Razor (Underbelly) Read online

  By then, Sydney was no longer a small town but a sprawling metropolis with a decaying inner city surrounded by middle-class suburbia. In the two decades from 1910, Sydney's population doubled from 630 000 to 1.2 million. As criminologist and author Dr Alfred McCoy has pointed out:

  In an age when mass urbanism reduced the individual to powerless anonymity, the gangster alone retained the power to rule the city . . . The radiating grids of tram and train drained inner Sydney of its gentility, and the city centre suffered a 10 per cent population loss during the 1920s. As the garden suburbs became the archetype of a life that was both comfortable and moral, the gangster's dominion stood as an innercity demi-monde of degradation, the antithesis of surrounding suburban propriety.

  The passing of the legislation designed to control or ban all-hours drinking, drug use and dealing, prostitution and illegal gambling did not have the effect the lawmakers desired. Indeed, as stated previously, these vices went underground and into the control of career racketeers, thus becoming more of a problem and harder to police than ever before.

  The drug trade, particularly, was out of hand. In the late ′20s, police estimated there were around 5000 drug addicts in Kings Cross, Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo. People smoked marijuana and opium, injected heroin and morphine (one young man set up by night on the steps of the GPO in Martin Place, selling on-the-spot injections of morphine for fifty pence a hit), and drank paraldehyde (one of the many unhappy side effects of which was halitosis for days to come) and chorodyne. But cocaine — or ‘snow’ — was Sydney's drug of choice. Sniffed, or mixed with water and injected, cocaine induced euphoria, but exhilaration palled quickly and more cocaine was needed to maintain the high. Snow was snorted by the rich at parties, by businessmen in swish ‘snow parlours’ where each table had a bowl of the drug in the centre, by vagrants in alleyways, by mobsters needing a belt of courage before pulling a job, and by prostitutes seeking fortification to get through a Darlinghurst night.

  As mentioned in the previous chapter, prostitutes were often part-paid in cocaine by their pimps and brothel-keepers. Drug addiction, the proprietors knew, kept a prostitute shackled to the game. Selling cocaine to the sex workers guaranteed regular drug sales and, when the women became addicted, the pimps and brothel owners paid them an ever-larger share of their wages in drugs, rather than cash. To sate their addiction, the hooked women had to work more often and for longer. In the late ′20s, some 75 per cent of prostitutes were cocaine addicts. In his book on the Australian drug trade, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia, Dr Alfred McCoy cites one once attractive, drug-addicted Surry Hills prostitute whose appearance bore the disastrous effects of cocaine use, and the boracic acid and other impurities used to adulterate the drug. The woman's eyes were sunken, the bridge of her nose had disappeared, leaving the nostrils distended, and her skin was the colour and texture of parchment. The majority of drug busts involved two-bit runners caught selling cocaine to prostitutes, such as this unfortunate, on the streets.

  Cocaine was sold to the illicit drug trade by crooked chemists, doctors and dentists, or smuggled into Sydney by sailors from Asia and South America. In 1927, a cache of cocaine-filled wooden pencils was confiscated on the Sydney docks. Cocaine bought by a wholesaler from a chemist for, say, £1, could be bulked up with boracic acid or other adulterating agents, parcelled into tiny ‘pinches’ and sold by peddlers, or ‘runners’, on the street for £60 or more.

  The first anti-drug laws, enacted in 1924, allowed police to arrest dealers if they caught them in the act of selling but, oddly enough, the lawmakers seemed not to regard possession as a problem, and people apprehended with the drug in their pocket were usually let off if the quantity was small, or lightly fined if it was found in bulk. With organised dealers mainly operating out of guarded premises safe from police surveillance, these flimsy drug laws were never going to curtail drug use.

  For a while, the acknowledged czar of the Darlinghurst cocaine trade was Charles Passmore, a faux-genteel habitual criminal with a record predating World War I. Passmore, mainly selling drugs to prostitutes, prospered until coming unstuck in 1928. In 1924, he earned a classic courtroom dressing-down by renowned policeman of the era, Sergeant Tom O'Brien. ‘This man,’ rasped O'Brien, glaring at Passmore, ‘is the representative of all things evil. He is lord and master of a dope combine and has waxed fat and flourishing through the agency of his hopeless clients. You can see him any evening about 11 o'clock standing at the corner of Woolcott and Craigend Streets, Darlinghurst, and its environs, handing out the deadly contents of an innocent-looking package — cocaine — to scores of addicts.’ For all of O'Brien's eloquent venom, Passmore was fined just £50.

  In August 1927, drug laws got teeth when the New South Wales Parliament passed the Dangerous Drugs Amendment Act and Passmore fared less well. The law stated:

  No person shall manufacture any drug unless he holds a licence. No person shall distribute certain drugs unless he holds a licence. The police will possess power to seize drugs unlawfully in the possession of any person. A register must be kept of all drugs supplied by licensed dealers.

  Passmore was thrown into gaol when police found cocaine in his flat in 1928.

  Prominent in the fight against drugs on Sydney's streets was the new two-man Drug Bureau comprising Sergeant Tom Wickham and Constable Wharton Thompson. For a time, their bête noire was the self-professed king of the Sydney dope traffickers, Harry ‘Jewey’ Newman, a sly, vain and stupid knockabout. While not averse to ordering a henchman to beat up someone who had reneged on payment, Newman lacked the criminal savvy and ruthlessness of a Tilly Devine or Kate Leigh. His modus operandi was to buy cocaine from doctors and dentists at their surgeries for a small sum — he'd often call on them with his young son in tow — then sell it, after cutting the drug by 40 per cent with boracic acid, at Paddy's Market in the Haymarket. Police cottoned on to his activities in April 1925, when they raided the home of prostitute Mary Edwards in Pelican Street, Surry Hills, and she told them that the thirty packages of cocaine in her bedroom were Newman's. Officers now kept tabs on him. They learned that he employed a network of runners, including the convicted criminals Rose Steele, ‘Botany May’ Smith, James Delaney and Lillian ‘the Human Vulture’ Sproule. Members of this choice coterie were arrested many times, but always Newman was able to distance himself from them.

  It was Newman's rank foolishness that brought him down. Called into Central Police Court on 18 February 1929 on a minor matter, he could not resist big-noting to Tom Wickham. ‘I'm taking over Bobbie Carr's fish shop in Goulburn Street, and if I had you fellows with me I could corner the cocaine market, and we could make a packet out of it,’ he enthused. ‘These fucking women must have snow, you know. In a couple of years you could retire. You'd make a bonzer publican.’ As the incorruptible Wickham responded that he was perfectly happy in the force, he realised that Newman had given himself away. From that moment, Carr's fish shop was under permanent surveillance. Five days later, on 23 February, police raided the shop and found eighteen packets of cocaine hidden in a drainpipe. With possession now a serious offence, Newman was gaoled.

  In spite of his braggadocio, Newman was no cocaine kingpin. Nor was Passmore. Their turnover was comparatively small and they were constantly bilked by standover men. They were never going to survive. By 1927, the real rulers of Sydney's drugs roost were the highly organised, tough, forward-planning Kate Leigh and Jim Devine. They laughed at standover men, sent them packing with a beating, and they were not intimidated by police, whom they outwitted or paid to leave them alone. Wickham and Wharton were the bane of drug traffickers and made many arrests, but while they rid the streets of a number of small-time pushers, they were, without strong anti-drug laws to support them, relatively powerless against the big-timers.

  In the archives of the New South Wales Police Force is this un-bylined, curiously colourful description, circa 1927, of Kate Leigh as drug dealer:

  No more
remarkable woman ever strode upon the stage of Sydney's nightlife than this middle-aged, matronly dame who slinks a furtive figure in the background of the drama of real life. A sinister, shadowy character, she plays a dominating part in the tragedy which is spelt with four letters: D-O-P-E. She meets young women in cafés and hotel lounges, and she ingratiates herself with them. Such a nice, steady, agreeable dame! Such a monster in human disguise. For she deals in a commodity that means more than the wrecking of physical health. It means the destruction of mental health, the warping of the moral outlook, the damning of the eternal soul. Clever and unscrupulous enough to know that once a victim is made, she becomes a sure customer for life. To show them the door to Drugland she paints a glowing picture of the joys inside. She conjures up hours of gay, exotic happiness. They open the door, slowly, hesitatingly. She stands behind them and reassures. They enter and find — a living hell. Price is nothing to the victims. They will pay all that is asked. They want more and more and more. If it gets too dear for them, they stop at nothing to get the money. They will impose on their friends, they will steal, and descend as low as a woman can go to feed the ravenous appetite that dope creates. It is a tragic but terribly true thing that a great percentage of fallen women who walk the pavements of Sydney are drug-takers.

  Sly grog was the result of the Holman Government's Liquor Act of 1916, which closed hotels at 6 p.m., enshrining the notion that drinkers must be saved from themselves. In spite of the best intentions of the legislators, a (literally) staggering 8896 people faced Sydney's Central Police Court in 1926 charged with public drunkenness. When pub doors clanged shut at six, many drinkers, after knocking off from factory or office at four or five, were just getting a thirst. As closing time neared (‘If you can't drink ‘em, leave ‘em; if you can't leave ‘em, drink ‘em!’ the publican would bawl) they'd guzzle with feverish intensity, soaking up as much as their bladder would hold before they were emptied out onto the street. The notorious ‘six o'clock swill’ was a Sydney custom until 1955 when 6 p.m. closing was abolished. A visiting British journalist, Arthur Helliwell, was amazed and appalled, as he informed readers of London's Sunday People:

  The 5 to 6 o'clock ‘beer swill’ when hordes of thirsty Diggers invade the pubs for a final hour of frenzied boozing . . . will shock you. You need the physique and constitution of an all-in wrestler to emerge unscathed . . . Elbows, shoulders, knees, fists and feet are all employed indiscriminately as the customers battle for strategic positions near the bar.

  Sly-grog shops were there for those not too battered and bruised by the swill to want to keep drinking into the night.

  The quality of illicit after-hours alcohol varied. Well-organised, serious dealers such as Kate Leigh (who fitted out her better grog shops with a lounge, comfortable chairs, card tables, and perhaps a gramophone) craved return visits from their well-heeled customers, so they sold good liquor. Kate did deals with the breweries. She would buy large quantities of Tooth's and Resch's beer and Johnny Walker whisky at wholesale prices, and have it delivered to her network of Surry Hills establishments in trucks and horse-drawn wagons. Flakier operators, whose groggeries, for example, may have been nothing more elaborate than a trestle table set up in a lane with a few unlabelled bottles arrayed upon it and a ‘cockatoo’ posted nearby to keep a lookout for police or standover men, cut corners. They would make their beer, whisky and gin go further by diluting it with water or tea.

  The thirsty public rewarded the sly-groggers’ enterprise. Many dealers, none more so than Kate Leigh, grew wealthy and extended their empires; though, to ensure their survival they had to pay off corrupt cops with money and free drinks.

  Another unavoidable overhead for sly-groggers (indeed, for almost all underworld entrepreneurs) was the stand-over merchants out to take a cut of others’ ill-gotten gains.

  Standover merchants were far more of a threat than police to criminal entrepreneurs of any stripe. Unless racketeers were rich and powerful enough to employ their own gang to defend their interests, extortionist thugs would menace with impunity. Drug-dealing, sly grog, prostitution and illegal bookmaking being strictly cash-only businesses, they were prime targets. If a vice purveyor was being stood over, the police didn't want to know. Their limited resources were stretched protecting the innocent, they protested.

  A weekly protection fee, explained the predators to the proprietors, would ensure that other, more unpleasant, mobs would be kept at bay. It would also obviate the mysterious fires, the brawls that erupted from nothing on busy nights (in which innocent patrons were bashed) and the wanton destruction of property that had befallen other sellers who, foolishly, inconceivably, had chosen not to cooperate with them. Most dealers got the message.

  As soon as a lawbreaker entered into an agreement with a standover team, they became a pawn. In spite of what the protection merchants said when touting for their business, any grogger, brothel-keeper or drug seller paying off one gang was always going to be targeted by a rival mob demanding more. Then the competing gangs would fight each other for the business, with the battleground often their benefactor's establishment. These hard men swarming around the illicit operations were like the grey nurse sharks that feasted on the bloody cattle carcases that in those days were thrown into the Parramatta River from Homebush Abattoir.

  Few standover men were as menacing as ‘Long Harry’ Slater, a pioneer in the practice. The Melbourne criminal moved to Sydney in 1921 and became wealthy ripping off Surry Hills sly-groggeries. Any alcohol seller thinking of resisting Slater forgot about it after Slater's gang murdered the son of a recalcitrant Surry Hills dealer named Monaghan. After three trials, Slater was acquitted for lack of evidence, and cooled his heels in the bush for a few years. But he had set the template, and other hardened criminals followed his lead.

  Kate Leigh, however, who by the mid ′20s had been a sly-grogger for half a decade, was largely left alone by Slater and those who came after him. Would-be extortionists received the rough edge of her tongue, and often more besides. Kate's motto was ‘retaliate first’, and she kept standover merchants at bay by hiring her own team of thugs even more formidable than the marauders. Such men as Gregory ‘the Gunman’ Gaffney and her sometime lover Wally Tomlinson did not come cheap, but with her empire of lucrative grog shops left in peace to prosper, Kate came out way ahead.

  ‘For the first time in its history,’ wrote Alfred McCoy in Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia, ‘Sydney could sustain entrepreneurs who lived by controlling criminals instead of committing crimes.’ That's where Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine, and two other wannabe crime bosses named Norman Bruhn and Phil Jeffs came in.

  Norman Bruhn was a gunman, thief, standover man and pimp feared for his garrotting skills: one hand tightening a leather thong around the spluttering, purple victim's neck, the other rifling his pockets. He was thirty-two when he arrived in Sydney from his home town, Melbourne, in November 1926, with his wife of six years, Irene, and toddler sons, Noel and Keith. Bruhn had served with the Australian infantry at Pozières in France in World War I and after the Armistice, back home in Melbourne, became a thief, gunman and alley basher, serving time in prison for all offences. He headed north in ′26 after absconding from bail while awaiting trial on a shooting charge.

  Bruhn installed tiny, dark-eyed dressmaker Irene, one of ten children of a French Creole, and his sons in a rented flat in Park Road, Paddington, and within months of his arrival in Sydney, he was the number-one criminal in Kings Cross and Darlinghurst. (It is possible that it was his Melbourne criminal friend Leslie ‘Squizzy’ Taylor who encouraged him to go for broke in Sydney. Taylor had tried Sydney on for size in 1924, but found himself under constant police surveillance and soon returned south. ‘The Sydney dees [detectives] are too hot,’ he grumbled. ‘They're a bloody lot of narks, and I'll let them have their Harbour.’) Bruhn's gang included John ‘Snowy’ Cutmore (who would die just a year later in a Melbourne gun duel with Squizzy Taylor), George ‘the Midnig
ht Raper’ Wallace and Frank ‘Razor Jack’ Hayes. The Bruhn mob began rampaging in the Cross.

  Phil ‘the Jew’ Jeffs, bulbous-nosed and thick-lipped, was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1896. His family went to live in London when he was a boy, and, destitute, abandoned their son. The young Jeffs slept on the streets and stayed alive by scrounging in West End garbage bins for food and stealing the clothes of other homeless people. In his early teens, he was employed as a cook's slushy on a tramp steamer bound for South Africa. He lived there for a time, then, in 1912, he signed up for a working passage on a cargo vessel to Sydney, where he jumped ship. Jeffs found a job as a pageboy at the Coogee Bay Hotel but was sacked for stealing from guests. He operated a fruit barrow in Darlinghurst before embracing a life outside the law in the early 1920s.

  Jeffs grew into a cocky and super-ambitious young spiv. He affected a bogus urbanity which disguised a brutal soul. He carried a cosh and a revolver, and used them. His dream was to be a rich crime boss, decked in fine clothes and loved by beautiful women. But to see him at work in the early and mid ′20s — mugging drunks for a few pounds in the lanes of Kings Cross, slyly exchanging drugs for money in public toilets, working as a cockatoo at sly-grog shops, being an obsequious lackey to crooks more prominent than he — his chances seemed slim.

  When chauffeuring a band of drunken mobsters and their girlfriends in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, he rolled their car near Glenbrook. One of the passengers, Eva O'Grady of Surry Hills, died in the crash. Jeffs was charged with manslaughter but acquitted. And once, trying to pick the pocket of one William Fisher in the early hours in Palmer Street, Darlinghurst, Jeffs suffered the ignominy of being horsewhipped by his victim in front of a crowd. Jeffs reeled away, then pulled his pistol from his pocket. He fired at Fisher three times from close range, but, as the throng hooted in derision, missed. One of pimp Jeffs's specialities was teaming up with prostitutes to play the ‘badger’ game. He'd lurk in the street outside the prostitute's flat until he received her signal — the drawing of a curtain, the snuffing-out of a lamp — that she was about to go to bed with her client. Then Jeffs would storm into the room, eyes blazing with outrage, shriek that he was the woman's husband and demand compensation from the hapless john. Desperate to avoid a beating, the sucker would pay up gladly and flee.