Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  It opened at six and ran to three in the morning. In the big room off William Street the dynamic house band was the Levi Smith Clefs fronted by Barry McAskill. They played a forty-minute set each hour from nine to three, pumping out a slick succession of soul covers by the likes of Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and Tina Turner. The music was more funky than you’d get elsewhere in Sydney and the club attracted a large proportion of the black GIs.

  For the twenty minutes each hour the band was recovering, go-go dancers would gyrate to recorded music, the tapes updated by a local radio station. The music was loud and never stopped: the last part of the tape was instrumental, and by the time it ended, McAskill and his outfit would be back on stage and playing the same tune. Then he’d yell out, ‘Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, would you please say thanks to the go-go girls!’ and the band would launch into its next set.

  The Whisky could fit 900 people, many of them GIs in civilian clothing and, according to Sydney artist Michael Fitzjames, as soon as you walked in you could ‘smell the sex’.27 On Tuesday to Thursday nights there was the Madison Ladies Club, where female office workers from the city were lured by the offer of free champagne and tickets in a draw for shopping vouchers for the House of Merivale, a fashion boutique. There was also the lure of the GIs, especially the black soldiers with their ability on the dance floor. Many Sydney girls left their jobs to live and party with the GIs, changing partners each week. They were the ‘grasshoppers’.

  They weren’t usually paid directly for sex, but they received presents and got by on their wits, taking their American to a selected gift shop in return for a secret commission. The same went for accommodation and bars. Other girls would lure their soldiers into Rushcutters Bay Park to be bashed and robbed by criminal accomplices.

  You could find innocence among all the sex, alcohol and money. Inez Amaya, who sang with the Levi Smith Clefs, recalls the youth and simplicity of boys she met, whites from the mid-west and blacks from the south, who had never been to a city as big as Sydney before. Inez and her friends held baked dinners for some of the GIs on the weekends, and the soldiers would bring along cassettes of their favourite music. Some smoked dope, some were cracked from the war. Most just wanted to go home.

  There were plenty of nightclubs and pubs with music in the Cross, including The Bourbon and Beefsteak, The Texas Tavern (which specialised in country and western), The Aquatic Club, The Rex and the upmarket Silver Spade at the Chevron. But the Whisky was the biggest and for many the best. Apart from the Levi Smith Clefs upstairs, there would be another group – maybe Max Merritt and the Meteors – in the smaller venue below.

  Due to licensing laws, patrons couldn’t drink after a certain hour unless they bought food. To comply with this the venue served a dish called Chicken in a Basket; roast chook on a greasy paper doily in a small plastic basket. No one in the know ate the chicken, which was recycled through the night.

  The Whisky changed over time, but downstairs for much of its existence was the Tahitian Bar with fake grass huts and appropri-ately clad waitresses, and the Celebrity Room where the second band played. Elizabeth Burton worked in the latter, wearing a tight plunging top, black fishnet stockings and red tutu. The Whisky was a class club: before each shift, the waitresses had to line up to check that their clothes and fingernails were neat and clean. While serving, they had to lower themselves in ladylike fashion when at tables, rather than bending over and revealing even more of themselves than was already on display.

  Elizabeth bopped as she moved around the Celebrity Room and caught the manager’s eye. Being a waitress was not a bad job – you got tips plus extras. One trick was when a waitress was giving a GI his change on a small tray. She would hold one of the coins beneath the tray and keep it if the soldier didn’t realise his change was short. If he said anything, she would let the coin drop onto the ground where – suitably apologetic – she would spot it a moment later.

  There were two go-go girls in the Celebrity Room. One night one of them didn’t turn up and the manager told Elizabeth to put on a bikini and hop into a cage. She never worked as a waitress again. With her height and athleticism, Burton was a star, and before long she was signed up for the Rainbow Show tour of Vietnam.

  She arrived on 4 October 1968, a few days before her 21st birthday. Suddenly she was being shuttled around a war zone in a helicopter and dancing for thousands of American troops while the ground shook with the thud of incoming shells. Between times she huddled in bunkers, performed in clubs behind the lines, and socialised with black troops despite having signed a contract saying she would not fraternise across the race line.

  One day Elizabeth was attacked on a beach and raped by a group of American soldiers, who prodded her with guns during their assault.

  It would take years to come to terms with the Vietnam experiences, and while some were terrible, others were liberating. Like many of the women back in Sydney, she enjoyed fraternising with the black soldiers, with their different style and culture, and in fact left Vietnam not because of the rape but because she was deported by the Military Entertainment Bureau for hanging out with men whom the American military authorities still described as ‘niggers’.

  CHOW HAYES PUTS THE BITE ON JOE BORG

  One night in her house at Bronte, Linda the Vice Queen proposed that Chow Hayes, using his status as a newly released prisoner, ‘bite’ (that is, demand money from) Joe Borg for $1000. According to Hayes, the Vice Queen was ‘extremely jealous’ of Borg because of his dominance of the brothel trade. For her, the proposition was win/win: if Borg acceded to Hayes request for $1000, her gang would get a cut; if he didn’t, any ensuing violence would harm Borg.

  In the six months since the suicide of Anne Borg, Joe Borg had acquired a new partner, an ex-prostitute whose working name was Julie Harris. On Saturday 5 May, he was parked in his dark-coloured Buick out the front of The Tradesman’s Arms Hotel in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst. Borg was in the driver’s seat, Harris was sitting next to him and there was one of Borg’s trademark Alsatians in the back seat, ‘a monstrous thing, almost as big as a small pony’, which started barking and growling the minute Hayes and Ratty Jack Clarke approached the car.

  Hayes went through his spiel, asking for $1000 until he was back on his feet, etc., but the dog was barking so loudly he couldn’t hear what Borg was saying. Hayes erupted, ‘Stop that mongrel dog barking and howling or I’ll bash its fucking head in!’

  Borg quietened the dog. He agreed to give Hayes $1000, but – alluding to his many well-paid friends in and out of uniform – warned that his generosity had limits. ‘He simply peeled the cash from a huge bankroll’ and gave it to Hayes. Hayes would later give $400 to Ratty Jack, who had been standing beside him with a con-cealed gun while he talked to Borg, and $200 to Donnie the Glove, who was sitting in the Tradesman’s Arms as back-up.

  Then came the finale, which demonstrated Borg’s mastery of the art of bribery. He called Hayes and Clarke back to his car and said, ‘Look, I’ve been thinking it over and I don’t want you coming back asking for thousands. I’ll put you both on my payroll at $100 a week. Will that suit you?’

  It did. Hayes and Ratty Jack went on Borg’s payroll, thus reducing the threat they posed to him. But they didn’t tell the Vice Queen.

  EXIT JOE BORG

  On 28 May 1968, Borg came out of his house at 36 Brighton Boulevard, North Bondi, and got into his Holden utility to go to the hardware store. It was 11am – like most criminals, he was not a morning person. He had one of his Alsatians with him. When he turned on the ignition, a bomb under the car exploded.

  ‘We were driving and heard a bang,’ recalled a policeman who was on patrol nearby. ‘We saw Joe Borg lying on the footpath, with both his legs almost blown off. He was still alive but on death row … There were bits of dog hair and Joe everywhere.’28 He died on the way to St Vincent’s Hospital.

  By a grim coincidence, the inquest into Anne Borg’s death was held only three days la
ter. The lawyers must have moved fast because in the intervening 72 hours it had been established that Borg had left his considerable estate – estimated at $250 000 – to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. When the coroner heard that the RSPCA was represented in his court, he was astonished.

  Coroner: ‘How can that be? How is the Association connected with Anne Borg?’

  Mr Reynolds (for the RSPCA): ‘The Association is not, but following what has taken place in the last few days the Association has been following reports in the press, and the association between the deceased and the man bearing the same name, who met his death a few days ago. We feel we are an organisation concerned, very near or quite close to a substantial sum of money.’29

  Quite. A lot of tails must have been wagging.

  From the outset the press took the line that Borg’s death was an episode in a gang war between major criminal organsiations. Linda the Vice Queen figured prominently in their speculations – understandably when one asks the proverbial question ‘Who benefited from this death?’

  Four days after Borg was murdered the Sydney Sun – the Fairfax-owned afternoon tabloid and rival to Murdoch’s Mirror – told readers that ‘Before Borg was slain, there were said to be four “factions” – one represented by the Vice Queen – controlling Sydney’s lucrative prostitution market. Detectives forecast that, with the death of Borg, an underworld power struggle will develop.’ The Sun reported that the Vice Queen had herself been threatened – the whole impli-cation of the story being that she had had Borg killed so she could extend her control over the precinct. ‘Police were told that, because of the threats, the woman had today sought protection from three of the toughest criminals,’ The Sun said.30 (This is a probable reference to Donnie the Glove, Ratty Jack Clarke and Chow Hayes.)

  The next day, the Sunday Mirror said, ‘Scared underworld informants told the Sunday Mirror that the next to go would be the woman who runs an opposition string of brothels in the same area. Her death would give a virtual monopoly of the Chapel Street area to one of the remaining vice syndicates.’

  The Sunday Mirror went on to launch a tendentious attack on ‘the government’ for its spinelessness in failing to legislate to close the ‘only one woman’ loophole opened up by Ex parte Fergusson. The paper proposed its own solution, which was ‘to order the razing of any house declared to be a brothel. It would be almost impossible to conduct a brothel on a vacant allotment’.31

  On the basis of his encounter with Borg three weeks before his death, Chow Hayes was hauled in to Darlinghurst Police Station. They quoted his words, ‘Stop that mongrel dog barking and howling or I’ll bash its fucking head in!’ back at him, claiming that he had directed them at Borg and not the dog. Hayes believed there were only two possible sources for that information, Ratty Jack Clarke – who was being interrogated just down the corridor, along with Borg’s partner Julie Harris – and Linda the Vice Queen herself.

  Hayes trusted Ratty Jack – but not the Vice Queen. Hayes would have made a natural scapegoat for Borg’s killing – a convicted mur-derer, released on parole on a licence that forbade him from associ-ating with criminals. The police wouldn’t even have to charge him – they could send him straight back to Maitland Gaol just for being in The Tradesman’s Arms. But the (unnamed) ‘head copper’ gave him a break and sent him off with a stern warning – that shows either that the police weren’t all bad, or else that the ‘head copper’ had plans for Hayes. Hayes bolted out of Darlinghurst and ‘went and gulped down two or three stiff bandies at The Courthouse Hotel’.

  Besides the blame game, the newspapers also speculated about the economics of prostitution. The police had previously estimated Borg’s weekly income at $2000, now they revised it upwards to $8000–$10 000. Their calculation was based on his practice of keeping his brothels open for three eight-hour shifts, seven days a week.32

  Despite what his killers would later say, Borg had a reputation – justified or not – of being the working girl’s friend. At his funeral a woman placed a wreath on his coffin bearing the message, ‘In memory of Joe Borg, who done a lot of good for a lot of good people’.33

  And his image got a posthumous boost when prostitutes found the rent they had to pay for their rooms in The Lanes immediately shot up. ‘Borg charged his “girls” $20 a shift – often less when business slowed on a rainy night’, the Sun-Herald reported. ‘Since the closures, Borg’s former rivals are charging his “girls” $48 an eight-hour shift.’

  Amid all the speculation about ‘gang wars’ and ‘struggles for control’, the increase was seized on as evidence that the motive for his killing was commercial. But there was a more straightforward explanation. The lawyers handling Borg’s estate had immediately closed down his terrace houses, which comprised at least one-third of the premises in The Lanes. This meant that the same number of prostitutes were now competing for fewer rooms. As one detective explained, the rent hike was simply the result of supply and demand.34

  LIFE OF AN SP BOOKIE

  In May, George Freeman and a few mates, including Stan Smith and Arthur Delaney, went to Perth for the shoplifting. Delaney had finally returned to Australia: CCTV had arrived in London, and the glory days of shoplifting were over. It was not a successful trip because they were arrested, although this turned out to be something of a transformative moment for the thirty-three-year-old Freeman. As he was carted off to prison he told himself, ‘Bugger this, there has to be a better way of making a living’. He decided to focus on SP bookmaking. This was a potentially huge field of criminal endeavour.

  A woman we will call ‘Margaret Smith’ has given us a description of the SP industry during this time. Smith’s father, David, was a mid-level SP bookie working around Eastern Sydney from the early 1950s until 1983. He took in bets from a network of employees in the city’s pubs and on its streets, he ‘made a central book’ in an office with a staff of seven, and he ‘laid off’ his bets (a form of reinsurance) with larger operators including George Freeman. Horse racing was the core of the business, although David also took bets for the Trots and the Dogs. He had a silent partner, a man who took little part in the running of the business and was frequently overseas.

  David Smith was born in Melbourne around 1920 and got into the bookie business in the early 1950s. He teamed up with a relative, a bookie, who operated out of a little house in Woolloomooloo. The relative didn’t take things very seriously. He’d go to sleep in the house and punters would poke envelopes with bets in through the letter slit in the door, so there was no way of knowing whether they made the bet before or after the result of the race was known. That story became a kind of in-house, family joke about the need to stay alert in the SP business. Then the relative got a housing commission flat and moved out to the suburbs, leaving the business with David, who proved to have a real talent for it, showing formidable skills of memory and calculation. For example, he could work out amounts owing, including calculating the odds, in pounds, shilling and pence – far more difficult than in decimal currency – all in his head.

  Up until the late 1960s the family lived in Kings Cross – the brother of baccarat king, Richard Reilly, lived in the same block of flats. They then moved to Darling Point. Margaret’s father employed a bodyguard known as ‘The Count’, although Margaret remembers the Cross around 1960 as a friendly place: for a night out the family would drive up the road, sit in the car and talk to passing acquaintances. David liked good clothes and good cars – for a while he drove an E-Type Jaguar.

  Margaret’s initiation into the SP business started early: every Thursday The Telegraph published a betting sheet, and as a schoolgirl she earned pocket money by copying out the betting sheets which were used in the office on Saturdays. At about the age of twenty she went overseas for five years, and when she came back she was married with young children. From about 1970 until the business closed she worked in the office. It was, she says, a good job for a young mother because it involved just two days a week
, the race days Wednesday and Saturday. The office moved around: for a while it was in St Peters, then Coogee. The location wasn’t important; what mattered was having police protection.

  The people who actually took the bets were the ‘outside’ men. They all had nicknames: one of Smith’s operators was nicknamed ‘Hollywood George’ in an ironic nod to the fame of ‘Hollywood George’ Edser, among the most celebrated Sydney punters of the day. The ‘outsiders’ phoned bets through to the office, where a central book was ‘made’ – compiled.

  In the early 1960s David Smith decided to diversify and set up a gambling club on Macleay Street. It was a small place, ‘no more than a few tables. Baccarat was the main game’. But it got closed down quickly by the police because he didn’t have the proper contacts – this despite him being on good terms with Richard Reilly.

  The episode highlights that the most important asset of any Noir enterprise was ‘having the pull’ – knowing whom to bribe. This was far from straightforward, with bribes often passing through channels that were secret even in the Noir world. Cards, Dice and Pennies author Lew Wright made the following observations on the higher theory of ‘pull’: ‘Time (for a baccarat school to generate profit) can only be bought by a “contact” man … no school can hope to survive for more than a week without a contact … Contacts are generally shadowy figures whose habits and methods remain as secret as the people with whom they do business. As go-betweens their value is in knowing people who can supply protection. The contact is known and so is an official he approaches – only their connection is a well-placed secret. And the source of power reaching down into the underworld is as a result unknown. It never takes long to ascertain if the liaison is effective. Should a raid be launched within three days of opening, it is apparent that arrangements in the contact department are hope-lessly inadequate.’35