Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  This seems to have been a case, not uncommon in large organisations, of staff being more cautious than necessary when trying to second-guess their superiors. As we have seen, Allan was actually prepared for an expansion of the data used to compile crime statistics.

  At this point Arantz began to drift away from the police culture that had dominated his adult life. He explained the ‘Paddy’s book’ system to two important civilians, Jack Kendrigan, a member of the Public Service Board who was the Police Commissioner’s systems consultant, and Keith Parkinson, who had recently moved from the Board to become secretary of the Police Department. They were at first skeptical, then – after visiting police stations with Arantz – shocked, not least as they realised for the first time the political problems coming up for the Commissioner, and indeed the government, if the current practice of underreporting the true crime figures were revealed by the new system.

  Kendrigan spoke to Allan about what he’d found out and proposed that a system of ‘total reporting’ be trialled in three metropolitan divisions and one country district. Allan agreed, but insisted the official reporting arrangements were not to change for the moment.

  The trial proceeded. The police force used the State Treasury Department’s computer, although later it would be the first police in Australia to buy their own machine, a Univac 9300 named FRED (Flaming Ridiculous Electronic Device), soon replaced by a Univac 9400 called ALFRED (A Larger …). The results of the trial showed that the real number of reported crimes was some 80 per cent more than the official number, while the real clear-up rate of 16 per cent was much less than half the official rate, which was 39 per cent. This was the first time in over a decade that the true state of crime in any part of New South Wales had been quantified.

  According to Arantz, when Allan saw the figures he made an important decision: he gave Kendrigan permission to extend total reporting across the state, although with a rider. There would need to be an explanation of why the new figures were so different from the old ones. It seems (Arantz’s account is not entirely clear) that he thought Allan planned to say that the increase in the total crime figure came from including categories of minor offences previously excluded. These figures were now being included due to the extra capacity provided by the computer.

  Arantz believed that pretending the previous figure had consisted only of serious crimes would imply that the exaggerated official clear-up rate had been achieved for those crimes, which was not so. He was uncomfortable with this. However, as he later recalled, ‘Kendrigan was not sufficiently familiar with this particular analysis to be aware of this fact and I chose not to tell him at that stage. I believed that if I did advise him and he told the Commissioner, it would undoubtedly cause a cessation of the development (of the new system). It was my opinion that the benefits to be derived for the members of the police force and the public far outweighed the retention of the old system purely because a disclosure of the true crime situation could be an embarrassment to the Commissioner.’69

  There are some problems with this account. The first is that serious crimes, then as always, did have higher clear-up rates than less serious ones, because more resources were devoted to their investigation. Therefore, it is quite likely the previous figures, intended to make the police look better, had consisted of relatively more serious crimes. The second is that Allan had already announced the computer system, noted that it would affect the figures, and set it in train: he was hardly likely to dump it as Arantz suggested.

  But by this point Arantz had read up on the experiences of police forces in America that were fighting corruption, and come to hate the NSW Police culture of secrecy and paranoia, which he saw personified by Allan. He says he witnessed this culture in action in his own unit, when a competent programmer was thrown off the computerisation project for demonstrating against the Vietnam War and criticising some improper police practices. Whatever the cause – and Arantz’s account is by turns meticulous and self-serving – his views were becoming increasingly unusual for a Sydney policeman of his generation.

  SHIRLEY BRIFMAN: COMING DOWN

  On 29 December 1970, Sonny Brifman, in gaol on remand, wrote a letter to Shirley in which he said that ‘Fred K’ had not visited him, explaining that such a visit would be recorded – and presumably held against Krahe.70 This suggests the possibility that at this point Krahe, despite having severed his intimate connection with Shirley nine months earlier, was still on reasonable terms with the Brifmans.

  In the end, the Brifmans spent eleven months in legal limbo after their arrests. During this time Shirley thought about all the policemen (she would later count a total of thirty-three) who had been happy to take her money and/or to have sex with her, or to let her do their dirty work for them – and then disown her at the first sign of trouble. She seethed. And when the anger got too strong, she took more downers.

  According to Mary Anne Brifman, Shirley was convinced that even after Krahe had distanced himself from her, given her services to her corrupt contacts in the Queensland police in the National Hotel Royal Commission, they would intercede on her behalf to have the NSW prostitution charge dropped.

  ‘She was very determined (that they would help her) because it really was her only hope … That’s why she was growing more and more depressed … and that’s why she was growing more angry with them and it blotted her vision so that she couldn’t realise that they weren’t going to do anything with her and she was not about to let them get away with it. She was definitely going to um say a lot more, a lot of things about Terry Lewis and Tony Murphy…’71

  And by now her mother’s drug use was escalating. ‘She used to take uppers and downers, sleepers, strong sleeping tablets, tuinal … when I was thirteen she used to offer me purple hearts if I wanted any and pep pills … she used to take tablets to wake up, tablets to go to sleep … and she used to have morphine.’72

  END OF AN ERA: THE DEATH OF TILLY DEVINE

  But as another Sydney vice queen, Tilly Devine, could have told Shirley Brifman, nothing lasts forever. Forced out of her remaining Palmer Street brothel two years earlier, she died on 24 November 1970, penniless and unmourned.

  James Cunningham of the Sydney Morning Herald recorded the occasion. Devine, he wrote, ‘triumphed in a now forgotten period of sly grog and dubious late night entertainment. And she lingered on to die in a Sydney almost as remote from her era as it is from the days of the old Rocks pushes’.

  She ‘knew and employed a great many people. But last night in the Tradesman’s Arms in Palmer Street, once her drinking headquarters, nobody wanted to know. The old pub, of course, has changed. Smoothly tailored young men now stand around the bar where once the standover men used to drink.’

  (As it was only two years since gunmen like Chow Hayes and ‘Ratty Jack’ Clarke had been drinking there, this suggests just how fast The Lanes had changed since the death of Joe Borg. And once started, the march towards gentrification was irreversible: The Tradesman’s Arms is now The East Village Hotel.)

  ‘Tilly Devine?’ said an elegant young executive, ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘In the Tradesman’s Arms last night some of those who had known Tilly Devine in her heyday gathered at the bar as usual. But it was a sour party. “She hasn’t been here for so long,” said one large lady at the bar. “She never had many friends and no one here is collecting for a wreath. She was a hard woman. I don’t want to talk about her anymore.”’73

  ‘She’d never shown the same compassion as her much-loved rival, Kate Leigh,’ recorded crime reporter Bill Jenkings. ‘The only public eulogy offered the ‘Queen of the Loo’ came from former police commissioner Norman Allan who said, “She was a villain, but who am I to judge her?”’74 He had always been a tolerant man.

  MURDER AT THE MAYFAIR

  On New Year’s Day 1971, a Kings Cross policeman reflected on the year before:

  ‘Being a policeman in the Cross means you know something will happen every day that’s not in the rule
book … we get a proces-sion of Victorian bank clerks turning up half-naked after some pro has knocked off their clothes … On weekends you get (young men) travelling sixty miles full of piss for a night out on the Cross. When the sun goes down the clowns come out. And then you’ve got your real violence. Someone gets kicked to death in a strip joint, a man is shot at the Venus Room. Only yesterday a girl was strangled at the Mayfair Hotel…’75

  We know a lot about this ‘girl’ who was strangled in the Mayfair because her killer was brought to trial.76 We have chosen to tell the story in some detail because the trial documents give a rare account of how prostitutes actually worked, a subject on which the record (even Shirley Brifman) is reticent. Except for the investigating police, we have changed the names of the people involved, out of respect for them and their descendants.

  On Wednesday, 30 December 1970, Mary Carter, aged twenty-nine, woke up in her house in Leichhardt, where she lived with her husband, Richard Carter, and their four children – the eldest a girl aged eleven. Sometime during the morning her ‘boyfriend’ John Darling came to the house for a while, then went away. Around 1pm she drove her husband into the city and dropped him off at his workplace in Oxford Street. Later in the afternoon she picked up Darling and they drove to the Mayfair Hotel, where they arrived about 5pm. Darling headed off into the Cross on some errand – ‘to cash a cheque’, he said. Mary Carter went up to the Lounge Bar on the first floor. Her husband later told police how Mary had first started to work at the Mayfair about two years previously, as a barmaid.

  He used to come in and have a few drinks as she was finishing her shift, but then their relationship soured, and he stopped visiting the hotel. Richard Carter said that he believed she was still working there as a barmaid. In fact, she was now working the Lounge Bar, picking up customers and going off with them to one of the rooms in the peeling Art Deco floors above. The client had to pay for the room, which cost $5.75, and Carter charged $20 a trick.77

  On the same Wednesday, soldier George Smith, aged nineteen, woke up in his quarters at the Infantry Centre in Ingleburn. It was payday and he and his roommate pocketed their $70 each and headed into Kings Cross to spend it. They were due to leave for Vietnam in one week.

  Around 11am they arrived at the Kings Cross RSL, and stayed there for about an hour. They had a few drinks. They had a meal and went to the Mayfair Hotel, where they had a few drinks. Then they went to a tattoo parlour, then headed back to the hotel. On the way they met another army mate, who joined them back at the Mayfair, where they all had a few more drinks.

  There were at least three prostitutes working the Lounge Bar of the Mayfair on that day. One was Georgina Hand, and around 4pm she and Smith’s roommate came to an agreement; he hired a room, number 21 on the seventh floor, and they went up together, had sex, and then both returned to the bar.

  By the time Mary Carter arrived there were about forty people in the Lounge Bar. Various men and prostitutes went up to hired rooms during the afternoon, sometimes in pairs and sometimes trios. Smith was not one of them. Around 7pm, he decided to leave the hotel to fetch some steak sandwiches for his mates.

  According to his testimony ‘this woman accosted me near the elevator at the hotel and asked me. Although I did not want to go up with her she kept at me and later I agreed. When we got to the room

  (number 21) I did not want to go through having intercourse with her. I wanted to go out the door but she was between me and it. She kept wanting to get undressed.

  ‘She took off her loose top and I took off my shirt. I was hes-itating and very embarrassed and when I finally took it off she started laughing at me. … I got very upset with her taunting me. I remember picking up a bottle near the sink on the floor and threw it at her. It hit her and she fell to the ground. I went nowhere near her but she got up again and started screaming and shouting and calling me a mongrel bastard and things like this. With the grog and embarrassment and that I suppose I lost my head and I tried to stop the woman from screaming. I couldn’t stop her. We were screaming – wrestling and struggling around and she scratched me on the face near the lip. The next thing I remember was kneeling beside her and finding a handkerchief and it was not mine. I don’t honestly remember putting it around her neck …’78

  Mary Carter died as a result of being strangled by the handkerchief.

  Smith washed his hands and left, ‘running out of the hotel and down the street’. Then he calmed down, bought the steak sandwiches and took them back to the bar. He had only been gone half an hour and his friends – according to their testimony – didn’t notice anything amiss. A bit after 8pm the soldiers returned to their barracks.

  The next day, New Year’s Eve 1970, two detectives tracked down the two soldiers at the army base in Ingleburn. It was only then, Smith said, that he found out that Carter was actually dead. At first it was his roommate who was taken to Darlinghurst Police Station and questioned about the events of the previous day. The detectives then returned to Ingleburn and interviewed Smith. When he returned to his room he told his mate, ‘The police said, “You have no worries because your story is the same as mine.”’ But Smith did have worries: he had categorically denied being in room number 21. By 5 January the forensic experts had done their work and Smith was taken to Darlinghurst Police Station, where he was interviewed by Detective Sergeant Morey, who, after some initial fencing, said:

  Q: ‘I have been informed by fingerprints experts that your fingerprints have been identified in room 21, can you tell me now how those fingerprints came to be in that room?’

  A: ‘Oh God, what’s going to happen to me now.’ (STARTS TO CRY AND PLACES HANDS OVER FACE). (CONTINUOUS [sic] TO DO SO FOR ABOUT THREE MINUTES).

  As we have remarked, Sydney Noir was a small world. The typist during this interview was Detective Senior Constable Roger Rogerson, early in a career which would make him the most notorious Sydney policeman of his day. The misspelling of ‘continues’ is one of the very few typographical errors in the record of interview, for in fact Rogerson was renowned for his speed and accuracy as a typist. A few years later a colleague would watch amazed as Rogerson sat down with a man he had just arrested and proceed to rapidly and fluently type out an entire record of interview, questions and answers – without either Rogerson or the suspect saying a word.79

  Mary Carter came from a hard world. In 1957, at the age of sixteen, she had been convicted by the Children’s Court in a small western town of malicious wounding and sent to a juvenile institution. At some stage she had settled into a relationship with Richard Carter, who was about twenty years older than her. In the second half of the 1960s Mary was arrested three times in Sydney: for offensive behaviour (street fighting), assault and robbery, and stealing.

  Giving evidence at Smith’s trial, Richard Carter gave an account of how their relationship had deteriorated during 1970. Asked about the boyfriend Darling, Carter said he ‘was a friend of the wife.

  I don’t know much about him myself but she seemed to be going out with him a fair bit over the last seven or ten or eight months. We had our little troubles over it. There was too much fighting in the home in front of the kiddies and I let her go her own way’.

  The defence lawyer for Smith asked Richard Carter whether he knew his wife was working as a prostitute. Carter replied, ‘Never in my life’.

  Q: ‘You know she had a considerable amount of money of her own, did you not?’

  A: ‘Yes, she was a good gambler, put it that way, a real good gambler. She could put 20 or 30 on a horse or a dog and think nothing of it.’

  Three questions later, the lawyer got more or less what he wanted, a description from the husband of how things stood between the Carters.

  Q: ‘You did know, and I am not critical of you, but you knew she had a pretty close association with this man Darling?’

  A: ‘Only in the last month I would say and I wanted to really put my foot down. She said, “You went your way and I am going my way. We are not getting o
n together too well, but I am staying, you have got my kiddies, I am staying with the kiddies, you are staying and paying your way.” That is as far as it went.’

  Darling didn’t give much away in his testimony. He said he had first met Carter at the Mayfair Hotel in February 1970, at which stage she was working as a prostitute. On the day of her death she arranged to meet him at 7.30pm in the Lounge Bar, but she never showed up – by then she was dead. He waited in the hotel until 10pm, then went on to a club; if he was concerned about her disappearance, he didn’t do anything about it.

  Smith’s lawyer took a swipe at Darling, trying to get him to confess that he was her pimp.

  Q: ‘When you took her to the Mayfair Hotel you knew she was going for the purpose of prostitution?’

  A: ‘Yes.’

  Q: ‘You were there to keep an eye on her, were you not?’

  A: ‘No.’

  Q: ‘You say, do you, that she gave you no money on this afternoon at all? Or this evening?’

  A: ‘She gave me no money?’

  Q: ‘Yes.’

  A: ‘No, she didn’t give me any money at all.’

  If Darling had answered ‘Yes’ to that question he would have laid himself open to being charged with managing prostitution. At this point the clearly skeptical judge intervened:

  Q: ‘She did sometimes, I daresay?’

  A: ‘Well, I have given her thousands of pounds.’

  George Smith’s background was no more fortunate than that of his victim. His parents divorced soon after he was born, and he was raised by relatives, taking their surname. Finishing school in Adelaide just after he turned seventeen, he immediately joined the army, but was discharged within weeks as being ‘not fit to be a soldier’. He went to work as a timber-cutter, but was struck on the head by a falling tree.