The use of nicknames was a hallmark of Noir culture – criminals as well as police – and the trial process was replete with them. Joe Borg was known to some as The Writer, because of his habit of lodging written complaints about police harassment. Paul Mifsud was sometimes Paul Zammit, while the diminutive Paul Attard on occasion called himself Little Paul – it was his small size that had ordained that it was he who crawled underneath Borg’s ute to attach the bomb.
Keith Keillor, real name Joe O’Brien, was ‘The Jitterbug Kid’ thanks to his youthful expertise on the dance floor (the ‘Jitterbug’ was a dance craze of the 1930s and 1940s). One of the witnesses was Robert Steele who, as we have seen, acquired the name ‘Ironman’ after surviving an assault by Lennie McPherson that left him carrying various pieces of lead in his body. Also involved was a man named Skinny Dick. These nicknames were taken seriously and used by many of those involved – at the trial of Borg’s murderers, the judge instructed the jury about Keillor’s alternative moniker even though it was not relevant to the case.
The question of motive for Borg’s murder was the subject of debate. As we have seen from the newspaper coverage, the theory that it was a clash between criminal organisations was a favourite from the outset, and is still widely accepted.46 But as with the murder of Richard Reilly, the motives of Mifsud and Attard seem to have been personal rather than corporate.
At the trial it was claimed Mifsud had said, in a statement to police, that at the Mediterranean Club in Crown Street, five weeks before the murder, he’d sworn at Borg and spat on the floor because ‘all the Maltese boys were very angry with Joe. He rob all the boys’ girls who work in the Doors’. (Not just Borg, but Attard and Mifsud also, lived with women who were or had been prostitutes.)
‘I think maybe me and Paul we shoot him but that was too dangerous, you know, that he have a gun all the time, Mr Charlton (investigator Detective Sergeant Frank Charlton), so I say to Jitterbug, “Tell me how we make a bomb” because Jack Steele he say to me that Jitterbug he is all right.’ It was similarly claimed that Attard had told police they’d killed Borg because ‘he wanted all the girls to work for him. He wouldn’t let any work for anyone else’.
The Crown case was that Keillor and Steele had advised the Maltese on how to make the bomb, but only Keillor was charged with murder because Steele hadn’t known it was to be used to kill someone. (In the event, Steele died between the committal hearing and the trial, as a result of an attempt by surgeons to remove some of the lead from his body.) Keillor had apparently stated this in a police interview, where he’d explained, ‘I may as well go the whole hog now. Certain people know I’ve been talking, and my life is not worth a Mintie, I’m much better off in your hands … I met Paul Zammit, that fellow you call Mifsud, at the Rex Hotel at the Cross a couple of days after the bombing and he said to me, “What you think Jitterbug, the bomb go good?” and I said to him, “Christ, what did you fucken use, a whole case?” and he said, “First we have six sticks of gelignite, and then we put three more, we make sure,” and I said, “Nine sticks, up, up and away.”’ A potential problem with the Crown case was that it depended on statements from the accused, who had all refused to sign them with the exception of Attard, who later claimed he did so only under duress: ‘Then the policeman who was typing, he stand up and start pushing me around. Then he grabbed me from the back of my collar, behind my neck. He tied his hand, his fist, close to my nose. He said, “Your nose been broke.” He said, “Do you want it broken again?” and he continued, “Sign,” and I said, “No” and then I was frightened and I was scared of being hurt and I signed the record of interview at each place where the policeman pointed to.’47
Keillor claimed at the trial that Steele had found out he’d been released to gather evidence, and visited him one day with a pistol, telling him if he gave any information to the police he’d be a dead man. To reinforce this, he fired two shots into the wall behind Keillor’s head. Keillor said that after this, Steele did a deal with the police so that Keillor rather than himself was charged. Keillor was re-arrested and found himself in an interview room with a detective who started laughing and said, ‘You think you are in here. You only think that. You are in the other room confessin’ (that is, that was where his record of interview was being typed).’
Keillor’s story was that it was Steele who had arranged the bombing because of an occasion in the Mediterranean Club when Borg had sooled his Alsatian onto Steele, after which Steele had threatened to put Borg into orbit.
Justice Robert Taylor was having none of the defence suggestion that the police might have verballed the accused. ‘The suggestion that these are concocted,’ he told the jury, ‘not only means that those police officers have come here and sworn falsely, but it means that they have been prepared to frame innocent people and to charge with the crime of murder these people who made no admission to them whatsoever.’ Of course it didn’t necessarily mean that at all. As one of the defence lawyers later explained to the judge, invented statements were also used by the police to frame guilty people.
In his address to the jury, His Honour also said, revealing the depth of judicial naivety upon which the NSW Police Force relied for so long: ‘[W]hat motive would the police have for doing this (allegedly inventing confessions)? Because every officer that did it or was party to it has risked not only his career in the police force but he has committed a criminal offence, and for what reason would they do that? … are you prepared to entertain as a credible suggestion that eight police officers – eight of them – would put themselves in jeopardy by concocting this evidence?’
Of course, the greatest risk to an ambitious cop’s career was not framing crooks but refusing to frame them. Successful cops were those who achieved convictions using the methods at their disposal.
Another potential problem with the Crown case was the behaviour of a detective named Bates in letting Keillor out of prison to assist with the inquiry, only to charge him later. Here too the judge was not concerned. ‘If it is suggested that in some way it is something that Bates should not have done the plain answer is, as Bates said, “I will get information from anyone if I have to solve a major crime such as this case. I will take information from anybody.” If he chooses to arrange that the police do not oppose a reduction in a man’s bail so that he can get him out, as part of his modus operandi, to get information, it seems to me that is his business. We are not conducting an inquiry here into how police officers should or should not obtain information.’
Heaven forbid.
The jury went out and after some three hours came back with a verdict of guilty against all three men. When the judge called Keillor up, the prisoner announced, ‘I think, in view of my antecedents and sickness in mind and body it was a just verdict, but I was very, very drunk and did not realise the people were fair dinkum and they were going to do it.’
After some consideration, Justice Taylor sentenced Mifsud and Attard to life imprisonment while Keillor, for the lesser charge of accessory before the fact, and taking into consideration his assistance to the police, received seven years with a non-parole period of just three. His Honour noted in passing sentence that, ‘I think you are rather an inadequate person and easily led.’
And in all of the evidence there was no suggestion of any great ‘organisation’ behind Borg’s killing. Steele did have a track record of extorting money (or trying to) from brothel owners like Sharon Lee,48 but he was a freelance standover man – quite a different thing to being a rival brothel owner. Clearly, Mifsud and Attard were rank amateurs – Steele had kicked them out of his house because he didn’t want them around. Keillor was well past his prime, scrab-bling around to curry favour with the cops. The quartet of Steele and Keillor, Mifsud and Attard scarcely amount to ‘organised crime’.
Despite the tabloid speculation, there was no suggestion in the trial of involvement by Linda the Vice Queen – though it is an interesting coincidence that the Vice Queen’s contact Frank Charlton h
elped obtain the ‘confessions’ of Mifsud and Attard. But it was a small world.
There was certainly a turf war in The Lanes after Borg died, and certainly, the whole system changed dramatically – the number of brothels in the vice precinct itself declined (though not in the Eastern Suburbs as a whole) and new proprietors emerged. But to say that this was Mifsud’s and Attard’s intention is to confuse cause and effect.
ENTER MICK MOYLAN: ADVENT OF THE CASINOS
Sydney’s illegal casinos were the most flamboyant expression of the city’s Noir culture in the Golden Years. But it took a newly arrived Irishman to invent them.
By the time Richard Reilly was killed, the old baccarat schools were already languishing. Other forms of gambling were eating into their clientele. One ‘gambling school operator’ admitted to the Sydney Morning Herald in mid-1967 that ‘Big time gambling in Sydney had been dying for about two years now. The money which changes hands now was nothing like it used to be before the decimal conversion (in February 1966). European migrants, used to legalised gambling casinos in their home countries, are taking more interest in racehorses. They are spending their money on the TAB or with bookmakers.’49
It was time for a change. According to Richard Hall, ‘the Kings Cross baccarat games of the fifties and early sixties in retrospect seemed to have achieved a kind of roseate glamour. But (by the mid-sixties) only someone with a determination to be enchanted could find anything charming about (them). They were grotty smoke-filled rooms. Among the clientele were plenty of desperates, the rank and file of gamblers, and a sprinkling of working prostitutes.’50
So there was a vacuum and nature – in the form of Michael Moylan, ‘an Irishman of considerable charm’ – filled it. Moylan arrived in Australia in 1966 and his first involvement in illegal gambling was as a partner in Johnny Warren’s short-lived baccarat club in Kings Cross. Late in 1968, he had an idea.51 According to Richard Hall, Moylan ‘approached Perce Galea and told him that he planned to start a continental-style casino with roulette as the main game. … Galea, confident of the entrenched position of baccarat, said it was all right by him as long as it didn’t have any baccarat games. The other club owners agreed … (Moylan’s proposed) venue on Oxford Street (Number 33) was well away from the existing clubs. The premises had formerly housed a baccarat game but it had not done particularly well.’52
Moylan turned 33 Oxford Street into a place that appealed to the middle and even the upper classes. The staff dressed and behaved well, the décor was impressive, and there was free food and drink for the patrons. The 33 Club was a success, and the owners of the baccarat schools complained to George Freeman about their loss of business. But Moylan had been wise enough to hire the organiser as a ‘consultant’ already.
‘If I was you,’ Freeman told the other gambling operators, ‘I’d take a mug’s advice and do the same as him. Do your places up and give the punters a drink.’ He told them ‘they couldn’t have decent people in their clubs standing next to some bloke in shorts and thongs and another who hasn’t shaved or washed.’
The other owners took his advice and, as Freeman further recalled in his memoir, ‘the Forbes Club (whose principal owner was Perce Galea) was done up and so was the Bondi and the Palace. But it never really affected Moylan and the 33 Club. He had the jump on them and his clients didn’t leave. The other clubs just never took off like his did. Mick Moylan had changed the rules of the game.’
And as Moylan made money, so did his protector Freeman, who recalled that ‘this guy called Sandy Waterman, the boss of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, came over to have a look for himself. … There wasn’t an illegal casino I didn’t show Sandy during that tour; his reaction was enthusiastic. “This is better than Caesar’s Palace,” he told me. “If you had a share in one of these (the Sydney casinos) it would be better than Vegas.” Sandy Waterman said the basics were the same in both towns, Vegas and Sydney … He also pointed out that the Sydney casinos’ bosses paid less taxes and overheads than the guys in Vegas.’ The new illegal casinos were an apt symbol of the Golden Years. They were big – some could accommodate hundreds of people. Unlike the baccarat schools, they offered a variety of games: tanta-lising roulette, dice, poker, blackjack as well as baccarat. Unlike the schools, their interior fittings were luxurious if flashy and there was a lot of cleavage on show. They drew in criminals, politicians and celebrities. And they were (almost) immune to police raids.
This immunity was particularly necessary because the fittings of a casino were large and expensive. To run a baccarat school all you needed was tables, chairs and cards; to run a casino you needed roulette tables, which were transported in crates so large they required road closures and cranes for delivery. The 33 Club’s main table was 13 metres long.53 No one was going to make this sort of investment if they could lose it at the whim of an under-bribed detective con-stable. Therefore, whatever sort of insurance the casinos paid, it was of a different order of reliability to the old schools.
THE DISORDERLY HOUSES ACT
During 1968 arrests for ‘permitting prostitution’ continued to rise. This show of resolve by the police was backed by the Disorderly Houses and Other Acts (Amendment) Bill that came into force in October 1968.
This legislation made one-woman brothels illegal, closing the loophole opened by Ex parte Fergusson that had so irritated Detective Sergeant Vic Green.54 It also ‘introduced significant new penalties for prostitution-related offences … created a new offence of loitering in, or in view of, any public place for the purpose of prostitution (the Chief Secretary specified that this clause was aimed at the women who sat in the doorways of The Doors) … There was no require-ment to prove that the accused was a common prostitute.’ And it extended the prohibition against ‘living off immoral earnings’ to women as well as men, thus closing the fifty-year-old loophole that had conferred opportunity and fame on madams like Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine.55
One result was that from mid-1968 there were more prostitutes walking the streets, both because they had been driven out of The Lanes and because they were responding to a surge in demand from US servicemen. One stretch at the top of William Street was known, in homage to a popular television show, as Pick A Box.
The Lanes also faced an upsurge of arson and intimidation in the precinct following the death of Joe Borg, with at least seven brothels – three of them formerly belonging to Borg – being burnt out, among them Tilly Devine’s last establishment.56
As we have seen, Borg had bequeathed his large estate to the RSPCA – on condition it cared for his surviving Alsatian and four cats. Julie Harris apparently got nothing. A wreath at his funeral carried the inscription, ‘In Gratitude from All the Homeless Animals’. So when his legacy started going up in flames, it made for good copy.
‘State president of the RSPCA Mr VG Jerabek was shocked when told of the latest fire,’ reported The Sun. ‘“Oh, no,” he said, “not another one”.’ The same report commented that the police ‘were convinced that (the fires) are the result of criminals fighting for control of the vice empire in the area.’ One of the officers in charge of the investigation was Detective Sergeant Fred Krahe.57
Just as, following the Reilly killing, the Labor Lord Mayor had floated the idea of legalising gambling as a way of removing it from the orbit of crime, so the Borg killing prompted Labor Deputy Opposition Leader Pat Hills to float the idea of legalising prostitution. Not that he was in favour of it himself, of course. But he did think the death showed the need for ‘a searching inquiry into the question’.58
‘THE INEFFICIENCY OF THE POLICE FORCE’
Shirley Brifman would later insist to police investigators that while she had acted as an intermediary for Krahe, ‘pulling’ for him or receiving money on his behalf, she had not spied on criminals for him. It was the fact that she did not betray the confidences of criminals that made her such a valuable intermediary.
Her establishments at Earl Place – and later Ithaca Road and Wylde Street –
were like mini-Casablancas, neutral spaces where those on opposite sides of the law could mingle. Hanging around in her flat, police like Phelan and Krahe knew they could keep abreast of the Noir scene, as long as they didn’t take too much notice of any criminals they might bump into there. And the knockabouts knew that this made Shirley’s flats useful places to trade and disseminate information, and to store stolen goods and other contraband.
Sometimes Brifman herself did not know what was going on in her own flat, as she relates here:
‘(Two detectives from the Armed Hold-up Squad) came to my place and questioned me about all the TAB robberies. At that time I was keeping company (that is, having sex) with Billie Preacher (the pseudonym of a criminal, famed for his skill at driving getaway cars). One of my clients was called Ian something, he was a carpenter. Preacher and Ian became friendly.
‘Preacher asked Ian to get some gelignite and fuses. I did not know a thing about it. Ian turned up with a parcel. I did not know what was in it. He asked me if he could leave it for Preacher. I was going to the hairdressers and I gave him the key of my flat. He delivered the parcel and brought the keys back to me.
‘A few days later (the) two detectives came and questioned me about the TAB robberies. They did not search the place when they found out who I was (that is, protected by Krahe and Phelan). Consequently they did not find the gelignite and fuses. I told Harry Louis about it and he told me to go out and buy a lottery ticket and call it, “The inefficiency of the Police Force”. One of the detectives took a fancy to me and he never let up on sex. I never gave him money.’59
Sydney Noir Page 14
