Razor (Underbelly)
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22
Pretty Dulcie
Dulcie Markham was wild at heart. She was convicted more than 100 times from 1930 until the 1960s, for prostitution, vagrancy, consorting, assaulting police and the public, keeping a brothel, drunkenness and drunk driving. ‘Dulcie used to say it was easy to get a hundred pounds a night at a brothel,’ recalled Lillian Armfield. ‘She was completely incorrigible.’ Markham's crimes were committed under an exotic assortment of aliases, including Tosca de Marquis, Tasca Damarene and Tasca de Marca, as well as the comparatively mundane Mary Eugene, Dulcie Taplin, Mary Williams and Dulcie Johnson. But to her friends, enemies and the police she was best known simply as Pretty Dulcie.
Markham, who periodically plied her trade in Melbourne at times of police clampdowns in Sydney, was a beautiful and vivacious prostitute and thief, earning herself the unfortunate nicknames ‘the Angel of Death’, ‘the Black Widow’ and ‘the Hoodoo Girl’, to add to the list of aliases. These nicknames seem understandable, as at least eight of her lovers were shot or stabbed to death. However, the jinx sobriquets exasperated her. ‘Because men who have loved me have died, I've been called these silly names,’ she sighed in the 1940s. ‘I've even been sketched in one newspaper, feet apart, hair flying loose and holding a smoking gun. But I'm no gun-girl. I've never touched a gun in my life. It's just unfortunate that those men have died. Believe me, I'm just an ordinary girl. These things have been thrust upon me.’
Like Nellie Cameron, Markham was born on Sydney's north shore, in 1913, and, after falling out with her family, she became a prostitute in Kings Cross and Darlinghurst in 1930. Until coarsened by her life and work, Markham had the ripe looks and figure of a movie star. In her most flattering photos, there is a resemblance to Ginger Rogers. As one who knew her observed, ‘Dulcie confounded anyone who equated beauty with purity.’ She was willowy, had piercing grey eyes, full lips, a pert nose and long blonde hair. She wore a silver slave chain on her ankle. ‘She came shimmying into the underworld scene . . . and promptly created a sensation,’ hubba-hubba'd the Sun. Markham's beauty distinguished her from most of the other women who sold themselves in Razorhurst and so she was rushed by clients who paid top money — up to £2 — for her favours when she was in her prime as a prostitute. Inevitably, she attracted the attention of Tilly Devine, who pegged her as a cash cow and installed her as a star attraction in her Palmer Street brothels.
‘Dulcie had a magnificent figure and she walked better than any model,’ recalls former detective Bill Harris. ‘I'd rate her twelve out of ten. I'd give Nellie Cameron a seven or eight, and I'm afraid I'd only rate Kate Leigh a minus two. She was a big, fat old woman.’
Lua Niall, a Darlinghurst policeman in the ′30s who knew Markham well, says the first thing you noticed about her was that she was ‘absolutely beautiful’. But her good looks belied her criminality. ‘She was always consorting with criminals. She made a lot of money out of prostitution. But Dulcie didn't have a brain in her head and I don't know where the money went. She certainly didn't save any, because I saw her when she was fifty and she was still working in a Darlinghurst brothel.’
In the public-enemy stakes, Markham's lovers were a league below those of Cameron, the only other prostitute as attractive. While Cameron was fought over by gang leaders, it was Markham's fate to be romanced by foot soldiers. She married robber and extortionist Frank Bowen in 1934, but the pair parted two years later when Markham fell hard for another small-time villain, Alfred Dillon, who was just eighteen years old. Markham and Bowen would not formally divorce, but his murder in Kings Cross in 1940 would make the status of their union academic.
Ever dangerously undiscerning, Markham dumped Dillon for William ‘Scotty’ McCormack, the standover man who co-owned and job-shared the Darlinghurst fruit barrow with Guido Calletti. When Dillon heard he had been superseded he became mad with jealousy and told friends he would kill McCormack. Few took the young lout seriously. Then, after a day spent shadowing McCormack and Markham, Dillon cornered them in a shop doorway in William Street, just down from the Fifty-Fifty Club. Without a word, he rammed a bodkin (a large, blunt needle used to sew sugar bags) between McCormack's ribs and into his heart. Markham abandoned McCormack and fled into nearby Bourke Street. McCormack, who had not fallen when stabbed, lurched with a quizzical expression some distance along the William Street footpath. A passer-by, noticing his unsteady gait, asked him if he felt all right. ‘I'm OK,’ McCormack assured him — and fell dead.
Markham was hiding in a cinema when a fellow prostitute, who had been soliciting in William Street, tracked her down and told her McCormack had been killed by Dillon. Whenever she streetwalked for some weeks after, Markham wore a black wig as a sign of respect to Scotty. Dillon went to gaol and Markham was there to see him sentenced. When the judge, who had made allowance for Dillon's youth, gave him thirteen years for manslaughter, Markham, in the public gallery, waved Dillon farewell with tears in her eyes. After that, as far as is known, she forgot all about him.
23
Deadly Triangle
Calletti and Green's take-no-prisoners tug of war over Nellie Cameron was nearing its climax. Whenever the two hoodlums’ paths crossed — on the street, in gaol, in pubs — a brawl would erupt. Sergeant Colin Delaney (whose damning character assessment of the gangster would help scupper Calletti's Truth libel-suit scam in 1934) once passed a bruised and black-eyed Calletti in the street and asked him whether he'd been hit by a bus. ‘No,’ said Calletti ruefully, ‘my old enemy Frank Green and I had a disagreement.’ Delaney asked if Calletti planned to report Green for assault and Calletti laughed: ‘I never go to court. In these matters we fight it out ourselves.’
In January 1933, Cameron, then, like Markham, doing business with Tilly Devine, was free on bail, waiting for her appeal against a prison sentence for a drug conviction to be heard. In March, Frank Green had just been released after serving a gaol term for consorting. Both he and Cameron knew that her appeal would surely fail, so, before the judge locked her up, he spirited her out of Sydney, bound for Queensland. The pair, travelling by train with a prostitute friend of Cameron named Maisie Allen and another man, made it only as far as Newcastle, where Cameron fell ill with stomach pains. Green checked her into Newcastle Hospital as ‘Mrs Russell’, he being the most-concerned ‘Mr Russell’.
While Green was skulking in the pubs of Newcastle waiting for Cameron's health to improve sufficiently for them to continue their journey, he was recognised by police officers who put him under surveillance. It was only a matter of time before they realised that the Mrs Russell whom Green was visiting in hospital was the bail absconder Nellie Cameron. Green soon realised that the police were onto him and would be planning to arrest Cameron as soon as she was well enough to be taken back to Sydney and gaol. So nearing midnight on 21 March, in torrential rain and lashing winds of up to 100 kilometres an hour, Green and his male friend stole into Cameron's ward, lifted the sick, weak woman out of bed, wrapped her in an overcoat and hefted her from the hospital into the gale.
As soon as a nurse saw Cameron's empty bed, the hospital reported her abduction to police, and squad cars combed Newcastle for the criminals. Green, Cameron and their friends eluded the lawmen. Drenched and freezing, they stole a car in Hamilton and drove to Sydney to hole up where they thought they'd be safe — Razorhurst.
The lovers continued to evade Sydney police, but their whereabouts was no secret to the underworld, and when Guido Calletti was released after his two-year prison sentence for his thwarted attempt to rob the grazier, he again made a beeline for Cameron, now recovered from her illness. Calletti cajoled her into agreeing to dump Green and going to live in Brisbane with him. Two weeks after the Newcastle hospital kidnap, Cameron was again heading north, but with a different lover this time. Unlike her escapade with Green, she made it all the way to Queensland. She and Calletti lived quietly in Brisbane for a month or so until local police learned they were there and gave them a choice: get out of town o
r be arrested. Calletti and Cameron had no option but to return to their nest and take their chances. They caught the train to Sydney. When they arrived at Central Station, an irate Frank Green was waiting.
Green and Calletti slugged it out in Woolloomooloo. Both agreed that to the victor would go the spoils, namely Nellie Cameron. That was fine by her. Their fist fight in a backstreet was watched by a cheering, wincing crowd of nearly 600. As ferocious one-on-one streetfights go, old Sydneysiders say it has been rivalled only by the legendary 1950s marathon stoush in the Domain between Jimmy Carruthers, world-champion boxer and proprietor of the local hotel the Bells, and the boxer and tough guy Ray Colman. Carruthers won that one, but when Green and Calletti fought over Nellie Cameron, there was no clear victor. For an hour, the two men punched, gouged, kicked and wrestled each other, until their bodies were bloodied and their clothes in tatters, and neither was capable of continuing. With no winner, Cameron chose to stay with Calletti, and Green could do nothing but churlishly withdraw to plan his next move to win Nellie Cameron's heart.
An opportunity arose in June when Calletti again fell foul of the law. ‘I was stationed at Regent Street,’ Ray Blissett says, ‘and a bloke came in and said he'd been assaulted and robbed on a train. The description of the fellow who'd done it fitted Calletti. I knew where Guido hung around — Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo — and went out looking for him. I rousted him and arrested him for vagrancy. I kept him locked up on that pretext until the man he robbed on the train arrived at the station to identify him. Calletti copped six months in Long Bay.’
Now, again, one suitor capitalised on his rival's forced inactivity. Green begged Cameron to return to his bed. He partially succeeded, but for all her charms, Cameron was a poisoned chalice. In one wild brawl with a man who'd tried to take Cameron from him, Green had his nose all but bitten off; in another, a knife fight, he nearly lost his right hand — his gun, razor and best-punch hand. After the second of these, Cameron delivered the badly injured Green to St Vincent's Hospital, where doctors did what they could to repair his hand, the muscles, arteries and tendons of which had been severed. Green told medics and police his injury had not happened when he'd been knife-fighting, but when he ‘fell on a spiked fence. It seemed to rip my hand open.’ Another time, he returned home to his and Cameron's flat and found a man hiding under their bed. She protested that she had no idea who the stranger was and that he must be a prowler. Green and the interloper fought, but the man was armed and shot Green in the stomach. The wound was not serious and he recovered quickly; when he was discharged from hospital, a contrite Cameron was there to nurse him back to health.
Revolving doors, swings and roundabouts. In January 1934, Green was again in gaol on a consorting charge, and Calletti, now released, reclaimed Cameron. This time, he thought, she wasn't getting away. He took her to Melbourne and married her.
Not that being Mrs Calletti earned Nellie a holiday from work. In the month they spent in Melbourne after their nuptials, Cameron was twice arrested for soliciting, once using the alias Alma Johnson and on the other occasion the poetic Nelly Kelly.
When they returned to Sydney, Calletti and Cameron declared that they were going straight and opened a fruit shop in Paddington. In Rugged Angel, Lillian Armfield recalled the change of image. ‘I think I was one of the first to learn they were married.’ They told her they were going straight, and invited her to look at their shop. ‘It didn't have much stock, and I guessed it would only be a front for a sly-grog shop . . . I didn't take seriously their claim that they intended to become reformed characters. [Nellie's] record and Calletti's were too bad for me to believe that.’
In his career, Guido Calletti tried many ways to make a pound: most were illegal and required little work, unless smashing someone on the head from behind and relieving them of their wallet could be classified as such. One of his most audacious get-rich schemes was to sue Truth for libel in the Supreme Court, in November 1934. The spur for his action was an article in the tabloid which branded Calletti and his wife as ‘disreputable’.
Hoping to be awarded a swag of defamation money, Calletti dressed up for his day in court. He wore a heavy, brown-striped suit, a colourful tie, and his short, dark hair was plastered flat with pomade. An expression of bruised innocence replacing his usual querulous one, Calletti took the stand to be gently quizzed by his counsel, Mr Williams. He was a labourer, he asserted softly, who lived in Miller Street, Hurstville, with his wife Nellie. He had been involved in crime before, but: ‘Since coming out of gaol and marrying, I have turned over a new leaf. I tell his Honour and the jury that I am out to make an honest living.’ To that end, he had kept away from his trouble-making friends and rented a fruit shop in Underwood Street, Paddington, around the corner from the police station, for fifteen shillings a week. He and Nellie had worked hard, and their endeavours were earning them a wage of about £4 a week. All had proceeded smoothly for a month (‘I was helping her to go straight, and she was helping me to go straight’) and then his noble attempt at abiding by the law was scuttled by Truth, whose story had defamed him.
After the article was published, claimed Calletti, ‘people would not come into my shop and I had to give it up because I could not pay the rent.’ Dismayed, but undeterred in his resolve to be an honest man, Calletti had borrowed money from his sister to take out a mortgage on another store in Waverley, but, again, the public shunned the shop and all because of Truth. He had had to close the doors of that shop, too. Since then, he had been trying to support himself and his wife by labouring. He was suing the tabloid for libel so he could clear his name and open another shop. A Sergeant James Comans appeared for Calletti. He backed the mobster's claim that while Calletti was proprietor of the Paddington store, no complaints had been made against him. Nor had any of his underworld associates been seen there. There had never been any untoward noise.
King's Counsel Watt led Truth's defence. He told the court of Calletti's long and violent criminal history, and insisted that Truth had not libelled or defamed Calletti because it was impossible to destroy the good reputation of a man who had no good reputation to begin with. Calletti angrily responded that he had committed only a very few crimes, and most of his convictions had been a result of either mistaken identity or victimisation by police. He had certainly never heard of the razor gangs. Watt reminded the court that in the month after Calletti and Cameron had wed, she had been booked for prostitution. Again Calletti blustered, saying that she hadn't been soliciting, merely catching up with old friends on the street.
Now, Watt, who had assembled a group of policemen delighted to testify against Calletti, asked Detective Sergeant Colin Delaney of the CIB, the man whom Ray Blissett had succeeded at Glebe and who would later become police commissioner, what he knew of Calletti. Delaney didn't mince words: ‘I would say that Calletti . . . a flash, handsome Australian of foreign extraction . . . Is a daring and dangerous criminal. I would further say that he has been one of the worst criminals we have had in New South Wales in recent times. He is a man who I know has lived on the proceeds of bad women for a number of years. I have never known him to do any remunerative work.’ Delaney then told the court how in his police career he had always tried to help criminals whom he believed were making an effort to turn over a new leaf. And, Watt asked, was the detective of the opinion that Guido Calletti was one such reformed character? ‘Unfortunately,’ said Delaney, ‘no.’
Delaney was followed by Detective James Walker, who glared at Calletti and said: ‘In my opinion, Calletti is a gunman and a man who lives on the earnings of street women. He is a man who will resort to any violence to gain his own ends.’ Walker told how once he had served a summons on Calletti at the fruit shop demanding that he pay court costs that had been levied on him. Nellie Calletti had yelled at her husband, ‘Aw, Guido, why don't you just go out to the “Bay” instead of paying the bloody costs?’ Calletti, said Walker, had shouted back, ‘I've had enough boob! I'm not going back there.’
When the time came for the jury to retire to decide whether Guido Calletti had been libelled by Truth, and if so, how much he should be compensated for the injury to his reputation, the judge told the jurors that before reaching a decision their task was to think hard about the evidence they'd heard and decide what kind of a man Calletti was. They had to decide whether ‘a man of the worst reputation is entitled to the same measure of damages as one of unsullied and unblemished reputation’.
The jury found Truth had libelled Calletti, but if the criminal was hoping for a big payout, he was sorely disappointed. Financial damage to his character was assessed at one farthing, a quarter of a penny. Calletti swallowed his disappointment and eventually saw the funny side. He framed a copy of the jury's finding and hung it on his wall.
24
Shady Ladies
As stated previously, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, for all their devotion to acquiring money and possessions, were socialists at heart. Tilly's impoverished youth in Camberwell left her with a lifelong preference for any political party whose policy was to help the poor. She was scornful of New South Wales's right-wing New Guard, and her haranguing of Francis de Groot after he disrupted the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932 would not be quickly forgotten by de Groot himself nor by anyone else who heard it.