Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  Kelly’s efforts notwithstanding, in the end no one was charged with Walker’s death, despite a £1000 reward. At the inquest, O’Connor reappeared and said, ‘On 9 July 1963 about 6.10pm I refuse to answer where I was, as the answer may incriminate me.’ As for Stan Smith, he ‘wouldn’t say that I could recollect where I was on 9 July. One day is the same as another.’

  Coroner John Loomes observed glumly, ‘I have met a wall of silence in these proceedings.’ He concluded that Walker had ‘come to his death as a result of an elaborately prepared and carefully planned method of extermination in typical gangster fashion per medium of the machine gun … this is the first of its type in the State.’17

  Both the Chicago-style killing of Walker and the fact no one was charged enhanced McPherson’s reputation in the underworld. Now forty-two, he was not yet seen as Mr Big, but he was close enough for others to want to contest his reputation. This meant more competitors who had to be removed.

  In February 1964, according to Tony Reeves, he killed standover man and greyhound trainer Charles Bourke, at 26 Norton Street, Randwick. Bourke was shot fourteen times in the front yard as he came home late at night, his body – clothed in sports shirt, slacks and the ubiquitous cardigan – sprawled on the crazy paving.

  Bourke was a senior underworld figure, active since the early 1940s. On the night of his death he had visited a few gambling clubs and among the witnesses at the inquest were Reginald Andrews and Richard Reilly of the Kellett Club, and Bruce (son of Perce) Galea of the Victoria Club. They all claimed he’d been to see them about a dog.

  Andrews recalled a visit from Bourke the previous week in which ‘There was some conversation with him on that occasion concerning bullet wounds he had received in the past … he said [he had] a total of sixteen or something in bullet wounds … He said it was an awful life he led and he never really felt like a normal person and never knew when his life would be jeopardised.’

  It was certainly an impressive record for someone who was nominally just a greyhound trainer, even allowing for the notoriety of that occupation. Detective Sergeant Richard Lendrum of the CIB gave evidence that one of these wounds had been incurred in 1943, when Bourke had been shot by his wife.

  An article in the Sunday Mirror, 22 March 1964, announced that ‘Bourke died because he had fallen foul of the king of the Sydney underworld’, and Tony Reeves suggested that Bourke died because he was in competition with McPherson over the provision of protection to gambling clubs. Apart from the Mirror article, McPherson suffered no inconvenience from the night when Bourke was, in the words of the coroner, ‘ruthlessly and viciously exterminated’. Ray Kelly saw to that.18

  Then there was the attempted killing of Robert Steele in 1965. In his Oz magazine, Richard Neville – early in his career as a counter-culture guru – had described McPherson as a ‘fizzgig’ – a police informant. Oz used only the name ‘Lenny’, but people knew to whom that referred. Steele, who thought he was tougher than McPherson, bought twenty copies of the magazine and handed them around the underworld to provoke McPherson. He succeeded. One night in November, while walking home from the pub to his residence in Wallis Street, Woollahra, Steele was cut down by a fusillade from a shotgun, rifle and pistol. Forty pieces of lead pierced his body, yet remarkably he survived, acquiring the nickname ‘Ironman’.

  McPherson also paid a call to Richard Neville to discuss his unhappiness with the article. Neville later recalled the encounter.

  ‘A bear-like stranger pushed through my Paddington door and introduced himself as Lennie McPherson. I was alone. How had he got my address?

  “From a mate. His son’s at the university. A friend of yours.”

  ‘Small world.

  “I’m not a rival gang,” said Neville.

  “And I’m not a fizzgig,” said McPherson. “Okay?”’

  Neville asked McPherson to give him a lift to the Savoy cinema, where he had to review a foreign language film for the Sydney Morning Herald. McPherson obliged. On the way into town, Neville inquired about gashes in the car’s ceiling and some shredded upholstery.

  ‘Shotgun.’19

  It was an odd action on McPherson’s part, odd to visit a magazine editor in his own home. But McPherson liked to get on the front foot and he was always interested in what the media had to say about him.

  He was also a keen traveller, mainly to Asia. In 1966 Stan Smith and he travelled to Hong Kong, where the authorities, forewarned, declined to allow them entry. The Hong Kong cops advised their NSW equivalents that the duo ‘had letters of introduction to some shady character here who certainly would have been able to lend assistance one way or another. They seem to have a particular interest in prostitution’.

  There’s a famous photo of McPherson and Stan Smith taken at a press conference in Sydney on their return from Hong Kong.20 Both wear the coat and tie obligatory for the era, but there the sartorial similarity ends. Sporting a check waistcoat and pork-pie hat, Smith looks like a bodgie version of Frank Sinatra. McPherson’s garb is much more conventional. In his sombre club tie he looks like any member of the Australian establishment in the mid-20th century – which in a way he was. His wonky eye ranges with disturbing, unfocussed effect over the interviewer’s shoulder.

  ENTER SHIRLEY BRIFMAN: ‘ROYAL COMMISSIONER SLUT’

  The relationship between Fred Krahe and Shirley Brifman is at the core of this book. With Krahe’s help, Brifman became Sydney’s most notorious madam, and an intermediary between crooked cops and the underworld. Then he let her down and she turned on him, in a series of interviews with police investigators that gave the most intimate account of Sydney Noir we possess.

  Born Shirley Emerson in 1935 on North Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands, she was the youngest of twelve children. Her father was a feckless drunk and Shirley escaped early to the big smoke of Cairns, where she started working as a prostitute before she was twenty. She also worked as a barmaid in the Court House Hotel and in June 1957 married its proprietor, Polish immigrant Szama (‘Sonny’) Brifman. At forty-two, he was exactly twice her age.21

  In 1958 the Brifmans moved to Brisbane. She continued to work as a prostitute, at first in a South Brisbane brothel known as the Killarney Private Hotel and then from the National Hotel, a favourite watering hole for corrupt policeman, including Commissioner Frank Bischof. The National was notorious for providing sly grog – alcohol sold out of legal hours – as well as the services of Brifman and her fellow workers, and in November 1963 the Queensland government set up a royal commission to investigate. Coached by crooked detectives Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan – both of them her sexual partners22 – in January 1964 Brifman gave sensational false evidence that discredited witnesses testifying to police corruption.23

  As a result, for a long time she was remembered in Noir circles as the woman who lied for the police: later a female criminal in Sydney would call her a ‘Royal Commissioner slut’ and ‘a copper’24 – the latter in this sense meaning a police informant. But as she rose to become Sydney’s most high-profile madam, her Brisbane connection, particularly her relationship with Hallahan, would be an asset.

  Brifman was one of a group of four prostitutes who all worked in the Killarney Private Hotel around 1958 and who all moved to Sydney.25 One, Anne Bahnemann, became the wife of Sydney brothel king, Joe Borg. Their circle highlights three notable features of the Noir world during the Golden Years.

  First, it was very small – both socially and geographically. The same people turn up again and again – everybody knew everybody else. And most of the events we describe occurred in the Eastern and inner Western suburbs of Sydney – a fraction of the city then, an even smaller fraction of today’s behemoth.

  Second, there was a close connection between the Sydney and Brisbane underworlds, far more so than between Sydney and Melbourne, with criminals and police moving seamlessly between the two cities.

  And third, Noir lives tended to be short. Brifman was only thirty-six when she died – but
she outlived her three colleagues from the Killarney Private Hotel.

  She first moved down to Sydney around August 1963, before she derailed the National Hotel Royal Commission.26 When our story opens in 1966, she and her four children were living in a house in suburban Maroubra.

  In Sydney at the time there were, broadly speaking, three forms of prostitution: the upmarket, the brothel workers and the streetwalkers. It was not a very large profession; speaking of the last two categories, one detective claimed it was possible ‘to know the name of every prostitute in the city’.27

  The upmarket bar girls and call girls worked out of apartments in and around Kings Cross and Elizabeth Bay. The brothel workers had their own domain, a recognised ‘red light’ district in the area known as the ‘The Lanes’, south across William Street. This was the Darlinghurst bastion to which the sex industry had retreated after being driven out of the city centre in the 1920s (though a few independent prostitutes did continue to work in the city).28 Palmer Street, the heart of this vice precinct, had been the domain of the notorious madam Tilly Devine. Now, after nearly half a century, Devine was still in business – but only just, having been stripped of her fortune by the taxation authorities. (Her great rival, Kate Leigh, had suffered a similar fate before dying in February 1964.)29

  There were some forty houses of assignation in and around The Lanes, in which about 130 women worked in shifts. They paid the landlord, a madam and a ‘sitter’ – a man, to protect them from violent clients. In the mid-1960s the East Sydney precinct generated roughly one-third of all the revenue from prostitution in Sydney. This fact, like much else of what we know about The Lanes in the post-World War II period, is recorded by Roberta Perkins in her authoritative 1991 survey Working Girls: Prostitutes, their Life and Social Control.30

  The post-war flood of European migrants included large numbers of single men, who swelled the ranks of the punters. Talking of the late 1950s, one of Perkins’ sources, the sex worker ‘Lisa’, said: ‘In The Lanes it was mostly “New Australian” men. The basic wage was then £16 and £2 (the going rate for ‘short time’, prostitute slang for ‘no-frills’) was a lot of money to them. Business was usually short time, a few minutes, that’s all.’31

  Being such a large proportion of the clientele, it was logical for New Australians – notably the Maltese – to invest in the industry and own the premises from which the women worked. One of the Maltese entrepreneurs, Joe Borg, would wind up owning as many as twenty houses in and around The Lanes. (Estimates vary, and not all of Borg’s houses were used for prostitution.) This made him the biggest brothel owner since the heyday of Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, and earned him the title ‘The King of Palmer Street’. But there were other brothel owners in almost the same league – like Shirley Brifman’s rival ‘Linda the Vice Queen’.

  Right-thinking Sydneysiders frowned on prostitution. At election times, the Australian Council of Churches stepped up its calls for total prohibition of the sex industry. Successive state governments responded by regulating the industry to the point where it operated within extremely narrow limits.

  These laws were the reason why the practice in The Lanes was for only one woman to work in one house at any one time. As the law stood, for premises to be declared a ‘disorderly house’ and closed down, there had to be more than one prostitute working there. Because they were tiny, the single-storey terrace houses of The Lanes were well configured to avoid prosecution. The women adjusted their technique to work around the law. To be on the pavement was to risk arrest for soliciting, so the women sat just inside open doorways, giving rise to the other nickname for the precinct: ‘The Doors’.

  Like the bar girls in the posh hotels, the sex workers in The Lanes had a dress code: ‘suits, handbags, hair and nails done, and nice make-up. Everyone took a pride in looking after themselves’, according to ‘Lisa’.32 The Lanes were a louche destination for sightseers seeking ‘Sydney after dark’. According to ‘Karen’, another of Perkins’ sources and a worker in The Lanes: ‘It was packed like a football oval at times. The madams often held parties to which top personalities were invited. Everyone used to come down there to have a look.’33

  The precinct, visible and well known, was closely policed. So when politicians felt a sudden need to crack down on prostitution, The Lanes was where the effect was first felt. The Lanes were actually closed down ahead of the March 1962 State elections, but then reopened afterwards. Even in ordinary times, the police made arrests to show that they were doing their jobs, and there was an informal system whereby prostitutes would be arrested on a rotational basis. (Off-course bookies were sometimes subject to the same system.)

  As well as arresting and exploiting them, the police actually did protect prostitutes. One of the hazards of The Lanes was the hooli-gans who would assemble on Friday and Saturday nights to harass the sex workers. ‘Lisa’ recalled how ‘one night these first-grade foot-ballers came down here and one of them took out his penis and started weeing on one of the girls’.34 On his regular sweeps through The Lanes, Darlinghurst policeman ‘Bumper’ Farrell would dish out a rough justice to larrikins like these, a habit that made him popular among prostitutes.35

  The other venue for prostitution was the street itself. Streetwalkers typically met a client on the pavement, struck a deal and accompanied them to a room, or sometimes a car (‘car girls’36), or even just a patch of ground, nearby. In the quiet times of the 1950s and 1960s this zone included College Street, William Street and the Kings Cross portion of Darlinghurst Road, but as the 1960s wore on, streetwalkers also took station all the way down Bayswater Road into New South Head Road. Like its upmarket and indoor cousins, up until the mid-1960s street prostitution in Sydney was not flagrant. Compared to what came later, dress standards were quite decorous.

  There were some advantages to working on the streets. ‘Street girls’ were more independent and charged more than did the women in the houses in The Lanes. The mere fact of being at large on the street, with the ability to walk away from a customer, gave the street worker a stronger bargaining position than those immured in a brothel.37 On the other hand, the work environment on the street was uncomfortable and the women were more exposed to violence. Of all the sex workers, the streetwalkers were the most directly exposed to extortion by the police. As Shirley Brifman put it: ‘It was a well-known fact that all the girls working on the streets had to pay forty dollars a week as well as take their pinching (routine arrest) once a month.’38

  Others recall ‘routine’ arrests as coming as often as once a week.39 One of the sights of the Sydney legal calendar came on Monday mornings when the police’s weekend haul of working girls came before the Central Police Court in Liverpool Street. Some women were fined hundreds of times.

  On the streets, the protection that in The Lanes was provided by the ‘sitters’ was provided by pimps, or ‘hoons’ as they were then known. (‘Hoon’ is a term which has undergone a distinct change in meaning, losing its association with prostitution and coming to just mean just ‘lout’.)40 But some hoons could be as violent towards the sex workers as clients. ‘Bumper’ Farrell made a point of beating up violent hoons as well as troublemakers.41

  That left the upmarket independents. Shirley Brifman was one of ten or fifteen ‘bar girls’ working out of the Rex Hotel in Macleay Street, Potts Point, who met their customers in the lounge bar before going off to nearby flats to have sex with them.42 The bar girls were a recognised attraction of the Rex; management welcomed the custom they brought to the hotel – though it banned them from having sex in the hotel itself. They took pride in their appearance: according to ‘Leonie’, another bar girl at the Rex – later interviewed by historian Raelene Frances – they were ‘beautifully dressed in designer-label outfits, hats, gloves’.43 The Rex had a hairdressing salon that was heavily patronised by the bar girls; the gossip there must have been sensational.

  Along with the ‘call girls’ who worked independently (or ‘on the phone’ as Brif
man described it)44 out of apartments in salubrious neighbourhoods, the bar girls of the Rex and other upmarket Kings Cross hotels like the Chevron regarded themselves as being a cut above other working girls. They certainly charged a lot more (in 1965 Oz magazine cited a charge of £30 for the services of a call girl), and they weren’t representative of sex workers overall.

  The bar girls needed the approval of the police to work at the Rex. Around this time Jim Anderson, a tough Glasweigan, former Royal Marine and later one of sleaze lord Abe Saffron’s lieutenants, was learning the trade of ‘entertainment director’ in Sydney hotels and nightclubs. Anderson, who was living at the Rex, said it was where he ‘first came into contact with corruption and prostitution (in Sydney) … The Rex Hotel was a place for working ladies of a high standard and quality, with complete police protection … I studied the system pretty closely because I found, having come from London where things were done a little more discreetly, this was blatant. It seemed to be accepted and that this was the system.’45

  Brifman had been quickly inducted. Soon after she began working at the Rex, she was approached, in a genial way, by Detective Sergeant John Phelan of the Vice Squad – Mick Phelan, as she called him. Later she told police investigators how Phelan ‘said to me, “from now on you can start paying. You are one of the top girls. You will have to pay.” I said, “I don’t mind paying.” He said, “One hundred dollars a week, Shirl.” I agreed to this … I met him the next day … and gave him one hundred dollars. It might have been fifty pounds.’46