Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  Since the 1890s, the Western Australian gold mining town of Kalgoorlie has been a bastion of legalised prostitution, and during the Golden Years it was the only tolerated brothel precinct in the whole of Australia.57 As a result, moving to Kalgoorlie was a recognised way out for Sydney sex workers who found themselves under threat from pimps or partners, police or criminals. The prostitute Rita told Raelene Frances, author of Selling Sex, how she fled Sydney for Kalgoorlie in the late 1960s because she was being threatened by standover men. ‘Because I was a freelancer and I was making that much damn money. And all the big fellas got the ideas into their heads, see … I nearly ended up getting blooming killed by ’em. Because I refused to join ’em.’58

  Lisa was the sex worker who had witnessed the first-grade foot-baller urinating on prostitutes in The Lanes. In the 1960s she too went to Kalgoorlie for a while, returning to Sydney in late 1969, where she found that all her colleagues were ‘back on William Street, but this time driving cars. You had your own car and you would pick a client up and take him back to a house run by the only woman now allowed to run houses. If anybody else tried to get a house the police closed in, and if you had a boyfriend or husband he was arrested for “living off the earnings”. You had to work for her (the only woman now allowed to run houses). If you didn’t, you had some terrible misfortunes in your life.’59

  As with 1968, the police statistics on prostitution for 1969 aren’t very illuminating. The only significant change was a continuation in the steep decline in the arrests of women on the catch-all charge of ‘offensive behaviour’, from 2485 down to 1634. What you don’t get from the numbers is the sense of what Lisa was saying: unlike in Shirley Brifman’s high-class establishments, for the bulk of Sydney’s working girls, as the sixties turned into the seventies life was getting harder.

  LENNIE RUNS INTO TROUBLE

  Nineteen sixty-nine had started badly for Lennie McPherson. Detective Sergeant Leslie Chowne, an honest cop, had unaccount-ably been appointed head of the Consorting Squad. Some of his detectives confronted McPherson in a club and told him, ‘You know the gloves are off, don’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Detective Chowne wants you out of the way, and he is the boss, and we are going to give you the treatment.’60

  Chowne actually charged McPherson with consorting with known criminals. When the matter reached court in June, the cop who gave evidence was the corrupt Frank Charlton, who assured the equally corrupt magistrate, Murray Farquhar, that there was no evidence to link McPherson to organised crime. McPherson did not go to prison.61 Presumably Chowne was unhappy with this outcome. It was a typical example of the problems faced by honest police seeking to impose the law on Noir figures.

  ENTER THE WHISTLEBLOWER

  The story of how policeman Philip Arantz leaked the true crime figures for New South Wales in 1971, thereby shaming the Commissioner and the premier, is well known. It is widely believed that but for his brave action, the police force and the government would have kept lying about the true state of crime.

  As Arantz’s own account shows, the reality is more nuanced. But its subtleties were overwhelmed by Allan’s bizarre response to the leak, which was to try to have Arantz classified as insane. As a result, Arantz became not only Australia’s most famous whistleblower but, in the eyes of many people, a martyr.

  In the late 1960s, governments everywhere were adopting computers. The Public Service Board decided that New South Wales, with one of the largest and most dispersed police forces in the world, should not be left out. Policing was an activity that would benefit significantly from the capacity to record and analyse the vast amount of data it produced.

  Commissioner Allan, who had a reputation as a keen admin-istrator, agreed, but there was one problem. One of the things a computer would do would be to record crime statistics. As we’ve seen, for many years the police force had been lying to the public by minimising the amount of crime in the state, and exaggerating the clear-up rate. How this worked was that all crime reported to a police station was recorded in the so-called ‘Paddy’s book’, but only some of it – mainly those crimes that had been solved – was passed on to headquarters and appeared in the annual reports tabled in parliament.

  Crime rates were actually growing dramatically, especially crime against property.62 The public sense of insecurity increased, whipped on by the ever-vigorous evening tabloids, the Sun and the Mirror.63 People might not know the real figures, but everyone knew someone who’d been burgled or had their car stolen.

  Commissioner Allan had inherited the ‘Paddy’s book’ system, and actually made serious efforts to move the figures closer to reality. From 1961 to 1966, the official clear-up rate as recorded in the police annual reports dropped from 82 per cent to 68 per cent.64 It continued to drop, while the official crime figures rose. Under Allan the figures were being changed, even if they still lagged a long way behind the reality.

  In the Police Department Annual Report for 1969, Allan noted that the official crime figures in the report were only those offences described as ‘serious crime’, of which 52 per cent had been cleared up. He announced that he had approved the introduction of computers to ‘determine, more precisely than has hitherto been possible, the nature and extent of all offences committed in New South Wales’.65 Allan, in other words, was perfectly aware that computerisation, involving non-police staff and more effective data collection, would increase the overall crime figures and further reduce the official clear-up rate. He was preparing the public for these outcomes.

  The Police Administration and Management Research Branch was responsible for introducing computer technology to the Central Investigation Branch, and in December Detective Sergeant Philip Arantz of the latter was seconded to the former to assist. His job would be to liaise between the boffins and the detectives. It was not a job most detectives would have wanted, but Arantz was an obsessive character with an independent mind and an interest in technology, and he’d applied for the position. CIB chief Don Fergusson was on the interview panel and possibly was glad to get rid of him.

  ‘A BEX AND A GOOD LIE DOWN’

  As we have seen, in 1960 the use of illicit drugs like marijuana and heroin was almost unknown in Australia. In the early sixties there were only very occasional seizures of heroin, which was obtain-able from Chinese sources in Sydney’s Dixon Street.66 ‘Most of the heroin and opium landing in Sydney goes to the Chinese – or doctors,’ Richard Neville recorded.67 After peaking in the 1920s, cocaine use had almost disappeared. And you were more likely to run across marijuana in the novels of Raymond Chandler than in real life.

  It was the same elsewhere. Years later, narcotics agent Bernard Delaney would recall how in 1964 he and his team made Melbourne’s first marijuana arrest in decades. Between them, the three had thirty-four years’ experience in the Victoria Police, and yet this was the first time any of them had had any contact with illicit – that is, non-pharmaceutical – drugs or illicit drug users.68

  Marijuana use would increase dramatically during the Golden Years, but from an almost negligible base. Speaking of the mid-1960s, Richard Hall commented ‘Marijuana was … something of a cult drug among band members and surfies; while it moved into the better-off middle class, the large-scale market was still a few years away’.69 From a similarly negligible base, heroin use also increased, but to nothing like the same extent. And even given the rapid increase in the popularity of marijuana, overall use of ‘illicit’ drugs in the period 1966–72 was only a fraction of what it would become in the late 1970s.

  The real drug problem in the Golden Years was pharmaceutical, the abuse of a whole legion of ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’, stimulants and sedatives, or ‘speed’ and ‘barbies’. Most required a prescription, but in an era when the medical establishment was less seized of the dangerous side effects of such medication, by today’s standards doctors tended to over-prescribe.

  The use of licit drugs was celebrated in popular culture
. The barbiturate Tuinal was widely used – including by role model James Bond.70 Other widely used downers were Mogadon and Valium. Among the uppers was the amphetamine Dexamyl, nicknamed ‘purple hearts’, which, as The Who recorded, was a mainstay of London’s Mod subculture.

  The plague of prescription-strength pharmaceuticals was bad enough, but even more pernicious, because so innocuous and widespread, were the sachets of powder sold over-the-counter in news-stands, corner shops, wherever. Examples included the addictive pain killer phenacetin, an ingredient in the medicines Vincents, Bex, APC and Veganin, and now known to be responsible for a forty-year epidemic of kidney disease.

  The sachets were ubiquitous, as evident in this account of the first television transmission in Sydney: ‘After watching the test pat-tern for 10 minutes, the very first thing to come on was not the Queen, or the National Anthem but an ad for Vincent’s APCs (head-ache powders).’71

  The illegal baccarat schools would hand out the powders to punters to encourage them to keep playing.72 The manufacturers targeted women, pushing their product as ‘mother’s little helper’.73 Phenacetin fixed everything: when the partner of bent greyhound trainer Charles Bourke described the events leading up to his shooting in 1964 she recalled how, when woken by a strange noise outside their house, she ‘took a powder’ and went back to sleep.

  ‘Have a cup of tea, a Bex, and a good lie down’, went the slogan, but the reality behind it was that by the mid-1970s, a fifth of all patients with kidney failure were heavy phenacetin users. Alfred McCoy cites a survey that found that in the ‘early 1970s the Australian rate of analgesic-related kidney failure was fifty times that in other countries’.74 Phenacetin was ultimately banned in 1977.75

  During the Golden Years, if you used narcotics you were one of a tiny minority. If you were young, if you surfed, if you read Oz, then you might well have tried marijuana. But the vast majority of drug users got their kicks out of pill bottles and sachets of powders, whose contents had received medical sanction. And wherever they worked – as call girls, in The Lanes or on the street – prostitutes were known for their high rate of drug abuse, just as they had been during the cocaine epidemic of the 1920s.

  The double standard over licit and illicit drugs involved both conservative hypocrisy and false consciousness. Shirley Brifman talked in a patronising and disapproving way about a young woman who ‘hit the (illicit) drugs’ – as if the sedatives to which she herself was addicted were in a more acceptable category.76

  RAKING IT IN

  AN ANATOMY OF CORRUPTION

  There is no doubt corruption in Sydney in the Golden Years was widespread, and widely tolerated. The Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service (1995–97), after interviewing hundreds of witnesses including former commissioners, found that ‘a state of sys-temic and entrenched corruption existed within the Service’.1

  ‘There seems to have been a perception within the Service and outside of it, during the 1960s and 1970s, that corruption was rife … Pay-offs to police from gaming and vice interests were an open secret, but never seriously targeted.’2

  ‘The main power base in the Force in this period was undoubtedly the CIB and its various squads, elements of which were regarded as seriously corrupt. Transfers to and from the CIB could take place overnight “in the interests of the Service”. Those from the squads were recognised as having shortcut systems for achieving results such as ‘police verbals’ and ‘loads’ (planting of evidence). Moreover, investigations were seen by other police to become unpredictable if the CIB, which had the power to move in on any investigation, took them over.’3

  The Royal Commission concluded that, ‘The reluctance or inability on the part of management to face up to the problems which emerged in this period allowed such behavior to continue unchecked. It also gave the appearance of tacit approval by senior officers to what was often perceived as “noble cause” corruption, and as informal control of crime through allowing preferred and powerful criminals a licence or “green light”, in return for the elimi-nation of their competitors, the avoidance of worse criminality, and the provision of information.’4

  But the details of this corruption remain sketchy. The police of the Golden Years wrote down relatively little. What they did write was related to specific crimes – they did not even have an intelligence section until 1974. So in our period, if a crime was not reported (and most crimes were not), there was no written trace of it. Today, the police archives are largely empty or unavailable.

  In 1970, a Victorian policeman named Bernard Delaney joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and moved to Sydney. He later wrote his memoir, Narc!, which is one of the few first-hand accounts of police corruption from this period.

  Delaney had had previous dealings with Sydney police. He’d found that crime was far more prevalent and open in New South Wales than Victoria, because a ‘hard core of corruption runs right through [the NSW Police Force’s] ranks. Its many honest policemen are not allowed to go about their work as they might. Those corrupt policemen who protect certain criminal elements are in turn protected by equally corrupt senior officers and politicians’.5

  Delaney worked in the Victorian Homicide Squad from 1968–70. It was common practice for Victorian police to avoid sharing sensitive information with NSW Police in case it was given to criminals. On one occasion, Delaney sought the cooperation of Sydney police in his investigation of illegal abortionists. They told him they couldn’t obtain search warrants to raid suspicious doctors, or find evidence against abortionists. This was simply untrue.

  In return for payment, Delaney later wrote, NSW Police gave the ‘green light’ to shoplifters in suburbs they controlled. The NSW Vice Squad detectives would drive through Kings Cross and receive money more or less openly from prostitutes and pimps. (Hence the story of the civilian who, having bought an unmarked police car at public auction, was driving along Darlinghurst Road when a crook recognised it and threw a bundle of cash through the window.)6

  In New South Wales, in a practice known as ‘selling briefs’, police would sell prosecution evidence to defence lawyers before a trial, enabling the defence to better prepare its case: ‘I have been on the fringes of conversations where New South Wales detectives discussed the price of a brief and the way to split it.’ Lawyers who questioned this were treated poorly: ‘I have even heard New South Wales policemen threaten a solicitor with physical violence outside a court. The solicitor cowered.’7

  Delaney claimed corruption was pervasive in Sydney, extending from the populace to police to the legal fraternity and into parliament. Carloads of people from the suburbs would circle the streets of Kings Cross at night and on weekends to view the (illegal) streetwalkers and, later in the 1960s, the entrances of the well-known [illegal] casinos. Delaney did not even ‘believe that the people of New South Wales expect their policemen to be honest. They speak openly and without apparent malice about their attempts to buy their way out of traffic bookings. They expect to “sling” to the police for recovering stolen property. Some joke about having “the best police money can buy”.’8

  DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

  On Sunday 15 February 1970, Detective Superintendent Donald Fergusson, Head of the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the NSW Police, was found dead of a gunshot wound.9 He was lying in the shower cubicle of his executive office at CIB headquarters in Surry Hills, with the door to his suite locked. The coroner found that he had died of a ‘bullet wound to the head, self-inflicted whilst in a state of mental depression’.10

  In the canon, Fergusson’s death is sometimes taken as evidence that police corruption was so bad it caused senior police to kill each other. The story goes that after falling out with Fred Krahe, Fergusson was either pressured into suicide or was actually murdered by Krahe.11

  Several hypotheses for the alleged rift between Fergusson and Krahe are proposed, including that Fergusson had accepted a promotion that would have seen him replaced at the CIB by someone less supportive of corrupti
on; that he was refusing to become involved in the growing drug trade due to moral qualms; and that he was about to inform on his corrupt colleagues, who also included the still influential ex-detective Ray Kelly.12 But there is no evidence for any of these hypotheses, and in fact the sole ‘evidence’ that Fergusson was murdered at all is the claim by author Tony Reeves that he was told by a morgue worker that the cause of death was two bullet wounds to the head (not one, as stated by the coroner), fired from a distance of some three metres. ‘He must have had very long arms and very quick reflexes (to have committed suicide),’ Reeves’ source told him.13

  But if you were a cold-blooded killer planning to pass a murder off as suicide, why would you fire twice? Also, the two shots-three metres scenario suggests the killing involved some very fine shooting indeed, and would have taken place outside the small shower cubicle, which would have left a terrible mess in the middle of the CIB office.

  Fergusson’s wife Sylvia told the coronial inquest how on Saturday, 14 February, her husband had gone down the road to pay the newspaper bill, then returned to their flat to watch sport on television. The couple, who’d been married since 1938, lived in the modern red brick block, Carrbrook, on the corner of Carr and Brook Streets, Coogee. In the late afternoon Fergusson drove to his office to collect some papers he wanted to read the next day. She recalled: ‘I went out to the balcony as it was his habit to look up and wave to me. I saw him come out of the building below me but he did not look up to wave to me as was his usual practice. He walked to our garage and shortly afterwards drove away in the Police Rambler sedan.’