IT’S OVER
In January 1972, Philip Arantz was dismissed from the NSW Police Force. In April, his appeal was heard by the Crown Employees Appeal Board, presided over by Justice J William Perrignon. On 19 May he learned his appeal had been dismissed. Given that he had breached two rules, this was perhaps inevitable. But after a lengthy hearing the Board in its report also canvassed other aspects of the matter.
It concluded ‘that the motive of altruism which the Appellant professed and with which many were impressed, covered a deep personal hostility to the higher police authority … the Appellant deliberately breached his duty and … he did so in the knowledge, which he admitted, that he would be disciplined and dismissed, and it is very clear that this is what he set out to achieve in order that he could have a public confrontation with the police administration’.
The judgment drew attention to how Arantz had ignored the fact that publication of the incorrect crime figures in the 1970 annual report had been qualified with the information that a new method of reporting was to be introduced, which would capture more crimes. It also noted that Allan had publicly announced a twelve-month trial of the new system, and in mid-November released the statewide total reporting figures to all detectives. Any suggestion that the truth would remain hidden unless Arantz revealed it was therefore wrong.
There was some publicity but the matter soon died down. Arantz found it hard to get work – he later claimed that Askin let it be known privately in the computer industry that any company that employed him might find it hard to get a government contract.
Nevertheless, Norm Allan seems to have been damaged by the affair: in the same month as the judgment was handed down, he went on extended leave, even though not due to retire until 1974. In May 1972, he was replaced by his deputy Fred Hanson, who acted in the role until being made permanent in November. It is interesting that Allan’s name still appeared as author of the police annual report of 1971, signed on 11 August 1972. But then, there was much to report.14
‘As was expected,’ he recorded, ‘introduction of the new (computer) system brought with it many technical and human difficulties and much remains to be done in both areas before total efficiency can be attained.’
Indeed.
‘The total number of … crimes and offences is 143 007, of which 37 419 or 27 per cent are classified as having been “cleared up”.’
The previous annual report had recorded 81 319 crimes and offences, defined as only ‘serious crimes’, and a clear-up rate of 45 per cent.
‘The “up-curve” shown in the number of certain crimes and offences which were previously included in the annual reports of the police department can be said to be one of the direct results of the (new) system …’ noted the Commissioner. ‘I am advised that similar increases in crime figures have shown up in overseas police force records immediately following the introduction of “total crime reporting”.’
Fred Hanson would note in the next year’s report that Allan’s considerable achievements, in his decade as commissioner since
1962, included ‘the acquisition in 1971 of the police computer. In recognition of his services to the State, Her Majesty the Queen recently created Mr Allan a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George.’15
The corrupt Hanson was a supporter of Krahe. This was demonstrated when Queensland Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod, an honest man, approached Hanson and suggested they establish a joint crime intelligence unit to monitor the movement of police and criminals between Sydney and Brisbane. Whitrod knew there was an ‘east coast network of corrupt police’. Hanson agreed, and proposed as one of New South Wales’ task force members no other than Fred Krahe. Whitrod knew when he was beaten and dropped the idea.16
But Krahe’s time as a police officer was over anyway, despite the new commissioner’s support. Following the Brifman interviews, Brian Doyle was preparing departmental charges against him,17 so he decided on a strategic retreat. In May he retired from the police force on medical grounds; thrombosis of the leg. The brief article in the Sydney Morning Herald described him as ‘one of NSW’s top homicide detectives’ and mentioned his role in the Glenfield siege and in capturing Darcy Dugan in 1969.18 He was only fifty-two, eight years younger than Kelly had been when he retired back in 1966, and this rejection by the force must have hurt. He had abandoned Shirley, and now he was abandoned in turn. He died in 1981.19
George Freeman in his memoir would recall bitterly that, ‘Once Krahe had you in his clutches he never let go. He had a feared reputation as a killer, and as a cop he had every reason to carry a .38 with him at all times. He boasted that he even slept with it under his pillow at night. Krahe didn’t care who he took on or how he took them on.’20
Possibly Freeman had read The Prince and the Premier, where David Hickie canvassed claims by others that Krahe had killed not just Brifman but Don Fergusson and Juanita Nielsen.21
JACK MCNEILL INVESTIGATES
Jack McNeill was gradually being prodded to action. In April 1972, Nation Review ran an article alleging not just criminal but mafia involvement in clubs, a claim that took the story to a new level. Police hadn’t done much yet and Bob Bottom prompted them on 30 April with his article ‘Club Rackets Inquiry’. And then there was a pesky federal cop named Richard Dixon, first in a long line of honest Canberra cops who would cause grief for Sydney’s detectives.
Dixon had been a colonial policeman in Rhodesia who, after that country became independent, moved to Australia and in 1966 joined the Commonwealth Police Force. That Dixon was an out-sider was perhaps not insignificant.
He was placed in the newly formed Central Crime Intelligence Bureau, and in 1971 spent several months with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who gave him some information they’d received from the FBI. It concerned the Bally Corporation and also Joe Testa’s visits to Australia. So far as they knew, this was the first time anyone linked to the American mafia had visited Australia. On his return to Canberra, Dixon prepared a report that was sent to all police commissioners in Australia on 30 May 1972. A report from a police organisation was something that could not be lightly ignored, unlike a few irritating articles in the media.
By now Dixon had a good idea of how the NSW Police operated. On his return from Canada, he’d become involved in a matter involving a Canadian criminal on the run in Sydney. After Dixon located him, the NSW Police arrested the man in his house. There they found a bag containing a large amount of money. This they proceeded to share among themselves.
When visiting Sydney, Dixon was taken for drinks to the Mandarin Club by another group of detectives. On returning to the table with his round, for which he’d actually paid, he announced innocently, ‘I don’t think that barman will keep his job. He gave me more in change than I paid him.’ His hosts thought this was very funny, a policeman who paid for his own drinks.22
When Jack McNeill received a copy of Dixon’s report, he learned that ‘United States Mafia-type criminals’ had some control over Bally America, and therefore Bally’s presence in Australia was ‘a most undesirable development’.
He also read that in September 1971 the Commonwealth Police had been told that Lennie McPherson and an unidentified American crime organiser – possibly an employee of Bally America – had attended a meeting between an Australian distributor of Bally and private club owners. The purpose was to help Bally displace other machines and take over the local market. McPherson was alleged to be instructing professional poker machine players to manipulate the local machines, made by Ainsworth and Nutt & Muddle, to damage their reputation and put pressure on clubs to switch to Bally.
McNeill now launched an inquiry that had something of the appearance of a serious effort, and produced a report to his superiors on 1 July 1972. Based largely on the information provided by the Commonwealth Police (although this was acknowledged only in passing), it claimed that the investigation had been underway for some time and there was no doubt Bally America was controlled by the mafia an
d there was criminal activity in the clubs of New South Wales. On 13 July, Premier Askin made a statement to parliament based on McNeill’s report. This produced press headlines such as ‘Mafia in Clubs – Askin’ and ‘Criminals in NSW Clubs – Sir Robert’.
The media kept up pressure on the government. The next break-through article appeared days after Askin’s statement. It was written by Tony Reeves and Bob Bottom. ‘The Night the Mafia Came to Australia’ was published in the Sunday Telegraph on 16 July 1972. The article described many things the subsequent Moffitt Royal Commission would find to be true, most importantly that a mafia figure had visited Australia three times and had close links with ‘Sydney’s underworld czars’. Although this figure was described as ‘the Organiser’, the term ‘organised crime’ did not appear in the article – it was not yet in wide use.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that Francis Ford Coppola’s immensely popular and influential film, The Godfather, had been released only a few months earlier in 1972. In 1974 it would be followed by Godfather II; between them they won nine Oscars and made a significant contribution to the geist of Sydney Noir. But while the mafia was a useful introduction to the concept of organised crime, it sometimes encouraged writers to attribute the real mafia with more power than it had here.
The article was right about much but wrong in its claims that the mafia had ‘lieutenants’ in Australia, where it had built an ‘empire’ worth up to $50 million. Nevertheless, thanks to this and other press coverage, especially in Nation Review, the issue of organised crime became a free-floating matter of great public concern. The newspapers began to write about it more often, and the opposition seized hold of the issue and asked questions in parliament. This marked a major shift in popular and political culture.
By this point an energised Jack McNeill and his team were visiting dozens of clubs and examining records and interviewing office holders. Allegations of corruption that came to their attention included the South Sydney Junior Rugby League Club, South Sydney Rugby League Club, the Associated Mariner’s Club, the Associated Motor Club, Aviation Club, Mandarin Club, Blacktown Workers Club, and the Polonia Soccer Club.
Bally was worried, as the publicity threatened its plans to expand massively in Australia. The company was already extremely successful around the world, due in part to its backing by organised crime: a dollar invested in Bally America in the early 1960s would have been worth $1000 a decade later.23
Recently the company had expanded from manufacturing machines to operating and leasing them. Revenue increased over the previous year from US$48 million to $84 million. It expanded its Dublin assembly plant to meet growth in Britain and Australia, and bought out local distributors in many countries. As already noted, these included the dynamic Jack Rooklyn, who had started out in the pinball business just before the war and worked his way up, becoming Bally’s local distributor in 1956 or 1957.
He’d just sold the rights to Australia and South-East Asia back to the company, but had retained the rights to Japan. For this deal he received about $460 000 in cash and Bally shares for his distribution company in Australia, and $6.6 million in cash for those in South-East Asia. He became a substantial shareholder in Bally America and manager of the company’s Australian and Asian interests. (The report of the Moffitt Royal Commission, incidentally, would profess puzzlement at just what it was Rooklyn had had to sell worth these amounts of money. It noted there were rumours of some sort of combined casino/brothel businesses run in conjunction with Abe Saffron in Asia, but could not confirm this.24)
During the police investigation, Rooklyn was interviewed by the detectives for a day. It was not a hostile experience, indeed he even went to lunch with them at Remos restaurant on the corner of Crown and Devonshire Streets near the CIB headquarters. Over pasta, Rooklyn described how each month he did a round trip of twelve days visiting his interests in South-East Asia. He owned a home in each of the countries where he had a business. He also talked about his well-known yacht Apollo, which he raced around the globe.
Rooklyn informed Bally of the damage that was being done to its reputation in Australia by media attempts to link the company with the mafia, partly through the person of Joe Testa. Bally sent its attorney, William Tomlinson, to Sydney to deny these rumours. On 20 July 1972, he met with Rooklyn and others including Jack McNeill and Dick Dixon. Tomlinson was at pains to distance Bally from Testa, at the meeting and in interviews with the press. He said Bally no longer had any connections with the mafia in America, and no connections in Australia with the entertainment side of the clubs.25
Rooklyn told the police that Bally’s Australian competitors were engaged in a smear campaign against the company because it had superior machines.26 This, of course, is perfectly possible, but it did little to refute the claims being made about Bally, particularly its links to the American mafia.
THE DOUBLE BAY CRIME SUMMITS
On 3 August 1972, the Commonwealth Police learned from their informant Jim Anderson, the killer of Donnie Smith, that a group of major crooks had met several times at the home of one of them, Karl Bonnette, at 44 William Street, Double Bay. There had been three meetings in the past two weeks, and according to the police running sheet, the source said ‘the meetings are alleged to be called to discuss the current activities re organised crime … They usually have drinks until 11pm when they move to the William Street address. A male person in an old Holden car is alleged to act as cock-atoo during these meetings.’
These meetings have assumed iconic status in the annals of Sydney’s criminal history. Along with the social gatherings for Joe Testa in previous years, they are almost the only firm evidence of association among a large group of leading gangsters. Some have put them on the same level as the Apalachin criminal summit meeting in America in 1957, which helped confirm the existence of the mafia in that country.
The others present were: Lennie McPherson, George Freeman, Stan Smith, Fred Anderson, Iron Bar Miller and Albie Sloss, a Labor politician who represented the voters of King in the state parliament. When the NSW Consorting Squad was informed of the meetings, it talked to one of its own informants, who confirmed the meetings had occurred and subtracted one name from the guest list (Albie Sloss) and added two: Arthur Delaney and Leo ‘The Liar’ Callaghan.
We don’t know the purpose or significance of these meetings, but Jack McNeill must have been disturbed that the Commonwealth Police had found out about them. Probably he was annoyed too – what right did the Feds have to be taking such an interest in Sydney crooks?
McNeill could have used this as a golden opportunity to gather information. Instead, he brought the meetings to a halt. He sent one of his most experienced officers, Frank Charlton, the protector of Linda the Vice Queen and confidante of Susan Barling, around to Bonnette’s house at 8am to ask if the criminals had been meeting there. Bonnette denied this. (He still does.27) Then, to show that life is not meant to be easy, Charlton arrested Bonnette for receiving a stolen television set.
Two years later, Justice Moffitt would describe McNeill’s actions in this matter as ‘almost beyond belief’.
AUSTRALIA’S OWN ‘WAR ON DRUGS’
The NSW Police annual report for 1972 noted that the whole force was now involved in action against illegal drugs. As for the Drug Squad, it had arrested 1382 people for various offences. This was an increase of 145 per cent since 1968, so drug use was not yet booming. Police had also seized ‘a number’ of marijuana plants, their cultiva-tion being ‘a comparatively new development in this country’.28
Jan O’Truba was an early adopter. He had started to use heroin as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in the Eastern Suburbs. After convictions for heroin use and stealing, by the age of twenty he was using his job at the Orpheum Theatre in Cremorne as a front for heroin dealing. He’d also acquired a reputation for being a rip-off merchant.
On 31 August 1972 he bought an ounce of heroin from a dealer – who was said to be an undercover policeman. O’Truba spent the next
day travelling up and down the northern beaches, selling the ounce in capsule lots. In the evening he met another buyer outside the Orpheum and then disappeared. On 2 September his body was found in bushland at Oxford Falls. Jan O’Truba was the first known heroin dealer to be executed in Sydney.29 There would be many others.
Another sign of the future was found hundreds of kilometres south-west of Sydney, in the Riverina town of Griffith. It was in 1972 that the first exploratory crops of cannabis were planted in the back blocks of the irrigated farms that gave the town its prosperity.
Developments like this provided ammunition for the advocates of prohibition. In October 1972, Detective Sergeant KS Astill of the NSW Police Drug Squad published an article in The Australian Police Journal, calling for a war on drugs.
‘Although drug abuse in this state has not yet reached cata-strophic proportions, it is nevertheless a growing menace in our community and to correct this dangerous condition every person is duty bound to wage total war on the illicit importation and abuse of drugs.’
MCNEILL’S REPORT ON THE CLUBS
On 17 August, one of Jack McNeill’s men, Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard, told two Commonwealth police officers that Jack Rooklyn had asked Abe Saffron to put pressure on his police or political contacts to take some of the heat out of the clubs investigation. Ballard also said his Commissioner’s office appeared to be cooling towards the inquiry.
Nevertheless, the investigation continued. Like a lot of senior police in the 1960s, McNeill lacked many of the qualities we today associate with good managers. His appointment must have depended on other factors. Like most successful cops of the time he was a big man, although by now that was turning to fat. He was a strict and arbitrary manager, with great belief in his own instincts and contempt for conventional intelligence gathering and analysis. His record keeping was so unimpressive that he lost his two police diaries covering the period of the Bally investigation, and would be unable to produce them at the subsequent royal commission.
Sydney Noir Page 26
