The coronial inquiry clearly showed, and the Sydney Morning Herald reported, that Fergusson had for many years suffered from hypochondria to a degree that verged on mental illness.14 His GP said he believed he had a brain tumour and had raised this fear at every consultation over a period of eleven years, despite the lack of any symptoms. In the note Fergusson left his wife, he wrote that he was convinced he had cancer and was terrified of dying horribly, as several of their acquaintances had done.
According to the autopsy report, Fergusson did not have a brain tumour or cancer. He died of a single gunshot wound. His body was found curled up in the shower recess of the bathroom (presumably he used the cubicle out of consideration for the cleaners), with no signs of a struggle or bloodstains anywhere else.
For Krahe to have covered up a ‘murder’ of Fergusson, he would have had to suborn not just multiple police investigators, but morgue workers, the pathologist, the handwriting expert who verified that the suicide note was in Fergusson’s hand, and Fergusson’s personal doctor – who might have had to forge medical records stretching back eleven years – and the coroner himself. Even by the standards of police corruption in Sydney at the time, this seems unlikely.
It was Krahe himself who probably got it right. When he heard of Fergusson’s death, he reportedly said, ‘The stupid bastard, he didn’t have to do it’.15 Some have sought to explain this comment by suggesting that Fergusson killed himself from remorse at his own corrupt behaviour, or that his fear of exposure by Krahe was mis-placed. But Krahe’s utterance fits perfectly with the known facts as accepted by the coroner. Even corrupt detectives can suffer from mental illness.
One wreath at Fergusson’s funeral had a card that read, ‘With deepest sympathy from Lennie’.16
BERTRAM WAINER: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Dr Bertram Wainer found that his campaign for abortion law reform had some unforeseen consequences. In March 1970, he appeared on ABC TV’s Four Corners program and gave the journalist the information Don Fergusson had refused to accept the previous year, which was a list of the names of illegal abortionists who treated women particularly badly. When Commissioner Norman Allan appeared on the same program, he said there were no abortionists operating in Sydney. Shown Wainer’s list, he denied its accuracy, at which point the journalist showed him film about an abortionist’s surgery on the list, including interviews with patients. The surgery was within one block of police headquarters.
When you hear of this sort of thing, you can see why despairing contemporaries might have believed Allan was on the take. But he might just have been doing part of his job, which was to make the public feel that Sydney was a law-abiding city run by a competent police force. Even if that was false.
Police raids on abortionists on the list followed, although some had by coincidence left for overseas just before the police called. There were also raids on other abortionists, ones who treated their customers relatively well, who had to close their businesses. As a result, many women were forced to use the services of back-yard abortionists, and the incidence of women with septic abortions entering public hospitals shot up – something Wainer deeply regretted.17
THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE
For Shirley Brifman the year began on an unusual note: her one and only trip abroad. On 6 February 1970 she led a trade mission of Sydney prostitutes to Singapore.18 She did so at the behest of a Sydney ‘financier with mining interests’, who said he wanted to do a good turn for some Asian business contacts. When they got to Singapore, the women were installed in a luxury flat, with a former local policeman as a bouncer.
According to what Brifman would later tell the Sunday Mirror, the real story emerged over a couple of days. What she thought had been a short-term gig was in fact an audition, to see whether she would be prepared to traffic Australian prostitutes to Arab harems in the Middle East.
One of the Singapore businessmen she was dealing with proposed that Brifman recruit more Australian prostitutes. When they arrived in Singapore their passports would be taken from them and sold for $2000, of which Brifman would receive half. Then the women themselves would be sold: ‘Australian girls were worth $5000 apiece on the slave market, he said, because Caucasian women were much in demand for Arab harems.’ Unnerved, Brifman and two of the three other women returned to Australia after just six days.
Brifman’s excursion to Singapore was not an isolated phenomenon, but an example of a burgeoning Asian Noir connection. South-East Asia was a destination for Noir money: Australian criminals invested in bars in Manila, and twice, in 1969 and 1970, Abe Saffron would visit Jakarta at the behest of Sydney poker machine king Jack Rooklyn to investigate opening bars there. Lennie McPherson was a frequent visitor to the Philippines.
On her return to Sydney, Brifman was contacted by the Australian representative of the Singapore businessman, who warned her not to say anything about the episode. ‘If you talk, you’re dead.’ The message was reinforced on 25 February when a ‘prosperous-looking Asian’ turned up at Wylde Street and attacked her with a hammer. Brifman ‘was knocked to the ground and kicked before other girls intervened and wrested the hammer from him’.
Deciding that publicity was her best defence against the employers of the ‘prosperous-looking Asian’, Brifman gave an interview to the Sunday Mirror, making the front page for the second time in less than a year. This time there was even a photo of her – or rather, of a bruise on her arm. Her face was out of the frame, because she didn’t want to ‘be identified in the suburb where she lives with her children’. To be so open about her business, Brifman must have been very confident in her immunity from prosecution.
After Donald Fergusson’s suicide, the new head of the CIB was Detective Superintendent Richard Lendrum, and for Fred Krahe this proved to be a disaster. A few days after the Sunday Mirror published its story about Brifman’s Singapore misadventure entitled ‘White Slave Racket – Sydney Girls Sold’, Krahe turned up at the brothel in Wylde Street.
‘Dick Lendrum had not long taken over,’ recalled Brifman. ‘Krahe came up to my place in a panic and a half and said, “We have just had a meeting and Dick Lendrum had a shot at me over the white slave traffic in Singapore”. Krahe said to me, “I think you had better go to Western Australia”.’19
Lendrum’s linking of Krahe and Brifman cannot have come as any great surprise: ever since Brifman’s interview with Commissioner Norman Allan nine months earlier, their connection was official knowledge. The difference now was that without Don Fergusson to protect him, Krahe was staring at the career-ending fate of Mick Phelan and Harry Giles. With Lendrum at the helm of the CIB, Brifman had become a dangerous liability, and he wanted her out of Sydney and out of his life.
And so Lendrum’s intervention triggered the end of Freddie and Shirley: Krahe broke off their three-year Noir romance. And, despite her many other sexual partners, that’s how Brifman saw it, as a romance. Freddie was ‘on’ with her. Whenever she was away, ‘Freddie would ring me every day and say he missed me’.20
It was from this moment, she said, that she stopped having sex with him. It was from this moment that she stopped paying him the $100 a week: from now on, Fred didn’t owe her any favours anymore. But she was still paying $100 per week to Detective Sergeant Crest of the Vice Squad, through the discredited Mick Phelan, and other payments to police as individual problems needed fixing.
And almost simultaneously, Brifman broke with the other major policeman in her life, Queensland detective Glen Hallahan. ‘I fell out with Glen in February or March 1970,’ Brifman said. ‘I fell out with him over, I think, Col Bennett. He was querying me about Col Bennett ringing up or coming to see me.’21 Bennett was a Brisbane lawyer and Labor state MP, a relentless critic of police corruption and of the newly elected Bjelke-Petersen coalition government. Brifman had first had dealings with Bennett at the time of the National Hotel Royal Commission; now she took him on as her lawyer and confidant. If her life was a game in which she had put most of her chips
on corrupt police, her relationship with Bennett was a side bet.
Later in March, Fred Krahe was on leave when he was recalled to help investigate the biggest cash theft in the state’s history, the robbery of $587 890 from a Mayne Nickless armoured van at Guildford.22 The robbery was never solved, but there is a theory that Krahe identified the thieves and told his criminal associate Kevin Gore, who headed the Toecutter Gang that tortured at least one of the thieves and stole some of the proceeds of the crime.23
SHIRLEY COMES UNDONE
These days the general view of Shirley Brifman is that as a woman, as a sex worker, she courageously struck back at her exploiters – and that is true. But people around her became victims too. In particular, there is one episode that no commentator has sought to excuse, an episode which – as author Steve Bishop puts it – shatters her image as ‘the prostitute with a heart of gold’.24
In March 1970, Brifman’s eldest daughter Mary Anne, who had turned thirteen the previous December, was put to work in the Wylde Street brothel.25 Mary Anne Brifman told her story in 1988, to investigators with Queensland’s Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct – ‘the Fitzgerald Inquiry’.
‘When I was thirteen I was taken to a unit and held prisoner there … I was forced to work as a call girl or prostitute … when the detectives finally came and I was so relieved to see them, not knowing that I would get my parents into so much trouble relating to that charge.
‘My mother took me there. And I don’t think she meant for anything to happen there but my father came up and I probably looked sixteen and I was extremely pretty and just one of their wealthy clients wanted to see me and when I told him I’d never done anything before he didn’t realise I was their daughter he then offered to pay more and then that’s how I ended up staying there and my father kept me there … until the police came. I wasn’t streetwise enough to know how to run away. I tried to kill myself there and they took me to a private hospital and then I was taken back there.
‘There was another lady that always lived there and there were other girls that came in as well (it was) a brothel. They just knew that I wouldn’t run away. And then my mother went to hospital because she had to have a couple of operations and that’s when she taught me how all the business worked … and I resigned myself to the fact that I would be there till I was eighteen, until I thought I was old enough to run away … sounds ridiculous but that’s just how it was.’26
Although Mary Anne sought to partly exonerate her mother – ‘I don’t think she meant for anything to happen there’ – obviously Shirley Brifman was complicit in prostituting her daughter. The consequences for all concerned would prove devastating.
Meanwhile, despite the fall of Phelan, and despite having fallen out with Krahe and Hallahan, Brifman was not bereft of friends in the police force. Policemen still liked to hang around Brifman, her brothel was full of good things: juicy bits of information about Noir goings on; a few beers on the house; bargains on the stolen goods that were fenced at her premises; free sex with her or one of the other working girls; and bribes.
Detective Sergeant David Cootes (not his real name) had been buzzing around this honey pot since 1965. In March 1969, when she was moving into The Reef, he helped her hang the stolen artwork with which she decorated it.27 He was, she said, ‘wrapped in’ her.28 So much so that Krahe had begun to see him as a rival for Brifman’s affections: ‘The only one (of the other detectives with whom she had sex) Krahe was ever jealous of was David Cootes,’ she said. ‘He transferred him … He was a very jealous man in his own way once you got intimate with him.’29
Then something bad happened at Wylde Street. ‘Two of the girls working for me, it might have been three, were raped by two men who climbed a forty-foot wall,’ Brifman recalled. ‘The girls were New Zealand girls (one of them) got loose and rang up from one of the flats and the police car which was in the area was called and the girls were taken to Darlinghurst Police Station. The girls talked openly (that is, did not conceal the fact that they worked in a brothel).’
Previously it would have been Krahe who took care of damage limitation; now Brifman turned to Cootes. ‘I rang David Cootes at his home and he sent (two corrupt detectives to quash any investigation). Sonny handled that. I did not, but money was paid to get the whole thing dropped.’
Brifman paid for the police investigation into the rapes to be quashed because if it went ahead the fact that she was running a brothel in Wylde Street would inevitably come to light, and the whole racket – so lucrative to everyone – wrecked. As one of the detectives said, ‘we can’t have Shirley come undone’.30
But that’s just what was about to happen.
In June Shirley Brifman went back into the Sanitarium Hospital for more medical treatment. She was in hospital for five weeks, and it was during this time that her stand-in manager at Wylde Street hired another prostitute provided by the Vellas. ‘Young Pat’ (not her real name) was fourteen.31
Underage prostitution was a feature of Sydney’s sex industry. Underage prostitutes were a known attraction of Abe Saffron’s Venus Room, and Roberta Perkins interviewed a woman who was forced into prostitution as a thirteen-year-old teenage runaway working in school uniform and managed by a female pimp. Boys in their mid-teens also worked as prostitutes.32
According to Shirley Brifman, ‘Young Pat’ had twice escaped from juvenile detention centres. Working as a streetwalker and ‘going with’ a Maltese man named Frank, she was being threatened by a Detective Donald Evans (not his real name) of the Vice Squad, who had twice arrested her and was demanding $700 from her, otherwise he would send her back to juvenile detention. ‘She could not afford to pay him. Frank must have discussed this with Joe Vella because Joe sent her to my place to work to get her off the street.’33
Once there, Young Pat discovered she was not the only underage worker in the Wylde Street brothel, and she told Detective Evans about Mary Anne’s presence. By now Brifman was out of hospital, and in early July the axe fell: Brifman, her husband and Mary Anne were all arrested by Evans. (We do not know why Evans had different attitudes to Young Pat and Mary Anne; possibly it was because he was not receiving money from the Brifmans.) Brifman and Sonny were charged with procuring a thirteen-year-old girl for the purposes of prostitution, and Mary Anne was sent to a Child Welfare Home. And that was the end of Shirley’s career as a Vice Queen; it was at that point ‘I went out of business’.34 Brifman was bailed out by her admirer David Cootes. And she was still on sufficiently good terms with Fred Krahe for him to offer some low-profile assistance. ‘I got out on bail on the Sunday morning (5 July) and I spoke to Freddie. He gave the names of a couple of (juvenile detention) homes my daughter might be in. Freddie told me to go and see (lawyer) Kevin Murray to defend me.’35
Krahe was still a good cop to know. In fact, in June 1970 he was awarded the Peter Mitchell Trophy for the Most Outstanding Performance of Any Phase of Police Duty. Ray Kelly had won the trophy twice.
Krahe and Murray agreed that the best way out of the mess for all concerned was for Sonny to take the whole rap. ‘During the hearing of the charges against me and Sonny over Mary Anne, Fred Krahe and Kevin Murray told Sonny to go through on his bail (that is, abscond) so that all the blame would be thrown on to him because he was missing,’ Brifman recalled. ‘He did go through but he only went to Brisbane (that is, his flight wasn’t dramatic enough to convince prosecutors that he actually was wholly responsible). He is a sick man. Sonny should have turned up for court the first time.’36
As it was, Sonny’s trip to Brisbane just confused the issue. The cases against the Brifmans were continually deferred. Shirley, too hot for the police to protect any more, shut down Wylde Street and stopped paying off the Vice Squad. Mary Anne spent about a month in juvenile detention, and was finally released into the custody of an aunt who lived in Queensland, in her late fifties and deeply religious.37
Brifman sought the help of poli
ce she had assisted previously, but none wanted to know her. She tried Tony Murphy in Brisbane, whom she had saved from the Royal Commission in 1963–64. Murphy refused, taking the position that in prostituting her own daughter, Brifman had put herself beyond the pale.38
FIRST WAVE OF ILLICIT DRUGS
Around 1970 illicit drugs – principally marijuana and heroin – began to feature more prominently in the Noir world. Bernard Delaney saw the rise of the trade at first hand, while working undercover with the new Australian Bureau of Narcotics.
At that time the narcotics trade was still in its infancy. ‘Those close to the drug scene talked about ‘matchbox ounces’, Delaney recalled. ‘A seizure of one pound of marihuana (the alternative Spanish spelling used for many years) was considered a major capture, a seizure of LSD or heroin something out of the ordinary.’39
But that changed quickly. ‘The year 1970 was critical. It was the year when the traffickers really got rolling. Marihuana was being imported from South Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia; hashish was being imported from India; LSD was finding its way to us from the United States; heroin was being imported from Hong Kong and Thailand; the Chinese (in Sydney’s Dixon Street) were beginning to deal with Europeans … It was also the year when the heavies arrived armed with guns.’
Until then, the nascent drug trade was associated with peaceful hippies or elderly Chinese. But by the end of 1970, according to Delaney, the Bureau of Narcotics was beginning to deal with professional criminals, who included Stan Smith. On 16 October Delaney arrested Smith for trafficking – albeit in stolen pharmaceuticals, amphetamines, rather than marijuana or heroin.40
The illegal drug scene remained modest by later standards, although R&R certainly made a difference. Every weekend when the Pan Am flights with another thousand US servicemen arrived at Kingsford Smith Airport, the Bureau would be called out to arrest those who’d been found with heroin in their possession. An ‘amnesty bag’ was passed around inside the plane as it approached Sydney, but some soldiers thought they could get away with it. Many of them did. Delaney recalled that often the servicemen caught didn’t even realise they were heroin addicts until they were thrown into a police cell for the night. Most had been smoking the heroin and thought that would not give them a habit. ‘The majority of those soldiers were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment and the time they spent in prison was added to the period of the obligatory national service,’ Delaney recalled. ‘On returning to Vietnam … these convicted smugglers would be thrown straight into the front lines.’41
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