Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  The 1920s and ′30s boasted many formidable and dedicated police officers: William Mackay, boots ‘n’ all beat cop Ray ‘the Blizzard’ Blissett, Lillian Armfield, drug-squadders Wickham and Thompson, and undercover man Joe Chuck. But for all the forces aligned against them, lawbreakers held sway in the 1920s.

  It took only a few corrupt and on-the-take officers to counter the toil of the straight arrows. As well as the bad apples within, the police force was still nobbled by a weak Crimes Act and was undermanned and ill-equipped; not surprisingly, with its long hours and scandalously low wages. In 1927, the Police Association was in the Industrial Court trying to make the State Government increase the minimum pay of a policeman to £1 a week.

  When Superintendent John Parmeter, who patrolled Darlinghurst and Kings Cross in the 1920s and ′30s, retired from the force in 1960, he reflected that Razorhurst ‘was a policeman's honeypot’. Some 95 per cent of the city's criminals lived there, and whenever an interstate criminal arrived he headed straight for the Cross. ‘Those days, you'd strike more crime in Kings Cross in one night than in all of Sydney in a month today. It was against departmental orders to patrol there at night without a mate. There was no police radio then, so you couldn't call for a fleet of cars to back you up if you got into trouble. It was you against the mob.’ Parmeter said that to get a crook to the police station an officer had to run a gauntlet of the arrested man's family and friends ‘who would follow you along the street, cursing and spitting at you’.

  Car accidents kept police busy, and no resource was spared to catch the individual violator — the murderer, the rapist, the safe-cracker. But organised crime — defined as ‘a continuing and self-perpetuating criminal conspiracy that operates for a profit motive and which thrives on fear and corruption’ — was largely left alone by the police. This was because organised crimes such as prostitution, sly grog, narcotics and gambling were usually victimless and popular with the people. And even when police did happen to arrest and charge a racketeer (as Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine proved time and again in their long criminal careers), they got off lightly because they could afford the best legal defence, and also count on unofficial help from political and judicial contacts, and their many powerful customers, to minimise the damage to their illegal concerns. It was usually only when organised crime resorted to violence against the public that the police reacted with heat. If the bloodshed was confined to warring gangsters, police were delighted to turn a blind eye.

  Weighing against the lawmen, too, of course, was the Sydney gangster's version of the Mafia code of omerta. ‘One reads with amazement,’ mused Sydney daily newspaper the Sun in 1929, ‘that individual after individual, sorely wounded, brutally battered, or shot in cold blood, refuses to disclose to police the names of his assailants.’ Nobility had little to do with the outlaws’ silence. Any ‘shelfer’ who identified their assailant to the authorities, of course, paid dearly. Reprisals against them, their family and friends were inevitable, swift and deadly. If a victim wanted revenge against a rival, they would have to mete it out themselves. Police were powerless when a victim refused to cooperate. ‘What can we do?’ worried one in August 1927. ‘The victims won't talk. We seize a suspect. Often we are sure we have the right man, and he is arrested. Then he is discharged when his victim won't testify. And that's the end of it.’

  Greg Brown, now living on the north coast of New South Wales, has wonderful recall of the era and its personalities, bad and good: ‘The main trouble spots were Darlinghurst, the ‘Loo, Surry Hills. They were lucrative patches and that's why the gangs fought each other so ferociously to run their piece of turf. There was cocaine in those days, maybe not as much as there is today, but it was everywhere in East Sydney. Criminals used to snort it before a job. That was the big thing. They thought it would give them courage.’

  As well as being the recognised queen of sly-groggery, Kate Leigh was a major receiver and seller of stolen property. Thieves would make a beeline to Kate with their stash, she'd inspect the goods with a hard eye, pay a pittance for them, then sell them to a warehouse for a profit. ‘If there was a big robbery,’ says Brown, ‘Kate would be the one the robbers would come to see first to unload the goods. She'd sell that stolen property in a flash. She was a rough, tough old bird. I could never warm to her, although many in the force liked her. When I first started in Darlinghurst, there was a young copper who used to patrol near a pub called the Pottery. It was a hangout for crooks. The Pottery was only about thirty metres around the corner from one of Kate's sly-grog shops. One day a gang of hoodlums got stuck into the young constable. Kate came storming out of her house with a gun tripped for shooting. She said she'd shoot the mob unless they let the policeman go. She saved that young man's life.’

  Brown had many clashes with Guido Calletti. ‘Guido was vicious. He was stocky and an extremely aggressive street fighter. The word around Darlo was: don't cross Guido. I ran into him in Palmer Street once in the mid ′30s and he gave me a bit of lip so I charged him with using obscene language. He was a standover man and ran prostitutes and tried to ally himself with Tilly and Kate. He was also associated with Nellie Cameron and “the Angel of Death”, Dulcie Markham. Every bloke who got mixed up with Dulcie got murdered. She was a good-looking bird, too. I saw her early in the piece before time damaged her and, I tell you, she was a particularly good-looking girl. She could look and act beautifully and you'd never pick her as a prostitute and gangster. But she certainly had a foul mouth when it suited her. The swearing was the same as today, the F-word and the C-word.’

  Brown looks back on his career with pride. In the early 1940s, he was promoted for chasing and catching two escaped Long Bay convicts single-handedly. His act of bravery made all the front pages of the day. ‘It was such a good life, so interesting. I'm sure I could have got another job that paid more, but I loved the work.’

  More than any other single police officer or politician, William Mackay was responsible for the jihad on Razorhurst. Mackay, known to his men as Billy, was born in Glasgow in 1885, the son of a prominent policeman named Murdoch. He followed his father into the Glasgow constabulary in 1905, and such was his aptitude for policing he spent only about two years in uniform before being made a detective and cracking some major cases, many involving murder. Glasgow then, as now, was a violent city, and it was there, wrote police historians Lance Hoban and Bruce Swanton in the NSW Police News, that beefy, two-fisted Mackay ‘learned the hard way policing's most basic rule — run to a fire but walk to a fight’.

  In a portent of the controversy that would dog Mackay's Australian police career, he resigned from the Glasgow force in acrimonious circumstances. A murderer he had arrested was freed on a technicality. An angry Mackay then applied for the reward that had been offered for the suspect's capture and when he was offered a fraction of the sum, just £68, in disgust he decided to emigrate with his new wife to Canada. However, when he learned that it cost only £52 to book passage to Australia, he and his wife sailed to the southern hemisphere instead. The Mackays docked in Sydney on 1 April 1910 and moved into a small house on the north shore. Mackay bought a shovel and found work as a labourer, then became a clerk in a city office.

  Days after starting at his new job, Mackay made a citizen's arrest of two pickpockets at the corner of Pitt and Market streets in the city. He beat up both men when they resisted. A plain-clothes officer who helped Mackay frogmarch the thieves into custody suggested he was wasting his time working in an office and that he should join the New South Wales Police Force. Mackay was sworn in as a probationary foot constable in June. After an office stint, he shed his uniform and worked in plain clothes on the vice beat.

  A rising star, Mackay was posted to the Metropolitan Superintendent's Office, the administrative nerve centre of the force. There he learned the idiosyncrasies of policing Sydney and, being personable, ambitious and smart, he was befriended by senior officers. His most influential champion was fellow Scot James Mitchell, who, in 1914, wa
s appointed metropolitan superintendent and the following year inspector-general of police in the state.

  During the war, with many officers serving overseas, Mackay (whose application for military service had been rejected on essential service grounds) took on a backbreaking administrative workload. Nor did he grumble when at weekends he was sent to quell brawls in the Domain in Woolloomooloo and to keep an ear out for any subversion in the speeches of the soapbox orators there. Mackay became a sergeant (first-class) in 1917, and in 1923, he was placed in charge of detectives at Clarence Street Police Station. There he concentrated on policing sly grog, vice and graft, and fought successfully to have patrol cars fitted with wirelesses.

  In 1927, just as the razor gangs were honing their blades, the now-Inspector Mackay was supervising police arrangements for the New South Wales tour of the Duke and Duchess of York and their opening of Parliament House in Canberra. On the royals’ departure, he was relocated to Sydney's hot spot, No. 3 Division, Darlinghurst Police Station, to do battle with Bruhn, Jeffs, Leigh, Devine and their foot soldiers. After a period in the Razorhurst trenches, often working closely with Tom Wickham and riding in the sidecar of the division's only motor cycle, Mackay was made head of the CIB in late 1928. Soon afterwards, he was one of a group of senior police sent to England, the Continent and America to study new police methods, including the effects of consorting laws and special vice squads on street and organised crime. His findings led to the formulation of the Consorting Clause.

  Mackay became a favourite of New South Wales Premier Jack Lang, whose Labor Party won office in October 1930. With the far-right-wing organisation the New Guard a thorn in the side of the government, Mackay made it clear to Lang that it would be a privilege to take on the rabblerousers.

  ‘Mackay's an interesting bloke,’ says George Parsons. ‘He got the police commissioner's job, as I understand it, because the existing commissioner wouldn't sort out the New Guard, and Jack Lang said, “This is no good, now who are the brightest young people on the force?” And Mackay was among them. Lang called Mackay in and said, “Do you want to be commissioner?” Mackay said he did, and Lang said, “Right, then, sort out these New Guard bastards for me.” Mackay drafted all the working-class cops he could find and sent them out on the streets to combat the New Guard. He gave them instructions to “belt the bloody heads off the Guardsmen”. After Mackay cowed the Guard, Lang said to him, “You'll do,” and, in time, he was made police commissioner.’

  Mackay's troops were fond of him, too — as praise from Greg Brown shows: ‘The best police commissioner I ever worked under was Billy Mackay. He was a policeman's man, rather than someone who tried to please the politicians at our expense.’ Brown insists that Mackay had no great love of politicians, and in fact kept a dossier on them which listed their foibles or misdemeanours and could be used to control any politician trying to make Mackay's working life difficult. Maggie Baker says: ‘Mr Mackay's door was always open to us.’

  Mackay was made metropolitan superintendent in March 1932, and found himself again in the national limelight on the 19th of that month when at the official opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge he arrested a leading light of the New Guard, Irish-born antique dealer Captain Francis de Groot, after de Groot galloped in to sabre-slash the commemorative ribbon before Lang could snip it with his ceremonial scissors. ‘First to reach de Groot was Superintendent Mackay, chief of the CIB, and with brisk agility that officer pulled him from the saddle and flung him to the ground,’ reported the Sydney Morning Herald next day.

  (Poor de Groot wouldn't have known if he'd been shot or stabbed when, a short time after being bulldogged by Mackay, he collided head-on with Tilly Devine. De Groot's appearance on 5 April at Central Police Court to face charges of offensive behaviour on the Harbour Bridge coincided with one of Tilly's regular appearances there. Seeing de Groot at the court, Devine, who — says George Parsons, for all her airs and graces and love of the monarchy, was in fact a socialist at heart — buttonholed de Groot. ‘You are a basher,’ she growled at him. ‘Wait until the [left-wing] Nationalists get back in. You'll starve then. You would not give a dying man a feed!’

  By now, William Mackay was the obvious choice to succeed his friend James Mitchell as inspector-general, and he oversaw many landmark innovations. The old Central Barracks had become the headquarters of the CIB in August 1930 and the state's most effective officers were employed there. Crime-scene examination became an art, modus operandi and property tracing sections were established, and consorting, fraud and motor surveillance teams recruited. The Special Squad (later known as 21 Division) was employed. These officers used the Vagrancy Act to pressure criminals, prostitutes and vagrants. Call boxes popped up all over inner Sydney and later, in 1935, the police cadet scheme was introduced. Mackay upgraded police communications, especially radio, and during his reign, New South Wales police had one of the world's most sophisticated police wireless infrastructures.

  Later, Mackay, who, almost inevitably, became police commissioner in 1936, introduced the Police Rescue Squad, the Air Wing and Police–Citizens Boys Clubs. He also knew the value of good publicity, and so ordered spectacular police entertainments each year at the Royal Easter Show. A favourite was the chariot race using police motorbikes, and long queues formed at the Police Exhibition, where bullets, razors, mug shots and the odd pickled hand fascinated young and old.

  Mackay's was a glittering career, though controversy brought on by his increasingly dictatorial ways and love of a drink — Hoban recalls seeing him falling-down drunk — tarnished his reputation. The 1937 Royal Commission into SP Betting found him to be ‘impetuous and impulsive’. In the 1940s, Mackay's health deteriorated and he suffered a hernia and an eye haemorrhage. He was forced to take sick leave, but never really recovered. He died of a coronary occlusion in 1948.

  If William Mackay was the brains of the New South Wales Police Force, Ray Blissett was the muscle. ‘The first I ever heard of Ray Blissett,’ recalls Lance Hoban, ‘was when I was young, in about 1930. I read in the paper how Ray had arrested a fellow after he hurled his baton at the fleeing miscreant and felled him cold. I said to my dad, “My, he must be a pretty fair shot.” I got to know Ray as a good and loyal friend.’

  Blissett's Consorting Squad colleague Greg Brown remembers one night when he and Blissett were in Woolloomooloo and a local rough-nut named Geoffrey Robinson and his cronies decided to test Blissett's reputation as a hard man. ‘I didn't even get a chance to help him. He cleaned up the entire gang. He had a very heavy punch. You see movies where the hero knocks a baddy out with a single blow and you laugh and say, “That's impossible.” But Ray, who was a woodcutter, could do it. If he hit you, you stayed hit.’

  Blissett, rugged and incorruptible, was feared and respected by the underworld, and his deeds did much to swing the balance of power between the police and criminals back to the lawmen. After becoming a feared uniform and plain-clothes cop in Glebe and East Sydney, the stocky bruiser was a Consorto and, in 1953, as a detective sergeant, became chief of the Consorting Squad. The year before he retired in 1968, Blissett won the Queen's Police Medal for distinguished service.

  Funny and smart, Blissett, now ninety-two, lives in a neat brick bungalow in the western Sydney suburb of Abbotsford, with his wife Elva, a fine pianist. Their son recently retired as a senior magistrate and their grandson is a solicitor. ‘The law is in our blood,’ Blissett quips.

  When interviewed for this book, Blissett was not as hale as he may have wished, and walked with a frame, but he laughed often as he recalled his beat days, when he was paid five shillings a week and found all the excitement he could handle. ‘One day I went to the wedding of a cousin. His father, a policeman, was there in uniform. Over the keg I said, “You fellas have got an easy job.” They said, “Well you're big enough, why don't you join us?” I was only nineteen.’

  As soon as Blissett turned twenty, in 1928, he joined the police force and was posted to the Regent Street Depot,
the training centre, at Redfern. ‘My first day on the job, they brought in what we used to call a “sword swallower”, he'd been caught behaving indecently in a park or public toilet. He was complaining about the way he was being treated so a sergeant knocked him down. He got up and complained some more and the sergeant knocked him down again. Regent Street was the busiest police station in Australia. I learned my trade there. I was soon sorting out the razor slashers, the pickpockets and bashers. Like with the sword swallower, you knocked ‘em down and if they got up and complained, you knocked ‘em down again.

  ‘The original razor gang was Norman Bruhn's mob and the other razor mobs followed Bruhn's lead. He came from Melbourne, and he and Snowy Cutmore and their gang were carving blokes up and getting carved up themselves. Slashing and shooting. They were cruel bastards. Sydney's major crime in the ′20s and ′30s was assault and robbery, but there was plenty of sly grog — the chief librarian at Sydney Town Hall had a sly-grog shop at Glebe. There was cocaine in Darlinghurst and Kings Cross, and I was always raiding the Chinese opium dens at the Haymarket. Rounding up the illegal gamblers kept me busy. Mostly the gangs kept to their turf, and other gangs didn't try to encroach. But when one gang strayed into another's territory, there would be trouble.

  ‘The best informant the police ever had was Kate Leigh. When I came to Regent Street, Kate had a sly-grog shop behind Toohey's brewery in Foveaux Street, Surry Hills. Jack Aldridge, one of the best detectives Sydney ever knew, read the lesson for Kate when she died. But he didn't tell the truth. He didn't tell what she was really like. She was an old bitch, she really was. She'd hit you with an iron bar as soon as look at you.’