Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  So, in the mid 1930s, all-out warfare between the Devine and Leigh gangs stopped. Over the next fifteen years, the two women even developed a grudging admiration (though never an actual liking) for each other. Sydneysiders knew them by sight and, repelled yet fascinated, recounted their deeds. Tilly and Kate were on their way to becoming — like Don Bradman, Bea Miles, Yabba the barracker on the hill at Sydney Cricket Ground, and Arthur Stace (who chalked ‘Eternity’ on Sydney's footpaths) — true Australian folk heroes.

  26

  Blood and Roses

  The Depression was easing by the mid ′30s and people had more money to spend. Phil Jeffs's Fifty-Fifty and 400 clubs and Graham's nightclub prospered. They offered booze and entertainment in slicker surroundings than Kate Leigh could offer the underworld characters and what one Sydney newspaper called ‘parliamentarians and men of good character, of wealth, of business standing or of good family’ who queued for entry.

  By 1936, the police allowed the nightclubs to sell alcohol after 6 p.m. with only the odd perfunctory raid. This may have been because of Mackay understandably designating a low priority to closing down sly-grog dealers, considering his troops better occupied catching thieves and murderers. And undoubtedly, some police still accepted the bribes of the proprietors to look the other way. Then, too, it was hard for a policeman to get too worked up over joints that always offered a cop a free meal and a beer in the kitchen when they dropped by. Night after night, the Fifty-Fifty Club, the 400 Club, Graham's, Oyster Bill's, Macleay House (a chemin-de-fer parlour in Macleay Street, Kings Cross) and Bondi's Lido Club continued to resound with the noise of popping corks and ‘Here's to you!’ On the rare occasions when police visited and took names, those names were not made available to the press.

  Normal procedure when police raided, for example, the Fifty-Fifty Club was that officers would knock on the security door, which would customarily take some minutes to be opened. By the time the police gained entry, the alcohol would have been hidden in safes, under the floor or dangled on string from the windows, and the tipplers at the tables and the bar would be transformed into bridge players, brows furrowed in concentration over their hand of cards, and good citizens chatting over lemonade and tea. Vases of flowers would appear on each table. The orchestra which moments before had been thumping out the latest hot jazz from Harlem would perhaps be tinkling primmer fare like ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’.

  One time when the police came calling on 22 January 1936, the door was opened with more alacrity than Jeffs and Snowy Billington would have wished, and patrons were caught cold drinking wine, whisky and beer. Police had no choice but to prosecute them. However, when summons were issued, all the names they had taken turned out to be false. Instead of hauling Jeffs over the coals, the police lamely grumbled that there was nothing more to be done.

  In one newspaper, Graham's even advertised its after-hours alcoholic attractions. Perhaps genuinely outraged (but more likely out to crank up a good controversy to haul the tabloid out of a periodic circulation lull), Truth campaigned against Graham's and Phil Jeffs's clubs. It accused dapper, honey-tongued Upper House politician Anthony Alam of having a financial interest in Graham's and demanded that the authorities close down the nightclub.

  In September 1936, the tabloid badgered Alam into granting an interview. The politician received Truth's reporter at his home. Although it was late afternoon, Alam was sitting up in bed in striped pyjamas with a breakfast tray on his lap. Alam treated the reporter with withering disdain. He cavalierly denied owning a piece of Graham's but agreed that he patronised the club. He confirmed that he was an acquaintance of many staff members but said that to his knowledge they were not criminals. ‘Vaughan [Graham's floor manager and a known thug] is not a basher,’ said Alam, straight-faced. ‘He is one of nature's own gentlemen. He cries when he sees anybody being struck, and the last time that trouble occurred down there he had to be locked in a room because his nerves were so bad. We were afraid he would scream.’ Cashier Dick Reilly (a major gangster in the making who had recently knocked out three patrons, one after the other, in a dance-floor brawl then pulled a gun on another seven who wanted to avenge them) came from one of the best families in Sydney, and could have been a champion boxer ‘but his mother did not like it’ Alam claimed. Apparently his brother was one of the most respected members of the police force and ‘Snowy’ Bartlett was once the ex-boxing champion of New Zealand.

  True, Alam conceded, there was a slight problem with the manager, John Sullivan. ‘Sullivan has been told that if there is any more bashing, his contract will be cancelled.’

  With whom, asked the Truth journo, does Sullivan have this contract? ‘By the man who runs the place.’

  Was that not Alam?

  ‘No.’

  Alam then accused the tabloid of hounding Graham's because the newspaper's managing director Ezra Norton had many thousands of pounds invested in the Trocadero, a rival Sydney variety and dance club. The reporter said he knew of no such vendetta, then returned to his desk at the paper to write his story. The article, which ran on 4 October 1936, had two repercussions. Anthony Alam served Truth with a £10 000 libel writ. And on 7 October, the police burst into Graham's, and arrested and fined manager Sullivan and four waiters, including the future television comic Buster Fiddess and his brother Joshua.

  Truth's revelations embarrassed the police into enforcing the licensing laws more strictly. A clampdown on Sydney's sly-grog nightclubs began, and it increased in intensity as the decade wore down. Graham's ceased to trade and, gradually, Phil Jeffs's political and police contacts deserted him. Between April 1933 and October 1935, police had raided the Fifty-Fifty Club just six times and levied fines totalling only £185. From 1937, the den was targeted more often, without an advance tip-off, and customers and staff were fined heavily.

  Jeffs began selling his nightclubs, and by the end of the 1930s, only the 400 Club, the jewel in his sly-grog crown, remained in business. In wartime, in 1942, it too closed its doors after a national security order decreed that it be shut permanently. Jeffs, worth more than £250 000 and every bit as wealthy as the street punk of twenty years before had dreamed of becoming, retired to a life of luxury at Ettalong, north of Sydney. In his palatial apartment (part of a luxury complex he had built), he entertained often, had many lovers, and, he liked to boast, read and reread his library of philosophical works. Apart from joining Dick Reilly in a brief foray into illegal baccarat schools in Kings Cross in 1944 and a little drug dealing, Phil the Jew's criminal career was over.

  27

  Laying Down the Law

  Under William Mackay, the New South Wales Police Force was getting its act together in the 1930s. Mackay, was, however, unable to eradicate corruption — that was never likely while police pay was so low and courting informers part of policing — and he was stubborn and autocratic. His enemies in the press and in parliament called him ‘Hitler’ and ‘a prime bully’. But thanks to the Mackay regime, police were better trained and fitter.

  The force was compartmentalised into foot police, plainclothes police, women police and mounted police, and detectives were detailed into murder, consorting, arson, drugs, betting, company crime, vice, railway theft and stock stealing squads. There were the fingerprint and photographic branches and the Modus Operandi Office, where the methods, characters and idiosyncrasies of criminals were recorded on index cards and used to identify likely perpetrators of crimes. Information on Kate, Tilly, Jeffs, Calletti and Green made the wooden boxes bulge. Sydney was divided into divisions to facilitate policing, and 100 telephone call stations (or sentry boxes), two-way car wireless and faster cars also improved the lot of the constabulary.

  In the mid 1930s, numbers of murders and assaults, robberies, drunkenness and riotous behaviour rose exponentially with Sydney's growing population, but the Consorting Clause had thrown organised crime into disarray. Even allowing for the relative latitude that the police extended to Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh
, the enforcing of the new law had hurt their syndicates. Police, of course, could, and did when it suited them, arrest Tilly's prostitutes, Kate's cocaine sellers and sly-grog dealers and their foot soldiers simply for meeting in a public place. Many of these minions threw up their hands and quit the underworld to seek legitimate work. Consequently, the women's crime empires shrunk. Tilly and Kate were still out-earning captains of industry and the prime minister, but by 1938–1939, their boom times were over.

  Prostitution and sly-grog selling, while curbed by the consorting provisions, would never be eradicated because of entrenched public demand. To Kate's dismay, however, as her gaoling for possession served notice, the police were determined to eradicate cocaine. To that end, the Consortos and the Drug Bureau harassed and gaoled street traffickers, and shut down the rogue chemists and dentists who had been supplying the dealers. With these outlets closed by the late ′30s, virtually the sole source of cocaine was Asian seamen, and after concerted raids were made on visiting vessels thought to be carrying the drug, lawmen could claim that the illicit cocaine trade was suppressed. With suddenly no peddlers, distributors, wholesalers or importers from whom to collect ‘subscriptions’, cocaine's eradication seriously depleted the takings of standover toughs like Frank Green and Guido Calletti, who simply preyed more on prostitutes and illegal bookies to make up the shortfall.

  The end of the cocaine trade — for a time at least — put a serious dent in the infrastructure of syndicated crime. This was not only because of the money it generated, but also because drugs had long been an intrinsic part of the business of prostitution. As discussed previously, to a brothel-keeper, an addicted sex worker was an ideal employee, her need for drugs forcing her to work long hours and being under the influence of drugs making her pliable. Crime lords such as Jim Devine grew rich on their due percentage of prostitutes’ earnings, then grabbed a cut of what was left in the sex worker's purse by selling her cocaine. An addicted prostitute had to remain in the game to support her expensive habit; when she grew old, she consequently retired from prostitution with no savings. With less — or no — cocaine about, many addicts left the game.

  The police now turned their attention to illegal off-course SP (starting-price) bookmaking, which boomed in the 1930s. Depression times saw the poor hard-pressed to afford public transport to the track and the admission charge when they got there. It was far cheaper to stroll down to any local pub where a bookie with a telephone took their bets and they could listen to the race on the radio over a beer or two. By the time the worst of the Depression was over, off-course betting had become part of the Australian lifestyle. It remains so to this day.

  Average race-day attendance at Randwick fell from 7189 in 1929 to 4064 in 1934, and on-course totalisator tax collections dropped from £14 324 to £4230. To redress the situation and get punters back spending their money at the track, racing administrators pressed the State Government to double its efforts to wipe out illegal bookmakers. The police formed an SP Squad and from 1930 to 1936, more than 20 000 arrests were made: however, in a time when pleasures were few, workers were not about to be easily deprived of their weekly flutter and this demand saw the illegal betting industry continue to flourish.

  In 1938, the Betting Act, comprising tougher new laws, was passed. The legislation provided hefty fines for SP bookmakers. For months, police swoops on pub bookies and the fines imposed on those arrested sent the racket reeling. Three city hotels were branded ‘common gaming houses’ and their licences suspended. Another 200 were warned they would suffer the same fate unless the illegal bookies were run off the premises. Radio stations were forbidden to call races and allowed only to broadcast results long after the race had ended. It became a crime to telephone racing news from the track.

  Betting — like sly-grogging and procuring prostitutes — was too popular to be banned by a politician's decree, however. Illegal betting operators found new ways to beat the laws. Bookmakers vacated the hotels where they could be easily targeted, and now worked from their homes and cars or in parks and halls. The latest odds were relayed to them by contacts at the racecourse who tapped out the prices with a Morse code-like contraption (known as a ‘tic-tac’) to men outside the track with telescopes who in turn phoned the information to bookie clients or to hives of runners who then scooted from bookie to bookie in their neighbourhood. Two specialist odds suppliers, Telesports Pty Ltd and Eatons Pty Ltd, charged illegal bookmakers a £1 fee for the starting information.

  So dispersed and fragmented did the industry become that police found it extremely difficult to enforce the anti-SP laws. To please their superiors and politicians who were demanding high arrest rates, large sums of money were paid to informers to shelf SP bookies. More alarmingly, some corrupt police made arrests on trumped-up evidence to save face. There was verballing of the innocent and sometimes confessions were beaten out of framed citizens.

  Another negative was that outlawing off-course betting only made the industry more vulnerable to standover toughs who leeched protection payouts from the outlaw bookies and punters. Unlike the police, the criminals had no trouble locating the bookie joints. As the Daily Telegraph noted:

  The harder the police drive [to suppress SP shops], the deeper into the underworld the bookmakers will go. The government will have accomplished precisely the opposite of what it set out to accomplish. SP will be so closely wedded to crime, that it will be almost impossible to clean up the mess.

  The newspaper was proved correct, as armed extortionists such as Calletti and Green now terrorised the industry.

  Opposing the conservative State Government's harsh anti-SP campaign, Labor's R.J. Heffron proposed the introduction of government-run off-course betting outlets. These, he declared, would ‘see the end of child runners, welshing bookmakers, standover men, and the other evils of the present vicious system. Realities must be faced. The gambling spirit of the Australian cannot be suppressed by legislation. Whether it is moral or immoral, the Australian will bet.’ Government bookie joints never materialised, but when Labor eventually won office, it relaxed its predecessor's vigilance.

  28

  Deadly Companions

  The year 1937 was an inauspicious one for lovers. A botched robbery led to the death of Nellie Cameron's old flame Edward ‘Ted’ Pulley, a New Zealand–born standover man, housebreaker and gunman, who went nowhere without his heavy-calibre Mauser pistol and his trademark Hollywood-style sunglasses. The year before, Pulley had beaten a charge of murdering gangster Cecil ‘Hoppy’ Gardiner.

  After spending most of 6 March 1937 drinking in the Town and Country Hotel in St Peters, in the late afternoon Pulley drove to an SP betting shop run by sisters Florence Riley and Florrie O'Halloran in Wentworth Street, Glebe. He entered the backyard, where a wireless was broadcasting the races from Randwick, and demanded £3 from the women. Riley said he was too late, she had no money to give him because ‘we have been stood over enough’ by other extortionists. Riley and O'Halloran went into the house and closed the back door. Pulley, drunk and in no mood to be thwarted, leapt through the window in pursuit.

  In the Coroner's Court, Riley told what happened next. ‘Florrie caught hold of a chocolate tin which contained our betting money. Pulley caught hold of her, trying to take the tin, and she wrestled with him.’ Riley had then run upstairs, fetched a rifle from the back bedroom and returned to the kitchen, where Pulley and O'Halloran were still grappling. Riley then shot Pulley twice in the back and he fell to the floor. ‘He said, “What have you done to me? I can't get up.” Florrie was holding a pencil in her hand and Pulley asked, “Did you stab me with that?” He then said to call a doctor and mumbled something about his spine.’ Pulley's concern about his spine was well founded for it had been severed by a bullet. He died a week later in hospital. Riley was exonerated when the court decided that killing Pulley was justifiable homicide.

  No one knows if Nellie Cameron was upset by Pulley's demise, but she was certainly at her theatrical best whe
n her husband Guido Calletti was gaoled for six months that year. He had been arrested for consorting in August, but his sentence was suspended when he promised to stay out of trouble and leave the state. He did neither. In October, Calletti was arrested for using indecent language and consorting with undesirables and now the court reinvoked his original six-month term. At his sentencing at Central Police Court, Cameron wailed: ‘It's only for me that he goes out and does bad. I don't know how you can send men like my husband to gaol and then go home to sleep! Guido has been working hard for four years. You're not going to send him to gaol are you? Oh, you must give him another chance.’

  Calletti moaned in his defence: ‘I have been trying to keep my bond, but I am not allowed to. If a fellow known to the police talks to me, I'm booked. I don't get a chance. I might as well be dead.’

  Later, as Calletti was being led through a court corridor to the cells, an hysterical Cameron appeared with a young criminal named Usher, whom she ordered to attack Detective Jack Aldridge, who was escorting her husband. When Aldridge put his hand on Cameron's shoulder to calm her down, Usher swung at the detective, who slipped the punch and swiftly overpowered the youth.

  Another who had to do without her man in 1937 was Tilly Devine. For a change of scene, she and Jim had travelled to north Queensland together late the previous year; Tilly was arrested there for drunkenness and fighting in a public place, and Jim was arrested for assault. Feeling the heat, they headed south to Brisbane and Jim linked up with an old criminal friend named Wilkins and became a greyhound trainer. His sporting life ended abruptly in August when he and Wilkins were caught picking pockets at the Brisbane Show and sentenced to three months in gaol. Tilly returned to Torrington Road alone while Jim served his time.