Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  Cameron had kept a low public profile since the early 1940s, with only isolated incidents thrusting her back into the newspapers. On 27 november 1944, a client she was entertaining at her flat at 253 Liverpool Street, East Sydney, was shot in the buttocks. Police believed Cameron fired on the man after he caught her gingering him, but the victim insisted that a stranger had shot him while he was sleeping with Cameron on her bed. Police had no choice but to file the shooting under ‘Unsolved’.

  Then, eight years later, in 1952, when they investigated moans in a passageway beside Cameron's flat in Denham Street, Darlinghurst, neighbours saw her crawling on all fours, weeping with pain and losing blood from a gunshot wound in her stomach. She was rushed to St vincent's Hospital where the bullet, which had perforated her liver and lodged between two ribs, was removed and she was treated and released. Doctors later professed amazement at finding two other bullets from earlier shootouts in her abdomen, and numerous Razor and knife scars crisscrossing her body.

  Police arrested William Donohoe, a wharfie with whom Cameron had lived since the end of her second marriage, to one Charles Bourke. Witnesses had seen Cameron and Donohoe arguing in a nightclub the day before the shooting, and Cameron had ended the contretemps by hitting Donohoe on the head with a beer jug. But Cameron refused to cooperate with police and the charges against Donohoe were dropped.

  The good-time girl now fell into a deep depression born of post-operation symptoms, a nervous condition and her conviction that the doctors’ probing in her liver to repair the bullet's damage had given her cancer. Donohoe tried to reassure her that her cancer was all in her imagination, and doctors gave her a clean bill of health, but Cameron would not be dissuaded. She believed she was dying. She hardly ever left her decrepit apartment and spent much of each day in bed.

  On 8 november 1953, she waited until Donohoe left the house, then she turned on the gas jets in the oven in her tiny kitchen. She knelt, as if in prayer, in front of the oven, opened the door and put her head deep inside. When Donohoe came home, nellie Cameron was dead. She was forty-one.

  Her funeral was held on 10 november, and it was extravagant. More than 700 friends and admirers of the darling of the Razor gangs were at the church and Botany Cemetery, where her rose-covered coffin was interred. Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, not long back from the coronation, attended. Cameron survived most of her husbands and boyfriends, but Donohoe, the last man in her life, was there. So was her one-time lover, deathly pale, balding, alcoholic Frank Green, who appeared shockingly old to those who hadn't seen him since his days as an enforcer in the 1930s. Within a year, the Little Gunman himself would be dead.

  Cops mingled with mourners, taking notes and photographs. Lillian Armfield, who always had a soft spot for Cameron, paid her respects. As she recalled to vince Kelly:

  I didn't see any tears shed for Nellie. And she didn't deserve any. And, to do her justice, I know she wouldn't have wanted any. Nellie would have been happy if there had been a brawl at the funeral, a real ding-dong affair in which a few would have been wiped out. That's the sort of funeral Nellie would have liked for herself. She was only forty-one when she died, but she had lived up every day of her life.

  38

  The Taxman Comes

  Calling

  By the mid 1950s, Kate Leigh's fortune was gone. This was due to the competition for the illegal alcohol pound, her compulsive clothes and jewellery buying, generous donations to the needy, the escalating cost of paying her henchmen and the police fines and bribes she paid to stay out of gaol and in business.

  Tilly Devine was doing better, though she, too, was bound for financial ruin. In the late 1920s and ′30s, she had owned many of the properties that housed her brothels, and at one stage she ran some thirty bordellos in East Sydney. Like Kate, she had essential overheads to pay, and her extravagant parties, parasitic loved ones and friends and trips to Europe would have bit deeply into her fortune; but from the 1920s until the mid ′50s, she was never less than a wealthy woman. As George Parsons says: ‘I don't know what she invested in, but she was loaded . . . There was the Maroubra house and a lot of other properties around Sydney.’

  These properties included a bungalow with Harbour views in ian Street, rose Bay. She also owned a large house at 145 Brougham Street, Woolloomooloo, and for a time she owned or rented a beach house on Scotland island on Pittwater, near Sydney's northern beaches. Modern-day Scotland island resident Leicester Warburton attests to the local legend that buried somewhere on the island is a cache of Tilly's money and jewellery that she attempted to hide from the Taxation Department after they began their pursuit of her. Once Warburton was swimming ‘and I dived down and saw a vague rectangular shape at the bottom, and suddenly the thought popped into my head that this may be Tilly Devine's fabled treasure trove.’ To his dismay, the treasure chest proved to be no more than an old Silent Knight refrigerator someone had dumped.

  While some police officers seemed reasonably content for Tilly and Kate to continue catering to the victimless vices of Sydneysiders indefinitely, as long as things didn't get too rough, the Taxation Department was not so understanding. Around the early 1950s, the department eyed the women's wealth and found it at odds with their tax statements, or lack of them. Kate, the taxman discovered, had not submitted a return since 1942, and in the returns she had filed from 1938 to 1941 her declared income was just £115. The department came down on the old woman like a ray Blissett haymaker. It levied an assessment on her of £6191. Kate was forced to swallow her pride and protest that she could not, would not, pay, so the department sued her for the money. When various friends who had loaned Kate money to invest on their behalf learned that she was no longer flush with funds, they panicked and sued her for the return of their money.

  Kate was declared bankrupt on 31 March 1954, on the petition of the deputy commissioner of taxation, and the authorities took action to claim all her assets. Her Lansdowne Street house and her remaining three Devonshire Street properties, including her sly-grog headquarters at no. 212, were sold for a total of £1830, and the tax people realised another £130 from the sale of the furniture within. Her furs, her rings, her hats were all confiscated and sold, and the proceeds turned over to the Taxation Department.

  Kate was reduced to near poverty. ‘Look at me,’ she said at the time. ‘I'm almost as poor as the lowest derelict I ever helped. The only lesson I've learned is the old one, that crime — if you can call sly-grogging a crime — doesn't pay.’ in June, Kate suffered a stress-induced blackout when climbing stairs and fell heavily.

  She recovered, and was in Bankruptcy Court in August as tax officials continued to try to untangle her finances. The press flocked to report on her humiliation. When W.D.T. Ward, the lawyer representing the official receiver, placed Kate in the witness stand, she, possibly to win sympathy, began her evidence by telling Ward that she had not been well, and was quite deaf. The lawyer was unmoved and proceeded to dismantle his quarry. He made her agree that she had paid out thousands upon thousands of pounds in police fines over the previous ten years and demanded to know where she got the money. ‘Selling liquor, but I have given away more liquor than I have sold. I have given it away for nothing.’

  Ward then asked her to explain how she had been able to pay her solicitor, Mr roach, who had been so busy on her behalf. ‘Mr roach has been very good to me. I have not paid him several times because I haven't had any money. One day I might be able to give him £1000 or £2000 because I might win the lottery, or something.’ And with what did she pay her barristers, including the expensive Dovey? ‘Mr roach has paid the barristers,’ she said quietly. She also claimed that ‘samaritans’ had given her money over the years. ‘I've helped a lot of people when they were down and out and now they've come good while I'm down and out,’ she said. Ward looked at his notes and saw that a Mrs Parsons was one of Kate's creditors. Was she the notorious Tilly Devine? ‘Oh cripes, no,’ Leigh chuckled. ‘This Mrs Parsons is respectable.’

&nbs
p; Ward quizzed Kate on the sly-grog business. ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘I buy wine for four shillings a bottle and sell it for seven, eight or ten shillings a bottle. But business has fallen off. There are many others in the game these days. And the cops get most of the takings when they fine me. The good old days are gone. And even when times were good, Jack Baker was the principal and got most of the money. I haven't got one penny piece. You could turn the place from Sydney to England and you would not find a penny piece belonging to me. I'm stony broke. I live on less than £2 a week, eating neither meat nor potatoes and making a loaf of bread last a fortnight. I haven't bought clothes for three years.’ Ward asked what had become of her fabulous diamond rings. ‘Lost two down the drain, lost one in flour, gave my nephew one. I sold one and bought clothes with it.’

  Another to take the stand was William Beahan, son of one of Kate's siblings and recipient of a ring, who managed the fruit-and-vegetable shop at 212 Devonshire Street. Beahan was asked to shed light on Kate's financial situation. He said she was ‘a proud woman’ but she was poor. She had not been wealthy for years. In earlier times, Beahan said, when Kate was told a woman was wearing a £50 hat, she would boast ‘Well, my hat costs £200.’ She didn't say things like that anymore. Beahan said he paid his aunt, who now lived upstairs in a squalid room at 212 Devonshire Street, £2 a week rent to sell produce in the shop, but would often supplement that with gifts of fruit and vegetables. Beahan added that Kate ‘puts on parties for kids, but she has never smoked or drunk in her life’. Yes, she did sell sly grog, but he had never had anything to do with that.

  Broke and embattled, Kate did her best to earn a li ttle money selling illegal alcohol from friends’ homes and rented rooms. Then, in 1955, the new South Wales Government put her out of business for good when it ended the six O'clock swill, extending hotel trading hours to 10 p.m. Suddenly there was absolutely no reason for a drinker to imbibe illicitly, and the era of sly grog, and with it Kate Leigh's criminal career, was over. Kate's only income was what she could scrounge occasionally hiring out hand-carts to vegetable and fruit hawkers for two shillings and sixpence a day.

  The following year, it was Tilly Devine's turn to be mugged by the Taxation Department. In October 1955, it ordered her to pay more than £20 000 in unpaid income tax and fines. It sequestered £3862 from her bank account towards the bill and warned her that if the balance wasn't forthcoming, more fines would be levied upon her. For once, there was no party going on when a reporter telephoned Devine at her Maroubra home. ‘Tell me, where am I going to get twenty grand?’ the distraught Tilly asked. ‘I'm a sick woman and won't be able to pay the dough before I die. The whole thing has got me beat. The Taxation Department gave clearances to me and my husband before we went to England in 1948 and 1953. I am a trifle deaf in the left ear and did not understand the taxation people recently when they asked me to call and see them. Had I understood the message and turned up, all might have been straightened out. I've battled all my life to get where I am today, and now I get this slug. I'm in a ton of trouble. I'll certainly have to ask the taxation blokes for time to pay.’

  Tilly, like Kate, had to sell her assets to pay the Taxation Department, although somehow she managed to hang on to the Maroubra home. ‘I'm broke,’ she wailed. ‘I've had to sell everything I own.’ At one point, she claimed to police that she could not sell her diamonds and give the proceeds to the taxman because a former friend had stolen them. She had been drinking heavily at Torrington road with the friend and had passed out. When she awoke, the rings on her fingers were gone. The authorities refused to believe her.

  By 1959, Devine, ‘the Queen of the night’ who had once presided over so many thriving brothels, had just one establishment, and a shabby affair at that, in Palmer Street, to her name. ‘The taxman finished her,’ says George Parsons. ‘It was the classic Al Capone scenario. They couldn't get him for the murders he committed, but they got him for not paying his tax. That's how they got my aunt.’

  39

  Last Rites for Razorhurst

  In 1955, a man threw Dulcie Markham from the balcony of a first-floor flat in Bondi. In hospital, she insisted the fellow was a stranger, but the police believed he was a client. Markham never really recovered from the serious internal injuries and broken ribs she suffered in the fall. She became known in the neighbourhood as ‘the Limping Blonde’. Mirror man Bill Jenkings saw her soon after her accident, in Central Court where she faced a soliciting charge. He remembered it as resembling a celebrity's return when she entered the court building. ‘. . . Down at the court she was smiling, waving at friends, including me, and [was] stylishly dressed in a mauve frock. She sported a becoming blonde coiffure . . . tough old Dulcie.’

  Virtually crippled by the fall, she could no longer work as a prostitute. She met an irish sailor who, a novelty for her, had no criminal connections, and she lived with him in East Sydney until 1964. She was happy and they lived quietly, staying out of trouble (if a few vagrancy and soliciting charges are discounted) until one day the sailor was savagely beaten by a man in their flat. Soon after, the irishman was gone.

  There was a minor brouhaha in the late 1950s when a fire broke out in a house where Markham was living in Botany and she complained to the police that it was a case of arson. She attempted to cut a deal with Detective Sergeant Bill Harris. ‘She walked into my office,’ he recalls, ‘and she had some mongrel of a bloke with her and I said to him, “You're not welcome here. Get out and wait in the street.” He did so, and that left Dulcie and me alone. She said, “Sergeant, I know the fire was deliberately lit and I want you to find who did it and deliver him to me because I want to deal with him.” I said, “Why is it so important that you get him?” She said, “i had many thousands of pounds sewn up in a settee that was destroyed in the fire and I believe some bastard stole the money first then burned the house down. If you deliver the bloke to me, there'll be a score of quids in it for you.” I said, “Dulcie, forget it. When I find out who set the fire I'll arrest him first and tell you second.” it turned out it was Dulcie's niece who started the blaze.’

  Bumper Farrell once told a judge that, in his opinion, Dulcie Markham was ‘past redemption’, but he was wrong, for in the early 1960s she went straight. A short while after her irish lover departed, she married another solid citizen, named Martin rooney. For twelve years they lived together, peacefully and within the law, in a neat two-storey semi-detached house in Moore Street, Bondi. They had a dog.

  Then, on 20 April 1976, when Markham was sixty-three, she said goodnight to rooney and retired to bed just after 9 p.m. As she always did before closing her grey eyes and drifting to sleep, she lit a cigarette. This night, she dozed off while the cigarette was still burning. It set fire to her bed and Dulcie Markham was asphyxiated by the smoke before her husband could rescue her.

  ‘I loved the woman,’ Martin rooney sobbed after his wife's body had been taken away by ambulancemen. ‘She was a wonderful housewife and we both wanted to forget the past. She was Mrs rooney, not Pretty Dulcie.’ Her funeral service was held at St Patrick's Church in Bondi and she was cremated at the Eastern Suburbs Crematorium.

  Frank Green once boasted to his lover nellie Cameron, ‘no bullet will ever get me.’ He was right. It was a knife, a 30-centimetre carving knife, which, in 1956, ended the life of the last of the razor-men.

  In his fifties, Green was wizened and frail, a shadow of the murderous street fighter and gunman that he was in his younger days. He now disguised his baldness with a greasy comb-over. A neighbour once told police, ‘I have never seen Green any other way than the worse for liquor, either morning, noon or night.’ it wasn't just the alcohol that had destroyed Green's constitution. He liked to joke that he had so many bullets in his body — indeed, at his autopsy, eight were discovered — that he rattled when he walked. These days, about all that would give a passer-by pause on coming face to face with Green in a desperate part of town was the large Razor scar on his right cheek and his intense
dark eyes.

  Green had lived in obscurity since his career as a major criminal finished at the end of the 1930s. Like Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, he found himself marginalised by the new breed of bad-man. In World War ii he was employed by various new Mr Bigs to collect standover payments from gambling dens near army bases. At war's end, he opened his own illegal betting shop in Paddington. When that quickly foundered, he was reduced to painting houses Monday to Friday and working as a cockatoo at a Woolloomooloo SP betting shop on Saturdays.

  In the mid 1950s, Green rented a shabby flat in Cooper Street, Paddington. His live-in lover was a woman named Beatrice ‘Bobbie’ Haggett, a saleswoman in a city department store. They fought often in the two years they lived as man and wife, usually after they had been drinking heavily. A frequent source of arguments was Green's penchant for pawning everything that was not nailed down, including an electric Razor and wireless of Haggett's, to fund his booze sprees. One October night in 1955 after a particularly nasty argument, Haggett walked out on Green to live with someone new. When Green learned her whereabouts, he stalked her. ‘Frank and another man came looking for us with iron bars,’ she later told a court. ‘He kept sending me rude messages about different men I was supposed to have been with, or telling me to pay off goods he'd bought on time payment.’

  But even while he was, in his inimitable way, trying to entice Haggett back to his fold, he had replaced her in his bed with a prostitute from Kings Cross known as Larry. She, to Green's jealous fury, had a tattoo on her arm reading ‘Phil’, the name of her husband. What Larry thought about the woman's breast tattooed on Green's arm is not recorded. For six months, Green and Larry lived together. As well as frequent drunken arguments, there were tender moments. ‘He had an old bullet lodged at the base of his spine,’ Larry would tell reporters. ‘It used to break out into an abscess, and every four hours I'd bathe it for him. Another old bullet had caused a cyst in his stomach and from time to time it would swell. He would not go near a doctor and would deflate the swelling by sticking a needle in it.’ But such quality times were not enough, and Larry left Green in early April 1956.