The Night Dragon

by Matthew Condon

  The New South Wales police had a host of bad apples but none more so than Gunner Kelly. Inspector Kelly, arguably Sydney’s best-known detective of his era, famously said once: ‘I’ve shot brumbies. I’ve chased steers. But there’s nothing to touch the thrill of a manhunt.’

  At his peak during the 1960s, the mere mention of Kelly’s name would strike fear into the criminal milieu; he had a huge array of criminal informants and would later use them for his corrupt practices. According to author David Hickie in his book, The Prince and the Premier, ‘He [Kelly] became the best-known crime investigator in New South Wales, who always seemed to turn up at the right place at the right time. His success was based on the extensive “espionage” service he built up over several decades, a grapevine notorious for its sordid nature. The many criminal phiz-gigs [informants] who worked for him usually did so in fear of the consequences if they refused.’ One of his leading informants was Frederick ‘Paddles’ Anderson.

  New South Wales detective Frederick Claude ‘Froggy’ Krahe, like Kelly, also had an enormous number of contacts in the underworld, and lived off his reputation as a hard and feared man. He would end up having an affair with brothel madam Shirley Brifman from Queensland. And through Brifman, Krahe developed a relationship with Glen Hallahan and Tony Murphy. It was the hard-nosed, Brisbane-based Murphy that most resembled Krahe, given they were similar in age, cultivated a dangerous, hardman image, and shared Brifman as a lover.

  Then there were the gunmen Stewart John Regan and Vincent O’Dempsey. The boy from Upper Freestone in the Darling Downs soon developed a reputation in Sydney as a reliable ‘gun for hire’. He was organised and meticulous and a man who understood that ‘business was business’. Years later, when O’Dempsey reminisced about his youthful exploits at the end of a weapon in the 1960s and 70s, he described his work as ‘just business’.

  Friends of O’Dempsey during this period described his special ‘shooter’s outfit’ – a raincoat and beanie – that he’d wear to avoid any gunshot residue. They said he would burn everything after a job, including all clothes and shoes, and that he preferred to travel or move around under cover of darkness.

  O’Dempsey was also intimately acquainted with his surroundings at all times. He planned things down to the letter, drew up maps and took notes on potential hazards. He was permanently alert to being followed.

  As one colleague observed: ‘He wasn’t a loose cannon that would sit there and then he’d fly off the handle or anything like that … he was Cool Hand Luke all the time. Everything went into that brain of his … he’d digest it and then nut it all out and then he’d say, “Right, this is what we’ve got to do.”’

  The colleague also said O’Dempsey was always prepared in the event that he might get caught. He had several ‘hidey-holes’ where he stashed guns, money and drugs off major highways and roads between Warwick and Sydney. ‘He said never bury anything where they’re going to widen the road, and always bury it in a container that’s tight, so white ants can’t get into it and water can’t damage it,’ the colleague said. ‘He told me one time when he got in the nick he was stuffed, but he knew he had 20 grand of his heroin money snookered away somewhere. He said, “Money’s your best friend when you’re inside and when you get out of the clink – money’s your best friend.”’

  Still, in many respects, while O’Dempsey and Regan may not have been like brothers, their upbringing, methods and predilections were part of the same broader family. In some instances, they bore some striking similarities. In the 1960s Regan, at just 17, was working as a fist for hire for various brothels, and living off the earnings of prostitutes, just like O’Dempsey. Regan was about seven years younger than O’Dempsey, but both had been born and raised in country towns; Regan in the historic gold mining town of Young, in the New South Wales central west, about 370 kilometres from Sydney.

  Regan was the only son of Arthur and Clare Regan. Regan would call his mother ‘The Colonel’. He was raised a Catholic, as was O’Dempsey. Regan wanted to join the Army as a young man but was precluded courtesy of flat feet. O’Dempsey was enlisted briefly in the Army before he was discharged following allegations of sexual assault against another recruit. Both men were extremely conscious of their health. Regan didn’t drink alcohol, he preferred orange juice. O’Dempsey rarely drank and was a committed vegetarian.

  Both men would leave prison and begin their careers as bouncers, Regan at strip joints and clubs, and O’Dempsey at Brisbane’s mock auctions and at brothels. Regan would eventually run a large number of prostitutes; O’Dempsey would later follow him down that path.

  The two men also had similar nicknames. Regan was ‘Nano’ or ‘The Magician’, because he made people disappear. O’Dempsey would be dubbed ‘Silent Death’ and later ‘Swami’ for the very same reason.

  It is unclear how the men met, though in the early 1960s Regan was in control of several brothels and had ambitions to take over the prostitution scene in Kings Cross, and O’Dempsey was living off the earnings of a prostitute in the same sleazy suburb. Both men also shared a passion for property and real estate. Close friends of O’Dempsey would confirm that he and Regan would later become ‘business partners’ in a property in Vince’s home town of Warwick. But that was in the future.

  Billy and Barbara

  By the mid-1960s, O’Dempsey had established a reputation for violence in Sydney and had already done time for the serious assault of a police officer in Warwick. Rumour that he’d ‘vanished’ Tommy Allen followed in his wake. Coupled with the fact that he was a ballistics expert and not averse to carrying weapons at all times, including pistols and knives, the word in both criminal and police communities along the east coast of Australia was that O’Dempsey was a man to be reckoned with. He would later be called one of the last of the old-time gangsters.

  As O’Dempsey was making his presence felt up and down the coast between Brisbane and Sydney, a young mother, Barbara May McCulkin, was living a life on the move with her husband, Robert William ‘Billy’ McCulkin. McCulkin was in the Navy Reserve and had been posted around various bases before briefly settling in Nowra on the New South Wales south coast.

  Barbara, who had grown up in the country town of Maryborough, Queensland, was not only coming to terms with motherhood in a strange town but had started wondering about the man she’d married. The reality of her marriage was falling short of the dreams she’d had as a girl. Since living with Billy, she had learned in no uncertain terms that he liked a drink, could be violent, and that he mixed in unsavoury company.

  When little Barbara May was growing up in the sugar cane and timber town north of Brisbane she would drive her three brothers mad with her incessant tap dancing. The only daughter of James Gardiner and May Alice Ogden, she and brothers Neville, Barry and Graham lived in an old Queenslander in Pallas Street. ‘She was a popular girl,’ brother Graham remembers. ‘She was likeable, and most times she had a happy demeanour. There were no problems. I don’t think she even smoked.’

  For the Ogdens, money was always tight. An additional worry was an ill mother. May Ogden had contracted tuberculosis and was often ill with chest problems. ‘Mum spent a lot of time in hospital,’ Graham said.

  Barbara, who was not academically inclined, left school and got a job working at Kings Café in Queen Street, not far from the Mary River. In her late teens, Barbara fell pregnant. She wanted to keep the child but her father disallowed it. The baby, Jocelyn, was subsequently adopted out. Even so, Graham Ogden said his sister was bright and bubbly, with a ‘wicked sense of humour’.

  At some point, working at Kings Café, Barbara met Billy McCulkin from Brisbane. Just over five foot six inches tall, with brown wavy hair and green eyes, McCulkin had always been a roustabout. His nose had been broken so many times in fights that a detective would later call it ‘Billy’s east-west nose’.

  In his Record of Service with the Navy’s Strategic Reserve, M
cCulkin listed his profession as ‘storeman and packer’. Billy joined eight days after he turned 18 in March 1957. He saw service at several naval bases – HMAS Tobruk, Sydney and Penguin – in the late 1950s. Coincidentally, in the winter of 1959, a fellow Queenslander – Noel O’Dempsey, brother to Vincent O’Dempsey, from Stewart’s Avenue, Warwick – also served briefly at Penguin, in the suburb of Balmoral on Middle Head in Sydney Harbour.

  In June 1960 McCulkin went on to marry Barbara, who was already four months’ pregnant with their first child, Vicki Maree, born in Sydney on 9 November. Billy took two weeks’ leave for the occasion. Their second daughter, Barbara Leanne (known as Leanne), was born two years later on 26 June, when Billy was based at the HMAS Albatross, the RAN’s air base near Nowra south of Sydney. By the end of that year, Billy parted ways with the Navy and began kicking around Sydney. In 1966, he temporarily separated from Barbara. It was during this period, in the mid-1960s, that O’Dempsey and McCulkin began a friendship on the streets of Kings Cross.

  They were a curious pair, McCulkin and O’Dempsey. McCulkin was short, stocky and drank too much. O’Dempsey, however, imbibed very little and was extremely conscious of his diet. McCulkin was a hanger-on. As one associate observed: ‘Billy McCulkin was just hanging onto other people’s coat-tails, trying to be a part of the group.’

  Former detective Alan Marshall got to know McCulkin well through various investigations during the 1970s. ‘Yes, he’s a very complex personality … and his biggest problem was the alcohol. Like he was the most ugly-looking man you’d ever come across. [His nose] had been flattened across his face so many times. He actually did a bit of work for a couple of solicitors at one time to try and collect some unpaid fees. He knocked on the door this one time and this bloke said, “What do you want?” Billy said, “I want the money for the solicitor’s fees.” The bloke just went bang, and knocked Billy out. When Billy went and saw the solicitor he said, “I don’t want any more to do with this, I’m out of here.” Because Billy wasn’t very big, he was only about five foot five inches.’

  It was an extraordinary time in Sydney’s Kings Cross, with brothels and illegal gambling rampant. O’Dempsey was living off the earnings of a prostitute who worked out of the infamous Rex Hotel. There was also no shortage of Queenslanders in Sin City in the early stages of their criminal careers, who would have undoubtedly crossed paths with O’Dempsey on the small intersection of streets that made up the notorious inner-city suburb.

  As O’Dempsey and McCulkin began forging a friendship, former Atherton girl Shirley Brifman was also setting herself up around the corner as one of the city’s most notorious brothel madams. Brifman also kept a room at the Rex, where she would entertain corrupt Detective Glen Hallahan when he was in town – which he frequently was. Brifman was also close to leading Brisbane detective Tony Murphy, and when she wasn’t back in Brisbane on business where they could catch up, they corresponded by letter.

  Brisbane detectives, Glen Hallahan, Tony Murphy and Terry Lewis (who would later become Police Commissioner) would also collaborate with their New South Wales counterparts and regularly visit the big smoke. In the early 1960s the detectives, known as the Rat Pack, had consolidated ‘The Joke’ with Licensing Branch officer Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert. The Joke was an elaborate system of graft and protection payments that Queensland police collected off the back of illegal gambling, SP bookmakers and brothels. Over time, it was a network that infiltrated all corners of the state and yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars for the police involved.

  Another woman, Norma Beniston, also known as Simone Vogel, was similarly making a name for herself around Kings Cross during that time. As a prostitute starting out, she would rack up 170 convictions before finally moving up to the Sunshine State and establishing herself as a leading brothel madam. Vogel would be instrumental in setting up the new generation ‘massage parlour’ industry in Brisbane. Although she may not have known it yet, her path was also destined to cross with O’Dempsey and participants in The Joke, with disastrous consequences.

  At some point in 1966, McCulkin returned to Brisbane and caught up with his mate O’Dempsey. McCulkin would seek work only when he had to, and when he did earn money, he drank it away at the Lands Office Hotel in Brisbane, along with his criminal mates. A plan was soon hatched for O’Dempsey and McCulkin to rob a safe from the Waltons department store in Fortitude Valley. Both were ‘ratted out’ by a police informant to the notorious detective Glen Hallahan. It was rumoured that local tattooist William ‘Billy’ Garnett Phillips was the ‘dog’ who gave them up.

  O’Dempsey was charged with break, enter and steal, possession of an explosive substance without lawful excuse, and unlawful possession of an unlicensed firearm. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

  Curiously, McCulkin was held on remand for a month and then released. Had McCulkin been the beneficiary of some police favour? Or had the court been lenient given his relatively clean criminal record? Either way, it must have rankled O’Dempsey that he copped the full brunt of the offences, while his co-accused skipped free.

  Billy Phillips, known as the King of the Brisbane bodgies, was not the only one doing favours for police. Hallahan had also recruited the talents of former Westbrook inmates, young John Andrew Stuart and the future Clockwork Orange Gang member Tommy Hamilton. Both would go on to crack safes and commit robberies on the command of Hallahan, and the Rat Packer would split the proceeds with his stable of thieves. It was all part of The Joke.

  One friend of Hamilton says: ‘Tom was doing business with Hallahan in the 1960s. He’d do jobs for him and if Tom was picked up the charges would be dropped. It was mainly to do with stolen goods. [Detective] Tony Murphy was there in the mix too. Tommy was a good crook. He used to get messages to and from Hallahan through the Nundah police, not far from where we all grew up. That’s how he got the word through about jobs and stuff. They were all kicking back money to the corrupt cops.’

  At some point the distinguished detectives Murphy and Hallahan had crossed the line in terms of their use of criminal informants. Instead of gleaning information from them to solve crimes, the detectives were now using those informants as tools to commit crimes on their behalf. Tommy Hamilton, John Andrew Stuart and Billy Phillips were on Hallahan’s team. McCulkin, fortuitously for him, was attached to the honest officer Basil ‘The Hound’ Hicks, while Vince O’Dempsey, the most prized and the most dangerous informant of all, had a future beckoning with Tony Murphy.

  Invariably, in their early years, this loose constellation of young criminals would orbit around Phillips and his tattoo parlours. Criminal Billy Stokes says: ‘When he [Phillips] opened a tattoo shop opposite the South Brisbane train station in 1961 it was a regular meeting place for lots of the boys. The shop had a small bed behind a partition and anyone who picked up a willing girl could take her there for a root. Once, showing that he was also interested in cops and robbers games, Phillips flashed a revolver around the shop.’

  When McCulkin was released on remand in late 1966, he returned to his wife Barbara and their children, Vicki and Leanne, and they rented various properties in Brisbane. Barbara worked to support the family. There was always very little money. Barbara was so desperate to keep the family afloat that she had a workmate open a separate bank account to secure part of her wages and keep them out of Billy’s hands. She also made sure her wider family was not aware of her problems at home.

  ‘Barbara not only kept a clean and tidy house and held down a part-time job in a café, she provided a stable home life for her family with the resources she had,’ her brother Graham said. ‘Barbara was completely discreet with us when it came to her husband, Billy McCulkin. While we knew him to be a sometimes difficult and moody man, who had been violent towards her, she never criticised him or discussed anything about their marital problems in our presence.

  ‘But I never liked the bastard.’

  Boggo Road
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  Brisbane’s notorious Boggo Road Gaol, not far from the South Brisbane cemetery in the suburb of Dutton Park, was no place for the faint-hearted in the 1960s. It was a perpetual carousel of young inmates who would, within a decade, develop the city’s cabal of hardened criminals in concert with corrupt police. The repercussions of their actions in the violent, tumultuous decade that followed would reverberate into the 21st century.

  ‘It was a finishing school for the boys who went to Westbrook [Farm Home for Boys],’ says one former inmate of Boggo Road. ‘By the time you got out of there you had absolutely no respect for authority. When you see what happens in there and the shit that goes on, it’s almost hard to believe.’

  On any given month in Boggo Road Gaol in the 1960s, you could acquaint yourself with the likes of John Andrew Stuart, Garry Dubois and older inmates like Arthur Ernest ‘Slim’ Halliday and Gunther Bahnemann. Many would form serious friendships on the inside and become criminal associates on the outside.

  One former inmate, incarcerated at 17 for the unlawful use of a motor vehicle, went inside in 1964 on a 12-month sentence. ‘I went to work in the kitchen,’ the former inmate recalls. ‘There was another guy, he was the head cook and he was a nice guy, he was … a lot older than me, and he said if you’re going over to the stores – from Two Gaol, that’s where the store was, you had to go through this tunnel. He told me to watch the screw in charge of the kitchen. He said, “Never get on the back of a barrow.”’

  The ‘barrows’ were metal boxes containing prisoners’ meals that were delivered by the prison kitchen hands, usually boys, from One Gaol. ‘The head cook told me that when you’re going through and he stands and opens the gate and you walk through the carrier, he said the screw tries to stop you and play with your dick,’ the inmate recalls. ‘I said, “You’re fucking kidding.”