘On a Sunday afternoon, the prostitutes would be on the steps of Mark Foys on the corner of Elizabeth and Liverpool streets like ants. I'd go up there to clear them away. This day, there was five or six prostitutes in a doorway at Foys and with them was a blonde woman who was showing off her silk stockings to the passers-by. I went up and said, “Come on, bugger off, get out of here. My sergeant is complaining.” ‘ But the blonde was unintimidated: ‘Oh, come back when you grow up, sonny,’ Tilly said to Blissett.

  In 1930, Blissett was posted to the Consorting Squad to police the new provisions. ‘I ended up in charge of the Consorting Squad. I worked all hours and loved it. Shifts didn't matter to me. In those days there were so many crooks about you could stick your hand out the police station window and pull in a thief any time. If I believed a man was guilty, I'd “vag” him. We were allowed liberties then. One of the best cops I knew was Martin Fisher, a big, strong fellow. Molls used to battle around Elizabeth Street and Railway Square to sleep with Martin before they started their work for the night.

  ‘I was religious in those days. A Catholic. Then a bloke came in to be in charge of detectives at Regent Street and he was a big shot in the [anti-Catholic] Masonic Lodge, and that was the end of my detective career at Regent Street. At twenty-three, in 1931, I was an ex-detective. They put me to working traffic outside Grace Bros at Broadway. I said, “This is no good. Can you send me to Glebe?” So they sent me there as a probationary constable to replace Colin Delaney, a Glebe detective who had been transferred to the CIB and later became police commissioner. I worked the beat at Glebe. I was a terror there. My nickname was “the Blizzard”. I never walked around a hooligan, I walked over the top of him. I found it was very effective. My reputation preceded me.’

  Blissett says if he wanted a quiet Saturday afternoon in Glebe, he'd jump onto the running board of a tram, ride it down Glebe Point Road to George Street and back, and word would get out among the hooligans who roistered in the pubs in Glebe that Blissett was on duty. ‘Nobody would start trouble, because they knew if they did I'd crack ‘em. I caught more than my share of thieves and bashers. I never had a moment's trouble with Chow Hayes. I'd say, “I want to see you at the station, Johnny.” I never called him Chow, always John or Johnny. He'd be there, don't you worry.

  ‘Norman Connolly, he was a bad man, a thief around Glebe in the early ′30s. I pinched him once for stealing the false teeth from some bloke who was having an epileptic fit. He'd stand on the corner and rob kids of their pocket money and on pension day he'd rob old people coming out of the post office with their money.

  ‘I was in uniform at Glebe. I had a couple of years’ experience behind me and people would tell me things. If I knew they were guilty, I liked to roust blokes out of bed at 6 a.m. and arrest ‘em — for breathing. I had a network of informants. The detectives at Glebe complained about me, said I was a bull in a china shop and interfered with their work . . . I was hauled into the CIB and given a dressing-down by old Bill Pryor, who was the chief then. He said, “You're interfering with the detectives’ work.” I bailed him up and said, “Compare the number of arrests I make to the number they make, look at the blokes I've put in gaol.”

  ‘After the reprimand, I walked out of the CIB headquarters thinking I didn't have a friend in the world, then Frank Mathews, one of the best detectives in Sydney, came up behind me and said, “You'll never learn, will you? Here I am trying to get you a job back in plain clothes and you go in there and blow up the boss.” I said, “You know bloody well that what I said is right.” He grinned at me and said, “Don't worry, you'll be all right.”

  Ray Blissett balls his fists and says that he is no longer the religious man he was in his younger days. ‘I couldn't be anything but irreligious,’ he says. ‘I don't know how anyone can spend forty years among the crime in Sydney and believe in God. The bludging, graft, poverty . . . I'm no hypocrite.’

  17

  Exile and Incarceration

  Tilly Devine was one of the first to feel the sting of the new consorting laws. In January 1930, she was arrested for being in the company of disreputables: her own prostitutes. In court, she also faced two charges outstanding from late the previous year, one of riotous behaviour and another of assaulting a policeman.

  She pleaded with Judge Laidlaw to let her off; her mother in London was ailing, she said, and she promised him that if he did not charge her she would leave Australia and stay in England for two years. The judge, possibly relishing some relief from the menace of Palmer Street, agreed: ‘If I can be satisfied that this woman bona fide intends to leave for England within a month, and if I can be satisfied that she intends to behave herself, I don't know that that wouldn't be a very fair way out of it.’

  Knowing she could leave Big Jim to run the rackets alone in her absence, Tilly went to the shipping office to buy a first-class ticket on the Otranto. But, mortifyingly, her reputation had preceded her and the shipping line would only sell her a third-class passage. ‘My money is as good as anybody's,’ squawked the vice queen. ‘Nobody has the right to refuse me a first-class passage.’ The sales clerk, it seemed, did. Tilly backed down, and made the best of it. After a month of raucous bon-voyage parties and a final all-night farewell at her Maroubra home, Tilly, wearing a snappy red beret and holding a lush bouquet, waved goodbye to Big Jim and other well-wishers from the deck of the Otranto as it sailed away from Woolloomooloo wharf. ‘It was a swell party, believe me, boy!’ she told a friend that day, referring to the Torrington Road bash. ‘You ought to see the place this morning!’

  With Tilly away, staying with her parents in Camberwell and perhaps being reunited with her son Frederick, Kate Leigh could not resist taking time out from her sly-grog and drug selling to lambast her enemy. ‘It is my educated opinion,’ she told a reporter whom she had summoned to her home, ‘that Matilda Devine has ruined the lives of innocent young women by setting them to work in her brothels.’ Kate ended her tirade with a snippet that she hoped would prove to the reporter's readers beyond any doubt the black character of her adversary. ‘I,’ she divulged, ‘once loaned Tilly Devine a dog and that woman never returned it.’ It was not long before Tilly learned of her rival's attack.

  From London, Tilly wrote a missive of outrage to Truth. The tabloid, gleefully beating up the feud, published the letter on 29 June 1930 — although some of its flourishes create the suspicion that Tilly's words were embellished by an in-house hack before publication:

  Dear Sir,

  I am writing this letter, asking a favour to keep my name out of the papers in any connection with Kate Leigh, as I don't wish to know her class. I never mixed
in with her and never in my life did she give me a dog. They are my dogs! I have their pedigree, and they are a class above hers. Fancy her saying things about me now that I am out of the country. And tell her for me I don't wish to see her iron face in London as I have my parents here and they are clean. That woman! She could not compare herself with my mother, who is a wonderful old-fashioned lady and knows nothing of my doings in Sydney. Thank God! Anyway, I must say you gave my husband a fair go at his trial in your papers, so surely you will be fair to me. Let dying dogs die. As I say, ‘Give a dog a bad name and it sticks.’ I was not as bad as I was painted. There are lots in Sydney who will miss me, even the police; as I hope never to come back to Sydney. I like it but you people did not like me because I am English. If I had been an Aussie girl there would have been nothing said. I was too straight for half of them. I spoke my mind as all Londoners do, right from the shoulder. Kate Leigh! That thing of a virago! She is jealous of my youth and prosperity. I know too much for her, that is why she hates me, and then she has the cheek to say she doesn't mind being called ‘notorious’ but she hates to be called ‘the worst woman in Sydney’. Well, I think myself a class above her. The underworld all took their hats off to me and class me a lady beside her. Men in gaol know her class. Why is it she can do as she likes and other women are dead frightened? No, she is handy for the police. She is known as the biggest police top-off in Australia. Send one of your reporters around to different prisons and ask those that are doing a turn what class of woman she is. One well-known man is doing life at Long Bay. She sent a dinner to him last Xmas and he found out it was from her. He packed it in a clothes bag and sent it right back to her, and if you don't believe me, I can tell you the man's name if you care to answer this letter. So I must thank God I was born of good parents. My father has never taken a drink, and never been inside a police court in his life. My dear mother is very sick at the present time and I am nursing her back to health, otherwise I would put my address on this letter. It would worry them if they saw half what was in the papers about me. So, trusting you will do this favour for once, as your paper is a class above the others.

  I remain,

  M. Devine.

  Tilly's delight can only be imagined when that same month Kate was arrested for possession of cocaine after drug squad detectives Wickham and Thompson, with sergeants Russell and McLeod, policewomen Lillian Armfield and a Mrs Mitchell, raided her Riley Street home.

  In Central Court, Kate, in a black dress, fur stole and wide-brimmed hat, sat silently (for once) as Wickham and Thompson testified against her. They gave evidence that when they raided her home and were questioning her, an object fell from Kate's clothing and she had attempted to retrieve it and throw it into a fire that was burning in the room. Armfield had taken the object from Kate. On inspection, it was a small tobacco tin filled with cocaine. Another eight cocaine-filled tins had been found in Kate's bedroom — in the fireplace, in a vase and in a dressing-table drawer. ‘It's a frame-up,’ Kate had shrieked, and attempted to manhandle the police from the room. The sergeants had picked her up and carried her struggling and shouting to the patrol car outside in the street. In court, Kate's lawyer, Mr Moseley, entered a not guilty plea on the grounds that the police had framed his client and, besides, she had never been involved in the drug trade in all her life.

  Mid trial, Kate's mother Charlotte died at age eighty-one, and, the day after the funeral, Kate appeared in court trembling, sobbing and wailing. Whether her histrionics were true grief or a cynical ploy to garner sympathy and buy time can only be guessed at, but Moseley called for an adjournment because, he told Judge Perry, his client was distraught and should be under sedation. ‘Mrs Leigh was passionately fond of her old mother,’ said Moseley, who added that at the funeral at Rookwood Cemetery, Kate had collapsed on her mother's grave. He produced a medical certificate stating that she was suffering from ‘shock and neurasthenia’. The judge had little option but to adjourn the case until the defendant had recovered.

  Alas for Kate, just days before the scheduled resumption of proceedings, her staunch insistence that she had never had anything to do with drugs was embarrassingly and fatally undermined when her occasional lover and latest chauffeur, Herbert ‘Pal’ Brown, who had succeeded Kellett Street razor victim Bruce Higgs at the wheel of Kate's limousine, was gaoled for fifteen months for cocaine possession and car theft. On 9 July, commercial traveller Leslie Tilney had parked his car in College Street, East Sydney, while he made a call. Minutes later, he saw his vehicle speeding down the street with Brown at the wheel. Tilney chased on foot for 100 metres, then commandeered an NRMA patrol cycle and overtook him in South Dowling Street. Tilney made a citizen's arrest and took Brown, who was under the influence of alcohol and cocaine, to Darlinghurst Police Station.

  In court, for reasons best known to Brown and his lawyer, the long-suffering Mr Moseley, Brown feigned drunkenness on the stand. He glared at Judge Fletcher and the jury and, his eyeballs revolving and body swaying, Brown slurred, ‘You call this a court of law!’ Then he claimed he was not responsible for stealing Tilney's car because, on the night in question, he was inebriated, too inebriated to drive, and in fact had been drinking for six weeks. His drunk act was doused by the cold waters of cross-examination. The prosecutor proved that Brown's chauffeuring was a cover for the cocaine he distributed for Kate Leigh. Brown then confessed to cocaine addiction, and told the court that Kate often paid him with white powder. He received fifteen months in gaol.

  Late in July, when she was unable to delay proceedings further, it was Kate Leigh's turn to go down. In spite of her police and political contacts, she was sentenced to twelve months’ gaol and fined £250 in lieu of a second year behind bars on the cocaine possession charges.

  On the stand, Tom Wickham could hardly contain his emotions at nabbing Kate at last on a drug charge: ‘I have known this woman for fifteen or twenty years. She is a principal in the cocaine traffic in this city. Not only does she peddle it herself, but she is one of the biggest suppliers to other pedlars. She is titled “the uncrowned queen of the underworld” and there is no doubt that she wields a powerful influence in the underworld of Sydney. She boasts her privilege of obtaining preferential treatment of prisoners in the gaols and of her influence with high political and legal people. I regard her as a menace to the community. She is a low moral type, capable of committing any crime in the criminal calendar. Many of the recent underworld vendettas have been attributed to her and I am sorry to say that I cannot say anything for her. Many years ago, she introduced me to her daughter, Eileen. The girl was then only fifteen years old. I have seen that girl go down and down, until today she is the lowest type of woman.’

  As Kate was led away in handcuffs, she rounded on Wickham and screamed across the courtroom, ‘Look here, Wickham! You can't say that I've not been a mother to my daughter. I've been a better mother to my daughter than you've been a father to yours!’ A few days later, a police informer walked into the CIB and claimed that, from prison, Kate had offered a hit man from Melbourne £100 to kill Wickham.

  While rejoicing in Kate's incarceration, Truth asked why it had taken so long for her to receive a lengthy gaol term, then answered its own question: because her informing was too valuable to the police. Under the headline ‘Sydney's Vicious Harridan of Underworld Should Have Been in Gaol Long Ago: Shelf, Hypocrite, Base and Vile’, the piece continued:

  There are oft-repeated whispers that when she tired of her lovers, the law conveniently reached out and placed them in gaol for long periods. This might have been no more than coincidental. Kate gets hot under the collar when suggestions are made to the contrary, but it was always Tilly Devine's most telling verbal blow when she and Kate got into wrangling. Writing from England some months ago, Tilly slated Leigh as the greatest top-off (informer) in Sydney, and Tilly had plenty of fellow-believers. That there was some influence that saved Leigh from gaol on numerous occasions goes without saying. She was the associate of criminals
and the Consorting Act could have swept her into gaol many months ago had the police applied it. But Kate seemed to bear a charmed life.

  The tabloid reminded its readers of how Leigh's sparkling car swept her about the streets, driven by one chauffeur after another, how her sly-grog shops were left alone by police, and how she was constantly in the company of known criminals, including Wally Tomlinson.

  The privileged life enjoyed by Kate on the street continued unabated behind bars. Police, mindful of the many inmates who were in Long Bay Gaol because of Leigh's informing, kept her isolated from the vengeful. She was allowed a steady string of visits from Razorhurst underlings who ran her lucrative cocaine trade and sly-grog shops while she was indisposed. Kate, as usual, was given a cushy job in the kitchen, where her talent for baking scones was appreciated by warders and official visitors to the prison. One such visitor was Lady Gwendolen Game, the wife of State Governor Sir Philip Game, who declared Kate's scones ‘far better than those they serve me at Government House’.

  The most-favoured treatment Kate received annoyed other inmates. The ‘Old Woman’, as she was known in gaol, ‘never does any work in the kitchen,’ griped one. ‘She is supposed to scrub and do other things, but she gets the other women to do her work for her. She pays them in tobacco. She seems to be able to get unlimited supplies of tobacco although it is forbidden. She pays these silly creatures to do her work for her and then she boasts about it.’