Razor (Underbelly) Read online

  Jim Devine, known as Big Jim, had many faults. He had a black temper and was violent. He was lazy, dishonest and a liar. He was not blessed with charm, always preferring to snarl than smile, and he used the word ‘fuck’ as if it was a comma. But let no one accuse him of jealousy. From the outset, he insisted that Tilly stay on the game. He would do all he could for her, give her protection, make sure the money she earned was spent wisely (that is, on him). For her part, she knew prostitution was her ticket out of Hollington Street, and she was an enthusiastic breadwinner.

  Acquiring a police record of course came with the territory of her profession, and in the files of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and Police Station, opposite the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, is ample evidence of her activities. From 1915 onwards, she had spent time in Bow Street court and lock-up for prostitution, theft and assault. On one document it is recorded, in the ornate copperplate handwriting typical of the age, that on 2 October 1918, one Matilda Devine, ‘a common prostitute’, was arrested by PC Hebbes for ‘annoying by soliciting at the Strand’. It is noted on the document that Devine is married, has no fixed abode and that her age is nineteen. In fact, she was just eighteen when she was nabbed. She was given the choice of paying forty shillings or spending twenty-one days in the cells at Bow Street. In the margin it is noted, with a cross, that she paid the money.

  Little has changed at Bow Street since the days when Tilly Devine was bundled screaming and kicking into the lock-up. The cells are much the same today as when they were constructed in 1880. They are tiny, have a hard plank bed, cream-tiled floor and walls for easy hosing-out, a small square window to let in a little light, and massive iron doors with a sliding peephole big enough to pass a small plate and a cup through. Virtually the sole difference is that today the toilet is a porcelain bowl in the corner of the cell with interior plumbing. Tilly would have had to use a slop bucket. Oscar Wilde, the World War II traitor William Joyce (aka Lord Haw Haw) and murderers Dr Crippen and the Kray twins are others who have sampled the hospitality at Bow Street down the years.

  At war's end, Jim Devine was shipped home to Australia with his fellow Diggers on a troop carrier. His wife followed him a year or so later on the ‘war-bride ship’ Waimana, with scores of other English wives joining their new husbands for a civilian life in Australia. After a six-week voyage, the Waimana docked at Circular Quay in high summer, 13 January 1920. Toddler Frederick was not with his mother. In 1943, Tilly would explain to a judge, ‘My mother said that I was too young to bring him out to Australia when he was a baby, and he has been with my people ever since’. The boy was legally adopted by Tilly's parents and was known from then on as Frederick James Twiss. (If she ever saw Frederick again, such a meeting is unrecorded. He married and had a son and a daughter, and fought in World War II. It is believed he died in the 1950s.)

  Big Jim was at the Quay to meet Tilly when she disembarked, and he whisked her off to his rented flat in Glenmore Road, Paddington. She started work at once. Before they left England, they had decided that she would continue to be a prostitute in Sydney. He would be her pimp and dabble in whatever other illegal opportunities presented themselves. (It is not known whether she asked to see his kangaroos.)

  It was 1920, and everyone they knew wanted to party and forget the hell that was the war. The women shortened their skirts, smoked, Charlestoned. The men drank themselves senseless and used opium, marijuana, morphine and the in-vogue drug, cocaine. ‘Good-oh’ was the catch-cry of the day. Tilly Devine zeroed in on East Sydney like a spider on a particularly exotic bug. For someone like her, who knew no job but prostitution and was bent on making her pile from it, there was nowhere else to be.

  There had been a thriving red-light industry in the area since the days of the First Fleet. Throughout Sydney's first 150 years of settlement, males heavily outnumbered females and many of those men not married or in a relationship had no qualms about paying for sex. And, with few legitimate job opportunities for a woman, becoming a prostitute was a means to pay the rent and put food on the table. For many women, selling themselves as a streetwalker or working in a brothel was simply an economic necessity, a job like any other.

  Conservative governments wanted to crack down on prostitution, but they were opposed by more liberal thinkers who saw prostitutes as victims, not criminals. In 1908, when the Conservative New South Wales Government attempted to introduce an all-encompassing crime bill that would have lumped prostitutes with murderers and thieves, one Labor member, John ‘Red Shirt Jack’ Meehan, railed: ‘[T]he unfortunate women of the streets, I say they are driven there by some of the pillars of society and the church, who rob and sweat unfortunate women and children, and drive them out into the streets, where any person who likes can make use of them.’ Another MP, George Beeby, insisted: ‘In very rare instances is the woman who is concerned in [prostitution] a woman of abnormal sexual desires . . . 90 or 95 per cent of the women engaged in this traffic are engaged in it as a result of outside pressures of different kinds.’

  Enlightened thinkers such as Meehan and Beeby were not referring to Tilly Devine. She may once have been a prostitute out of financial necessity, but by the early 1920s, she had food, shelter, no children to support and a husband profiting from myriad criminal pursuits. With her intelligence, drive and energy she would have always found legitimate work, even in times of high unemployment. Tilly Devine sold herself because it was the best and easiest way she knew to realise her dreams of wealth and power.

  In her Sydney streetwalking days in the first half of the 1920s, before she became the ruthless madam of legend, Tilly looked as one might imagine Eliza Doolittle, with her peaches-and-cream complexion; bright blonde hair; bonnets; lacy, high-collared blouses and ankle-length dresses. One policeman recalled her as ‘a beautiful young woman with a deep, husky, fascinating voice . . . she had charm and there was something likeable about her. She was recklessly generous, not only to her friends but to anybody who went to her with a hard-luck story’. One observer described her as then having ‘a complexion of milk and roses and hair the colour of a hay-rick in summer’.

  Annoy her in any way, however, and the sweet illusion would be shattered by a blast of bullocky language and, if her tormentor was particularly unlucky, a punch or a kick. Tilly was just one of hundreds of women in East Sydney out to grab the pounds of randy punters, but she was not fazed by the competition. Attractive, a party girl, and skilled at her trade, she made money from the start. She charged top price, ten shillings or more, and always collected. The foolish few who baulked at paying up after they'd had their half hour with her had the fists and boots of Big Jim to contend with or (maybe worse) the fury of Tilly herself.

  Tilly Devine worked all the prostitute haunts: Palmer, Bourke, Forbes and Riley streets and Darlinghurst Road in Darlinghurst; Macleay and Kellett streets and Bayswater Road in the Cross; and Crown and Cathedral streets in the ‘Loo. Neild Avenue, running down the hill from Paddington to New South Head Road, was another popular rendezvous for Tilly and other streetwalkers — chiacked as ‘inkwells’ by cheeky locals, always when out of earshot of the prostitutes’ ‘bludgers’ (pimps) — especially on fight nights at nearby Sydney Stadium, the old Tin Shed with its signs spruiking Laxettes and Penfolds Wines. And William Street, the boulevard of broken dreams that starts at Hyde Park in the city, traversing the northern edge of Woolloomooloo and the southern boundary of Darlinghurst, and on up the rise into the heart of Kings Cross, was a busy place of fun and small business, and a prized position for soliciting. Only the toughest prostitutes backed by fierce pimps and protectors were strong enough to stake a claim there. Tilly Devine made the cut.

  Today, William Street boasts office blocks occupied and abandoned, luxury car showrooms, a few coffee shops, general stores, tattoo parlours and pubs, including the lollipop-painted hotel the Strand. The multi-lane road is often gridlocked with the cars and buses of commuters travelling from the eastern suburbs into the city and back again. At nigh
t, a handful of prostitutes and bands of carousing youths from the suburbs (spiritual descendants of the larrikins of old, perhaps) loiter on corners. Back then, when Tilly Devine hit town, William Street had recently, in 1916, been widened from a thirteen-metre-wide track to more than twice that width. Cars, omnibuses, horse-drawn carts and wagons jostled chaotically with rattletrap trams and pedestrians for room on the road. (In 1921, thirty-six people were killed by cars in central Sydney; by 1924, the toll had hit 144.)

  In the twenty-first century, almost the only remnants of old William Street are the Chard Building, which in the ′20s and ′30s housed the Fifty-Fifty Club, and the Strand, in Tilly and Jim's day a scabrous saloon where gangsters boozed and brawled (and, at the height of the razor-gang wars, shot each other). In the 1920s, the Strand Hotel's now long-vanished William Street neighbours included Emanuel Berkman's Pawn Shop (there were three other hockshops as well) and the Schibesi brothers’ general store. Up and down the street there were gaudy signs for Wolfe's Schnappes, Bushell's Tea, Mother's Choice Flour. Other shopfronts included Misses von Hammer's costumieres; Sing Chong's laundry; Weigzell's Ornamental Hair Works; Isaac Hernandez's oyster saloon; Mrs Peachman's refreshment room; Murphy's wood, coal, coke and bulk supply store; Guy Whar's greengrocery; twenty-nine penny-cheap boarding houses; numerous gambling dens; and bars owned by men named Maloney, O'Shaughnessy, Donovan and O'Sullivan. Tattoo parlours, then as today, abounded. (It's possible Jim Devine was one of their best customers, for he sported a horse's head inside a horseshoe and ribbon, and the words ‘Good Luck’ on the back of his right wrist; ‘Tilly’ was indelibly stamped into his left forearm, and on both arms, galleons sailed and flags fluttered. The legend ‘Across the Sea’ was on his bicep.)

  Here in William Street, the heart of East Sydney, Tilly Devine raked in the cash and hoarded it away — in spite of Jim's best efforts to squander it on liquor, cocaine and racehorses.

  Until she and Jim made beachside Maroubra their home and headquarters in the late 1920s, the Devines lived in Paddington, Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo (even then known as ‘Woolloomoolethal’ and ‘Woolloomoolewd’). Their typical digs when they were getting started would have been a dingy circa-1850 terrace house: damp and cockroach-infested, three rooms downstairs, two upstairs, paper-thin walls, reeking open drain and pan-toilet out the back, wooden prop for a clothesline and bathing tub hanging on the paling face. They drank regularly in the pubs in these areas: the Tradesman's Arms; the Strand; Craig's Royal Hotel at Five Ways, Paddington; and the Lord Dudley. Tilly was no respecter of the sexual apartheid then practised in pubs, refusing point-blank to be banished to the ladies lounge.

  For a real party, the Devines and their friends went to Kings Cross, with its rakish honky-tonks and gaming dives where men played cards and pool as if fighting war. Also to enjoy there were bare-knuckle fights, gypsy booths and lowlife dance halls where accordians wheezed. Rat pit fighting — where punters bet on how many rats a terrier could kill before being overpowered by the rodents and itself torn apart — had its devotees. Cheap bawdy-houses, known as cock-and-hen clubs, were everywhere. The Cross was a place of clamour and attitude, horror, sleaze and randy charm, all pervaded by the stink of cigarettes, vomit, cheap perfume and frying fish.

  Kings Cross was nirvana to Tilly and Jim. They partied there and transacted business in its dives and alleys, Tilly on the game, Jim as a pimp, standover man, mugger, cocaine dealer and occasional hire-car operator. After a night on the tiles, they would head off down the hill to their terrace at dawn, nail a blanket to the window to ward off the sun's rays, and sleep till the late afternoon when they would get up, return to the Cross and do it all again.

  In Sydney, Tilly Devine wasted no time in adding to the prodigious number of convictions she had racked up in London. Between 1921 and 1925, she was arrested seventy-nine times for her usual offences — whoring, obscene language, offensive behaviour and fighting. She would have crossed paths, and swords, with Haden Spyer, a constable at Darlinghurst Police Station. As he recalled for Woolloomooloo historian George Farwell, his beat covered Oxford Street, College Street, William Street and Barcom Avenue. He carried a baton and later a firearm. The Woolloomooloo lock-up was most nights full of prostitutes. ‘We used to carry drunken women in a barrow if they couldn't walk. From a police point of view we regarded Woolloomooloo as a very low down crowd.’

  Usually Tilly was fined; occasionally she was imprisoned for a few days, weeks or months at Long Bay Gaol, where she was known as ‘Pretty Tilly’. But by 1924–1925, she was getting into more serious trouble. She served some months in Long Bay Gaol after savagely beating a commercial traveller who reneged on payment after sex. On a charge card dated 11 January 1925, Tilly is described as a ‘married woman residing with her husband. She is a prostitute of the worst type and an associate of criminals and vagrants’. Already she bore the wounds of street war, the card noting that she had scars over both her eyes, on her face and chest. And in February of that year she was sentenced to two years at the Bay for slashing a man with a razor in a barber shop. Big Jim hardly got a chance to miss her, for soon afterwards he was gaoled for eighteen months for living on the immoral earnings of a prostitute: his wife. Jim's record by then, too, was burgeoning, with more than a dozen convictions for indecent language, riotous behaviour, assault and larceny.

  Like Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine made the most of her time in prison. Always whip-smart and self-aware, she took stock of her life, and in so doing made a vow. She was twenty-five then and had been a prostitute for ten years. It was high time to let others do the dirty work. She knew well that the Police Offences (Amendment) Act of 1908, which had made prostitution an offence for the first time, had forced most sex workers off the streets and into brothels, and she knew too of the astounding anomaly in the Act that made it illegal for a male pimp or brothel-keeper to profit from the immoral earnings of prostitutes but not for a woman to do so. Her days of being pawed and violated by sweaty, drunken strangers, she now swore, were over. On her release from prison, she would become a madam, using the money she had salted away to bankroll the biggest, best-organised, most lucrative brothel network Sydney has ever seen.

  When freed, she bought a slum cottage in rundown Palmer Street, just off William Street, fitted out its rooms with beds and faux-exotic decor and put a red light in the window. She provided the premises and the women paid her a percentage, sometimes as high as 50 per cent, of their earnings. She charged freelancers who wanted to use her rooms £2 a shift. In her employ at her brothels in Palmer Street, Chapel Street, Woods Lane, Berwick Lane, Burnell Place and environs, were prostitutes of every age and background: seasoned streetwalkers who'd been operating since before the war, hard-up housewives and mothers from the suburbs trying to support their families, lonely and poor young women who had come to the city from the country, or inner-city street kids drawn by danger and excitement and the chance to make more money than they could working in a factory or shop.

  Tilly was regarded as a benevolent despot by her workers. If they did their job, paid up on time and didn't try to conceal their earnings from her, she cosseted them. She gave them food and lodging, medical care, clothes and, in the shape of her hired goons, protection from sexually deviant or violent customers or from other prostitution rings out to enlist their services. But if she caught her ‘girls’ cheating her, she'd sack them — and often beat them as a parting gift. Big Jim sold cocaine to his wife's prostitutes. As discussed further in Chapter 4, it made economic sense for brothel-keepers like the Devines to foster drug addiction in the sex workers: it ensured loyalty and meant prostitutes increasingly preferred payment in cocaine rather than in cash.

  As the money rolled in, Tilly bought another house, in Woolloomooloo, and another in Darlinghurst, and another and another . . . By the late 1920s, she had eighteen thriving bordellos. So established, she and Jim paid £1650 cash for a solid red-brick bungalow on the corner of Torrington and Malabar roads, in middle-class suburban
Maroubra, and made it their home. Before long, their neighbours’ quiet lives were being disrupted almost nightly by the Devines’ rough and riotous parties, and their wild domestic arguments, after which Tilly routinely sported facial cuts and black and swollen eyes.

  Tilly Devine was on her way to becoming the woman about whom it was written in a police journal article at the end of her long 204-conviction criminal career:

  She has been in conflict with society all her life. She has fought it with words, with action, with her bare hands. She has held it by the throat and shaken it. She has spat in its face. Her sense of values, her code of morals and of ethics, are her own and she will tolerate no interference. For the average man, her life has held that singular fascination the criminologist describes — the fascination of the thunderstorm.

  4

  The Birth of Organised Crime

  The 1920s was a decade-long party wedged between the carnage of World War I and the desolation of the Great Depression. In Sydney, as in New York, London and Paris, employment was high and wages were good, and after the tragic attrition of the Great War there was a try-anything spirit in the air that enticed people to live with abandon and for the moment. In East Sydney, criminals took advantage of the prevailing good times. They realised there was big money to be made from workers with more disposable funds than ever before: from the monied classes who came from the prosperous suburbs, and from ‘bushies’ in town for the Royal Easter Show or the annual Sydney–Country rugby league match.

  Especially from 1926 onwards, Sydneysiders had ringside seats for a series of unprecedentedly violent incidents as vice lords and their gunmen, razor-slashers, cocaine and sly-grog sellers, illegal gamblers, pimps, blackmailers, thieves and strong-arm gorillas went to war with each other for a share of the rich proceeds of organised vice. Now, because of the lawbreakers’ outrages honest citizens of the city's east had to endure the tabloids referring to their neighbourhood as ‘the Dardanelles’, ‘a vice cauldron’, ‘a hothouse of crime’ and, of course, ‘Razorhurst’.