The Latin Quarter went into a decline after this. Sammy Lee was beaten up outside his club on Pitt Street; it’s not clear if this was connected with O’Connor’s death. Jim Anderson, observing it was ‘a rather messy murder’, moved on.41
The bullet that killed O’Connor was found lodged in the wall of the Latin Quarter. The autopsy found another bullet that, to judge by the calcium deposits on it, ‘had been in his body for some years’. O’Connor was twenty-nine when he died.
Much of the urban setting of the Golden Years is long gone, swept away by the tsunami of development which gathered speed in Askin’s premiership – but 250 Pitt Street is a proud exception. From the ground up the building is now the very model of sanitised commercial propriety, billed by real estate agents as the ‘home of the jewellery industry’. But the shades of the Golden Years still linger in the basement, home to the incongruously named ‘Penthouse’ – ‘Sydney’s Top Licensed Brothel’.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
Given that everyone in the Latin Quarter that night seems to have been, in Detective Wild’s words, ‘under the influence’, this is a good place to consider the overweening place of alcohol in Australian society during the Golden Years. The austerity of the Depression years had brought an unprecedented sobriety in their wake, and when national statistics first began to be recorded in 1944–45, Australians were drinking the equivalent of 3.71 litres of pure alcohol each year. At this time ‘alcohol’ in Australia was largely synonymous with ‘beer’, so only the consumption of beer was taken into account. In 1960–61, for the first time, statisticians recorded the consumption of wine and spirits as well as beer. Added to a continuing rise in beer-drinking, that pushed annual per capita consumption to 9.34 litres. By 1965–66 this had risen to 10 litres. Peak Booze was 1974–75 when consumption reached 13.09 litres per head.
So during the Golden Years people (including at least one prime minister) were drinking like fish, more than at any other time during the 20th century – and no one thought anything much of it. Askin regularly repaired to the Manly Hotel for a few beers with his mates – on Saturday mornings.42 Imagine the reaction if a premier did that now.
The Noir milieu was particularly sodden. According to one account Darlinghurst Police Station conducted its business in an alcoholic haze, with cops drinking right throughout their shifts.43
Some detectives would actually base themselves in bars and pubs.44 Fred Krahe was a ‘terrific drinker’, whose ‘office’ was the Art Deco Hyde Park Hotel (now demolished: it stood on the corner of Elizabeth and Bathurst streets). So too did criminals, particularly SP bookies, which was convenient for all concerned. Crime journalist Tony Reeves recalled how, in a Woollahra pub, he ‘watched a senior eastern-suburbs detective call out his bet to the SP bookie from the doorway between the two bars’.45 This level of consumption took its toll: Krahe, for example, died of cirrhosis of the liver.46
Beer remained the staple drink for women as well as men. When Anne Borg, the partner of brothel king Joe Borg, was treated for alcoholism, she was drinking four bottles of beer a day.47 Shirley Brifman was often ‘having a few beers’ with her police and criminal friends.48 When an undercover reporter visited her brothel in 1969, Brifman and her fellow sex worker drank beer – out of crystal goblets.49 This, like the habit of serving bottled beer in champagne ice buckets – the practice at the Latin Quarter, for example – was considered the acme of sophistication.
THE KANGAROO GANG
Ducky O’Connor had left behind his wife, Grace ‘the Case’, although she was not with him when he passed away. They’d been married in 1962, with Lennie McPherson and Stan Smith at the nup-tials. The marriage was not a success and there were frequent quar-rels, and Grace left him within a year.50 In Melbourne she became a successful shoplifter until an unfortunate incident when she was caught leaving a department store by Detective Sergeant Brian ‘Skull’ Murphy. When the goods could not be located on her person, Murphy threatened her with a body cavity search. Grace asked for a few minutes alone, and produced a set of diamond cufflinks, some earrings and a bracelet.51
Like many shoplifters frustrated by the relatively slim pick-ings in Australia, Grace eventually went to London and the world’s largest luxury retail precincts. In the days before CCTV and effective police intelligence, the opportunities were extraordinary. By 1967 the Kangaroo Gang consisted of some fifty Australians operating in teams of up to eight. Some had been robbing the stores of Bond Street and Knightsbridge for five years. They had a certain dash and the ability to pass themselves off as wealthy shoppers that the local villains lacked.
Grace fitted in. She was petite and cheeky with lots of front. She worked with a team inside a big store as the ‘minder’, who would watch while the other members went about their appointed tasks – distracting the staff, stealing keys to jewellery cases – and then give the signal to go ahead if no one had noticed them.
In 1967 the British police published the first ‘Australian index’ to the Police Gazette, identifying some of the gang by name and photo. Grace was there, listed as a twenty-nine year old with convictions for ‘larceny, house breaking, robbery, soliciting prostitution etc’.
By that time the gang was bribing British telecom and Qantas’ London office, for free phone calls home and free tickets to wherever they wanted to go. They were sending large shipments of stolen goods back to Sydney, where some were used to help launch a well-known retail chain.
It’s no wonder the Kangaroo Gang were targeting Qantas. The Golden Years were the beginning of the era of mass air travel – but it still wasn’t cheap. A return airfare from Sydney to London cost at least two months of average weekly earnings – and that was after Qantas introduced the Boeing 747 in 1971. Nowadays it is closer to a fortnight’s pay.
DEATH OF A KINGPIN
The most powerful criminal ever murdered in Sydney was Richard Reilly. At least since the early 1960s he was one of Sydney’s dominant gangsters, and owned the famous baccarat joint, the Kellett Club at 14 Kellett Street, Kings Cross. This required police and possibly political protection, and Reilly had many important contacts on both sides of the law.
The background to the execution of Reilly was a Noir cocktail of reputation, revenge, ambition and large sums of money. It was not, as has been generally accepted, a ‘gang war’.
Reilly owed Woollahra moneylender Charles Rennerson £5000, and was refusing to pay the money back.52 Someone else who owed Rennerson money was one Claude Henry Eldridge, also a figure (but a much more minor one) in the Kings Cross baccarat industry. Rennerson decided not to wait any longer for his money.
He asked a friend, James Haig (not his real name), to arrange the murders of the two debtors. In 1966, Haig had worked intermit-tently in a gambling club in Liverpool owned by a John Warren and frequented by a Ray Brouggy, Noir partners whose criminal association stretched back to their early teens. On Rennerson’s behalf, Haig offered Warren $8000 for the killing of Eldridge and $12 000 for that of Reilly.
Haig was asking the right person, because Warren hated Reilly. A few years earlier Warren had set up a baccarat club in Kings Cross, which had done well enough to eat into Reilly’s profits at the Kellett Club, so Reilly had had him thrown out of the Cross. Now Warren had more than just revenge on his mind: he determined to replace Reilly as the baccarat overlord of the Cross. Warren would later explain that his masterplan involved the killing of four others: Lennie McPherson, Stan Smith, John Regan and a Detective Sergeant David James who had forced Warren to close down his betting shop in Liverpool earlier that year.53 Driven by ambition and the desire for revenge, Warren took up the contracts; Brouggy acted as his offsider.
Eldridge was first. On 22 April Warren, driven by Brouggy, arrived in Kurraba Road, Neutral Bay, where Eldridge was visiting his mistress.54 According to Brouggy’s later testimony, Warren was wearing ‘black-framed glasses, and I fancy there was a black mous-tache hanging from them and definitely he was wearing a black plastic nose’.55
Warren shot Eldridge seven times with a semi-automatic .22 rifle, but it was hard work. On the way back over the Harbour Bridge, he complained to Brouggy that he’d paid £50 to have the weapon modified to fire in full automatic mode, but even so, he’d ‘had to pull the trigger each time’.
Then Warren turned his attention to Reilly, with the additional help of his thirty-one-year-old girlfriend, Glory McGlinn. These two had been in a volatile relationship since 1958. Each was married to someone else, and they had a history of breaking up then getting back together again. In early 1967 they were together again, but not entirely happily. Glory’s husband Hugh, who used to collect his daughter from Warren’s residence on occasion, once heard McGlinn and Warren arguing about her seeing other men.56
Now the couple spent two months following Reilly and decided to kill him as he came out of his mistress’ place. They rehearsed the killing, and practised using walkie-talkies. Brouggy was again the driver for the hit, and before the shooting Warren briefed him: ‘Have a good night’s sleep, keep away from the horses, and come down nice and fresh.’ When Brouggy turned up at McGlinn’s house on the afternoon of the murder, 25 June 1967, he chatted with her mother and daughter while Warren pulled the weapons out from where he had been hiding them under his girlfriend’s bed.
Reilly lived on the North Shore and played in the Eastern Suburbs. His home was at 9 Cammeray Avenue, Castle Cove, while his mistress Aileen Glynn lived at Double Bay. At 7.30pm Reilly came out of her flat at 6/13 Manning Road and walked towards his blue $17 000 Maserati coupe. He was fifty-eight, a big man in a $200 suit. As he reached the car he was hit twice by blasts from a shotgun and a rifle fired by Warren and possibly McGlinn. He managed to get into the vehicle and drive off, but died almost immediately, smashing into a shopfront.
A secretary named Pamela Eldred happened to be on the scene. She saw the Maserati crash into a gift shop on New South Head Road and ran across to the vehicle, where blood was pouring from the driver’s mouth. She found a pulse in Reilly’s wrist, but it stopped while she was still holding his hand.
As Brouggy drove the killers away, the car erupted in recrimina-tions. At first they thought Reilly had survived, with Glory accusing Warren of missing him. ‘You don’t know what this man is like,’ Warren said. ‘He just kept coming like a bloody tank.’ Warren feared Reilly would go on a mad shooting orgy in revenge. ‘Sydney will be literally strewn with bodies, and I’ll be fortunate if I’m not one of them.’
They went to South Sydney Junior Rugby League Club to establish alibis. Then, as they were driving away, news of the killing came over the car radio. Warren and McGlinn grabbed each other and screamed with pleasure. They stopped at a café and celebrated with doughnuts and coffee, with Warren paying Brouggy his share of the contract there and then.
Newspapers speculated that Reilly had been killed by competitors involved in the baccarat business. This was partially true, although Warren was small fry, and barely merited the description of competitor.
There was a major investigation into the murder, which found four black notebooks in which Reilly had listed 389 contacts, including politicians like the former federal Labor MP for Sydney Eddie Ward, lawyers, policemen and plenty of other gangsters. This discovery naturally caused some excitement as news spread, but the full list of names has never been released. (Fifty years later, NSW Police insisted on heavily redacting the copy they provided us.) In a huge police effort everyone in the books who could be contacted was tracked down, but as the weeks and then months went by, no arrest was made.
THE BACCARAT INDUSTRY: A SNAPSHOT
A month before Reilly’s murder, Labor Alderman R.E. Murphy had taken a swipe at Noir activities in his Kings Cross ward that got him onto page one of the Sydney Morning Herald. Describing the Cross as a ‘Barbary Coast’ (that is, a haunt of pirates like part of the coast of North Africa from the 16th to the 19th centuries)57 he took aim at the gaming schools: ‘Even baccarat has been going on for years. It is open slather. It almost seems as if it is protected.’
Murphy argued that baccarat increased the likelihood of street crime in the district. People ‘can walk in and play baccarat and if they lose, walk out and have a go at someone to recoup their losses,’ he said, calling for the schools to be closed down.58
Three days after Reilly’s murder, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story that revealed that, in addition to the six well-known baccarat schools in the Cross, there were fifteen others spread around the inner city. ‘Kings Cross houses the big games where thousands of dollars change hands in a night, but the inner suburbs of the city are even better served with smaller schools,’ wrote ‘A Special Reporter’. ‘There are five schools in Newtown, four in Oxford Street, two in Flinders Street, Darlinghurst, one at Bondi, one at Bondi Junction, one at Glebe, and one at Bellevue Hill.’59
The next day ‘A Special Reporter’ published an interview with a former bouncer at a baccarat school, one of the more detailed accounts of their operations to appear.60
The bouncer said ‘he did not believe that recent underworld killings, including (that of Reilly), were directly connected with baccarat. These shootings are usually the result of personal feuds between personalities’.
‘The top baccarat men are just like big business leaders. They cooperate closely for financial help and in organising protection. There is no one man who runs the whole show. But, for example, if I wanted to start a small school in the suburbs I would not dream of doing it without first going to one of the big men and obtaining his support both financially, if necessary, and for help with protection.
‘He said the baccarat operators become involved with criminals and gunmen whom they employed in their clubs … They go to a lot of trouble to see that their clubs are well controlled and that players are looked after. Good bouncers at the door are paid over $100 a week to keep out people who might cause trouble.
‘Floormen are employed inside to guard against men who might be watching a winning player with the idea of robbing him later. The big schools usually have a couple of men with guns on hand in case trouble flares up quickly before the police can get there.’ This was the same service that ‘gunnies’ like Chow Hayes had provided to Thommo’s two-up school for decades.
The same day the Sydney Morning Herald began its series on baccarat – 28 June – Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Mirror tabloid beefed up its own coverage of the issue. The Mirror could find only twelve baccarat games compared to the Herald’s twenty-one, but compen-sated with good colour. ‘All (games) were well-attended,’ reported the Mirror . ‘A sprinkling of the underworld rubbed shoulders with well-dressed men and women, graziers, professional men and junior executives … “We haven’t seen a bull (policeman) all night – maybe it’s buck’s night at the CIB,” a regular patron joked.’ According to the Mirror, even one of the second-tier clubs had a turnover of half a million dollars a year, and was run by a syndicate of four with a full-time staff of twenty.61
In the words of the Herald, Reilly’s killing provoked ‘an outcry against illegal gambling’.62 As usual when pressed hard on a crime issue, Askin cannily passed the buck, asking Commissioner Allan for a report on the subject. Then, ten days after the murder of Reilly, ten days in which for the baccarat clubs it was business as usual, came the standard response, familiar to everyone in Sydney Noir and their clients: the short-lived crackdown.
‘An all-out blitz by police is bringing to a close the era of big-time gambling in Sydney,’ breathlessly proclaimed the Sydney Morning Herald , obviously well briefed by the police. ‘This week, for the first time since the war, many of Sydney’s well-known gambling spots were not operating. Regular gamblers at Kings Cross baccarat games, Thommo’s two-up school at the Haymarket and dice games were told on Friday night, “We’re closed”.63 In fact, illegal gambling in Sydney was on the eve of another very prosperous decade.
According to one detective: ‘I was at a meeting after Reilly’s murder where the baccarat owners (a category which inclu
ded Perce Galea, Joe Taylor, Eric O’Farrell, Eli Rose and George Walker) met the police and asked whether they could keep operating. They were told it would have to be checked out with the Premier first. Later they were told by the police that it was okay.’ The view from the baccarat industry was a bit different: as one involved recalled, the police went round to the various schools and said: ‘To get going again, you’ll need protection. We’ll organise it.’64 So the post-Reilly dispensation was a reorganised protection racket run by the police.
Besides confected outrage and public interest, the Reilly killing also sparked debate about legal gambling. Labor Lord Mayor John Armstrong called for the establishment of a state-run casino. This was a debate that would drag on for decades. Askin’s response was: ‘The Government has no intention of turning New South Wales into Las Vegas.’
The Daily Mirror poured scorn on the idea legalisation would stop crime. It noted on its front page that the TAB was supposed to have wiped out the SP, yet three years after its introduction ‘everybody knows you can lay a bet with an SP bookie in almost any pub in the state’.
But why stop there? asked the paper, heading into rhetorical over-drive. ‘Why not licence two-up schools, chemmy (baccarat), massage parlours, nude shows, the harlots of William Street and all the other organised operations that cater for human lust and avarice? Then, of course, all the standover men, the gangsters, the madams and the pimps will vanish from our ken to become respectable citizens, underworld shootings will be no more, and “hoodlum” will become an archaic word. Does Alderman John Armstrong really believe this? Does any thinking person believe it? Not bloody likely!’65
In the following years, NSW governments did expand the TAB into pubs, legalise casinos and decriminalise prostitution. The effect was largely the opposite of the Mirror’s feverish prediction.
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