Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  Big Jim Devine faded into obscurity. He is believed to have died in the 1960s.

  Phil ‘the Jew’ Jeffs died suddenly in Ettalong on 30 November 1945, aged forty-nine. It is said that Jeffs's death was caused when the bullet wounds he'd suffered after the May 1929 riot in Eaton Avenue, Kings Cross, turned septic and poisoned him. He was buried as ‘Phillip Davies’, the alias he adopted when he retired from Sydney's underworld to live the life of a legitimate businessman and bon vivant on the Central Coast.

  Few compadres from his Razorhurst days were at the elaborate and expensive funeral. The good burghers of Ettalong came to mourn the man they thought of as a jovial, free-spending pillar of their community. A Jewish mourning prayer was intoned as Jeffs's orchid-bedecked coffin was lowered into the ground.

  At the time of his death, the one-time razor gangster, pimp, drug dealer, sly-grogger, mugger and briber of police and politicians, had realised his dream of becoming Australia's Al Capone. He left to his friends and lovers a fortune of £65 000, as well as substantial property and his valuable collections of antiques and books. Jeffs, Norman Bruhn, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh controlled Sydney's vice between the wars, reaping literally millions from their illegal activities. But of the four racketeers, Phil the Jew was the only one cunning enough to hold on to his riches until the end.

  33

  Old Friends

  Aged sixty-six in 1947, Kate Leigh seemed an unlikely candidate to fall in love and marry. Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan was a gnome-like incorrigible thief who had spent the majority of his sixty-three years behind bars, mostly for hold-ups and break and entries. He'd known Kate since the days of World War I, when he was a friend of Leigh's lover Samuel ‘Jewey’ Freeman and they all shared digs in Frog Hollow. He and Freeman had, of course, pulled the Eveleigh Railway Workshop heist, and Kate had followed Shiner and Jewey into gaol for perjuring herself to protect Freeman.

  When Ryan began writing to Kate out of the blue in 1946, she was elderly, her two marriages and various flings with the likes of Tomlinson and Baker in her past. But Kate enjoyed Ryan's accounts of his adventures in the country's gaols, especially his tale of how he escaped from Yatala Prison in South Australia in the 1920s after stealing the master key, and had had four keys cut from the original, arrayed them in a plush-lined case and sent it to the prison's superintendent with a note: ‘To F.E. Becker, Superintendent, Yatala Labour Prison, South Australia, with the compliments of the season. December 25, 1925, from Ernest Alexander Ryan.’ And she was especially intrigued when he sent her a remarkable painting he had created in her honour. The Reclamation was a landscape which showed two paths — presumably his and hers — intersecting at the gates of Fremantle Gaol, where Christ held a black lamb labelled ‘Shiner’. Ryan signed the work: ‘To Kate “Bonnie” Leigh from Ernest A. Ryan with the compliments of the season, January 1, 1947.’ Leigh was chuffed, and wrote to her admirer to tell him so. He corresponded back asking her to marry him, and she said yes.

  When Ryan was released from prison in 1949 he went at once to Sydney. The press, whom Kate, naturally, had apprised of the impending nuptials, met him en masse at Sydney Airport. At an impromptu press conference, he hugged Kate and declared with a shy grin that he intended to make her ‘Mrs Ryan’ and take her back to Fremantle, Western Australia, with him where they would live happily together in his room above a stable. Kate turned red with embarrassment and chided him, ‘Arrgghh, get out of it, you mug, before I drop you. What about all those girls I hear you've been running around with?’

  ‘Not me, love,’ her beau replied. ‘I'm too shy. I don't like sheilas. You're my girl. But if you won't marry me and make your home in Fremantle, I'll up and out of your life, s'help me.’

  ‘Aw, what's wrong with you, mate?’ Kate blurted back. ‘Why don't you call me Bonnie, like you used to?’ Then Kate gruffly assured the reporters: ‘I'm not rushin’ into this. I'll see what the mug's got to say before I agree to go to Fremantle.’ Ryan must have said all the right things, because, soon after, the pair hosted an engagement party at Lansdowne Street, where 300 guests made short work of hot dogs, beer and champagne.

  The wedding took place in Fremantle on 18 January 1950. Kate wore a striking delphinium blue-with-silver-beading wedding gown, a black veil, white gloves and white nylon stockings. Instead of her usual cluster of rings, she sported only the simple golden band Ryan had given her. ‘Ain't it ducky!’ Kate called to the assembled wellwishers. ‘Take a gander at me, everyone! These clothes cost real dough.’ Afterwards, as guests hip-hip-hoorayed, the buxom Kate smothered her diminutive husband, clad in a green fedora and a fawn double-breasted suit bought by her, with hugs and kisses on the lawn outside the chapel. She laughed, ‘I'll see he doesn't get down to the bloody pub again,’ and Shiner replied with an unsettling glint in his beady eyes, ‘If this marriage don't work out, I've got a good sharp razor.’ Everyone laughed.

  Each step of the way, Kate had made it clear to Ryan that she had no intention of selling up in Sydney and moving to Fremantle. Sydney was where she lived and worked, and he'd have to get used to that. Almost as soon as the newlyweds settled in Surry Hills, they began to squabble. Ryan missed Fremantle, he moaned, he would never be happy in Sydney. Within a month or two of the wedding, he was back in the west. If Kate shed a tear over Shiner's defection, she did so in private.

  In December 1950, almost one year after she and Ryan wed, there was a hearing in Sydney that upheld Kate's audacious demand that as Ryan's deserted wife, he had to pay her financial support of £3 a week. In Fremantle, Ryan was incredulous. ‘What a Christmas box!’ spluttered the old lag. ‘Apart from a few days after the wedding, me and Kate have not lived together. I went east with her for a few weeks but then returned here and haven't seen her since. What a laugh! My only income is the old-age pension and there she is with thousands of pounds and she wants me to support her. I can't pay. If Kate wants me to cut it out in the cooler, I'll do that. If I go inside she'll get nothing, but I'll get free treatment for my asthma.’

  When she read in the paper of Ryan's reaction, Kate chuckled: ‘Oh, he's a sly old fox. He needn't worry about me sending him to the jug. He knows me better than that.’

  Shiner Ryan died in 1954. When reporters asked her for her memories of the criminal, Kate released a statement in which she praised him as best she knew: ‘He was a brilliant man. He engineered the whole Eveleigh holdup. He had brains in his fingertips. He could open any lock with a wire coathanger.’ She then placed a memorial notice in the classified section of the Sydney newspapers that read: ‘Shiner, we cannot clasp our hands, sweetheart/Thy face I cannot see/But let this token tell/I still remember thee/your devoted wife, Kathleen Ryan.’

  Old Edward Twiss was ailing, so in September 1948 his daughter Tilly Devine decided to pay the eighty-three year old what she thought might be a final visit to the home where she had grown up in Camberwell, London. She called a press conference at 191 Palmer Street and told the well-attended gathering her travel plans. Her itinerary would include some time with her father and then she would go to Ireland ‘to have a feed,’ she said, ‘then tour Germany and many other European countries.’

  Tilly could not help gloating to friends and reporters that she had cunningly schemed to join the Orontes in Adelaide so she would not be on board when the liner docked in Melbourne, where she might be arrested for skipping bail fourteen years before (when arrested with Dolly Quinn for brothel-keeping in Carlton). Tilly also took the opportunity to confide to the press that she was seriously ill. In fact, she said mournfully, her days were numbered, and this trip home was one way of ‘making the most of the short time left to me’. What, if anything, was ailing her is unknown, although she suffered from chronic bronchitis from her forties onwards. Tilly booked a return first-class passage on the Orontes and hurled herself into a round of farewell parties.

  Tilly was ever solicitous of friends serving time in prison, and these unfortunates always looked forward to the booty she would
bring them. So days before she flew TAA to Adelaide to rendezvous with the liner, she had her driver motor her to Long Bay to visit her prostitute friend Stella Croke who, with her husband Surridge and an accomplice, had beaten to death the Royal Sydney Golf Club chef Ernest Hoffman when a gingering went wrong. In the boot of Tilly's limousine were vegetables, and tins of tuna and salmon. At the prison gates, she unloaded them from the car and took them inside. There, a warder made a condescending remark to Tilly, who lost her temper and abused him. Ordered from the gaol for causing a scene, she stacked all the goodies back into her car and shrieked to anyone in earshot, ‘I was taking this stuff to poor Stella . . . she's serving life for murder, you know. The screws wouldn't let her have it. Fancy not allowing a woman serving life to have a paltry cauliflower. I took in a chook, too, but they said she couldn't even have that. Once a month for years I've been bringing out chooks to that poor woman and this is the first time she hasn't been allowed to have one. I was so mad I threw the chook at a screw.’

  But before she sailed away to England, for who knew how long, there was something else Tilly had to do.

  To those who knew the women, to those who had listened to their venomous denunciations of each other for twenty years, and seen them order the slashing and shooting of each other's gangs, the photograph that appeared in the press in 1948 of Tilly and Kate embracing was as surprising as if they'd picked up the paper and seen a picture of Robert Menzies doing the foxtrot with Joseph Stalin.

  Who set up the photo shoot is a mystery. It could have been one or both of the women. Possibly it was an opportunistic tabloid editor who assigned a photographer on a slow news day, and the old crime queens heard his proposal to kiss and make up for the camera and thought, ‘Oh, why the hell not?’ Certainly they were no longer at each other's throats for a cut of the proceeds of Sydney vice. Kate still ran her groggeries and Tilly her brothels, and both were more than capable of, as Tilly was fond of saying, ‘turning on a blue’, but, older and mellower, they were now small players. Kate and Tilly were happy to leave the nasty work to the usurpers.

  George Parsons says today that it was rumoured in his family that Tilly and Kate had called their truce, of which the photo was symbolic, because ‘they had come to a conclusion that destroying one another was not the way forward. They were under threat from the newer gangsters, and I suppose they thought they had a better chance of surviving if they battened down the hatches and got along. Tilly wanted the street violence to end because she realised that the more violent Darlinghurst was, the more police would be there to police it and she wanted to be left alone to carry out what few activities she had left.’ By the late 1940s, a good ten years after Billy Mackay's ultimatum, Tilly and Kate were content to bask in the glow of being ‘colourful characters’.

  For the photograph, Tilly called on Kate at her home in Lansdowne Street, on the pretext of saying goodbye before she sailed for London. Kate, on cue, welcomed her warmly and invited her in. The photographer followed. Kate gave Tilly a box of Winning Post chocolates, a plaster figure of St Therese and a charm to bring her luck on her journey. Tilly grew teary at Kate's generosity and hugged her old enemy. The women kissed each other's wrinkled cheeks. In the photo, Kate at sixty-eight looks her age but appears robust. Wearing a dark dress with floral embroidery down the front, she oozes affection as she embraces Tilly. Her leathery face is creased in a huge smile. Tilly, hair set in blonde waves, wearing a rich fur and diamond rings, looks pleased to be there, but her wry gaze at Leigh betrays wariness, almost as if she is expecting to be ambushed at any moment.

  Tilly and Eric Parsons then flew to Adelaide to meet the Orontes. She wore a full-length mink coat, two bracelets, a huge brooch, a jewelled bracelet watch and more than a dozen diamond rings, which she had insured for £10 000. Eric waved her off, then caught a plane to London, where they planned to meet in six weeks. When the Orontes docked in Perth for a few days, Tilly was hectored by local pressmen, whom she managed to avoid. As the ship pulled away from the dock, she called out to the thwarted reporters and photographers, ‘Ha! I'm too good for you.’

  During the voyage, Tilly suffered food poisoning, which confined her to her luxury £200 single cabin on the promenade deck for a day or two. She was often observed sitting without company on a deck chair, staring at the sea listening to popular love songs on a portable wireless set and occasionally nipping into the lounge for a stiff libation. She did not mingle much with other first-class guests, but made friends with a number of people in tourist class. She invited them up for a party the day before the Orontes docked in England.

  When the liner berthed in Southampton, Tilly (whose disembarkation regalia included a black straw hat festooned with five red roses, and huge hooped diamond earrings) entertained Fleet Street reporters with a song and a galumphing buck and wing. She then hired a Daimler sedan and driver for £12, which whisked her in high style across a London still strewn with the rubble from the Blitz and bleak with wartime deprivation. She headed to Camberwell and arrived at her decrepit family home, which was soon to be razed and made the site of the council estate there today. During their reunion, Devine attempted to persuade her widower father, Edward, to accompany her back to Australia, but he refused. (Again, no record exists of any meeting with her son Frederick.) Tilly met up with Eric as planned, and they travelled together on ‘our happy honeymoon’. At the end he flew home, leaving her to say her farewells in London and reboard the Orontes.

  On the return voyage to Sydney, a female passenger with the surname of Campbell-Bone observed the vice queen at close range and wrote about the experience. Tilly, although she'd booked a first-class passage, was in tourist class drinking with a group of Englishwomen who, Campbell-Bone understood, were returning with the notorious madam to work in her brothels. Devine had beckoned to Campbell-Bone, who was in her early forties, to join them, and she did. After more drinks were ordered, Tilly plied Campbell-Bone with questions about her life. So intense was the grilling that Campbell-Bone became convinced Tilly was assessing her suitability as a prostitute. Tilly, her fellow passenger thought, looked worn and old — ‘No trace remained of the attraction she may have possessed when Jim married her.’ The questioning continued as another round of drinks was ordered. ‘Tilly was most affable and seemed to be mildly amused (or thoroughly bored) as, with her skilful questioning, my life was mercilessly bared . . .’ Campbell-Bone must have failed the audition for, to her vast relief, Tilly did not offer her a job.

  In keeping with Kate's newfound incarnation as a gruff but open-hearted local hero, her door was always open to reporters wanting a colourful feature about the bad old days. Early in 1950, one journalist from People magazine found her in windbag mode when he interviewed her at her Lansdowne Street terrace house, her home since 1933. When he arrived, she was standing in her usual pose at her front door, head majestically thrown back, hands on hips. From the outset, she made it clear to the reporter, and with no hint of irony, that she had not sold sly grog for many years and these days she was a ‘shopkeeper’ selling ‘oranges, biscuits and lettuce’ at her establishment in Devonshire Street. The reporter left, some hours later, ears ringing with a hoard of interesting facts.

  As he wrote in his article, the local kids loved her, and crammed her Devonshire Street shop at lunchtime to buy lollies and hear her jokes. She donated large sums to the Salvation Army and church charities, and on a grassroots level hired out fruit carts for destitute friends and stocked them, free of charge, with lettuces for them to sell. But, believe it or not, the adoration of Kate Leigh was not universal, the scribe conceded: Kate told him that not long ago she had been assaulted by a guest at one of her parties. He had turned the light out, hit her on the head with a bottle and, as she lay unconscious on the floor, kicked her in the stomach.

  Kate confirmed in the story that she and Tilly were on friendly terms, and, in fact, hadn't been foes for quite a while:

  Tilly Devine and me, we were enemies for years. Tilly would
put the dirt in about me to friends and then I'd tear into Tilly and we'd chase each other from one street to another. But that's all done now. When poor old Til came down from the Bay last time we had a real nice couple of hours together. Til's a very good woman, mind you, no matter what the police say about her. In that, she takes after me.

  As she showed the reporter around her home, she told him: ‘I've got plenty of other houses. I've got a ten-roomed house in Devonshire Street. And I won't move out of the Hills.’ Her greatest thrill in life? ‘To make the kids happy around here. The Hills people were pretty good to me when I had nothing and I won't leave them now. Surry Hills is the quietest place in the world now.’ She added, not, it seemed, without a trace of regret, that these days ‘you could fire a gun in the Hills at night and you wouldn't hit a soul.’ The article continued, with Kate on a roll:

  No, I don't drink or smoke. Anyone'll tell you that's right. I don't like the taste of the stuff. I remember once a plain clothes cop was bashing a man's head on the pavement. I tore into him good and hard and he hauled me up for using indecent language. Me! And then do you know what he tried to say? That I was blind drunk! The magistrate — real nice he was — soon put a stop to that. He said, ‘I know that this lady does not know the taste of liquor.’ See, everyone knows that I never touch a drop.

  She then pontificated on the condition of the state's prison system, a subject on which few were better qualified to speak:

  I've been 13 [sic] times in gaol — but never once for prostitution. Are women prisoners welltreated at Long Bay? Yeah. Beautiful. Couldn't be better. If I'd got my hands on that woman that gave a story to the papers about the awful conditions out at the Bay I'd have given her the biggest damn hiding she'd ever had in her life. It's just like a palace out there for first offenders. There's no excuse for women to go in again. They give them lovely dresses when they come out and dress them up like princesses. And what happens? They come into my shop with their beautiful clothes all filthy and themselves all full of plonk! And I says to them, ‘What the hell's wrong with you? Pull yourselves together.’ You can't do nothing with some women.