Leviathan

by John Birmingham

  According to McCoy the informal alliance of the underworld and the city’s political superstructure became evident in 1967 as men like Borg and Reilly began to die. The very nature of this violence was a measure of the new system. Between 1944 and 1963 there were, writes McCoy, only eight murders in Sydney’s criminal milieu, an average of one killing every 2.25 years. Many of these were the result of personal vendettas and involved such intimate methods of murder as combat with knives, chains and pistols. The five killings of 1967, however, occurred at the rate of one every five weeks, and were ‘impersonal liquidations involving machine guns, sniper rifle and dynamite’. The victims had set themselves against the new regime by refusing to recognise its authority. Most significantly ‘none of Sydney’s new syndicate leaders were indicted or even investigated for their role in these killings. When it became apparent to the milieu that the new syndicate “powers” had an immunity to police investigation, vice traders either sold out their business to the syndicate or retired’.

  The central business of organised crime has always been extortion, mostly on the supply side of any illicit economic activity. Like any other capitalist enterprise the ultimate objective, explains Judith Allen, is to maximise profits by the greatest possible control of the market, ‘a striving towards the ideal of monopoly’. Here perhaps, we can find the genesis of the city’s fall; that ceaseless, shifting dissonance within Sydney’s history, that will to power in a place without history, long-lived institutions or a moral centre. There is something so familiar in the way the likes of George Freeman and Lennie McPherson consolidated their hold over the city in the 1960s. Something so ordinary in the ferment of violence and ruthlessness directed towards establishing their monopolistic power. John Macarthur would have understood.

  But in the end, of course, understanding counts for little when measured against consequence and the sorrows of the dead.

  Gordon Gallagher was a good cop. And that, said his wife Wendy, was the problem. The politics, she said, the politics were well and truly there. ‘Yeah, well and bloody truly,’ whispered Gordon beside her. I had to lean forward to hear him and keep my own voice low, concentrating hard on what he was saying, because Gordon was dying. The cancer which had taken Wendy’s brother just a few years before had come back to claim another of her men, and although the pain had not yet disordered his mind, it had reduced him to a husk who could only murmur his last thoughts into my tape recorder. He was fifty-one years old when I spoke to him, fifty-two when he died.

  We sat at the kitchen table in their simple home on the city’s south western fringe. ‘You’ll have to excuse the mess,’ said Wendy as I tried not stare at the cleanest house I had ever seen. Empty display homes in model estates could only aspire to be this immaculate. The crumbs which spilled from the plate of fruitcake she served me were the only unruly element, unless you wanted to count the bursts of uncontrolled muscle spasms which seized poor Gordon every now and then. He was a bald, kindly, round-shouldered man, with none of the hardness or scarring of the soul you might expect to find in a veteran of the force. He wasn’t hard enough, said Wendy. That was his problem. He wasn’t hard enough and tough enough. He had a conscience, she said, leaning forward, wanting me to understand. ‘Gordon never lost his humanity,’ she said, ‘and I’m pleased about that, John. He always stayed a person, a fair person, I’m proud of him.’

  Gordon joined the force in 1965 looking for a job with a bit of security. He worked as a tyre-fitter in Liverpool after leaving school, meeting his wife-to-be when she was a fifteen-year-old office girl with the same outfit. He never burned to be a policeman, unlike many of them. He was just getting a little old to learn a trade and looking for a job he could settle into for the rest of his life. The tyre game wasn’t much money, he reckoned. You’d work your arse off all day for next to nothing. Wendy didn’t want him anywhere near the force, though. She wanted him to go into the fire brigade if he absolutely had to get involved in that sort of thing. ‘My next-door neighbour was a police officer,’ she said, ‘and he used to say to me, “Tell him not to do it.” He didn’t understand the implications.’

  There were 120 or so in his class at the academy. Only two of them were women. They were a pretty good bunch, as he remembered. A few footballers, some tradesmen, ex-screws, a few poms, a couple of blokes just out of the army. They all had similar reasons to him for going in and most were his age. They did six weeks initially, returning for a week’s secondary training every two months out of the next twelve. There was a lot of physical stuff, every morning and afternoon. Sit-ups, push-ups, weights and punching bags. The classroom work was basic, mostly paper shuffling. Gordon looked at it and shook his head and thought, ‘I don’t think I’m up for this.’ He used to hate paperwork. Still did, when I spoke to him.

  They sent him out to Regent Street to walk a daylight beat for a couple of weeks, completely lost, freaking out, ‘praying to Christ nobody was gunna ask me anything cos I didn’t know what to bloody do’. He got his first break when he was transferred to Glebe to work under an old cop named Joe Walker, a senior constable who’d been there since the First Fleet came in and who went by the name of the Doctor, because if he couldn’t fix something, it couldn’t be fixed.

  ‘Most of the work over there was street accidents,’ murmured Gordon. ‘Brawls in pubs and deceased persons, suicides. I had heaps of them. Every day you went to work you’d get at least one.’

  Wendy placed a hand on his arm and interrupted, ‘I remember one time he came home and we couldn’t let him inside the house because the bodies had exploded and they were all over him.’ They had to burn the uniforms, nodded Gordon. He was living out at Campbelltown then and had to drive all the way home with the stench seeping into his clothes, his hair, the folds of his skin. And not just the stench but other stuff too. Stuff you don’t talk about with the wife. I asked him how long it took to harden up. About twelve months, he answered. After about twelve months you ignore it. You say it’s nothing to do with me. Still, when you came to the end of the job it could get to you.

  ‘A lot of people go into the job and after about six months on the street they find somewhere to hide or run,’ he said, pausing, and then sighing. ‘Aaah … you go into places and everything’s splattered everywhere … you know, time and time again … especially the kids, cut up, you know.’

  Gordon and Wendy were married in 1972. Gordon spent six months with prints, a few weeks at Liverpool, then ten years in Green Valley, at that time the toughest of the city’s public housing estates. The Valley was mostly the haunt of the welfare generations, as he called them without any trace of judgment. Hundreds of thousands of hopeless souls forced to the edge of settlement, the last tidal outflow of the underclasses which Arthur Phillip set in motion when he despatched the convicts to the western side of the Cove. Marooned in estates where the architects had planned for everything except grinding poverty and inherited ennui, successive generations of the city’s poor devolved into modern variants of the ‘loathsome reptiles’ the Herald found in nineteenth-century slums like Durands Alley where ‘careless of life, and heedless of death, they sink into the grave leaving nothing behind them but a vicious example’. Gordon spent nearly two decades trawling through the wreckage of these lives. The distaste in his voice was palpable even with his low, murmuring delivery.

  ‘The suicides … oh, it was unbelievable the suicides out there. You’d get one at least every second day, one way or another, hanging or drugs, and they had this habit of blowing their bloody heads off with shotguns out there.’

  Wendy leaned forward and stroked his arm which had begun to shiver again. ‘Tell John about that time that fellow sat his kids down,’ she said, desperate that I should understand what Gordon had seen and done for twenty years. I doubt he was even seeing me when he replied in his soft, haunted voice, ‘One bloke got round the side of his house and held the shotgun under his mouth to blow his head off. He had his young blokes sitting there to watch him while he did
it.’

  Wendy and Gordon had a strange sort of interlude then, during which they spoke in their own personal shorthand, quick snatches and fragments of phrases conjuring up a vision of a shared hell. They repeated each other’s words like talismans. Much of the time Gordon would just moan or groan or say, ‘The stink’ or ‘The stench’, while remembering something. His left arm would fall and hang limp at his side until Wendy noticed and gently picked it up and replaced it on the table. His other hand, which was okay most of the time, would rise unsteadily to his forehead during a hard moment and begin to twitch and tremor as though with the onset of Parkinson’s.

  ‘The Green Valley Hotel,’ he said quietly, as though confiding a secret, ‘you’d go in to get someone … blokes there’d belt the living hell out of you … arms on them like this. Everyone had to have a fight … Christ, I couldn’t fight my way out of a paper bag, you know.’ He wasn’t lying. He seemed the antithesis of a hard-riding Sydney cop, even in photographs taken before the onset of his illness. He was not physically imposing. Threat did not emanate from him like a scent, the way it does with a lot of cops. ‘It was a new pub, this pub,’ he said. ‘Top ten pub in the State for a long time because it sold so much grog. It was even number one at one stage. It was the centre of social life out there.’ Wendy interrupted again to explain that the people had nothing else. It was miles away from Liverpool shopping centre, she said, with no rail line. ‘Yeah, the old pub, she was the centre of attention,’ laughed Gordon softly but without mirth. ‘I got some floggings … but gee did I get some floggings out there. I got one, I was in hospital for three months. I copped a bloody good kickin’… touch and go for about three months.’

  His eyes grew distant again, lost in the memory. ‘They just wouldn’t leave the pub,’ he said. ‘They had a baby. We went over to try and get them out of the pub but as we were trying to get rid of the father, the two sons jumped us. Me mate had glasses on and as soon as they smashed his glasses that was the end of him, he couldn’t see. At least he got back to the truck and got to the radio. I copped a bloody flogging on the ground, I did. From the four of them. Mum, dad and the two sons … You’d get belted up just about every night. Everywhere you went, domestics, everything. No-one’s going to go along easy, it’s always, “Come on, take me,” you know.’

  Gordon had an old Australian voice which still had a lot of residual power but it failed him frequently, trailing out long silences which were often more eloquent than words.

  ‘One of my mates … shot in the guts … shitbox bloody domestic … lucky to be alive.’

  At one point he transferred to Liverpool for two or three years but Green Valley called him home. Wherever he went in the west, however, the drugs were always there. It was a shame he said as his own life sputtered out of him, it was just a shame to see those kids going down the same shitty path. ‘Remember Ashcroft High?’ he asked Wendy. ‘They had that good football team. Lot of sports kids out there. It was a shame to see some of them go down. You’d look at them, six months later they’d be dead. OD. Shockin’ it was … hangin’ themselves … never seen so many hangings in me life,’ he muttered, reminding me of Brando’s Colonel Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now, so much tightly contained horror coiled up in the voice.

  Mostly I’m pretty good at keeping my distance during these interviews. Doesn’t matter how sad or outrageous the story might be, I just nod along, waiting for that telling detail, that awesome quote I know is going to nail the story for me. With Gordon and Wendy, however, I found myself worrying less about the interview and more about the subjects. They were simple folk, as Wendy stressed more than once. But their mutual regard, their love, and their unobtrusive pride in that love, was painful to observe. This man was obviously seeing out the closing weeks of his life and although his job had conspired to keep them apart so often – Gordon told me he had spent only one Christmas with Wendy in twenty years – they were closer than almost any married couple I knew. Perhaps the lack of children contributed to that. With many couples, childlessness seems to loom as a void with the passage of time, but these two seemed to have filled any emptiness with a heightened sense of each other’s worth. I had only recently been married myself and the strength of their bond was reassuring, just as its inevitable sundering by Gordon’s cancer would be wrenching and traumatic.

  It was his fight with the police service that was keeping him alive, even as it ruined their last days together. Some years before, Gordon had arrived at work to be told the district commander wanted him to transfer to Liverpool. Another sergeant was scheduled for the move but refused, having been entangled in an affair with another policeman’s wife over there. ‘He couldn’t move because this bloke was going to kill him,’ explained Gordon, who went in his place. The biggest mistake of his life, he now believed. In Liverpool he ran afoul of one of the rising stars of the force, a shameless self-promoter with a flair for massaging the media.

  ‘This bloke just didn’t like uniformed police to start with,’ explained Gordon. ‘He just hated uniformed police … no-one knows why … just an absolute bastard that’s all. His mentor was Attila the Hun … he took his leave once and wrote this little book. He was going to boost morale at the station. He took all these sayings from Attila the Hun.’

  When word came through from Queensland that Wendy’s brother had cancer, they decided to leave Sydney to look after him. ‘And John, I was happy for him to leave,’ said Wendy, ‘because those eighteen months he was under that man … Gordon’s always been an even-tempered … He’s not an easily provoked person … And he’s not a malicious person … And that last eighteen months under that man … Gordon would return to the house ropeable and ashen grey. I said it’s just no good for you, leave the stinking job, because I could see by that time it was really having a toll on him. Little did we know that he had a malignant melanoma on him. We’d sold the house. We’re in between the move. And in June Gordon gets diagnosed with a malignant melanoma. It was just one hell of a time. I saw Gordon’s health go down. And I think it was the stress. Because Gordon’s a straight person. And I don’t think this bloke could handle that attitude. The sergeants weren’t there to lick his boots. They were there to do a job. I mean, if the guy has a persecution number that’s his problem. You tell John what your opinion was, Gordon. What you joined the police force for.’

  Gordon, who was shaking quite a lot now, drew in a long shuddering breath. ‘Just to go to work and do your job,’ he breathed. ‘And to be left alone, and not be hampered by stupid bloody bosses about bloody stupid things when they knew that all this shit was going on.’

  His voice began to speed up and become more emphatic. What he meant by all this shit was the corruption exposed by the Wood Commission. ‘That’s what got him at the end,’ Wendy nodded emphatically. ‘It was blatant to a lot of them what was going on.’

  Unprompted, Gordon suddenly launched into a bitter speech, fired by an intense energy which had been missing up to that point. ‘You used to tell them things what were going on in the bloody cells and shit,’ he spat. ‘Why people were hanging themselves, you know, and some bloody things that might have helped. And they’d do bloody nothing about it! All they did was get up after some bastard was dead … You could bail bloody most of them … Get rid of them. Was only stupid little things they were kept in there for. They could have been bailed out and gone. That was just their procedure then, filling up the bloody cells with bloody people.’

  ‘The politics is there,’ said Wendy. ‘The black knights and the white knights, whatever you call them. The politics are there well and truly, John.’

  ‘Well and bloody truly,’ nodded her husband.

  ‘And if you’re not in, you’re gone.’

  ‘They’ve all come through the system,’ Gordon said. ‘They’re all ex-detectives. They’ve all been involved in the quid coppin’ and everything else. They’re all bosses. And if they didn’t know, they should have bloody known. That was their bloody job, to know,
to dig it out …’ This seemed to disgust Gordon more than anything. He bore the scars of doing his job for more than twenty years but the bosses had not done theirs. ‘The people who bloody complained …’ he continued. ‘Soon as you mentioned anything … Christ they came down on you like a bloody ton of bricks. Telling people to come forward … yeah come bloody forward all right.’

  ‘It’s like politics,’ said Wendy. ‘You pick on the easy one, don’t you? It’s the same system. Pick on the guys that can’t really defend themselves while the heavies, they keep going.’

  ‘It’s better off handing out a hundred bloody parking tickets than grabbing some bloody crook,’ muttered Gordon.

  Wendy leaned forward with an imploring look on her face. ‘You guys would know this, you’re round it all the time, aren’t you?’ she said, meaning journalists. ‘You’re seeing it. You must see it better than dumbos like us. God only knows what goes on in some places. You would have seen it up in Queensland. What can you do about it? Will anything ever be done?’

  ‘Some blokes, they try to do their bloody job …’ Gordon whispered to himself.

  ‘And they’re worse off for doing it, aren’t they?’ said Wendy. ‘To be fair and have a good police service you’ve got to have it from the top down, don’t you? Maybe I’m very naive in my talkings … But I think it’s the only way that people are going to gain confidence … Why are they frying the little guy, and the big guy who is responsible keeps getting off the hook all the time? Nobody is going to address that in my opinion, John. That’s the game, isn’t it … it’s so political. And that’s why the police force will never be what the public would like it to be … because it’s so political … I presume from the detectives up is where it kicks in. You look at the royal commission, that seems to be where it’s coming from. Not that Gordon or myself would ever know about those levels.’