Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  Some who knew Nellie Cameron say she was worth every bruise and cut her lovers suffered. For someone whose beat was prostitution, dope-dealing, robbery and receiving, and bare-knuckle brawling, Cameron was still, somehow, a class act. Time and again, people who remember her say she was as at home in swish inner-city nightclubs such as Prince's and Romano's as she was at the Tradesman's Arms and the Fifty-Fifty Club.

  Cameron had sultry good looks, blue eyes, thick glossy hair and a classy style borne of her upbringing on Sydney's prosperous north shore and her private-school education. Those who met her in her heyday recall a softly spoken, witty and fearless criminal. ‘I'm no judge of beauty,’ says Ray Blissett, ‘but I reckon she was a great-looking dame.’ To Vince Kelly, a reporter of the time, ‘She had a charm that was her own, very exclusively her own in the underworld to which she descended, and a natural dignity that she never lost in the most hectic of circumstances.’ And one Razorhurst scribe rhapsodised, ‘Cigarette smoke curls ceaselessly from the soft lips of gangland's mystery girl, veiling the features that themselves veil with inscrutability her inmost emotions.’

  Cameron's fatal flaw was her irresistible attraction to the underworld. Twice she fell pregnant to criminals who were her lovers and pimps, but lost the babies after miscarriages. By late 1931, she was a notorious femme fatale. She'd been a member of the original razor gang with Bruhn, driven a jealous Guido Calletti to cool the ardour of her suitor mobster Eric Connolly by shooting him in the stomach in February ′29, vanquished Black Aggie, and been Frank Green's accomplice on the night he stole Jim Devine's tie pin and Fred Moffitt was shot. For a while, too, while Green and Calletti were behind bars or lying low, she was the lover of New Zealand standover man Edward ‘Ted’ Pulley.

  Part of Cameron's allure was her bravery. No matter what was done to her (and in her time she was shot, slashed and beaten) she refused to squeal. Never was her adherence to the criminal code more in evidence than when, in November 1931, just five months after the death of Moffitt, Cameron was gunned down in Darlinghurst, near St Vincent's Hospital, where she had been visiting Green, himself recovering from near-fatal gunshot wounds.

  Her shooting was the culmination of a bloody love-tangle that stretched back two years. In 1929, Cameron, with Bruhn in his grave, was living with Frank Green when Green fell in love with a society woman who was the girlfriend of a tearaway musician named Charles Brame. The woman was in turn smitten with Green. The gunman and the socialite became lovers. Meanwhile, Brame and Cameron repaid Green by having a fling with each other. When the society belle quickly and inevitably tired of the crude and boorish Green, the latter decided to reclaim Cameron by murdering his rival. He shot Brame in Belmore Park, near Central Railway, but Brame survived. Then, in mid 1931, just before the Devine tie-pin robbery, Green razor-slashed Brame. The musician again survived.

  Green now set another trap. He persuaded Cameron to meet Brame in Liverpool Street, near St Vincent's Hospital, one night in late October. As Cameron and Brame stood talking in the lane, Green walked up. Brame later told police he saw Green reach inside his coat. He had assumed Green was drawing his pistol, so pulled out his own gun and blasted Green in the stomach. The bullet passed through Green's bowel and lodged near his spine. Green fell to the footpath, and Brame fled.

  Cameron ran to the moaning Green's side and enlisted a passer-by to help her take him to St Vincent's. Doctors expected Green to die, but he slowly recovered. When questioned by police he told them he had no idea who shot him. Meanwhile, Brame, possibly guilt-wracked but more likely in mortal fear of what Green's friends would do to him, gave himself up to police, seeking safety behind bars. He was acquitted of trying to kill Green but gaoled for nine months for carrying an unlicensed firearm, for which sentence he was doubtless grateful.

  At this point, in the absence of court or police records, matters grow murky. All that is known is that three weeks later, as Green's condition hovered between grave and critical in hospital, a woman in a Darlinghurst wine bar declared of him, ‘It's a pity the bastard's not dead.’ At that, another drinker, a friend of Green, slashed the woman on the cheek with his razor. The razor-man then left for St Vincent's Hospital to visit Green. Later that night, as the razor-slasher, Nellie Cameron and another man and woman left the hospital, they were bailed up by a gunman — like the slashed woman, there is no record of his name, but it was possibly Wally Tomlinson, who was living with the slashed woman in Cronulla and hated and feared Green. The gunman aimed his sawn-off rifle at the group, but they pounced on him and tried to grapple the weapon from his grasp. In the struggle, the gun discharged and Nellie Cameron pitched forward onto the road, shot in the side.

  She was taken to St Vincent's for surgery. There, as ever, she was stoic. Though in terrible pain, she waited patiently for treatment, refused to cooperate with police when they asked who had shot her, and when a nurse wondered whether she wanted to inform her mother that she'd been shot, Cameron smiled, ‘Don't worry her, nurse. I'll be all right.’ Meanwhile, at about that time, the woman who was slashed in the wine bar was the victim of another razor attack, a reprisal for Cameron's shooting, in Pitt Street in the city.

  When she recovered in mid 1932, Cameron was gaoled for two months for consorting with Frank Green. But a now-recovered Green — who was due to stand trial for consorting with Cameron and other undesirables, as well as for stealing Jim Devine's tie pin — failed to keep his appointment with the magistrate and went, as they said in those days, into smoke.

  The monotony of incarceration at Long Bay was broken for Cameron when she was taken from the prison to Darlinghurst Sessions Court to face a charge of gingering one of her clients, Frank Ward, of £15. Ward told the court that Cameron approached him while he was drinking in a hotel in Oxford Street. While they were chatting, the publican shouted them drinks. Cameron had then suggested he accompany her to a room nearby and he accepted. Later, he had discovered his ‘roll’ was missing from his vest pocket. Cameron, he was sure, had stolen it. Looking radiant and relaxed in her prison garb, she smiled sweetly when she denied the charge from the dock. How in heaven's name, she wanted to know, given that they were entangled on the bed the whole time, could she have stolen Ward's money without him seeing her?

  Her ingenuousness certainly won over the normally stern Judge Herbert Curlewis, who observed to the jury: ‘It's very easy [for Ward] to make these sort of charges, and sometimes it's very convenient to make an accusation against this class of woman. You know that not all married men are saints, but most of them, when a thing like this happens, have got sense enough to keep it to themselves, but Ward publishes it.’ The jury quickly found Cameron not guilty, and she was bustled back to prison to tell her tale to the girls.

  One person keenly following the progress of the police dragnet for the absconder Frank Green was Jim Devine. He had an excellent reason to want to see Green in custody, for before he disappeared, Green had broadcast throughout Razorhurst his intention to shoot Jim the first chance he got, then cut the ears off his damnable corpse and pin them to a wall in Stanley Street.

  While Green was on the loose, Jim refused to venture from his Maroubra home without his bodyguard. So, for him, there was cause to celebrate when police finally arrested Green at a flat in Park Road, Moore Park, near the Captain Cook Hotel. As before, it was Nellie Cameron who inadvertently led the law to her lover. Police had tailed her from the moment she had been released from Long Bay, and one day an officer saw her buy two large pieces of porterhouse steak at a butcher's shop and deduced that it was unlikely that she would be eating both steaks herself. He followed her to the Park Road flat.

  On 2 August, Cameron was cooking sausages for Green at the flat, where he had indeed been holed up, when police banged on the front door. High farce ensued. Green flung himself under a bed as the officers forced the door and tumbled in. ‘Where's Green?’ demanded Detective Sergeant Reg Kennedy of Cameron.

  ‘Not here,’ she said.

  ‘Then
whose feet are they sticking out from beneath that bed?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Cameron with unconvincing nonchalance, ‘just my lover's.’

  Police dragged a squirming figure out from under the bed, but, at a glance, this person looked nothing like their quarry Green. Green's hair was usually heavily oiled and elaborately quiffed, while this fellow had a bristle-cut. Green's complexion was pale, this chap's was an odd pumpkin-yellow. Green's features were mean, and somewhat battered but regular, while the man under the bed's face was contorted into a clownish grin and one of his eyes was closed tight. But the officers were not fooled for long by Green's ludicrous attempt to disguise himself. The giveaway, police said, was the trademark razor scar on the fugitive's right cheek. He had shaved his head, rubbed henna onto his face and screwed up his visage so he resembled Quasimodo. A huge wad of gum distended Green's cheek.

  Kennedy chuckled, ‘Well, you're certainly smart, Green. And a pretty cool customer, too. Fancy screwing up your face like that when you meet a pal. And I've been looking for you everywhere.’

  An embarrassed Green spat out his gum and went quietly. ‘Aw, ease it,’ he told Kennedy. ‘Break it down.’

  ‘Hard luck, Frankie,’ said Cameron as her man was led away.

  One newspaper's headline read ‘Sudden End of Gangster's Liberty’, under which the article informed:

  Green is a gunman, a gangster, a night prowler, a vulture who preys on unfortunate women, a razor hand, an underworld terrorist. And the scar on his face, which an operation has failed to obliterate, makes him a marked man even when he cunningly changes his complexion with henna hair dye and screws up his face.

  Green was sentenced to three months in Long Bay, and, while a prisoner, faced trial for relieving Jim Devine of his tie pin.

  In the dock at Darlinghurst Court in late August, Green denied stealing the pin. Jim Devine was a liar, he snapped, and claimed that Jim had invited him and Nellie Cameron to a party at their home, then when the party was in progress Jim had become unpleasant and the two men had fought. Green knocked Jim over a lounge and Jim had picked up his gun and ‘chased me and Nell out of the house’. When they were trying to flee in Moffitt's taxi, Jim had fired, killing Moffitt. Green said he had called out: ‘Turn it up, Jim. You've shot the taxi driver,’ and Jim had shouted back, ‘Yes, and I'm going to shoot you, too.’ In turn, Jim Devine angrily denied his former friend's version of events. There had been no party. Green had invaded his home. Devine reiterated how he had fired at Green in self-defence after Green stole his diamond tie pin at gunpoint.

  Green's counsel, Mr McMahon, then asked the court how they could believe the testimony of a ‘creature like Jim Devine, who lived on money earned by his wife on the streets’. At that, Tilly, her blonde hair coiled in hard, tight ringlets, face twisted in fury, leapt to her feet and shrieked: ‘My husband never sent me out on the streets. You're a liar, Mr McMahon. He never did! He never did!’ Writhing and yelling, she was ejected from the courtroom.

  The jury retired, and its confused and unsettled members were unable to decide which, if either, of the men was telling the truth. So when they reconvened in the courtroom, they acquitted Green of theft. Before she left the court, grinning broadly, Nellie Cameron emitted a loud sigh of satisfaction.

  20

  Deadline Darlinghurst

  As the early 1930s continued, Australia's debt-ridden economy foundered as overseas creditors, themselves in dire financial straits, called in the money owed them. All over the land, the Great Depression took hold. Wages and pensions, like welfare spending and public works, were cut. Businesses closed their doors. Unemployment averaged 33 per cent throughout New South Wales, but in some working-class regions, such as Razorhurst, it hit 70 per cent.

  The upper and middle classes of Sydney were not drastically affected. They had savings, were employed in established professions and owned their homes. But for the working stiffs who toiled in factories, shops and on the docks, the closure of these establishments meant unemployment, which meant poverty. For them, life was grim at best and desperate at worst.

  Many could not afford clothing or nourishing food. Landlords turned tenants unable to pay their rent onto the street and sold their furniture. Subletting had always been rife, but suddenly there were twenty or thirty men, women and children cooped in a single terrace house. Many evicted families were clumped in appalling conditions in sheet-metal-and-paling shantytowns in Surry Hills, Redfern and Newtown. People cowered in caves in the Domain. They slept in parks in the warm months and in winter threw themselves on the mercy of church and Salvation Army charities or slept in verminous doss-houses. Some renters served with notices to quit refused to budge. They fortified their houses or flats with galvanised iron, barbed wire and sandbags, and squatted until police forcibly evicted them. There were break-ins and muggings as the destitute resorted to any means to lay their hands on money.

  Unfed domestic animals roamed the alleys skinny-ribbed, plundering garbage bins and chasing rats. Abandoned litters of kittens mewed day and night. Kilometre-long queues snaked from Circular Quay where dole and sustenance coupons were handed out. Beggars fought each other for prime position on the street. Buskers wheezing Strauss waltzes on squeezeboxes and mouth organs, and singing Irish ballads and the apt new Bing Crosby hit ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’, provided a soundtrack for hard times.

  Inevitably, the Depression bit into the profits of the racketeers. A customer to whom a big night out was drinking sly grog, having sex with a prostitute and buying a deal of cocaine now had to think twice about his evening's entertainment as he tightened his belt. Numbers at all establishments dropped. But there were still plenty among the well-heeled who could afford the goods and services they offered. Like any savvy captain of legitimate industry, Tilly and Kate reduced overheads by closing unprofitable brothels and groggeries and retrenching expendable staff.

  Although Kate and Tilly's wealth can never be accurately gauged because they rarely filed tax returns, it's likely that, totting up property, cash and possessions, in the early ′30s each was worth around £250 000, a fabulous sum then and the equivalent in today's money of millions of dollars.

  Kate's sly-grog empire was memorably described by People magazine:

  [Her kingdom is a] noisome slum which begins across the road from Central Railway Station and whose squalid, dirty, narrow streets rise and fall across Surry Hills . . . The Hills are crammed with ancient hovels and terraces and life is characterised by the personalities of people, the rottenness of crime, the roughness of jungle justice, and the generous impulses of the badly-off towards the worse-off.

  Kate's was an ‘empire of brothels, gambling joints, flophouses, sly-groggeries and gin mills [full of] prostitutes, pimps, thugs, blackmailers, thieves, bludgers and strong-arm toughs’. Tilly lorded it over equally seamy Darlinghurst, and pockets of Kings Cross, Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills and Paddington.

  Kate and Tilly were both damned and romanticised in the press, whose relationship with the women was like that of two prisoners shackled together who hate each other but have no choice but to get along. Often the city's tabloid journalists knew more about a villain or victim than the police or politicians, since Kate and Tilly, who knew the value of public relations and were skilled spin doctors for their day, rang them to leak strategic information. Kate would telephone with news, suitably embellished, of an embarrassing incident that had befallen Tilly; Tilly would tip the paper to a crime she knew Kate had been planning for weeks. If some other gang was becoming a threat, or even getting uppity, Tilly or Kate would plant a story about their rival's operation that would bring the police down on their heads.

  Knowing their readers loved it, Truth, Smith's Weekly, and later the Sun and the Mirror, chronicled every bloody street battle, every peccadillo and jape involving the women. The press splashed the story of how Tilly carried a suitcase emitting a foul smell into Central Police Court when facing trial in January 1932 for turning the Oxford Street air
blue when the proprietor of the Canberra Cafe had sold her bad crayfish. She had then punched the police officer who arrested her. As proceedings wore on, the stomach-churning odour pervaded the courtroom. Gagging officials ordered Devine to open her suitcase. With a flourish and whoop of glee, she did so and, like a magician whipping a rabbit from a hat, revealed Exhibit A, the decaying crayfish.

  Just weeks later, Tilly was back in court being convicted of consorting. She claimed she was too unwell to be gaoled since she suffered gastritis, a sore and ‘probably broken’ arm, and ‘nervous dispairia’. All this was to no avail. When the judge sentenced her to six months’ prison, she cursed out the prosecutor. On their front pages, the tabloids painted the scene. For example:

  Devine flew into a frenzied rage. Her face turned a rich purple, her eyes became piggish, and in a berserk shriek which could be heard all over the building she poured out a stream of vile abuse upon the heads of all and sundry. ‘You don't ---- give a ---- woman a chance. You're all ----against me! You don't give a ---- woman a fair go.’ It was a scene more reminiscent of a padded cell than a court of British justice.

  And also in January ′32, when Kate Leigh was facing consorting charges, newspaper readers learned how she was ‘smiling and smirking in the courthouse corridors, waving and wangling and bowing to acquaintances among the habitues, the press, the police and even deigning to beam upon the public’. She had brazenly faced down the prosecutor who reeled off her criminal record: perjury, consorting, possessing cocaine, found in a house in company of thieves, stealing, street fighting. ‘I am a respectable woman with a lot of businesses,’ she protested, ‘and I have my own money.’ A week later, the press made great sport of Kate's refusal to attend court to face charges of holding a gun to the face of Kings Cross woman Patsy Neill and threatening to ‘blow your bloody head off, you bitch, unless you give me the two quid you owe me.’