Razor (Underbelly) Read online

  While Hayes was recovering in hospital, Bruhn and his gang stormed into one of Kate Leigh's sly-grog shops in Liverpool Street and, razors flashing, took her proprietor's night's takings, £100 of the man's own money and a stash of jewellery. A few nights later they returned to Liverpool Street and lay in wait outside the home of a well-known thief, knowing he had recently pulled a job but had not yet unloaded the loot to Kate Leigh. When the thief arrived home they hustled him inside his house and demanded his cache. The thief did not resist, and handed it over. When she learned of the heist, Kate totted up the money Bruhn had once more cost her and seethed.

  Next, Bruhn and Wallace even held up Mack's, Bruhn's old stamping ground in Chalmers Lane, another dive in which Phil Jeffs had a stake. They took money and a quantity of five-shilling deals of cocaine. Bruhn, Wallace and Cutmore then raided a number of Tilly Devine's brothels, assaulting prostitutes and patrons alike. Bruhn was out of control.

  All day Wednesday, 22 June 1927, Norman Bruhn drank in the Courthouse Hotel, Darlinghurst, with a young horse trainer from Melbourne named Robert Miller; Jim Hassett, a professional punter; and a man named Dick O'Brien. As trams clattered up and down Oxford Street outside and the wheels of justice turned at Central Criminal Court across the road, the four grew drunk and rowdy, and Bruhn argued with Hassett and O'Brien. At closing time, 6 p.m., the four staggered out of the pub into the chill of a winter's night and weaved up Oxford Street towards Paddington Town Hall.

  Bruhn's wife Irene was not surprised when her husband did not come home for dinner. Thanks to Nellie Cameron, Bruhn's appearances in their seamy little flat at 21A Francis Street, Darlinghurst (just around the corner from Mack's), were rare these days. Although, from her later comments, it seemed Irene had no knowledge of Bruhn and Cameron's affair. Irene Bruhn fed herself and her sons and went to bed about 9.30 p.m. An hour later she was awakened by three loud bangs — gunshots — but was assured by a neighbour, ‘Oh, that's only backfiring from the taxi garage.’ Shortly afterwards, she later told the police, someone from Mack's came in and said, ‘Norman has been shot.’

  The usual silence descended on Razorhurst after Bruhn's death, and the mystery of who killed him has never been solved. What is known, from police reports and witness statements at the 25 July inquest at the City Coroner's Court, is that at about 9.45 p.m. on 22 June, Bruhn, Miller and two other men hailed a checker cab outside Paddington Post Office in Oxford Street. The taxi driver, Noel Infield, told the coroner that all four were drunk. Bruhn ordered Infield to drive them to the Best Hole Cafe in Chalmers Street, Surry Hills. The four entered the cafe while Infield waited in his cab. After a short time the men returned to the taxi and Bruhn told Infield to take them to Mack's in Charlotte Lane. ‘Now,’ snapped Bruhn to Infield when they arrived there, ‘hop out and knock at the door.’ When a man opened it, Bruhn, Miller and the two other men went inside.

  Infield noticed that Mack's was very quiet. After a while, he left the cab to stretch his legs with a stroll in the pitch-black lane. Suddenly two men appeared from the shadows and asked him how many people had just entered Mack's. ‘About five,’ Infield replied and, unsettled, walked away. A minute or so later, he saw a number of dark figures in the lane outside Mack's. Suddenly, the cabbie said, he heard four gunshots (Irene Bruhn said she heard three shots, other witnesses recalled five) and saw men scatter in all directions.

  Then Infield heard a wail of agony — ‘Help, I'm shot! Oh, I'm shot!’ He ran to where a man lay writhing on the ground. It was Bruhn, and he had been shot twice in the stomach. His clothes were blood-soaked and there was blood and foam pouring from his mouth. He continued to scream, ‘I'm shot! Help, I'm shot!’ Infield, and a beat constable who had come running when he heard the gunfire, tried to make Bruhn more comfortable. When Bruhn recognised Infield, he gasped: ‘Bring your taxi, quick. Get me to a hospital. I'm shot.’ Infield and the constable lifted Bruhn, still writhing and ‘swearing terribly’, into the back seat and Infield drove to Sydney Hospital. On the way, the constable repeatedly asked the semi-conscious Bruhn his name but received no cooperation from the dying man. Detective Sergeant Miller interviewed Bruhn at about 11 p.m. as his life ebbed away. He introduced himself. ‘Yes, Mr Miller,’ whispered Bruhn, ‘I know you.’ But to the sergeant's questions as to the identity of the gunman came the all-too-familiar Razorhurst reply: ‘I won't be a copper. I wouldn't shelf anybody. Go away, I'm too sick. I don't want the police to interfere.’

  Irene Bruhn was with her husband when he died in the early hours of 23 June. Later, Detective Sergeant Miller asked Irene if her husband had told her who shot him. ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘And I wouldn't tell you if he did.’

  Bruhn was buried at Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney's west, with only Irene and his two brothers from Melbourne at the graveside. After the killing, his lover, Nellie Cameron, and henchmen, Wallace, Cutmore and Hayes, went to ground.

  In the days after Bruhn's funeral, his widow spoke at length with reporters. ‘These things they say about Norman in the newspapers are wicked lies,’ she sobbed. ‘God knows, if he had been as they say, I should have discovered it, for I had been married to him for seven years. I married him when I was sixteen and he was twenty-six, and to me he was a good husband and a good father to his children.’ (What Nellie Cameron must have thought when reading this can only be imagined.) ‘He had his faults,’ Irene went on, ‘but despite what everyone says, I never knew him to carry a razor or a gun. Norman fought in the War, having enlisted with the 6th Battalion. He was severely wounded with shrapnel, and those were the marks they saw on him at the morgue.’

  To Melbourne's Truth, she claimed that in his final moments, Bruhn had whispered to her the name of his killer and had told Irene: ‘He did not intend to shoot me. It was somebody else he was after.’ And, before he expired, Bruhn had made her promise never to reveal the identity of his slayer. She said that prostitutes who gathered in Charlotte Lane after the shooting also assured her that the killer got the wrong man. The reporter asked Irene Bruhn why she would not want to help bring her husband's slayer to justice. ‘I don't want to be shot,’ she replied.

  The police did their best to catch the killer of Norman Bruhn. Police Commissioner Mitchell declared that he had given the force definite instructions and drastic action would be taken to apprehend the gunman or gunmen. In spite of copious evidence to the contrary, Mitchell declared that he did not believe Bruhn was the victim of an underworld vendetta, and added that, to his knowledge, only a few local hoodlums had been fighting among themselves. Superintendent Tom Mankey, head of the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB), was placed in charge of the manhunt, headquartered at Darlinghurst Police Station. ‘We will get the murderer,’ Mankey's second-in-command, Officer Pattison, assured the public. ‘We might come up with him in less than a week.’ They didn't, and today, seventy-three years later, Bruhn's murder remains unsolved.

  Certainly the authorities got no help from Robert Miller, Bruhn's drinking companion who was at the scene of the crime, nor Joe McNamara, the proprietor of Mack's. At the coroner's inquest, Miller seemed terrified, at times to the point of hysteria, that he would say something to incur the wrath of whoever killed Bruhn.

  A study of the court transcript that icy July day reveals that Coroner H.F.W. Fletcher and Detective Sergeant Miller could hardly have found a more unreliable and uncooperative witness than Robert Miller. Fletcher began the questioning. No, Miller remembered nothing of the 22 June drinking session and its aftermath, apart from being with Bruhn in the hospital that night (‘I was drunk all day’); but then, yes, he did remember walking with Bruhn in Charlotte Lane and that shots were fired. When reminded of the statement he gave to the police the same night, he could not now recall who he was walking with — in fact he didn't even know Charlotte Lane at all. Yes, he remembered telling the police officer that there were four men on the corner and that one of them pushed him away; but when asked who else was there that night in Charlotte Lane, replied, ‘Nobody�
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  Detective Sergeant Miller then took over the questioning; the witness, according to court reports, was now fidgeting and sweating profusely. This time around, Robert Miller could at least shed some light on the drinking session before the shooting: yes, he recalled that Hassett and O'Brien were present. And then the self-contradictions continued. No, he wasn't drunk after a session alone in a Dowling Street pub prior to going to the Courthouse Hotel. So he was sober on entering the Courthouse? No, he was drunk — and had been for three days. Did he know Mack's? No, he'd never been there. So could he swear that he wasn't at Mack's earlier in June? No, he couldn't remember. And when asked by the detective sergeant, exasperated no doubt by his witnesses's alcohol-fuelled memory loss, ‘Look, Miller, are you always drunk?’, he replied (truthfully perhaps for the first time), ‘I've been drunk ever since I came to Sydney last Easter!’

  When Joe McNamara, thin, shabbily suited and with his hair greased and parted down the middle, took the stand, he took his interrogators inside his den on the night of the shooting, but could not (or would not) unmask the culprit. Curiously, he said a man named Snowy was with Miller and Hassett when he opened the door to let them in. However, when pressed by Detective Sergeant Miller, he said he did not believe it was the man he knew as Snowy Cutmore. And when Jim Hassett was paraded before the inquest, McNamara offered that the Hassett standing before him was not the Hassett with Bruhn, Miller and the mysterious Snowy on 22 June. At the end of the inquest, exasperated and stymied, Coroner Fletcher pronounced that Norman Bruhn had been shot to death by an ‘unknown murderer’.

  On 23 June, the day after the shooting, taxi driver Infield was called to a police line-up to try to identify any of the men who scarpered by him in the dark of Charlotte Lane. In the line-up were Tom and Sid Kelly, Frank Green, Gregory Gaffney and other denizens of the underworld whom police had rounded up overnight. Infield could make no positive identification. That night he was sitting in his cab in Oxford Street when a man he described to police as ‘thick-set, with side-levers [sideburns] and a dark grey suit’ spoke to him. ‘It's just as well you didn't recognise anybody in that lineup today. Be equally as careful tomorrow, or you'll find yourself in hot water.’

  The feisty Infield turned on the threatener. ‘How come you know so much about it?’

  ‘That's all right,’ smiled the man. ‘Remember what I've told you,’ and walked away.

  At another line-up of local crims the next day, Infield again could be of no help to police, but he told them of the stranger's words the night before and assured them he had not been influenced by them.

  So who killed Norman Bruhn? Did Miller, Hassett and O'Brien lead him into the Charlotte Lane ambush? Did McNamara kill Bruhn to pay him back for earlier trashing and robbing Mack's? Was Bruhn's death, as Irene claimed, a case of mistaken identity? Author Hugh Anderson in his biography of Squizzy Taylor, Larrikin Crook, raises the possibility that Snowy Cutmore killed his boss to avenge a friend who had been robbed by Bruhn. (One theory goes that Cutmore's slaying of Bruhn incensed Bruhn's old partner-in-crime Taylor and it was bad blood over this that led to Squizzy and Snowy's fatal rendezvous four months later in Cutmore's mother's house in Barkly Street in Carlton, Melbourne.) Did Tilly Devine or Kate Leigh have Bruhn murdered to stop his invasion of their territory?

  Policewoman Lillian Armfield, in Vince Kelly's biography Rugged Angel, said she believed that Frank Green shot Bruhn. Green could have done so at the behest of his boss Tilly Devine, or he might have killed Bruhn to win Nellie Cameron, to whom he was attracted. Did Phil Jeffs kill Bruhn, or have him killed? A Jeffs hit seems probable. Did he set the Kelly brothers onto Bruhn? Or go further afield? It is acknowledged that Melbourne standover man and killer-for-hire Harry Slater, a man well known to Jeffs (and Bruhn), was in Sydney shortly before the slaying.

  9

  And Then There

  Were Three

  Bruhn's murder left Jeffs, Leigh and Devine at the pinnacle of Sydney crime. Bruhn's razor gang disintegrated.

  Razor Jack Hayes took his bullet-scarred carcass to Germany after being once more badly injured, this time in a street affray in 1928, and was never heard from again. For so long a feared menace, George ‘the Midnight Raper’ Wallace became a figure of fun. Wallace was in Brisbane when Bruhn was shot, and shortly after his return in early July ′27 he ran into Tom Kelly in Victoria Street, Darlinghurst. It is not known what started the fight, possibly recriminations over the shooting of Razor Jack Hayes, or Wallace may have accused Kelly of killing Bruhn, but it was quickly settled. When Wallace shaped up to Kelly in a boxer's stance, Kelly picked up a hammer from the doorway of a hardware shop and hurled it at Wallace's head. The direct hit made Wallace flee.

  Then on 23 July, Wallace, drunk and addled with cocaine, was again humiliated in a fracas he started at a cafe in King Street in the city. Wallace had barged into the Plaza Cafe nightspot without paying the five-shilling cover charge for supper and cabaret. Manager Harry Murray approached and told Wallace he would have to pay the cover charge or leave. ‘If I do leave,’ snapped Wallace, ‘I'll do some damage before I go,’ and punched Murray in the face. Murray fought back and the pair grappled as customers ducked for cover. When Murray began to get the upper hand, Wallace slashed him on the head with his razor. Then, as Murray lay bleeding, Wallace, bellowing with rage, upturned tables and threw glasses. Seizing a heavy coffee pot, he hurled it at a waitress, hitting her on the head.

  While Wallace was wrecking the place, staff locked the doors and called the police. Wallace saw he was trapped and attempted to escape, but his way was barred by staff and customers. The gangster slumped disconsolate and near tears onto a chair, and this was how Sergeant Dennis found him. At first Wallace claimed he was the victim, that for no reason he had been set upon by the crowd. This was met by a chorus of incredulous denial by diners. Dennis handcuffed Wallace and led him to the police station as patrons heckled and jeered the deflated thug.

  Facing court over the brawl, Wallace threw himself on the jury's mercy: ‘I've got a wife and a child five weeks old, and I've got a job in the city and I'll guarantee not to make a slip again.’ He was found guilty, fined £2 and a further £3 to pay for the Plaza's damages.

  Soon after, Wallace left Sydney for good. His guarantee to the court was worthless, for his criminal record shows many subsequent convictions for assault and robbery in Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and numerous country towns along the way. On 23 November 1948, Wallace was stabbed to death in the toilet of the European Club in Perth. He was forty-six. A miner, Leonard Levy, whom Wallace had robbed of £140, ended the life of the Midnight Raper with a butcher's knife.

  Snowy Cutmore, his wife Gladys and a friend of Phil Jeffs named Herbert Wilson (aka Roy Travers) returned to Melbourne in mid October 1927. Curiously, there to meet them were the ubiquitous Kelly brothers, Sid and Tom, who had dealt with Cutmore's cohort Hayes and were suspected by some of killing his boss Bruhn. (Cutmore's rendezvous with long-time adversaries Wilson and the Kellys just months after Bruhn's murder adds weight to theories that Cutmore had betrayed his leader.) In Melbourne, Cutmore renewed his feud with Squizzy Taylor, badmouthing him to any associate who would listen. After a riotous day at Richmond racecourse with Wilson (Cutmore's behaviour and reputation saw him warned off the course by detectives) and a round of welcome-home booze-ups at which he was at his obnoxious worst, Cutmore fell ill with influenza. He took to his bed at his mother's home, where he and Gladys were renting a bedroom, at 50 Barkly Street, Carlton.

  On 26 October, just as Cutmore's mother was cooking her bedridden son a dinner of roast lamb and peas, Squizzy Taylor came calling. He burst into Cutmore's bedroom. The two argued and twelve shots were fired in rapid succession. Herbert Wilson and Cutmore's mother, who was wounded in the shootout, later took police to the bullet-riddled room. There, her son's perforated corpse lay sprawled and stiffening on the bed. There was a bullet in his heart and his right-hand little finger had been blasted off. Squ
izzy Taylor, also shot numerous times, had staggered from the death house but died of his wounds half an hour after being dumped at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital by a hire-car driver. Police arrested Wilson and the Kelly brothers and questioned them at length over the deaths of Taylor and Cutmore, but the Sydneysiders were soon released.

  Sometime Bruhn mobster, the floridly named Lancelot McGregor ‘Sailor the Slasher’ Saidler — small, pale and obstreperous — continued after Bruhn's death as a lone-wolf standover merchant targeting the bars and clubs of Glebe and the section of Elizabeth Street (near Central Railway and the Toohey's Brewery) known as ‘the Barbary Coast’. At 3 p.m. on Saturday, 13 September 1930, he stalked into Ernie Good's wine bar in Elizabeth Street, near Central, a watering hole frequented by police and crooks alike, and demanded five shillings protection money. Good was a man not easily intimidated, and he told Saidler to leave. Saidler threw a glass of wine in the proprietor's face. He then drew his razor and growled: ‘I'll carve you up. I'll slice off your smeller with this little beauty!’ As Saidler ranted and waved his blade in the air, Good calmly reached into his drawer, took out a pistol and shot the razor-man dead. Police charged Good with manslaughter but he was acquitted on grounds of self-defence.

  An interesting insight into the private life of a razor gangster came to light in late September, when Saidler's grieving widow, Lallie Brown, whom he had married when she was fifteen, went to Good's saloon and, with a penny, scratched a message into the woodwork on the front door: ‘I'll kill you for killing Sailor.’ For reporters, she then painted a picture of her happy life with Saidler.

  He wasn't a gangster, she insisted, just a ‘wild boy’, a ‘daredevil’. He kept a house full of cats, and he pulled the noses of Chinese children in Surry Hills until they squealed with delight. He was kind and thoughtful and, why, he was so concerned for her welfare that he had even dissuaded her from smoking. ‘We were sitting at a table in a wine saloon,’ she fondly recalled, ‘and there were other girls there, all of them smoking. I picked up a cigarette that one of them had placed on the table, and put it in my mouth. Sailor said, ‘Do you want to be like these other girls?’ and I told him I wanted to learn to smoke. He plucked the cigarette from my mouth and thrust it back in again, only he put the lighted end in first. It burnt my tongue and blistered my mouth inside, and I had to cry out. He asked me if I would ever smoke again. I was wild with him and I said I would if I liked. He stood up and hit me in the eye. You see, he always tried to look after me and keep me from being like the other girls. He was wonderful.’