The year brought echoes of the bad old days for Kate Leigh too, when her bodyguard and sometime lover Henry ‘Jack’ Baker was shot by Chow Hayes. Hayes had known Leigh since the 1920s, when she fenced the young hoodlum's shoplifting spoils. By 1937, Hayes was a gunman and standover thug. Occasionally he'd turn up at Kate's home and sly-grog shop in Lansdowne Street, Surry Hills, and demand protection money. If Kate's bodyguards were elsewhere, she'd usually pay Hayes, for whom (inexplicably to most who knew the snarling crook) she had a soft spot. Jack Baker was not long out of prison after his 1933 conviction for stealing and when he heard Hayes was demanding money from his boss, he took direct action.
Hayes told his biographer David Hickie in Chow Hayes — Gunman how Baker accosted him as he drank in the Lansdowne Hotel and warned him that he was looking after Mrs Leigh's interests now, and that if Hayes knew what was good for him he'd better stop bothering her for money. A few days later, said Hayes, he and a friend named Charlie Osborne stood in the shadows near Kate's house. To ensure that Baker was about, Osborne knocked on Kate's door and asked to buy a dozen bottles of beer. Baker took his money and gave him the beer. Later that night, Osborne again knocked on the door and told Baker that Chow wanted a word with him outside the Lansdowne Hotel.
According to Hayes, when Baker arrived, Hayes taunted him. ‘I'm going to see Kate . . . I want to borrow a tenner from her.’
Baker said, ‘You'll get fucking nothing. I told you earlier in the week.’
At that, Hayes drew his .32, said, ‘Well, here you are, you can take this for your trouble,’ and shot Baker in the stomach and shoulder.
Five days later, Hayes was rousted in the Railway Hotel and taken to the CIB in Central Lane by Detective Jack Parmeter (the same Parmeter who would later become superintendent). When the policeman told Hayes he was a suspect in the shooting of Jack Baker, Hayes said he'd never heard of him. Parmeter took Hayes to St Vincent's Hospital, where Baker was recovering from gunshot wounds. Baker, said Hayes, immediately insisted he had never seen him before, and told Parmeter that the man who shot him was much taller and darker than Hayes, who breathed a sigh of relief. They went back to the CIB and Parmeter said, ‘I know it was you, Chow, and the only thing I can say now, is that it was a pity you didn't make a fucking good job of it.’
Jack Baker and Chow Hayes worked off and on for Kate for another fifteen years. The old sly-grogger even paid some of Hayes's legal bills and bailed him out when he was charged with consorting.
The angel of death also alighted on Dulcie Markham's shoulder. She was working in a Melbourne brothel in 1937 when she took Arthur ‘the Egg’ Taplin as her pimp and lover. Fellow Sydneysider Taplin was on the run from Darlinghurst police.
On 15 December he was with two friends at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Swanston Street, Melbourne, when the trio decided to have some sport with an inoffensive-looking male hairdresser in the bar. All afternoon, Taplin and his friends pestered the hairdresser to buy them drinks and the man, suspecting there would be trouble if he declined, kept opening his wallet for them. Then Taplin left and the hairdresser, emboldened by the absence of his most menacing tormentor, refused to fund the remaining pair's party any longer. They left the pub and returned with Taplin, who smashed a beer glass on the hairdresser's head. The hairdresser climbed to his feet, drew a gun from his coat pocket and shot Taplin, wide-eyed with amazement as he fell, in the chest.
Taplin died on 22 December in Royal Melbourne Hospital. Markham was chief mourner at his funeral. The hairdresser was charged with murder but successfully pleaded self-defence.
Suddenly, however, towards that grim decade's close, the activities of Sydney's gangsters — which had appalled yet fascinated many for the past thirteen years — were overshadowed in the minds of the public by darker and more momentous events in Europe. In 1937, Hitler had rearmed Germany, annexed Austria and would soon begin his rampage through Czechoslovakia and Poland. To many, even two years before its declaration, another war seemed inevitable.
Fears of another global conflagration were briefly forgotten on Black Sunday, 6 February 1938, when five Sydneysiders drowned after three freak waves crashed on Bondi Beach. It was a typical hot and sunny Sunday, and the beach was packed with swimmers. A gentle swell caressed a sandbar about fifty metres from the shore and body-surfers frolicked in the breakers. Eyewitnesses recall that suddenly, eerily, the sea went flat. Then, from nowhere, monster waves more than ten metres high reared up and smashed down on the sandbar. As the waves’ whitewater was sucked back out to sea, it swept with it more than 200 bodysurfers. Thirty lifesavers, ‘Ready Aye Ready’, hit the water and swam after the stricken, screaming bathers. They saved all but five.
One week later, on 13 February, came another disaster on the water. Nineteen people drowned when the ferry launch Rodney capsized on Sydney Harbour. The vessel was jammed with 175 spectators farewelling the US cruiser Louisville, come to celebrate Sydney's 150th birthday since white settlement. As the cruiser passed the Rodney, the passengers on the ferry all rushed to the port side to get a better view. The Rodney tipped over, pitching the people into the water. Five sailors leapt from the deck of the Louisville into the water to rescue the drowning. They were assisted by fifteen members of the police band, who were on another boat serenading the Louisville out of the Heads.
Only a few years earlier, the murder of so prominent a mobster as Guido Calletti would have been front-page news, but with war looming — in August, ′39, it was only a month away — public interest in his slaying was scant.
In April 1938, Calletti was released from Long Bay, where he had been gaoled the previous October for consorting. He returned to an empty nest. In spite of her teary outburst when he was sentenced, Nellie Cameron had deserted Calletti while he was inside, and left Sydney to work as a prostitute in Brisbane and Cairns. In the hope of arousing Cameron's jealousy, Calletti began squiring Dulcie Markham and grew flabby — and complacent — on the large amount of money she earned as one of Sydney's busiest prostitutes. Possibly spurred on by his money-hungry new lover, who herself had just served a month in Long Bay for robbing a tourist of £20, Calletti decided to make his play for the big time by taking control of all SP protection racketeering in Surry Hills and Darlinghurst. In a few violent months in early-to-mid 1939, Calletti and his gang beat off rival outfits and he reigned unchallenged as SP standover king of Razorhurst. Calletti at age thirty-seven had never been as powerful or feared.
Now he considered new kingdoms to plunder, and began to covet the profits that the Brougham Street Gang was making selling protection to illegal bookies in Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo. He declared war on the Brougham Street boys. Calletti's strategy was not to target the bookies themselves, but to let the Brougham Street mobsters collect, then corner individual members of the gang and relieve them of their takings. There was open brawling on Butlers Stairs, in the Domain and the wharves of the ‘Loo. But soon Calletti's attacks had the Brougham Street Gang reeling. Feeling invulnerable, Calletti began skiting that he had beaten his rivals, and spoke of setting up a criminal empire the likes of which Australia had never seen.
On Sunday, 6 August, Calletti joined other mourners at his grandmother's funeral in the western suburbs, then returned to Darlinghurst to meet Dulcie Markham. Over a drink, Calletti had a rush of blood. He decided to prove his fearlessness by crashing a Brougham Street mob party being held that night to celebrate the birthday of one of the gang's girlfriends.
Conversation stopped when Calletti and Markham sauntered brazenly into the house in Brougham Street, just off William Street. The rival mobsters and their molls glared at the interlopers. One thug approached Calletti and said, ‘I hope you haven't come to cause a blue.’
‘No,’ Calletti assured him, ‘I only came to have a friendly drink.’
Warily, the Broughams called a truce with their enemy and offered him the first of many beers. For an hour or so, Calletti chatted amiably with his hosts. Then, as he became drunk, he grew
obstreperous. At one point he snarled at a group of Broughams, ‘I'll fucking-well fix all you fucking bastards.’
Calletti continued his tirade of abuse. A brawl ensued. The Broughams rushed Calletti, who punched and kicked out at them. Calletti was powerful, but was heavily outnumbered and getting the worst of it. He reached for his gun; one man grabbed his wrist. Women screamed. Somebody smashed the lamp with a chair, plunging the room into darkness, and there were two shots and a bellow of pain. When the light bulb was replaced, Calletti lay on the floor writhing and semi-conscious. Blood flowed from bullet wounds in his stomach. Dulcie Markham sat dazed beside him, cradling his head in her lap.
All the men fled, leaving five women in the house. One hailed a cab to take Calletti to hospital. The taxi driver arrived, looked aghast at the dying gangster and ran to a police callbox in the street. Detectives Dimmock and Jack arrived ten minutes later. Dimmock knelt beside Calletti, whose eyes were glazing over. ‘Do you know me?’ asked the policeman. Calletti nodded. ‘Who shot you, Guido?’
Calletti gasped, ‘I don't know,’ and passed out.
An ambulance was summoned and sped Calletti to St Vincent's Hospital. He died there two hours later. His body was taken to the Reliance Funeral Chapel in Flinders Street, Darlinghurst, where, next day, his teenage son from his first marriage wept over his body, which lay in an open coffin. Calletti was dressed in one of his gaudiest suits.
Back at Brougham Street right after the shooting, Detective Sergeant Colin Delaney combed the premises. He questioned the birthday girl, a nurse, who divulged the names of those who had been at her party. A dragnet hauled in all but two of the revellers, Robert Branch and George Allen, who police believed were the killers of Calletti.
Two days later, Guido Calletti was buried with glitzy pomp. Five thousand mourners, many weeping and almost all from the underworld, paid their final respects at the Catholic Chapel at Rookwood Cemetery where Calletti's rich oaken coffin sat engulfed by a sea of flowers. Among the wreaths were a large cross of blooms and a heartbroken message from Nellie Cameron, despatched from Queensland. Cameron couldn't make her husband's funeral, but his last lover Dulcie Markham keened melodramatically by the casket.
Acting on further information from the nurse (who had been promised immunity from prosecution as an accessory to murder), on 10 August, police arrested Branch and Allen in a house deep in bushland at Cowan Creek, north of Sydney. Both men had pistols. Knowing the accuseds’ friends would try to intimidate the nurse into retracting her story, the police hid her in a Moss Vale guesthouse, where they believed the Brougham Street Gang would never find her. Then the guesthouse proprietor, who was under orders to report anything suspicious to Delaney, phoned to say that the nurse's sister had paid a visit. Delaney soon discovered that neither of the nurse's siblings were in the state and took a boxload of mugshots to the proprietor to see if he could identify the mystery visitor. The man pointed to a photograph of Nellie Cameron.
At the murder trial of Branch and Allen at Sydney Quarter Sessions, the nurse blithely denied all her previous evidence while insisting that neither Cameron nor anyone else had pressured her to change her story. She explained that now that she had had time to think about things, she realised she had made a mistake and the two men in the dock, on closer inspection, were not the men she saw fighting with Calletti at the party after all.
Cameron was subpoenaed and called to the stand by a prosecutor hoping that, in her grief over her husband's death, she would indict the suspects. He was disappointed, for she refused to cooperate. Policeman Lua Niall was in the courtroom that day: ‘I was posted to observe the trial of the men charged with killing Guido Calletti. Nellie was first witness for the Crown and every question the prosecutor put to her she said, “I can't remember, I can't remember.” The case fell through and the men who killed Calletti went unpunished. I remember her as quite attractive, not badly spoken, either, but she had a terrible memory.’
How to explain Nellie Cameron's behaviour? Why did she warn the nurse not to incriminate Branch and Allen, and not attempt to avenge her husband's murder on the witness stand? Cameron and Calletti were estranged at the time of his death, but they remained married after being lovers for a decade, and she had taken the trouble to send the cross of flowers to his funeral. On the evidence, the most likely conclusion is that the Brougham Street Gang offered her money to switch sides and keep silent and, knowing that Guido was past help, she took it.
Having just dried her tears after Calletti's funeral, Dulcie Markham returned to Melbourne. There she heard that her husband Frank Bowen had been shot dead in Kings Cross. She took solace in the arms of a lowlife named John Abrahams. Abrahams was out of his depth with the beautiful prostitute and was soon locked in a violent tug of war for her affections with a towering villain known as Big Doll.
On the night of 14 June 1940, Abrahams and Big Doll fought in a Collingwood gambling den. Abrahams was pummelled and, in the time-honoured way, Markham went home with the victor. At 2 a.m., Abrahams, battered, humiliated and drunk, staggered from the dive. His problems were just beginning. A man, who witnesses said was ‘tall and hiding near a car’, confronted Abrahams and opened fire with a revolver. The early volley missed and Abrahams ran for cover, but the tall gunman chased and shot him down. Abrahams died in the street. Markham travelled north once more, to the employ of Tilly Devine, and a Sydney about to be changed forever by World War II.
29
The War at Home
War was declared on 3 September 1939, and the vice queens — Kate was nearly sixty and Tilly a flagging thirty-nine — watched helplessly as many of their customers and henchmen enlisted, and sailed away to fight. For the next six years these men would be indulging their vices not in Razorhurst, but in the roaring quarters of Cairo, London and the Pacific.
While the servicemen were away fighting, residents of inner Sydney came to terms with daylight saving and the rationing of food, clothing and petrol. People were required to carry ID cards. Cheap austerity meals, consisting of the most basic ingredients, were suddenly on restaurant and cafe menus. Then, in March 1942, came the first load of R&R-ing American servicemen. For the vice bosses, the loss of the locals was in large part compensated for by the first of many Allied invasions of Sydney. The Yanks were cashed up and keen for a good time after enduring the horrors of combat, and made a beeline for the fleshly and alcoholic delights of Razorhurst. In the interests of the war effort, the authorities were prepared to cut the visitors some slack, and left alone the criminals who catered to the servicemen.
‘We found it necessary to not only turn a blind eye, but to give tacit approval to the existence of a brothel which catered exclusively to American Negro servicemen,’ tut-tutted Lillian Armfield.
It is painful to recall that such was the case, but it was, and our own Defence authorities and those of the United States forces accepted it and approved it as a necessity. On that point it is even more painful to recall that, before this establishment came into being for them, we found our own girls, sometimes very young girls, immorally associating with the Negroes. It was like a knife through the heart when we found that one Sydney girl, only twelve years old, was in the bed of a Negro serviceman, as Detective Sergeant Farrell of the Vice Squad could confirm.
Some Americans got more than they bargained for, as they were gingered outrageously by the prostitutes and mugged by their pimps. Rat-smart locals fleeced the cocksure servicemen by selling them cigarettes made of cabbage leaves or crushed gum leaves rolled in Tally-Ho papers, and cold tea or tobacco water poured into brown bottles and passed off as beer or whisky before the sellers faded into the shadows. When they realised they'd been suckered, the Americans would set off in bands to take revenge, and brawls between them and denizens of the Cross and Darlinghurst, Tilly Devine included, erupted nightly. As former Darlinghurst detective Bill Harris recalls: ‘Events began to overtake Tilly in World War II. Once a black US serviceman came to her brothel and did what he had to d
o with one of her prostitutes, but when he finished with her he wouldn't get off. The prostitute was screaming, and the bloke was getting ugly, then Tilly ran in with a bottle and hit him on the head and fractured his skull. She was charged with grievous bodily harm.’
As the rich, randy and thirsty Yanks stormed Sydney's hot spots, Kate Leigh, as Sydney's pre-eminent dispenser of sly grog, and Tilly Devine, its leading brothel-keeper, had every right to expect that they would reap a financial bonanza. But the 1940s saw old warhorses like them challenged by a new generation of younger, hungrier outlaws, including Dulcie Markham's occasional lover Donald ‘Duck’ Day, Lennie McPherson, Abraham Saffron, Dick Reilly and old razor-man Sid Kelly, who moved in to make a profit from Sydney's vice economy.
Making his malevolent presence felt in the war years, too, was Percy ‘Big’ Neville, a 187-centimetre, 130-kilo standover man who deluded himself that he was Guido Calletti's successor. Neville habitually swung a gold chain and, like Calletti, preyed on the vice purveyors. Born in Moss Vale in 1916, Neville grew up in Redfern. He was a criminal minnow in the ′30s, but in wartime Sydney, with Kate in decline, he wielded his size and bad attitude like a blade and established a lucrative sly-grog business. While Kate, in her own rascally way, dealt squarely with publicans and breweries, Neville stole and browbeat alcohol from the wholesalers. He was feared and hated in equal measure. ‘Neville was a dingo,’ said one policeman of the time. ‘He was a big hulk but had no guts when it came to a showdown.’ Neville was probably the murderer of his cardshark accomplice Francis Allard — together they'd travel on interstate trains fleecing travellers in rigged card games — who was found dead from head wounds in the Cooks River, possibly caused by a knuckleduster with sharpened blades. Neville moved to Melbourne after the war, and on 10 July 1948, he was shot dead in Flinders Lane. ‘Percy Neville was no use to nobody,’ said a policeman when he died.
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