Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  But not everyone in Kings Cross applauded Houghton’s commercial success. Just after 6am on 22 June 1969, a firebomb was thrown through the front door of The Texas Tavern, where break-fast was being served to tens of GIs who were about to catch a plane back to Vietnam. One of the staff kicked the device out onto the street; shortly afterward police arrested three men over the incident.14

  As in other cases involving Houghton, a cone of silence descended on the affair. One reason may have been that the Texas Tavern had now become ‘home to a few of the CIB (Criminal Investigation Branch) squads such as the Armed Hold-up Squad (or ‘Stick Ups’, as they were known) ... the licensing police seldom came knocking’.15 Houghton and/or the CIB may have preferred to avoid any further scrutiny in court.

  It was around this time that Houghton applied for permanent residency in Australia. In July, a letter in support of his application was sent to the Department of Immigration by one RJ Taylor, a former NSW policeman, now the Secretary of Argus Investments Pty Ltd, which owned the Texas Tavern. Abe Saffron was also associated with Argus, but police were unable to establish a connection between the two men. In October 1969, ASIO gave Houghton a security clearance.16

  For his part, Saffron was often seen in the Bourbon and Beefsteak drinking with police – but then a lot of people went to the B&B. Askin ate there with members of the Hungarian Mafia. It was a phenomenally popular venue, taking in up to $10 000 on a good weekend – a Joe Borg-sized cash flow.17

  It’s no wonder Houghton’s businesses were going well. In 2003, historian Lisa Oldmeadow interviewed Australians involved in R&R. One of her sources, ‘Linda’, described the R&R period as one long party. ‘Working all day,’ Oldmeadow comments, ‘made it difficult for a girl to party all night and get up the next day to begin the cycle again. A lot of girls took up the offers of American servicemen to take the day off work, while the Americans paid that day’s wages and on occasion the day would turn into a week. Americans also did things like pay the girl’s rent … When the servicemen had to leave, the girls often went to see them off in a tearful goodbye, a goodbye that most often turned into a welcoming smile when the next bus with a new load of servicemen rolled in for the week.’18

  The rapacity of the Australian ‘welcome’ of the American servicemen was striking. Artist Michael Fitzjames, who lived around the Cross at the time, knew a ‘grasshopper’ who was quite frank about her and her friends’ avid seizure of the opportunities offered by the ‘notoriously nice’ Americans. ‘The routine went like this: a nightclub, a motel room, a joint, maybe some uppers and downers, and sex. Then the woman would say, “I have to go home now”; the American would come down into the street and hail a cab for them, ask how much was the fare to (wherever in the suburbs they were going) and give it to the woman. She would jump in the cab and, as they were driving off, say to the cab driver “Just drop me off at Central”, and pocket the difference’.19

  Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey, chroniclers of Kings Cross during the R&R era, recorded how the economy of the district became geared towards the Americans: and there was ‘a corps of girls who literally live off the soldiers … Many of them work on a casual basis for a shop or a service or a disco that wants the R&R custom. The girls chat up the guys in the street and inveigle them into spending money at their employers. From this they pick up a healthy commission.’20

  Everyone was at it. As one taxi driver said, ‘“Take a Yank” is the name of the game around here. They pay anything for anything.’21 The Americans were not unwilling to have Australians help them spend their money. ‘Crazy as loons some of them,’ said one Kings Cross Hotel owner. ‘They paid off my mortgage in tips last year. Hope the bloody war never ends.’22

  Despite the dollar signs in their hosts’ eyes, the Americans professed themselves pleased with the R&R program. July 1969 brought the opening of a new dedicated R&R reception centre, prompting the US Consul General to say that the program had worked well with ‘an astonishing lack of problems. Well over 100 000 men had come to Australia. Only a dozen had been arrested.’23

  NOIR FEUDALISM

  The end of the old dispensation in The Lanes left Linda the Vice Queen and Donnie the Glove at a loose end. For a while they tried to get back into the sex industry, pressing Brifman to ‘sell them her phone number’, that is to say, to sell them her business.24 She declined.

  There was real rivalry between ‘the Vice Queen’ and Brifman. To take one instance: Brifman had an unusual client whom she called ‘Professor’, who enjoyed the company of multiple women at the same time not – as she put it – for ‘sex’ (that is, intercourse) but to ‘play with’. ‘He never took his clothes off,’ she said. The Professor also liked new faces and Krahe, who sometimes took an active role in managing the brothel, arranged for the Vice Queen to send over a batch of new faces for the Professor’s delectation. But Brifman refused to have them in her establishment because they were associated with her competitor.25

  Then ‘Linda and Donnie’ (as Brifman called their partnership) found a new arena for their operations – Brisbane. As we have seen, the Vice Queen had formerly been protected by Detective Sergeant Frank Charlton of the Consorting Squad. But now Fred Krahe had acquired an interest as well.

  ‘Glen Hallahan came down (to Sydney),’ Brifman recalled, ‘and Krahe took Glen out to meet Linda and Donnie. This was about when Linda and Donnie came up here (to Brisbane), Krahe fixed it with Glen for them to come up here.’26

  In Brisbane, Linda and Donnie began to run prostitutes out of the Interlude nightclub, but their activities rapidly expanded to involve other forms of crime – which was not what Hallahan had bargained for. ‘Glen found when they got here he could not handle them. They had done robberies and passed a few dud cheques,’ Brifman would recall. ‘Glen was copping a lot of responsibility on these things.’27

  As they were drawing too much attention to him, Hallahan sent them back to New South Wales. ‘He gave them Newcastle,’ Brifman said – for all the world like a feudal baron ridding himself of some unruly followers by awarding them a remote fief.

  Krahe had a hand in apportioning Newcastle to Linda and Donnie. When investigators later asked Brifman how she knew that Krahe had been protecting the duo, she said, ‘Jackie Clarke (the gunman), told me that Donnie and Linda were in Newcastle. So I asked Freddie (why they were there) and Freddie said, “I asked you before if you would go to Newcastle” (that is, he had previously offered a Newcastle prostitution franchise to Brifman). I had said to Fred, “I can’t I have too much business here.” Fred then turned around and said to me that he had given the business in Newcastle to Linda and Donnie. Naturally I came to the conclusion that he was protecting them.’28

  Linda and Donnie didn’t stay long in Newcastle. They tried their luck in Western Australia but that didn’t work out and they returned to Sydney, still trying to get back into the prostitution industry. It was an attempt that would cost Donnie the Glove his life.

  MAN OF MYSTERY

  The picture of the power structure of organised crime in Sydney so far given omits Frederick ‘Paddles’ Anderson who, born in 1915, was older than most of the other leading gangsters. He’d grown up in Sydney and been charged with murder in Melbourne in 1940, but acquitted. Following a string of lesser charges on his return to Sydney, he disappeared from public view for most of the rest of his life. Tony Reeves said that Lennie McPherson was the godfather of Anderson’s daughter Erica.29

  Some observers, including reporter Bob Bottom and crook Karl Bonnette, have suggested Anderson was the most powerful criminal in Sydney for many years, possibly from the 1950s right through to the 1970s.

  David Hickie suggested that Anderson ran the major rackets in Sydney with Ray Kelly, and after Kelly’s death in 1977, by himself. Tony Reeves, on the other hand, has Anderson ‘an old man and a chronic alcoholic’ by 1972.30 This seems to be contradicted by the so-called Dazzler police tapes of the late 1970s, which show Anderson still engaged. Anderson remains a p
uzzle.

  We know far more about Lennie McPherson, but not enough – it is still hard to assess his power precisely, although you wouldn’t have wanted to get on his wrong side. Whatever the relative importance of Anderson and McPherson, it seems that crime in Sydney was ‘organised’ only to a point. Rather than a rigid structure, it was more an arrangement that Al McCoy calls a ‘milieu’, in which business relationships came and went, albeit with a few people continuing to exert the most power within their own spheres of influence. This explains why there were competing corrupt factions within the police force, and uncertainty among criminals in some cases as to who had the pull.

  Richard Hall is a rare author who supports this view, in his 1986 book, Disorganized Crime. For what it’s worth, George Freeman also warned against seeing things as too centralised, at least by crooks. In his memoir he claimed, ‘From my experience, the only real “organisation” of crime in Sydney has come from individual police. Because when it comes to criminal networking, crooked cops have the game to themselves.’

  The choice of words here could be important. He speaks not of a hierarchy of corruption but of ‘individual … networking’ cops, of robber barons like Krahe and Frank Charlton, as well as the occasional minor freelancer, all roaming the byways of Sydney Noir looking for crims to rip off. This fits with the picture painted by Shirley Brifman. Freeman added: ‘The reality is there is no Mr Big. But people believe what they want to hear.’31

  Of course, it’s possible he was just being modest.

  MAN OF PARTS

  Robin Askin and his wife Mollie had no children. He was gregarious but had few if any close friends, and the couple rarely entertained at home. One visitor, his press secretary Geoffrey Reading, says Askin had a passion for neatness and would not tolerate any leaves on his lawn: he was known to race out of the house to pick up any that fell. The couple doted on their two cats, Kitty and Ginger.

  According to Reading, Askin had affairs, or at least sex, with other women. Reading admired his boss for being ‘a man’s man, with a man’s energy and drive and passions’. When driving around Sydney he would point out to his driver Russ Ferguson the many places where he’d had sex. Reading recalls one evening when Askin was drinking at the Texas Tavern in Kings Cross, with its owner Bernie Houghton, John Charody and the Deputy Premier Sir Charles Cutler.

  Askin was attracted to a woman described as ‘an habitué of the Texas Tavern’ – that is, a bar girl – and they slipped away together. Askin left his gold watch in the woman’s apartment by mistake, and when Russ was sent to retrieve it the next morning, she said she didn’t have it. Houghton’s aid was enlisted and two burly gentlemen called at the apartment and recovered the Premier’s timepiece.

  If Reading is to be believed, this is a telling (albeit undated) incident on several grounds. It places the Premier and Deputy Premier in a bar frequented by women of easy virtue. It places Askin with Houghton, an American spook, and both of them with Charody, a member of the Hungarian Mafia. And, of course, it has the spook effectively providing the Premier with a prostitute.

  In Reading’s view, ‘Sir Robert was a loyal provider and devoted to his wife. He was one of those men for whom one-night stands do not count, for whom affairs only begin to equate with infidelity when they become permanent or semi-permanent liaisons, such as having a mistress on the side.’ As to his virility well into his sixties, ‘I take my hat off to him, and I know that every red-blooded Australian will do the same.’

  Askin (like many other politicians) continued to use SP bookmakers, and would sometimes even ask staff to bring him a fake note so he could leave the Legislative Assembly to place a bet. On other occasions, they would place bets for him with the Parliament House SP. ‘You could get $500 on without the bat of an eyelid,’ recalled Reading. ‘I placed bets with him for Askin and on my own account. His customers included members from both sides of the House as well as Parliament House staff.’

  Increasingly, although not yet significantly, Askin was chal-lenged by social change. Students were protesting about all sorts of things, especially the Vietnam War, and doing so in new ways that brought them into confrontation with the authorities. On 1 May 1969, Sir Roden Cutler, the Governor of New South Wales who had lost a leg and won the Victoria Cross during WWII, was hit by tomatoes thrown by student demonstrators while attending a graduation ceremony at the University of Sydney. Askin effectively threatened to withdraw funding from the university unless students were expelled over the incident. There was an uproar over this threat to the university’s independence, and wiser heads persuaded him not to follow up. The incident did not help Askin’s reputation with many university students.

  THE PARTY TO END ALL PARTIES

  On the 9 May Shirley Brifman held a housewarming party to cel-ebrate her move to The Reef. It was a flamboyant gesture, in tune with the flagrancy of the times, a flagrancy that saw the 33 Club operating openly within a few hundred metres of the Darlinghurst Police Station.

  The party marked Brifman’s apogee, both her crowning moment and the beginning of her fall – or as she would put it, ‘all the strife with the newspapers’. She was ‘The Venus of The Reef’. (The words ‘Venus of the Reef’ appear as unsigned marginalia on the police record of interview with Brifman dealing with the party. Perhaps some unknown policeman had a whimsical imagi-nation, or perhaps they were recording a Noir nickname. One way or another the anonymous scribe recorded a moniker that, though perhaps ironical, reflects the archetype in Shirley Brifman.)32

  ‘It was Freddie Krahe’s idea to have the housewarming in the first place,’ she recalled. But then, unbeknown to Krahe, she invited ‘nine or ten’ other policemen. ‘He did not know that I was going to invite the others. When he found out he was crooked and he told me he did not want any other police there. But I asked Phelan there too because he was a good friend of mine. There were big business people there.’33

  The invitations to the other police, to which Krahe so objected, show how fine was the dividing line between corrupt and honest policemen. When later asked for the names of the other invitees, Brifman replied ‘most of them were decent men and not mixed up in graft and it would not be fair to them to name them. They had been to my place a fair few times and I had got to know them fairly well.’34

  So here is a whole category of detectives who are friendly enough with Brifman to be a familiar sight in her illegal brothel and yet who were ‘decent’ and ‘not mixed up in graft’. Given that Brifman had no compunction about exposing dishonest cops, one is inclined here to accept her judgment of their honesty. And why did they accept her invitation? Possibly they were customers. Or it may have been simply the same motive that used to draw hordes of sightseers down to The Lanes – having a good perv.

  When two years later Brifman went through her party snaps from that night with police investigators, it was as if she was talking about a staff party in any ordinary office.

  ‘The next one shows Leanne Clark and Sarah Williams with Mick Phelan in the background. The next shows Sarah and Phelan. This is Jane the hairdresser. I don’t know her other name. She works in Channel 2 in the makeup section. There’s also Leanne Clark and my husband and Leanne’s sister. In the background is Freddie Krahe in the centre.

  ‘The next shows Detective Sergeant Fred Krahe, myself and my husband. This is Freddie Krahe and myself. This is Dutchy Van Hooten’s father. He is an ex-gunman, dancing with Lily Ryan (Ryan was the third of Brifman’s co-workers in Brisbane’s Killarney Private Hotel who moved to Sydney). It shows Fred Krahe in the background. Lily used to work for me. … This is Mick Phelan and Sarah Williams and Freddie Krahe and myself …’

  It seems like everyone had a great time – until the hangover.

  The trouble started when the party snaps found their way to the Daily Telegraph, the Askin-supporting tabloid then owned by Sir Frank Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press. It’s not known how they got there, but one way or another the Telegraph was on to the story –
and yet, Packer didn’t publish it.

  But Rupert Murdoch did. On 8 June, Murdoch’s tabloid Sunday Mirror ran a story about the Ithaca Road brothel, but without the incriminating party photos.35 Headlined ‘Sydney’s Richest Call-Girl – $5000 a week from knights, pop stars, tycoons’, the story filled the front page and spilled onto page two.

  The Sunday Mirror said the information in the story had been gathered by a staff reporter who visited the flat posing as a client. Brifman, on the other hand, said that the story had been sold to the paper by fellow prostitute Susan Barling, who had worked alongside Brifman for some years.

  Whatever the source, the Mirror’s story was curiously garbled. The article mentioned ‘a party’ at The Reef, but not the party of 9 May. It said that Brifman had four children, which was true, but says they lived interstate, which was not. It said she was divorced, which she was not. It doesn’t mention her role in the Brisbane National Hotel Royal Commission, for which she was notorious. The ‘undercover reporter’ claims that Brifman told him that she was aged forty; in fact she was thirty-three.

  ‘If the Sunday Mirror had not published the article,’ Brifman recalled, everything ‘would have been all right. When it was published everybody panicked.’36 Specifically, she said, ‘The Mirror had published the story about a knight’ and, that ‘Freddie was frightened that Packer might print the photographs …’ – like that of Krahe standing next to his disgraced former colleague Mick Phelan.

  The frightened Freddie Krahe instructed Brifman to pre-empt any further revelations by approaching Police Commissioner Norman Allan. He ‘told me to ring John Nader the solicitor and he would write a letter to the Commissioner about an appointment. Mr Allan rang him (Nader) and said, “Get her up here immediately”.’ Brifman’s brief was to explain to Allan that she was a long-term informant of Krahe’s (which was plausible, though she later vehe-mently denied being his snitch), and that he had attended the party solely in the line of duty (which was false).