Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS

  Faced with the failure of its drive against prostitution, the Askin Government switched the focus of police efforts from the working girls themselves to their managers and the owners of the premises where they worked. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, there are significant questions about the reliability of crime statistics compiled by the NSW Police during this period. But to the extent they are meaningful, the statistics for prostitution-related arrests reflect this shift in emphasis. In 1967, arrests in New South Wales of actual prostitutes for ‘offensive behaviour’ declined by one third to 8094, down from 12 173 in 1966. On the other hand, arrests for ‘permitting (that is, managing) prostitution’ trebled, from 58 to 177.66 This did not, however, deter Joe Borg from expanding his property portfolio in the Darlinghurst precinct, where he bought another eight houses in late 1967.67 Borg was so identified with The Lanes that the little terrace houses came to be known as ‘Borg houses’.68

  In all times and places, attempts to clamp down on prostitution usually see it slip around the corner and turn up under another guise. This Noir ability to shift shape was the genesis of another threat to traditional prostitution in Sydney, one that ultimately proved more destructive of the old ways than the Askin Government and the police. This was the massage parlour, a business model that would come to dominate the sex trade.

  The idea of the massage parlour was imported to Australia from the west coast of the United States in the mid-1960s with references to massage parlours first cropping up regularly in the Sydney newspapers around 1967.69

  The advantage of the massage parlour was that while a brothel can really only ever be a brothel, sometimes a massage parlour is a massage parlour. Parlour operators reversed the burden of proof, requiring authorities to demonstrate that their ‘health studio’ was actually something else. Not that this stopped corrupt police from extorting money from prostitutes – far from it. In fact, it increased the opportunities for corruption, as prostitution spread from Kings Cross out to the suburbs.

  Massage parlours weren’t just harder to police, they had a number of other different features, like a new look. ‘Like their American counterparts, (they) had prostitutes dressed in the white uniforms of the masseuse, massage tables instead of beds, and no condoms on the premises, so as to minimise arrest.’70

  And they had a new management style. Lisa had worked in The Lanes in their heyday and found the new regime in massage parlours uncongenial. The daytime shifts from 10am to 6pm denied women the ability to choose their own hours that had been one of the attractive aspects of the sex industry. And workers felt exploited by management, which deducted money for ‘extras’ from their pay. And worst of all, the clients expected ‘French’ (oral sex).71 The menu offered by Sydney brothel workers and streetwalkers in the mid-1960s was not a long one: it consisted of ‘straight sex’: missionary position with the woman keeping her shirt on. Removing all her clothes or taking more time cost more (an old tradition: in the 1930s the Kings Cross prostitutes’ cry had been ‘Thirty bob – strip to the earrings’),72 and variation was not counte-nanced. Recollections of the period stress the rigour with which the profession maintained these austere standards.

  As ‘Lisa’ described it: ‘The guys just asked for straight sex and nothing else, no oral or anything, and if they did they would have got their head kicked in … It was unmentionable twenty years ago (in the 1960s). I don’t think married people did it (oral sex) then.’73 Prostitutes who broke the code got short shrift. ‘One girl got caught doing oral and she was smashed and left lying in the gutter.’74

  And it wasn’t just oral sex. By the 1970s the demands of clients had spread around the Mediterranean, embracing not just ‘French’ but ‘Greek’ – anal sex – and ‘Spanish’ – between the breasts – as well. Perkins argues that ‘Prostitution follows sexual trends rather than initiates them’75 and attributed the demand for oral sex to the American influence. The Kinsey Reports (ground-breaking 1948 and 1953 surveys by US researcher Alfred Kinsey) found that oral sex was becoming more common among Americans and Perkins reasoned that ‘since the idea of massage parlours as clandestine brothels was imported from America, it is possible that French came with them as a basic service’.76 Then in 1972 came the release of the movie Deep Throat; oral sex went mainstream.

  MARIJUANA, A COMMIE PLOT

  In the 1960s the traffic in illicit or non-pharmaceutical drugs was an insignificant part of Noir life because there was almost no market.

  In 1967 the highlight of NSW Drug Squad activity was the arrest of a part-time university lecturer and a research scientist for manufacturing LSD. However, more Sydneysiders were trying marijuana, one impetus being the discovery of the Great Hunter Valley Cannabis Infestation. Originating in 19th-century farm crops grown for hemp fibre, this was a wild plantation which stretched for kilometres down the banks of the Hunter River below Singleton.

  In his 1965 article ‘Oz Guide to the Sydney Underworld’ Richard Neville talked about marijuana being ‘distributed in the Kings Cross area. Most of it is being collected from the Hunter River area or grown in Paddington backyards. But, despite police prosecutors’ assertions, it’s pretty harmless and non-addictive. You’ll probably pick up a reefer from someone at The Royal George’. (Neville was referring to the old Royal George Hotel at 113–115 Sussex Street, the famed haunt of the Sydney Push, and not the George Street establishment which now goes under that name.)77

  It took the authorities nine years to eradicate the Hunter Valley infestation, but by that time the genie was well and truly out of the bottle: starting from almost nowhere, marijuana use in Sydney rose dramatically in the Golden Years. Public awareness of illicit drugs was growing fast, thanks to lurid publicity coming out of America and Europe. And the Askin Government was fine-tuning the legislation that would come to be known as the Poisons and Therapeutic Goods Act 1966. Coming into force in late 1967, this would form the legal basis for the prohibition that would enable the underworld to survive the legalisation of sex and gambling.

  Covering the new legislation, journalist Guy Morrison commented: ‘Marijuana and Indian hemp are dirty words in the Magistrates courts.’ Sentences for its use were harsh, with young men given gaol sentences of three to six months for smoking marijuana they had found ‘growing wild at Lochinvar near Maitland’.

  Morrison highlighted the inconsistency in the approach to licit and illicit drugs, making the point that ‘Anyone caught smoking marijuana is likely to be imprisoned for a year, although a chemist who sells the far more harmful methedrine may be let off with a fine’.78

  But the police had an eye for an opportunity. In the Police Department Annual Report for 1967, Commissioner Allan observed: ‘I am fully aware of the seriousness to the community of drug addiction. In the permissive society in which we live today dangers are overshadowed, even disregarded, in the urge to satisfy a desire to do the “in thing”. To our regret … “drug abuse” is to some sections of our society part of modern living and one of the “in things”.’

  Others took an even more pessimistic view. Mrs Mollie Askin, the Premier’s wife, would later tell a Liberal Party Women’s Group: ‘It has always been part of communist teachings that if they can’t beat us on an equal footing, it is within the bounds of their policy to subvert us. There is no easier way of doing this than through drugs.’79

  THE MASONIC COMMISSIONER: NORMAN THE FOREMAN

  The Police Commissioner from 1962 to 1972 was Norman ‘The Foreman’ Allan, born in 1909, the same year as Richard Reilly. The fair-haired, grey-eyed Presbyterian was, like Robin Askin, a Mason. From early in his career he worked in various administrative and staff positions. In 1943, according to his service record, he was ‘Commended for having the interests of the Department at heart in submitting a suggestion in regard to making use of the backs of obsolete warrant cards, the adoption of which resulted in a great saving of cards’.

  In 1960 he was commended for his work on the Graha
m Thorne kidnapping and murder case. Allan, who had been an assistant to the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner since 1944, was praised for his administrative assistance with the extradition of the killer from Sri Lanka.

  Many other officers despised Allan for his almost complete lack of direct operational experience. Once when visiting Manly Police Station as Commissioner, he asked ‘Bumper’ Farrell, ‘When are you going to show some respect?’ To which came the response, ‘When you show some ability’.80

  But Allan’s absence of operational experience was also an absence of much opportunity for corruption. This needs to be considered against the claims that after he became Commissioner in 1962 he became hugely corrupt, and in the Golden Years he and Askin ran the state between them as a vast criminal organisation.

  There is even less circumstantial evidence for Allan’s corruption than Askin’s. Obviously he tolerated an enormous amount of corruption in the force that he led, and it is quite possible he rose to the top because he combined ability with a talent for looking the other way. Anyone who wanted to reform the police would never have made it that far. He was, if you like, an effective front man, whose reward was not great wealth but the position of commissioner of police. Which came with a very decent pension.

  This does not mean Norman Allan was a complete stooge. Sitting in 1985–86, a joint Federal-State Royal Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Telephone Interceptions (the so-called ‘Age Tapes’) was headed by Justice Donald Stewart. The Inquiry looked at the history of phone tapping in New South Wales, and it took evidence from a former police technician, D Williams. He said he was called to Allan’s office in 1967, where rising star Detective Inspector Don Fergusson was also present. Allan, who until entering the police force had been a telephone technician, told Williams they could no longer rely on obtaining information from informants, and needed to explore the possibility of phone taps and listening devices. This idea possibly came from America, where the effectiveness of record-ings in fighting organised crime had been proven in the 1950s.

  This conversation suggests the Commissioner was not completely happy with the use of informers and the faked confessions that characterised the status quo. Williams went away and came back with a device for tapping phones. Again, Fergusson was present and the Commissioner professed himself pleased with the device. He ordered that a small unit be set up to utilise the new technology, but said it was not to become involved in the investigation of police misdemeanors or to provide assistance to the Police Internal Affairs Branch. Williams recalled that Allan seemed reluctant to add this rider, but add it he did. Possibly it was Fergusson who had urged this.

  In any case, almost no use was made of the new phone tapping capacity for the next seven years. The Stewart Royal Commission found that only eleven phones were intercepted over that period, and seven of those were in connection with the investigation of terrorism – the bombing of Yugloslavian travel agencies.81 It seems likely the reluctance to use phone taps derived from the fear they would reveal the closeness of the connections between police and major criminals.

  Despite this lack of technology, the police apparently demonstrated extraordinary ability. Speaking in the Legislative Council on 16 August 1967, government member Asher Joel compared the effectiveness of the New South Wales Police with foreign counterparts. Joel marvelled that some American police were able to ‘call up the central command post (and) have the number of a suspicious vehicle processed by a computer, and find out immediately whether it is a stolen car’. Australian police had no access to computers. Despite this, in America ‘crime detection and arrest rates are nowhere near the rate achieved in New South Wales. I am quoting these figures because if one is to criticise from time to time various units within our community, it is also our responsibility as citizens to give credit where credit is due’.

  Joel, presumably without irony, marvelled at the fact that ‘The New South Wales Police Force has cleared up a greater proportion of crimes than any police force in the United States of America, England or (other parts of ) Australia’. A comparison of the local clear-up rates with those in some other Australian states led him to note ‘how fortunate we are to have such an efficient police force’.

  In fact, the police had lied for years about the crime rate and the clear-up rate, which were considered a joke by police in other parts of the country.

  Askin presided over this farce easily enough. While there is no strong evidence he was actively corrupt, he must have been aware that corruption was widespread (not least because for much of his time as premier he was also police minister), and he did nothing to disturb what in political terms was an unexploded bomb.

  The Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service (1995–97) noted that in 1967 ‘an opportunity for lifting the lid off corruption within the gaming and vice industry was presented, and lost, with the case of a Chinese restaurant owner, Mr Ng Biu Kuen, who had reported the presence of senior police in an illegal casino in Dixon Street. He claimed that he was assaulted by police, and later loaded with opium by way of payback. Although his conviction was overturned on appeal, and two officers were departmentally charged in respect of the search of his premises, Commissioner Allan and the Premier successfully resisted requests for a Royal Commission into the affair, including the alleged association between senior police and gaming interests.82

  In his book, The Prince and the Premier, David Hickie provides some interesting details about this matter. He wrote that a lawyer had told him he’d seen Askin and Allan toss the two-up pennies to open a new gambling place in Chinatown in the late 1960s. If this event did occur, it showed a recklessness out of character for both men. Hickie described Askin as ‘a close friend of Chinatown’s gambling king of the era, Henry Lee Young, who originally operated a casino from the Hop War dry cleaning and greengrocery premises at 33–37 Dixon Street. Young later bought the Dixon Restaurant and re-established his gambling house behind it’.

  ‘Askin personally intervened when three senior police were recognised dining with the casino operators at 33 Dixon Street in 1967. He had been handed a statutory declaration by a Mr Ng containing allegations of police complicity with members of organised crime syndicates in Chinatown; they were involved in unlicensed gambling, smuggling of narcotics and counterfeit money.

  ‘The Ng controversy lasted two years. Ng and his lawyer were harassed and even threatened with death. At last Askin refused an inquiry into Chinatown – ostensibly on the basis of a report from Commissioner Allan.

  ‘John Hatton MLA (an independent MP with a strong interest in corruption) subsequently told parliament that independent opinions obtained from Ken Marks QC … and two other leading interstate counsel had concluded that Allan’s report was a “carefully compiled and intelligent whitewash that should be categorised as dishonest and a derogation of a duty to the public to ventilate serious matters”.’83

  It seems unlikely Askin would have been indiscreet enough to open a casino. On the other hand, his not wanting to expose instances of corruption, especially on the advice of his police commissioner, was entirely within character. Certainly it was the practice of premiers before and after him.

  ENTER BERNIE HOUGHTON: THEIR MAN IN SYDNEY

  In 1967 a new element was added to the Sydney Noir mix: American troops on rest and recreation leave from Vietnam. Their advance guard was a Texan named Maurice Bernard (‘Bernie’) Houghton, who arrived in Sydney on 1 January 1967.

  These days a bust of Houghton gazes benignly over a playground in Kings Cross’s Fitzroy Gardens in recognition of his large chari-table donations to the district. Nearby is another of his legacies, The Bourbon Hotel, which he opened under the name The Bourbon and Beefsteak bar in September 1967. But there’s an ironic edge to his presence near the playground, because according to Tony Reeves the B&B, as it would be known, was to become ‘the first place in Australia where heroin was readily accessible’.84

  Houghton was born in Texas on 25 July 1920, son of an oi
l driller, and served in the US military before leaving in 1946. Prior to his arrival in Australia he spent some years in South East Asia working for a ‘construction material expediter’.85 But it’s hard to be sure because Houghton, as one who knew him put it, was a ‘virtuoso bullshitter’. In fact, he was a CIA agent who carried on his intelligence activities in Sydney behind a facade of business ventures, of which the B&B and the Texas Tavern were the most famous.

  Houghton would later tell Australian authorities that prior to his arrival in Sydney he was involved in the construction of US military bases in Thailand and South Vietnam. Former US Air Force colonel Allan Parks remembered Houghton differently, as the operator of a fleet of cargo aircraft, shipping contraband including opium and ‘slot machines’ – that is, poker machines – into Vietnam. This, of course, was the stock-in-trade of the CIA’s Air America airline. The twist is that Parks recalled Houghton’s freight activities as continuing as late as 1971, four years after he had relocated to Kings Cross.86

  This is one of the many mysteries surrounding Houghton. Another is the way in which he succeeded, within days of arriving in Sydney, in landing a job with Paul Strasser, construction and property magnate and a close friend and confidant of Robin Askin – one of the Premier’s Central European friends known as the ‘Hungarian Mafia’. According to Strasser, he was sitting in a coffee shop in Kings Cross in January 1967 when someone introduced him to Houghton. The American said he was broke and looking for a job, but any deficiency in his presentation was remedied by his referees: they included Admiral Earl Yates, at one time chief of US strategic planning for Asia and the Pacific.

  Later, Strasser would profess himself to be as mystified about Houghton’s origins as anyone else. ‘All the time I asked him about Vietnam,’ Strasser said, ‘but he didn’t want to talk about it. He was the best salesman I ever had in my life. I always wondered. He came in literally without a penny in his pocket. I had to give him a loan on Friday (to tide him over) till Monday morning.’ Houghton moved out of the sleazy Kings Cross Hotel where he had fetched up into a flat in Avoca Gardens, Randwick, and spent the early part of 1967 selling real estate for Strasser.