Razor (Underbelly) Read online

  If Nellie Cameron mourned her lover Bruhn at all, she did not do so for long. Within weeks of his demise, she was arm in arm on the streets of Razorhurst with Frank ‘the Little Gunman’ Green.

  10

  Razor-mania and the

  Campaign for Law

  and order

  Scarcely a night passed without a slashing in Razorhurst. If straight society prayed that the street mayhem of 1927 was an aberration, and that the demise of Norman Bruhn and his gang would see the streets of East Sydney safe once more, a spate of violence in the first weeks of 1928 dashed their hopes. While Leigh, Devine and Bruhn circled each other warily, preparing to strike before they were struck, crime's lower echelons went at each other with razors. ‘Following on the operations of the notorious [Bruhn] razor gang at its zenith have come a crop of desultory slicings, and stabbings and hackings,’ noted Truth on 1 January 1928. The paper declared there could be no doubt that the blade was quickly gaining favour over the ‘old-fashioned bare knuckle fist when it comes to settling underworld squabbles or even to holding up honest citizens.’

  On 17 January, Woolloomooloo prostitute Dorothy Roberts, known to her friends as Black Dot, took umbrage at a sailor customer from HMAS Sydney who ran off after sex without paying her. Roberts, twenty-one years old and described as ‘short and stubby with a mop of black hair, black eyes and heavy black eyebrows’, ambushed the sailor, Victor Kelly, and razored him from groin to knee. On 25 March, Sam Barker, a young Darlinghurst crook, stormed a Newtown cinema with fifteen henchmen looking for a rival named Billie James. After the brawl, the police tracked Barker down, and found in his pockets a revolver and three razors.

  Also in late March, Judge Herbert Curlewis sentenced Gordon Barr, described by one courtroom observer as ‘a mean-looking, flashily-dressed mockery of a man’, to five years in prison for slashing the face of prostitute Betty Carslake in Darlinghurst. As Barr whimpered and cowered in the dock, Curlewis thundered that the prison sentence was scant punishment for ‘one of the most poisonous and loathsome creatures on the face of the earth’. Curlewis regretted being unable to order that Barr be whipped. Nevertheless the sentence imposed was enough to unhinge a group of women in the gallery. Barr's mother wailed, ‘Oh, no! Don't!’ while Barr's present and former wives, Dolly Barr (aka Diamond Dolly) and a woman named Tremaine (aka the Flying Angel) hysterically abused the judge and were escorted from the premises by police.

  Months after he shot an underworld figure named Alphonso Clune, gangster Norman ‘Mickie’ McDonald was himself blasted twice in Surry Hills in March and even while he was being treated and refusing to name his attackers to police, two of the men who had shot McDonald were themselves shot and a third razor-slashed. In November, in Surry Hills, William Dillon (aka Darkie Davis) was shot in the face in a revenge shooting that followed Dillon's slashing in Darlinghurst of a member of a rival gang. Dillon wouldn't name his attacker.

  In a domestic argument, this time played out in broad daylight at Central Railway Station, Betty Honeyman slashed an eight-centimetre gash in the neck of her husband Jim. As he fell to the ground bleeding, Jim Honeyman screamed: ‘This woman is one of the razor gang! She has slashed me with a razor!’ In court, Betty was found guilty of grievous bodily harm, but no evidence was produced to support her husband's claim that she was in cahoots with Phil Jeffs, Frank Green or Guido Calletti. Jim Honeyman, like other Sydneysiders that year, was under the influence of ‘razor-mania’.

  There were also more than twenty gang-related shootings in the lanes and alleys of East Sydney in 1928. Notably, in March, Lawrence Tracey was gunned down on the corner of Goulburn and Riley streets, Surry Hills. He died without squealing. On 7 April, again at Surry Hills, extortionist Tom O'Brien was shot in the stomach; but when police arrested three local hoodlums on the most incriminating evidence, O'Brien refused to identify them.

  Phil Jeffs spent 1928 setting up a string of cocaine and after-hours sly-grog clubs in Kings Cross, Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst. He was making enormous sums from drug trafficking, and extorting from drug dealers, illegal bookmakers and prostitutes. He also set up brothels in Kings Cross flats. He was as capable a criminal as either Tilly Devine or Kate Leigh, but on 5 March 1928, his burgeoning career almost came to an end.

  Around 11.30 p.m., Ida Maddocks, twenty-eight, of Darlinghurst, a married mother of two babies, staggered hysterical with clothing askew into Darlinghurst Police Station. She said that two hours earlier she had been walking down Bayswater Road, Kings Cross, when two men emerged from a lane. One had whispered to her, ‘Hello, love,’ and the other hissed, ‘Come here, dear.’ Maddocks said she quickened her step but the two men and another who had appeared from the shadows grabbed her by the shoulders and skirt, and dragged her down a passageway and into a side door of a block of flats named Kings Lynn. In a bedroom there, she was raped by her three abductors and another man who was in the flat.

  Maddocks told police, ‘I said, “For God's sake, let me go home to my husband and children.” ‘ One of the rapists had snapped back, ‘You'll go home when we're finished with you.’ A fifth man, this one small and swarthy, entered the bedroom. One of the men addressed him. ‘Phil, this is our little sport. I've given her £2 for the night. Will you make it three?’ The man named Phil had said, ‘Certainly,’ and sent the others outside, locked the door of the bedroom and, said Maddocks, ‘threw me onto the bed and assaulted me’.

  The next day the police arrested Phil Jeffs, Ernest Wilson, Fred Payne, Les Heath and Herbert Wilson (the same man involved in the Snowy Cutmore–Squizzy Taylor shootout in Melbourne) and charged the five men with rape and assault. If found guilty, they would hang. The crime, which became known as ‘the Darlinghurst Outrage’, was front-page news for weeks, and when Jeffs and his cohorts arrived at court to be charged, a crowd of citizens and pressmen milled in the road for a glimpse of them. When questioned by police, Jeffs snarled brazenly, ‘What you say and the questions you ask don't interest me.’

  At Darlinghurst Criminal Court in May, the accused men's defence team attempted to discredit Maddocks's story. She was a woman of loose morals, they sneered, whose own husband had recently threatened to razor-slash her face ‘from ear to ear’ when he learned she was working as a prostitute. On the night of 5 March, Jeffs's lawyers told the court, Maddocks had been soliciting in Bayswater Road when she was approached by a group of men and she had agreed to have sex with them all for £5 at Kings Lynn flats. At the flats, she had, for reasons known only to herself, become distraught and ran to Darlinghurst Police Station where she accused the men of raping her.

  Further, the lawyer continued, the five fellows in the dock may not even have been the men with whom Maddocks had willingly had sex that night. Fred Payne swore he was drinking wine with a woman named Fifi in the park opposite the Watsons Bay Hotel when the alleged attack was taking place. Les Heath claimed he had been at a Kings Cross cinema enjoying a crime double bill, The Underworld and Tell It To Sweeney. Jeffs, too, had an alibi: clad in an expensive white fur, Olive Reynolds, a barmaid at Kings Cross's Temple Bar Hotel, told the court she had spent the day and evening drinking champagne with Jeffs and other friends. The jury took just thirty minutes to acquit the defendants.

  Police were furious at the acquittal, and for the next few months kept Jeffs under constant surveillance, desperate to catch him committing an offence so they could haul him back to the cells. On a number of occasions, he was arrested and charged with having no lawful means of support, but each time Jeffs beat the vagrancy rap. Once, he said he had a half-share in a ham and beef shop and when police asked its location, Jeffs chuckled, ‘That's what you're paid to find out.’ On another time, he claimed he was paid £4 a week for tending William Archer's Hot Bath House in Crown Street. He told one officer who tried to ‘vag’ him that he was a pastrycook, and another that he had ‘a half-interest in a bookmaker's bag’.

  Charged yet again with vagrancy, Jeffs boasted to prosecutor Constable Stinson that he wa
s a man of many, many talents, but dealing in drugs and peddling illegal alcohol were not among them. ‘Do you support yourself by assisting in sly-grog selling?’ Stinson demanded. ‘I do not!’ barked Jeffs, his face twisted with mortification at the very suggestion.

  ‘He's discharged!’ said the magistrate.

  The almost daily violence was decried in the press, in parliament and from the pulpit.

  From the outset, Truth led the pack. Every time it covered a Razorhurst crime in salacious, gloating detail, as it had the Bruhn killing and the serial offences of George Wallace, its circulation soared. For a time it was unchallenged as Sydney's chronicler of the underworld, as its crack court reporters and police roundsmen luridly described every shooting, beating and slashing. ‘Truth existed on the fears of men and the tears of women,’ recalls old-time policeman Lance Hoban.

  But Truth was also capable of switching from being a voyeuristic vulture to a moral guardian in a flash and without a qualm. Amid its ads for Akubra hats (‘There's personality in an Akubra!’), Clarke's Blood Purifier and the movie version of For the Term of his Natural Life (offered ‘with Magnificent Atmospheric Presentation’, at the Crystal Palace), it would declaim against slum-land conditions and weak laws that bred the crimes it so enthusiastically headlined and cashed in on. In a series of articles in 1928 — under such titles as ‘Wipe Out Gang Terrorism!’, ‘Gaol Dingo Packs That Are A Canker in City's Heart!’ and ‘Flogging For Razor Slashers!’ — it harangued politicians and police to stamp out the mobsters and street thugs of Razorhurst.

  Truth was determined to stir the ‘lethargic’ public conscience and to keep stirring the government until the city could tell the world it had its gangs of criminals in hand. ‘To the man who returned to Sydney this year after a couple of years’ absence, [it] must have appeared . . . a veritable jungle abounding with human wolves and tigers’ whose utter contempt for any law was being fearfully demonstrated as each week brought its fresh list of atrocities.

  Truth's legion of detractors were on safe ground when accusing the newspaper of hypocrisy and scaremongering, but the paper can claim credit for goading politicians into action and helping to create a social climate a couple of years later in which new laws could be enacted that helped bring the gangs to heel.

  On 15 January 1928, the newspaper crowed that on its urgent representations the Minister for Justice had called for immediate reports on the crime wave sweeping the state.

  This is the hour of the glistening blade and crimes of violence — particularly razor slicings — are part of the daily increasing carnival of bloodletting. It is no longer possible for decent citizens to walk the streets of Sydney without fear of sudden and terrible attack . . . The harvest of hackings and slicings and stabbings is being garnered in all parts of the metropolis. The razor has found its place in the pockets not only of the original razor gang, but in the hands and thoughts of hundreds of nondescripts who have found that a well-honed blade is a weapon that strikes terror into the hearts of innocent victims.

  Years before the establishment of 21 Division and the consorting laws, the tabloid called for the establishment of ‘a special vice squad — backed by an effective vagrancy act — to clean up the meandering, prowling degenerates and social parasites who hunt in packs around sordid Darlinghurst's flatlands’. In the same article, on 11 March 1928, it decried the fact that in New South Wales there was only one policeman for every 700 citizens and demanded the recruitment of more. As a result of Truth's hectoring, New South Wales Police Inspector General James Mitchell agreed that ‘the Vagrancy Act has for a long time needed stronger amendments’ and promised the public ‘legislation that enables the police to deal more effectively with criminals under that Act’. That day, too, Chief Secretary Bruntnell announced that a further 200 police would man the metropolitan police district.

  All year Truth pounded away at Premier Thomas Bavin, who had campaigned for office on a law and order platform, to give the vagrancy laws the added teeth of imprisonment and flogging for razor carriers, and for the establishment of an anti-vice squad and consorting laws that would gaol known criminals if they were caught associating with each other. In September, its campaign, which reflected the sentiments of an increasingly frightened public, bore fruit when State Parliament's Upper House passed Attorney-General Boyce's Crimes Amendment Bill, which decreed a six-month sentence ‘for those found in possession of a razor, razor blade, or other cutting instrument who cannot satisfy the justice that their purpose is lawful’. People convicted of assault with a razor would be jailed for a longer term, and lashed if the magistrate so deemed. Well and good, but many months of debate were yet to come before the amendment became law as parliamentary committees sweated over the fine details.

  While the politicians dithered, street violence not only continued but worsened. By year's end, advocates of reform who had long supported the conservative government called for a halt to the Bavin government's procrastination. ‘Stop This Dilly-Dallying,’ demanded Truth: ‘Amendments of Crimes And Vagrancy Acts Must Be Made Law: Attack That Cancer Of Crime’. The paper declared it was up to Premier Bavin to ‘shake himself from his lethargy’ and protect the ‘law-abiding sections of the community’. ‘It is useless blaming the police force; they are doing their best under awkward conditions . . . The Bavin Government has been appealed to again and again to amend the laws but always something happens to save the artists of the underworld from the treatment they merit.’ Truth noted the amended Crimes Act had not been heard of for months. ‘It is a certainty that we shall not get this legislation this year. Meanwhile, the criminals . . . aware of the ineffective state of the law and the powerlessness of the police under the present system, will make hay during the Christmas and holiday season.’

  What Truth and the Bavin government's other accusers didn't know was that, far from sitting on his hands, Bavin had co-opted the hard man of Darlinghurst Police Station, William Mackay, to advise them on the practicalities of enforcing consorting laws. Mackay, characteristically, threw himself into the task. By 1930, due in large part to him, it would be a gaoling offence even to be in a known criminal's company. The Draconian legislation, enforced down the years by elite police officers such as Ray Blissett and Greg Brown, would go far to cleaning up the razor gangs, but, as 1929 dawned, the Consorting Law and the anti-razor Crime Amendment Bill were simply dreams on a drawing board. The twelve months until their enactment would see the bloodiest criminal conflict in Australia's history.

  11

  The Sly-grog Queen

  and the Battle of

  Blood alley

  The year 1929 was Sydney's worst for shark attacks, and there was a spate of maulings on metropolitan beaches. A lad named Colin Stuart was savaged while standing waist deep in the surf among a crowd of bathers at Bondi. He died of horrific wounds the next day. Another youth was mauled at Maroubra Beach, and yet another died when attacked while swimming in the Parramatta River at White Bay. Then a girl was maimed at Collaroy Beach.

  The human sharks of Razorhurst were tearing and ripping too. Throughout 1928 and the early months of 1929, as the lawmakers squabbled and prevaricated, casualties mounted. On 18 February 1929, Alice Preston was slashed to death by her lover Charles Wilson, who then took his own life with the murder weapon.

  Ne'er-do-well William Thompson was badly wounded in a gangland shootout outside Darlinghurst's Frisco Hotel on 21 February. Guido Calletti was one of a number of locals questioned by police, but although it was well known locally that Calletti and Thompson had been feuding for months, Thompson insisted he had never before laid eyes on Calletti.

  That day, too, Ellen Kelly was slashed by a man with a razor in Crown Street, and the next day on the same street another citizen was the victim of a knife attack. It was Joe Ryan's turn on 28 February: he was sliced up in Kippax Street by a mystery razor-man.

  Next came two dreadful domestic assaults. On 1 March, Hazel Sly was fatally slashed by her husband at Five Dock in
Sydney's west, and on 4 March, May DePena needed multiple stitches after being cut by her husband at their Redfern home. Then, in an horrific razor attack in Francis Street, East Sydney, Roy Watson, an old adversary of Norman Bruhn, was slashed on the face, neck, shoulders and chest by a gang of three blade-men. Only a rush trip to St Vincent's Hospital prevented Watson bleeding to death on the ground where he lay.

  Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine were consolidating vice empires that would endure for decades. Because both had clawed their way to the top in a hard man's milieu, they had to be tougher, smarter and nastier than the male of the species. Neither woman hesitated to use violence to protect what was theirs or to add to their fortune. Indeed, as police records attest, they delighted in doing so. As nabobs of crime, only Phil Jeffs was in their league.

  Nearing fifty at the end of the 1920s, the handsome looks of Kate Leigh's youth that had had men queuing for her favours were gone. She was now squat and puffed up, her big face leathery as a saddlebag. Kate's nose was broken and a pronounced gap split her brown, tombstone-like front teeth. A one-woman hullabaloo, she swore, threatened and gave orders in a voice that was a gravelly blast. ‘I'll tell ya what, luv!’ former policeman Greg Brown recalls her bellowing. ‘When she'd show her granddaughter around Surry Hills, she'd say, “Look at me little baby here, love. Doncha love her, hey!” ‘