Sydney Noir

by Michael Duffy

  The injury triggered behaviour that resulted in his being treated in a psychiatric institution. There he complained of hallucina-tions, including that the Vietcong were trying to stop him leaving Australia to go to Vietnam; he could ‘hear them laughing at him’. While in hospital he took an overdose of tablets but this ‘was not considered to be a serious suicide attempt’.

  He discharged himself from hospital in January 1970, moved to Sydney and in April joined the army again, using his birth name to conceal the circumstances in which his earlier enlistment had been terminated. This time – despite other episodes of depression and self-harm, which he managed to conceal from the authorities – he performed well enough to be selected for active service in Vietnam.

  The jury found Smith not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter, and added a recommendation for mercy. In doing so, it seems to have accepted Smith’s plea that he acted under the influence of alcohol. Smith admitted to drinking about ‘seventeen mid-dies of beer and a couple of brandy lime and sodas’ in the eight hours leading up to the murder.

  The jury also seems to have been swayed by Smith’s plea that he resorted to violence partly out of ‘embarrassment’ – an attitude endorsed by the judge, who in sentencing Smith cited his testimony that Carter had ‘provoked and taunted’ him.

  And Smith made a third plea: that he deserved leniency because he was a soldier. Right at the opening of his statement from the dock he said, ‘I am a member of the permanent Army and I was on draft to Vietnam. I am very keen on the Army and in fact I first joined the Army at the age of seventeen …’ Neither his defence lawyer nor anyone else made much of this argument, but perhaps they didn’t have to. Historian Raelene Frances points out that there is in Australian society a widespread view that ‘soldiers are intrinsi-cally worthwhile; sex workers are worthless’.80

  Smith was sentenced to gaol with a non-parole period of four years.81

  READING PADDY’S BOOK

  BUSINESS OR PLEASURE?

  Joe Testa returned to Sydney on 13 January 1971, staying for about six weeks.1 He brought his new wife, a former air hostess. The couple were greeted at the airport by George Freeman and Ronnie Lee. They stayed at the Gazebo Hotel in Kings Cross for a while, and then rented a place in Holt Street, Double Bay. As before, Testa went on a shooting trip out west with Lennie McPherson, both men taking their wives. McPherson later said he was asked to take Testa on the trip by George Freeman, who ‘doesn’t like shooting, and is tied up in the SP and couldn’t get away’.

  Testa bought himself a racehorse called Just U Wait. He invested some $150 000 in a real estate development project with his mate George Freeman, but it didn’t work and he sold out at a small loss. One day the two men were picked up by the Consorting Squad. ‘I was quite harassed by it,’ Testa later recalled, ‘because it is the first time in my life in forty-three years that I had ever been to a police station. (The policeman) told me Freeman was this and that, and he insinuated I was a member of the Mafia and I got pretty upset about it. … I was that perturbed about it I was going to report it to the Commissioner, or whatever I had to do to make a formal complaint, and Mr Freeman told me not to.’

  ASKIN WINS ANOTHER ELECTION

  Every January the Askins holidayed for free in the beach house of businessman Ron Dunbier at Kiama. This year as usual whenever he wished to swim he would send Russ Ferguson in first, saying, ‘There might be a shark. It would be far preferable that you should be taken rather than the premier.’

  It was a joke, of sorts.

  In the election on 13 February Askin just scraped back in, with 50.9 per cent of the vote after the distribution of preferences. But he was back, and later in the year decided that if he could give knighthoods to others, why not provide one for himself? So he recommended this move to the Palace,2 having changed his name by deed poll from Robin to the less androgynous Robert.

  THE RETURN OF ELIZABETH BURTON

  Elizabeth Burton was back in Sydney again, working at the Whisky and as a stripper at the Barrel Theatre in Bayswater Road. In New York she had met a man in a chicken shop on 185th Street who’d introduced her to Buddhism and got her off heroin. It turned out stripping was something she really liked and was very good at.

  For Sydney’s strippers there was now competition in unexpected places. Venues such as The Hasty Tasty, the all-night café in Darlinghurst Road underneath the Pink Pussycat, had begun to employ topless waitresses.

  Barry McAskill and the Levi Smith Clefs had moved from the Whisky to Chequers, in an attempt by John Harrigan and the Wong brothers to revive the fortunes of the classic nightclub, which were waning as the world turned its back on Frank Sinatra and Shirley Bassey, tuxedos and evening gowns, and embraced rock music and informality.

  But R&R ended in 1971, so the Americans stopped coming and the Levi Smith Clefs disbanded. The Whisky itself closed not too long after. (Before it did, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, later to become famous as one of Roger Rogerson’s victims, did a stint as a waitress.3) For Sydney’s entertainers it had been a good war, but it was over.

  Elizabeth Burton returned to New York, working on the tiny stage at the Psychedelic Funhouse on 42nd Street in a flowing white cape and bikini, under the name The Immodest Miss Modesty. There she would find an agent and a successful international career.

  ‘IF YOU TALK YOU ARE DEAD’

  The case over the prostitution of Mary Anne Brifman finally came to court in early June 1971. Shirley Brifman was committed for trial and remanded in gaol. She had foreseen that this would happen, and so had arranged to be bailed out by an old and (she thought) trustworthy friend, David Lennon (not his real name). But a Vice Squad detective derailed her arrangements, telling Lennon not to do so. Lennon ‘told me the Vice Squad told him to keep (the bail money) himself’, she said.4

  As a result, she was held in gaol for a week before being released. Surprisingly for someone who had had lived so long in the Noir world, this was her first experience of gaol, and it shocked her pro-foundly. And the message from the Vice Squad was clear: Brifman could no longer presume on the immunity granted by her former close relationships with detectives Phelan, Krahe and Cootes.

  So like Darcy Dugan, Shirley Brifman sought revenge by becoming a whistleblower. In the months ahead, when police investigators would ask why she was making her allegations, and why she had waited so long before doing so, her answers to the question ‘Why?’ were complex, but her answer to the question ‘Why now?’ was simple: ‘I was left in gaol when I should have been bailed out.’

  On 15 June she recorded an interview with the ABC’s flagship This Day Tonight (TDT) program, in which she told the story of her involvement with corrupt police. This covered not only the years she had been in Sydney, but her crucial role in the National Hotel Royal Commission in Queensland, where she had lied to protect Brisbane detectives Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan. Naturally, from the NSW perspective it was the allegations about the Sydney police that were the most sensational.

  Everyone was astonished, even those for whom the content of her revelations was no surprise. Seeking to explain Brifman’s actions years later, George Freeman would suggest, ‘She was upset about something most other crooks in Sydney already knew: when you dealt with Fred Krahe there were no rules and regulations. You paid at both ends of the deal, legally and illegally. And you paid often. Brifman couldn’t understand why she was charged and fined while Krahe and the others had had their hands out for years. She thought there was honour among thieves.’5 But for Brifman this wasn’t just a matter of business: it was personal. Krahe and she had been an item, and he had dumped her.

  Three days later, she was holed up in a terrace house at 191 Victoria Street, Kings Cross. Over the next day or so there were a number of people in and out of the house. There was a pair of policemen: Detective Inspector Williams and Detective Sergeant Paull, who queried her about what she had said on TDT. There was an unidentified ‘bodyguard’, who was asleep when a reporter from Brisba
ne turned up. There was her husband Sonny, and there was David Lennon’s son. This seems odd, given Lennon’s part in her predicament, but then he and Brifman had been very close – she claimed, for example, to have ‘practically brought up’ his son. And by now she was heaping all the blame for the bail fiasco onto the Vice Squad.

  And then there was a knock on the door heralding the appearance of ‘The Magician’, John Regan. The three years since Barry Flock’s murder had only enhanced Regan’s reputation for violence and therefore the message he gave to Shirley Brifman was entirely believable: ‘Don’t talk. If you talk you are dead. Don’t talk on Charlton.’6

  ‘Charlton’ was Detective Sergeant Frank Charlton, who we first met as he tried to spin the investigation into the 1967 Phillips bombing case. Then, Charlton played a lead role in the investigation into Joe Borg’s murder. Brifman knew him well. ‘Charlton has been in my place (the brothel at Earl Place),’ she said. ‘He protects Susan Barling. He protects Linda the Vice Queen.’7

  Unravelling this tangle shows what Richard Hall meant by ‘disorganised crime’.

  Susan Barling had worked as a prostitute alongside Shirley Brifman from at least early 1967. Charlton was to Barling and to Linda the Vice Queen what Krahe had been to Brifman. So here were two prostitutes, Brifman and Barling, working out of the same premises and yet paying two different policemen for ‘general’ insurance, influence within the police as a whole. And the policeman Barling paid, Frank Charlton, was the protector of Linda the Vice Queen, the professional rival of Shirley Brifman. And neither of the policemen was in the Vice Squad: Charlton was in the Consorting Squad, Krahe in the Criminal Investigation Bureau. Brifman had to pay the Vice Squad separately.

  Susan Barling’s main value to Charlton had been as an informant, passing on information she obtained as she moved in Noir circles.

  ‘Susan hung Charlton by talking about Charlton, Charlton, Charlton, all the time,’ Brifman said. (That is, she compromised him by needlessly advertising their connection.) ‘Susan used to give Charlton a terrific amount of information about criminals over the telephone. She made most of the phone calls from my place to Charlton.’

  When asked whether their relationship went beyond that of a detective and informant, Brifman said, ‘I have only got Susan’s word that he was playing up (having sex) with her as well. He might have come up and given her a naughty now and again’.8

  Now the murderous ‘Magician’ John Regan was acting as an emissary for Charlton.

  A PRIVATE JOKE

  We now present a rare vignette of Fred Krahe at work, although not at his day job. It involves two dodgy mechanics, Reg Varley and Alan Burton. It all began around about now, when Burton approached Varley and said, ‘Aren’t you fed up with battling against the odds? Would you like to make some money?’ After replying in the affirmative to this rhetorical question, Burton was driven by Varley to Moore Park, where they parked under a tree. Five minutes later, two big men got into the back seat of the car. One was smoking a cigar and said nothing. The other said, ‘I’m Dick Lendrum.’

  ‘You know who he is?’ Burton asked his partner.

  ‘I’ve heard the name.’

  ‘He’s second in charge of the CIB.’

  The detective then proposed an arrangement whereby he would pay the duo to obtain car wrecks and steal unwrecked vehicles of the same make and colour. The identification numbers of the wrecks would (due to a long-running flaw in the state’s vehicle registration system) be transferred to the stolen vehicles, which could then be sold on the open market.

  Burton and Varley accepted the offer and went into business with the police. In the next seven months they grossed over a million dollars. The interesting part of the story, for our purposes, was that the cop in the car wasn’t Richard Lendrum but almost certainly Fred Krahe. He used Lendrum’s name to conceal his own, and presumably as a joke because Lendrum was honest.9

  BOB BOTTOM LIFTS THE LID

  Reporter Bob Bottom arrived in Sydney from the far western NSW town of Broken Hill in late 1968, having cut his journalistic teeth exposing the corrupt grip of the unions that ran the outback mining town. He had landed a job at the Daily Telegraph .

  Bottom, only half the age of many of the crooks in this book, would become the most important of the reporters who exposed corruption in Sydney over the next twenty years. Most were members of a younger generation with a less tolerant view of the subject than their predecessors. A new culture of investigative journalism, which eventually led to some important books by Bottom and others in the late 1970s and the 1980s, would be crucial to Australia’s growing recognition of the reality of organised crime, and would eventually force reluctant politicians and law enforcement agencies to take at least some action.

  In Sydney, Bottom worked first as a general reporter, but soon gravitated towards corruption, realising – as recalled in his memoir Without Fear or Favour – that ‘the illegal bookmakers and swy (two-up) merchants of the Hill were choir boys compared with the racketeers of The Big Smoke. … My arrival in Sydney happened to coincide with the ushering in of a new and disturbing era for Australia: the graduation from old-style racketeering to sophisticated, syndicated organised crime. … Out went backstreet baccarat, and in came shop front casinos. Friendly Freds who ran barbershop SP betting were pushed out or forced into syndicated networks. Laneway prostitution gave way to massage parlours. With their new power, Sydney syndicates branched out interstate and forged international connections.’10

  The unwritten arrangement was that while politicians in opposition could occasionally complain about this, politicians in government would never do anything substantial to uncover it, because members of both major political parties were implicated. The Fairfax Sydney Morning Herald supported this by not publishing anything about organised crime until 1981. Fringe publications such as Oz and Nation Review occasionally covered the subject, as did the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, whose owner Sir Frank Packer was more independent than the Fairfax family, and more pugnacious.

  But this coverage scarcely scratched the surface of what was going on in the Sydney underworld. The average man was aware of his local Friendly Fred, and perhaps knew he was tolerated by – even paying – the local sergeant. There was a vague awareness that a few ‘colourful characters’ operated behind the scenes. But beyond that lay a vast ignorance, which assisted criminal enterprises to expand and flourish.

  This now began to change, and the turning point was Bottom’s 1971 article on the criminal penetration of registered clubs that – along with the work of other journalists – led to the Moffitt Royal Commission into organised crime in clubs of 1973. Coverage of the commission’s hearings, and its report the next year, would make most of the public aware for the first time of the concept of organised crime, and its presence in Sydney.

  This would also be the first instance of a disclosure model that would do much over the next few decades to increase public knowledge, and government action. The sequence ran like this: rumours would flourish, journalists would write, relying at first on anonymous sources, the opposition would agitate, and government would finally act by setting up a royal commission. It was a cumbersome process, very hit and miss, but without it we would know a lot less about the Sydney underworld.

  Sir Frank Packer’s company, Australian Consolidated Press, always had the current secretary of the state’s Trades and Labor Council on its board. In 1971 the then secretary, Ralph Marsh, told Packer that union officials in the club industry were concerned that criminals were infiltrating some clubs. The starting point was the claim that threats had been made against the life of an entertainment booking agent named Richard Gray, by criminals who were trying to take over that line of business.

  Packer assigned Bottom to investigate the story, and Marsh put him in touch with the officials. The allegations came as no surprise to Bottom. A year or two earlier he’d been approached by Jack Toohey and another elected official of the Associated Motor
Club, who claimed criminals including Lennie McPherson were involved in the running of the club. In that case the officials had backed off, too scared to give Bottom a story he could publish.

  Now Bottom spoke with many people in the industry who made allegations of criminal activity. He spoke with Richard Gray, who denied he’d been threatened yet pleaded with Bottom not to write about the allegation, saying that if Bottom did that, he (Gray) ‘could cop it’. Bottom saw that Gray and others were in fear for their lives.

  As a result of his work, Bottom concluded that Lennie McPherson was behind a group of criminals active in the South Sydney Junior Rugby League Club, South Sydney Leagues Club, Associated Motor Club and the Polonia Soccer Club. But this could not be proved to the point where names could be published.

  Bottom’s article, ‘Crims Grab Clubs’, appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 25 July 1971. Given what followed, the article seems surprisingly modest today, appearing on page three and consisting of only a few hundred words and not one name, including its author’s – Bottom was referred to as a ‘Special Reporter’. But its claims of infiltration along the lines described above were explosive, and known to be so – Frank Packer edited it himself, and went to the printery to see it come off the presses.

  ALMOST AS BIG AS VEGAS

  Bob Bottom was on to a story of great importance. Unlike the American mafia, the Sydney underworld tended to stay away from legitimate enterprises. There was one major exception to this: by 1971, criminals were indeed penetrating a major New South Wales institution, the registered club.

  There were 1450 of these clubs in New South Wales, ranging from small local bowling clubs to enormous leagues clubs employing hundreds of staff. Many were associated with the powerful Returned Servicemen’s League or leading rugby league teams. Together they formed an industry with a turnover of some $300 million by 1971.11 Its rise in the 1950s had hurt the hotels, not least because clubs alone could have poker machines, which were very popular. By the early seventies there were some 30 000 of these machines, their vast profits enabling clubs to provide shows and cheap food that attracted even more people away from home and hotel.