Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  On the other hand, David Smith did have the pull for his SP business, which continued to operate smoothly. ‘You were warned (by the police) when you were going to have trouble (get raided),’ recalls Margaret. When David received a warning of a raid, he called for volunteers, people who were prepared to be arrested. Raids were quite friendly. Paying bribes did not mean that a business would never get raided at all, but ‘if you didn’t have the contacts then you got raided more often’ – and if you got raided too often then you had to close down. It was a question of degree.

  A bigger threat to the prosperity of the business was some of the employees. Every race day David Smith would deliver the bank – a cash float – to the outsiders. They kept a record of all money they received in bets and paid out on wins.

  Smith moved employees around within his organisation because the longer they stayed in any one location, the more likely they were to form close relationships with a particular punter. And the closer a relationship between an employee and a punter, the more likely it was they would collude to defraud Smith. This could be in a mild way, by betting on credit (the rule was cash-only), or a more complex scam where the worker, in return for a cut, would pay out on a bet that had never been made in the first place. Another rule was that employees were not allowed to place bets themselves (‘though everyone did’). And at the end of the day accounts had to be reconciled exactly, down to the last cent.

  The most dramatic way in which employees could cheat was to claim to have been robbed. This was a very delicate and serious matter: an easy way to make a lot of money and hard to disprove. If an employee claimed to have been robbed ‘people’ (that is, like The Count) would be dispatched to mount a searching inquiry.

  ‘You had to trust the person placing the bet, and you had to trust the person taking the bet.’ Trust was paramount, and there were few people David Smith could trust absolutely, which explains why he tried to keep the business in the family as much as he could.

  On one occasion David told Margaret to accompany Lennie McPherson to collect from a debtor in the city. The debtor, a professional man, had been stalling, saying the money would be there ‘next week’. But the moment the door opened and he saw McPherson he ran – actually ran – to get the money. McPherson didn’t have to do anything on this occasion, his reputation being sufficient. For his services McPherson received half the money collected.

  (We have been told of another example of McPherson at work. He was paid 10 per cent of the profit to provide protection for an illegal casino in the 1970s. On one occasion, a drug dealer robbed the place of $12 000 at gunpoint. The dealer was found with a broken arm in Perth two days later, and the money was returned to the casino by McPherson.)

  Although the SP business maintained regular customers over the years, it was a curiously shadowy relationship. The customers were known by their initials. ‘I spoke with people on the phone all the time,’ Margaret said, ‘but I never knew what they looked like.’

  One time an employee had a heart attack and the ambulance turned up with the police. Margaret and her colleagues had their work cut out persuading the emergency services that they would carry the victim out to the ambulance, rather than letting them into the office, and thus revealing that it was an SP establishment.

  Smith was himself not a gambler, and not even particularly interested in horses. He never went to the racecourse and never made a bet himself. ‘If I become a punter myself, then it’s no good’, he would say. His real interest was in the calculation of the odds, on which his whole business turned. Nor was he a drinker. For someone whose chosen livelihood was illegal, in some ways his life could be described as conservative.

  He did, however, know most of the Noir characters of the era, and was quite friendly with Joe Taylor. At his funeral, McPherson and the other crooks sat on one side of the aisle with the police on the other.

  GEORGE FREEMAN GETS SERIOUS

  The SP industry depended on the Sydney Morning Herald, which employed journalists to record the odds on offer just before a race, which would be published in the paper. That the establishment Fairfax family provided this useful service to Australia’s largest illegal industry is perhaps an indication of just how accepted that industry was. It also sold a lot of newspapers.

  George Freeman initially set up an SP business in Marrickville, but it didn’t have much success. He often had to subsidise his losses with the proceeds of his other illegal activities. One of the bettors to whom he was always paying money was a butcher from Tempe, who bet himself and was also a ‘commission agent’, who placed bets for others in return for a fee. One day he made Freeman a job offer.

  ‘Why me?’ Freeman asked.

  ‘Well, I trust you,’ was the reply. ‘You turn up every week to pay me, no matter what. I think you’re an honourable young bloke.’

  In his autobiography Freeman reflected, ‘Strange as it may sound to people who have never mixed in these circles, being a trustworthy sort of crook was important to me. I’d always regarded myself as an honourable thief and I was pleased to be recognised as being fair dinkum. I never shelfed (informed on) anyone, I always shared the whack-up in the right amounts, and I wouldn’t steal from my friends or the penniless. And I’d turn up to pay my betting losses – which is a lot more than I can say about some of the supposedly honest and upright men who participate in the horse-racing industry, usually from their privileged positions in the members stand.’

  From 1963 to 1966 Freeman was in partnership with the butcher. They worked out of the Henson Park Hotel in Marrickville.36 The butcher taught Freeman a great deal, and along with Joe Taylor was the closest he had to a mentor, even perhaps a father figure. He died after a while, and Freeman went to work with another big punter, Mick Bartley. This, presumably, was when he gave up the regular safe cracking and shoplifting. In his new role he would rove the east coast of Australia in search of the best odds, often carrying up to $20 000 in cash.

  ENTER THE MAFIA

  Although working as hard as ever, Freeman still had time for holidays. In 1968, having dodged a prison sentence in Perth, he visited a mafia associate named Joe Testa in Chicago.

  Testa was a real estate developer whose young daughter died in 1965. He took a foreign trip for distraction and found himself in Hong Kong, where he was given a letter of introduction to casino owner Ronnie Lee in Sydney. He flew south, via Bangkok and Singapore, and stayed at the Menzies Hotel in Sydney. On that occasion he was entertained by Ronnie Lee but not, so far as is known, by other criminals.

  The next step in this growing relationship between Testa and Sydney’s leading criminals was the visit to the US by Freeman, Stan Smith and two other crooks in 1968. In his memoir, Freeman called the trip ‘a shoplifting expedition’ and recalled, ‘One day I was walking through a big department store in Los Angeles when I noticed a woman shop worker had left the jewellery safe unattended. The safe was locked but I could see the keys just lying nearby. I sig-naled to the other guys to draw the attention of the other staff, and I had the safe opened within seconds. There, standing up looking at me, was a large amount of jewellery. … I stuffed the loot into my shirt and we walked slowly out into the sunlight a whole lot richer than when we walked in.’

  In another version of this story, the leader of this caper was one of Freeman’s fellow travellers, Arthur Delaney, who hoisted most of the jewels, not from a department store but at the opening of a jewellery shop in Beverley Hills.37 Ronnie Lee had given Freeman and Delaney a letter of introduction to Joe Testa: ‘A mate of mine may be stopping in Chicago. If he does and if he calls you, kindly look after him as good as gold.’ Testa invited the tourists to stay with him in his 400-apartment complex in Sheller Park, where it was claimed over 800 air hostesses lived. Certainly Freeman mentions them often in his memories of the following six weeks. ‘We had a party,’ he later recalled fondly. It went on for quite a while. Said Testa, ‘We had girls in and we had a lot of giggles, and there was a swimming pool, my house
was here and there was a swimming pool right below it and the air hostesses were there and we had a ball, we had one hell of a time.’38

  The Australians got on well with the air hostesses and Testa in Chicago. They stayed six weeks, going out ‘cabareting’ each night. Their host held a dinner party to introduce them to some of his tough local associates, one of whom ended up arguing with Testa and throwing a punch. ‘When the rough stuff started,’ Freeman recalled, ‘no one wanted to know our host. No one, that is, except one of my Aussie mates. He yells “Fair go!” and then boots the young Chicago boy under the chin. By the time the boy lands back on the ground, one of his ears and half of his nose had been bitten off.

  ‘Crocodile Dundee had nothing on this Aussie bloke (who was probably Stan Smith). His legend, and that of all of us, spread far and wide through Chicago and beyond as a result of that brief blue.’

  After that, Testa took the Australians to Las Vegas. This would have been educational for Freeman, maybe even inspirational, because back home he moved in on the illegal casinos around this time. In his memoir he noted that R&R brought a lot of money ‘to the operators of certain types of business establishments and often these sorts of businessmen, or their employees, are the kinds of people who like to boost the bulge in their wallet by taking chances – by gambling’.

  Freeman said that by 1968 he had become an organiser and protector of the baccarat schools. ‘It was my job to keep things running smoothly and to keep the bullies out. I had a certain reputation for being able to talk to people and point out common sense to them.’ This role of standover man was performed possibly in partnership with Lennie McPherson, and continued for at least a decade, perhaps much longer. But here as so often, important aspects of the story remain obscure.

  THE COMMISSIONER ACTS

  On 2 July 1968 police went to arrest a twenty-three-year-old, cogni-tively-impaired thief named Wally Mellish at his home in Glenfield in south-west Sydney. Mellish resisted, and as he had a gun and his girlfriend Beryl Muddle and their baby were hostages, it quickly became a siege. Tear gas could not be used because the baby was prone to bronchitis.39 The Emergency Squad arrived and a local detective was invited inside the house by Mellish, for a chat, so the situation was under control and possibly approaching a peaceful resolution.

  For reasons never explained, Commissioner Norm Allan decided to leave his office on this occasion and take command of the operation, and had himself driven out to the siege site. The results were somewhat comic, although made more so by media misreporting of what was soon an event of huge public interest. It was one of those crimes, like the Graeme Thorne kidnapping, that seems to have involved most of Sydney’s better-known detectives; certainly Fergusson and Krahe were there.

  Allan rang the detective in the house, abused him and ordered him outside. The Commissioner then agreed to Mellish’s request that he be allowed to marry Beryl on the condition that he would surrender afterwards. In this decision the Commissioner was supported by Fergusson and also Clyde Paton, the Long Bay prison chaplain who knew Mellish and at his request was also at the house. The wedding occurred, with Paton officiating and Allan and Fergusson as witnesses. It was wrongly reported that Allan was provided with five rings, to make sure one of them would fit, and allowed the couple to have a wedding cake and a hot break-fast. (Paton says they were given a few sandwiches and two small cans of soft drink.)

  Mellish demanded, and was given, an Armalite rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition. One of the detectives present, Philip Arantz, recorded in his memoir, ‘Allan claimed publicly that the weapon had been disarmed and was incapable of being fired, but the CIB grape-vine had it that the first thing Mellish did when it was handed over was to fire two rounds through the floor to make sure it did work.’

  When Mellish finally surrendered after eight days, Allan directed that he not be charged with anything. Instead he was sent to a mental hospital for the criminally insane, no doubt in the hope he’d be committed and this could be used as a reason for avoiding an embarrassing trial. But the psychiatrists found Mellish sane. Premier Askin, possibly wishing to quell concerns about his Police Commissioner’s competence, awarded Allan a Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct, because ‘on two occasions he entered a house and confronted a mentally disturbed and heavily armed man … who threatened to shoot the Commissioner and others’. Allan had received quite a few commendations in his career, but this was the first for bravery.

  There were other medals. Allan himself recommended a Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct for Don Fergusson. It was the least he could do.

  The 1996 film Mr Reliable (also called My Entire Life) was made about this highlight from the annals of NSW policing.

  A NOIR FASHION SALE

  One of the lighter moments in Shirley Brifman’s story was a 1968 gathering in the Coogee flat of a fence called Mickie (not his real name), where a consignment of stolen women’s clothing was being sold to a congerie of police, criminals and prostitutes.

  ‘I went out there with Sarah Williams (not her real name),’ said Brifman. ‘We went out to look at all this woman’s gear that came out of a bust (that is, a robbery). It was mostly all women’s dresses, expensive stuff. There were dozens of them, they were all over the beds and everywhere. I don’t know where it came from. Some of the stuff was Marina brand.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Fred Smith was there; I was talking to him. Gwyneth Nixon was there (together with her husband) Gerard Nixon, he had just done two years, and (has) just got (another) twelve months in Brisbane for stealing from a car. Legs, a shoplifter from Melbourne, was there. (Fred Smith, Gwyneth Nixon and Legs had all been in Hallahan’s room at the Rex Hotel on the drunken, violent night the previous Christmas.) Bobby Brennan (not his real name) was there, and his wife was there, too. He is from Melbourne. Me and Sarah and the other girls bought some dresses. I bought three, Sarah bought about six. I tried the dresses on.

  ‘(Later) I was speaking to Freddie Krahe (and) I asked him straight (if he’d got anything from the sale). He didn’t know what I was talking about. I said to him, “Aren’t you in the whack from the bust the other night?”

  ‘Krahe quizzed me about it and he said, ‘I will have to have a go at Fred Smith over this one (for not cutting Krahe in on the deal). He doesn’t do anything unless I know about it.” About a week later Mickie said to me, “You know Fred Krahe well, if we don’t get through to him (with a bribe) we will all get pinched (arrested).”

  ‘I had a meeting with Fred Krahe at Earl’s Court and I told him what Mickie said and he said, “It’s going to cost him money.” I told Mickie what Fred said and Mickie called in and gave me three hundred pounds or dollars40 and Fred called up and got it. I usually rang Fred when I had money for him. I have still got one of the dresses at home; it is brown striped with a brown collar.’41

  Here was Brifman in her element, using her status of ‘being on’ with Fred Krahe to act as an intermediary between the cops and the criminals. But her privileged position didn’t make her invulnerable, because when she came to pay for the stolen dresses in Mickie’s flat, she found she herself had become a victim of crime: ‘I left my purse in the lounge and someone robbed me. They took the money out of my purse.’42

  IS YOUR WIFE WELL KNOWN TO MR SIN?

  In 1968, Abe Saffron contrived to stay out of the limelight. But an aside in a court case in August gives a glimpse of the notoriety that kept his tag ‘Mr Sin’ alive.

  Alexander Ewan Armstrong, a Country Party Member of the Legislative Council (the upper house of the New South Wales Parliament), was being questioned by the formidable QC Laurence Gruzman. The context was a night out at the Cross. Armstrong had been with a party of men, including a gunman whom Gruzman described as Armstrong’s bodyguard, doing the rounds ‘of the lower-class nightclubs’. The party wound up at The Villa.

  Gruzman was on a fishing expedition to establish that Armstrong consorted with criminals, when the following exchange occurred: Gruzman: ‘T
he Villa is owned by Abe Saffron?’

  Armstrong: ‘I don’t know, it could be.’

  Gruzman: ‘That’s a lie; you know it is owned by Abe Saffron.’

  Armstrong: ‘No, it is not a lie. It could be owned by him, I don’t know.’

  Gruzman: ‘It is known as a den of iniquity, isn’t it?’

  Armstrong: ‘I would not think so.’

  Gruzman: ‘You saw Mr Saffron there that night?’

  Armstrong: ‘Yes.’ Armstrong said he could not recall whether they had drinks with Saffron or not.

  Then came the killer punch. ‘When Mr Gruzman asked Armstrong whether his wife Margaret was well known to Saffron, Mr Staff (counsel for Armstrong) objected.’43

  As well he might.

  Not only was Saffron notorious for his sexual appetite,44 his ways of demonstrating affection for the opposite sex were widely believed to range well beyond the conventional. In 1956 he had been charged with Scandalous Conduct (flagellation) and ‘an unnatural act … Buggery’ – in both cases with a woman on the receiving end. The prosecution failed,45 but the mud stuck. As a result, Abe Saffron was definitely not someone you wanted your wife to be well known to. And particularly not if you were a member of a government that was in the middle of a crackdown on vice.

  DEATH OF JOE BORG: GANG WARFARE?

  In the second half of 1968, three men were tried for Borg’s murder. It is worth pausing to consider their trial, because of its intrinsic interest and also what it tells us about police and criminal – and judicial – conduct at the time.

  The initial suspects were two Maltese men, Paul Mifsud and Paul Attard. Because police didn’t have enough evidence to charge them, they let a habitual criminal named Keith Keillor, in custody on a stabbing charge, out on bail to gather evidence for their case. They probably chose Keillor for this unusual task because he was a suspect himself, and, in fact, the police ended up charging the three of them. Keillor went to prison for seven years for showing how to make the bomb, while the two Maltese were gaoled for life for carrying out the bombing.