Razor (Underbelly) Read online

  All in all, an unlikely beginning, but in time Jeffs would realise his ambition of being a big shot. So much so, in fact, that in Sydney in the ′40s and ′50s, there was a popular expression, ‘As rich as Phil the Jew’.

  Aside from Leigh, Devine, Bruhn and Jeffs, there were other criminals who moved in on East Sydney in the mid ′20s. Prowling the maze of filthy, scrubby streets and alleys was pimp, gunman, basher and thief Guido Calletti, leader of the feared Darlinghurst Push. Foul-tempered and weasel-faced Frank Green, though then yet to take a life, was snarl and muscle for hire. Beautiful gangster groupie and streetwalker Nellie Cameron was melting the iciest hearts, including Bruhn's. She would later be the lover of Calletti and Green, driving both to murderous jealousy. Jewey Newman and Charles Passmore dealt drugs. Lancelot Saidler worked mostly alone, occasionally for Bruhn, a shadow in the backstreets of the Cross, rolling drunks and prostitutes. And when police hauled in the usual suspects after a robbery or assault, chances were they'd bail up such incorrigibles as Wally Tomlinson, ‘Gunman’ Gaffney, the Kelly brothers Sid and Tom, Sid McDonald and John ‘Chow’ Hayes (of whom celebrated policeman of the day Ray Blissett says: ‘He was a criminal, a liar and a lair. The world would have been a better place if he had not been born.’).

  A disparate bunch from many backgrounds, these criminals, reflects Lua Niall, another policeman who patrolled Darlinghurst and Kings Cross, were typified by a ‘sneering contempt for anyone stupid enough to hold a regular job, and they had no qualms about going to any lengths to relieve them of their wages. The criminals themselves were usually unemployed, maybe from time to time working on the wharves or selling fruit from a barrow to tide them over between criminal jobs. Many had wives and children, but they tended not to be family people.’

  In ‘Choker's Lane’, poet Kenneth Slessor vividly evoked East Sydney lowlife as an Antipodean ‘Hades’. It is an underworld inhabited by thieves and women whose faces are ‘white as zinc’, where one can feel ‘the breath of beasts decaying in their den’ and death with its ‘leather jaws’ that ‘come tasting men’.

  Crime fomented through the 1920s, and in 1926, the year before things got truly nasty, there were more crimes committed in New South Wales than ever before. The vast majority of these offences took place in inner Sydney.

  5

  Blades

  Sydney's criminals had always kept handguns and knives in their armoury, but after the Pistol Licensing Act of 1927 dealt an automatic prison term to anyone with an unlicensed firearm, many outlaws began carrying another weapon: a cut-throat razor, honed sharp.

  Mobsters had used razors as weapons before. In the East End of London in the teen years of the twentieth century, there were gangs that cut marks into their rivals’ faces. These mobs comprised Russians who had fled to London after the Revolution. The disfiguration was a punishment, and a warning to those who saw the scars that no one was out of the gang's reach. In the London underworld, the slash was called a ‘traitor mark’ and served the same purpose as when a Mafia hitman fires a bullet into the mouth of someone who has talked too much.

  It's unknown whether news of the East End slashers had filtered to Sydney, but the first recorded use of a razor in a Sydney gang attack was just days after the anti-handgun law was passed in early ′27. In Womerah Avenue, Darlinghurst, a visiting sailor wielded a straight razor in a brawl that broke out in a sly-grog dive. The altercation was reported in the newspapers and members of the underworld, wary now of carrying guns and hugely impressed by the damage wrought by the sailor's blade, began packing razors. Norman Bruhn and his men made the razor their trademark weapon, and became the first ‘razor gang’ of Sydney. The mobs of Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh and Phil Jeffs followed suit.

  A cut-throat, Bengal-style straight shaving blade could be bought for a few pence at a grocer's or chemist's. Razor gangsters carried one or more in their coat or pants pocket. The more serious wielders honed their blade on a sharpening stone. Some crooks carried a more discreet version: a simple safety razor blade embedded in a piece of cork that could be neatly concealed in their fist.

  Although they could do horrendous damage, a blade, unlike a gun, was not necessarily used for killing. Many victims of razor attacks did die, but the razor was more often used as an instrument of intimidation and disfiguration. Yet, a sharp and gleaming razor could be as terrifying as any pistol or shiv. Threatened with a slashing by a gangster, the victim would waste no time handing over his wallet, or a prostitute her night's takings. Even the hardest mobster, when bailed up by a razor-flashing rival, tended to do precisely what his enemy demanded.

  Sydney's weekly tabloid Truth provided an accurate picture of the new phenomenon:

  The razor is more effective than the revolver as a cash extractor. The sheen of its bright blade close to the cheek puts deadly fear into the heart of the victim . . . Razor gangs are terrorising the underworld of Darlinghurst, that region of bohemia, crime and mystery. The razors its members carry in their hands are feared far more than the revolver of the ordinary crook. Men who will defy the black muzzle quail before the bright blade held threateningly to their cheek. But even with their faces slashed open, victims refuse to speak when questioned by police. They know too well the fate that awaits them once the gang learns that they have allowed resentment to get the better of discretion. So they remain silent, and prefer to attempt revenge in their own way. It is all an underworld affair, to be settled in the underworld's own drastic way and that is why a deep veil of mystery shrouds a carnival of bloodletting. Men have pledged themselves to ‘get’ each other and there are at least two men who, should they meet face to face in their peregrinations, will stage a combat that should be short, sharp and utterly decisive.

  From 1927 to 1930, there would be more than 500 recorded razor attacks and many, many more where the victims nursed their wounds in private.

  In late 1927 alone, in the early days of the razor-gang wars, police confiscated sixty-six razors from suspects searched in connection with crimes. But finding the razor was one thing, convicting its owner of possessing a concealed weapon quite another. All men shaved, so proving that a villain was carrying the razor with bad intentions, and was not merely on his way home from the chemist to shave, was not easy. To make such a charge stick, the victim's blood, literally, had to be on the blade.

  A typical victim of a razor attack, such as gangsters Frank Green and Jim Devine, would sport for the rest of his days an L-shaped scar extending down one side of his face to the jawbone, then across the cheek to the mouth. Eyes and ears were occasionally lost in the process. Severed tendons, nerves and muscles resulted in facial paralysis. Thirty to sixty stitches were often needed to close razor-attack wounds.

  In those times, Darlinghurst's St Vincent's Hospital and Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street often tended several victims a week, with the peak slashing periods Thursday night (payday), Friday night and Saturday. In one month in 1927, St Vincent's treated twenty-two razor victims. As reported in a July edition of the Sydney Morning Herald after a spate of blade attacks: ‘At St Vincent's Hospital several young men were treated for razor gashes and cuts from sharp instruments. None of the men would say how they received their wounds.’

  Suddenly, in the wake of the Womerah Avenue razor attack, most lawbreakers carried a razor. On the night of 25 June 1927, an eighteen-year-old razor-man named Harry Griffiths chased wickerworker James Brown 400 metres along Cleveland Street, Chippendale. The pursuit followed a brawl. As Griffiths hared after Brown, he yelled, ‘I'll cut your head off.’ When Brown collapsed from exhaustion in Buckland Street, Griffiths slashed him across the neck and on both arms. Brown told police in St Vincent's Hospital, where he was treated for massive blood loss, that he would never forget the sight of his attacker's blade gleaming in the streetlight.

  Visiting Spanish seaman Joe Sanchez was resting on a wooden bench near the entrance to St James Station in Sydney's Hyde Park on the evening of 31 July when two men, who had been sitting n
earby with three women, sidled up and asked him for a cigarette. Sanchez complied, but when delving in his pocket for his packet of tobacco, one of the men drew a razor and slashed Sanchez on the left cheek. The men and women fled. Thirteen stitches were inserted in the sailor's wound, which extended from his eyebrow to his chin. No theft was involved, so police declared Sanchez a victim of mistaken identity.

  Just two days later, World War I Digger Harold Ward was slashed in Mary Street, Surry Hills. The blade opened a deep gash across his forehead and almost severed his left ear. Police, who found Ward unconscious and bleeding, did not believe him when he insisted that his injuries had been caused by a fall. Ward, who gave his address as ‘anywhere and everywhere’, refused to name his attackers.

  In October, Guido Calletti slashed one Jules De Flyn in a house in Cathedral Street, Woolloomooloo. De Flyn suffered deep wounds to his throat, right ear, the back of his neck and left arm. After an evening at the cinema with his wife, De Flyn had been eating dinner at the house when a drunken Calletti and three other men entered and, De Flyn said, ‘made themselves objectionable’. Calletti tried to kiss Mrs De Flyn and when she resisted he struck her. De Flyn defended his wife, but was held fast by the other thugs while Calletti produced a razor and repeatedly cut the helpless De Flyn, who collapsed, bleeding profusely. The men left, and Mrs De Flyn called the police. Calletti was arrested at a nearby house. He was gaoled, but released after a few months.

  That same month, on the 19th, William ‘Darby’ Lloyd, barber, tobacconist and cocaine peddler, and his sidekick, William Scott, were found bleeding heavily and near death in Crown Street, Darlinghurst. Lloyd's face had been razor-slashed three times, and he had a deep cut on the back of his neck. Fifty stitches were needed to close his wounds. Lloyd told police he could not identify his attacker: ‘I don't want any arrest . . . I was drunk, that's all.’ Darlinghurst police surmised, correctly, that Lloyd (who had recently been arrested after a fight with a local cocaine addict) had been ‘attacked by a member of a razor gang’.

  That member, it transpired, was William Smiley, a young thug employed by Kate Leigh, and the lover of Kate's daughter Eileen. Kate posted £400 bail for Smiley. True to the criminal code, the victim Lloyd stood up in court and swore that not only was Smiley innocent, but the two were the best of friends. He and Scott had been slashed not by Smiley but by someone else, someone he did not recognise. Then the Crown produced that rarity of the razor years, a brave and loquacious eyewitness, named Sydney York, who took the stand and told how he had seen Smiley and Eileen Leigh approach Lloyd and Scott in the street and Leigh had pointed at Scott and yelled: ‘There he is! Get him.’ Smiley, said York, ‘hit Scott on the head with what looked to be a bag tied around his wrist. There was a rattle and something shone in Smiley's hand. Scott immediately fell. He was covered in blood. Smiley kicked him several times on the face and stomach. He then stood on his face and jumped on it.’ Then, continued York, Smiley attacked Lloyd with his razor and ‘Lloyd dropped’.

  The jury preferred to believe the evidence of York (who after the trial was terrorised for months by Smiley's friends and forced to quit Sydney for Melbourne) and accepted the Crown's case that Lloyd and Scott were victims of an underworld vendetta by the Kate Leigh gang. The inappropriately named Smiley — though slickly handsome and with luxuriant locks, he wore a perpetual scowl — was sentenced to five years’ gaol. ‘I believe that you belong to a razor gang,’ said Judge Cohen.

  When Smiley was released in the early 1930s he took up where he left off, and was a menace on the streets of East Sydney until he was shot and left to bleed to death in Butt Street, Surry Hills, in 1940. A dead cat was found beside his body. Nobody was ever charged with Smiley's murder.

  Another example of how razors were suddenly ubiquitous in 1927 unfolded in Surry Hills on the afternoon of 29 December. Les Anderson, a Mosman hotel broker, was drinking alone in a Crown Street wine bar when a local hood named Bill Weldon and a woman entered, and began arguing. Weldon threatened the woman, and she appealed to Anderson for help. Anderson gallantly ordered Weldon to leave. Weldon skulked away, then Anderson comforted the woman and agreed to walk her to her bus stop in case Weldon was lying in wait for her. When Anderson and the woman reached the corner of Cleveland and Crown streets, Weldon leapt upon Anderson from behind and slashed his throat with a razor. Weldon and the woman tried to rob Anderson but he jumped to his feet and, though bleeding and at near collapse, threw Weldon to the ground. Two tram conductors came to Anderson's aid, but Weldon and his accomplice escaped. Later that night, while Anderson was receiving twenty stitches in his throat at St Vincent's Hospital, police arrested Weldon and the woman.

  So notorious were the razor gangsters as 1927 drew to an end that they sometimes found themselves scapegoats for crimes they had not committed. On 20 December, after one ‘Tassie’ Bates presented at St Vincent's Hospital, police were called to inspect an evil-looking gash on his arm. Bates told them how he had been jumped by five razor-brandishing bandits. He had fought the five off, of course, but before they fled howling with fear into the night, one had inflicted the wound that the officers now saw. His tale unravelled when he was confronted by witnesses who insisted he had sustained his wound rather less gloriously. Earlier that evening while drunk he had provoked a fight in a Surry Hills pub. His adversary had picked him up and hurled him through a glass door. The shattering glass had caused his wound.

  Suddenly razors and the damage they were wreaking were the talk of the town. Before, when domestic violence erupted, the angry, drunk or unhinged may have lashed out with their fist or boot, reached for a copper stick, wrench, cricket bat or kettle to use as a weapon. Now, they were making for the medicine cabinet and grabbing their razor. In June 1927, Edward Smythe, a World War I veteran and Burwood resident, used a razor to inflict terrible wounds on the face and throat of Elsie, his wife and mother of their five children. He then slashed his own throat with the same instrument. Both recovered, but not before thirty stitches were inserted in Elsie Smythe's wounds and fifteen in Edward's.

  PART 2

  The Razor-Gang

  Wars

  6

  Storm Warning

  By 1927, the cunning, ambitious and ruthless Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine, Phil Jeffs and Norman Bruhn were unchallenged as Razorhurst's major gang bosses. For a while they were content to live and let live. Kate's territory was Surry Hills, where she ran sly grog and dealt in cocaine and stolen goods. Tilly's beat was brothels in Darlinghurst, Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo. Jeffs's specialties were drugs, gambling and sly grog in the Cross and the ‘Loo. Bruhn and his razor gang monstered small-time vice purveyors in Kings Cross and Darlinghurst: freelance prostitutes, drug peddlers and low-rent two-up schools and sly-groggers unallied to Leigh, Devine or Jeffs. For a time, none encroached on another's turf or activity. Then in early 1927, the thieves fell out — and hell broke loose.

  It was Bruhn who first split from the ranks. Dissatisfied by his takings and hungry to be Sydney's crime kingpin, he attempted to collect protection money from the enterprises of the other three czars. Then, when Bruhn's challenge was repelled, Tilly and Kate declared each other on. In these battles — which became known as ‘the razor-gang wars’ — screams pierced the narrow, seedy alleys of Razorhurst and the blood of the slashed, beaten and shot flowed in the gutters.

  The years 1927–1931 would see the worst mob wars in Australian history. Nothing before or since has approached them for ferocity. By the time hostilities wound down in the early ′30s as the Depression imposed austerity on once free-spending Sydneysiders — closing down many sly-grog shops, brothels, gambling dens and drug dealers — and Draconian consorting laws stopped gangs from assembling in the streets, a score of mobsters were dead and hundreds maimed and scarred.

  Sydneysiders had much to be concerned about as the clouds of impending gang violence roiled over Razorhurst in 1927. But there were distractions. This was the year when Prince Albert and his wife Elizabeth
, the Duke and Duchess of York (he was destined to become King George VI after the abdication of his brother Edward VIII in 1936, and she would become the Queen Mother) visited Australia. Sydney feted the royal couple when they sailed into the Harbour on HMS Renown on 27 March. Before docking at Circular Quay, the duke and duchess inspected the work on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, still five years from completion. ‘Every crowd was happy,’ the next day's Sydney Morning Herald declared. ‘It seemed as though all Sydney betook itself to the Harbour — until after the landing, one turned to the thronged streets and city buildings. The route of the procession was even more densely populated than the waterfront.’

  One of the highlights of Tilly Devine's life was being in the throng at the coronation of the duchess's daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, in London in 1953 so, although there is no record of her being there to wave at the royals in Sydney that autumn day, it's probable she was.