Razor (Underbelly)

by Writer, Larry

  The old crook didn't grieve for long. Within days of Larry's exit, Beatrice Haggett succumbed to Green's pleas and returned to live with him at Cooper Street. She knew what she was returning to. ‘In drink, he would become very violent,’ she later told reporters of her first stint under Green's roof. ‘His eyes would bulge and he would bare his teeth and everyone would become terrified. [Once] I came home and Frank had been drinking all day. He kept nagging me all the time, and for no reason at all he got this knife off the cupboard and stabbed me in the left shoulder. Five stitches were inserted in the wound. He used to sleep with the knife under his pillow or mattress.’ Green stabbed Haggett on two occasions and, she said, hit her on the head with an iron bar.

  Frank Green spent most of 26 April drinking with a friend named Hunkus in Kings Cross pubs. In the early evening, they bought a crate of beer and continued their carousing at Green's flat. Beatrice Haggett was there. When Hunkus left at 10 p.m., he later told police, Green was reeling drunk, careening off the walls of his living room.

  Sometime in the next hour, Green and Haggett were sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer when he accused her of having an affair with his brother Bill. ‘I'll do for you!’ he growled, and reached for the carving knife that lay on the tabletop. Haggett, not as drunk as him, was quicker: she grabbed the knife first and plunged it into her tormentor's heart. Green lurched back in his chair.

  Haggett ran from the flat and banged on a neighbour's door. ‘I think I've killed Frank,’ she screamed. ‘Will you go in and try to help him while I go to the hospital for a doctor?’ The neighbour found Green dead at the kitchen table. Still sprawled in his chair, his head was tilted straight back and his mouth gaped wide. His arms hung at his sides. His shirt and trousers were drenched in blood. The knife lay on the table, beside a glass of flat beer.

  Later, when Green's body was removed, Haggett sobbed to Detective Sergeant Workman of rose Bay Police Station: ‘I'll plead guilty. I stabbed him. What more is there to say? Frank was nagging me. It's been going on ever since I came back to him. Nag, nag, nag.’ At her murder trial, Haggett had no trouble convincing the jury that she slew Green because she was in mortal fear that he was about to kill her. She was acquitted in fifteen minutes.

  In the days after Frank Green's death, Sydney's newspapers were full of epitaphs for the fallen hoodlum. Larry offered a heartrending eulogy to assembled reporters that had those who knew him wondering whether she wasn't talking about some other Frank Green:

  Frankie liked to act tough, but he wasn't so tough when you got to know him. Do you know, he used to say his prayers . . . kneel down and pray every night. He taught me the Lord's Prayer. I never knew it before. He was cuddlesome, too, and loving. He'd get up and go out late at night to the Cross to get me something for my asthma. Faults? He had one. He couldn't cook tripe proper. Oh yes, and he went real crook if he found bobby pins on the bathroom floor . . . He loved music and he loved kids. There was a little girl who used to come up his place and say, ‘Mr Dween, can I have my favourite record on?’ I was married to Phil. He was a singer and I like singers. Met him on Wednesday, got married on Saturday, pawned his ring on Monday, left him on Tuesday. But the only man I ever loved was Frank.

  More realistically, Truth's obituary read: ‘Frank Green, scar-faced gangster extraordinary, died on Thursday night and underworld associates, police, newsmen who knew him in his criminal heyday, the many victims of his vicious forays for easy money, knew no regrets.’

  Kate Leigh certainly had none. When asked by a reporter whether she'd be attending the funeral of the man who had waged such ferocious war against her in the razor-gang years, Kate barked: ‘Go to his funeral? Hell, no. But if I do find out where they bury him, I'll go and dance on the bludger's grave.’

  40

  The Bitter End

  It was the early 1960s, and gradually Sydney had become a different place. Men didn't wear grey felt hats anymore, or dangle an Ardath cigarette from their lower lip like a fashion accessory. Chinese and italian restaurants were springing up, families were smaller. The dunny man had gone the way of the ice carter and the rabbit-oh — into nostalgic recollection. Sentimental ballads about June and the moon had been drummed off the radio by British beat music and the surfin’ sounds of southern California. People were no longer gathering in lounge rooms in a semi-circle to stare at the family wireless set while listening to John Dease, Jack Davey, Yes, What! and The Search for the Golden Boomerang. These days they were grooving with Brian Henderson on television's Bandstand, and following the phlegmatic cop heroes of Homicide and the fortunes of garrulous Barry Jones and brave, doomed Frank Partridge on Bob and Dolly Dyer's Monday night quiz show Pick-A-Box.

  And suddenly, Kate Leigh was no longer out and about in Surry Hills. Ubiquitous for fifty years, nowadays she rarely ventured into the streets of her heartland. An octogenarian, she preferred to rest her aching bones in the small, dark room upstairs at 212 Devonshire Street where she lived alone with her memories, the bottles and bouncers of her lost sly-grogging days having long since vanished. Few people nowadays bothered to visit her, but she always kept her pantry stocked with biscuits and tea in case someone dropped in for a chat.

  Kate no longer bothered to go to Central Criminal Court to support her friends. No point, for most of them were dead. She'd stopped staging parties for the local children or to help the hopeless and homeless. She was the one who needed assistance now. She lived in the past and reminisced a lot. ‘I could never knock back a bloke for a feed, a drink or a few bob,’ she told People magazine, and anyone else who'd listen. ‘They used to come to me in droves and the more destitute they were, the derelicts, the impoverished, and the ragged, the wider I opened my heart.’

  For the first time she expressed regret at killing Snowy Prendergast that morning in March 1930 when he invaded her home looking for her lover and henchman Wally Tomlinson. And where was Wally now? in fact, in his white-haired but wiry sixties, Wally was still in a gang, but now it was a Sydney County Council tree-lopping gang at Carlingford in the city's north-west. Kate, however, would never be drawn on the demise of norman Bruhn, even though she undoubtedly knew well who pulled the trigger in Charlotte Lane that winter's night in 1927.

  For a moment, in July 1960, she was back in the headlines. When Sydney eight-year-old Graeme Thorne was kidnapped, she piped up, saying that yes, she'd done some bad things in her long life, but she had never stooped to kidnapping. Kidnappers, she growled, were beneath contempt. ‘Why, I've got one of the biggest butcher's knives in Sydney and it would give me the greatest pleasure to use it on the mongrels. I hope I will hear something that will put me on their trail. By the time I finish with them, they'll make a good meal for the dogs’ home.’ Fortunately for Graeme Thorne's abductor and murderer, Stephen Leslie Bradley, it was the police, and not Kate, who ran him down.

  From time to time, Kate would visit the shops or a friend's house, where she would bitterly complain about the bad hand life had dealt her in her final years. When she walked, she moved slowly and gingerly. Her arthritis had spread and she was often in pain. Those who saw her commented on how much weight old Kate had lost, how shaky she looked and what a shame it was that she no longer went to the trouble of dyeing her white hair black or chestnut. Kate's neighbours often remarked that it seemed like only yesterday that she was the queen of Surry Hills, the feared sly-grog and drug dealer, owner of property, fine clothes and a strongroom of cash. Where had it all gone? They pondered that, and felt old themselves.

  On Friday, 31 January 1964, Kate Leigh, aged eighty-two, suffered a stroke in her Devonshire Street room. She was rushed to St vincent's Hospital. She slipped into a coma. Though her brain was dead, her piratical heart beat on over the weekend and then, on the night of Tuesday, 4 February, it stopped.

  Her funeral was held on 7 February at St Peter's Church in Devonshire Street and the Catholic Cemetery at Botany. Her daughter Eileen, a couple of Kate's surviving siblings, nephew William Beahan,
Tilly Devine, a few old lags from the underworld, police and masses of p eople from Surry Hills attended. There was also a scattering of minor celebrities hoping for a picture in the next day's Daily Mirror which, just as the young turks of crime had superseded Kate, had taken over from Truth as Sydney's raciest tabloid.

  ‘When Kate died,’ Maggie Baker told this author, ‘I felt, well, there's a bit of good old Australian history that's gone. I didn't go to her funeral. Not into the church, at least. I heard on the radio that she had died and that there was a huge funeral planned. I knew I wouldn't have been able to get into the church, so I stood outside in the street. I've never seen so many cars, so many people from all walks of life. Even the metho drinkers. Poor old Kate, for someone who was supposed to be such an old villain, she sure got a good send-off.’

  In the church and at the grave side, praise rang for the deceased. There was no trace in the eulogies of the crime tsar who helped create Razorhurst, the venal gangster who rode roughshod over East Sydney's hardest men, the profiteer who sold cocaine, the biting, clawing, king-hitting street fighter, the harridan who thought nothing of ordering a rival's murder or of shooting a man dead herself. Invoked instead on that hot, cloudless day was the other Kate Leigh — the gruff but good-hearted, more-sinned-against-than-sinning Samaritan.

  Veteran detective Jack Aldridge praised Kate to the heavens in his eulogy. And, said another mourner, former deputy commissioner of police W.r. Lawrence: ‘Kate used to go to the courts nearly every day and she would do all she could to help first offenders. On many occasions I saw her actually paying the fine of people who were not in a position to pay. I spent nineteen years at the CiB and Kate was one who gave me lots of information and help. There was another side to her life. Certainly she had a criminal record, but she did all she could to help the needy and young offenders. She warned many of the youngsters about the futility of crime.’

  At the back of the congregation, Tilly Devine, aged sixty-three and frail as a sparrow now, may have smiled wryly.

  Tilly survived Kate by six years. In 1970, as old as the century, she was a croaky-voiced wraith. The once-buxom madam with the boundless energy was bone-thin and walked with a stoop. She wore big, round, thick-lensed glasses that made her wizened face look tiny, like a discarded victorian doll. Sydney had largely forgotten her. The newspapers that once gasped disapprovingly at the sensational incidents of her life were now preoccupied carping on about the ‘shocking and outrageous’ demands of Women's Liberation. Another media obsession was the decline of society, as evinced, the moral guardians claimed, by the tens of thousands who marched in the streets protesting the vietnam War — in which in March that year in the battle of nui Dat nine Australian troops were killed and twenty-nine injured.

  Almost everyone Tilly knew from the days of knees-ups and rorts was dead. Her husband Eric was gone. Her parents and some of her siblings were, too. And so was Kate Leigh — ‘God rest the old bitch's soul,’ she'd say with a smile warmer than any she expended on Kate when her great rival was alive. Nellie Cameron, Guido Calletti and ‘that bastard’ Frankie Green, norman Bruhn of course, Phil the Jew, Stella Croke — all in their graves. Certainly Gunman Gaffney and Fred Moffitt were no longer among the living, and she should know, for her own Big Jim had shot those poor blighters dead. There were many others who had passed away, but lately she was having the devil's own trouble remembering their names. Dulcie Markham, who in 1970 still had six years left to her, was pretty much the only member of the old crowd she knew of who was still living.

  Everything was changing, and the changes bewildered and irritated Tilly, made her cracked lips curl. The music that came out of her kitchen transistor or the radio in the hospital where she was spending too much time lately, or over the speakers at the Tradesman's Arms, where she still drank occasionally — the songs of the Beatles, the rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs — must have sounded as unintelligible and discordant to her as the frantic babble of the Chinese merchants at the Municipal Markets in the 1920s. Give her ‘Ain't We Got Fun!’ any day. In the old times, if they'd been behaving themselves, she used to shout her girls to the flicks, to see Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, Laurel and Hardy, Shirley Temple and Charlie Chaplin, or, to show them what life was like back in London, noel Coward's Cavalcade. These days, she complained, without a trace of irony, all you got was sex and violence: Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Women in Love.

  In lucid moments, Tilly could remember the sights and sounds of London during World War i, when she was one of the prettiest girls working on the Strand. She'd never go home again, she knew. She could recall craning with the other English war brides for a view of her adopted city as the Waimana steamed into Sydney Harbour in 1920, twelve years before the Bridge was completed. Billy Hughes was prime minister, and since ‘the Little Digger’ she had seen prime ministers Stanley Bruce, James Scullin, Joe Lyons, Earle Page, Bob Menzies, Arthur Fadden, John Curtin, Francis Forde, Ben Chifley, Menzies again, Harold Holt and John McEwen come and go.

  Back when she blew in, East Sydney — Razorhurst, they used to call it — was wide open, a frontier town by the sea. Darlinghurst was virgin territory, so to speak, ripe for exploitation. Acquire the premises, install the girls, hire the razor-men to protect your interests or protect them yourself if you had to. Be feared. Get rich. The money, and the good times, had lasted, more or less, a long time, through the roaring Twenties, the Depression, another world war and well into the ′50s. The luxury jaunts back home were worth every penny.

  Much younger criminals, more vicious than she ever was, or so she liked to say, ruled the roost nowadays — weak and weary, she gladly left them to it. There was Abe Saffron. And there had been Joe Borg, a stocky young Maltese immigrant with a mean streak as wide as William Street, who bashed and extorted his way to establishing a string of twenty-six brothels in East Sydney. Borg made many enemies and was dealt with in a way Tilly would have understood. In 1968, he was blown apart when rival gangsters planted a 2.5-kilogram gelignite bomb under the seat of his car.

  Tilly had been law-abiding since ′68, when she switched off the red light at her last remaining brothel in Palmer Street. She quit the game for good after she was terrorised by local heavies, possibly the same ones who killed Borg, who wanted to reign over an East Sydney prostitution monopoly. For a while, she resisted their threats, more out of instinct than any real desire to remain a force in vice, but she threw up her hands and stalked off when the hoodlums hurled a firebomb at her brothel and broke into her home, smashed it up, and stole her collection of cut glass. That year as well, the crazy old law that allowed women, though not men, to live off the immoral earnings of prostitutes, was repealed.

  As a widow on an old-age pension, Tilly struggled to make ends meet. She spent her time in lonely anonymity, testily turning away the occasional reporter who sought her out to talk about her life and times for ‘Where Are They now?’ features in the Sunday papers or Pix, People or Australasian Post. One of her few remaining joys was writing to her favourite niece, Maureen Cocks, in England, and quietly entertaining friends in her Maroubra home, now bereft of the fine furnishings and art the taxman had taken. At these low-key gatherings, Tilly talked endlessly of the old days. Just as Kate Leigh had done in her final years, Tilly griped about how the Taxation Department had destroyed her. She complained about her health, and with good reason, for as well as the bronchitis she had suffered for years, she now really did have cancer, and rheumatism in her hands and feet and cirrhosis of the liver, too. There would be no more blues or shootouts for her, no more high-kicks and sozzled singalongs on her front lawn. ‘By the end she was an anachronism,’ says George Parsons. ‘She was pretty much broken.’

  Stories never end. After the first edition of Razor was published in 2001, a number of people contacted this author to share their memories of Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, and the gangsters and police of the era covered in the book. There was a priest who administered last rites to
a number of the protagonists and a nurse from Sydney Hospital who tended the wounds of the warring villains. Peg Donnelly, daughter of Monte Gildea, a proprietor of the gangsters’ pub of choice in the late 1920s, the Tradesman's Arms, recounted how her father ‘kept a waddy at the back of the till in the bar’ and her brother, who worked in the pub, vaulted the bar to quell the disturbances that erupted regularly among the drinkers. ‘I saw many street brawls while looking through the lace curtains of the music room on the first floor.’

  Most interestingly, there were messages seeking a meeting from richard Twiss, a friendly and garrulous Sydney man who is Tilly Devine's grandson, son of her son Frederick. This came as a shock, because Freddy, many interviewees had assured me, had been killed in World War ii. In fact, he emigrated to Australia in 1955 with his wife, Maude, and their young sons, richard and David. Fred had been a singer of popular songs at a club in Coogee, a vocation also adopted by richard. Freddy and his mother had a rocky relationship. He died around 1980.

  I learned, too, that as well as Frederick, Tilly and Jim Devine had another child: Alice Teresa, born premature, who lived just one day and died on 9 March 1918, at the Twiss family home at 57 Hollington Street, Camberwell.

  Then there was an unsettling voice message from a gentleman gruffly identifying himself as ‘John Parsons . . . I'm the bloke who doesn't exist. The bloke you didn't write about in your book.’ When I called him back, the number he had left had been disconnected. I persevered and after a time I traced John to Adelaide. He turned out to be a sweet-natured, sincere man of fifty-four. ‘My birth mother was a friend of Tilly's,’ he explained to me.