Razor (Underbelly) Read online

  After the idyllic conditions that greeted the duke and duchess's arrival, Sydney's weather deteriorated and, astoundingly, on the day the duke was impressing with his keen interest in the manufacture of cigarettes at a local tobacco factory, snow fell on the streets of Sydney. Fierce storms then lashed the metropolitan area and gale-force winds whipping Bridge Street blew down a large decorative timber arch erected to honour the royals. Eight died in the tempest.

  Sydneysiders were appalled when on 3 November, in the biggest disaster to befall their Harbour, the mail steamer RMS Tahiti collided with the ferry Greycliffe off Bradleys Head and forty-six lives were lost. They were, however, largely indifferent when it was reported that Darwin police chained Aboriginal ‘lubras’ suffering venereal disease to stakes in their compound. And when Pastor Efon Thomas was stripped, bound with barbed wire and coated with tar for offending local sensibilities in Warragul, Victoria, his plight caused more amusement than fury in the pubs and cafes of Sydney. Both items were barely mentioned in the newspapers.

  But the people of Sydney were outraged and reaching for their own barbed wire and tar when local film editor and writer Robert Dexter told a Commonwealth Film Commission conference in Sydney that there was no chance of a viable film industry being established in this country because: ‘Beauty is the merchandise of the motion picture, and Australia is practically barren of beauty. Nature made a wonderful job of this continent, but as human beings we are an ugly race.’

  In the same month that David Jones opened its luxurious new department store on the corner of Elizabeth, Castlereagh and Market streets in the city (‘The finest achievement in Retail Stores within the Commonwealth,’ the advertising insisted), fifty-year-old William Alcock drank himself to death in his Balmain shack and when his corpse was found next morning it had been mutilated by rats.

  7

  The Bad and the Beautiful

  Born in 1912, Nellie Cameron hailed from a respectable middle-class home on Sydney's North Shore. By the age of twelve, she was stealing from her parents and local shops, and sleeping with much older men. In 1926, she ran away from home and became a prostitute, cocaine runner and a fence for stolen property. By the age of fifteen, when she met Norman Bruhn, she was a hooker on William and Palmer streets. With her beauty and criminal contacts, she had no need then to enlist with Tilly Devine or any other madam. The teenaged Cameron ‘was a very beautiful schoolgirl with a life full of promise’, the top Sydney policewoman of the era, Lillian Armfield, once remarked. However:

  she became a prostitute, for no other reason than she wanted to be one. But she wasn't content with the sordid thrills of the life of a prostitute. She wasn't happy unless she was associated with violent men, and it is beyond any doubt that she encouraged them to violence. And if gangsters held a lure for Nellie, she also held a lure for them, and it turned out to be a fatal lure for some of them. Jealousy over her was responsible for more than one murder.

  Cameron was pretty in a wide-eyed, open-faced, toothy way. She had an hourglass figure. Sometimes a redhead, sometimes a blonde, she was noisy, laughed a lot, could fight like a dervish, was a cheap drunk and bathed infrequently. She was brave and never squealed. She always carried a razor, often a gun, and loved to take off her clothes at parties.

  Cameron dominated men with her sex appeal, rather than with her criminal clout or overpowering personality, as Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine did. It was said of her that she loved no man, but criminal power was her aphrodisiac. In his book Wild Women of Sydney, George Blaikie's pseudonymous protagonist ‘Pinto Pete’, according to Blaikie a customer of both the young Tilly Devine and Nellie Cameron, gave the points to Cameron: ‘Tilly was like a big raw horse [in bed]. Nellie . . . was like a thoroughbred. The Darlinghurst boys used to pay Nellie the high compliment of describing her as a filly that would win at Randwick.’

  Throughout her life, Cameron repeatedly took as her lover and pimp the most powerful criminal of the day. Should her man be outdone by another, she dumped the vanquished for the victor. Kenneth Slessor's poem ‘The Gunman's Girl’ was supposedly inspired by Cameron. His heroine wears ‘mother of pearl’ as well as ‘a coat of real possum’. She carries ‘a kiss of a knife’ on her neck; her milieu is ‘the land where snowdrops blossom’, a reference to cocaine.

  In early 1927, Bruhn ruled the roost. For a brief while, Bruhn and Cameron were the power couple in the bars and brothels of Kings Cross. Much like Tilly and Jim Devine, it was a case of opposites attracting. His plug-ugliness, querulousness and dour dress sense — suit, white shirt, tie and grey felt hat — were offset by her sunny style and vivacity. Bruhn lusted after her beauty and sexual virtuosity, not to mention the financial benefits she brought him. As well as being Cameron's lover, he was her ‘protector’, and confiscated part of her earnings in return for safeguarding her against other pimps and giving her a place to sleep and cocaine, beer and cigarette money.

  In the late ′20s, Cameron charged a minimum of ten shillings for sex (twice that when her reputation was at its height), and accommodated as many as ten customers a day, seven days a week, so before Bruhn exacted his tithe, she was making, at worst, £35 a week tax-free when the basic gross wage was £3. Also, Cameron perfected an age-old game, called ‘gingering’ in Australia. After soliciting a stranger on the street, she would take him to her apartment and they would proceed to the bedroom. Hiding under the bed or in a cupboard would be her accomplice. When sex was under way, the lurker would stealthily emerge and take the client's wallet from his pants or jacket, which Cameron would have been sure to sling over the end of the bed or a convenient dresser. At that point, coitus would be interrupted by angry banging on the front door by another involved in the scam. Cameron, feigning panic, would exclaim it was the police or her irate husband, and urge the client to dress and depart by the back door. Keen to avoid the embarrassment of prosecution or a beating, the customer would flee and usually not notice until later that his wallet was missing. He couldn't win. To return to Cameron's flat and make a scene would guarantee him a bashing by her pimps or, if he was less than robust, perhaps even by Nellie herself. To press charges with the police would result in his family and friends knowing the circumstances of the sting. Most victims wrote off their gingering as a lesson well learned. Cameron and Bruhn would chuckle as they split the contents of the stolen wallet. Tilly Devine was another adept gingerer and schooled her employees in the practice.

  For all Bruhn's pride in being known as Nellie's lover, he beat her throughout their brief liaison, so setting the pattern for her life. She would be kidnapped, bashed, stabbed, slashed and shot by her criminal lovers Frank Green, Guido Calletti, Edward ‘Ted’ Pulley and Eric Connolly, but somehow outlive them all save Green. Nellie Cameron was known as ‘the Kiss of Death Girl’. Once she was asked what she saw in Bruhn. ‘When I wake up in the morning,’ she answered, ‘I like to look down on someone lower than myself.’

  At night, Bruhn prowled with his blade-men, George Wallace, Snowy Cutmore and Razor Jack Hayes. On the fringe of this band were freelance hoons who were employed as circumstances dictated: they included Lancelot McGregor ‘Sailor the Slasher’ Saidler and a gay black man who dyed his hair platinum-white and was known as Nigger. Bruhn found the Kings Cross underworld ripe for exploitation. His modus operandi was simple: he and his men would gorge on booze and cocaine, then bail up sly-groggers, prostitutes and drug sellers in no position to tattle to the police, and demand money. They made it clear that if the money was not forthcoming, the penalty would be at best a slashed face; at worst, death.

  George Wallace bore the same name as a popular Australian comedian of the time, but there was nothing amusing about ‘the Midnight Raper’. Wallace earned his nickname by sexually assaulting hookers who refused to pay him a cut of their takings. He would often slash their faces for good measure. He was a beetle-browed, cleft-chinned brute who began his criminal career as a member of Sydney's army of pickpockets (memorably labelled by Magistrate McMahon in
1926 as ‘dingoes who hunt in packs about the Central Railway Station and ferry wharves’). Wallace soon found drug trafficking more lucrative, then discovered it was easier still to mug other traffickers. His talent for mayhem won him Bruhn's notice.

  Snowy Cutmore was a Melbourne bandit who followed Bruhn to Sydney after Bruhn had convinced him that Sydney was an El Dorado for criminals. Like Bruhn, he was an associate of Squizzy Taylor, but had fallen out with the diminutive Melbourne mobster. The fresh-faced Cutmore wore his lank, blond hair long on top and short at the back and sides. Cutmore's go was standover thuggery, dope peddling and sly-grog selling. In 1918, when in his late teens, he shot dead a youth in a Fitzroy, Melbourne, pub but evaded the law. In a precursor to his Sydney work with Bruhn, Cutmore led the so-called Safe Prosecution Gang, which relieved other criminals of their booty. He was renowned for viciousness. In 1919, still years before he turned up in Sydney, he slowly, deliberately, battered a trussed-up rival with an iron bar, stopping only when his victim neared death.

  Cutmore was an alcoholic, and in fact was discharged from a 1919 charge of stealing boots from a wagon because a judge deemed him to have been too drunk to be capable of forming intent. Violent — notably with women — at the best of times, Cutmore was homicidal when intoxicated. One such time, the young crook and a friend attended a circus in a field in Northcote. The pair strode past the woman collecting tickets, explaining that the man behind would pay. The manager summoned the police, but before the constabulary could arrive, Cutmore had started a riot, laying into the manager and patrons with fist and boot. When police arrived in force they dragged Cutmore, squirming and lashing out and yelling obscenities, to the lock-up. He accumulated eight convictions in Melbourne, for assault, theft, offensive behaviour and shopbreaking, and notched another seven in quick time in Sydney, principally for assault and battery.

  Razor Jack Hayes was a thin, lugubrious scoundrel. He gave his occupation as salesman and, as an habitué of racecourses, a successful punter. What he did best, however, was wield a razor, hence his sobriquet. He was also handy with his fists and was into anything illegal. He was feared, and with good reason, and so was made to measure for Norman Bruhn.

  In December 1926, Wallace, Cutmore and three other members of Bruhn's mob were arguing with a young woman on a Darlinghurst street when a promising welterweight boxer named Billy Chambers, no cleanskin himself, chased them off. Word got about that Chambers had routed Bruhn's boys. The mob's reputation was at stake. So on Christmas morning, Bruhn, Wallace and Cutmore broke into Chambers's room in Darlinghurst. The boxer attempted to fight them off, but he was pistol-whipped unconscious. One of the mobsters sliced a long gash down Chambers's leg with his razor, cutting tendons and sinews. They then robbed the helpless pugilist of anything not nailed down. While most Sydneysiders were enjoying their Christmas roast, Chambers had seventy-six stitches inserted into his leg — and would never fight again.

  Five months later, in May 1927, two months after Bruhn decided to break the truce and move on the other ganglords’ enterprises, Wallace and two other Bruhn men leapt onto the running board of a car driven by a villain from Kate Leigh's firm as the man drove in Darlinghurst. Brandishing a razor, Wallace demanded money. The motorist handed them five shillings each. Not enough. The driver protested, and for his pains he was held firm by the henchmen as Wallace slashed him from forehead to left cheek to chin and across his mouth. Then, with the bleeding man's arms still pinioned, Wallace stole his wallet.

  The victim swore revenge and cornered Wallace alone some weeks later in a William Street tobacconist. He levelled his revolver at Wallace's huge belly and announced he was going to pull the trigger. Wallace ran screaming into the street, shrieking: ‘Police! Police! He's going to shoot me.’ The Midnight Raper, however, had the last laugh. When Wallace found himself cornered at gunpoint again by the vengeful scarfaced man, some weeks later in an Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, hotel, he was prepared for the end. The fellow pulled the trigger at point-blank range, but the bullet jammed in the chamber. Wallace whipped out his razor and this time slashed the man's right cheek.

  The opening gambit in Bruhn's plan to be the unchallenged king of the Sydney underworld was when, in early 1927, he despatched Razor Jack Hayes to deal with Sid ‘Kicker’ Kelly, one of the infamous Kelly brothers, hard men whom Bruhn knew were friends and allies of Phil Jeffs. Hayes slashed Kelly's throat, but Kelly survived. Retribution was inevitable. One night not long after, Sid Kelly and his brother Tom followed Hayes and Bruhn into Mack's, a sleazy cocaine and sly-grog den run by Joe McNamara, in Charlotte Lane, Darlinghurst. There they goaded Hayes and Bruhn into a fight, and the Kellys gave them a severe walloping, followed by a kicking. Bruhn and Hayes were hospitalised.

  Starting in March that year, Bruhn, unfazed by his beating, targeted Jeffs's, Devine's and Leigh's establishments in a series of hyena-like hits that left his enemies’ operatives bruised and slashed. Bruhn's attacks began to bite into the others’ revenue as patrons, fearing serious trouble, began to stay away from their establishments. It's not known if Jeffs, Leigh and Devine gathered for a council of war, but they did stock up their arsenal and plotted how to destroy the Bruhn gang without drawing police attention to themselves.

  Police knowledge of the escalating war was sketchy due to the criminal code of silence. But they, like reporters on the crime beat, sensed that something nasty was brewing in Razorhurst. Truth, in an article on the razor gangs, fretted sensationally:

  And so . . . the vendetta gets fiercer . . . Its climax may come in a wild campaign of shooting any night, as the mystery gangsters, once elusive, shady and unknown, are now easily identifiable by those who have sworn to ‘get’ them. The ‘Midnight Raper’ has other names, ordinary names, but they do not count much, as a criminal changes his title about five times a week if it suits him. There are others identifiable by nicknames, too, one of them of snowy white locks who is called ‘Nigger’, and yet another who is referred to more often than not as ‘The Jew’. The reputed leader [of the worst gang] is a Melbourne man who absconded from bail and bolted for Sydney after he had been committed for trial . . . And so, known to the police and known to their victims, the gangsters prowl through the shadows, and even into the light of day, spreading supreme terror as they go, and never fearing that the processes of the law may be set against them.

  Bruhn's fate was sealed when in May he and Hayes held up a sly-grog shop, in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, in which Phil Jeffs held a major financial interest. As Bruhn knew it would be, the audacious strike was interpreted by Jeffs as a direct and personal challenge. To avoid being branded a coward and losing his underworld credibility, Phil the Jew had no choice but to lash back at Bruhn.

  In the early evening of 6 June, Bruhn's man Razor Jack Hayes was gunned down in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst. Passing taxi driver Jack Edelman told police he saw two men arguing on the footpath. One, he said, drew a revolver from his coat and shot the other in the chest. Edelman had seen the gun flash and heard a ‘pop’. The shot man fell into the gutter. The shooter climbed into a large, dark limousine, which turned into Bourke Street and sped towards William Street. Edelman pursued the limousine and took its number, then returned to where the victim lay unconscious and bleeding. He lifted him into his cab and drove him to St Vincent's Hospital. For days, Razor Jack was not expected to recover. The bullet had entered his upper-right chest, passed through his body and emerged from his back. It had missed his heart but blood loss was heavy. Although Hayes refused to name his attacker, police, acting on Edelman's information, traced the getaway car and charged Tom Kelly with malicious wounding.

  By the time Kelly's trial began, at Sydney Quarter Sessions on 28 July 1927, Hayes had recovered. In court, he heard the accused admit to shooting him only in self-defence after Hayes had threatened him with a razor: ‘I'll cut your ears off!’ Fearing a reprisal from Hayes's mates nearby, Kelly claimed, he'd then sped off in his car.

  When Razor Jack took the s
tand, his was a virtuoso performance. Both Kelly and cab driver Edelman were confused or lying, he declared. He said that he knew Tom Kelly, but he had never quarrelled with him, and certainly Kelly was not the man who shot him. Hayes's version of the incident was that he had spent the day at Randwick racecourse and was standing outside a Darlinghurst tobacconist's when summoned to a nearby car. He approached the vehicle then felt a pain in his chest, but remembered nothing more until waking in hospital the next day. And, he told the Crown prosecutor, he had no idea who was in the car or why anyone would want to shoot him. Yes, he knew Norman Bruhn, but he was not a friend. He and Bruhn had never held up anyone nor slashed them with a razor. It was not true that people had been afraid to report him and Bruhn for assault because they were terrified of retribution. Hayes did know a barrowman in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, named Ellis, but no, he had never slashed Ellis with a razor while Bruhn pinioned his arms. He did not have a razor in his pocket on the night he was shot, and was not, as far as he knew, known as ‘Razor Jack’.

  Hopelessly confused after hearing three differing versions of Hayes's shooting, the jury acquitted Tom Kelly, and on 28 August he strode jauntily from the court. Perhaps his spirits were bolstered by the knowledge that he would never be called to account by Norman Bruhn, at least, for shooting the feared gangleader's trusted henchman. For, by late August, Bruhn himself had been dead almost two months.

  8

  Norman Bruhn's Death Wish

  Bruhn seemed unperturbed by the 6 June shooting of Hayes. Far from curbing his attacks on the other crime leaders, he escalated them.