‘Never let up on the sex’. Consider the array of her sexual contacts in this interlude: Ian the carpenter, Billie Preacher the getaway driver, the detective from the Armed Hold-up Squad, Phelan and Krahe – the latter two the source of her immunity and power. So it was not just Brifman’s flat, but her actual body, which became the Casablanca-like space.
Her relations with corrupt policemen, sexual and financial, varied according to circumstances. The Harry Louis who suggested the cynical name for the lottery ticket was Detective Sergeant Harry Louis of Darlinghurst Police Station. And while the consequences for Brifman had the gelignite been discovered by the Armed Hold-up Squad detectives could have been severe, she was on sufficiently relaxed terms with Harry Louis to joke about it with him. Louis ‘was a terrific friend’, Brifman said, ‘even though I did pay him money’. That money was for arranging ‘the bullet operation that I previously referred to (that is, on the wounded Melbourne criminal performed by the Macquarie Street gynaecologist). But I never paid him for protection, he was a good friend’.
They were so close that when Louis died suddenly, a set of keys to Brifman’s Earl Place flat was found in his locker at Darlinghurst Police Station.60
A HALT TO THE KILLINGS
For some time, Joe Borg’s would be the last in a line of underworld killings stretching back to 1963. Al McCoy calculated ‘there were nine underworld executions in some way related to the continuing struggle for control within the milieu. Five of these nine killings
took place between January and June 1967.’
Speaking particularly about the murder of Richard Reilly, McCoy suggested the assault on some leading figures ‘was influenced, at least indirectly, by the outcome of the 1965 State elections. … Established criminal leaders like Reilly suddenly found their well-cultivated Labor Party contacts useless and rising criminal syndicates with allies in the new government were now in a position to contest his influence over the milieu … As Reilly and his mates went out in a blaze of gunfire, syndicates with closer contacts to the new government rose to dominate the milieu.’61
It was certainly a time of change, but there is little evidence for political connections. After 1965, plenty of powerful crooks had no trouble maintaining their positions and power despite the change in government. There’s no suggestion the killers of Reilly or Borg – the vicious loser Warren or the vendetta-pursuing Mifsud and Attard – had had backing from either side of politics.
McCoy is certainly right to identify the period of 1967–68 as one of unusual violence, followed by years of relative calm.62 That calm has been linked to the dominance of Lennie McPherson and his friends George Freeman and Stan Smith – although when one looks at his recorded activities, it’s not clear why Smith is always included in that troika. In 1968 McPherson was forty-seven, and his power clearly rested on his capacity for violence. It came about directly from the murders he had committed. However, even today it is impossible to say precisely who were the most important underworld figures of the Golden Years and how extensive their spans of control.
R&R: FLIGHT OF THE GRASSHOPPER
Nineteen sixty-eight was the first full year of the R&R program, and for the next four years at any given moment there were about 1500 US servicemen in and around Sydney. Some stayed with families across the state, but in general the GIs congregated between the Whisky a Go Go nightclub on William Street and the El Alamein Fountain. Sex and alcohol were the overwhelming priorities of most of the visiting Americans. Within seven weeks of the beginning of R&R, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Pat Hills, was already claiming there had been an ‘alarming’ increase in prostitution as a result of R&R.63
There certainly was a considerable increase in sexual activity around the Cross, but what’s not clear is just how much of this was prostitution in the sense of an exchange of sexual services for money by professional sex workers. Such statistics as do exist aren’t very illuminating; the NSW Police Annual Report shows that in 1968, prostitution-related arrests for ‘offensive behaviour’ continued the steep decline evident in the previous year, from 8094 in 1967 down to 2485 in 1968. Arrests for ‘permitting prostitution’ – managing it – rose slightly.
The anecdotal evidence does suggest a rise in street prostitution. ‘Bonnie’, another of Roberta Perkins’ sources, recalled that: ‘Soldiers on R&R were around then and it was pretty easy to pick up a guy on the street and take him home. You only had to walk out of your flat and they were there.’64
But – to the anger of the professional sex workers – a lot of the demand for sexual services was fulfilled by the phenomenon of the ‘grasshopper’: the temporary girlfriend.65 To moralists, the grasshoppers seemed to augur an eruption of laxity among the young, but most Sydneysiders over forty-five would have recognised the situation as simply a reprise of that in World War II.
As Perkins described it, ‘the bulk of prostitution in (WWII) occurred not in brothels nor even on the streets, but in pubs, bars and at private parties arranged for the Americans to meet women. And the prostitutes in these clandestine situations did not identify as whores’. Another of Perkins’ sources, ‘Maggie’ – who worked as a ‘good time gal’ at the time – recalls what it was like:
‘There was a lot of money about in those days. The Yanks were here and they were good with their money, buy you anything you wanted. Prostitutes were always the street girls. We saw ourselves as “gold diggers” or “good time girls”.’66
R&R provided conservatives with plenty of opportunities for outrage, not least because some Americans gave drugs to the grasshoppers.67 This was the context in which a Federal Court in December handed down ‘the heaviest penalty (yet) to be imposed on a US Serviceman convicted of drug offences by an Australian Court’. The offender was arrested in Sydney in December 1968 on his second R&R leave visit to the city. On his first visit earlier in the year, a sixteen-year-old girl from Carlingford had shown him around the city. On his return to Vietnam, he had posted marijuana in envelopes to the girl. When he came back to Sydney he was arrested, convicted and fined $800.68
Premier Robert Askin in a characteristic Golden Years pose. Alcohol consumption in Australia peaked in the mid-1970s and Askin did his bit for the national effort. News Ltd/Newspix
‘Mr Big’ and his mafia mates. (L to R) Lennie McPherson, Nick Giordano and Joe Testa during a hunting trip to Bourke. News Ltd/Newspix Fairfax Syndication
Detective Inspector Ray ‘The Gunner’ Kelly with Askin. Nicknamed because of the men he had killed, Kelly was Sydney’s most fêted policeman of the 1950s and 1960s.
Criminal Stan ‘The Man’ Smith arrives home after being deported from Hong Kong, 1966. McPherson’s closest associate, Smith was ahead of his colleague in both dress sense and willingness to engage in the emerging drug trade. Fairfax Syndication
Brothel madam Shirley Brifman, ‘The Venus of The Reef’. Her interviews with police give the most detailed account we have of how Sydney Noir actually worked. News Ltd/Newspix
(L) Detective Sergeant Fred Krahe. Brifman’s lover and nemesis, he succeeded Ray Kelly as Sydney’s most notorious ‘tough cop’. Fairfax Syndication
George Freeman, standing, with Darcy Dugan at the 1988 launch of Freeman’s autobiography. Freeman was possibly the most able and successful of Sydney’s criminals, a leader in the vertical integration of the SP bookmaking industry. Dugan, in contrast, was a notorious recidivist. News Ltd/Newspix
Perce Galea, ‘The Prince of Punters’, with his horse Eskimo Prince. When the colt won the 1964 Golden Slipper Stakes at Rosehill, casino owner Galea threw some of his £30 000 winnings into the crowd. News Ltd/Newspix
Go-go dancers at The Latin Quarter nightclub in Pitt Street, 1966. In the following year Raymond ‘Ducky’ O’Connor would be killed here in a confrontation with Lennie McPherson. News Ltd/Newspix
American servicemen on R&R leave ponder something cuddly, c. 1970. The few blocks around Kings Cross became the centre of a highly extractive but short-liv
ed industry known as ‘Take a Yank’. Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive
THE VENUS OF THE REEF
‘SYDNEY’S RICHEST CALL GIRL’
The year began well for Shirley Brifman: she got her slice of the Great Australian Dream.
Brifman’s practice was to maintain two establishments. One was a flat in the Kings Cross area where she could carry on her busi-ness; up until early 1969 this was Flat 16, Earl’s Court, Earl Place. When she set up as a madam in 1968, she started renting other flats in the same building, creating a hive. In Earl’s Court, for example, besides number 16, Leanne Clark lived in number 19, and Brifman also used number 23 for work.
As well, Brifman maintained a family home in the suburbs where her four children lived, looked after by a full-time house-keeper.1 When she first moved to Sydney, this home had been in Old South Head Road, Bellevue Hill. The family shifted to Bunnerong Road, Maroubra, and then again to Maitland Avenue, Kingsford.
Whenever Brifman mentions her husband Sonny, it is always in the context of him ensuring that payments to her policemen lovers, Phelan then Krahe, are up to date. ‘When I wasn’t there,’ she recalled, ‘my husband Sonny paid Fred. They were on good terms.’2 The partners of prostitutes frequently faced charges of ‘living on immoral earnings’, so the fact that Sonny Brifman never did was evidence of his wife’s good standing with the police. Apart from that Sonny, who by now was in his mid-fifties, rarely rates a mention in Shirley’s testimony.
Then on 14 January 1969 Brifman bought a nice house in a new suburb far away. Her bit of the Great Australian Dream was in Eucalyptus Drive, Westleigh, a new development carved out of Sydney’s bushland fringe near Hornsby. The Sunday Mirror described the house as being on the ‘exclusive North Shore’,3 not entirely accurate for those aware of the significant social differences between the north and the north-westish. In 1976 Bruce Beresford would choose Westleigh for the location of his film of Don’s Party, David Williamson’s play about misogyny, male inadequacy and Labor’s failure in the 1969 Federal election. The suburb was aspirational rather than establishment.
Aspirational: Shirley Brifman fitted right in. By 1969 she was doing so well she might have agreed with some of the sex workers interviewed in the 1980s by Roberta Perkins. These women emphasised ‘just how much more control they have over their lives, including the inter-sexual contact with male clients, in sex work compared to social situations beyond prostitution’.4
But on 17 March one of Brifman’s long-time police lovers, Detective Sergeant Mick Phelan of the Vice Squad, came undone. He was arrested outside the Central Court of Petty Sessions after receiving $50 from Donald Jones, a wharfie.
That day, Jones’ wife was before the court on charges of soliciting for an immoral purpose, resisting arrest and assault. Jones, who had been provided with marked currency notes to give to Phelan and a tape recorder, said the money was payment to Phelan, who had undertaken to arrange for Mrs Jones to be released on remand.
Phelan’s convoluted defence mirrored his corrupt relationship with Brifman. Phelan said he had known Jones as an informant for ten years, and had lent him the money in February. The $50 was in repayment; as for the story about Mrs Jones, he was being framed. ‘The loan had followed a curious relationship which only a detective-sergeant and a criminal can have,’ said Phelan’s lawyer JC Hartigan. His client had ‘felt he ( Jones) deserved a helping hand and his hand had been severely bitten’. Phelan, Hartigan argued, was the victim of his own good nature.
But the world is a hard and cynical place: when Phelan appealed against his dismissal to the Crown Employees Appeal Board, it didn’t believe him.5 Phelan, who had been shaking down prostitutes for years and was described by Brifman as ‘one of the biggest collectors in Sydney’,6 burst into tears.
The reputation of the NSW Police for corruption in the Golden Years is so bad it comes as something of a shock to learn that sometimes bent coppers actually did get weeded out. Not quite, though, because even after he’d been sacked, Phelan remained the bagman for the Vice Squad – at least as far as Brifman was concerned. ‘(Phelan) came up to see me and told me I could still keep the payments going and he would give the money to Detective Sergeant Crest. Then I would be protected just the same from the Vice Squad. Mick told me that the money would be shared up in the Vice Squad. I just took it for granted that I was protected.’7 She continued to pay Phelan for protection from the Vice Squad up until June 1970.
Around the time of Phelan’s arrest, Brifman moved her brothel from Earl Place down the hill to the prestigious address of Unit 16, 19 Ithaca Road, Elizabeth Bay, or ‘The Reef’, as the apartment block was known. This was a much more decorous environment and soon one of Brifman’s new neighbours, Mrs Ella Ritchie, accused her of running a brothel.
‘I will fix her,’ said Freddie Krahe, springing chivalrously to Brifman’s defence. Krahe decided to combine the chastisement of the unctuous Mrs Ritchie with profit and brought in a professional burglar to reconnoitre Mrs Ritchie’s flat, which was full ‘of valuable jewellery’.8 But the burglary was never carried out.
THE RETURN OF JOE TESTA
Joe Testa returned to Sydney on 10 February 1969, accompanied by fellow mafia associate Nick Giordano.9 They were greeted at the airport by George Freeman and Ronnie Lee and stayed at the Chevron Hotel for about three weeks, Freeman not being in a position to put them up in an apartment block with 800 air hostesses. They socialised with Sydney’s leading gangsters at places such as Chequers nightclub, Ronnie Lee’s house at Watson’s Bay, and the nearby Fisherman’s Lodge Restaurant, where Testa was presented with a big cake with ‘Welcome Joe’ piped onto it. Those present at most of these events included George Freeman, Lennie McPherson, Arthur Delaney and ‘Ironbar’ Miller (Milan Petricevic) along with their wives or girlfriends.
This social whirl was interrupted by a three-day trip organised by Lennie McPherson, for the purpose of hunting kangaroos and pigs. Testa later recalled he used a .25/20 rifle (‘Bad gun if I may say.’) and went with McPherson, Giordano, ‘a fellow that I only know by the name of Bronco, and the pilot. I chartered an aeroplane and we flew up to Bourke shooting.’
During this stay, Testa won $12 000 on the Melbourne races and gave a party at the Chevron Hotel for his Sydney friends. Among the guests were Lennie McPherson, the American singer Roger Miller and some local radio announcers. Testa also gave an interview to the local People magazine whose reporter described him as the ‘millionaire cop from Chicago’ who drove to work in a let-tuce-green Cadillac. When Testa flew out of Sydney at the end of his trip, McPherson gave him a champagne party at the airport.
‘LIKE KAFKA’
In Melbourne during the late 1960s, a doctor named Bertram Wainer became famous as an advocate of abortion law reform. Due to the public debate this kicked up, illegal abortions became harder to get and some women flew to Sydney for their terminations. Wainer was told ‘frequently that a well-known Sydney ex-policeman, working with a senior serving officer, not only arranged protection for a price, but also supplied the staff for the doctors … It appeared the Sydney scene was much more controlled by the police than was Melbourne.’10
Wainer’s sources told him conditions in Sydney were terrible, with one woman saying that in return for the fee of $200 each, she and six other women had entered a surgery at 9.50am and all been curetted without anaesthetic and turned out of the surgery by 10.30am, ‘aborted but scarcely in a fit state to face the world’.
Wainer collected evidence of police corruption and, invited to take part in a radio debate in Sydney about abortion, told journalists he was prepared to give this information to the police commissioner there. Before Wainer left Melbourne he received anonymous phone calls saying he’d be killed if he came to Sydney. These he took seriously – on a previous visit, there had been shootings outside his Kings Cross motel on three successive nights. Sydney, he decided, ‘could be a tough city’. So he decided to charter a plane rather than risk commercial flights. He mad
e it to radio station 2GB in Sydney, accompanied by journalist Evan Whitton, and told the police that he would meet them there.
Superintendent Don Fergusson attended, accompanied by a police public relations officer and a young detective named Roger Rogerson. Wainer was struck by Fergusson, later recalling that he was ‘an impressive man. From him emanated an aura of power and ruthless strength. He was well-spoken, well-dressed, with silvery hair and penetrating eyes … He was undoubtedly the smartest and toughest policeman I have ever met’.11
The cops asked why he wouldn’t come to police headquarters and Wainer expressed his fear.
‘No one ever gets killed in Sydney,’ one of the detectives pro-tested. When Wainer recounted his previous experience of shootings outside his motel, the public relations man said, ‘Oh, that’s just the boys killing the boys; we don’t mind, it cuts down our work.’
Wainer then offered Fergusson the information he’d brought, which Fergusson refused to take on the odd grounds that there were journalists present. The meeting was over.
Evan Whitton wrote it up for Truth magazine, recording that Wainer said, ‘This is like Kafka.’
‘I don’t know Kafka,’ said Fergusson.
To which Wainer replied, ‘No matter, you could have written it.’12
‘HOPE THE BLOODY WAR NEVER ENDS’
With his Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar and Texas Tavern venues pros-pering, Bernie Houghton had the opportunity to travel. In January 1969, he was charged in California with passing forged cheques, resisting arrest and ‘fraudulently disposing of chattels’, but he – or his powerful patrons – were able to smooth things over.13
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