Mr Big: Lennie McPherson and his life of crime

TONY REEVES is an investigative journalist of many years standing. He first became interested in Lennie McPherson more than thirty years ago and has been following the miasma of corruption that has hung above Sydney ever since. Tony has worked as a journalist with the ABC, Nation Review, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Australian, all the time peeling away deep layers of truth to expose the real workings of Australia’s underworld. His reporting helped bring about the Moffitt Royal Commission into organised crime. He now enjoys a quieter life in Brisbane.

Also by Tony Reeves

Tony Reeves began gathering information on Abe Saffron over forty years ago, an activity that did not go unnoticed by Saffron—on a number of occasions Saffron tried to entrap Reeves in a bribery/blackmail sting. With Saffron’s death in September 2006, Reeves can finally, and safely, reveal all. And what a story it is—far from being the innocent businessman he claimed to be, Abe Saffron led a life that reads like that of a real-life Godfather.

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Copyright © Tony Reeves 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Reeves, Tony, 1940– . Mr. Big: Lennie McPherson and his life of crime. Includes index. ISBN 978 1 74175 290 8 (pbk.). 1. McPherson, Leonard Arthur, 1921–1996. 2. Criminals – New South Wales – Sydney – Biography. 3. Organised crime – New South Wales – Sydney. 4. Sydney (N.S.W.) – Biography. I. Title. 364.1092 Typeset in 11/14 pt Baskerville by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Vic. Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Prologue 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 10 11 12

1

The early years: fines and iron bars The fix of the fifties Staying on top: it’s murder out there! Friends in the right places The murders go on: death in the Latin Quarter Funniest standover man in the business Sex, drugs, the CIA and a US free trade agreement The Moffitt Royal Commission The good judge reports Life after Moffitt Never-ending chores Changing the guard

Epilogue: the morning after Notes Index [v]

10 33 67 83 103 120 148 177 209 221 241 256 268 272 276

To Kamala, for her untiring support, encouragement and much-needed patience; to Ian for decades of support and help; and to Richard for making it all happen.

PROLOGUE

WHEN NELL MCPHERSON reached her three-score years and ten her clan got together to give the sprightly old dame of Balmain a great birthday bash. And what a clan: she’d brought ten children into the world, most of them now married, and with their numerous offspring they came in droves to give ‘old Nellie’ a good old knees-up. A grandson—a stockily built, quietly spoken union organiser—came to her flat, gave her a hug and a kiss, pinned a corsage on her collar, handed her the crutches she’d been using since she lost a leg two years earlier in an operation, and drove her off to a local sports club for luncheon, a few drinks and a few yarns. At around four in the afternoon, Nell was feeling a little weary (some thought she might even be a tad woozy), so she said her thanks and farewells and the grandson drove her back to her little pensioner’s flat nearby, and saw her and a pile of presents and gift-wrapping safely indoors. Moments later there was a rapping at the door. Nell was surprised to see her youngest son standing there— [1]

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and even more surprised to see him holding what looked, to her, like a small white rabbit. She hoped he wasn’t going to offer it to her as a present—how could she look after a rabbit? ‘I came around to wish you a happy birthday, Mum. Did you have a nice party?’ asked the man, now in his late thirties. ‘Yes, it was very nice, what with all the family getting together . . .’ ‘Not quite all the family, Mum,’ he interrupted. ‘I wasn’t invited!’ ‘Well, you know how it is, son, what with the criminal stuff and all . . .’ At that he put one large hand around the neck of the rabbit, grasped its head with the other hand, twisted and pulled and, in a splash of blood, ripped off the poor animal’s head. He then threw the twitching remains on his horrified mother’s front doormat, shot an angry glare at her, turned on his heel and stormed off. Before this he hadn’t seen his mother since she was in hospital having the leg amputation, a circumstance he tried to use as an alibi for a murder. After this, he never saw her alive again. Meet Leonard Arthur McPherson. That story says more to me about the man who became known as the Mr Big of Sydney crime than all the remaining words in this book on his life and times. It conveys the sense of brutality that punctuates almost every anecdote I’ve been able to gather about Lennie McPherson. When he died in 1996, the Australian newspaper asked me to write an obituary. I accepted the commission on condition I was not required to say anything nice

PROLOGUE

[3

about him, the generally accepted function of obituaries. They agreed. The obituary began with these words: Leonard Arthur McPherson, who died in prison yesterday (August 29), will be glorified by some over the coming months. But for this unofficial biographer, his passing has made it a better world. McPherson was a thug. He was described in an official NSW Police document in 1974 as a murderer, rapist, thief and standover man.

As I write this it’s about 30 years since I first took an interest in this man. I had been working as a journalist for the ABC in the mid-1960s and later News Limited, and I’d long been trying to understand what really made Sydney tick. I had begun peeling away layers of concealment as one might take an onion apart. As a youngster I was advised by friends to fold a banknote into my driver’s licence. If I were pulled over the cop would probably take it and let me off with a warning. It really worked, they assured me. I found it offensive in the extreme that corruption could be tolerated and encouraged at such lowly levels. If this ‘tip of the iceberg’ example was commonplace around our suburbs, what on earth, I thought, could be happening higher up the food chain? Good stories often cause embarrassment to governments. I was told at the ABC (by a man who bore the censoriously lofty title of Controller of News) that a series of stories I was writing on foreign students overstaying their visas was ‘upsetting the [Immigration] Department and embarrassing to the [Gorton] Federal Government’. This was not to compliment me on my good journalism:

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I was ordered to desist. (So much for left-wing bias at the ABC!) In the late 1960s, like so many of my colleagues who could not get their mainstream media employers to publish their ‘good’ reports—stories that could rattle the foundations (or at least ‘tremble the partitions’ as reporters used to quip) of our social and political structures—I regularly contributed articles to the somewhat rebellious Melbourne-based weekly Nation Review. It was that paper which published a series (not mine) on the arrival of the Bally poker machine company into Australia, a company, the paper reported, that had clear links to the US Mafia. The stories whetted my appetite. I talked with people I knew in the clubs and entertainment industry—managers, union officials and workers. Many were very scared by what they were seeing, scared that a young entertainment agent had been savagely beaten, scared that club secretaries were being corrupted by huge secret commissions to install Bally machines. Frightened people would meet me secretly, on park benches or in little out-of-town cafes. I spent three months putting together a report that I took to Sunday Telegraph news editor Chris Forsyth. It detailed the arrival of US Mafia-linked people in Australia, and meetings they held with local criminals. I had drawn a managerial flow chart, showing the linkages between the US mobsters and prominent members of our own underworld milieu. At no stage in my investigation did I talk to any police, although I became aware that both the federal and NSW state police were making inquiries similar to mine.

PROLOGUE

[5

Forsyth put a team of top crime reporters on the job: himself, Bob Bottom and Phil Cornford, to work with me, and as you’ll see later, we came up with a story titled ‘The night the Mafia came to Sydney’ which went into print in July 1972, later described by noted crime journalist Evan Whitton as ‘another seminal piece’. For journalists who’d been trying for years to expose corruption and criminal activity at high levels among police and politicians, this was an exciting time. Stories were popping up all over the place. Politicians who’d been shouting across the State Legislature for years, threatening to expose each other’s closeted skeletons, were pushed into action by a rare outbreak of media revelations of serious allegations of high-level crime and corruption. In 1973 the Askin government, under pressure from the flurry of media stories, finally announced a royal commission into allegations of crime in clubs, to be headed by Supreme Court Judge Athol Moffitt. Bottom, Cornford and myself were among the few journalists to volunteer statements and evidence to the inquiry. Others were compelled to appear on subpoena and were somewhat less helpful. A number of the journalist witnesses (including me) ran into problems with the inquiry over the industry-standard refusal to identify sources of material. The experience enhanced my own reputation as an investigative journalist and soon people who had knowledge about criminal activities but who had virtually given up trying to get exposure started making contact with me. Plain brown paper envelopes (literally!) began to appear under my front door, containing interesting

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documents. A state ministerial press secretary passed on valuable (and to his minister, damaging) information. A newspaper executive, displeased at his own publication’s lack of action on this front, produced a bundle of highly incriminating documents about Lennie McPherson and his associations with allegedly corrupt police. Working for a while at the Sunday Telegraph, I became something of a magnet for stories about crime and corruption. And information came to me from diverse sources. Well-known private eye Tim Bristow, for example, regularly contacted me to tell me stories about crooked goings-on, and even discussed with me a number of boat excursions he’d made at McPherson’s behest to get rid of troublesome characters. He explained that a person thrown overboard about 60 miles out to sea doesn’t have to be injured in any way: they’ll never make it back to shore. This all helped shape my view that a great miasma of corruption hung over much of the public and private sector in Sydney, and that a book (or two) should be written to tell some of the real—and terrifying—stories of crime and corruption in a city that created its first police force from a band of criminals. Having started with the transcript and final report of the Moffitt inquiry, my area of interest was expanded and then refocused onto Lennie McPherson. Through his remarkable story, I believe, can be shown a depth of corruption that plagued a series of NSW governments of all persuasions and their police administrations and, to some extent, allowed the public to be inured against caring about the social and moral cost this was having.

PROLOGUE

[7

By 1975 another story distracted me: the murder of Kings Cross heiress Juanita Nielsen was to occupy much of my time (and that of another dedicated journalist, Barry Ward) for more than three years. Even in that incredible story of police and political duplicity, McPherson’s name kept popping up. But that’s another story. Being aware of high levels of corruption and feeling powerless to do anything about it can be frustrating and tiring. When I quit Sydney in the early 1980s to live in the tranquillity of the NSW Central Coast, I was quoted in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying I had to leave the city to get rid of the stench out of my nostrils ‘ . . . and I’m not talking about air pollution’. My first draft of the story in this book started gathering dust through the 1980s and ’90s. Meantime I had to earn a living. While I maintained my interest and collected every scrap of information I could lay my hands on, it took an event like the beginning of a new century to start the long process of getting it into print. That first resulted in a flurry of rejection slips, so it was back to the drawing board. That it is now in your hands is a direct result of the energy that publishing consultant Richard Walsh has generated in me to get it reshaped and finished. For me it was never acceptable to try to foist a book onto the market that was simply a rehash of old press clippings. I have tried in this enterprise to bring to the reader a great deal of original information, as thoroughly fact-checked as is possible as to its veracity, to provide the most detailed portrait I could of the man who was a major force in Australian criminal activity for more than 50 years.

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As my interest in this project became reactivated, considerable new information has been uncovered. Some people who might have been reluctant to talk earlier have now come forward with their stories, adding significant detail to our knowledge of a man and his times which rightfully commands a place in the dark side of our history. Finally I would like to make it plain that this book is not intended as a dissertation on police corruption: there are many erudite studies of this problem available. But for readers not familiar with the nature of police corruption, let me simply say this: when this author complained personally in 1976 to newly elected NSW Premier and Police Minister Neville Wran about the urgent need to deal with corruption in the state’s police force, he suggested the problem was one of a ‘few rotten apples’. Identifying and removing them would ensure the problem did not spread throughout the barrel of apples, he said. I am not the only person to reject this simplistic view. In April 1981 Mr Justice Edwin Lusher reported on his Royal Commission into NSW Police Administration. Pointing out that his terms had not required him to inquire into corruption, he nonetheless offered this generalised summation: In an organisation such as a police force, where signs of corruption are perceived, the ‘rotten apple’ theory as a control measure should be firmly rejected by management. While it is accepted as a control no real progress is likely to be made with the removal of corruption.

PROLOGUE

[9

Corruption . . . is not individual, not spasmodic, but a continuing organised process, functioning because the type of service being given has become an objective of a sufficiently significant power group able to impose and enforce such an objective on the organisation or the relevant part, to the extent that it becomes acceptable.

In the pages that follow we shall see how well Justice Lusher’s words describe the State of New South Wales when Lennie McPherson reigned supreme.

1 THE EARLY YEARS: FINES AND IRON BARS ON THE HOT, humid morning of Thursday 19 May 1921, a dozen or so young bruisers were nursing the bumps and cuts they had received the previous night at the opening of the big boxing tournament at the Sydney Hippodrome. Old age pensioner Walter Alexander Sparrow would be at the second night of the fights, enjoying the freedom which had so nearly been taken away from him when a magistrate found him guilty of stealing cattle at suburban Botany, sentenced him to nine months’ jail and then suspended the sentence in deference to ‘his considerable age’. Miss Maude Maddocks could do little for the battered boxers, but was making her contribution to the good looks and well-being of Australian women by offering cures for sunburn, freckles and the removal of 125 superfluous hairs for one guinea in her George Street salon, while the Chamber of Manufacturers was complaining that taxation in New South Wales had reached ‘oppressive levels’ (does nothing change?). Australia’s population [ 10 ]

THE EARLY YEARS

[ 11

had reached 5 435 734; Billy Hughes was in his fourth term as Australian prime minister and the newly formed Communist Party of Australia was celebrating its first six months of existence. Overseas, Sinn Fein members were exploding bombs in England and Northern Ireland and talks in London hoped to find a way to peace in the Shamrock Isle. The closest thing to a crime wave in Sydney on 19 May 1921 was a warning by police that men were jumping onto trams, snatching ladies’ handbags and jumping off while the tram was in motion. Tom Mix was fighting the good fight against evil, starring in The Texan at the Strand cinema in Pitt Street, and Sydneysiders were at peace with the world as they eased towards the end of an autumn that had been only marginally cooler than the preceding months of a long, hot summer. On that humid, thundery morning, with a hot breeze puffing in from the north-west, little Leonard Arthur McPherson came into the world as the tenth child of his metalworker father William and long-suffering mother Nellie. The event didn’t quite make headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald. In fact, Lennie’s arrival didn’t even rate a birth notice in that paper of record: the four lines for three shillings, extra lines a shilling each, would have been more than the hard-stretched budget of the McPherson household could run to. It would be some years before this Taurean baby of the family would get his name in printers’ ink. Life was tough indeed in those lean, between-thewars years in which were sowed the seeds of the so-called Great Depression. It wasn’t only the McPhersons in the

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harbourside suburb of Balmain, but families all over Australia, who were on bread and dripping and whatever they could beg, borrow or steal. Little wonder then that Leonard Arthur McPherson’s life of crime started just before the end of his brief schooling at the local Birchgrove State Primary School. On 7 December 1932, at the age of eleven and a half, he was put on probation— a good behaviour bond—in the Children’s Court on a charge of stealing. If he reoffended during that probationary period, he’d be in serious trouble. Nell McPherson would have taken her son to the court that warm, dry Wednesday morning. Located in a stern two-storey brick building with barred windows that contained two courtrooms, a boys’ shelter and cells below the street-level offices, its imposing sandstone entrance still bears the words ‘Children’s Court’ carved into the lintel. It was handy to police CIB headquarters, not in the centre of the city but in a sort of no-man’s-land at 66 Albion Street, Surry Hills, a few blocks away from Central railway station. Nell would have listened while the magistrate warned the lad that he would be ‘sent away to the boys’ home’ if he committed any wrong-doing during the probation period. The brief details were entered in the records by a policeman who would also have warned him of the perils of a life of crime. Later mother and son would have headed off towards George Street, to the Balmain tram stop. It should be mentioned here that there’s actually a paucity of detail available about Lennie’s brushes with the law, from these early encounters on. In the late 1950s

THE EARLY YEARS

[ 13

Lennie developed useful contacts in the police, prisons and justice records departments and ‘bought’ his files— the originals—thinking they could then not be used against him in later court appearances. An alert staffer in Justice made a photocopy of the main records held there and filed the bundle away obscurely under ‘Z’. Years later those records came into my hands by courtesy of a long-serving ministerial adviser who told me what he knew of the whole sorry saga. Six months later Lennie quit Birchgrove Primary, leaving behind him what one relative, a cousin called Vic, years later described as: ‘an undistinguished school career—it’s rather touchy to talk about it though, with Lennie being the way he is’. On 13 June 1934, 18 months after his first appearance, he was back in court on another apparently minor stealing charge. His probation was renewed for a year and then, on 18 July, he was convicted on two stealing charges. Again his mother Nell would have been his only supporter in the Children’s Court: lawyers did not trawl for business in this lowly end of the justice system, and would in any case have been beyond the McPherson household budget. This time—as my copies of the rather cryptic court records show—there was no clemency: he’d broken the terms of his earlier probation and was committed to an institution. No detail of his crime remains: what he stole and who he stole it from are not known. His mother Nell probably wept silently as the police took him away to the ‘naughty boys’ home’ at Mount Penang, overlooking Gosford on the NSW Central Coast, today an hour’s drive north of Sydney.

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Initially Lennie must have been pleasantly surprised by his first glimpse of his new home. He would have been expecting a prison, with high walls and sentry towers, but Mount Penang looked like a holiday resort. A row of timber cottages resembled the main street of a small country town. There was a central hall where films were shown once a week, and an administrative building. There were no high fences, just a few strands of wire to keep in the cattle that roamed across the gently undulating fields surrounding the ‘village’. But its rustic charm was misleading, for life here was tough, with some youngsters who were destined to spend most of their lives behind bars treating the young Lennie as they did all newcomers: despite his heavy build and strength, he was frequently bashed and sexually assaulted during the six months of his sentence, and found the warders didn’t want to hear his complaints. In the mid-1980s, by sheer coincidence, I met an exwarder from Mount Penang at a social gathering. We got talking and, when I found out his background, I quizzed him about Lennie’s stay at the infamous boys’ home. This gentle old retiree told me: ‘They didn’t single out McPherson: he was an unknown at the time. Every newcomer went through a brutalising bastardisation initiation ceremony. A number of the staff looked on and a few even participated. It’s the way things were there, in those days.’ Lennie returned home tougher and smarter from the Mount Penang experience. He’d established himself as a thief: now he would need to develop skills that would enable him to avoid capture—the dream of all law-breakers.

THE EARLY YEARS

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It was nearly four years before he again stood, cloth cap in hand, before a magistrate of the Children’s Court. On 3 March 1938, Lennie was arraigned on the trifling charge of having evaded a one penny tram fare. In a humiliating experience for a ‘gang leader’ (as he probably would have seen himself by then) he was fined one shilling and ordered to pay five shillings and sixpence in court costs. If he was to be a regular at the courts, he wanted it to be for something better than this. His debut into the world of crime had hardly been an impressive one. Petty theft at this time earned him enough money to be able to buy a motorbike as soon as he was old enough to get his rider’s licence. After the bike came a series of cars that, in their day, would have been considered ‘fast’. He liked to impress mates in the gang he knocked around with in Balmain and the inner suburbs with his driving skills, and his name littered the records of the traffic police for years to come. In September and October of 1939, for example, at the age of eighteen, he paid out a total of fifty shillings in fines in lieu of six days’ hard labour for exceeding the speed limit and driving without headlights. His cousin later told me that a magistrate during that period appropriately described him as a ‘mug lair’. He frequently got drunk, gambled on horses, and followed the fate of Balmain rugby league club, which that year won the first grade Sydney premiership for the first time in 15 years. It was a lavish lifestyle for a lad who had no steady job and few visible means of support. Lennie, at a time when the minimum weekly wage was set at £4/15/- ($9.50) was often paying out more in traffic fines alone than most men were earning.

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THE END OF HANGING IN NSW: JOHN KELLY SWINGS An event of historic significance at Sydney’s main prison in August 1939 did not appear on Lennie’s radar. But in later years this occurrence was to entangle McPherson in a web of intrigue. On 24 August 1939, John Trevor Kelly was hanged at Long Bay jail for the murder of Marjorie Constance Sommerlad of Tenterfield. This turned out to be the last judicial hanging by the State of New South Wales. While capital punishment remained on the state’s books until 1955, after 1939 successive governments simply stopped hanging people. The Australian Labor Party in New South Wales had resolved at its policy conference back in 1911 that capital punishment should be abolished and that life imprisonment should be the longest sentence to be imposed on miscreants, but it took more than 40 years for the state parliament to support that view. When Kelly was certified dead that morning, a prison officer handed the official form containing the dead man’s details to his senior clerk, who had watched the whole event and who then registered the facts in his distinctive cursive script in a book on a table near the gallows: the grimly titled ‘Capital Convictions Book’. The officer was known for decades in the prison system as the Major, and years later his clerk’s handwriting sample would provide devastating proof of a murder McPherson had committed.

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Australia followed England into war with Germany on 3 September 1939 and the following month the federal government introduced military conscription. While other 19-year-olds were going off to war, Lennie McPherson found a way to stay at home. His father helped him get a job as a driller at Morts Dock, near his Balmain home. As a repair yard for Australian naval sloops, the dock’s employees were exempt from military call-up. Lennie stayed there just long enough to avoid going to fight for his country, then left. He liked the idea of going to war only slightly less than a 44-hour-a-week job. His preferred lifestyle involved running around in fast cars, from which he amassed seven traffic fines in the first four months of 1940 to the value of £19.1.6d or 17 days in lieu. It was all petty stuff and this pattern persisted through to 1945, when he registered eight offences in the year. He had, it seems, a penchant for driving unregistered vehicles, parking too close to corners, driving in a manner police describe as ‘negligently’ and a host of other bad road manners. The end of World War II had little impact on Lennie: he had managed to stay away from the fighting, and unlike some older men he was getting to know, he hadn’t found a way to make any fast cash on the black market out of the event. He got busy honing his skills as a thief, as well as exercising his libido. He dated a young schoolgirl a couple of times, and she became pregnant and bore his child. (That daughter, now living in northern Victoria, still refers to Lennie reverentially as ‘Dad’). In 1940 he had also met, courted and married at Rozelle an attractive girl three years his junior, 16-year-old Dawn Joy

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Allan, signing Marriage Certificate 26250/1940 to make it official. His debut into serious crime came in 1946 and was to earn him his first adult jail sentence. On 22 January, with the city sweltering under a fortnight of near-century temperatures, Lennie started the year in court, copping a fine of £7 or 14 days for having stolen goods in his custody. He’d been arrested and held in a police lock-up pending the Magistrates Court hearing, but was released on bail. A new defiance entered Lennie’s relationship with the legal system: he appealed against the stolen goods sentence. The appeal was dismissed and he was ordered to pay a further three guineas in costs. He appealed again (perhaps he really was innocent?) but the conviction, and the fine, were affirmed. Then, on Friday, 15 February 1946, he was again found guilty of receiving stolen goods, having been arrested at Circular Quay. Nearly 25, Leonard Arthur McPherson was sentenced to his first stint in jail as a grown man: 12 months’ hard labour at Long Bay. He was photographed and fingerprinted and had his details entered on a prison description card. The photograph showed a double-chinned young man with a high forehead. He weighed in at 15 stone (95 kilograms) and was measured as five feet 11 inches (180 centimetres), with black hair, brown eyes and a dark complexion. His religion was listed as ‘CE’ and education as ‘R&W’, probably meaning ‘can read and write’. His occupation was listed as ‘ironworker’ but the space for ‘particulars of last employment’ remained tantalisingly blank.

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The prison authorities—among whom he would make lasting and trusted friendships over the years, particularly with the officer nicknamed ‘the Major’—were, at this early stage in his prison career, impressed with him. They began the routine assessment of whether he was an appropriate candidate for transfer to a prison farm or camp. The supervisor of the motor shop reported that he was quiet, a good worker and that his conduct was ‘satisfactory’. The prison doctor described him as ‘sensible’. But there was a hitch in proceedings. HR Vagg, State Superintendent at Long Bay jail, signed a form on 21 February 1946, the ‘Report on Transfer of a Prisoner to a Camp or Farm’, pointing out that Lennie faced further charges and arguing that a decision on his transfer should be deferred pending the outcome. This and other forms and memos are among the swag of papers that subsequently came to me from the justice department source. A week later they bundled him—Prisoner Number 98—into the Black Maria and back to the sitting of the Sydney Quarter Sessions Court to face a similar charge, on which he was found guilty and sentenced to another 18 months, to be served concurrently with the first sentence. Again, the available records don’t give details of the crime. The case was not deemed important enough to report in the daily press, and outside his gang of mates in the inner western suburbs, Lennie remained unknown. The records show that during his first week in jail he wrote to his wife, Dawn Joy, no doubt telling her of his labours on behalf of King George VI. He quickly ran into trouble when his fellow inmate, the notorious standover man and murderer John Frederick

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‘Chow’ Hayes, started stirring things up. They didn’t have a physical fight but Lennie later admitted that he’d been a ‘cheeky bloke’. He told a friend: ‘They couldn’t stand over me, so he wanted to get me fucking belted.’ Lennie threatened that if anyone hurt him he’d ‘split their fucking heads open when they’ve got their back to me’. Later on, Lennie said, he ended up good friends with Hayes. From March to May 1946 there was a flurry of departmental memos about the possibility of transferring him to a prison farm. Superintendent Vagg noted on 12 March that the attorney-general had decided ‘not to proceed with the outstanding charges against this prisoner’ (although gave no hint as to why that was so). ‘However he [Lennie] signed a notice of appeal on 11th instant against a conviction and sentence of 20 days h.l. so perhaps consideration of his transfer to a Prison Camp could be deferred until this appeal is disposed of ’, wrote Vagg. Within a month, with the appeal dismissed, Vagg wrote that: ‘McPherson appears to be suitable for transfer to a prison camp’. At the end of May Lennie was moved to a much lower security prison farm at Glen Innes, an afforestation camp in north-western New South Wales, 624 kilometres from Sydney. He was not to stay long at Glen Innes. On 10 July, about six weeks after he arrived there, he was transferred again, this time to the tough security of Grafton jail, as a result of what the prison authorities ambiguously and enigmatically described as ‘an outbreak of poor behaviour’. When news of Lennie’s transfer to Grafton reached his wife, Dawn Joy penned a letter to the officer in charge of the Glen Innes camp seeking information. She wrote:

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Could you give me any information concerning my husband’s (L. A. McPherson) removal to Grafton Jail. I would be very grateful if you could. I don’t suppose it would be much good me asking you if it would be possible to have Len sent to Long Bay. He is only 25 years and sometimes doesn’t act his age, he isn’t really bad, it’s only he’s hot-headed sometimes and is always sorry when it is too late. Len is the youngest of ten children and has never been given the opportunities other children have. If he had have had I’m sure he’d be a very different man. Please sir, give him another chance, I don’t want him made a criminal. Yours sincerely, Dawn McPherson.

Please sir, give him another chance. I don’t want him made a criminal. How this young mother of a pretty little girl laid her heart out before the harsh prison authorities. Her letter arrived at Glen Innes on 18 July and was sent to Sydney. Within a few days the Deputy Comptroller of Prisons responded: ‘In reply to your letter to the officer in charge, Glen Innes Afforestation Camp, I have to inform you that your husband was removed from the camp because his conduct was unsatisfactory. It is not proposed to transfer him from Grafton Gaol at present.’ Within a couple of weeks of that rejection, an extraordinary submission was made on Lennie’s behalf: a member of federal parliament wrote to the state minister of justice urging Lennie’s release from custody. Tom Sheehan was the Labor member for the federal electorate of Cook, which was then centred on Redfern, an inner working class suburb, and spread out to West Sydney and Lennie’s birthplace suburb of Balmain; but it did not cover Gladesville, where Lennie now lived.

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First elected in October 1937, at the age of 46, Sheehan held the seat until his death in March 1955. Who persuaded the federal MP to act on behalf of a jailed man who was not even a constituent is not known. In his appeal for Lennie’s freedom Sheehan wrote (totally erroneously): ‘it is his first offence and his record is excellent. The prisoner’s wife and child are in destitute circumstances . . .’ It was the first but not the last time that prominent members of the right-wing faction of the New South Wales branch of the Australian Labor Party would show such supportive friendship to Leonard Arthur McPherson. This letter hit the desk of the justice minister in the NSW McKell Labor government among a pile of waiting paperwork on 13 August 1946. It clearly failed to impress him. Even the most cursory scan of Lennie’s record would have convinced him that he knew more about this man’s history than the Hon. Tom Sheehan, MHR. He passed the federal MP’s submission on to the secretary of the prisons department, Mr CR Hughes, marked ‘No Recommendation’. Three days later Hughes sent a memo to the officer in charge at Grafton jail with the minister’s decision. On the form memo under ‘Special Remarks’ appeared ‘Please note, and place with papers’ but the words ‘and inform prisoner’ had been crossed out. Lennie was not to learn through official channels that an application for his release had been made and rejected. It is paradoxical that the minister of justice, who on this occasion was so unyielding towards the 25-year-old thug, was one Mr RR (Reg) Downing, a man who in later years, as we shall see, was persuaded—allegedly with the help

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of a bulky brown paper bag—to take a much more lenient attitude towards LA McPherson. Within a couple of months the prison authorities had a change of heart and transferred him to Long Bay for the rest of his sentence. The officer in charge at Grafton wrote to Sydney head office in November 1946 in response to a request for information on Lennie’s ‘conduct and industry’ while at Grafton. The memo said: During the period that McPherson was at Grafton Gaol his conduct and industry were very good. He was employed at boot repairing and although [he had] no previous experience at the trade, he carried out the work in a very creditable manner. He was transferred to the State Penitentiary on 3rd October 1946 on his own application. Although I would have liked to have retained his services as a boot-repairer at Grafton I formed the opinion that his future interests would be better served by removal to a principal gaol.

Lennie was paroled on 24 December 1946, home with Dawn and baby Janelle for Sydney’s hottest Christmas for a decade. He’d served ten months of his sentence. He found it difficult to settle down, and took to bouts of heavy drinking, after which he would shout and swear at Dawn Joy and, at times, beat her up. The marriage would last for many years yet, but the love seems to have vanished from the relationship around this time. As often occurs when marriages start to crumble, Lennie sought liaisons elsewhere. Sadly for the women involved, the associations were marred by the violence that characterised most of his human relationships. One

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woman, heavily pregnant to Lennie, was viciously assaulted by a group of criminals with whom he’d got off-side. Lennie and John Henry Hutchinson had been ganging around through the 1940s with Redfern-based SP bookie Joey Hollibone and one Martin Goode. Then came a falling out. Hutchinson had become pally with some of Lennie’s sworn enemies, and although they hadn’t fought over the issue, Lennie had put his former mate in the category of ‘not to be trusted’. Then, in 1947, Hutchinson had ‘gone into smoke’ because of a robbery he’d done. When police caught up with him, Hutchinson, Goode and Hollibone not unfairly accused McPherson of having tipped off police with details of Hutchinson’s whereabouts. In a monstrous attempt to ‘get back at’ McPherson for fizzing to the cops, they packraped the pregnant woman. Nothing is known of her subsequent life. After the rape Martin Goode began to knock around with Chicka Reeves and his dad, Ted Reeves [not relatives of mine!], and a group that Lennie was ‘crooked’ on. Chicka Reeves frequently threatened to ‘knock’ McPherson. The threats between Chicka and Lennie got so bad that the old man (Ted) once got the police to pull them both in to warn them to cool things off. Lennie and Chicka acted like long-lost buddies in front of the cops, but the enmity remained. In the early 1970s Chicka Reeves would occasionally call in to pubs that journalists were known to frequent. I chatted with him a few times at one such hostelry. Most of his yarns were barely credible, but through them all ran a deep hatred and contempt for Lennie McPherson.

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Lennie had learned much from his association with the hardened criminals he met behind bars at Grafton and Long Bay. One skill in which he graduated with honours was the fine art of snitching. In jail he formed special relationships with the prison ‘screws’ by ratting on what other inmates were up to. This didn’t earn him any brownie points among his fellow inmates, but it did earn him a few favours and creature comforts granted by the prison staff. Back in civilian life, Lennie used his developing association with a few of the police to become a fully-fledged stool pigeon. He would fizz on anyone— even people who thought Lennie was a close friend—to ingratiate himself with a growing circle of copper mates. One older, retired criminal recalled in a chat with the author that the young McPherson was known for some years as ‘Lennie the Pig’ and ‘Lennie the Squealer’, so loudly did he fizz to the cops. The name didn’t stick, somehow, despite Lennie’s lifelong history of informing. In the earlier years the people he betrayed were mostly petty criminals who annoyed him. Many were sent to jail on information Lennie provided to police. It worried Lennie not a shred that his fizzing was the cause of mounting anger among Sydney’s low-life milieu. Those who raised any concern about his treachery would be haughtily threatened with the same treatment. When he put his competitors behind bars, new opportunities opened up for Lennie and he was never slow to move in on them. His growing success at this time relied heavily on the fact that no irate opponent managed to kill him during these years. Later the likelihood of this happening became increasingly remote

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as he sucked up to a growing number of corrupt policemen and surrounded himself with a considerable number of protective and loyal muscle men. He found he was in a position to grant favours to petty crims for their loyalty: a word in the ear of a friendly cop would ensure the law turned a blind eye to the activities of those Lennie promised to ‘look after’. He would also ‘go bail’ for miscreants if they committed themselves to be on his team. Lennie was out of jail for six months before he was brought before a magistrate again—this time in Balmain Court on 24 June 1947 on the trivial charge of using indecent language, for which he was fined £2 or four days in the slammer. On that chilly winter Tuesday— Sydney’s driest stretch since 1883: 19 days without rain—Lennie paid the fine and repaired to his favourite pub. That night he and some mates were at the Sydney Stadium to watch the popular Aussie lightweight boxer Vic Patrick outpoint American Eddie Hudson. Patrick never looked like losing, and even at short odds, Lennie picked up a bundle from his wagers. Lennie’s thirtieth birthday marked a turning point in his career: he was becoming bored with his life of petty crime, and even though he’d made some powerful contacts among police, politicians and prison authorities, he was still a relative unknown to the general public in Sydney and was considered a bit of a nuisance by some of the better-established criminals around town who had Charles ‘Paddles’ Anderson as their champion and leader. Despite his brusque, self-indulgent manner, Lennie was a man with a dream: he read every word he could

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about the American gangster Al Capone. He idolised the Chicago-based thug, and tried to emulate him in every possible way. (This was a dream destined to remain unfulfilled; among the significant differences in the way the two men operated was Lennie’s personal rejection of the ‘code of silence’, any breach of which would have meant certain death among the American Mafiosi.) On turning 30, then, and seeing little real progress in his chosen career, Lennie set out on a study tour of the United States—the fatherland of what he saw as great criminal triumphs. On this trip he made initial contact with US Mafia-involved people—but not Capone—in Chicago. They were down-the-scale thugs rather than the Mafia dons Lennie idolised, but first contact is rarely made at the top. To get out of Australia he used a forged passport for this visit. As he later patiently explained to the Moffitt Royal Commission, he used his surname but another given name ‘because with convictions you can’t get a visa so I used my brother’s name . . .’ But he got caught and in Sydney Quarter Sessions on 22 December 1952 Lennie protested his innocence of charges of ‘forging and uttering a document, to wit a passport application’. Senior Crown Prosecutor Charles Rooney told Judge Adrian Curlewis that McPherson and Gilbert Brice Griffiths, 34, an engineer, of Evans Street, Rozelle, had left Sydney in August 1951 with two others, using the false passports. Another accomplice, Martin Goode, was also charged. They had returned home before Christmas through America, Rooney said. He conceded that nobody had been defrauded and that, other than obtaining the false

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passports, the men had gained nothing. He failed to mention that one of the purposes of the trip was for Lennie to try to make links with criminals in the US. Barrister Alf Goran (later to become a long-serving District Court judge), appearing for the pair, argued that their primary reason for getting the passports was that they had been offered a trip on a week’s notice by a man ‘who offered to help them if they ran out of money . . .’ and they could not obtain the necessary tax clearance from the Australian tax office in that time. Nobody talked about the real reason for the trip, which Lennie was later to admit to Moffitt. ‘The maximum penalty for this offence is ten years’ imprisonment,’ said Goran, ‘but it is within the province of the court to impose a fine.’ And this he recommended the good judge do to his clients. Judge Curlewis retired to think about it overnight, and delivered his verdict on the drizzling morning of 23 December: a fine of £100 and a bond of £20 to be of good behaviour for three years for each of them. The judge expressed concern about the extremes of penalties that were available to him on the statute books: it was either a ten-year prison term or a fine of £100, with no options in between. He obviously felt the crime deserved more than the fine, but told the pair that he was not satisfied that the facts of the case warranted a term of imprisonment. Both men, Curlewis pointed out, had police records, but one had not been in trouble for seven years, the other for four. Nobody was taking bets that Lennie would be of ‘good behaviour’ for the required three years and,

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indeed, in less than five months—within ten days of his thirty-second birthday—he was up before a magistrate in Sydney’s Central Court of Petty Sessions on his first charge of having knowingly consorted with known criminals. The local consorting laws were part of the Police Offences Act and were first introduced in the 1920s in an attempt to break up the vicious ‘Razor Gangs’ which were then terrorising parts of Sydney. The provisions of the laws required police to produce evidence of at least eight meetings between the person charged and ‘known’ criminals over a six-month period. A conviction under the consorting laws invariably resulted in a jail sentence. In Lennie’s first brush with the consorting laws he escaped a sentence when the magistrate invoked the first offender’s provisions, recording a conviction but imposing no penalty. With a list of prior criminal convictions running to several pages, this would have seemed to some to be an unusual decision. The ‘556A’ provisions were used solely at the discretion of the magistrates and they rarely gave reasons for their decisions. But Lennie was now marked down clearly as a person who is ‘known to police’. He didn’t go back behind the bluestone walls again until later that year. At the Sydney Quarter Sessions on Remembrance Day morning, 11 November 1953, he was sentenced to three and a half years for breaking and entering with intent to steal and being ‘found at night with housebreaking implements in possession’. He’d been caught red-handed with—amazingly—partner-incrime John Henry Hutchinson (one of the men who some years earlier had pack-raped the pregnant female

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acquaintance of McPherson). One night the previous March, as the pair had been forcing their entry into an office in a laneway behind Wynyard railway station on the edge of Sydney’s central business district, two members of the CIB safe-breaking squad just happened to drive past. They nabbed the men, plus their bag of tools and some explosives. ‘It was purely bad luck for them and good luck for us,’ one of the arresting detectives later told my journalist colleague David Halpin. ‘We were not acting on any radio call or information. We were just making a routine patrol in the back lanes when we caught McPherson in the act. We took him to Phillip Street police station and charged him, and later he was released on substantial bail. McPherson, of course, never had trouble arranging bail,’ he added. Lennie still hadn’t graduated to the status of Al Capone. Even the friends he was developing in high places were not powerful enough—or willing enough at that stage—to ‘spring’ him. This time he had to face the prison rap. So Lennie was back inside Long Bay jail. In March 1954 he lodged an appeal against the balance of his sentence to the Court of Criminal Appeal. In the hearing on 7 May the court dismissed the appeal and affirmed the original sentence. He ran into some bother with prison authorities, too. Within a month of the start of this stretch he was hauled over the coals for having ‘written a clandestine letter and attempted to pass it out of jail’. Then came a series of charges early in 1954 of ‘having contraband in possession’. A total of nine days were added to his sentence for his poor behaviour inside.

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His case barely rated a mention in the Sydney press. In mid-1955, while still serving his sentence, he appeared before Balmain Court on three charges of possession of an unlicensed pistol. He was found guilty and sentenced to 12 months on each charge, to be served concurrently. On 19 October 1956, a mild spring day with winds gusting in from the south-west, he was paroled after serving nearly three years. He came home to a now embittered Dawn and their growing young daughter Janelle. The terms of his parole required that he get a job and give up his life of crime. His first action the next day was to round up some old mates, go to his local and place a winning bet with the SP bookie on Redcraze in the Caulfield Cup. He also talked about his need for a job, to satisfy his parole condition, and after a few beers someone came up with the bright idea of him using the ‘motel’ as a front for a job. The so-called motel was a group of tiny rooms built on the flat concrete roof of a private lock-up car park in Balmain. Lennie, his nephew Norman Foster and some acquaintances had built the rooms on the roof and had developed it into a safe haven for selected crims who were ‘hot’. It was a relatively easy matter to start making book entries that showed Lennie was on the payroll for £20 a week. He never really did much work there, of course, even though he was still claiming twenty years later it was his only source of income. His control of the motel, however, enabled him to keep a finger on the pulse of the criminal milieu of Sydney without dirtying his hands a great deal. It was an extension of his earlier activities of offering to go bail for young blades that would play on his team:

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now he was hiding them away in the motel until the police heat died down a bit. And, on the books, he was fulfilling one of the basic requirements of his parole. There was also another little side benefit of this arrangement. The cops on his team came to an understanding with Lennie that he would sometimes tell them whether someone on their wanted list was available, which meant they were probably at the motel. Lennie used this period in his life to develop his somewhat amateur pastime of ‘motel-keeping’ into a malignant web of organised criminal activity. The action he’d seen on his American trip and the long sojourn in jail pondering his future had convinced Lennie that the writing was on the wall for the petty criminal. If crime was organised, all its practitioners would benefit. And if crime in Sydney was organised, Lennie was certain that it was going to be him who would do the organising. Some had different ideas about who, if anyone, should become the ‘Mr Big’ but Lennie was determined to win out. He knew there would be fights, and some people would have to be removed, but he was sure the way they organised things in the US was the way to go here.

2 THE FIX OF THE FIFTIES GEORGE JOSEPH HACKETT’S bullet-ridden blood-spattered body was found in the gutter at Elswick Street, in the inner Sydney suburb of Leichhardt, at about 11 o’clock at night on Monday, 27 July 1959. He was dressed in a blue suit, blue open-necked shirt and brown suede shoes; detectives deduced that he had been killed about an hour earlier. At this time Hackett was a wellknown criminal with at least 40 convictions to his name; he had twice been acquitted of murder, with more than a little assistance from Lennie behind the scenes on one occasion. In 1951 police in Brisbane had been unable to convince a Criminal Court jury to bring home a conviction against Hackett for the murder of Albert Flarrity, whose body had been found floating in the Brisbane River by a couple of schoolboys on 12 May that year. The body was in bad shape, having been in the river for five days. According to the evidence, a complex series of arguments had blown up involving Flarrity, Hackett (who had [ 33 ]

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travelled to Brisbane from Sydney a couple of weeks earlier) and other men who were, as the saying goes, ‘known to police’. Flarrity had married the woman Hackett had previously lived with, and that was the cause of some of the friction. And another man, Billy Burns, had collected £100 to be used to bail out one of Hackett’s mates from the police watchhouse, but had ‘shot through’ with the money. Hackett, then 31, and an associate, Leonard Vaughan Toms, 38, had allegedly held Flarrity captive while colleagues searched for the missing Burns. Evidence was given the group had been on a two-day booze binge. Police told the court that Hackett had confessed to the murder to detectives at the CIB. When confronted with a cab driver who identified Hackett and Toms as two of three people he’d dropped off on the banks of the river in Coronation Drive, Hackett allegedly said: ‘Yes, we dumped him in and he never came up. I knew it was coming. Both me and Toms were really stirred up but we shouldn’t have done it.’ He then agreed to show police the spot where the incident had occurred, allegedly saying: ‘Yes, you’ve got the rest. I’ll do that.’ When left in the CIB interview room with Constable ME Davies, Hackett allegedly said: ‘It looks like I’m gone on this. This is what the drink does to you!’ Toms allegedly told police he’d helped Hackett throw the very drunk and unconscious Flarrity into the muddy swirling waters opposite the famous Regatta Hotel. ‘But it wasn’t my blue, I shouldn’t have been in it. It was Hackett who wanted to get rid of Flarrity,’ police said Toms told them. But police never formalised the

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confession statements, leaving them in the realm of unreliable ‘verbals’. They were also criticised by the trial judge for botching an identification line-up, having shown the cab driver photographs of various felons (including Flarrity, Hackett and Toms) before the actual parade. On 14 August 1951, after eleven hearing days and 688 foolscap pages of evidence, the jury took just 62 minutes to return a ‘not guilty’ verdict for the two, after stern advice from Mr Justice Mansfield that police had not presented any signed, written statements, and had not shaken an alibi made for Toms. This had been George Joseph Hackett’s first acquittal for murder. Five years later, when sometime wharf labourer John William (Joey) Manners was shot dead at about 5.55 pm on Saturday 9 June 1956 outside the Australian Hotel at Millers Point in Sydney’s Rocks area, Hackett had again been charged with murder. Police gathered evidence that Manners, a standover man, thief and former professional boxer, had fought with three other criminals over the split-up of the proceeds of a robbery, knocking one out cold and leaving the other two the worse for wear. There was also a suggestion that, as in the Brisbane case, there may have been a love triangle involved, with Hackett having accused his then girlfriend, Sue Henry, of having designs on Joey Manners. Police had found an eyewitness to the shooting. A barman at the Australian Hotel, Keith Raymond Craig, initially told police he saw Hackett and Manners on the footpath when the shots were fired. But when he was called as a witness, the barman (who had immediately left his job) failed to appear. Mr Justice Richardson issued

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a bench warrant for his arrest, but he’d ‘gone into smoke’, as they say. Without the eyewitness the police case collapsed, and on 25 October 1956, the jury in the Central Criminal Court took just 10 minutes to declare Hackett’s innocence. Outside the court a cocky Hackett said: ‘I’ve never possessed a pistol in my life.’ A long-retired policeman who later discussed the case with me said police at the time were in no doubt that Hackett had used his then friendship with Lennie McPherson to ‘put the frighteners’ on the barman eyewitness. ‘Hackett had apparently done Lennie some small favour some time prior, and was now calling up the debt. Lennie was like that sometimes: very loyal to his mates until he chose not to be.’ Now, nearly three years on from the Manners murder, Lennie and George Hackett were no longer playing on the same team. Aged about 39 at the time of his brutal murder, Hackett, a dock worker who lived at Phillip Street, Petersham, had been involved in an underworld stabbing affray eleven days earlier, on 17 July, with a low-life crim called Ernie Best. Lennie was later to tell police that he’d had an argument with Hackett nearly a week after this stabbing event when they’d met at Balmain’s Commercial Hotel on Thursday evening, 23 July. He told Detective Sergeant Krahe that he recalled arguing with Hackett, who had been a ‘bit aggressive’ at first, when they’d met on the 23rd, but quietened down later in the evening. Ernie had come off second best and now Hackett was off-side with Lennie. One of Sydney’s sporadic gangland wars—it was really more a couple of skirmishes between

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a few rival egos—was on and Hackett had got himself involved. It’s not clear why exactly Hackett and Lennie had fallen out but Hackett’s current booze-fuelled rampage no doubt involved a claim that he was ‘the biggest, toughest crim’ in Sydney, or some such drunken boast, and that sort of language Lennie was never able to tolerate. As we will see, having a big mouth when you’re drunk is annoying to most people, but to Lennie it was a capital crime. From the story that unfolded later in court, it had been a classic set-up. Hackett had been drinking in a nearby hotel with his Judas, another criminal called Hilton Mervyn Clayton, aged 38. Just before the 10 o’clock closing time they left the pub together and, pulling their jackets around their chests against the chilly sou’westerly, walked into Elswick Street. Clayton asked Hackett to come with him to visit a friend a little way down the street. In the gloom Hackett and Clayton saw two shadows emerge from a dark laneway. ‘What’s this, George?’ Clayton asked (as if he didn’t know). ‘It’s McPherson and Rayner—run for it!’ yelled Hackett. Two pistols, a .32 and a .25 flashed and roared in the cold Monday night air. Clayton ran for it all right— and he got away. None of the bullets were intended for him. He ran to the home of a Mrs Sylvia Williams and stayed there for half an hour before leaving. He had played the part he was soon to admit, under duress, that McPherson had hired him for—setting up Hackett—and he would no doubt later collect his blood money. Seven

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pieces of lead ripped into Hackett’s body before the killers made good their own escape from the scene. An hour later, as was revealed in court, a local man, Horace Barber, 47, of nearby Day Street, was driving home when he saw a shape at the side of the road. ‘I pulled up and found a man laying in the gutter with his head covered in blood,’ he said later. ‘I drove to get a doctor and then went to Leichhardt police station.’ Another local who lived in a cottage nearby, Ken Buckle, was working in his garage at about 10 pm. His mother told him she thought she’d heard a noise like crackers going off. ‘I went to have a look, but the street was in semi-darkness and I didn’t see anything unusual,’ he said. Police never revealed why they immediately turned their attention to Clayton in their investigation into Hackett’s murder—who had tipped them off ?—but he became the first person arrested in the case, just after midnight. He later said police questioned him for 14 or more hours, during which time, police alleged, he said (and signed a statement to the effect) that the two men who had done the shooting were Lennie McPherson and William Louis ‘Snowy’ Rayner, then aged 39, who at that time lived under the guise of being a gardener at the Balmain ‘motel’ of which Lennie was supposed to be manager. Early on the morning of 28 July, Lennie was driving from Gladesville towards the city when Detective Sergeant Fred Krahe pulled him over. Krahe said later that McPherson’s first words were: ‘I suppose it’s over the Hackett shooting last night. It’s a funny thing, but whenever somebody

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SNOWY RAYNER: LENNIE’S CONSTANT MINDER Even though he was arrested under the name Rayner, this well-known criminal was actually born Lewis William Hunt on 29 August 1928 at Caulfield in suburban Melbourne. Within two months he was placed in the foster care of Mrs Lily M Rayner and stayed with her until he came to Sydney in 1946. Throughout that time and ever after he was known to his mates as Rayner. In Sydney he had a long and close association with Leonard Arthur McPherson. For example, in Snowy’s first passport application in April 1969 he gave his address as 23 Prince Edward Street, Gladesville— Lennie’s address. Passport number G 519331 was issued in the name of Louis Hunt. He renewed it in January 1974 and was issued with passport number H 479568 at his address at 3/3 Morrison Road, Gladesville—a few blocks from Lennie’s home. He frequently accompanied McPherson on trips to Manila and was last seen publicly at his boss’s funeral in 1998. Now, early in the morning after Hackett’s death, this five foot 11 inch (180 centimetre) snowy-haired, blueeyed, lantern-jawed man and his mate Leonard Arthur McPherson were arrested—both charged with murder. For ‘Mr Big’ McPherson and his protégé it looked like the beginning of the end. It would take powerful friends in high places indeed to spring them from this little pickle.

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gets shot in Sydney, they always come looking for me.’ Funny thing indeed, that. Krahe’s version of events, as revealed later in court, was that under questioning at CIB headquarters, Lennie allegedly told him that Snowy Rayner was a ‘pretty good friend’ of his and they’d been drinking the night before— the night of the murder—at the Commercial Hotel in Balmain. He’d left the pub at 6.30 pm and gone to visit his mother, who was having a leg amputation in Balmain hospital. He left the hospital around eight o’clock, picked up Rayner about an hour later and then, he claimed, ‘had a couple of bottles of beer and went to Kings Cross for a hamburger’. He dropped Rayner home around midnight. It was hardly the stuff of a watertight alibi for 9.55 pm—the time of Hackett’s murder—and, indeed, Lennie’s story was to change over time. While Krahe chatted with McPherson, Detective Les Chowne questioned Snowy Rayner in another room. Rayner allegedly first said he’d last seen Lennie at six o’clock the previous night, but finally admitted he’d been with him as late as midnight. Rayner was nowhere near as cocky and confident as Lennie, and when Chowne told him that he had been identified as one of the killers, he clammed up altogether. But Lennie remained talkative. Krahe later testified that he led the suspect through the crucial events of the previous night, telling him that two men had emerged from the laneway and approached Hackett in Elswick Street and had fired bullets into his body. ‘Is that so?’ said Lennie. ‘Yes,’ said a confident Krahe. ‘And we have been told that Hilton Mervyn Clayton was walking with Hackett

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when you and Rayner came out of the laneway and fired.’ ‘I’m not going to say anything else unless you tell me who told you I shot Hackett,’ challenged Lennie, retribution not the furthest thought from his mind. ‘All right,’ said Krahe. ‘Clayton has identified you as one of the two men who did the shooting last night.’ ‘He will never say that in court in a million years,’ said a cocky Lennie. Krahe said McPherson asked him: ‘Did Clayton tell you why I would want to shoot Hackett?’ to which Krahe replied: ‘Our information is that you had an argument with Hackett at the Commercial Hotel, Balmain, last Thursday.’ Lennie said: ‘I remember now. We did have a bit of a blue, but it was not enough to shoot him over. You know Hackett has been running around bluing with everyone. He has twice been charged with murder himself. He was in the fight at Ernie Best’s place last Friday night when old Best got stabbed.’ After questioning the two, police were confident they had enough to go ahead with the charges. Neither of the men had a plausible alibi for the time of the murder, and police had Clayton’s statement that morning that Rayner and Lennie had done the job. They were taken in the Black Maria to Long Bay jail while police prepared for the initial magistrate’s court hearing later that day. In the jail they were put into the OBS—an abbreviation for the Observation Section. This is an area used for criminals who are considered dangerous to other inmates or for those who might themselves be exposed to greater than average risk if placed among other prisoners in the cells. That Lennie and Rayner were placed

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in the OBS suggests that McPherson had enough influence to seek—and get—a bit of privacy and special treatment, despite the gravity of the charge against him. Even though he knew many people in the prison, both inmates and staff, this was not a time for socialising: he was in the most serious predicament of his life and he had some considerable thinking to do. A course of action was quickly determined: Clayton had already ‘been seen’ by persuasive associates of Lennie, who were certain he would remain silent. But there were a few details to attend to, the fine points of their story to resolve, before their lawyer visited them. Lennie decided to communicate with a trusted friend on the outside, to get him to speak to others, make arrangements. Not having the luxury of a telephone in their otherwise discreetly appointed cell, Lennie knew he would have to get a letter out to him. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Lennie could think of no other solution than writing to a trusted employee, Chris Campbell. It required for Lennie a leap of faith in a fellow human being that he had rarely displayed to date. The letter that Campbell received is reproduced here exactly as it was written, complete with punctuation and spelling errors: Chris The major will give you this and it’s worth £400 to you to do what I want because there is no time to waste. We had to knock Hackett because he had a big mouth when he was drunk. Snowy and me are in the O.B.S. and cant make contact you fix things up for me and get over here and see me.

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We surrendered to Verbal and there are no statements but two gigs saw everything as Clayton scarpered. Before Haligan comes out we’ve got to get thing straight for Phil. We have got to put ourselves at my place at Balmain putting out the rubbish bins for the tenants at the time. contact Dulcie to see Maxie Best and Harry Arden to give £1500 to the gigs and get them out of the way a trip overseas would do make sure they understand we’re gone dead set if this isn’t done. Clayton won’t talk hes been seen if there is any trouble get word to Maxie to see his sister at Brookvale Gloria is a dill with a big mouth but Bill and the Panther can fix that up so there’s no worry. This has got to be arranged and done before we see Halligan your £400 will go into Roach’s trust account at once. Unless this is done properly we are gone a million we can be dead set alibied but the gigs would bring us undone and we can’t take the risk. There’s no bail until after the coroners so Ive got to rely on you don’t let me down and Ill see you right again and will bail you. Burn this when you have made the arrangements and get over here as soon as you can. Len

Most of this document is obvious in its intention of setting up alibis and ‘seeing to’ witnesses, but a few words of explanation will help understand its importance. The ‘major’ referred to in the first paragraph was Lennie’s inside contact who was charged with the responsibility of getting the letter from Lennie to Chris Campbell. He was obviously both trusted by Lennie and known to Campbell. Lennie had first met him during his initial spell in prison in 1946. Investigation has shown the person was a long-serving prison superintendent, John Charles Cashman, at that time close to retirement.

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The second paragraph (‘we had to knock Hackett . . .’) is as clear-cut a confession to a murder as any Perry Mason could come up with. And this is obviously the main reason Chris Campbell did not burn the letter after he made the arrangements. Campbell would have seen the document as one of the best insurance policies any criminal could have. To have a written confession to a murder from one of Australia’s most powerful criminals is almost as good as having the criminal’s power. All that is needed, obviously, is the guts to cash in the policy and start using the power. Enough said. Campbell must have had a number of such opportunities but chose not to take them. The reference to surrendering to ‘Verbal’ and ‘there are no statements’ indicates they had made a deal (the fine print of which was never revealed) with the highprofile Detective Ray Kelly, who by this time had a close working relationship with Lennie. Ray Kelly was widely known by the nickname ‘Verbal’ among police, crims, lawyers and journalists for his propensity to ‘verbal’ crims by getting them to sign confessions which Kelly would later testify were willingly given. Kelly would have known there was fairly damning evidence against Lennie and Rayner, and they would fare a lot better before the court if none of what they had said at the time of their arrest was used as evidence against them. Such a deal would require the collusion of arresting officers Krahe and Chowne, and Kelly would have pulled many strings in the background to get them to go along with such an audacious scheme. If it could be pulled off—if Krahe and Chowne were prepared to go into court

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at the preliminary or remand hearing and lie for the two alleged murderers on Kelly’s request, or at least ‘overlook’ the statements the pair had made at the time of their arrest—they would be over the first hurdle. If Clayton’s statement was not revealed to the court, there would have been an outside chance the charges would be dropped for lack of direct evidence. But even if the charges remained intact after the remand hearing, they would then have had time before a trial began and they could start to exert whatever pressure was necessary to kill off the charges. And that would cost a considerable amount in bribes to officials. The letter had Clayton ‘scarpering’, as he did—to the friendly home of Mrs Williams—but two new witnesses have turned up: the two ‘gigs’ (minor criminals known to Lennie). Obviously they are the main source of Lennie’s worry. They know him, he knows who they are and yet he feels vulnerable. He fears they could—and would—identify him and Rayner as the murderers so he arranges to have them ‘bought off ’ with an overseas trip. Obviously they can’t be deadly enemies of Lennie’s, or they would either not be approachable at all or would have cost a lot more than £1500—or he’d have been arranging their elimination. Then there was the getting things straight for Phil— solicitor Phil Roach, the expensive lawyer of crims in trouble—before Haligan (later spelt as Halligan), a barrister Lennie thought had been briefed by Roach (although there was no subsequent evidence of such a barrister appearing in the case), interviewed them as part of preparing his case for the defence. Roach is mentioned

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again as the holder of the trust account into which Chris Campbell’s £400 would be paid.

PHIL ROACH: LAWYER AND GO-BETWEEN Solicitor Phil Roach built a large practice by being the linkman between crooked cops and the miscreants they booked to keep the arrest rates up. His main trade was defending the prostitutes, who were rostered by the cops who controlled their lives to do their share of court appearances. He would go through the charade every morning, looking at a copy of the brief the police had given him to discover the name of his latest client. ‘Er . . . Tiff . . . Tiffany? Yes, Tiffany, Your Worship, is a very decent girl, from a decent family out past Wagga Wagga. The family fell on hard times during the drought, Your Worship, and, er, Tiffany came to Sydney to try to find work so she could send some money back to her elderly parents, who are struggling . . .’ ‘Ten pounds or five days,’ the magistrate would say, banging his gavel. ‘Next!’ And so it would continue, all orchestrated by the crooked cops, with a compliant solicitor going through the motions of a defence for each of the rostered group of prostitutes who understood they had to pay Roach once a week for his legal representation, as well as the police for their ‘protection’. His close cooperation with the crooks who ran the police force meant he got more serious crime cases to work on. On one occasion in the Magistrates Court, the accused had been charged with, among other things,

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carrying an unlicensed pistol, but he claimed the police had ‘loaded him up’. ‘Mr Roach, do you want to inspect the gun, Exhibit A?’ droned the magistrate. ‘No, Your Worship,’ the solicitor replied without humour, ‘I’ve seen it many times before.’ When his police friends were organising to fix a case for a big-time crim, they would bring in Roach in for the preliminary hearings before a magistrate. He’d get big payments for these appearances, a bonus for his loyalty over the years. In the corrupt processes by which the police and justice systems in NSW ran for so long, Phil Roach was an important but miniscule cog, a small fish close to the bottom of the food chain, ever grateful for the scraps that fell down to him from the feuding sharks above. Then we have Lennie’s obsession with the rubbish bins at the Balmain ‘motel’—a most unlikely alibi, but it could possibly be made to stick if enough of his ‘tenants’ were prepared to say they had seen him there at the crucial time. It was the first shift away from his alleged statement to Fred Krahe that he’d been visiting his mum in hospital. The people named in the letter are nearly all readily identifiable. Dulcie is probably best described as a gun moll. Her family name appears to have been lost in time and she was known only as Dulcie from her early twenties, when she entered her chosen profession. She became a highly rated prostitute who shared her favours with a range of criminals, and who once had what one

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NSW policeman described to me as ‘a memorable affair’ with Bill Donohue, an SP operator in partnership with John Joseph Unwin, who was decidedly not in the Lennie camp. The Panther was also a gun moll, AfricanAmerican girl Jeannie Pink, who died of natural causes in 1974. Maxie Best was 26 at the time. He was later to make the police ‘top 100’ list of villains under his full moniker of Maxwell Fleetwood Frederick Best and a handful of aliases. His record would eventually show that he’d been arrested a few dozen times for stealing, break-and-enter and assault, and had been in a gang that robbed more than $2000 from a sports club in North Albury. He was described in the 1973 Australasian Criminal Register as a hardened criminal ‘who associates with the Balmain criminals’ (read McPherson and co.) and ‘organises large robberies from the Sydney wharves’. Bill Williams travelled under a few aliases, according to the state policeman with whom I discussed these matters. He was a procurer, a pimp. Harry Arden ran a milk bar at Balmain, and was the conduit to instant McPherson cash for bail for anyone who could appeal to Lennie’s sensitivities in times of need. Lennie McPherson’s bush lawyer’s guess that they would not be allowed bail until the coroner’s hearing into the Hackett killing began was a bit wide of the mark. When he appeared in Central Court later on the day he was arrested, Stipendiary Magistrate Roy Harvey allowed him bail of £1000 on condition that he report to the CIB at 7 pm each Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the coroner’s case began. The granting of bail in

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a murder case is rare indeed. Bail was refused for Snowy Rayner. Solicitor Phil Roach told the court that Lennie was quite innocent of the charge and, predictably, that he had not made any statement to the police. When Lennie discussed with Roach the idea of his alibi being that he was putting out the rubbish bins, the experienced criminal lawyer must have decided it was not at all good enough, so they settled on Lennie being in Balmain hospital, visiting his mother at the time of the murder. Lennie had already told Krahe this story, and it would have been Roach’s advice to stick to that rather than come up with a different—albeit possibly more sustainable—alibi. So they agreed on the hospital visit and the solicitor told the magistrate that this was the fact of the matter, and that Lennie was completely innocent of the charge. Nell McPherson, as previously mentioned, was having a leg amputation at the time, and it’s believed Lennie had in fact visited her earlier on the night of the murder. The whole fanciful story could be made to stand up, of course, only if Detective Sergeant Fred Krahe went along with the ‘no statements’ deal between Lennie and Ray Kelly and did not tell the court what Lennie had said to him at the time of his arrest. That was not to be the case, however. Krahe—himself a deeply corrupt cop—was either not a party to the bargain or he failed or refused to keep up his end of it. Or maybe he was just holding out for a better payoff from the Kelly/McPherson axis. Playing God in the milieu of corrupt cops and crims in Sydney in those days must have been a real adrenalin buzz.

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FRED KRAHE: ROGUE COP Frederick Claude Krahe was born on 6 November 1919 and became a police cadet at the age of twenty-one. He was a close associate of Detectives Ray Kelly, Don Fergusson and Roger Rogerson. With Commissioner Fred Hanson, these rogue police ‘grabbed the main chance during the Askin years’ according the respected writer David Hickie. Krahe was particularly involved in grafting from illegal abortionists. By early 1970 Fergusson had fallen out with Kelly and Krahe when Melbourne’s abortion reform activist Dr Bertram Wainer offered to come to Sydney to expose the graft and corruption that was associated with the illegal trade. Fergusson, it became known to this writer, urged the others to let Wainer come to Sydney, believing their lucrative racket would survive any storm the reformist might have whipped up. The others disagreed. A week later Fergusson (by then a superintendent) was found shot dead in the toilets at the CIB, his service revolver by his side. A morgue worker told me that the first autopsy report of Fergusson showed two bullet wounds to his head, shot at a range of ten feet, definitely not an act of suicide. ‘He must have had very long arms and very quick reflexes,’ the person said. A second report was quickly prepared and adopted as the official version. According to this, Fergusson was deeply depressed and fired a single shot to his head from his own revolver. Lennie McPherson later alluded to Krahe as: ‘The person who killed Don Fergusson at the CIB.’

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The operator of an illegal casino in the city, after closing up shop late one night, returned to his plush eastern suburbs house to find the place had been burgled: stripped bare of anything of value. He immediately got on the phone to Fred Krahe. ‘I want my stuff returned by morning—every bit of it!’ he demanded. And it was. ‘Now that’s organised crime!’ the gambler commented to one of his relatives later. In 1971 Krahe’s corrupt association with notorious prostitute Shirley Brifman was exposed and he allegedly killed Brifman in March 1972 by forcing an overdose of sleeping tablets down her throat while holding a gun at her head. Shortly afterwards, Police Commissioner Fred Hanson approved his early retirement, on a full pension, on health grounds. Krahe claimed to have a thrombosis in the leg. (Premier Neville Wran later joked with the author that Krahe’s health problem could have come from ‘kicking too many people to death’.) Krahe was later engaged as a security adviser to developer Frank Theeman in Victoria Street, King’s Cross, helping to evict squatters from fine old houses slotted for redevelopment, using more than a modest touch of violence. When anti-development campaigner Juanita Nielsen was murdered in 1975 Lennie McPherson told a senior Commonwealth policeman that he had rejected the contract to kill the woman, but it had been taken up ‘by the man that killed Don Fergusson in the CIB’—a clear allusion, the officer told me, to Fred Krahe. Journalist Barry Ward and I made a statutory declaration in 1976 that Krahe had ‘committed or organised’ with three others Nielsen’s murder.

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In the mid-1970s Krahe was employed for a while by the Sun daily newspaper in Sydney, though his main contribution was to prevent stories exposing police corruption from seeing the light of day. He died on 6 December 1981 of cancer. Making the bail application, Phil Roach said McPherson denied any association with Hackett on the Monday night. He said McPherson was in constant employment, had worked in one job for a considerable time and lived in his own home. ‘On Monday night he visited his mother, who is seriously ill in hospital,’ Roach said. ‘After leaving the hospital, he went to a friend’s home. He then went to the home of another friend where he discussed whether an operation would be performed on his mother. ‘Police cannot put him into the position of being in Leichhardt when the offence took place. If he is granted bail he is prepared to agree to any conditions that may be laid down. The details of this man are sufficiently exceptional to enable bail to be granted.’ The police prosecutor, Sergeant Ray Lucas, told Magistrate Harvey that Detective Sergeant Krahe and other police in charge of the case felt sure that McPherson would appear if he was released on bail—and he was duly released. Krahe, it seems, must have been persuaded by Ray Kelly to at least go along with a bail application. While this all seems improbable (a senior cop in a murder case agreeing to bail or any lenient conditions for the accused person) it must be remembered that we are talking about deeply corrupt policemen, and normal

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morality and ethics simply did not apply to the way they conducted their affairs. Rayner, who had no legal representation in that first hearing, was refused bail. Like Lennie, he emphatically denied the murder charge. Sydney was in the grip of a cold snap when Acting City Coroner Phil Davenport, SM, opened his hearing into the death on 21 September 1959, 56 days after the criminal had been gunned down in cold blood. Despite the fact of the arrests, the coroner was required to establish the basic details of who’d been killed, where, when and how, and if possible commit those who might be responsible for the crime to trial in a superior court. Police had rounded up the possible witnesses to the case except for the ‘two gigs’, who were by this time no doubt enjoying their overseas trip, so it did not come as a surprise that the next morning’s newspapers carried headlines like ‘Eyewitness to Murder Missing!’ A subpoena had been issued for Hilton Clayton but, predictably, police had not been able to find him to serve it. For a while it looked like Lennie’s earlier comments that Clayton would tell nothing to the court would prove to be true. The police officer assisting the coroner, Sergeant Frank Crook from the police prosecutors branch, said that Clayton, a vital witness, had not been seen since the night of the shooting. The hearing went ahead, but if Clayton could not be found it would be to little avail. The procession of 23 available witnesses started to piece together the grisly events of the night of 27 July 1959. Police ballistics expert Detective Sergeant William Ross said that Hackett’s body had been shot seven times

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by the two pistols, a .25 and a .38. He had bullet wounds below the left eye, in front of the left ear, in the left temple, the right shoulder, the left shoulderblade, in one buttock, the abdomen and the right arm. Detective Sergeant Ross said he had retrieved the expended shells from near the body in Elswick Street. Detective Sergeant Krahe gave the court what he claimed was every detail of his interview with Lennie— including the alleged argument Lennie had had with Hackett at the Commercial Hotel on the Thursday prior to the killing—and the police interrogation of the witness Clayton. Detective Sergeant Les Chowne told the court that he told Rayner that Clayton claimed he and McPherson had shot Hackett on 27 July. Rayner had allegedly replied: ‘That’s impossible. I was home in bed.’ He refused to take part in an identification parade at which Clayton would be present. Chowne said he’d told Rayner: ‘McPherson says he met you at 9 pm last night and went out in his car and drank a few bottles of beer with you.’ Rayner said it was true that after drinking the beer they had gone to the Hasty Tasty for hamburgers. Then a doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination on Hackett’s body gave medical evidence. Next came a resident of Elswick Street, who testified to having heard noises ‘like explosions’ and then a ‘cry like [a] child’s after the bangs’. Finally Hilton Clayton was called. But he did not appear. Sergeant Crook successfully applied to Coroner Davenport for an adjournment, saying that for Clayton to appear at the hearing was ‘very desirable’. Phil Roach,

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now appearing for both Lennie and Rayner, said he would strenuously oppose any additional applications for an adjournment. Davenport allowed Lennie bail of £1000 and Rayner £600 and adjourned the hearing until the next morning. Overnight, police made a breakthrough. Fred Krahe unearthed Clayton at a Manly hotel about 11 pm, arrested him and put him through a gruelling interrogation session. From some of the information he extracted, police again sought a brief adjournment when the hearing began in the morning so they could bring in the woman Clayton said he’d visited after he’d scarpered from the murder scene. Mrs Sylvia Mavis Williams, who lived in Grove Street, told the court she knew Clayton, and on the night of the murder she heard a knock on her door and found him on the doorstep. ‘He appeared very upset, too upset to talk,’ she said. ‘He was out of breath and could not talk for quite a while.’ Eventually he said to her, ‘A couple of fellows chased me.’ He told her he did not know who had chased him. Mrs Williams said he stayed for about half an hour, then borrowed ten shillings from her and left. When Clayton was led into the witness box, handcuffed to a detective, he said he was a salesman who worked for his brother at the city markets. Then, asked whether he was a friend of Hackett’s and had known him since 1946, he said he would refuse to answer any more questions. He told Coroner Davenport that he was concerned that he might incriminate himself. Throughout the morning he steadfastly stuck to his guns, refusing

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point blank to answer any question put to him. Generally people cannot be forced to incriminate themselves in court, but the Coroner’s Act provides strong powers for witnesses to be compelled to answer. If their replies might incriminate them in some criminal act, they can be given a certificate which excludes them from future prosecution based on their evidence. Continued silence can be dealt with as contempt of court, which can mean a prison term. Eventually Davenport warned him that he would have to ‘deal with him’ if he persisted in this attitude after the luncheon adjournment. Clayton got the message during the crib break, and eventually started to give some answers. Police read a statement allegedly made by him when they’d first interviewed him straight after the murder, and Clayton denied he had made any statement. When he was shown the document he agreed that his signature appeared on every page, and claimed that he had been in police custody for 14 to 15 hours before he signed some papers. Police had then released him within minutes, he said. At no time had he named anyone as the killers, he told the court: ‘I did not tell them I recognised the two men as McPherson and Rayner,’ he said. ‘You said to Hackett, “What’s this, George?” and he said, “it’s McPherson and Rayner—run for it.” Is that so?’ asked Sergeant Crook. ‘No,’ said Clayton, ‘he just said “run”. I ran away when the shooting started.’ ‘Why didn’t you wait to see what became of Hackett?’ ‘As soon as the gun flashed I automatically ran. It was self-preservation, I suppose.’

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He said that since the night of the shooting he had lived in constant fear for his life. After the shooting he ran half a mile to the home of Mrs Williams, stayed there for 30 minutes, borrowed ten shillings from her and left by the back gate. He said he then caught a taxi in Parramatta Road and went to a friend’s home in Balmain. Police had taken him to the CIB at about one o’clock in the morning and released him at about three in the afternoon. Phil Roach then asked Clayton if McPherson and Rayner were the two men he saw in Elswick Street on 27 July. ‘They are not the men I saw,’ he lied. As the letter signed ‘Len’ said: ‘Clayton won’t talk hes been seen . . .’ and as Lennie said to Krahe, Clayton would never identify him and Rayner as the killers in court ‘in a million years’. Phil Davenport committed Lennie and Rayner for trial at the 9 November sitting of the Central Criminal Court and refused bail, to which Phil Roach objected strongly. Two days later, on 24 September, the solicitor was granted a hearing in the Supreme Court, where Mr Justice Brereton granted the two men £1000 bail each—again an extraordinary courtesy shown to people facing a murder trial. So they were now free until the Central Criminal Court hearing in November. But in a sensational move, which at the time received very little publicity, State Attorney-General and Minister of Justice Mr RR (Reg) Downing dropped the murder charge against the two men by not ‘filing a bill’ in the matter. It seemed the minister was adopting a much more lenient attitude to Lennie now, even though he was

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charged with murder, than he had back in 1946 when he rejected an application from fellow ALP member and federal parliamentarian Mr Tom Sheehan for Lennie’s release from jail. One brief newspaper report commented that: ‘Attorneys-General do not usually publicise the reason they have not filed a bill against accused people.’ Some years later ‘unofficial government sources’ told some inquisitive journalists that it had been hoped more evidence might come to light and that, for instance, the murder weapons themselves might be found. They never were, of course. In the mid-1970s I asked Mr Downing what he could recall about decisions not to file bills in capital crime cases during his long term as attorney-general and minister of justice. The former minister said he was very hazy on most of the events of the time. ‘After all it was 15 years ago, and a lot of water had passed under the bridge,’ he said. ‘I doubt if I could remember any details from that period. My memory isn’t what it used to be.’ ‘The one I am most interested in is the murder of George Hackett in the fifties,’ I said to Reg Downing, checking that the tape connected to my phone was working. ‘Oh, that was the man McPherson murdered,’ he replied without hesitation. The faded memory had made a complete recovery. ‘I think if you look in the papers in the case you will find a police report to say, in effect, that the only witness they had—this fellow named Clayton— had now made another statement which said positively that as far as McPherson and Rayner were concerned, neither of them were the two men he saw,’ Downing said.

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He said that Clayton, who was a ‘bit of a criminal’ himself, had given police a verbal statement that it was Lennie ‘. . . but when it came to the crunch, after the coroner’s inquest or at the coroner’s inquest, I’ve forgotten which, he definitely made all sorts of statements to the police and the Crown that it was certainly not McPherson and the other fellow, and he was the only one you could get any evidence out of. I think that’s what happened, and the police said there was no chance of proceeding with it. And I was inclined to agree there was no use in proceeding with it . . . it would only be a waste of everyone’s time.’ Mr Downing stressed that Clayton had first told police it was Lennie and Rayner who had done the shooting, and ‘then subsequently went right back on it. We assumed of course—and don’t keep me to my recollection—but everybody assumed that he was being stood over. But he said pointedly and definitely that he hadn’t been.’ Downing agreed, however, that if you were being stood over it would be the normal practice to deny it. ‘I am certain in my mind,’ Mr Downing concluded, ‘that the evidence, whatever evidence the police had so far as to convict McPherson, collapsed and completely disappeared.’ What Downing was not asked to discuss (because I didn’t learn of it until later) was an allegation that a generous donation—said to be more than £10 000 according to a barrister who spoke of the matter to this author—was made to the minister on behalf of Lennie McPherson to assist him in the difficult decision on whether or not to ‘no-bill’ Lennie and Rayner. ‘That’s

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the way things were done in those days,’ the barrister, now a judge, said. The barrister had often been briefed by Roach to defend criminals, and said he’d often been privy to ‘secretive arrangements’ made between lawyers, police and prominent politicians where large sums of money changed hands. While casting no aspersions on the word of this barrister-turned-judge—who offered the information freely and apparently in the context of ‘filling out’ a story I was interested in—it would seem (and would have seemed to McPherson at the time) an unnecessary expense for Lennie to have gone to. Obviously Clayton was never going to talk (he’d ‘been seen’) and no weapon would ever be found. In light of these facts, Downing would quite properly have no-billed the case anyway. The case collapsed and disappeared because, as Len’s letter said, ‘Clayton won’t talk hes been seen’, and Lennie’s ‘fix’—if it was paid. In any case, police lost all further interest in solving the murder. It was written off as another gangland killing. As Hackett was a murderer and a gangster himself, it didn’t really matter who had killed him. And even officers of the New South Wales police force would probably have found it a bit too much to try to fit someone else with a murder which they knew had been committed by Lennie and Snowy Rayner. As one policeman said later, it was the Fix of the Fifties. ‘It was the biggest cover-up I have ever seen in the force,’ he added. The letter signed ‘Len’ was naturally never submitted as evidence during the Hackett murder hearings. At that time it was being held in secret by its

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owner, Chris Campbell, who hoped one day he could ‘cash in’ this remarkable insurance policy. The cover-up of the Hackett murder lasted for many years, until the memories had dimmed. This is the first time the full story has been told, and the account I have given here is based on the sensationally incriminating detail contained in that letter and assumes that it is a genuine document. But is it? The letter first fell into hands for which it was never intended in 1968. Two journalists working on Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper, Chris Forsyth and David Halpin, persuaded Chris Campbell to sell it to the newspaper for $600. The pair—top-notch journalists— had been researching organised crime in Australia, and particularly Lennie’s pivotal role in activities. The letter was a godsend, they thought. But it was not to be. Publication of the series of articles they had written relied in large part on the letter signed ‘Len’ actually being in his handwriting. The final decision was made at a meeting in chambers called by News Limited editorial chiefs with a prominent lawyer, Michael McHugh (later to become a High Court judge), who was then acting for News Limited. Present were senior Murdoch executives, the then NSW Premier Bob Askin, the then NSW Police Commissioner Fred Hanson, a handwriting expert, BJ Fitzgerald of Annandale, who had been engaged by News Limited, and lawyers for the police and the premier. It has subsequently been clearly established that Premier Askin and Commissioner Hanson were deeply corrupt officials. They would have been gravely

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concerned about the revelations which the Forsyth/ Halpin series might reveal of their own involvement in criminal matters, and about any exposure of the comfortable relationship between Lennie, Detective Ray Kelly and other senior police. Their lawyers were no doubt briefed to protect their interests. This was a moment in media decision-making at which the investigative arm was not present. Had Forsyth and Halpin been present, they no doubt would have pursued the issue further than meek acceptance by their bosses of the professional view of handwriting expert Fitzgerald, who reported on his examination of the controversial letter with known samples of Lennie and Dawn Joy McPherson’s handwriting, and concluded that neither of them had written the letter. For News Limited it was the end of the story: a shallow bureaucratic response to a single—albeit important—issue was allowed to kill off all investigation into the wide range of criminal activities the journalists had written about. These articles had been proposed by Forsyth and Halpin and accepted by the editor of the Australian, Walter Kommer, as an assignment that might take time for the two senior journalists to investigate thoroughly. Halpin later told me that he and Forsyth spent more than two months on the job and travelled to Canberra and Melbourne during their research. They questioned Chris Campbell—who sold them the letter— very thoroughly and were both convinced he, and the letter, were genuine articles. Their stories were never published. Editorial Manager Frank B Shaw wrote a memo to Kommer on

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2 December 1968 to kill off the series, having received advice from Michael McHugh that ‘without wholesale emasculation of detail, the series could easily be identified as referring to Macpherson [sic] and would leave us open to defamatory action difficult to defend’. Shaw wrote that in a brief discussion with Mr Murdoch ‘he agreed that the articles should not be published unless we can obtain undeniable proof of Macpherson’s [sic] handwriting for identification of the letter we obtained from Melbourne. I will keep the complete file safely locked away until this is produced.’ And so the files were locked away in the News Limited safe at its Sydney headquarters in Kippax Street, Surry Hills. They remained there until they were liberated by a senior News Limited executive who was aware of this writer’s considerable interest in the subject matter. In early 1974 he discreetly handed over a plain brownpaper envelope containing all the collected documents (except the articles written by Forsyth and Halpin, which, amazingly, were not even retained by the paper) at a ‘document drop’, the details of which would do the security services proud. To that person, great thanks. There’s no doubt now that the letter is not in Lennie’s handwriting, nor Dawn Joy’s, and neither does it tally with the one available sample of Snowy Rayner’s handwriting. But the sample the letter was compared with was written by Rayner many years after the time they were in prison together. A little more than a year after the Hackett murder, Rayner was shot in the right arm and left badly crippled. This would have dramatically changed his handwriting style after the letter in

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question was written. So the possibility existed that Rayner could have put pen to paper at Lennie’s instruction and dictation. Another inexact science lends convincing support to the view that Lennie actually dictated the letter. People close to Lennie have talked of his tendency not to write much himself, but to dictate notes to his lackeys. While he dictated he would jab the air with his forefinger and repeat: ‘Say this, say this,’ and then construct his sentence. And any dictation, if copied down verbatim, leaves what might be described as a voiceprint in the finished product. The style of speech comes through just as clearly in the writing as in the spoken word. The letter signed ‘Len’ has been read aloud to a number of people who knew Lennie and his way of speaking. One of them was Wal McGeechin, who was then Comptroller of New South Wales Prisons. Without being told beforehand who the letter-writer was, he—like the others—said that it sounded exactly like Lennie McPherson talking. His voiceprint comes through. When the letter came to light in 1968 there was some suspicion that Chris Campbell may have forged it himself, for the dual purpose of getting whatever cash he could by selling it to a newspaper, and also getting Lennie into difficulty as the settlement of a grudge. However, a scientific check I undertook some years ago with a handwriting analyst I knew (he’s long since retired), indicated the letter was written around 1959, the year of the murder. It was written on paper the age of which could be identified and, along with other checks, this ruled out the possibility of it being a forgery

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written by Campbell around the time he decided to sell it a decade after the murder. Investigation has also shown that a senior, long-term prison employee nicknamed the Major—Lennie’s old mate Prison Superintendent John Cashman—got his senior clerk to pen the letter. The clerk, who was totally loyal to Cashman, probably wrote down the dictation that Lennie spoke in the cell in the OBS. Experts are divided on whether the handwriting of the letter matches the handwriting of the clerk who made the historic entry in the Capital Convictions Book at the prison to record the last hanging there on 24 August 1939. The first analyst whose professional opinion I sought said there were ‘beyond doubt’ sufficient similarities in the formation of individual letters in the two samples to confirm they had been written by the same person. A later check by another analyst conversely said there were sufficient differences in character formation to refute that view. Both were asked whether the 20-year gap between the writing of the two documents could have influenced some details of the formation of the characters. The first said yes, the second said no. The first analyst volunteered the view that, given the extraordinary content of the letter, anyone putting pen to paper to take down those words would almost certainly try to disguise their handwriting in some measure, and that some of the ‘different’ characters looked somewhat ‘forced’, which could indicate a deliberate—albeit fairly amateurish—attempt to change the appearance of the writing. Further support for the letter having been written down by the clerk came from an unusual source. One of

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the old-timers of the Long Bay jail staff, a man we will know only as ‘Old Bob’, would often visit the staff and chat long after his retirement. A staff member I spoke with recently said that among the yarns Old Bob told them a number of times was the story of a senior clerk— who was a close mate of Bob’s—being taken into Lennie McPherson’s cell to transcribe a letter. This remarkable letter shows that even from the supposedly high security of a prison cell, Leonard Arthur McPherson was, in 1959, able to make positive moves to arrange for the bribery and silencing of witnesses to a murder that he’d committed. From the prison the Major would have ensured it was delivered to Christopher George Campbell, a man with a considerable police record who was, at that time, known as the Accountant in Lennie’s crime syndicate. He had been a bagman for McPherson, collecting protection money from brothels, SP bookmakers and other small businesses around Kings Cross, and he also ‘kept the books’ of the organisation.

3 STAYING ON TOP: IT’S MURDER OUT THERE! NEEDLESS TO SAY, demonstrating that he had attained the power and influence to ‘spring’ himself and his mate from the Hackett murder charge added immensely to Lennie’s reputation and stature in the underworld. It was to ensure for him even greater control over the world of crime, and even greater immunity from prosecution or exposure. In every way, in the world of organised crime, Leonard Arthur McPherson had ‘arrived’. And it would not take him long to demonstrate his new supremacy. A year after the Hackett murder, Lennie and Rayner were again charged, this time with the attempted murder of John Joseph Unwin, who was, as the newspapers say, ‘known to the police’. Unwin was an illegal SP bookmaker, and Lennie had been standing over him for protection money. Unwin, apparently, wanted to put an end to Lennie’s constant demands for cash, and Lennie was now showing him that it would not be all that easy. It became Lennie’s least successful assassination attempt; in fact it totally failed. With Rayner driving his [ 67 ]

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cream-coloured 1964 Chevrolet sedan number DET200 (of which he was very proud) and Lennie in the passenger seat, they parked near the top of William Street, Kings Cross, facing down towards the city. It was a Wednesday night—a race day and a busy one for Unwin the bookie. They’d been tipped off, apparently, that Unwin would be driving past around 9.30 pm, heading into City Tattersalls Club in Pitt Street to settle his accounts with some legitimate bookies. There was the usual evening pedestrian traffic up and down the footpaths and, as always, a fairly heavy volume of road traffic; then they spotted Unwin’s car. Police media briefings of the incident said Rayner lurched his Chevy out from the kerbside into the near side of Unwin’s car. Unwin drove ahead and Rayner overtook him and again rammed the car from the side. Lennie at that moment apparently fired a pistol two or more times at Unwin but missed his target. Unwin returned the fire, police said, and one bullet hit Snowy Rayner in the right arm, badly injuring him and forcing him to stop the car, allowing Unwin to proceed unharmed. Unwin, McPherson and Rayner were all charged by police with a range of offences, including shooting in public and driving dangerously. But Lennie was a favoured person at the CIB and it appears police made little effort to gather eyewitnesses to the violent affray from the bustle of passing pedestrians, and the charges were quietly dropped. Police were helped in their decision not to proceed by the refusal of Unwin, like others before him, to say anything on the record that might incriminate Lennie McPherson.

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Lennie—now a man who could literally get away with murder—was elevated to the ranks of untouchables, as Trevor Chaseling and Keith Kelly, a couple of young detectives from the consorting squad, were to discover. In May 1962 they arrested Lennie in Sydney. He was to be charged under the Police Offences Act for having knowingly consorted with known criminals. The detectives were aware that his previous consorting charge back in 1953 had been dismissed under the ‘first offender’ provisions. This time they were confident he would not get off so lightly. Lennie was seated in the back of the patrol car with one of the detectives while the other drove towards the police office in Central Lane, behind Central Courts. They intended to book him and bring him immediately before a magistrate. Over the car’s police radio they informed the CIB that they were bringing McPherson in. Senior officers of most squads monitor radio messages at their desks, and within seconds a sharp, urgent message came from one of them over the airwaves to the patrol car: ‘Release McPherson at once! Do not, repeat not, bring him in!’ Stunned, the detectives stopped the car and Lennie was released. They returned empty-handed to headquarters. They knew they had a watertight case against Lennie. Other men had been jailed for six months or more for consorting with known criminals, and such a conviction was usually a first step towards a person being declared ‘an habitual criminal’. Yet, as members of a disciplinary force, they had been instructed by a senior officer to let him go free.

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Waiting for them back at the CIB was Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly. He had little to say: ‘Leave McPherson to us in future!’ he snapped at the two younger men before turning on his heel and stomping off. The young detectives took their reprimand in silence. Only four men—themselves, Lennie and Ray Kelly—knew what had happened, and if word of this open protection by a senior police officer of one the nation’s top criminals got out to the world it would, they reasoned wisely, not only cause a public scandal but also ruin their careers. They later told their story to journalist David Halpin (who passed it on to the author) on the clear proviso that their names not be mentioned in connection with this unsavoury event, at least until after Kelly’s death. Meanwhile, Lennie’s domestic life was under unprecedented stress and, as his marriage with Dawn deteriorated, he took to drinking even more heavily. Always a man who discussed business over a few beers, he was now spending a lot of time in pubs and clubs. The need for him to get his hands dirty was diminishing as a growing band of ‘godsons’ he had helped were now only too keen to do his bidding and to hand over a tithe for his generous and life-saving patronage. Money started to roll in, and he had all the time in the world to spend it. Occasionally he would attend to a job himself, but generally he was arranging for younger blades to do the hard yakka. Sometimes Lennie would hear a report that some newcomer to the trade had not paid their respects to him. He would then take a few mates on a visit that resulted in apprehended or very real violence, depending on the seriousness of the newcomer’s intrusion. These

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standover tactics provided Lennie with extraordinary control over the criminal milieu: he looked after his own crowd of felons, ran out of business any intruders and kept the police arrest statistics looking good by fizzing on anyone who annoyed him from either camp. And with the power came even more time to drink. The once rosy-eyed but now disillusioned Dawn was totally embittered, a hostage to her husband’s grip of drunken violence. She tolerated extraordinary abuse. Once, when Lennie had accused her of having an affair, he tied one of her legs to a tree and the other to the rear bumper bar of his car, started the engine and took up the slack on the ropes, threatening to split her in half. Whatever psychological and physical damage she might have suffered from this experience, far worse would have been the terror of her belief that there was no escape from her husband’s brutality. However, it did finally come to an end in a horrendous showdown on the night of 17 October 1960. Lennie had spent much of the day at one of his favourite watering holes, the Bridge Hotel on busy Victoria Road, Rozelle, drinking, having a few bets, organising a bit of crime. Monday was traditionally the night for a roast dinner in the McPherson homestead. When he arrived home, Dawn explained that the dinner was still cooking, that it wouldn’t be long and that there was a cold beer in the fridge, so why not sit down and have a drink while she got the meal ready. Lennie was in no mood for this womanly chitchat— or for any more beer, it seemed. He started to thump the table with his huge fist, demanding his dinner. ‘I’m the

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toughest man in bloody Sydney, and I want my fucking dinner when I ask for it, not when you decides to serve it up to me,’ he yelled. He was dangerously drunk. Distraught, Dawn went to the kitchen to attend to the meal. Roast beef and potatoes were in the oven. She tested them: they were not quite done to Lennie’s taste. On the right-hand burner was the cabbage, which she’d only just turned on and needed a few more minutes. On the left burner was a pot of peas, nearly done. She was going to make the gravy in the meat juices. Lennie stormed after her into the kitchen, ranting: ‘I’m the toughest man in fucking Sydney. I can kill anyone I fucking well want to, but I can’t get my fucking dinner on time!’ He then took a pistol from his shoulder holster and started waving it around. He went up to the stove, picked up the pot of peas, held it out at arm’s length and fired every bullet in his gun through the bottom of the saucepan. Hot lead and hot peas ricocheted and splattered around the kitchen. Dawn Joy lost control and started screaming in terror, which unnerved McPherson even more. Yelling at her to stop screaming, he started to hit her with his left hand; then with his right hand. The gun was still in that hand. In gangster movies they call it pistol-whipping. It is a particularly vicious form of assault—it can crack a skull, it can kill. Dawn Joy was lucky; it did not kill her. Eventually she was able to get away from her deranged husband and telephone her father—one of the few people Lennie seemed to respect—who came quickly to 22 Prince Edward Street to collect her and her child. As she recovered from the cuts, bruises and the initial

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shock of this ugly battering, Dawn Joy agreed to her father’s urgings that she should file a charge of attempted murder against her husband. It was a charge that Lennie would have found difficult, if not impossible, to beat, had it gone ahead. But conciliation hearings were set up. The go-between in the estranged couple’s negotiations was Detective Ray Kelly, the rogue cop who had become McPherson’s most senior and powerful mentor. Lennie confided in Kelly that his wife would send him to jail if she wasn’t discouraged from pressing her charge. Kelly agreed to talk to her. Dawn Joy later confided in journalists David Halpin and Chris Forsyth that pressure was brought to bear by the very persuasive and intimidating presence of Kelly. Eventually a deal was made and she agreed to drop the charge. Later there would be a legal settlement of their joint property holdings, but for now there was a large one-off payment from Lennie (she did not disclose the amount to my former colleagues). She believed a generous commission also went straight into Kelly’s pocket.

RAY KELLY: ROGUE COP It is difficult for normal people going about their honest, hard-working lives to envisage a police and political system that is corrupt from top to toe. Yet this was how it was in Sydney from the 1950s to the 1970s. Corruption was of such intensity that for a long period, police would actually organise crimes across a range of activities, pay part of the ill-gained booty to corrupt politicians who would turn a blind eye to all but the

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proceeds of their greed, and have close dealings with senior criminals who would do the hard yakka required at the coalface. It’s long been alleged by prominent writers that Detective Ray Kelly of the Sydney CIB was the major practitioner of that craft for more than two decades, and that Lennie McPherson was his greatest asset in the underworld. A former senior member of a major crime squad assured this author in 2003 that this is an accurate assessment. ‘Kelly ran McPherson for many years,’ he said. ‘He ran a lot of other criminal activities but McPherson was his main point of contact with the crims—his major fizz-gig [informer].’ Kelly was never charged or convicted of any crime, and was hailed by Premier Bob Askin at his retirement in 1966 as ‘a close personal friend that no fictional detective could hold a candle to’. David Hickie, in his opus on Sydney crime and corruption, The Prince and the Premier (Angus & Robertson, 1985), wrote: ‘During the Askin years senior police officers became involved in bribery, corruption and organised crime which included armed hold-ups, gambling, protection, prostitution and drug running; in short, one of the most devastating results of the penetration of organised crime into politics was its influence on the police force’. Hickie and others allege Kelly was involved in the graft connected with the illegal abortion rackets of the 1950s with Detective Fred Krahe, and seconded Detective Don Fergusson to do most of the organising and collections from the abortionists, who were allowed to continue their back-yard trade if they paid up.

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Through the 1950s and ’60s Ray Kelly made no pretence of his friendship with renowned illegal abortionist Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones, illegal gamblers Perc Galea and Joe Taylor, and leading Sydney gangster Charles ‘Paddles’ Anderson. He was lauded by journalists as a ‘brilliant detective’. With a string of high-profile arrests to his credit, the reporters who did the police rounds would never criticise such a colourful and cooperative source of good copy. But not all the crimes he investigated were solved: he ‘kept the lid’ on many violent crimes as a reward to Lennie and a few other favoured criminals for their cooperation. It was Kelly, for example, who conducted the lengthy but unfruitful investigation into the murder [by McPherson] of Pretty Boy Walker. Kelly was born in 1906 in Wellington, in midwestern NSW, and attended the local high school before leaving home for the life of a jackeroo, wandering the dusty cattle stations of north Queensland for a decade before coming to Sydney in 1929 for a bit of excitement. He joined the police force and in about six years was a plainclothes detective in the CIB. After shooting dead a number of criminals in the line of business, Kelly realised that ‘gangland killings’ could solve a lot of problems for police and friendly criminals. A crime reporter—a great admirer of Kelly— once told the author that Kelly and other police set up a number of underworld killings ‘when a criminal got too big for his boots and could no longer be controlled within their system’. He became renowned for ‘verballing’ criminals, coercing verbal confessions from them for crimes they

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may not have committed. In one murder case referred to by David Hickie, barrister JJB Kincaid said: ‘Kelly— his name is Raymond, not Ned—seemed to be convinced of this man’s guilt long ago. I would hate to think of hanging a dog, let alone a human being, on the police evidence in this case.’ In another case gangster Chow Hayes, in the dock charged with murder, tried to grab Kelly and shouted: ‘I hope to live for the day when Kelly dies of cancer of the tongue.’ The Crown case against Hayes rested on a verbal confession which police alleged Hayes made to Kelly at the CIB. The nickname ‘Verbal’ was given to him by barrister (later Justice) Simon Isaacs, an uncle of Abraham Gilbert Saffron. A lesser-known foible of Kelly’s was his predilection for umbrella theft, as told to me by a former policeman: Kelly’s wife rang the CIB one day and asked Detective Ross (Rocky) Morrison to come over to their house at Fairlight. He was reluctant to do so without Ray’s knowledge. Ray wasn’t one to trifle with. When he did arrive Mrs Kelly showed him about 20 umbrellas in the garage that Ray had brought home over a period of time. She asked Ross to return them to their owners at the CIB. Ross had thus identified the legendary CIB umbrella thief. The close association with Lennie was doubtless Kelly’s most infamous link to criminals, and there are a number of incidents in this book which demonstrate the corrupt nature of that liaison. The tough, six foot (183 centimetres), 14 stone (90 kilograms) Kelly retired from the police force three

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weeks after the Ryan–Walker arrests in 1966. Nine years later, in the 1975 New Year’s Honours list, the Queen made him a Member of the British Empire. The MBE was recommended by the New South Wales premier of the day, Sir Robert Askin, on the eve of his retirement from politics. Askin had been known to sell knighthoods for up to $6000 each during his corrupt reign as premier, but Kelly’s MBE was a free ‘thank you’ gift. By that time Ray Kelly was part-owner of an illegal casino, in partnership with the then Police Commissioner Fred Hanson, at Gosford, on the New South Wales Central Coast. His long association with McPherson was maintained after he left the force, and Lennie was responsible for debt collection at the casino. Kelly died on 11 August 1977 of natural causes. Lennie was never to see Dawn Joy again. After staying with her father for some time she went to live in a house in Cardwell Street, Balmain. She later divorced McPherson, married a senior public servant and moved away from Sydney. The best years of her life had been wasted on Leonard Arthur McPherson. On 10 September 1962 she signed a memorandum of transfer handing over to Lennie her half of the Prince Edward Street house for the sum of £1500 ($3000), a property that Lennie said was worth $70 000 10 years later. Lennie remarried too, on 9 July 1963, a 22-year-old woman, Marlene Carrol Gilligan. He was then 42, nearly twice her age. From the day of the wedding, she was to

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learn that life with Lennie would never fit the description of normal. During the evening celebrations of their nuptials with friends in a private room at a local club, something along these lines took place: Lennie was called away. An associate had whispered in his ear that a call had come through from ‘the woman in Randwick, about that bastard Walker’, saying the man would be walking from her place to the Randwick shops just after 6 pm. Lennie apologised quietly to his new bride: called away on very urgent business; be back very soon. His offsider drove the car, a stolen 1961 Holden sedan coloured light and dark blue, to Alison Road, Randwick, where they parked down the road from the woman’s house, waiting for Robert James ‘Pretty Boy’ Walker to emerge. Walker, a handsome 26-year-old, worked on ships as a crew steward. Police later said they had been told he had been in fear for his life for a couple of weeks, after having been in a fight. At the Macquarie Hotel (now the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel), known through the 1960s and ’70s simply as ‘The Rockers’, a reflection of its live music offerings, Walker had intervened when a man started assaulting a prostitute. He hit the 26-year-old attacker with an iron bar and finally wounded him with a wild shot from a .303 calibre rifle. He was charged over the event and was now out on bail of £250 awaiting trial. He had received threats that the man he’d hit was a ‘friend of Lennie’s’. He was indeed: his name was Stan ‘the Man’ Smith, a psychotic gunman and drug addict who was one of Lennie’s closest ‘protectors’, and who was now driving the car.

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STAN SMITH: MCPHERSON’S DRUGGIE MATE Stan Smith, alias Raymond Arthur Owens, alias Stanley Raymond Lewis, alias Ronald John Goldsmith, alias John Eric Kean, alias ‘Staley Stan’, alias ‘Stonner’, but most commonly known as Stan ‘The Man’ Smith, was born at Balmain on 3 January 1936. By the time of his 1973 listing in the Australasian Criminal Register (ACR), he had the reputation of being one of Australia’s most dangerous gunmen. It listed him as a gunman, assailant, shoplifter, sexual offender and drug pusher, with more than 30 arrests on charges which included rape, conspiracy, consorting, being a stubborn witness, stealing, having stolen goods in his custody and assault occasioning actual bodily harm in police files in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. He was active in shoplifting gangs and in one raid in Western Australia netted $7000 worth of goods from 16 stores in three cities. In 1972 and 1973 he was arrested for possession of a large quantity of drugs. In 1970 he was charged with attempting to sell amphetamines in Paddington that had been stolen from a pharmaceutical warehouse. While he pleaded guilty, police testified he denied knowing drugs were involved: ‘Smith was only there to make sure there was no trouble and, in fairness to the defendant, as a result of inquiries made by him, a large amount of the drugs were recovered,’ police said rather helpfully. Magistrate Wally Lewer fined him $1200 and gave him six months to pay. His associate in the crime, James Randolph Sweetman, was sentenced to 12 months’ jail.

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Lewer said that, as Sweetman came from a good home and had an above average education (at Newington) he ‘ought to be more harshly treated than a person [like Smith] of a less favoured background’. In 1972 Smith was arrested by drug squad detectives and federal narcotics agents for possession of a large quantity of drugs he had for sale. In 1973 he was arrested in Victoria for possession of drugs. In 1978 he appeared before the Woodward Royal Commission into drug trafficking, where he was described by Bill Fisher, QC, counsel assisting the inquiry, as ‘a notorious criminal with a long history of criminal convictions and conviction for drug trafficking on a major occasion’. Himself a heroin addict, Smith was jailed in Victoria on 19 June 1979 for 15 months on drug charges. From the 1980s he split his time between Sydney and the northern NSW coastal town of Byron Bay. Walker had fled his flat in Liverpool Street, Paddington. He’d taken refuge with the young prostitute at her house in Alison Road, thinking he could trust her. But she betrayed him for a few pieces of silver: she phoned Smith at the wedding celebrations and set Walker up. Just before 6.15 Walker emerged from the house and headed for the shops, a short walk up the street. Lennie pulled the collar of his big dark coat high around his neck, and pulled the green hat with yellow band low over his eyes. He nodded to the driver, who put the car into gear and slid slowly away from the kerb. Lennie had reached into the back seat and was now adjusting an Owen sub-machine gun out of the window. It was

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the first time he’d used such a terrible weapon against a human. They came level with Walker as he walked past a local dentist’s VW parked at the kerb. Lennie opened fire. Five of the 9mm calibre copper-jacketed bullets tore into Walker’s right side, their force ripping him apart and spinning him round. A sixth slug hit him in the head as he collapsed, already dead, into a pool of blood. More bullets smashed into the dentist’s VW and a nearby fence. Within seconds, a crowd of more than thirty had gathered around the body, and police were on the scene in an instant. But the pair in the stolen car were not waiting around: they sped off along Alison Road, made their way into Botany Street, dumped the car in nearby Kingsford, and high-tailed it back to Balmain in their own vehicle, which Smith had parked there earlier. They hid the machine gun at a welding business run by one of Lennie’s mates, tossed the clothes they’d worn—including the fancy hat—into the Parramatta River and returned to the wedding reception. They had been away for just over half an hour. Marlene smiled and welcomed to her side her new husband, who again apologised for the interruption to their celebrations. He was back in time for a few rounds of the bridal waltz. The Walker murder was widely reported the next day, but there was not then—or at any time later—any media reference to Lennie. Veteran police roundsman Ced Culbert told me the yarn years after Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly had confided in him that Lennie had

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done the killing after the prostitute had set Walker up. My own research revealed the amazing fact that it had happened on his wedding night, a date I gleaned from records then held by the commonwealth police. Thus were played out the first hours of Lennie McPherson’s second marriage. Marlene bore him two sons, Danny and Craig. Lennie had another son, Stephen, by another of his loves and there’s the woman in Victoria, Gloria, who proudly claims to be his daughter and a beneficiary of his parental generosity. At a time when the electoral rolls showed people’s professions, Marlene Carrol listed hers as ‘home duties’. She was no doubt aware of the importance of serving Lennie his dinner on time.

4 FRIENDS IN THE RIGHT PLACES IT WAS COMMON knowledge among informed journalists, crooks, lawyers and police that Ray Kelly did a great deal to make life easier for Leonard Arthur McPherson before the detective finally left the police force. Of course Kelly wasn’t the only cop who nursed the top crook through some of his more difficult moments, but it was Kelly who took charge of a lengthy inquiry into the 9 July 1963 murder of ‘Pretty Boy’ Walker, and helped guide City Coroner Jim Loomes, SM, to an inconclusive view that quite a few people might have had reason to kill Walker, without ever pointing an accusatory finger at the true culprit, Lennie. The case received extensive front-page coverage in the Sydney press for some days, reconstructing the public assassination in the way we’ve told it in the previous chapter. The Sun-Herald got the scoop on the fact that this was the first time a sub-machine gun had been used in a Sydney gangland killing (which all media quickly reported it to be) in a ‘Chicago-like’ manner. [ 83 ]

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Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly quickly took control of the investigation and, arising from his close relationship with Lennie, proposed to the media possible theories for the killing. Within a week of the killing, the Sun-Herald reported on 14 July a Kelly suggestion that the murder may have resulted from a struggle for control over prostitution, or even from Walker’s association with feuding gangs of shoplifters, safebreakers and thieves. Ced Culbert told the author that Kelly had hinted that police inquiries were focusing on criminal Raymond ‘Ducky’ O’Connor, a fierce enemy of McPherson. But media interest quickly faded until Coroner Jim Loomes opened his inquest in December, five months after the slaying. Kelly himself did not appear at the inquest, assigning that task to a trusted offsider, Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill. He told the court about the confrontation between Walker and Stan ‘the Man’ Smith at the pub in Woolloomooloo over Smith’s assault of a prostitute. According to McNeill’s account, some days later, on 6 May, Smith—whom McNeill described as ‘an associate of some of the most vicious criminals in this state’—had gone to Walker’s Paddington home with a number of mates. Walker would have clearly understood their violent intention as they stomped down the hallway towards his flat. Walker, said McNeill, fired off a few volleys from a .303 rifle, with one shot hitting Smith in the chest, seriously wounding him. Smith took some weeks in hospital to recover. Police charged Walker over the shooting and he was released on bail. He then moved in with the prostitute in Randwick, hoping he would be safe there. But

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it was not to be: she was not to be trusted in this world of violence and intimidation, and set Walker up for the fatal shooting. After the legal fraternity’s long summer break, the inquest resumed in February 1964 with Ducky O’Connor called to the stand. It was an unproductive session, with O’Connor refusing to answer on the grounds he might incriminate himself, or simply because of that special strain of amnesia that afflicts the criminal classes at times of stress. Some months later, during a police raid on his Double Bay home, O’Connor was alleged to have said to a policeman: ‘Who put me in? I’ll bet that bloody McPherson and Stan Smith gave you the drum on me.’ The raid had been set up at Lennie’s urging, ‘to teach that bastard O’Connor a lesson’, according to a police reporter’s version I was later told of a conversation he’d had with Ray Kelly at the time. The raid resulted in O’Connor being charged over a loaded, unlicensed .45 calibre pistol police found at his home. The inquest fizzled to an inconclusive close, with Coroner Loomes unable to recommend any prosecutions for the murder. In his closing statement Loomes said: ‘This killing leaves a feeling of abhorrence at the thought that this is the first of its type in this State. It will, I am sure, engender in the minds of sober-minded citizens a feeling of revulsion and a hope for ruthless measures to combat this type of crime.’ Hard-nosed Sydney journalists Ron Saw and Frank Brown were later to provide another theory in relation to Walker’s murder. Writing in Oz Magazine in 1965 they suggested Walker had tried to blossom as a standover

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man ‘but his methods were considered too rough. (He once broke a man’s leg with an iron bar.) . . . A loose combination of hoods threw in to have him done—the executioner was imported.’ Their article did not offer any identification of the killer. The ‘ruthless measures’ suggested by Loomes would not be forthcoming. The perpetrator of the crime, Lennie McPherson, was beyond the reach of any such measures, shielded in the protective umbra of the man who was probably the state’s most powerful—and most corrupt— policeman. It’s as though Kelly and other police had given McPherson a ‘licence to kill’. Lennie again exercised his ‘rights’ within days of the conclusion of the inquest into Pretty Boy Walker’s murder. Standover man Charlie Bourke, aged 54, was gunned down on his front lawn at Norton Street, Randwick, in the early hours of 10 February 1964. Bourke had been ‘doing his rounds’ of gambling clubs around Kings Cross. A Queensland criminal called Riley had opened up a new baccarat club and Bourke had had an argument with Lennie over the provision of ‘protection’ for Riley. Bourke had also been encroaching into traditional McPherson standover territory by working the small ethnic gambling clubs around Newtown, a regular source of pin-money for Lennie. A coronial inquest was told that as Bourke was entering his home, a gunman concealed in bushes opened fire with a semi-automatic .22 rifle. Ten shots slammed into Bourke’s body. The gunman then reloaded, came up close to the dead man and fired off another ten shots before fleeing. That detail was offered

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by police from their forensic examination of the murder site. Again, police could find ‘no traces or motive’ for the murder and the investigation fizzled into distant memory. Again, my sources close to Ray Kelly confirmed that Lennie was beyond doubt the murderer, and that Kelly had ensured that police inquiries were never directed towards his friend and confidante. By the mid-1960s Lennie had decided to become the big gun in Australia’s organised crime rackets, and was widely recognised as such by in-the-know journalists, cops and lawyers. But there were quite a few other criminals who had the egos and stupidity to strut around calling themselves ‘Mr Big’. To get to the top, and stay there, Lennie had to persuade these challengers—and any others with social ambition—to give away the life of climb. He already had a few runs on the board in taking out (as distinct from taking on) challengers, and he had no qualms about dealing similarly with any other problems. One of his aggressors was 50-year-old Robert Lawrence ‘Jacky’ Steele. For far too long Steele— murderer, safecracker, explosives expert and standover man—had been claiming the crown of King of the Crims, disputing Lennie McPherson’s belief that he was the real Mr Big, and challenging Big Mac’s claim to power. Now Lennie and his men were out to kill him. On 26 November 1965, a shotgun blast ripped through the balmy quiet evening of Wallis Street, in Sydney’s inner eastern suburb of Woollahra. After a split-second’s hesitation the target for this spray of lead shot, Jacky Steele, knew exactly who had pulled the trigger. More shots were

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fired, from the shotgun, rifles and pistols. The way of crime was essentially that violent if you were to stay at the top. Steele was quite certain the attack was driven by Lennie’s ego. Remarkably, this view is supported by a document published by Oz Magazine. In 1965 the satirical magazine’s editors, Richard Walsh and Richard Neville, had published its own ‘Oz Guide to the Sydney Underworld’, listing the top twenty. Number one spot they left blank, with the notation: ‘(There isn’t any)’. Number two spot was listed as ‘Lenny’. Steele, incidentally, was not listed. In a subsequent edition Oz editors published minutes of a monthly meeting of 35 divisional detectives held at the CIB on 1 December 1965, which claimed that the Steele killing had been triggered by Steele making a big deal about Lennie’s listing as number two. The police document said in part: Steele believes the attack was carried out upon him by a gang organised by Leonard Arthur McPherson, a wellknown gunman. The reason for this suspicion on Steele’s behalf is that recently Oz Magazine published an article on Sydney’s top gunmen and named the top ten underworld characters. No 2 on the list being LEN. It further went on that Len, who lives at Gladesville, is a hated man, a police informer. Steele purchased 20 copies of this edition and openly advertised them to McPherson’s associates well knowing that McPherson would be informed of Steele’s verbal attack on him.

The police document revealed that Steele had said ‘in confidence’ that he thought Raymond O’Connor, Stan

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Smith and John Andrew Stuart had carried out the attack and that ‘Lennie McPherson is considered the brains and organiser’ behind these men. ‘It is unlikely that Steele will admit this information in the presence of witnesses or at any subsequent court hearing’, the document concluded. Oz said it was a devastating indictment of the police that the magazine obtained its copy of the internal police minutes from an underworld source. Richard Neville later wrote that after the ‘Oz Underworld Guide’—which described Lennie as ‘a fence and a fizz-gig’—was published and copies were distributed by ‘a known mobster’, he received a visit at his Paddington pad. ‘A bear-like brute came to the door and introduced himself as Lennie McPherson’, Neville wrote. The formidable visitor said he had got Neville’s address from ‘a mate at the university who knows you’. Lennie wanted to see for himself who was behind Oz, said Neville, to make sure it wasn’t a rival gang. (All this because he’d been listed number two!). ‘I’m not a rival gang,’ Richard Neville said. ‘And I’m not a fizz-gig,’ replied Lennie, ‘okay?’ ‘Okay.’ Then Lenny offered to give Neville a lift into the city. He noticed gashes in the roof of the car and the leather upholstery. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Bullet holes,’ replied Lennie laconically. Remarkably, Jacky Steele survived the first impact of the horrific shooting. His body from the shoulders down, front and rear, was riddled with shotgun pellets and bullets from the other weapons. Most of his clothing from below the waist was in tatters. He staggered 200 yards

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down the street and climbed three storeys to his flat before collapsing. His wife opened the flat door and saw her husband, bleeding and clutching his stomach. ‘I’ve been shot,’ he gasped. ‘Call an ambulance.’ She did so and he was taken to nearby St Vincent’s hospital. In the month before he died he became a tabloid media cause célèbre in Sydney, being dubbed ‘Iron Man’ Steele for his gritty fight to survive. He’d made an easy target: most evenings it was his habit to walk to the nearby Nelson Hotel. ‘I have a drink there every night after tea about 8 o’clock,’ he said later from his hospital bed. ‘I noticed a car on the other side of the road. It pulled around and came alongside me. I was a bit dazzled by the lights and looked at the car. I’m sure there were four men in it. Then there was a sheet of fire. They let fly at me with a 12-gauge shotgun and the blast scooped my guts out,’ he said. ‘It doubled me up. I grabbed my guts and started to run towards the flat where I had left my hot squirt [gun].’ Then he graphically explained how the assassins kept at their task. ‘I felt the pellets sting into my body and legs and I started to stagger away. I didn’t feel much pain; I just wanted to get home and get help,’ he told Brian Philips, a reporter from the Sunday Mirror. He would never have been shot, he told the reporter, if he had twigged to the extraordinary stunt Lennie pulled. The car used in the attack looked exactly like— and even displayed the numberplates of—the official car of the head of the police Criminal Investigation Bureau: ‘CIB – 1’ and the occupants were all wearing detectivestyle hats (popular in those days). For a moment Steele assumed that some coppers he was paying graft to were

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around for a talk. Then the shooting started and he realised he was wrong: it was Lennie and his gang in the car, not police, but in that wasted fleeting moment Steele may have been able to remove himself from the line of fire. He would have stopped to talk to coppers, but he would have run for his life if he’d recognised the car’s occupants immediately. It was clever, and typified the way Lennie planned things. It will now never be known whether the car was a perfect clone of the CIB car or whether it was the real thing that some police friendly to Lennie had loaned him for the operation—a distinct possibility. Not all of Steele’s quotes made it to the paper, but Brian was happy to share them with me. Amazingly, Steele was still conscious on his arrival at hospital. It’s a miracle he was still alive: the first shotgun blast ripped a five-inch hole in his lower abdomen. Doctors removed dozens of pellets from his front, then turned him over and started taking out the rest of the bullets: 40 bits of lead had entered his body. Back in his bed, only a few days after they finished operating on him, a chirpy Steele was interviewed and photographed by the media. After one such session he told the photographer that a sawn-off shotgun had been trained on him throughout. The startled photographer looked around the private ward, expecting to see the nozzle of a gun poking out of a ventilator shaft or through the window. Steele laughed and drew the weapon out from under the bedclothes. ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘A mate brought it in for me. You never know, the bastards are likely to have a go at me, even in here.’ He fingered the trigger every time the doorknob moved, he said. The

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nursing staff took a while to get used to it. The News Limited photographer said later in the pub we drank at that he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen the gun. ‘I can’t imagine the staff putting up with that, whatever Jacky said,’ the cameraman told me. Steele’s own criminal record showed he had served a seven-year prison sentence for armed hold-up in Western Australia, five years for safebreaking in Sydney and a further six months for carrying an unlicensed pistol around Kings Cross. As a standover man he came into direct contact—and open competition—with Lennie McPherson. It seems Steele was showing some signs of success in that line of business, so Lennie had to deal with that. There’s not a lot of room for free trade and open markets in the standover business. But the thing that galled Lennie most was Steele’s inflated view that he was—or was about to become—a ‘crime boss’ of Sydney. There wasn’t much room for competition in that egoridden field, either. It was on that basis, no doubt, that Lennie decided to eliminate Steele. The violence used in this assassination obviously enhanced Lennie’s reputation as a powerful protector (or a deadly enemy) in the minds of the many people from whom he—and Steele— had been eliciting protection payments. In the extensive media coverage given to Jacky Steele, Lennie was never mentioned, even under the newspaper-bequeathed moniker of ‘Mr Big’. By then he had reached a degree of immunity from such exposure, having gathered around him a supportive clique of hopelessly compromised journalists who were loyal to him until his death. Like all efficient corporate tycoons, Lennie

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used the media efficiently, calling on his ‘intimates’ in the game whenever he needed some personal publicity, or to plant a damaging story about an opponent (whether another crim, an honest cop or a troublesome politician or judge). And his alliance with Ray Kelly ensured that no police inquiry would result in charges being laid over the murder—at least not against Lennie McPherson. When Jacky Steele finally died from his injuries, Lennie reigned supreme. His hired guns had paid him handsome dividends for what at first looked like being a botched job. This murder was one of the many gangland killings attributed to Lennie and his henchmen. Most of the others were more instant successes. Lennie was reputed to be a great tactician, and the detail he put into the assassination of a troublesome opponent went right down to the detail of the story that compliant police would issue to the media. If that sounds incredible, Lennie and his men had no less than eight rehearsal runs before he was satisfied that they were ready to gun down Jacky Steele. This gem was revealed to me much later by an undercover commonwealth agent who had infiltrated the McPherson camp. Having opponents executed with police immunity greatly strengthened McPherson’s standing among members of the criminal establishment, and gave him the courage to behave even more outrageously in the wake of each successive killing.

To be a successful criminal requires one major prerequisite: don’t get caught. This is a basic—but

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uninsurable—policy. As one learned judge was to tell Lennie later in his life: if you don’t want to go to jail, don’t go around beating people up. But these were Lennie’s peak years, and after a few stints inside, he was looking for insurance that would keep him on the streets for good, beating up whomever he wanted. He had developed one of the required skills early in life: he had become an accomplished informer, a fizz-gig, rat, a squealer. Initially he’d taken on this most unsavoury role to save his own skin, and at times that had worked. As he matured, he realised that fizzing brought with it a close and cooperative association with some of NSW’s most powerful—and bent—police. The better the quality of the information Lennie had to offer about criminal activity, the higher up the corrupt food chain he climbed. And Lennie, not being backward in such matters as survival, understood that here was his insurance policy: here was immunity from prosecution, here was his ‘get out of jail free’ card. Played right, it would last him his lifetime. And it nearly did. Lennie also had to learn a lot about the factions in the New South Wales police force, and in this complex study he took early advice from friends in the right wing of the ALP. Do deals with the Micks, he was told, and dob in the Masons. Factionalism in the force had actually got a bit more complicated than that, but there was a period, up to the 1980s, when the police commissioner’s post was alternated between the Catholics and the Masons (a sheer coincidence, say some). Within each of these larger factions were subgroups of the corrupt and the non-corrupt, the major league and the minor league.

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This created a churning mass of churlish mistrust, vituperative gossip, vindictive punishment and grotesque competition for the spoils of corruption that tainted every facet of the force’s interaction with the community at large. Lennie obviously could ill afford to have dealings with the wrong faction: his was a high-risk game and with it came an unthinkable penalty for losing. Lennie’s intuition led him into a long association with Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly, who had already established himself as a cop who could cut a deal with a crim, as old-timer Charles ‘Paddles’ Anderson could have testified. This link put Lennie off-side with the other major corrupt faction, centred around noxious Herb Talarico and with the likes of the murderous Fred Krahe and Roger Rogerson high in its ranks. But Lennie was with the strength . . . for now. From the mid-1950s, right through for more than a decade, he was having frequent meetings with Ray Kelly and senior members of his team of Criminal Investigation Branch detectives. They would often meet at the Hollywood Hotel, a little backwater pub just a few doors down from the then CIB headquarters in Campbell Street, Surry Hills, a short stroll from the Children’s Court where his career had first been given recognition all those years ago. Other times they would venture over to the Phoenix Hotel on Nelson Street, Woollahra, where the crims and SP bookies would occupy the public bar and the senior cops, journos and other hangers-on would occupy the stools in the saloon bar. There was often a jam of humanity at the adjoining door as a fizz-gig from

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the front bar leaned into the doorway to catch the eye— and ear—of a saloon bar walloper to do a spot of fizzing. When the players began to feel at ease with each other, they would venture out to suburban pubs and clubs to have their parley. Invariably a lot of beer was drunk, and a lot of stories told. By the end of any such session Lennie would have imparted carefully selected items of news from his milieu and the cops would go away confident they could keep the arrest rate looking good enough across a range of crimes to stop bothersome politicians and nosy journalists asking questions. The cooperation between Lennie and Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly reached a dizzying peak in an incident that helped send a man to the gallows. Ronald Ryan, aged 40, was serving a nine-year sentence in Melbourne’s Pentridge jail for armed burglary. Peter Walker, 24, was in the same jail serving 12 months for armed robbery. With Melbourne sweltering in a hot northerly wind on Sunday 19 December 1965, their elaborate plan to escape to freedom went into action just after 2 pm. In their escape bid a prison warder, George Henry Hodson, 41, was shot dead. But Ryan and Walker were free. They had used a prison chaplain, the Salvation Army’s Brigadier James Hewitt, as a shield when they broke out from the exercise yard in Pentridge’s ‘B’ Division in what early media reports described as a ‘commando-style raid’. They had grappled with Hodson, a warder for eight years, outside the prison walls on busy Sydney Road, Coburg. At the time no one disputed the version of events in which the escapees shot Hodson dead.

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During the next 18 days, until they were recaptured, Ryan and Walker made banner headlines day after day. Their names became household words in the country that glorifies Ned Kelly. Police leave was cancelled in Melbourne as a massive manhunt got under way, but it is clear the police didn’t have a clue where they were. While CIB Chief Inspector Frank Holland, 50, directed the search, scouring every bordello and backwater pub in the metropolitan area (‘We think the two men are now sheltering with women friends’) the pair were hiding out for about 12 days in the lonely Strzelecki Ranges southeast of Melbourne. While planning and executing a sortie into suburban Ormond to rob £4500 from a branch of the ANZ bank to fund their escape, they worked out their master plan—they would flee to Rio! There was no extradition agreement between Australia and Brazil: it would be a safe haven for them. They figured, reasonably, they would need forged passports to get them out of Australia and in to the land of their dreams. But they were hot property. A man who they thought would turn them in, tow-truck driver Arthur Henderson, had died when a pistol went off in a scuffle with Walker (who was later sentenced to 19 years for the manslaughter) and Ryan had been accused of murdering the dead prison warder. Sitting in their hideout in the hills, Ryan and Walker figured that only one man in Australia was powerful enough to help them get their phoney passports—they had to go to Sydney to see Lennie McPherson. The pair arrived in Sydney on Sunday 2 January 1966, after the long drive from Victoria. They had

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from their bank robbery a veritable swag of twoshilling pieces, so they filled their car with petrol only at night, feeding the florins into automatic coinoperated pumps. At one such service station they were filling the car when a police patrol car pulled up. While they waited for their turn at the pump, the policemen had a polite chat with the convicts. Little did they know they were exchanging pleasantries with Australia’s two most wanted men. Local media reported that in Melbourne police had been as active as ever. New Year’s Eve parties across the city were raided by police carrying ‘projectiles’ (believed to be police jargon for ammunition for their various weapons), shotguns and pistols; police cars laden with tear gas bombs and spare ammunition stood outside the premises of many parties. ‘Every ship is being watched and all channels out of the country have been shut,’ said Inspector Holland. But the birds had already flown Victoria. In Sydney Ryan and Walker went straight to a pub in the eastern suburbs where they knew they could make contact with some criminals. They were received warmly into the group. One man, Harold Murray, said he would provide safe accommodation for them. A criminal associate of Murray later told the author of some of the arrangements and conversations that he had witnessed that took place over the next few days. Another man got on the phone and, after some muted conversation, returned to the bar and told Ryan and Walker that he had arranged an appointment for them with Lennie the next day at Lennie’s Gladesville house.

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They kept that appointment. Lennie told them that passports and tickets to Brazil could be arranged but it would cost them £5000 each. Ryan did not let on at that stage that he had less than half that much cash. They had another meeting with Lennie the following day, Tuesday, when they were to see a person ‘prominent in political circles’ who would make the arrangements for their passports. After this meeting Ryan remarked to their temporary landlord Harold Murray: ‘Christ, you’d never guess how high we’ve been today!’ They had told the politician that they didn’t have enough money, but would stay in Sydney and ‘pull a couple of jobs’ to raise the cash. With a bit of luck they would be out of the country within a week. They also made arrangements to move into their own flat, and paid advance rent on a small apartment near the University of New South Wales in suburban Kensington. It was all wasted effort. The politician told Lennie that Ryan and Walker planned to stay around for a while to raise the money. The alternative was that they wouldn’t get their passports and there would be no ten thousand quid to split up. But Lennie figured the odds were not good. He certainly didn’t want these two desperadoes running loose in his territory. A little bit of freelance activity he could tolerate now and then, but having a couple like Ryan and Walker around pulling a series of armed robberies he could well do without. So Lennie exercised his well-practised skill of informing. He got on to his old mate Ray Kelly, who only months earlier had been promoted to the rank of Detective Inspector, and told him of the presence in Sydney of Ryan and Walker and their plans for the next day or so.

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Kelly mounted an elaborate exercise using some 50 heavily armed detectives and arrested Ryan and Walker the next night, 6 January. The criminals had driven their big American sedan with Queensland numberplates to the Repatriation Hospital at Concord, west of the city. They were to meet a woman there. Ryan said later that if it hadn’t been for Walker’s weakness for women they would never have been caught. They would have, of course: Lennie would have seen to it. As their car pulled up and Ryan got out and walked to a telephone box, detectives hiding in trees and behind the hospital’s front wall tightened their fingers on the triggers of shotguns, rifles and pistols. The telephone had deliberately been put out of order, so Ryan walked across the road to a shop and asked to use the phone. Police had instructed the man to say his phone, too, was out of order. As Ryan left the shop Kelly gave the nod and five or six heavy detectives tackled the criminal. As he went down a loaded .32 calibre pistol clattered to the footpath. At the same moment Detective Sergeant Fred Krahe poked a shotgun through the window of the car at Walker’s temple. He surrendered without protest. Freedom for this notorious pair of gangsters was over. They were extradited back to Melbourne and Ryan was tried for the murder of the prison warder. He was found guilty and was hanged by the neck until dead at Pentridge jail early in the morning on 3 February 1967— the last person in Australia to endure the savagery of capital punishment. Later a story emerged that Hodson was killed in crossfire from another warder in one of the watchtowers,

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but for now, Ryan was labelled a cold-blooded murderer. He denied to the last that he had fired the fatal shot. Thirteen people later gave sworn evidence that they only heard one shot fired during the escape, and a prison warder, Robert Paterson, swore that he had fired one shot but he’d also heard another. He was the only one who did. Paterson later committed suicide. So it was easier all round to fit Ryan with this murder, rather than entertain the thought that warder Hodson may have been shot by a wild bullet from Paterson’s gun. And when you’ve been fitted with the murder of a prison warder, of all hallowed beings, you are hot property! The coup for Ray Kelly had left Melbourne’s Chief Inspector Frank Holland somewhat flat-footed. Right up to the moment of the arrests the full-scale manhunt proceeded in Victoria. He was quoted 24 hours earlier saying he believed they were close to grabbing the escapees who were ‘about to crack under the strain of mounting police pressure’. Holland said he would make the capture in Melbourne because ‘I can’t tolerate criminals, people who associate with criminals or those who make heroes of them.’ After the arrests in Sydney Holland moved to save face, saying the Melbourne and Sydney CIBs had worked in close cooperation, and that the extensive search activities were maintained in Melbourne to give the pair a false sense of security that they were safe in Sydney. Few believed the line, but it didn’t matter: it was Ray Kelly’s win, and Holland was irrelevant to the story. Ray Kelly was heaped with adulation. He told a press conference that he’d found out that Ryan and Walker

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were in Sydney from ‘reliable underworld information’. When pressed by reporters as to the identity of the informant he explained it was a senior executive of a large organisation! The regular police rounds reporters, invariably on close terms with the cops, did not press the point. One, Bill Jenkings of the Daily Mirror, who provided me with much of the detail of this account, told me that Kelly had confidentially (that is, ‘off the record, not for publication’) confirmed to him that Lennie had not only tipped him (Kelly) off but had kept him fully informed of the escapees’ movements from the moment of their arrival in Sydney. But that information has never before appeared in print. Lennie the Pig had squealed again and this time they hanged a man because of it. In his think piece on the arrests the Sydney Morning Herald’s features writer Bob Rice wrote: Public reputations are not easily made in the New South Wales Police Force, but Ray Kelly has made one. He is a hunter, and what’s more he looks like one. There is something vaguely serpentine about his face: the flat, glossy hair, the slit mouth and gleaming eyes all put one in mind of a genial python.

5 THE MURDERS GO ON: DEATH IN THE LATIN QUARTER IN JANUARY 1966, a couple of weeks after the Ryan/Walker arrests, Ray Kelly retired. He would no doubt have thought the highly publicised case had capped a brilliant career. He would also have been content that the unique relationship he had worked so hard to develop between the political arm, the police and leading criminals was now firmly entrenched. Bob (later Sir Robert) Askin had been NSW Premier for less than eight months, and he had proven most supportive of Kelly’s style of law enforcement. Within the force were a number of senior officers Kelly had hand-picked for promotions, all of whom had established working relationships with leaders of the criminal milieu. None of them had quite the style and flair of Kelly—as veteran police roundsman Ced Culbert once said to me, ‘When they made Ray Kelly, they broke the mould.’ But they would keep ‘the system’ running smoothly. High on Kelly’s list for succession into his leading role would have been Roger Rogerson and Fred Krahe, [ 103 ]

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and it was to the former the baton was believed to have been passed. Kelly would have seen Rogerson as a ruthless, tough cop, lacking in Kelly’s ‘rat cunning’, maybe, but certainly a man who could wield the type of power needed to stay on top of the potent blend of criminal activity, police action and political survival games. So Kelly moved on to the private sector, and (as I reported on the ABC some years later) became partowner of an illegal gaming casino at West Gosford, on the NSW Central Coast. Inside the force, Rogerson became McPherson’s main point of contact. But Rogerson did not appear to have the absolute control and respect of junior officers that Ray Kelly had possessed, and that enabled an embarrassing (for Lennie) slip-up to occur. In July 1966 Lennie and Stan Smith took a sea cruise to Japan, with a number of stopovers at far eastern ports. Some alert person in the NSW police performed the basic and reasonably intelligent duty of letting the police in each port to be visited know in advance that the two undesirables were on board. Typical of the response to this action was the following reply from police in Hong Kong, a document later to enter the public realm through the Moffitt Royal Commission: A couple of my detective officers did have an opportunity to talk to them [McPherson and Smith] at various times whilst the ship was in port . . . They seemed rather proud of their criminal background and somewhat boastfully admitted that although they had come to Hong Kong purely for a holiday they would have seized any opportunity to get in on the ‘big time’ (as they put it) smuggling gold and narcotics. They had letters of introduction to some shady characters here who certainly would have been able

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to lend assistance one way or another. They seemed to have a particular interest in prostitution and the type of vice associated with it—one of the said letters was addressed to a person involved in that sort of thing. However, what really interests me is whether there is any real danger of some organisation being set up to smuggle narcotics. I do not think so but one cannot be too careful—it is a very lucrative field and is one that might well attract people of McPherson and Smith’s calibre. I think we thwarted (and I am most grateful for your timely warning) their peregrinations in that direction, but I will try to keep a close eye on trends so that developments can be nipped in the bud.

It was a fine example of cooperation between police that helped restrain a couple of criminals in their push into new markets in South-East Asia. It had been triggered at a clerical level, and would never have happened had the senior police—particularly Roger Rogerson, who tended to Lennie’s interests—been alert to the correspondence. During this period Lennie was granted an extraordinary favour by the state justice minister, John Clarkson Maddison, then the MP for Hornsby, who came into this portfolio with Askin’s victory at the state election in May 1965. Maddison, I was later told by one of the minister’s own senior staffers, gave the nod to Lennie to make at least two private visits (meaning that no warders would be present) to prison inmates in their cells, where he conducted ‘kangaroo courts’ in which he tried, convicted and sentenced people to death. The visits were to Parramatta jail, where his close associate Billy Walsh (alias Kruger) was serving a life sentence. Lennie and Walsh called in the accused and a number of inmates to serve as ‘witnesses’. Lennie then

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read the charges (treachery voiced towards himself) and after hearing ‘evidence’—consisting mainly of the ‘witnesses’ nodding fearful assent at Lennie’s pointed accusations—and a brief statement from the accused, pronounced sentence. There was no donning of the black head cloth by the judge as occurred in real courts when death sentences were being handed down, but sentences pronounced by Lennie at these ‘trials’ were quickly carried out—and there was no process of appeal. One person ‘tried’ by this quasi-judicial wing of the criminal society was a certain ‘Ducky’ O’Connor, another of those foolish egomaniacs who had made it clearly known that he intended to take over control of the crime empire from Lennie. To this end O’Connor formed an alliance with another Lennie hater, criminal Chicka Reeves, who frequently boasted that it was his life’s ambition to kill Big Lennie. Other prisoners were summonsed to Walsh’s cell, as was O’Connor. ‘Judge’ Lennie explained in simple terms to invited prisoners that they were there as witnesses, and that O’Connor was the person who stood accused of ‘conspiring with Chicka Reeves to knock me’. After listening briefly to O’Connor’s protestations—and with neither Walsh nor witnesses called upon to give any evidence— Lennie pronounced the death sentence on O’Connor. One of the ‘witnesses’ spoke at length, many times, with this author after his release and this was among the remarkable stories he told. O’Connor’s death sentence was carried out in a nightclub at 250 Pitt Street, a short block away from

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Sydney Town Hall. The Latin Quarter opened in 1959, operated by flashy former Canadian Sammy Lee and the spectacular gambler, Reg Boom. It was among the first of the ‘new wave’ of theatre restaurants to pop up in Sydney during the late 1950s, most of which openly flouted the highly restrictive liquor laws of the times. The Latin Quarter was styled on Las Vegas nightclubs: semicircular banquettes (padded seating and tables) around the perimeter, smaller tables scattered across the floor, all overlooked by an elevated platform where ‘Las Vegas Style Cabarets’ were staged into the small hours, with a chorus line of scantily clad high-kickers and the inevitable comic act (frequently Norman Erskine, a corny Aussie entertainer who scratched out a living at nightclubs, and a close associate of SP bookmaker and McPherson ally George Freeman). The lights were dim, the music loud and jazzy, the dance routines corny but colourful and the illicit grog available in unlimited quantities at premium prices, all under the glistening reflections from a huge glitter-ball rotating slowly near the high, black ceiling. It was at this pulsating scene, exactly three months after his release, at about 3.10 am on 28 May 1967, that Ducky O’Connor made an appearance. He came into lively company: at one table sat Lennie McPherson with a couple of friends: Jackie Clark and a criminal called Williams. At another was Detective Sergeant Morrie Wild of the CIB and another detective. The details of what happened next belong in the territory of urban myth. There are a few versions of the extraordinary events which saw O’Connor gunned down in full public view,

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all cuts of the story sharing the common factor that no charges were ever laid. The ‘official’ or police version emerged at the inquiry by City Coroner Jim Loomes, mainly from the evidence of Detective Sergeant Wild. This version has O’Connor coming into the club and standing next to Lennie’s table. With the high-kicker show over for the night and loud canned music taking its place, the crowd began to thin out at around 3.25 am, said the policeman. The throng ‘blocked the police view of the McPherson table,’ he said. Then: ‘A shot rang out. I drew my gun and pushed my way through the crowd to the table.’ Wild said he saw O’Connor lying on the floor with a bullet wound in the head, clearly dead. Beside him were two pistols, a .25 and a .32 calibre, later found to be ‘wiped clean of fingerprints’ (an act performed with the aid, quipped the Daily Mirror, of what must surely be ‘the world’s fastest hankie’). The policeman told Coroner Loomes that he’d instructed McPherson and his two companions to sit down and place their hands on the table. He said McPherson told him that O’Connor had approached their table, pulled a gun and said: ‘Here’s yours!’ One of McPherson’s friends grappled with O’Connor, grabbing his arm, and in the struggle for the gun O’Connor (said Wild) ‘sort of shot himself ’. Wild said the .25 calibre piece was 30 centimetres from O’Connor’s right hand, the other pistol about 120 centimetres away with a bullet jammed in the breach. It’s interesting to note that Wild did not mention by name the pair sitting with Lennie.

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One woman provided an unusual titbit of evidence at the inquiry. She was sitting at a table near Lennie’s party, she said. Just before the shooting, she told the coroner, she saw McPherson drop a small pistol to the floor, and remembered having said to him: ‘That’s a funny thing to drop.’ In the end the coroner agreed with the police version and found that O’Connor had died ‘by his own hand’ and no charges were laid. The ‘unofficial’ version—much more colourful and probably more credible—was told to the author by Sammy Lee himself. Just before the shooting Lee had been brutally beaten outside the club, and after the murder he received death threats. He decided to take a break overseas, hoping for things to settle down. Just before he left the country a fortnight after the O’Connor shooting, he told me a different version of the events of 28 May. I was visiting him as part of my rounds exploring the possibilities of establishing an independent restaurant cum gig guide, having got to know Lee when I had previously had been responsible for the weekly wining and dining section published by the Daily Mirror. He told me that when O’Connor arrived at the nightclub, a person Sammy claimed he didn’t know rose from his place at a table and instructed O’Connor to sit on the curved bench seat next to another stranger seated there. The first man then resumed his seat, O’Connor now sandwiched between the two men. Lennie, who was seated at a nearby table, took a concealed revolver he was carrying out of its holster, crept under the table where O’Connor was seated and then fired off a couple of shots,

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before throwing the gun away and returning to his table. ‘That much is true,’ Sammy Lee swore to me. There is one final detail which may or may not be true about the urban myth that ultimately grew around this extraordinary episode. It is alleged that O’Connor actually saw Lennie approach his table and crawl under it, but he was powerless to do anything to save himself. Many believe that he had been purposely seated between two burly detectives—and they were actually sitting on his hands! In another kangaroo court session at Parramatta, Lennie accused Maurice Bernard (Barney) Ryan of ‘threatening to knock me’. Ryan desperately protested his innocence and was let off with a warning that he must not make any more threats. ‘One more word about knocking me and you’re off, within three months of getting out,’ Lennie warned Ryan, who walked around for the balance of his sentence like a man on his way to the gallows. Ryan made it known he wanted to apologise for his silliness: he was virtually trying to lodge an appeal against the suspended sentence. Lennie travelled out to Parramatta again to rehear the pleadings. Judge Lennie (one of the ‘witnesses’ later told me) said he agreed that his sentence may have been a bit harsh and said he would let Ryan off with a warning to be of good behaviour— more or less a bond. Whether the ‘judge’ in this case suffered from a bad memory or was simply lying is not quite clear, but it was three months to the day after Barney Ryan’s release that he was gunned down by four men who hid in the shrubbery at Ryan’s home after dark,

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awaiting his arrival. Each of them was acting on Lennie’s instructions to ‘empty your guns into the bastard’. My informant, who had been told by Lennie he had to ‘serve’ as a ‘witness’ in the Parramatta jail ‘hearings’ later told me that Barney Ryan had been mates with Chicka Reeves and Ducky O’Connor, and knew he was doomed after O’Connor was shot at the Latin Quarter. The gunmen obeyed their instructions, but police investigating the gunning—once again—could find ‘no motive or clues’ to help them resolve the case.

On rare occasions a copper with the appropriate seniority who was not in the ‘corruption loop’ got promoted to a sensitive position in the force. A case in point was Detective Sergeant Leslie Howard Chowne, who took over as head of the consorting squad in the late 1960s, and did as well as he could in the face of fierce internal opposition to use the full extent of the consorting laws to ‘clean up the crims’. A rule of thumb used by police when charging a person under the consorting laws was to produce evidence of at least eight meetings with three or four criminals over a six-month period. Each sighting was a consorting booking, and when there were enough bookings, the target would be charged. But the law did allow a target to be booked for meeting with only one criminal, and there were plenty of times Lennie was ‘warned’—as distinct from being booked—about mixing with other criminals. Without doubt, if police had been more vigilant, or more interested, Lennie could have

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served a number of jail sentences on consorting charges and even have been declared an habitual criminal. Under Chowne the pressure was applied to a number of men in Lennie’s coterie. What eventuated provides a good insight into the type of men who made up the board of directors of Crime Australia Inc. at this time. In the dock at Central Court, Sydney, on 2 December 1968 was one George Petricevic, then 23, described as a steward who lived at New South Head Road, Edgecliff. He was better known in the world of crime as Ironbar Miller, a nickname he earned for his oft-demonstrated psychopathic use of an iron bar in vicious attacks, mainly on the kneecaps of victims of his violence. He pleaded guilty to habitually consorting with known criminals in Sydney between 12 June and 8 November 1968. Detective Sergeant Chowne had arrested him on 8 November and had shown him a list stating the places, times and dates he had allegedly been seen with criminals. Chowne told the court that he knew all the men named on the list. ‘They are active, dangerous criminals,’ he told Magistrate John Teece. ‘Leonard Arthur McPherson needs no introduction to this community. He is an organiser of crime and has been arrested on a murder charge. He, Clark and Williams were in the Latin Quarter when Raymond O’Connor was shot. Stanley Smith, also on the list, is a standover man and an international shoplifter. John Edward Clark, also on the list, would be one of the worst criminals in this State.’ (Clark was shot dead in 1974.) ‘This person Petricevic would be of the calibre of the persons set out in this list,’ continued Chowne. The detective told the court that all the

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men mentioned had been charged with murder and had been acquitted. In addition to those already mentioned, the list included the names of criminals John and George Southern, Augustus Adams and John Williams. John Teece accepted Ironbar’s guilty plea as being a fair and accurate view of the charge, and sent him off to Long Bay for three months’ hard labour. Then it was Lennie’s turn to feel the strength of Chowne’s resolve. In January 1969 the policeman laid charges against Lennie that he had knowingly consorted with criminals between 7 June 1968 and 4 January 1969. It was the long summer vacation for the legal fraternity, and Lennie, then aged 47, was not represented in court. He asked magistrate Murray Farquhar for a one-month remand so he could appear with his solicitor and a barrister. The police prosecutor, Sergeant Greg Field, opposed the long adjournment and asked the magistrate to stand the matter over for no longer than two weeks. Police were ready to proceed, he said. Farquhar compromised between the two requests and remanded the matter for three weeks, until 29 January, releasing Lennie on bail of $80. Back in court on that date a slight adjustment was made to the dates in the consorting charges. But now, appearing before magistrate Jim Featherstone, it was the police who sought the adjournment. In contrast with their previous eagerness to proceed with the case, police now appeared anxious to put off the hearing. Police prosecutor Sergeant Dennis Millard said police had no fear that McPherson would not appear at a later date if granted bail. Lennie’s lawyer, Andrew Leary, said that his client was in regular employment (at the Balmain

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‘motel’) and that he had lived in the same house for 20 years. If granted bail, said Leary, his client would certainly appear when required. Featherstone, SM, remanded the case until 19 March and granted Lennie bail of $100. Despite the carefully documented charges, Lennie was somehow—and quite mysteriously—only punished with a slap on the wrist. His case was remanded a second time, and finally, on 25 June 1969, it was listed in the court of bent magistrate Murray Farquhar. No less a figure than Detective Sergeant Frank Charlton of the consorting squad then offered the court his view that he did not think there was any evidence to link McPherson with organised crime. Magistrate Farquhar nodded sagely and fined Lennie a token $100. Meanwhile, in less venal parts of the judicial system, other criminals were being given jail sentences on consorting charges. Whether this surprising turn of events was orchestrated on the initiative of Lennie’s tried and true friends in the police force is not known. If it was concocted within the realms of the state government, then it is clear that Lennie’s influence in that area recognised none of the normal impediments of party politics. For, between the dropping of the Hackett murder charge and the wristslap for the less serious but jailable consorting charges, the NSW government had changed from Labor control to the long reign of the conservatives under genial Bob Askin, who had now been in power for almost four years. Lennie seemed to be prospering as comfortably under the Libs as he had under the Labs.

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MURRAY FARQUHAR: CROOKED MAGISTRATE Murray Frederick Farquhar was one of those pillars of society: a magistrate, and later Chief Stipendiary Magistrate, in Australia’s most populous state. Unfortunately the society of which he was a pillar was corrupt. He was a part of the bent judicial process of New South Wales which had always existed but flourished into full bloom during and after the years of Sir Robert Askin’s premiership. Farquhar was born in Broken Hill in 1918 and after an unimpressive education at the local high school and military service in World War II, he studied law, became a solicitor and was appointed magistrate in 1962, then Chief Stipendiary Magistrate in 1971. His public reputation began to seriously unravel when, in July 1977, Farquhar was photographed in the members’ enclosure at Randwick racecourse with a couple of criminals: George David Freeman and his doctor Nick Paltos, who was already known to police and later convicted for a massive cannabis importation. When this story broke, the Chief Magistrate refused to answer questions put to him by justice department investigators about his association with the criminals. The Wran government’s initial response was to transfer Farquhar from the magistracy to a created full-time position as government adviser on drugs and alcohol. But more exposures and some tenacious journalism—particularly from the ABC’s Chris Masters—finally forced the government to give up its politically damaging defence of Farquhar, and he faced

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the courts. In 1985 he was convicted on a charge of perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years in jail. He was released after serving exactly ten months. While the consorting case was bubbling merrily along, Lennie was again mentioned in a court case involving criminals. On 13 February 1969 two Maltese migrants were charged with the car-bomb murder nearly a year earlier of the notorious vice king Joe Borg. They were Paul Mifsud (alias Paul Zammit), 29, a waiter of Annandale, and Paul Attard, 24, a painter and docker of Newtown. Another man, 50-year-old habitual criminal Joe Condon O’Brien, who went by the name of Keith Keillor, was charged with inciting Mifsud and Attard to murder Borg. In a spectacular assassination, Borg—who ran an extensive string of brothels in Palmer Street and the East Sydney laneways—had been blown to bits when he turned the ignition key of his car in Brighton Boulevarde, Bondi, on 28 May 1968, setting off a bomb planted under the bonnet. Keillor was to be treated by the justice system very differently to his two co-charged men, for Keillor, dubbed ‘the Jitterbug Kid’, was a police informer—and an acquaintance of Leonard Arthur McPherson. At the time he was charged, Keillor was in Long Bay jail on remand on a stabbing charge, unable to raise the required bail of $750. Detective Sergeant Les Bates, remarkably, told the court that Keillor had offered to assist police with their inquiries, if he could be released on bail. David Hickie reported in The Prince and the Premier the next

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extraordinary development: ‘Bates took Keillor from Long Bay jail to Central Court and his bail was reduced to $200. Policeman Bates then telephoned criminal Lennie McPherson and asked him to post the $200 bond for Keillor, which McPherson did. After thanking McPherson personally, Keillor worked as a police spy on the Borg case.’ Detective Sergeant Bates said Keillor claimed he was ‘the meat in the bloody sandwich’ because rival gangs were after him because he had ‘squealed to the police’. Keillor, Bates told the court, had instructed the other two in bomb-making, including how to make the kind of bomb that eventually blew up Borg’s car. The three had had meetings at various inner suburban hotels and at the home of a fourth person known to Keillor—who boasted explosives skills in his curriculum vitae—where there was talk of four types of fuses. Keillor allegedly told police that he’d met Mifsud and Attard at the Rex Hotel a couple of days after Borg’s murder and Mifsud had said: ‘What do you think, Jitterbug? The bomb so good.’ Keillor asked what they had used, to which Mifsud said: ‘First we have six sticks [of gelignite], then we add three more. We make sure. We also put some nuts and bolts in the bomb.’ Mifsud and Attard were charged on the basis of Keillor’s evidence. Mifsud and Attard were given life sentences, while Keillor was sent down for seven years. Despite believing he was a ‘dead man walking’ because his collaboration with police had been publicly revealed by Detective Sergeant Bates, Keillor survived to serve out his sentence. Little more was heard of him again.

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Detective Sergeant Chowne’s attempts to use the consorting laws to break up Lennie and his gang of thugs, murderers, drug pushers, illegal bookies, standover merchants, pimps, bludgers and shoplifters came to a somewhat abrupt end in 1970 when he was moved out of the consorting squad and replaced by Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill. Conspiracy theorists will want me to tell them that Chowne was moved sideways in a major, corrupt, political power play. Sadly, that does not appear to be the case: the promotions of Chowne out of Consorting and McNeill to head the squad were, on paper at least, purely routine. An ex-cop who was in the force at the time confirmed to me recently that, as far as he knew, there was nothing untoward about these moves. Indeed Chowne, he told me, went on through the ranks to become Superintendent before retiring gracefully. But it was certainly a big win for Lennie. One of the first things McNeill did—according to later evidence from both McNeill and McPherson to the Moffitt inquiry—was have a talk to Lennie to set down some ground rules about where—and where not—the criminal was to be seen. Lennie claimed McNeill had said to him: ‘There is a lot of complaints coming in about this. Not about you. I know the other fellows before me gave you a rough time and I don’t intend to lean on you.’ That conversation, according to the criminal, took place within the first six months of McNeill being in charge of the squad. Before that, while Detective Sergeant Chowne was still in charge, Ballard and another policeman had seen him in a club in North Sydney, Lennie

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claimed, and said to him: ‘You know the gloves are off, don’t you? The gloves are off from here on in. Detective Chowne wants you out of the way and he’s the boss and we are going to give you the treatment.’ But it wasn’t Lennie who was got out of the way: it was Chowne. McNeill took over and the kid gloves were back on again. The epoch of Ray Kelly had passed and Lennie McPherson was still riding high. His nemesis Chowne was off the scene and off his case and Lennie had developed an excellent working arrangement with the new head of consorting, Jack McNeill. Lennie was nudging ‘the big five-O’, a time of crisis for many men. But for Mr Big of the Sydney crime scene, life was just great.

6 FUNNIEST STANDOVER MAN IN THE BUSINESS IN 1973, AS we shall see, NSW Premier Robert Askin, under intense political pressure, announced that a royal commission would be held to investigate allegations of criminal activity in NSW registered clubs—the ‘poker machine palaces’—and infiltration of the industry by organised crime figures. It was to be headed by Supreme Court Judge Athol Moffitt. Much of our understanding of how Lennie and the police were operating in the early 1970s is based on the evidence they subsequently gave to the Moffitt Royal Commission. Here then is Lennie’s recollection to the Moffitt inquiry of his initial conversation with the new head of the consorting squad, Jack McNeill, who had just taken over from Les Chowne: ‘McNeill said he could not tell me where to go, but he could tell me where not to go. This is when I was having my talk to him about [Detective Sergeant Brian] Ballard. He said: “I cannot tell you where to go, but if you go anywhere you are not wanted, I want you to keep away from there”, and I have done that.’ [ 120 ]

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One of the places McNeill told him to keep away from was the controversial 33 Club, a highly popular, highly illegal gambling casino owned by one Mick Moylan at 33 Oxford Street, just to the east of Sydney’s Central Business District. Incredibly wealthy, Moylan lived in a luxurious apartment at Elizabeth Bay, overlooking Sydney Harbour, drove a late-model Rolls Royce with a gold ‘MM’ monogram on each front door, and reputedly had arrived in Sydney in 1964 flat broke. He died on 18 October 1973, aged 63, when, not long after returning from an overseas trip, a bad coughing attack brought on a fatal heart attack. He left a widow, son and daughter, a $25 000 racehorse and the lucrative gaming casino which attracted police, politicians, newspaper executives and even a judge or two among its regular clientele of players of roulette, craps, blackjack, chemin de fer and other banned gambling activities. The plush, chandeliered 33 Club was for a long time the most blatant of Sydney’s illegal casinos, although it was certainly not the only one operating. And here was a senior policeman, Jack McNeill, making arrangements on behalf of its owner about who should—and should not—go there. ‘McPherson used to go to the 33 Club a lot,’ McNeill told the Moffitt Royal Commission. ‘We have no power in these places. He has not gone there for some years because in 1971 I told him he was not to go there.’ He did that, he said, to ‘put an end to McPherson’s standover tactics’ at the club. ‘Although I have no proof of it, it was generally conceded that there was extensive gambling there, and I could not see where gambling, associated with a man of his background and reputation,

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should go hand in glove. I spoke to Mick Moylan, who was then the proprietor of the place, and I told him I did not think it was proper that McPherson should go there. I asked him about McPherson’s association with the place and he denied that McPherson had any interest in it or was getting any money out of it.’ McNeill said he told McPherson he had ‘carte blanche’ entry into two licensed clubs. One was the Northside Polonia Soccer Club, of which arrangement McNeill said: ‘That was conditional on him going there with his wife, and as far as I am concerned he could go there with another man—who had a criminal background—provided the man had his wife with him, for just a social evening.’ The ‘other man’ would be any of Lennie’s closer associates, generally Stan Smith or George Freeman. The chief of the consorting squad did not see it as an act of consorting for Lennie to go—with his blessing—to a place with another known criminal. The second club was the outer suburban Sutherland United Services Club, where they ‘have a concert every Sunday’ and where, said McNeill, McPherson could be found ‘at any time.’ McNeill would have known this for sure—after all, he frequented this club himself. McNeill told McPherson that off-limits were the Associated Motor Club and the Mandarin Club, where the management had indicated they did not want him there ‘so I passed that on to him too,’ McNeill told Judge Moffitt. The South Sydney Junior Leagues Club was also put on the ‘no visiting rights’ list. ‘Sergeant Chowne laid it down in the first place, and I continued it,’ he explained. ‘About the time I took over the squad, [pres-

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ident of the club] Wally Dean and [former policeman] Murray Riley were running around the town like hoodlums, and I was suspicious of South Sydney Juniors.’ Lennie McPherson had a very close relationship with ‘hoodlum’ Wally Dean, who for many years was president of the Souths Juniors club. As a young lad Wally had been an apprentice barber who grew up to have his own barber shop in Redfern, and back in the good old days used to cut Lennie’s hair. In mid-1971, Sunday Telegraph journalist Cliff Neville was following up some leads that all was not well out at Souths Juniors and that President Wally Dean was milking cash from the club using front companies. That was two years before Dean was forced to admit it at the Moffitt Royal Commission. Neville checked out his information as best he could and then personally confronted Dean with the allegations. In the club’s plush boardroom Dean (predictably) denied any impropriety. The next day the reporters’ office at the Telegraph received a phone call from Lennie. Neville was out at the time, so Lennie left a message. Now McPherson, who days previously had been telling another journalist that he didn’t have any links with the clubs, was saying that he’d heard the newspaper was ‘looking over’ Souths Juniors, and gave his personal assurance that there was ‘nothing crook’ going on. He extended an invitation to Neville to go out to the club again ‘and I will see you [the newspaper] have full access to the club’s records’. Neville no doubt thought that it would not assist his investigation to have a noted criminal giving him assurances that all was well. And he found that—as with

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so much investigative journalism in those days— provable facts were hard to come by. The story he wrote was published without names and hard data, but he retained his files and assisted me and others in our later inquiries. Journalist Bob Bottom, for many years a tireless investigator of crime and corruption, had faced the usual problems of naming names in many tough stories. In mid-1971 he had started his own inquiry into allegations that criminals were infiltrating clubs and had written a page-three story in the Sunday Telegraph on 25 July that year headed ‘Crims Grab Clubs’. It did not carry his by-line. Though no people’s names were used in the published version, Bottom had been able to report that clubs which had come under criminal control or influence were South Sydney Juniors, South Sydney Seniors at Redfern, the Associated Motor Club and the Northside Polonia Soccer Club, and that a ‘Mr Big’ of Sydney crime was involved. Bottom’s (unpublished) information was that Lennie was the leading criminal involved in the deliberate and organised infiltration of the club world and intimidation of elected club officials. His story seemed to arouse little interest at first—not even a single phone call from police to follow up on such serious allegations. But about two weeks later Bottom received a phone call at the newspaper office. He took a detailed note of the conversation. This is what was said: ‘Is that Bob Bottom?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I have a few words to say to you—you are the man

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who wrote that story about me in the Sunday Tele?’ ‘What story?’ ‘That story about me taking over the clubs. This is Lennie McPherson here. You know who I am.’ ‘I know the story you are referring to, but how do you know I wrote it?’ ‘I’ve been told, that’s all. I’m not saying who told me. I know.’ ‘How do you know you have the right information? There was no name on it. It could have been written by any number of reporters.’ ‘Do you reckon somebody might have given me your name to cause trouble?’ ‘I don’t know, but for your information I didn’t write the article and I would like to know how my name came to be mentioned,’ said Bottom, understandably going through the very proper journalistic exercise of protecting the anonymity of the author—even though it was himself. ‘I won’t tell you who told me. You wouldn’t tell me where you get your information from.’ ‘I understand that, but I would suggest you make sure of your source.’ ‘What, do you think somebody might have given me your name just to sool me on to you?’ ‘I don’t know, but it could be.’ ‘What, do you think somebody might be using me, then? Has somebody got the knife into you?’ ‘Not that I know of. But I know that for stories of this kind we don’t put the reporter’s name on them for the reason they don’t get threats.’

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Lennie then switched to the subject matter of the story, saying: ‘It was all wrong, whoever wrote that bloody stuff. I haven’t taken over any clubs. But I couldn’t if I wanted to. The police see to that. They won’t even let me into clubs. If I can’t get in I couldn’t take them over, could I?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Bottom. ‘Why aren’t you allowed into clubs?’ ‘It’s the police. It’s the Consorting Act,’ moaned the criminal. ‘I’ve been to see superintendents and they say I’m all right but when I go to the door of a club the young cops stop me. All my complaining to the superintendents does no good—I can’t go anywhere without them bouncing me. That’s why I get upset when I read articles like that one the other weekend. Every time they appear, saying Mr Big’s doing it, the police are out here straight away, putting the pressure on, asking me all about it. The police are on to me now about this club business and I’m telling you, it’s not me at all. As I said, I can’t even go into clubs. ‘Anytime a newspaper says Mr Big, everybody says it’s me,’ continued Lennie. ‘My young son came home from school the other day and said: “Dad, are you Mr Big?” I didn’t know what to say. I told him no, I wasn’t, but some kids at school had told him I was.’ Lennie didn’t mention it, but the eldest of his two sons was known at school and in the street for some years as ‘Little Mr Big’, a title he seemed to enjoy. ‘The bloody Mirror started all this,’ continued Lennie to Bottom, still busy with shorthand. ‘I have taken out a writ for $100 000 against them but it won’t do me any good. I’ll probably end up with a verdict and one shilling.

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When I do something I don’t mind if it’s published.’ (The Daily Mirror reported on 4 October 1968 that Leonard Arthur McPherson had issued a Supreme Court writ for $100 000 against Mirror Newspapers Ltd for alleged defamation.) ‘Do you regard yourself as fair game when you are responsible then?’ asked Bottom. ‘I have to, don’t I? This last bit, this club business, it wasn’t me. When these things come up it’s an easy thing to ring me, you know.’ ‘In future then, if we have a story suggesting Mr Big is involved, do you say we can ring up and ask you about it?’ ‘Yes, ring me. I’ve spoken to the Telegraph before. They ran a story by my pointing out I wasn’t Mr Big. If you have these stories, if somebody rings me up, I’ll put them on the right track.’ (Not that ringing Lennie up was all that easy in those days, unless he had given you his number. The telephone company had no record of a silent number being allocated to him, nor did his number appear in the directory listing under his or his wife’s name.) Lennie concluded the conversation with this unsolicited gem: ‘I’ve heard that some people are saying I’m involved with drugs. When it comes to drugs, I’m one hundred per cent against them. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I wanted you to know I get upset if wrong things are written about me.’ Commonwealth and state police were both asked by the Moffitt inquiry to report on what they knew of the alleged criminal activities in the clubs. Commonwealth police submitted a number of reports and notes and had

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previously freely passed on information to their state counterparts, who lodged with the inquiry three reports from their records, all of which—against the wishes of some state police—were subsequently made public by Moffitt. The state police—specifically Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill—had received information as early as 1971 from local poker machine companies that all was not well in their industry when, not coincidentally, a US-Mafia controlled pokies manufacturer and supplier, the Bally Corporation, began making significant inroads into the NSW clubs market. This information led to a special investigative unit headed by McNeill being set up in the consorting squad. Its brief was to investigate whether organised crime was infiltrating the club industry through poker machine sales or the entertainment side of the industry. But McNeill seemed reluctant to go anywhere with the inquiry. Judge Moffitt was later to note that from the establishment of this unit in December 1971 the various allegations made to McNeill and his men were not, it seemed, investigated until an outbreak of ‘intense press publicity’ on the matter in April 1972, and indeed, no real investigation took place until 28 June 1972. McNeill’s first report, dated 1 July 1972, said in summary that there was no doubt Bally was owned by the US Mafia, and that there was ‘some substance’ to the allegation of criminal infiltration of clubs. His second report, on 16 August, dealt with a specific inquiry from a Senate Select Committee on Foreign Ownership and Control, seeking information on whether Mafia money was coming into the country. While not as strong in its language as the first report, it did say there was ‘considerable

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substance’ to the matters under investigation, which should be regarded ‘as being of national importance’. McNeill’s third report, on 30 August, did a complete backflip on his earlier concerns. Now he said, in a lengthy final submission made after what he described as ‘extensive and painstaking inquiries’, that there was no substance to any of the allegations that had been made; that they were not merely not proven but were allegations made in pursuance of a poker machine trade war. The clear statements made in the two earlier reports about Bally’s criminal links no longer appeared: instead there were lengthy claims to the contrary made on behalf of Bally. Premier Askin pounced on this report, telling parliament on 22 November 1972 that the final report revealed no evidence that the club industry was being controlled by criminals or that there was any move by foreign syndicated crime figures (US Mafiosi) to take over the club industry. In relation to Wally Dean and Lennie McPherson, the first state police report said Dean and Lennie were connected in some operations in the club entertainment field. The report characterised Lennie as a well-known criminal and standover man. In their second report, state police said they had little doubt that Dean was associated with a crooked agency in relation to entertainment in his club and was referred to as ‘an associate of a criminal named Leonard Arthur McPherson’. McNeill’s final report with respect to this pair painted a somewhat different picture, using the not-so-subtle tones of whitewash, with many allegations being downplayed to a ‘more innocuous account’, in Moffitt’s view. The first reports

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had McPherson as a ‘more sinister figure’, the judge noted, ‘and the last report has tended in the opposite direction’. And it took the Moffitt inquiry four days to prise out of Dean admissions on a range of underhand activities which, Moffitt was to note, ‘revealed that matters were vastly different to those recorded or reported by the police’. Under questioning at the inquiry, McNeill referred to an incident at the Souths Juniors club involving Lennie and Wally. The detective reminded Moffitt that Lennie, in an interview he had given to the Commonwealth police, had said he used to have his hair cut by Dean but they were not personal friends. ‘McPherson said he had endeavoured to go into South Sydney Junior Leagues Club with a respected businessman named Nick Karlos, who wanted to join the club. The doorman refused them admission and sent word to Dean who came to where McPherson and Karlos were sitting in their car in the street. ‘Dean explained that consorting police had told management that McPherson was an undesirable person and for this reason he could not be accepted on the premises. They parted on good terms and have had no contact since,’ the report said. (Nick Karlos, a successful butcher, the ‘respectable businessman’, was a close associate of Lennie and in later years was to establish himself on Queensland’s Gold Coast prior to Lennie moving there.) Both Dean and Lennie gave a different view of their acquaintanceship than that offered by McNeill. But, as Moffitt was to dryly observe: ‘why should we accept McNeill’s version?’

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Dean, during his four-day stint in the witness box, under intense questioning by Garth Needham, QC, the silk assisting the Moffitt inquiry, confirmed that he had told Lennie he couldn’t come into the club when he arrived there once with Karlos. When Lennie came to be questioned about this incident, his recollection was much clearer. After first denying that he had ever had an association with Dean, he said: ‘He’s not a “friend” at all. He is somebody I know and respect because he respects me.’ He said Dean, he and Karlos had talked outside the club when two constables came along. ‘I was standing talking and these—or sitting talking, whatever one—and these fellows come up and say: “What are you doing here?” I said: “What do you want to know for?” and they said to the fellow [Dean]: “Get out of the car, you”. So he must have been sitting in the car. And I said: “You don’t have to get out the car at all. Sit there”. And he [the constable] said: “You will do what I tell you to do”. I said: “Just a moment”, I said. “What’s your idea of forcing us to get out of the car? These men are not criminals”. He said: “You are a criminal. You should know better”. ‘I said: “All right. I am a criminal. What are you treating these people like criminals for?” And that is when Wally Dean spoke up and said: “They have come here to see me”, or something like that “for an application”. ‘So I went and lodged a report with the superintendent of police and said their attitude was overbearing and then I started to get the treatment, because I put in a complaint to the police . . . all I can say is I was stood over by the police.’

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If anyone would know about standing over, it was Lennie McPherson. Wally Dean, too, went to the CIB to complain about being harassed and that he didn’t like the way the constables had addressed him. But how well did they know each other? After the start of the Royal Commission, but before he was called to give evidence, Lennie was seeking media exposure to tell the world of his colourful innocence. He was interviewed by radio natterbox John Laws in a recorded program broadcast by Radio 2UW in Sydney. Towards the end of the interview Lennie referred to Dean: ‘Now there is a man at the South Sydney Junior Leagues Club, I couldn’t find a nicer man. Now when I was barred from the club about two or three years ago, he said: “I’ve known you for too long to bar you”. He said: “As far as I’m concerned you can come in any time you like”. And I said: “Wally, I appreciate what you have said, but your friendship is too great for me to come in here and embarrass you. I would rather not come”.’ Later, at the Commission, Needham asked Lennie: ‘You say you are not a friend of Dean’s?’ ‘Well, if somebody shows friendship towards me I show friendship back,’ explained Lennie. ‘But that doesn’t mean to say I sleep with them, and there is no association with them whatever. If somebody treats me as a friend, I treat them as a friend back and consider them a friend, but you can’t say I am—you could not say Mr Leary [indicating his solicitor in the courtroom] is a friend of mine, yet I class Mr Leary as a friend of mine.’ At last he made it clear!

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Freed of concerns about prosecution, Lennie became the most feared—and most respected—standover man in Sydney. When Ray Kelly had been on call to help him out of any difficulties which might arise (and of course he always received an appropriate cut of Lennie’s action) the dollars simply rolled in from all quarters. And after Kelly retired the good times of the 1960s just seamlessly rolled right on into the 1970s. When asked later about his standover activities in those years, Lennie told the Moffitt inquiry: ‘Well, I would be the only man who has got a reputation as a standover man who has never stood over anybody. There is no evidence anybody has come forward with and said I have stood over them. I am the funniest standover man I have ever read about.’ In his view a standover man, he told Judge Moffitt, was one who ‘threatens to do things to them and who takes protection money from them’. He, of course, had never done such things, he assured the inquiry. The truth, of course, was quite the opposite. Kings Cross, with its bawdy strip joints, was a goldmine for Lennie. Most of the clubs were owned or controlled by Abe Saffron. The managers of the various clubs were only too pleased to ensure nobody tried any standover tactics there by paying Lennie to protect them against the gangs of thugs that inevitably bubble to the surface through any such criminal ooze from time to time. It was a well established way to do business, and it also ensured that Lennie or his ‘hired hands’ didn’t themselves cause any damage to such establishments.

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ABE SAFFRON: MAINTAINING THE RAGE AGAINST ‘SIN’ ‘Well, I have met this man they claim to be Mr Sin on about six or seven occasions in my life. You couldn’t get a softer spoken man than him. He is the loveliest person you could meet and in regards to saying any man is “Mr Sin” I can only say that any man who is behind drugs would be classed as a Mr Sin and there are many Mr Sins, so you can just nominate a man and say this is Mr Sin.’ So said Leonard Arthur McPherson when asked in a radio interview in 1974 if he’d ever met Abe Saffron. Abraham Gilbert Saffron deserves a special place in any story on Lennie McPherson—if for no other reason than the catchy monikers each was blessed with by the Sydney media. While Lennie was ‘Mr Big’, Abe Saffron wore the appellation ‘Mr Sin’, a title bestowed upon him by the Daily Mirror in the 1960s, a branding he has always complained vigorously is quite false. Saffron was born on 6 October 1919 and educated at Annandale and Leichhardt state schools before attending Fort Street High School. David Hickie wrote in The Prince and the Premier that one of his early scams was ‘buying textbooks from boys who no longer needed them, cleaning them up and selling them to boys starting a new year’. He left school at 15 and went into his father’s drapery business. His police record was opened in 1938 when he was fined £5 on conviction for a betting offence. In 1953 Saffron was arraigned with a number of other men and women on five ‘morals’ charges. Among the allegations police aired in court were that he and a friend had ‘outraged public decency by taking part in

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lewd and disgusting exhibitions’ at Palm Beach, north of Sydney. They were also accused of indulging in ‘scandalous conduct’ at Potts Point involving what police described as ‘an unnatural act with a woman’. They were also charged with having ‘wilfully exposed themselves in the presence of diverse persons for a long space of time’. The police prosecutor told Central Court that Saffron was ‘completely depraved and has no moral sense whatsoever’. But by year’s end the charges were dropped when police prosecutor Sergeant Roy Turner told the magistrate that a female witness to appear in the case refused to testify, and the police case collapsed. Saffron made headlines during the Royal Commission into Liquor headed by Mr Justice Maxwell, which got under way in Sydney in July 1951. The transcript of Abe Saffron’s evidence ran to 43 pages, that of his brother Phillip to eight pages. Saffron eventually admitted to the Commission that he held beneficial interests in a number of hotels, using different people as ‘dummies’. In his final report Justice Maxwell wrote: ‘These interests were successfully concealed from the Licensing Court; and before this Commission—with a clear appreciation of his obligation to abide by his oath and of his liability if he failed—he engaged in systematic false swearing’. Various liquor suppliers, he said, had made ‘considerable and regular deliveries of liquor to the Roosevelt restaurant’, which did not hold a liquor licence and in which Saffron had a dominant interest. The restaurant had been declared a ‘disorderly house’ on a number of occasions. Maxwell became convinced that Saffron could not possibly dispose of all this beer

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to patrons of the restaurant, and that he had ‘in turn been the medium of supplying outside sly-grog places’. From his earliest days Saffron had links with nightclubs that broke liquor laws. He owned many of the bawdy strip joints in Kings Cross, including the all-male revue venue, Les Girls, later named the Carousel. He divested himself of some of these interests in the late 1970s to try to obtain a liquor licence for his more upmarket Persian Room restaurant in Kings Cross. Saffron’s business affairs are vested in a maze of possibly more than 100 cross-pollinated companies and business names. For example, he became a director of a company called Perren Productions in 1968. But he’d had an earlier association with the company: in 1957 the metropolitan licensing court in Sydney rejected a liquor licence application made by Florence Bunte Hawkins for the Napoli Restaurant at 44 Macleay Street, Potts Point, on the grounds that Mr Saffron was a substantial shareholder in the company which owned the premises. Chairman of the court RM Stewart and magistrate J Kelly ruled that Hawkins was a suitable person to hold a liquor licence, but because of her association with Saffron she was not acceptable to the court. The court found that there were four shares in Perren Productions held by Apsley Investments and that both companies were in fact controlled by Anson Investments, in which Saffron was a substantial shareholder. The court was told that Perren was also a tenant in another section of 44 Macleay Street owned by Argus Investments, in which Saffron was a substantial shareholder. Among the grounds the court gave for rejecting the Perren appli-

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cation was Saffron’s disclosures before the 1951 Liquor Royal Commission of breaches of the Liquor Act. Over time other shareholders in Argus Investments—which owned the Texas Tavern—were Sir Paul Strasser and Mr John Charody, then directors of the Parkes Development group of companies, and Bernie Houghton, referred to later. In the 1970s Saffron had an association with Jack Rooklyn, who was, among other things, the Australian boss of the US Mafia-owned Bally poker machine company. Judge Moffitt, in his 1974 report, said of Rooklyn: ‘He is a man who has had some business relations with Saffron, and while the intelligence material constitutes no evidence, it is clear, on concessions in evidence, that he at least negotiated for some combined operations with Saffron in Djakarta’. When asked at the Moffitt inquiry on 4 December 1973 by Needham QC whether he was commonly referred to in the press as ‘Mr Sin’, Saffron replied: ‘I have seen the references you have and you have informed me for the first time that I might be commonly referred to as such’. ‘You did not know that?’ asked Mr Needham. ‘Not until you have told me,’ he replied. In 1987 he was convicted for tax evasion over a 13year period and served more than a year in jail for this. He successfully appealed against a subsequent related charge. The tax evasion charge remained unchallenged. About 40 years after the Sydney tabloids dubbed Abe Saffron ‘Mr Sin’, the Vaucluse businessman was still maintaining his rage against the tag, showing signs of sensitivity to being identified that way. In October 2003

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he sued the Sydney Morning Herald for defamation over a light-hearted article ‘Speaking up for Mr Sin’. The jury found the article imputed that Saffron had ‘an unsavoury reputation’ but was not defamatory. At the time of this book going to press, Saffron, aged 85, hired veteran defamation lawyer Clive Evatt to sue the Gold Coast Bulletin for defamation, complaining the paper published a crossword clue asking which Australian criminal was known by the nickname ‘Mr Sin’. Saffron watchers will closely follow that and any future defamation actions by a man who has consistently denied all allegations of sin. The threat of Lennie calling by for a spot of standover was even used by police, often to extort free drinks and meals. The owner of the Bengal Curry House restaurant in North Sydney, previously located in Victoria Street, Kings Cross in the early 1970s—who even 30 years later asked to be referred to only as ‘David’—told me recently that Darlinghurst detectives called in on him one night, not long after he’d opened on the north side. They showed him a photograph of Lennie McPherson, and said that having him in the restaurant could result in consorting charges for the owner. ‘He’s never been here,’ said the owner. ‘Well, we’ll just stay a while to make sure he doesn’t come tonight,’ they said as they wolfed down a hearty array of India’s finest cuisine and some quality Aussie beer, on the house, naturally. This was the cost of police providing protection against Lennie’s protection! One strip joint Lennie regularly collected from was the Pussy Galore, operated by a man called Tubby Black.

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On one visit in late 1972, he’d called on Black to pick up his usual protection money and on the way out was arrested and hauled before Chief Stipendiary Magistrate Murray Farquhar, charged with having $400 in his possession ‘suspected of having been extorted as part of protection money from Pussy Galore nightclub in Kings Cross’. Lennie claimed the money was his and it had been in his pocket all day. The bent magistrate needed little more convincing and the charges were dismissed. Lennie later tried to lie his way out of the Pussy Galore accusation. He told the Moffitt Royal Commission: ‘I went there to buy some equipment, such as projectors and video tapes, and the arrangements made by Tubby Black on each occasion before, but he told me what he had and at the two previous meetings—after that I didn’t keep them and when I didn’t keep the last meeting the person arranged for me to be there wasn’t there, just Tubby Black.’ If in trouble, talk rubbish. He met Tubby at the club, he said, and watched a show until his contact arrived. They went upstairs to a room above the auditorium. ‘This chap was going to take me to a shop where the stuff was,’ he went on. ‘And Tubby Black’s interest in it is that he was going to make a commission. I was assured the stuff was not stolen, it was obtained on a 30-day basis and the person that bought the stuff was selling it cheap, without my knowledge.’ The person told him again the stuff was not stolen and he would get a receipt for everything. ‘I didn’t ask any questions,’ Lennie continued. ‘But I believe he has since left the country owing money to everybody, but that is why I am getting it so cheap.’

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It was all very confusing—an attempt by Lennie to shift the focus from the sensitive area of ‘standing over’ to the less volatile stuff of trading in stolen goods. Jack McNeill, as chief of the CIB’s consorting squad, later gave the Moffitt inquiry his version of the Pussy Galore story. ‘There are rumours,’ he said on oath. ‘There are rumours, but I have got nothing I could ever substantiate. The rumour is that through his reputation as a gunman and what have you, he probably does afford protection to some people in the community—like those at the Pussy Galore club.’ McNeill agreed that McPherson had undoubtedly got some sources of income other than his earnings from the Balmain ‘motel’. ‘Has there ever been any attempt by the force, to your knowledge, to ascertain the source of that income?’ asked Judge Moffitt. ‘Not that I can say,’ said McNeill. ‘Of course, you are aware, I suppose, and you probably no doubt resent, the press allegations that the police are, in effect, giving McPherson immunity?’ asked the judge. McNeill said those allegations were not true and that he could not agree that police were not interested in finding out where McPherson got his money from: ‘. . . I would say police would be interested, but to get anybody to tell you about it . . .’ ‘Of course,’ said the judge. ‘You would find a man who is stood over is unlikely or unwilling to talk. Would that be right?’ ‘I think, if I can put it this way, they probably agree it is better to have McPherson around to give them protec-

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tion, if you care to put it that way, and pay cheerfully,’ said the veteran crime buster. ‘On that note, Your Honour, you see, we had a team of young Greeks named Singalis and Tomazos and they were going around and standing over the Greek clubs, and at one stage every man in my squad had them in for something or another. Well, McPherson, most probably, according to rumour, combats this type of person from moving in on the strip clubs.’ ‘Are you suggesting that your information is that McPherson really protects these clubs against people other than himself?’ Moffitt asked incredulously. ‘I think that is probably the case.’ ‘It is a most unusual type of standover activity?’ ‘No,’ said McNeill. ‘Once again you get rumours, you get no proof of it, but these young hoodlum types go into places and stand over proprietors after they have a meal and they threaten to break everything up and clear the place if they are not accommodated. A man like McPherson, if he came on the scene, they would disappear.’ It seemed that it was OK to stand over people if you were an old hoodlum type like Lennie, but not if you were young like Singalis and Tomazos. Moffitt then asked whether the force took any steps to protect people from such activities by Lennie. ‘We take any steps we can if we get information,’ said McNeill, omitting to add that most information they received about criminal activity came from Lennie himself. ‘McPherson moves around quietly. He is very rarely seen in these places, and certainly rarely seen in company and what can you do but depend on

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information because these people are not going to come forward and voluntarily complain.’ Moffitt was later to form the view, published in his official report, that: ‘McNeill, who as head of the Consorting Squad ought to have and in fact had a considerable knowledge concerning McPherson, has been inconsistent in his reports and statements concerning him.’ If the strip joints were a goldmine, the illegal casinos and starting price (SP) bookies were an El Dorado to Lennie’s standover business. He provided them with protection against himself, other undesirables and any police apart from those who were on the payroll. He also provided a collection service for punters showing signs of lethargy when the losses had mounted. In an official Victorian gambling inquiry in 1983 it was estimated that SP bookies’ annual turnover in NSW was $1800 million, and in Victoria $1000 million, which provided ripe pickings indeed to the police who allowed it to flourish and the parasitic standover merchants like Lennie who exploited that corruption to their own ends. Lennie’s close friend, George David Freeman, was a major SP operator and standover man, with links to a couple of dozen bookies. McPherson also provided ‘protection’ to the illegal gambling casinos which flourished during the Askin years, including the 33 Club and The Palace in Rockwall Crescent, Potts Point. Since Jack McNeill insisted that Lennie couldn’t enter the 33 Club, he engaged Wally Dean to make the collections. Dean later admitted to the Moffitt inquiry that he’d been collecting $600 a month from the 33 Club from mid-1972, when McNeill barred Lennie, for what he described as ‘promotion’.

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GEORGE FREEMAN: GANGSTER AND SP BOOKIE George David Freeman was a classic gambler—a flashy dresser with a flashy car, a brassy wife and gaudy Spanishstyle mansion overlooking the water at exclusive Carrss Park, on the estuary of the Georges River. Unlike most of his colleagues, he courted media attention. Born in the inner Sydney suburb of Annandale on 23 January 1934 (or 1935, according to some records), Freeman was 13 when he first came before a court. He was charged with stealing sheath knives, fountain pens and money, and on 28 October 1947 in the Ashfield Children’s Court he was convicted and placed on four years’ probation to be of good behaviour. Between August and December 1951 he was convicted in four different courts for a range of petty crimes: in Melbourne on 14 August for stealing a shirt and a tin of biscuits and having stolen goods in his custody (£10 good behaviour bond for 18 months to January 1953); on 7 August at Coffs Harbour in NSW, for evading a rail fare worth 9/3d (just under $1) he was ordered to pay the fare and a fine of £1; on 9 September he was fined £3 at the Metropolitan Children’s Court on a charge of using insulting words; and on 28 December he was committed to Lennie’s old alma mater, the naughty boys’ institution at Mount Penang, for two years, having been convicted on charges of break, enter and steal and the illegal use of a motor vehicle. On 19 February 1954, the hottest February day in Sydney for five years, he was sentenced to sweat out three years of hard labour on conviction of three charges

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of break, enter and steal—his first adult prison term. There followed a series of charges through to 1968, mostly stealing from shops. He claimed he’d grown up with Stan ‘the Man’ Smith who introduced him to Lennie in 1954. Freeman and McPherson became close friends and long-term associates in crime. Freeman’s speciality was gambling, a field in which he was quite imaginative. He forged TAB betting tickets, fixed the outcome of races, operated as a major illegal SP bookmaker, arranged the collection of gambling debts and gave race tips to ‘people in high places’ (one of whom was the eventually disgraced NSW Chief Stipendiary Magistrate Murray Farquhar). The Australian Tax Office caught up with him early in 1970, presenting him with a bill for $23 000 in unpaid taxes. He somehow found the money. He attended the ‘Double Bay Meetings’, a summit of Australian criminals held in 1972. Some commentators suggested in the late 1970s that Freeman had actually replaced Lennie as Sydney’s ‘Mr Big’. But in fact their friendship continued over the years, with Lennie providing increasing amounts of bookie and debt collection work to Freeman as Lennie’s age began to demand a reduced workload. At any gathering of Sydney criminals, Freeman took a chair close to the top of the table and over the years became recognised as Lennie’s right-hand man. Police records described him as a gunman, shop stealer, safebreaker and as a ‘plausible offender who travels extensively and can invariably be found with others of the criminal element’. He used Kenneth Carroll

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and Kenneth Laurence Kean as aliases. He was just over five feet 8 inches (173 centimetres) tall, was of medium build with a ‘fresh’ complexion, brown hair and hazel eyes. His nose bore a scar and he had the words ‘Geo’, ‘Maria’ and ‘Mother’ tattooed on his right arm and the clichéd ‘TRUE’ and ‘LOVE’ on the backs of his fingers. Following his appearance at the Moffitt Royal Commission (1973–74) Moffitt recommended that Freeman be made a ‘number one target’ of the NSW Police Crime Intelligence Unit, which he urged be established. Yet in 1977 he attended a mid-week race meeting at Randwick racecourse, sitting in the members’ enclosure with his doctor, Nick Paltos (later convicted of cannabis importation), and magistrate Murray Farquhar. In the 1980s he was fined a small amount on convictions of illegal SP betting. In 1977 commonwealth police charged Freeman in connection with a forged passport. For various reasons the court case collapsed, but there was an interesting side anecdote to the incident. During their raid on Freeman’s home looking for evidence, they opened the boot of his car and found it crammed full with thousands of forged TAB betting slips. The officers duly reported this state-level crime to the local NSW police, the nearest station being suburban Kogarah. The local police arrived promptly, collected the evidence and took Freeman to the station to charge him. But they hadn’t even started the paperwork when a call came through from Detective Inspector Jack McNeill, ordering them to release Freeman at once. In a frightening echo of the time Ray Kelly ordered two young

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cops to release Lennie, McNeill said: ‘Leave Freeman to me in future.’ They did as they were bid, and quietly told the commonwealth police officers the story. Kogarah station was where McNeill was posted after he was very temporarily busted to uniform duty after his drubbing at the Moffitt Royal Commission. In 1986 Justice Stewart found Freeman had lied to him in evidence to the Royal Commission he was conducting on drug trafficking. Stewart said there was evidence that Freeman was involved with illegal casinos, SP bookmaking and fixing of horseraces. Stewart also found Freeman had ‘improper relationships’ with police Inspector Patrick Watson, Superintendent Jack McNeill and Inspector Frank Charlton. Lennie also cornered the protection market on the small ethnic gambling clubs which operated in rooms above milk bars and cafes in suburbs like Newtown and Leichhardt. They were not big-time, but every little helps with the bottom line. One other lucrative earner, never before revealed, was his grafting on the transfer of suburban hotel liquor licences. A former federal policeman, who went in as the junior partner in a pub, later told me that when he and his partner moved to a bigger hotel, there was a $15 000 fee set aside for ‘special purposes’. When he pressed for details, he was told: ‘That’s McPherson’s cut.’ Later, undercover operations by commonwealth police witnessed money—hard cash—actually being handed to Lennie on liquor licence transfers. But the federal force could only watch: they had no power to

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prosecute state crimes and knew from bitter experience that their state counterparts simply weren’t interested in collaring Lennie McPherson.

7 SEX, DRUGS, THE CIA AND A US FREE TRADE AGREEMENT WHILE THEY MAY have provided some ‘pocket money’, standover activities paled into insignificance alongside the two most lucrative arms of Lennie’s activities: prostitution and drugs. As we will see, his lifelong denials of any involvement in—and indeed an abhorrence of—the drug trade had as much substance as his marriage vows. He never even bothered denying his involvement in prostitution: with many crooked cops grafting from the sex workers, Lennie provided his unique protective services. Anyone wanting to start up in prostitution basically needed to secure two things to survive: a compliant bunch of cops who would get paid to ensure no straight cops came along with arrest warrants, and the services of a man like Lennie, to ensure no other operators tried to horn in on their section of the trade. And Lennie could simplify matters by not only providing this latter service but by being the ‘liaison officer’ between the bordello operator and the grafting coppers—a one-stop shop to [ 148 ]

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free trade. Providing a continuing supply of suitable workers for prostitution is its own specialised field. While many volunteer, most are forced into the trade, abducted, enslaved, abused and then discarded. This recruitment area of the business needs protective services similar to those required by actual bordellos, and Lennie found, through the late 1950s and into the ’60s, that this was a most lucrative source of the green folding stuff. The prominent ‘white slave’ gang in Sydney in those years consisted of a man of Hong Kong origins who ran a large city social club, and his Aussie accomplice who ran one of the city’s earliest nightclubs. They were bringing women into Australia (not just Asians, as is popularly thought) and even doing two-way trade by sending some of our strapping suntanned blondes to places like Saudi Arabia. They engaged Lennie as a partner to ensure the local cops were kept happy and others were dissuaded from starting up in competition. All Lennie did was collect the money, shelling out much of it to his copper allies and simply pocketing the balance. Then, in the mid-1960s, Australia’s involvement in the US war in Vietnam provided the opportunity for a massive expansion of the business. A new partner was brought in: none less than Bernie Houghton, a millionaire Texan who as well as being the flamboyant owner of the Texas Tavern and Bourbon and Beefsteak bar in Kings Cross was also working closely with the station chief in Australia for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lennie first met Houghton when he called into the bar, after it was newly opened, to offer his unique protection services. He left with something far more valuable: a

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business involvement in the white slave trade with one of the CIA’s biggest operators in the Asia-Pacific region.

BERNIE HOUGHTON, LENNIE AND THE CIA For a loud and flamboyant Texan millionaire, Maurice Bernard (Bernie) Houghton was, paradoxically, a shadowy character. Houghton opened his notorious Bourbon and Beefsteak bar largely to cater for the needs of US servicemen on R&R leave in Sydney from the Vietnam War. A number of submissions to official drug inquiries in the 1980s and ’90s clearly stated that the Houghton’s Bourbon and Beefsteak bar in Sydney’s Kings Cross became the first centre of Australia’s heroin trade. Investigative journalist Brian Toohey told ABC Radio’s Watching Brief in October 1986 that after running restaurants in Sydney, Houghton ended up as Number Three in the CIA-controlled Nugan-Hand Bank. Toohey’s comments included: He has got an intelligence background—US intelligence background—and in fact an ex-member of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Peter Wilcott, who knows of him said both to me and to Australian narcotics authorities, in some recorded interviews with the Narcotics Authority, that Houghton was working as an undercover intelligence operative in Australia and he had been in Australia since the late 60s.

In his authoritative book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Drug Trade, Dr Alfred W McCoy described Houghton as: ‘a mysterious American expatriate

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with impeccable intelligence contacts’. The highly respected McCoy wrote: The Nugan-Hand Bank founders Frank Nugan and Michael Hand, together with Houghton, cultivated corrupt Australian politicians, Sydney crime syndicates, a fraternity of ex-CIA arms dealers, and the US Central Intelligence Agency. The key figure in much of the bank’s history, Maurice Bernard Houghton, is a mysterious Texan who arrived in Sydney from Southeast Asia in 1967 with an impressive list of references from senior US military officers. In 1964 Houghton moved to Southeast Asia, where he remained for the next three years during the escalation of the Viet Nam war, engaged in activities that remain unclear. Australia’s Joint Task Force into the bank’s affairs reported that Houghton was ‘part of the intelligence community’ in Southeast Asia before coming to Australia. Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny interviewed former US intelligence officers who claimed, on the record, that Houghton was a wheeler-dealer in Southeast Asia who traded in slot machines, opium—anything.

This was the man with whom Lennie went into business in the white slave trade and narcotics. When Houghton died in 2000 he left a $10 million estate. That Bernie Houghton involved himself in criminal activity should come as no surprise: at that time the CIA owned its own airlines and organised massive smuggling—and even the manufacture—of hard drugs out of Asia’s Golden Triangle and onto the world markets to help finance its covert and highly illegal bombing and land-mining operations in Laos and Cambodia, in support of the US war effort in neighbouring Vietnam.

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In the late 1960s Sydney was packed with US soldiers on R&R leave, and the streets were awash with drugs. The Bourbon and Beefsteak became the first place in Australia where heroin was readily available. And there weren’t enough prostitutes to go round. Which made for a perfect business expansion opportunity for Lennie and his associates. In 1969 the secretive Australian spy network ASIS uncovered the involvement of Lennie, Houghton and some NSW police in a massive people-smuggling operation. ASIS had mounted a ‘national security’ exercise to check on illegal immigrants as part of Australia’s Cold War paranoia about communists arriving by stealth and taking over the country. What they found was a massive trade in sex slaves, run by Sydney criminals and backed by a local undercover agent of the CIA. An ASIS operative who worked on the project has told the author there had been little if any evidence of secret arrivals that could be classified as ‘against the national interest’ but in the six months the project had been running he had produced a number of reports—naming names—on the sex slave activities. ‘There’s no doubt, they were all involved, and [another well-known criminal] as well,’ said the ex-ASIS man. ‘It was probably their most lucrative source of income, apart from drugs, putting the women into slavery.’ Then the operative was stunned when in late 1969 orders came from on high—he said it was from as high as federal ministerial staff level (which means the relevant minister would know but could deny all knowledge)—that the investigation was to be halted immediately: it ‘had a glove on it’ and the reasons for scrapping it were ‘above

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top secret’. His assessment at the time that he still stands by is that Lennie McPherson’s own political clout combined with Bernie Houghton’s undoubted support from the local official CIA chief was powerful enough to persuade the conservative government of John Gorton, or his most senior ministers, to drop a major project which the operatives had been led to believe was linked to national security. Lennie had the state coppers in the bag, as usual. Indeed, Detective Sergeant Fred Krahe was one of the police ‘bagmen’ and the linkman to outlets in Brisbane and Melbourne, as were senior members of the vice squads in three states. So they were mightily displeased when they learned that the nation’s most secretive spy organisation was taking more than a casual interest in their racket. And they would have found out about it, of course, when the ASIS material turned up in the reports from the Australian spy networks that were regularly sent to their ‘cousins’ in the CIA. Before it was actually despatched this material would have been read by a local cipher clerk, who would have warned Houghton of the danger it represented. Not only did the reports on the racket never get sent back to America: Houghton used his own clout and called on Lennie’s political contacts to get the local spooks off their case entirely. Two ministers in the government at the time have denied knowledge of the ASIS project or its axing. Sir James Killen, who was navy minister, told me in 2004 he didn’t receive the ASIS intelligence reports, he only read defence intelligence material. Attorney-General Tom Hughes, QC, and the Prime Minister (the late John Gorton) were the only two people to routinely receive

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ASIS reports. Mr Hughes said he had no knowledge of the matter. The previous attorney-general, who may have been able to shed light on this, was Nigel Bowen. Unfortunately he died in 1994. My ASIS source is convincingly adamant that his story is correct.

Lennie always protested his innocence as far as the illicit drug trade was concerned, but clear proof of his involvement came to light as a result of investigations by Australian secret service agents in the late 1960s—the same people who were able to reveal Lennie’s involvement in the white slave trade. Years later, consorting squad heavyweight Detective Sergeant Frank Charlton was to tell the 1973 Moffitt Royal Commission that he did not think McPherson was involved in drugs: not only because McPherson said he wasn’t, but because of what other people told him— because of what he had heard from other criminals like Clark, Freeman, Rayner and so on. ‘I can only give you my impression of the man, and although I say it could be so, my information is not that,’ Charlton said. Another McPherson watcher said it was absurd to support the view that Lennie was not into drugs: ‘I don’t think anyone would prove it, but let’s put it down to at least wilful blindness or tacit acceptance,’ the source told the author. ‘Everybody around him was into it in a big way.’ Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith, for example, when sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1998 admitted to the court that he had been involved over several years in distributing heroin on a large scale.

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‘The strongest evidence was provided by the link between McPherson and convicted heroin importer David Kelleher,’ a source said.

DAVID KELLEHER: LENNIE’S BIG-TIME DRUG MOVER David Kelleher, born in April 1951, was 22 when police opened his entry in the 1974 Australasian Criminal Register (ACR), where he was described as six feet (183 centimetres) tall, of medium build and complexion with blonde hair and blue eyes. He had a number of tattoos. The ACR suggested he should be approached with caution as he was an associate of the Hells Angels, Galloping Gooses and the Finks motorcycle gangs. By 1974 he’d been arrested 22 times for thieving, housebreaking, rape, unlicensed pistol, forging and uttering a passport and consorting. The ACR didn’t mention it, but one of the criminals he frequently consorted with was Lennie’s right-hand man, heroin addict and pusher Stan Smith. Neither did the ACR indicate that for some time before his 1988 imprisonment, he lived a few doors away from Lennie and was frequently in his company. On 21 September 1988, Kelleher became the first person to be sentenced to life imprisonment under changes to the Customs Act dealing with the importation of heroin. The court was told he recruited a courier to bring 10 kilograms of pure heroin into Australia, of which just over seven kilos ‘entered the community’. This was criminality at its highest level, and Kelleher, the court was told, showed ‘no contrition’. On 18 July

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1996 his sentence was redetermined and a non-parole period of 13 years was substituted. He was released on parole on 20 September 2001. The head sentence of life imprisonment remained. Lennie almost certainly chose Kelleher as one of the major Australian distributors for the covert drug importation and manufacturing business that was being operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency. In Asia, the US 5th Group Special Forces Green Beret Captain Michael Hand (who later was to become renowned for his involvement in the gun- and drug-running CIA-owned Nugan-Hand Bank), some Filipino Special Forces men and other likeminded people were amassing the drugs in an area called the Plain of Jars—a no-man’s land in Laos near the border with Vietnam which the CIA had saturated with landmines. From there they coordinated the export of the drugs to various locations around the world. The CIA had commandeered a C130 military cargo aircraft and it seems certain that they shipped huge quantities of drugs straight into Australia, to the airbase attached to the secret US base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs. From there, US military flights, obviously never subject to Australian Customs inspections, transhipped most of this heroin into Manila, Bangkok and to bases in Europe and Hawaii. Some went straight to Saigon to feed the addiction of a great many US soldiers fighting in Vietnam. A significant amount stayed in Australia to meet the growing demand here, fuelled in large part by the influx of thousands of US troops on leave from duties in Vietnam.

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Lennie’s near neighbour, Kelleher, was, according to an Australian secret intelligence service source who has spoken in detail to me on this matter, one of the most trusted Australian wholesale distributors of the drugs over the period of the Vietnam War. The combination of Lennie’s backing and the CIA’s involvement was as good an insurance policy against prosecution as any drug-runner could hope for. Up until 1974, at least, Australian police did not include drugs in Kelleher’s modus operandi. Yet according to Detective Charlton, Lennie ‘wasn’t into drugs’. The McPherson watcher who spoke to me said: ‘There was just too much money in it. And how were they going to get anything done in Lennie’s patch without his knowledge anyway? Any drug trade would require his tacit approval, at least. So it’s laughable to suggest McPherson never even made money from drugs.’

Over the years Lennie McPherson felt a continuing sense of frustration: the crime scene in Australia was fairly petty gangsterism compared to the successes of the mobsters in the United States of America. There was lots of money around—he was free to extort cash from any activity he and his police backers thought appropriate—but it was all pretty small beer compared with the massive wealth enjoyed by his US brethren he’d read about. With the possible exception of some Italian immigrant families in the wine- and marijuana-producing areas around Griffith, in south-western New South Wales, there was no sign of any ‘mafia’ and little chance of such an organisation

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developing. The criminals in Sydney were like warring clans much of the time: indeed, Lennie had greatly contributed to this state of affairs by having up-andcoming activists ‘knocked’ over the years. And things could keep rumbling on like that, but Lennie wanted more: and so did a few of the senior cops who were in cahoots with him. So Lennie turned to America. Australia’s criminals had established some links with their US counterparts in the 1950s but it didn’t count for much more than generous hospitality being extended to visitors in either direction—and few of the Yanks showed much interest in ‘down under’ as a serious business proposition. Lennie’s first visit to America had been in 1951 (on a false passport) but his bid to forge strong and lasting links of international cooperation on that trip had failed. So in 1968 another Australian delegation was sent off to try to do business with the Land of the Free. Lennie did not go, but sent a couple of close and trusted associates: George Freeman and Stan Smith. Freeman later described the trip as a ‘holiday’. But when asked (at the Moffitt inquiry) why, if it was a holiday, he had travelled under an assumed name, he said: ‘Well, prior to us leaving for America Stan Smith went to Japan or somewhere with Lennie on a ship on his own passport and was refused entry at each port they called at, so we assumed that going to America on his [Smith’s] passport they would not allow him in, or myself in because of the prior history, so that is why we went on false passports.’ In America, he said, they met and stayed with Chicago syndicate member Joseph Dan Testa, known as ‘the Organizer’. Freeman said Testa had visited Australia

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in 1965 and had met Ronnie Lee, proprietor of the illegal gambling den the Forbes Club, so Lee had given Freeman Testa’s address and suggested they should look him up on their visit. In Chicago, Freeman and Smith booked into a downtown hotel and phoned Testa, dropped Ronnie Lee’s name and were immediately invited to his place. ‘And I was amazed,’ said Freeman. ‘It was like a house you see in the pictures. I have never seen anything like it and he insisted we be his guests and we accepted it. And we was informed that we had no option—we didn’t intend to stay six weeks with him but we was told the police knew we was there under the name of Kean and we thought we would have trouble leaving America and coming back to Australia and that is why we stayed six weeks.’ They were arrested on their arrival back in Australia, and Freeman was fined $200 by a Sydney magistrate for uttering a forged passport application. They probably would have been arrested in the US had authorities there actually known they were travelling on forged documents. Freeman invited Testa to come to Australia ‘in return for the generous hospitality he had shown’ on their visit. And what hospitality it was. Testa owned, among other things, a complex of 400 flats that were home to some 900 female flight attendants. His own apartment (actually four of these units made into one) had a walk-in sauna, its own billiard room . . . every luxury! ‘He was a bachelor living in this paradise with numerous women friends of his,’ beamed Freeman. During their stay Testa showed them around, introducing them to many of his friends. He took them to

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Las Vegas and footed the bill for their stay and entertainment at the Stardust Hotel. In Vegas they met George Savoy, and Frank and Art Zimmerman—all reputed to have strong Mafia connections. But Freeman denied they met other friends of Testa, including Chicago syndicate identities Felix Aldorisio and Milwaukee Phil, and also denied he went to America for the express purpose of meeting Testa, and through him the American crime syndicates.

DAN TESTA: THE US MAFIA COMES TO TOWN Joseph Dan Testa was born in Chicago on 5 January 1928 and first came to the attention of anti-Mafia investigators during their investigation into a firm called Universal Match, in which he had an interest. A former officer from the US Justice Department, William Tomlinson, came to Sydney to provide Justice Moffitt with information about Testa and other matters. Testa had a reputation in Chicago of being a ‘lower level associate’ of the Chicago organised crime system, he said. He had a reputation for physical brutality, always carried a gun and was known to the Chicago police department as a man who was pathological when it came to violence. Between 1965 and 1973 Testa visited Australia four times, on each occasion being feted by senior members of the local criminal milieu. In 1979 he moved from Chicago to Florida, where he built and operated three caravan parks. It’s clear his mobster links were not a thing of the past: on 29 June 1981 he climbed into his

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Lincoln Continental at the car park of the Oakland Park Country Club and, turning the key in the ignition, set off a massive bomb that had been wired under the bonnet. He lost a leg in the explosion and died shortly afterwards in hospital. Although Freeman had never met Testa prior to the visit, they became good pals and when Testa returned to Australia in 1969, he attended a busy round of nightclubbing and private parties. At all times he was surrounded by a cabal of Sydney’s heaviest criminals, from Freeman and Smith to Lennie, Ironbar Miller and others down the line. The Sunday Telegraph published a story on all this after my own investigation in 1972, under the heading ‘The night the Mafia came to Sydney’. I began with these words: The Mafia, fat with money and confidence, came to Australia in the winter of 1969. At a small party at a luxurious home overlooking the Watson’s Bay waterfront, a slightly-built American was entertained by Sydney’s underworld czars. His main business was with a man about the same age, thick-set and lazy about his appearance—Sydney’s ‘Mr Big’. Also in attendance were the host—the owner of an illegal inner-city gambling club—and a former Sydney detective [Murray Riley], suspended and sentenced to one year in jail for trying to bribe a policeman [in New Zealand in 1966], and the man who was later to become one of the Mafia’s chief Australian lieutenants. Between drinks and food, the visitor, known in Mafia language as the ‘Organizer’, put forward the first feelers for a new outlet for the embarrassingly overflowing coffers of the American crime syndicates.

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Freeman later confirmed the accuracy of this report in his evidence to the Moffitt inquiry, where he recounted that after an initial small welcoming party at his home— then at Connells Point—they started the social whirl with the poolside party at the Watsons Bay waterfront home of Ronnie Lee, the casino operator. ‘McPherson was there,’ said Freeman. ‘And myself. I think Reg Andrews was there with his wife [Reg Andrews, alias Reginald Norman Hall, was part-owner with Ronnie Lee and others of the illegal gambling casino, the Forbes Club near Kings Cross; he died on 11 February 1995]. Abe Saffron was not there; I have seen him but I do not know him. I would know him if he was at the party, but definitely not. There was Norman Erskine. A lot of people had their wives there. Another fellow was George Miller, but he’s got another name, a long name starting with P.’ ‘Petricevic?’ he was asked. ‘It could be,’ he said. He added that Arthur ‘the Duke’ Delaney was there, and others—a caucus of Australia’s top criminals across the gamut of criminal activity from illegal gambling and international shoplifting to murder. It was the first round of such parties at which firm arrangements were being made for the entry of the American crime syndicates into the lucrative Australian scene. Joseph Dan Testa must have been quite impressed when he saw how free and unhindered his new-found Australian buddies were to exercise their enterprise. Police who weren’t on the payroll stayed out of the way, most of the media hacks didn’t poke their noses into

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places where they might get them cut off, and now and again a troublesome crim was handed over to the cops to keep the arrest rates bubbling along. The politicians were tame on exposing corruption, due mainly to a few old bones rattling around in their own cupboards. It was certainly getting more difficult in America, what with people the Mob could not control getting elected to the Senate and asking all sorts of difficult questions, and goddam grand juries poking into things that used to be protected with a few bribes. But nothing like that was going on in Australia—and the slot machine industry was set to boom! A perfect operation. On the 1969 visit Testa stayed from 10 February to 2 March. Before his next visit, on 8 January 1971, he had married and his new wife accompanied him on the trip. Freeman was to explain: ‘On his first trip Testa met a lot of girls, but now he’s married he doesn’t like girls.’ Kay, one of the ‘girls’ he’d met on the earlier visit, accompanied him a lot, and he was photographed (amazingly by a Commonwealth police undercover agent or a person who very quickly put the film into the federal copper’s possession) at Chequers nightclub in the city. There he was having a night out with Ironbar Miller, another woman named Margaret, Lennie McPherson and his wife, Stan Smith and his wife, international shoplifter Bill Delouney and his wife, the biggest name in shoplifting, Arthur ‘the Duke’ Delaney, with a woman called Barbara, and George Freeman and his wife. It was an illustrious gathering of the forces of evil. Another party at the Chevron Hotel was paid for by Testa. Lennie said later he thought Testa had won

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$12 000 backing a horse. Crooner Roger Miller entertained the group, which included Jack Rooklyn, who was Australian head of Bally, the huge poker machine manufacturer and supplier, and ‘. . . a few radio commentators whose names I did not know’. At another party there was a big cake with ‘Welcome Joe’ on it, he said. Mr Big himself, Lennie McPherson (who was a bit oafish, but he looks like he commanded plenty of respect) showed him lots of hospitality, such as the hunting trip out of Nyngan, in the remote north-west of New South Wales. Lennie had hired a light aircraft, piloted by a man he called ‘Bronco’: actually a violent thug named Branko Balic. Then he laid on ground transport in the form of a Ford pick-up truck and a large air-conditioned sedan to carry Testa and his armed bodyguard, Nick Giordano, to the scrub country where kangaroo and wild pig were plentiful. Lennie supplied a couple of Armalite rifles, a few less powerful sporting shooters and just to ensure they bagged a few ’roos, a couple of sub-machine guns mounted on tailor-made turrets at the rear corners of the pick-up truck. (He’d acquired the sub-machine guns from a Sydney karate practitioner who had stolen them from the army.) Back in Sydney Testa was picked up by consorting squad police outside a solicitor’s office in Bathurst Street in Sydney. He said he had been arranging a business deal with George Freeman. ‘I was quite harassed by it, because it was the first time in my life in 43 years I had ever been to a police station,’ he said later. ‘He told me Freeman was this and Freeman was that and he insinuated I was a member of the Mafia and I got pretty upset about it.’

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At CIB headquarters Detective Sergeant Doug Knight and another consorting squad detective also questioned Testa about whether he had been seeing McPherson on his visit and he said yes, he had, and told them about the kangaroo shooting trip to back o’ Bourke. He said he did not know Freeman was a reputed criminal, or that he could be charged for consorting with criminals, claiming he did not know the local laws. Knight then asked him whether he was one of the leaders of the Mafia. He said: ‘I strongly deny that.’ ‘That is probably when I started to get upset,’ he recalled at the Moffitt inquiry. He said he’d told Knight he was a reputable businessman and a captain of detectives in America and was visiting Australia on vacation for a couple of weeks and he was not bringing a lot of Mafia money into Australia. He also said he was president of a bank and that he was naturally interested in any business venture. When Testa headed for home, Lennie laid $400 on the bar at Sydney International Airport to buy farewell champagne for his new-found buddy. Lennie couldn’t conceal his delight—at last his dreams of working with the Americans was bearing fruit, he thought. He’d never considered his trade with Bernie Houghton to be of that class: he had no idea that Houghton was a crooked CIA man with more clout in the US criminal sphere than many a Mafia don. To Lennie, Bernie was a knockabout Yank who’d set up shop in Sydney and was keen for a bit of graft. But Joseph Dan Testa was a different fish altogether: here was a true-blue Mafioso straight from the Chicago School of Criminal Economics, alma mater

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of his own idol, Al Capone. Things were looking up! Judge Moffitt later highlighted one of the major problems Australia was facing in combating this international development in organised crime. He expressed concern at the huge disparity between the assessment of the commonwealth police and that of the New South Wales State police in relation to Joseph Dan Testa, and this was ‘but one area where there was conflict between the two forces’. Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill, head of the consorting squad in NSW, had at some time been given a copy of the commonwealth police report on Testa—a detailed outline of his involvement with Chicago syndicate identities—but he probably threw it in his bottom drawer, because he felt confident he knew what was really going on. He had a ‘snout’. McNeill’s own report, which was later provided to Moffitt, said in effect that he had spoken to a person who had now told him ‘the right story’ about Testa, which was, briefly, that for a series of innocent reasons Testa had been in Hong Kong and then come on to New South Wales for a holiday and, quite accidentally, as it were, he had met Lennie and others with criminal records. McNeill’s report, Moffitt commented, said this explained how McPherson ‘quite innocently’ met Testa and became friends and that as a result of that conversation McNeill ‘is now of the opinion Testa is a normal sort of fellow who in all probability visited Australia on a holiday with no ulterior motive’, and that McNeill claimed this was true because his informer ‘would not lie’ and that he rejected information from Chicago sources that Testa was a ‘psychopathic killer’.

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Moffitt ultimately made the following stern judgement on all this: ‘McNeill’s informer referred to has been disclosed to me and is connected with the group of criminals Testa met. Having in mind the members of this group and the commonwealth information on Testa from intelligence sources one can only share the obvious dismay of the Commonwealth Police at the grounds McNeill found sufficient to reverse the former view concerning Testa.’

OVERSEAS CRIM GET-TOGETHERS In New York in 1957 and then in London in 1966 groups of previously hostile criminals came to the conference table. Their intention was to establish organised crime for the first time on a sound corporate footing. A ‘board of directors’ would plan the destiny of their ‘company’ with the same care and precision as their counterparts in more legitimate pursuits, and would ensure, through this meeting of minds, that not only did they all benefit, but they all lived to enjoy the fruits of their communal efforts. The American meeting was held at the home of Joseph Barbara at Apalachin, New York, and was thereafter referred to as the Apalachin Meeting. It was organised by the Mafia leader Albert Anastasia, who didn’t actually make it to the meeting himself—he was murdered on 25 October 1957, an event which discouraged some from attending. The meeting was to have ‘carved up the action’ of organised crime in America among those attending or

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supporting the gathering, but was aborted when New York State police sergeant Edgar Crosswell, acting on ‘information’, raided the country home with his offsider Trooper Vincent Vasisko. Fifty-eight people were booked, and the meeting was later described as ‘a meeting of the Grand Council’ of the US Mafia. A special State Investigations Committee was set up to determine the purpose of the gangland meeting and to see whether any crimes had been committed. Ten of the gangsters were jailed for contempt of court and one for perjury. A group of crime bosses from Europe, England and the US met at the Dorchester Hotel, London, in 1966 to organise crime in a country to which none of them belonged. Their first purpose was to get the ‘inside track’ on the first tourist casino to be opened in Spain but they also discussed carving up the action in Europe and the UK. Two apparently reputable businessmen represented the European interests. One of them, Alex A Wilms, was European director of the American Bally poker machine corporation. Also there was Marcel Francissi, a wealthy French Corsican who was a leading restaurateur in France and Lebanon and a member of the French parliament, but who was also, according to US intelligence, a leading figure in the ‘French Connection’ smuggling heroin through Lebanon and France for refinement for the US market. Also present was Herbert Itkin, a US lawyer who had, he claimed, infiltrated the US Mafia at the behest of the FBI and the CIA. Both agencies later confirmed (through diplomatic channels to Justice Athol Moffitt

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in Sydney) that Itkin had constantly informed on Mafia activities to them over many years, well prior to the 1966 meeting in London and until his arrest some time later. He exposed details of the London meeting and control of the Spanish casino never eventuated. In the year after Testa left town, a lot happened. Lennie and he had talked about the way criminals in the US and Britain had put aside their differences and held large conferences to hammer out agreements on how to carve up the action—for everyone’s eventual gain. As a result of this discussion, early in 1972 Lennie had started talking to the tribal leaders of the milieu in Sydney with a view to setting up a similar meeting. He was making slow progress, and then a few events prodded the local crims into action. One was the publication of the story I had written for the Sunday Telegraph in July 1972, and the flurry of media and political attention that accompanied it, about US Mafiosi coming to town. Another was the discovery that somewhere in the higher echelons of the criminal milieu was an undercover commonwealth policeman who had been present at the wining and dining of Testa while he was in town. News that a photograph of the group’s night out at Chequers nightclub was in commonwealth police hands also required urgent discussion. The identity of the undercover man was never revealed and he stayed in place for at least a further five years (occasionally having a beer and chat with this author). So, in August 1972, the first of three meetings was held, bringing together the biggest names in Sydney

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crime. Karl Bonnette’s rented home at 44 William Street, Double Bay was agreed to as the venue, as Lennie was anxious to get the ‘eastern suburbs’ crims in, and Double Bay removed any suggestion this was to be dominated by his ‘Balmain gangs’. A most illustrious cast of characters gathered: apart from Lennie, Stan ‘the Man’ Smith and George Freeman, there were: •

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‘Paddles’ Anderson. By this time Frederick Charles ‘Paddles’ Anderson was an old man and a chronic alcoholic. He had come to power under former Labor Party state governments, and is reputed to have entertained himself and his associates so lavishly in the home of one former premier that the leader was forced to sit on a park bench across the road from his own house waiting for the mobsters to finish their revelling. Anderson’s senior position in the underworld attracted considerable attention at the Moffitt inquiry, and he was described by David Hickie as ‘one of Sydney’s most vicious criminals over four decades’. His specialisation was the organisation of massive international shoplifting operations. Lennie was the godfather of his daughter Erica. ‘Ironbar’ Miller. Born Georgi Petricevic on 28 September 1938 in Croatia, he used the following aliases: George Petroceric, ‘Big Miller’, ‘Ironbar’ Miller, George Petrocevic, George Miller, ‘Ironbar’ George, Milan Petricevic, ‘the Miller’ and Guri Petricevic. The 1973 edition of the Australasian Criminal Register (ACR) described him as a standover man and assailant who had notched up more than 20 arrests on charges

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including possession of an unlicensed pistol, consorting, stealing and various assault charges, including assaulting a policeman. It said he was ‘one of the most vicious criminals ever to come to this country’. Writer Evan Whitton (Can of Worms) claimed the ‘Ironbar’ tag came from his use of an iron bar to smash the legs of slow SP bookie debtors and the furnishings of nightclubs whose owners showed some reluctance to pay protection money to the likes of ‘Paddles’ Anderson, Lennie McPherson and others. Karl Bonnette. Karl Frederick Bonnette (sometimes spelled ‘Bonnett’), who was born in Melbourne on 8 June 1935, bestowed upon himself (as had others of massive intellect in this circle) the title ‘the Godfather’. He had a record of arrests and convictions for stolen goods, firearm offences, stealing and procuring. The 1973 ACR described him as ‘a desperate criminal who is depraved and who is strongly suspected of trafficking in drugs’. At the 1978 Woodward Royal Commission into drug trafficking, it was revealed that about $750 000 passed through Bonnette’s bank accounts in 18 months, during two months of which he collected $1917 in Social Security payments. Arthur ‘the Duke’ Delaney. Born on 11 September 1927, by the time of his 1973 ACR listing, Arthur William Delaney had a long history of shop theft and had to his credit 110 arrests in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, and in England, mostly on stealing charges. ‘He is Australia’s—and possibly the world’s— most active thief ’, the record says. ‘He has been

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expert in forming large gangs of thieves around him to perpetrate large-scale robberies. He is a criminal of international repute, known to police in many countries as “the Duke”.’ The New South Wales Criminal Intelligence Unit reported in March 1977 that Delaney had convictions for break, enter and steal, assault, possession of unlicensed pistol, consorting with known criminals, street betting, possession of explosives and offering a bribe. Leo ‘the Liar’ Callaghan. Born Patrick William Warren in 1938, Callaghan was a solidly built man who sometimes wore a grey toupee and had the numeral ‘1’ tattooed on his penis. He was a member of the notorious ‘Kangaroo Club’, an international shoplifting organisation that would hop over to London on a Qantas flight, hit the shops and hop back again before you could say ‘Harrods has been hit again by the Aussies’. He was an accomplished forger and a major supplier of forged passports, driver’s licences and the like for the Sydney crims. ‘Alby’ Sloss. Albert Ross Sloss was born on 15 February 1911. He twice served as an alderman on Sydney City Council (1939–40 and 1950–53) but, after a strong suggestion of involvement in corruption, he had his Labor Party endorsement pulled out from under him for the 1953 council elections. In February 1954 he was charged with having conspired to breach the Secret Commissions Act and the Local Government Act over alleged bribery, but the charges were dismissed in the Central Summons Court. Undaunted, he was elected to the NSW parliament

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as the ALP member for King (which covered Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst and the Kings Cross area) in 1956 and held this seat until 1973. Sloss denied he attended the Double Bay meeting, but those who knew that he was as bent as a paper-clip had little doubt. During this and the next two meetings an old man sat in a Holden car outside to act as ‘cockatoo’. While security at the meetings was good—there’s still only rumours about what was discussed—it didn’t take the commonwealth police long to find out they were happening. Having been tipped off by their undercover agent who had infiltrated the McPherson camp, commonwealth police passed news of this first gathering on to Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard in the NSW police, who provided some additional information gleaned from his own sources. That these criminals were meeting was serious enough. That a member of state parliament was reported to be at the meetings was even more significant. Ballard said his informant had seen all these people go into the building, with the exception of Sloss, although the information did not exclude the possibility that Sloss had attended. Ballard passed the commonwealth information on to his boss, consorting squad chief Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill, and McNeill assigned it to Detective Sergeant Frank Charlton to investigate. At the time McNeill, Ballard and other members of the consorting squad were investigating the allegations of organised crime, but Charlton was not involved in the special investigation.

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By the time Charlton received his brief from McNeill, the third meeting was over and done with. The morning after accepting the assignment, Charlton took some officers to the William Street address and arrested Karl Bonnette on the spot on a charge of receiving a stolen television set. Charlton also asked whether certain criminals—he read out the names of those on his list—had been meeting there. He was indignantly told they had not. Charlton said later that McNeill had not given him Sloss’s name, and he did not mention it to Bonnette. No surveillance of the building was carried out, and anyway that would have been futile after Charlton’s visit. Ballard and McNeill claimed that the material received from the commonwealth police was ‘not relevant to their inquiry’! Mr Justice Moffitt, who inquired into these matters, was less than impressed. Here’s what he had to say in his official report: The decision to discard this material from the police inquiry without further inquiry is almost beyond belief. Here was a group which included some of the worst local criminals, whose place and hours of apparently regular and continuing meetings were known, as were some procedures and the description of the “cockatoo”. McPherson was said to be there and McPherson was a man who in the current police reports was said to be a known associate of persons being investigated for crime in relation to the clubs. He was reported to be being used for intimidation in relation to clubs. He was known to have a number of associations with Testa. Testa was the subject of intelligence reports linking him with organised crime in Chicago. Others who had met Testa here were supposed to be at the Double Bay meetings. It would be some coincidence if Testa gravitated to these criminals by accident for social purposes.

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It would be some coincidence if the criminals, whom Ballard believed really were meeting, were holding regular meetings, guarded by a cockatoo, and all for no criminal purpose. The police inquiry was having some difficulty finding people who would confirm what was happening. Here, at least, was a chance, by surveillance procedures, to check one of the suspected avenues for infiltration of organised crime. This chance could not have been more effectively terminated by any plan than it was by a police officer [Charlton] with no connection with the special inquiry, going to the door at eight o’clock in the morning, when the people were not there and giving the names provided by the informers.

His report said that what happened appeared to have been ‘in reckless disregard’ of the possible safety of the informers. And referring to the allegations that Albert Sloss had been present at the meetings, Judge Moffitt said: ‘It was vital that the presence of a member of Parliament, if possible, be positively proved or positively disproved. In my view,’ he continued, ‘there was no intimation that Sloss was not there.’ He said he thought the truth of the matter was that Sloss was there and that Ballard believed so and reported this to McNeill. ‘There would have been no reason not to pass Sloss’s name with the others to Charlton, unless for some reason it was suppressed,’ he said. He went on: What then is the inference to be drawn from this sorry episode? Does it show there was some corrupt attempt not to uncover what was happening concerning organised crime? Again a conclusion cannot be come to . . . but I say at this stage of my report that the explanation I think lies in McNeill’s unjustified contempt at the time for

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material originating from the Commonwealth Police, coupled with his conceit that he was able to judge matters without investigating them, in this instance because he, McNeill, believed Sloss would not be there and because, without bothering to inquire as to the detail of the informer material or the reliability of the informer, he did not believe the information. I think it is likely that it was his decision rather than that of Ballard which discarded the matter by sending Charlton.

Charlton’s [deliberate or otherwise] flat-footed approach to the information put paid to the use of Bonnette’s house as a venue. It’s not known if the crims ever got together again, but it’s probable they did not. Sporadic gang wars which erupted on and off since then indicate that no great peace plan was drawn up, and the factions resorted to their traditional tribal ways.

8 THE MOFFITT ROYAL COMMISSION WHILE IT HAD long been Lennie’s dream to control organised crime in Australia, by 1972 many things about organised crime were literally spinning out of control that would have been quite worrying to him. For more than a year stories had been percolating through sections of the media about criminal activities in registered clubs, suggesting ‘skimming’ from poker machine profits and the use of Mafia-style tactics in the entertainment wing of the club industry. In one bizarre incident the late CJ McKenzie, reporter and raconteur, saw a bucket full of coins, covered with a layer of ice cubes, spilled onto the carpet in Wally Dean’s plush office at South Sydney Juniors club. A somewhat embarrassed Dean shouted at the waiter, whom he’d asked to bring some ice for their drinks, to ‘take that fucking money to the counting room where it belongs’. McKenzie had no doubts that a call for ‘ice’ from Dean was a code to bring in a bucket of coins from the poker machine take. With lax government control and inspection, it would have [ 177 ]

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been an easy matter to take as much as one wanted from the rivers of cash flowing through the clubs. ‘Skimming’ from the cash flow had been identified as a widespread problem in Mafia-controlled gambling clubs in Las Vegas. So, too, in the entertainment area. The entertainers’ union, Actors Equity, claimed that a few unscrupulous talent agencies were charging double or triple commissions for placing acts in some clubs. And overseas acts were booked for the clubs mainly through big Mafialinked agencies in the US. A series of stories starting in April 1972 in the fiercely independent weekly newspaper Nation Review upped the ante from the vague and unspecified claims in the Sydney tabloids. The weekly actually named the Bally poker machine company—which was making big inroads into the NSW clubs—as being under US Mafia control. In the UK the Bally offshoot had sued the London Daily Mail for defamation after the paper published articles claiming the US Bally parent company was Mafia controlled, but a jury in the English High Court concluded that the newspaper’s report was true. This had left Nation Review and other local media safer to report the Mafia control of a company that was now being accused of paying huge ‘secret commissions’ to NSW club officials to install Bally machines.

SPIKED: EXPOSING AUSTRALIA’S CRIMINALS IN THE MEDIA The failed attempt by Halpin and Forsyth in the late 1960s to publish their series of articles on McPherson and Australian crime in the Australian must now be

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recognised as the event that posed the earliest and greatest threat of exposure to Lennie and his empire of crime. Yet that series was spiked on the basis of an insufficient investigation into who wrote the famous letter signed ‘Len’, the one in which the writer said: ‘We had to knock Hackett because he had a big mouth when he was drunk’. With a few notable exceptions, journalists generally self-censored themselves and simply didn’t bother getting into stories that would prove difficult in the face of the nation’s fairly oppressive defamation laws. The few who tried often had the risk of a defamation used by newspaper management to block publication. My own attempt at the Sunday Telegraph to reveal the US Mafia’s overtures to the local crims bears some examination in this context. Like Forsyth and Halpin before me, I came up with alarming information. Not only was McPherson the main organiser of Australian crime (in league with some powerful NSW police), not only was the criminal octopus spreading its tentacles into the lucrative club industries, but now it had come of age: it had developed direct links with crime syndicates in America. The Mafia had arrived in Australia. After a couple of months of freelance—and often undercover—activity I compiled a report on what I had learned, complete with a cross-referenced card system (it was before we had computers) and a managementstyle flow chart showing the maze of complex links between people and organisations. I had learned details of the parties with which the local criminals had feted visiting Chicago mobster Dan Testa, plus some details

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of the Mafia-like activities in the club entertainment circuit and a great deal about the activities of Bally. I took the material to the news editor of the Sunday Telegraph, coincidentally and fortunately the same Chris Forsyth who had done the work in the 1960s. He immediately assigned two senior staff reporters to work with me. Everything had to be verified. There was a flurry of activity of checking, double-checking and confirming my findings through documents and interviews with their own contacts (including some of the police I had earlier decided to stay away from). We mapped out the story and wrote it. In my statement to the Moffitt Royal Commission I explained it this way: On the Wednesday the two reporters, the news editor and myself spent about nine hours discussing my original report with the News Limited lawyer, with the aim of seeking his advice on how much of it we could retain in story form with the libel laws in mind, at the end of which he was satisfied the story would stand up using most, but not all, of the names of people and companies in the report. Several drafts were prepared. Finally, on the Friday morning, myself, Bob Bottom and the other reporter, Phil Cornford, sat down at a typewriter and wrote a story on copy-paper in professional newspaper style. That afternoon Mr Bottom told me that he would take a copy of the story to Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill in an attempt to verify its accuracy. Mr Bottom said Sergeant McNeill had been conducting an inquiry into this area. Later that afternoon Mr Bottom said he had discussed the report with Sergeant McNeill who said it was largely accurate. The story was again that night vetted by the News Limited lawyer, who made some minor changes. The story was submitted to the editor, Mr King Watson, the following morning for publication, who directed that it be

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rewritten without names of any company or person. This was done and it was this story which appeared in print in the Sunday Telegraph on July 16, 1972, headed ‘The Night the Mafia came to Sydney’. The watering down of the story had naturally been a great disappointment to us all. The lawyer had expressed the view to the editor that if anyone sued over the story ‘they would be in gaol before the libel cases came to court’ because of the strength of the allegations in the story and its supporting documentation. There could be no doubt, he said, that the company [News Ltd] would win any cases arising out of publishing the story on the grounds that it was truthful and demonstrably was printed in the public benefit. Sadly the editor disagreed and said that he wouldn’t allow any story in his paper which might attract a writ, public benefit or not.

Although the ‘no-names, no-writs’ version of the story had its impact, in real terms, yet another attempt to expose Australia’s criminals in the media had failed. There can be no doubt that in those years—along with crooked police, magistrates judges and some politicians—the media collectively contributed to the immunity from exposure and prosecution which society in New South Wales had afforded its most significant criminal. Bally’s move into Australia and Asia involved the purchase of the business interests of Jack Rooklyn, a tough cigar-chomping operator of pinball parlours in Australia and gambling centres in Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau and the Philippines. According to Rooklyn, he had been born in London on 11 March 1918, but police reckoned he’d fudged his age

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somewhere along the line and he was really born in 1908. Noted observer of such matters, Evan Whitton (in Can of Worms) wrote that Rooklyn’s Russian-Jewish family migrated to Australia in 1921. During World War II Rooklyn arranged entertainment, including illegal poker machines, for US soldiers serving in Australia. He had become the licensed operator of a pinball amusement parlour on George Street, just along from Railway Square, in the early 1950s. By 1952 he’d also established parlours throughout Asia and by 1957 was a distributor of amusement machines made by Lion Manufacturing, a precursor to the US Bally company. Jack Rooklyn was reputedly bought out by Bally for $10 million and was kept on as general manager in the region. Bally had previously expanded into Europe, Thailand and Indonesia but their deal with Rooklyn now gave the company access to the rest of Asia and, of course, Australia. By 1972, less than four years after its quiet arrival on the Australian scene, Bally had captured 20 per cent of the lucrative $15 million a year poker machine sales and service market in New South Wales. And in that year it adopted a more coercive sales policy. State politicians could no longer avoid debate and in the NSW parliament there were angry exchanges between Premier Askin (later to be proven deeply corrupt) and Labor’s old-time leader Patrick Hills from the ALP’s Right (which had strong traditional links with local criminals). This descended almost to the farce of each threatening the other with exposure of the skeletons of corruption that were rattling around in various government and opposition closets. But whatever games

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were being played in Macquarie Street, eventually the politicians could not ignore the serious noises coming from sections of the media. In the background, the Labor leader in the Legislative Council, Neville Wran (who aspired to be leader) was applying his own pressure for an investigation that could cause Askin serious political damage. And the political temperature went up a couple more notches when NSW Chief Secretary Eric Willis approved an application for a Bally machine which could accept five coins per play, despite the government’s previous banning of multiple-play poker machines. There was a flurry of official activity in response to the growing wave of media interest. NSW Police Commissioner Fred Hanson assured reporters that ‘there is no Mafia threat in Australia . . .’ at an airport interview on his return from the general assembly of Interpol in Frankfurt, where he had been Australia’s representative. His Premier, Sir Robert Askin, appeared not to share this view when he said on 13 July 1972 that there was ‘worrying infiltration [of the clubs] by criminal elements, some with overseas connections’. And on the same day the US Embassy in Canberra offered the Australian government use of the FBI’s facilities, if needed, to help deal with the ‘Mafia problem’ in Australia. The British government had done this to curb the spread of Mafia activities there, the ambassador’s spokesperson said. Also on the same day Australian Treasurer Billy Mackie Snedden ordered a Reserve Bank inquiry into ‘evidence of growing Mafia infiltration into Australian business’ and the Deputy Commissioner of Commonwealth Police, Len Harper, said there was ‘possible

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evidence’ of a nucleus of Mafia infiltration into Australian business. ‘We are very concerned,’ he said. There was, as the old ribald classics used to put it, something going on. For months before this a few lone journalists had been trying to raise the public—and official—awareness, with patchy success, given the media’s inherent cowardice. But now at last some official recognition was being given to the problem. Then, in 1973, Premier Robert Askin, under intense political pressure, announced that a royal commission would be held to investigate the allegations of criminal activity in clubs and the infiltration of the industry by organised crime figures. It would be headed by Supreme Court Judge Athol Moffitt. Although this wasn’t commonly known at the time, it nearly didn’t get off the ground at all. Moffitt was first asked to hold a fairly shallow inquiry. With the Liberals and the ALP vying for the upper hand in a debate that could damage both Askin and Labor’s Pat Hills, Askin was looking for a political quick fix. Labor, with aspiring leader Neville Wran pushing the agenda, wanted an inquiry that would focus on allegations of Askin’s grafting, and Askin wanted something so general that he could throw it back at Labor during an election campaign. But Moffitt would have none of it. Years later, aged 90 and writing his fifth book, he told the author that he’d spent a whole weekend in negotiations. He refused point blank to accept a brief for a ‘quick fix’ inquiry. ‘Politicians don’t like to call inquiries that they don’t know the answers to,’ he said. ‘I insisted any inquiry would have to include a reference to organised crime activities, or as far as I was concerned, there would be no inquiry.’

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It was a close call, but finally Askin gave in to the respected judge and formalised the appointment on 20 August 1973 of Judge Athol Moffitt to inquire into ‘certain matters relating to allegations of organised crime in clubs’. Three terms of reference were given to the judge. He had to establish whether police reports (from Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill and from the commonwealth police) which Askin had tabled in parliament the previous November disclosed sufficient reason to take proceedings ‘against any person in respect of alleged organised crime in or in relation to Clubs’ and if so, whom? Moffitt was also directed to report on whether there had been any attempt by the government or anyone else to ‘cover up’ the existence of any such crime or the identity of those involved. At Moffitt’s request in December 1973, after a number of open and in camera sittings, the government agreed to a third term of reference, which asked the judge to determine whether the operations of Bally in Australia offered ‘a risk of infiltration of organised crime into or in relation to Clubs’. The historic Supreme Court building next to the Greenaway-designed St James Church was the venue chosen for the inquiry. The bewigged Judge Moffitt presided from the elevated bench, faced by two long tables in the front of the well of the room—invariably packed with up to 38 wigged and gowned barristers and their instructing solicitors. More than a dozen places were reserved for the media, and there were about four rows of tiered seating for interested members of the public. At the open hearings witnesses were sworn in (to tell the truth etc) and examined first by Garth Needham,

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QC, the silk assisting Moffitt. Then the various silks, representing government, state and federal police, unions, poker machine companies and individuals set to appear, could take their turns at cross-examining and, in some cases, move for certain evidence offered to be made ‘inadmissible’. A police and legal team was assigned to assist the inquiry, and it did a great deal of the preliminary investigative work, taking statements from those willing to assist, preparing and serving subpoenas to attend on those who were not so willing—people like Lennie. On a Tuesday morning in September 1973 there was a tense air of expectation around the elegant old courtroom. It was the day of a major highlight of the Moffitt inquiry: Leonard Arthur McPherson had been called to give evidence. Andrew Leary rose to address Judge Athol Moffitt, the ubiquitous file of papers in his right hand, left hand clutching the lapel of the standard black gown that denoted his status as a barrister. ‘I have been instructed relative to a subpoena served this morning upon a Leonard Arthur McPherson, who is in court,’ Leary said. ‘He received the subpoena at nine o’clock this morning. It calls for passport documents, share transactions. He is not ready to answer it. He needs time to produce these. The return date is today.’ A sigh of resignation wafted from the press gallery: Lennie was pulling a stunt, trying at the last minute to avoid the inevitability of his examination by this inquiry. As if in response to the murmur that had arisen throughout the courtroom, Leary continued: ‘Of course, my client is very anxious to comply with the subpoena

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issued to him. He wishes to take certain advice, in relation not so much to the validity of the subpoena, but the passport documents are matters upon which he wishes to take advice.’ Judge Moffitt said he would give McPherson until 10.45 next morning. ‘If he goes into the witness box [then] and says there is some delay he might be given more time.’ The sham continued the next day, with Leary telling Moffitt that his client is ‘not fearful’ of producing the documents but ‘he has certain advice and he feels he has a lawful excuse for not producing the matters’. Moffitt explained to Leary the extensive powers he could exercise under the Royal Commissions Act. Leary countered with arguments that the subpoena was ‘oppressive’ and went wide of the commission’s terms of reference. His client may need to consult senior counsel, he said. The issue was again adjourned till the following morning, but after lunch there was another development. Senior barrister Tom Hughes, QC, a former federal attorney-general and avid cricketer, stood at the bar table to announce that he, with ‘learned friend’ Leary, was there to represent McPherson. ‘He is here in court and has certain documents with him,’ said Hughes. ‘And McPherson has taken steps to make available some other documents. If required to be called to produce those documents he will invoke his right, if I may so describe it,’ continued the expensive lawyer, ‘to express his unwillingness.’ Under the Royal Commissions Act the judge could insist on receiving answers to questions. A person could

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indicate they were answering ‘unwillingly’ but were still required to give the information being sought. In their case, however, their evidence could not later be used against them in a further court action. Lennie’s bid to avoid the powers of the commission was never going to work, and he subsequently appeared and did, indeed, express an unwillingness to answer some questions. Finally sworn in on Wednesday 19 September 1973, McPherson was asked about the documents he’d been ordered to produce. Of his passport he said, in an almost incomprehensible babbling with which watchers of this inquiry would become familiar: ‘I had the passport in court on Monday in Queensland and I rang this morning—Mr Leary I think rang to see if it was there and they said I hadn’t left it there and they said they couldn’t find it, and it’s either in the plane or I left it in the car or it is in the home. I think it should come to light in the next few days.’ Replying to questions about his income, he said he’d been working for a Mr Foster (actually his nephew Norm), who owned the boarding house in Balmain, from the day they started building it 18 years previously, and had been earning the same salary of $40 a week ever since. ‘I keep the maintenance on the place,’ he told Justice Moffitt. ‘The other day I had to dig down and let water out of the pipes. I can do anything at all in the building trade.’ He went on to explain that his work at the ‘motel’ had tapered off as the years went by. ‘I used to start off by washing the linen, cleaning the flats out each week, putting the dirt bins out twice a week, collecting the rents on Saturday. Doing everything that needed

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doing there. I used to get paid extra for that. If I painted out a flat, I would get so much a flat. ‘My work has gradually gone off to a lesser stage,’ he continued. ‘I don’t do the laundry any more and I don’t do the cleaning of the flats. I don’t put the dirt bins out and as my wages stayed, I have done less.’ Responding to raised eyebrows around the bar table, Lennie added: ‘I do the best I can.’ (That night some wit daubed in huge letters along the wall of the Balmain ‘motel’ the words: ‘Lennie does the best he can’). Not exactly the lifestyle that would put an observer in mind of an Al Capone. And not the kind of occupation that would create such paranoia as to cause him to take the extraordinary precautions he went to in order to safeguard himself against perceived or real threats. Nor was it the sort of income one would expect for a man living in such luxury. In response to queries from the judge, Lennie provided details of what he claimed was his gross and taxable income for the few years before the inquiry.

THE PLACE AT GLADESVILLE: A FORTRESS FOR HIS PARANOIA All his long life Lennie McPherson knew that the longer you intend to stay on top, the more people you have to kill and the more people there are who want to kill you. To prevent the latter, he surrounded himself with physical and human barriers aimed at making it virtually impossible for an opponent to cause him violence. Outwardly he led a seemingly respectable life with his family in the middle class north-western Sydney

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suburb of Gladesville where he lived, at 22 Prince Edward Street, from the end of World War II when he bought it, according to my copy of a land title document at the office of the registrar-general, for £1746. (He told Justice Moffitt’s Commission, on oath, that he’d paid £900 for it, and estimated it was then—in 1973—worth $70 000.) He did, indeed, spend a great deal on renovations. In the early 1970s a massive two-storey mansion began to take shape over and around his old red-brick cottage. From the street the house looked fairly normal—even though it towered head and shoulders above its neighbouring single-storey detached red-brick cottages of 1930s vintage. Yet a closer look revealed one unusual feature for a quiet suburban street: a small swivel video camera suspended from the porch over the front door. But it was the invisible security installations that revealed his level of paranoia—or genuine concern for his safety. A building union official who talked with men who worked on the premises over time told me some of the details. The entire perimeter of the premises was wired to detect any movement within its limits. Placing one’s hand across the line of the plain-looking low, whitepainted brick fence at the front—or anywhere else over the boundary—set off alarms that could not be heard outside the house (the idea was to kill a would-be assassin, not to frighten him off with clanging burglar alarms). At night the rear garden was brilliantly floodlit and occupied by a couple of large dogs that only a fool would consider friendly pets. Anyone entering the premises (either clandestinely over the back fence or by overtly walking up the front path) was tracked on video camera

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linked to monitors in several locations around the house, and was photographed by concealed still cameras. In an extension of his paranoia over security, neither of his wives were ever allowed to bring in hired help: they did the housework—and served his dinner on time—themselves. For added security, Lennie frequently used hired cars of different makes, models and colours, as well as his own heavily reinforced late model Holden sedan— although official records never showed Lennie as a car owner, or even the holder of a licence to drive. He also had an automatic opener for his garage door—quite a common gadget—so the garage door could be opened as he approached the house and he could drive in quickly, closing the roller door behind him. It helped to eliminate those awkward and vulnerable moments of getting out of the car to open the garage door. One of his neighbours, for the first year or so after he moved into the street, told me he thought McPherson was giving him a cheerful wave as he drove by. Eventually he realised Lennie was not being neighbourly at all: he was just sending the signal to open the garage door. Another neighbour was once doing shiftwork and his wife, chatting with a friend across the road, asked the children playing with billy-carts in the street if they could play a quieter game to enable her husband to get some daytime sleep. Most of the kids agreed and put their billy-carts away, but Lennie’s two boys (the eldest used to strut among the local kids saying: ‘I’m “Little Mister Big”. Just watch your step.’) rode aggressively towards the woman. When she repeated her

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request that they play a quieter game, the eldest boy said: ‘We’ll go and get our father.’ The man joined his wife and the neighbour she’d been chatting with and kids from local families. Lennie approached them. ‘He swore violently at us,’ the man told me later. He said Lennie yelled: ‘My kids will do what they fucking well like in this street.’ The man asked Lennie to moderate his language and attitude, which resulted in the menace of a raised fist. The neighbour (slightly rashly, he admitted later) said: ‘Go on then. I’ll bet you’re not game to have a go. You’ll probably get one of your thugs to do it for you.’ To this Lennie retorted: ‘I’ll put you away in the fucking cemetery like I’ve put half a dozen others!’ Lennie made it known there were only two neighbours in the street he did not get on well with: the shiftworker and Sergeant Ray Briddick, a police prosecutor based at Central Court, who lived at number 20. Lennie realised the garage door-opening device was not totally foolproof: it transmitted a pulsed tone-modulated signal in the 27MHz band that was one of many thousands of variable combinations. He feared that an opponent could lurk nearby and record his particular signal pattern and then use it to open the garage door at will. But that was a remote risk he had to take. Once he was in his garage Lennie directly accessed the safety of the house without exposing himself to the world—and a possible assassin’s bullet. From the garage a passage connected to what looked like a kitchen pantry door inside the house. Near it was a cupboard containing a stash of weapons that he could easily access on the

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way in or out of the house. And on the front doorstep was a ‘welcome’ mat that would collapse into a one-foot deep pit at the press of a button from inside. What appeared to be normal mottled glass in the large front windows was in fact bulletproof glass. Construction of the house was delayed for three months awaiting importation to fill Lennie’s explicit order for the material: it had to look like the sort of glass being used in many larger private houses in Sydney in those days. The normal cement-rendered brick walls of the house were strongly reinforced against a possible bomb blast. Even the original old red-brick house was strengthened this way, and just as well—two sticks of gelignite were thrown at the house from a passing car during an earlier gang war. One nearby resident later told me the blast shattered neighbouring windows but caused no damage to the McPherson domicile. Lennie was always in fear for his life, and frequently told police with whom he was pally that he knew of a number of men at any particular time who would kill him, given the opportunity. He was never alone outside the house. Even when he went to one of his ‘locals’ for a drink he was accompanied by an entourage of heavily armed bodyguards who would place themselves strategically around the bar. Most of these gunmen modelled themselves on newsreel footage of the FBI men who surrounded the US president—they wore dark suits, had the telltale bulge under the armpit, were cleanshaven and very fit. This was possibly very appropriate, given that their employer modelled himself on another American gangster.

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From 1969 to his estimate for 1973, Lennie claimed his total gross income was $30 870, making the annual average just $6174. But then there must have been those handy tax deductions (no doubt tradesman’s tools like guns and material supplies like bullets are all deductible in his profession), so he ended up with an average taxable income of $4474.25 per annum. On that income, he claimed, he accumulated more than $10 000 in a joint savings account with his wife Marlene Carol. She also owned a property in the lush grazing valley of Minnamurra, in southern New South Wales, which, he said, was worth only $6000. No one believed a word of it and this first-ever public examination of his wealth did little to stem the rumours that had persisted for decades that he was a multimillionaire operating dozens of bank accounts in a variety of names. One day, the wagging tongues said, they’d get Big Mac for tax, just like they got his hero, Al Capone. But Lennie was the sort of person around whom urban myths breed, and the tongue-waggers never came up with a shred of evidence of great wealth and multiple bank accounts. The tax office did uncover one bank account in his wife’s maiden name after investigating his affairs in 1969 and two years later he could see no point in retaining it, so he transferred the modest $5000 it held into his own account. He admitted, reluctantly, that the account in the other name was ‘probably to avoid tax, or something’. But this was really penny-ante stuff and the statement of income he tendered to the inquiry either represented a true picture of a much-maligned man, or Lennie was far more astute in his financial

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management and asset acquisitions than some gave him credit for. It is known from federal police sources that during the 1970s Lennie was investing heavily in the Philippines and New Caledonia, hoping eventually to move into semiretirement in one or the other place. A journalist friend of Lennie said he was given a free flight and holiday to Noumea by Lennie in 1973. He said his benefactor had ‘considerable business interests’ in the capital of the French-controlled South Pacific island. None of this, though, was revealed to Judge Moffitt. At the inquiry he was asked about the source of any money he earned over and above the $40 weekly wage from the Balmain boarding house. ‘I couldn’t say I earn it on selling furniture only,’ he said. ‘I might earn it a hundred different ways. You ask me which way. I would say the true answer is I don’t know, but at a guess I’d say if I do any work, any plumbing—which I’m not allowed to do but I do a good job at plumbing—if somebody gives me money I pay tax on it. I am as good as any plumber, any electrician.’ He explained he had no invoices or records of furniture from Manila he bought and sold: ‘I could possibly have invoices if I looked for them, but I would say as I sell things the invoices get put away, or lost, or burnt, whatever suits me, and once I make money on the thing I destroy the things or shoot them away. I don’t bother with them any further. ‘I don’t tell my accountant about these earnings,’ he went on. ‘But I have paid tax on them. They appear in my tax returns under “Other Earnings”.’ He was then

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shown a copy of one of his subpoenaed tax returns and was asked to point out where this ‘other income’ appeared on it. ‘Here it is,’ he replied. ‘Here under “Incomes Received for Services Rendered”. But that’s not necessarily from buying and selling furniture itself. I just told you, I’m not responsible. If I do something for you I don’t write down I done it for you and I forget I done it twelve months later. But I know what I have in the bank and I know what I pay tax on. I know what I have to pay tax on is what I end up with.’ Explaining more of the intricacies of this novel accounting system, Lennie said he simply told his accountant of an amount of money and instructed him to include that on his tax return under ‘other income’. Didn’t his accountant ask any questions? Lennie quipped: ‘He wouldn’t get any answers. He did at first, but I said “Other Earnings” and the taxation department is told the same.’ During the 1969 tax department investigation into his affairs, Lennie was telephoned by a Mr Herkus of Albert and Agnew, tax accountants of Taylor Square, Sydney, who asked could he come out to Gladesville to go through his papers. Lennie agreed. Garth Needham: ‘Did they ask you what your income had been over the years?’ ‘They didn’t ask me, they told me what it was,’ replied Lennie. ‘They did not ask you how you got it?’ pressed Needham. ‘They told me how I got it,’ insisted Lennie. ‘They

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even told me what I have for breakfast. It’s going back a long time. I told them one story and they told me another. I told them I was stealing, but they said I did not, I got it from other sources.’ Asked about his betting habits, he said the most he’d ever had on one race was $600. Of course, he only ever placed bets with the legal TAB, never with an illegal SP bookie. He couldn’t recall any really big wins, but said: ‘$4000 for instance would not excite me.’ One record of spending came from the revelation that on one of his overseas trips he chalked up $4000 on his Diners’ Club card alone. But mostly he used cash, he said. He normally just walked into the airline office and handed over cash, he said. ‘It could be money I got off somebody . . . it could have been money I accumulated before that on the trips,’ he said when asked why cash payments did not tally with cash withdrawals from his bank account. He usually kept an ‘amount’ of money at home, he said. ‘One thousand dollars, two thousand, five thousand . . . depending on how well I am doing. If I need some money for betting, it is there.’ Over the years he also made sure he had some money handy in case someone rang up ‘for bail, or something like that’, he added. Why did he keep so much money at home, instead of putting it in the bank? asked Needham. ‘I have $100 in my pocket right now,’ replied Lennie, ‘you wouldn’t call that a large amount, would you?’ ‘I am not talking about $100,’ said the barrister ‘One thousand dollars is only 900 more,’ quipped Lennie, a slight grin crossing his rugged face.

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People observing Lennie’s examination at the Royal Commission couldn’t help feeling he was having fun with the battery of costly QCs and the judge himself, giving his ‘left-hand sense of humour’ an outing at their expense.

MCPHERSON’S ‘INCOME’ AS DECLARED TO THE MOFFITT ROYAL COMMISSION Year Gross ($) 1969 3480 1970 5030 1971 6080 1972 8280 1973 Estimate 8000

Taxable ($) 2274 3794 4669 7160

After he had given his evidence, Lennie made himself available for a number of carefully chosen media interviews. One of these was a television chat, hardly worth repeating in full here, but during it he used the line that he would be ‘the funniest standover man in the business’, and lots more, of course, all tinged with his own rare and finely honed sense of humour. A Daily Telegraph reporter monitored the show and wrote a story based on what had been said on it. It made page one the next morning, but when Lennie saw his own spoken words in harsh print, the gentle sense of humour disappeared. He flew into a rage, despite the fact that what he was reading was what he himself had said on TV the previous evening. So there and then, at 9.15 in the morning on Friday 15 February 1974, Lennie

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rang the Telegraph and was connected to a reporter who, thankfully, was up to speed in shorthand. This was the tirade he noted down: Who was the cunt who put that story about me on the front page this morning? I want you to give the mongrel a message from me—tell him I will blow his fucking brains out. I’m sick and tired of the Telegraph running me down. The bloke who wrote that shit may force me to live up to my reputation—although I’ve never earned it. . . . I never swore. They are trying to make out that I am an imbecile. What cunt wrote that shit about me being a funny man and a comedian—there was nothing funny about it. I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s funny. I’m warning the mongrel, if I do something, I do it properly and this time I will give him a warning—next time I will just go into the Telegraph office and do something definite. I am not going to make any more threats. I will just come in there and make a scene. You can tell the cunt I will blow his fucking brains out when he gets out of the car—and I’ll have a good alibi. No one has ever come forward to me with a penny. [The Telegraph story had suggested he stood over people for money.] I told the Royal Commission all it wanted to know. I don’t have to tell every other cunt. I don’t have to tell the world. I’ll tell you that Moffitt’s an imbecile. You tell that reporter to watch out.

For all of the careful, skilful cross-examination of McPherson by Needham, QC, Judge Moffitt and several wearers of silk and wigs at the Moffitt inquiry bar table, no one really laid a glove on him. The responses by veteran consorting squad Detective Frank Charlton to examination at the inquiry support this view. Charlton

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told the inquiry he had known McPherson for 25 years and that ‘to [my] knowledge’ he was no longer an active criminal. After some questions Charlton admitted that he would not know whether Lennie was or was not committing crime through some associates or agents. He didn’t think so, though, and neither did he think that McPherson still associated with criminals. ‘What about Stanley Smith, he associates with him, doesn’t he?’ Needham asked. ‘Stanley Smith is missing at the moment,’ said Charlton. ‘We are looking for Stanley Smith and covering quite a large search for him, and I feel if we found him he would not be in New South Wales at the moment.’ Indeed at the time—as Detective Sergeant Charlton knew only too well—the rumour was strong around the traps that our Stanley had been done in. Wally Dean actually rang a journalist mate at the Daily Mirror and floated a story, which was later published, that Stan Smith had been on the Queensland Gold Coast and that he had been ‘fed to the sharks’ (the Surfer’s Paradise equivalent of Sydney’s 60-mile swim, in which the unharmed victim is simply dumped overboard 60 miles from shore). But fans and customers of Smith relaxed not long after that, for the violent little heroin pusher and addict arrived back on the Sydney scene, alive, not very well, but certainly not shark bitten. Detective Charlton referred to Stan’s drug addiction during his evidence. ‘McPherson despises him to a degree over his drug habits,’ he said. ‘And I think that is what caused, to some degree, a fall out, or let us say the friendship is not as strong as it used to be because of Smith and

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his drug running.’ Detective Charlton could have offered a lot more information on Stan Smith had he been in a more cooperative mood: the official NSW police records devote a considerable amount of space to Stan’s history since he ‘first came under notice’ in 1954 with a conviction on an assault charge. Charlton then referred to another associate of Lennie, Georgi Petricevic, alias Ironbar Miller, who he described as a friend of Lennie. ‘But they haven’t been associating lately because Ironbar has left the country,’ he added. ‘He is wanted here but he left in about October 1973.’ (He was actually back by then: surely the police could have found him in his capacity as enforcer at the Palace illegal gambling casino at 22 Rockwall Crescent, Potts Point if they had really wanted to?) ‘Up until the time he left he was a friend of McPherson—or he was befriended by McPherson, and they did meet on occasions,’ continued Charlton. ‘And I have no doubt they met on occasions we do not know of.’ Charlton added that he did not think Ironbar had any drug convictions but ‘I know he is a standover man’. Then came a small burst of self-praise: ‘I have been in the Consorting Squad for 16 years and I try to learn as much as I can about the heavy criminals,’ he said. ‘McPherson, Miller, Clark, Freeman—all those criminals. I try to keep on top of them as much as possible and obtain as much information as we can.’ Charlton told the judge that he could only draw conclusions from the information that was available on McPherson. ‘But I would agree,’ he conceded, ‘that he is not the nicest man, as he would make out he is. As far as

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I am concerned he is still a criminal.’ Only a few minutes before this the veteran detective was saying that to his knowledge McPherson was not still an active criminal. ‘Why is he still an active criminal if he has ceased criminal activity in your view in the last five years and has not associated with criminals?’ asked a bemused Mr Needham, looking for the Catch 22. ‘Well, he has befriended Ironbar Miller; he is a friend of Stanley Smith; he is a friend of Clark, although they do not meet very often . . .’ Charlton said that alone would not make Lennie a criminal, but pointed out that he could still be booked for consorting because of those associations. Lennie’s old mate Snowy Rayner, with whom he had shared a murder charge and an attempted murder charge, had ‘given away the life of crime’, Charlton suggested, adding that members of the consorting squad ‘now seldom interfered with Rayner’. Rayner did work for a while as a cleaner in a club, but it closed down in about 1970 ‘and through a bullet wound has a deformed arm and gets a pension’, explained Charlton. ‘He seldom comes to view nowadays.’ Whether it was being done wittingly or not doesn’t really matter in the long run, but some of the police witnesses at the Royal Commission seemed to be less than anxious to extend their resources or impart their great knowledge to help Mr Justice Moffitt find out what was going on among Sydney’s criminals. Charlton glossed over Rayner’s arm wound without further comment, despite its significance in his relationship with McPherson. It was finally extracted from another prime police witness,

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Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill, that the wound was inflicted ‘during an SP bookie incident and he (Rayner) is a cripple now’. Both policemen must have known, but neither of them mentioned that the ‘SP bookie incident’ was the time when Rayner and Lennie tried to murder John Joseph Unwin up on William Street, Kings Cross. The lack of police surveillance of certain criminals came in for a measure of criticism from Mr Justice Moffitt in his final report. He pointed out, for instance, that some senior police were ‘inclined to accept McPherson’s claims of departure from the criminal scene’, just like Charlton accepted his and other criminals’ claims that Lennie was not in the drug scene. But to have suggested that Snowy Rayner had ‘given away the life of crime’ was, in my view, incredible beyond belief, unless being Lennie McPherson’s bodyguard was not seen as being involved with criminals. Nine years after Rayner received the arm wound he was actually living at Lennie’s place at 22 Prince Edward Street, Gladesville. He later moved in to Flat 3, 3 Morrison Road, Gladesville, just a few blocks away from Lennie’s house, and he accompanied Lennie on trips to Manila. Even if his only crime was a breach of the consorting laws, he was certainly guilty of that. The implausible Charlton continued his evidence, testifying that he thought McPherson’s only legitimate income came from the Balmain boarding house (‘it’s not very palatial, you know’) and that he was not sure, but he thought Lennie actually owned it. He agreed that it was obvious that Lennie had some other source of income and that police should have been interested in finding

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out what that source was. But he had not done so personally, he said. ‘Does it not look as though police are giving McPherson immunity if they are not interested in finding out where he gets his income?’ asked Needham. ‘I would say his reputation would give him an income,’ replied Charlton. ‘A punter with an SP bookie might get a phone call saying “You owe $500 from last Saturday. Pay up”. And the man would pay up, and McPherson would get a commission.’ Which, to those who have led sheltered lives, is part of the operation known as ‘standing over’. But veteran policeman Charlton went on to say: ‘I do not think McPherson has to stand over them. But I think if McPherson called on this type of person, he would give a donation.’ A donation! It all reads like some kind of fantasyland. But this farrago of nonsense had been sustained by the police for so long that, surprising as it may seem, it had become almost second nature for policemen to think this way. Years before, when brave young officers had said ‘Let’s get Lennie’, they had been quickly silenced by bigger, tougher policemen. So finally even the good ones, the veterans of many campaigns, had lost their ability and will to state the truth. However, this really did seem a bit too much for Commissioner Moffitt, who asked Charlton: ‘Would you not think that if somebody owed an SP bookmaker money and he was not prepared to pay, or he has not paid, and McPherson rang him up and said: “You had better pay that good and fast” or something like that, you would not think that that person was being stood over?’

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‘I feel he would,’ Charlton confessed, ‘but at the same time I feel the person would pay.’ ‘Because he is being stood over, is that the implication?’ pressed the judge. ‘Yes, that is a view of mine.’ The chameleon-like Charlton was again changing spots. ‘He would be using an implied threat,’ suggested Moffitt. ‘Yes. It would be a demand,’ he said. Charlton agreed that it was done that way in America, where organised criminals collected debts and were paid because of the fear of violence. After much questioning, he shifted even further from his original ground and agreed that McPherson was doing just that. And Lennie might ‘visit’ the illegal gambling clubs from time to time, he said, and receive ‘money or free liquor, but I do not think he would be interested in liquor. He is not a man who drinks a great deal.’ Charlton’s boss, consorting squad chief Jack McNeill, spent considerable time in Moffitt’s witness box, with much to say about Lennie. We’ve already seen how he met with the criminal when he took over in consorting, to discuss where and where not McPherson could go. Counsel appearing at the Commission for the commonwealth police, Thomas John Martin, a Melbourne-based QC, quizzed McNeill’s description of himself as a ‘field detective’. ‘I am due for promotion to Detective Inspector any day and when I am promoted at 51, I will be the youngest inspector in the NSW Police force. I chose to stay in the type of work I am in rather than switch over to administrative work so it can be fairly said that I would be the

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most experienced field detective in New South Wales and the Commonwealth.’ During the police investigation into crime in clubs McNeill himself interviewed John Ducker, then assistant secretary of the New South Wales Labour Council, the state’s peak body of trade unions, about concern among the unions with members in the affected industries. In his evidence to the Royal Commission Ducker said he had asked McNeill whether the lives of any of the union officials involved might be in danger. ‘Detective Sergeant McNeill said that Lennie McPherson had been on top of the underworld in Sydney for more than twenty years,’ Ducker said. ‘And he said that McPherson had not got rid of anyone for a long period of time; that he did not go after people in public office because of the repercussions, but if he [McNeill] knew that McPherson was after him—even though he is in a stronger position than myself or my union colleagues—he would certainly consider leaving the state.’ McNeill, under examination at the Commission, denied having said that, but Judge Moffitt, in his report, said: ‘I accept Ducker and not McNeill as to McNeill’s strong statements concerning the criminality of McPherson.’ (Many, many years later—at the start of a new millennium—John Ducker was to become the controversial chairman of Aristocrat Ltd during some very troubled times. Aristocrat, the company Len Ainsworth created, is one of the world’s largest poker machine manufacturers, and Ainsworth was one of those who in the 1970s complained to police about Bally’s corporate tactics.)

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Judge Moffitt drew McNeill’s attention to the incident (mentioned earlier) in which NSW police alerted forces in South-East Asian countries that Lennie and Stan Smith were on a sea voyage headed their way, and the thanks received from Hong Kong police for this cooperative intelligence. Moffitt was interested to know whether any similar action had been taken since that letter from the Hong Kong constabulary in July 1966. In fairness to McNeill, he was in the armed hold-up squad in 1966. But Judge Moffitt wanted to know why the NSW police were not doing the same thing with the police in Hong Kong. ‘Well, I must apologise,’ said McNeill. ‘I never knew the existence of that. I know a warning had been sent.’ He went on to say it would be done again in the future. One interesting aspect which was not pursued at the time of the 1966 sea cruise, or at the Moffitt Royal Commission, was the identity of the person who was so well connected that he could write these worthwhile letters of introduction for Lennie McPherson and his associates to overseas criminals. Certainly at the time Judge Moffitt read the Hong Kong letter there was some concern felt in some circles that the judge might pursue this line of inquiry, but he was probably already stretching his terms of reference, and did not persist. One man who wore a worried look for a while was a prominent community leader in Sydney, a large importer of wines, olive oil and related lines. In a conversation with a policeman and other persons, the merchant Vic Fiorelli confessed that he had been the author of some of the letters of introduction Lennie was carrying,

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referred to in the Hong Kong police memo. ‘I was shitting myself when this Hong Kong thing came up,’ Vic said later. ‘I had written half a dozen letters of introduction for Lennie to people in Manila, crims, and I thought the Moffitt Commission might get on to them, too.’ An ex-commonwealth policeman told me recently that he’d had Fiorelli under surveillance at one stage, but it was not in connection with the Moffitt inquiry. His interest had been sparked when he learned that Vic Fiorelli had witnessed a passport application for Lennie. Vic Fiorelli died on 16 April 1977.

9 THE GOOD JUDGE REPORTS A FULL YEAR after his first hearings, Judge Moffitt finished writing his 147-page report on 1 August 1974 and it was printed on 15 August. One of the first people to see the report was Lennie McPherson. A former NSW fraud squad detective turned reporter Laurie Smith was working for News Ltd’s Sunday Mirror and had been subpoenaed as a witness to the Moffitt inquiry. In his evidence Smith had said he once wanted a job as public relations officer with Jack Rooklyn and Bally. It was Smith who later—on 24 October 1974—wrote a front page Sunday Mirror story asserting that Rooklyn would ignore Mr Justice Moffitt’s findings that Bally should no longer trade in Australia and would flood clubs in NSW with Bally poker machines. Laurie Smith also saw a typewritten copy of Mr Justice Moffitt’s official report, which had been ‘obtained’ by McPherson from the state government printing office, at Lennie’s house at least one week before the report was printed, released and tabled in parliament. [ 209 ]

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Smith also wrote another front-pager for the Sunday Mirror of 11 August 1974—four days before the report was released publicly—under the heading ‘“I’m lilywhite”—Mr Big’, a story in which Lennie claimed that all the lies that had ever been told about him had been proved wrong by Mr Justice Moffitt’s report. Smith made a reference to ‘ . . . another section of his [Justice Moffitt’s] 450-plus page report . . . ’ The printed version of the Moffitt report was only 147 pages but it contained approximately 100 000 words, which with normal, double-spaced typing on quarto paper would have occupied more than 450 pages. That Smith had seen this typewritten copy of the report before its official publication is a credit mark for his first-rate contacts as a reporter. In reaching his conclusions about McPherson and all the ‘usual suspects’ who had paraded before him, Judge Moffitt was constrained by the terms of reference. He was required, he said, to find factual evidence of criminal activity in clubs by particular people; he was limited to what appeared in police files, and was not to make any recommendations about the industry. The second term of reference asked him to report whether there had been a cover-up by government or others (which came to include police), but not to make any recommendations for prosecution. In general, he found there was considerable activity to extort money from clubs, and while there was at the time limited organised crime in clubs, some—but not most—were vulnerable to the very real risk of the invasion of organised crime. On Bally’s operations he

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was unequivocal: the continued or future operations of Bally in NSW presented a risk of infiltration of organised crime into ‘or in relation to’ registered clubs, and he recommended that a copy of his findings be sent to the Australian government. The judge’s report did not paint Lennie as ‘lilywhite’ as the Sunday Mirror story claimed, nor did it suggest that ‘all the lies’ which had been told about him were proved wrong by Moffitt. From the police reports he dealt with, Moffitt noted that McPherson had a bad criminal record ‘but mainly in the fairly distant past, and a current reputation in some quarters which would place him in the “organised crime” class’. He wrote: ‘There is little material to form any reliable particular conclusion one way or the other in recent times’. The judge found that Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill, who had ‘substantial knowledge concerning McPherson’, had been inconsistent in his reports and statements about Lennie. The judge noted that McNeill’s first report had Lennie as a ‘more sinister figure with connections to people in the club scene’ and the last report had ‘tended in the opposite direction’. In the first report, noted Moffitt, McPherson was connected with Dean and the entertainment field and was described as ‘a well-known Sydney criminal and stand-over man’. It referred to Murray Riley’s use of Lennie to issue implied threats in the entertainment field. In the third report his associations with Dean and Riley were minimised to the point of having ‘no significance’, the judge wrote, merely by setting out—without contrary reference—the statements by McPherson and Riley themselves.

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As to his sources of income, Judge Moffitt was convinced McPherson was lying to him. In his report he wrote: ‘He must have a substantial source of income to provide his living, both as to his home and the frequent extended overseas trips, usually to the Philippines, of himself and his family. The explanation he gave as to the source of his income is not credible,’ he wrote. ‘Then there are some suspicious money dealings of McPherson in relation to women coming from the Philippines.’ He wrote that despite some material in police files about a visit to Hong Kong, no police check seems to have been made in relation to his Philippines visits. Moffitt was correct, though during the 12 months between the opening of his inquiry and his final report in August 1974, he could elicit no greater detail on Lennie’s overseas ventures. No charges against Lennie were recommended by Judge Moffitt, though he offered vigorous criticism of the police witnesses for ‘inconsistent reports and statements’ concerning him. While dismissing questions about Lennie’s culpability under his specific terms of reference, Moffitt added: ‘it would be wrong to conclude that McPherson is not on the scene of organized type crime or connected with persons seeking to make money illicitly from registered clubs. No conclusion either way can be come to on the available material.’ Of police handling of information about the meetings of criminals at Double Bay in 1972, at which Lennie was present, as we’ve seen, Moffitt was scathing. He noted that commonwealth police had passed information of the meetings to Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard, but that

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Ballard and McNeill claimed to him (Moffitt) that the material was not relevant to their inquiry into organised criminal activity in clubs. The judge wrote that McNeill’s actions could only be explained by certain of his personal characteristics: McNeill exercised strict and dictatorial authority over the men under him. Things were not done until he said so, and then within whatever limits he directed. He was somewhat a law unto himself. If what police instructions provided on documentation was inconvenient, he would wave it aside. It was his judgment alone that counted. It was not to be questioned, but often it was unsoundly based on whim rather than logic. His conceit, it seems, led him to the view that he could determine many matters by some shrewd intuition, born of superior police field of experience. It led him badly astray . . .

Judge Moffitt’s report discussed at length meetings between McNeill and two of his team’s officers, Detective Sergeants Ballard and Knight, and concluded that ‘I do not find I can place reliance upon [the testimony] of any of the three . . .’ It emerged in the report that a meeting had been held early in November 1972 between Rooklyn, McNeill and Knight at which Rooklyn offered the two officers some business partnership. ‘McNeill did not take it up [at the meeting]’, wrote Moffitt. ‘Knight showed interest and sought time to decide’, and later attended meetings and ‘acted in a way consistent with being a member of the business group’. Moffitt pointed out that the first two police reports were signed by McNeill and Ballard, while the third— which painted a favourable picture of Bally (and others)—was signed by McNeill and Knight, within days

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of the meeting and job offers. The reason McNeill rejected material of which he was aware (like the UK defamation action which found Bally to be Mafia controlled) ‘gains some force’, wrote Moffitt, ‘when within a few days McNeill is found with Knight in personal negotiations with the Bally organisation and, thereafter, their saying things in clubs concerning Bally, quite in conflict with what, they must have realised, would appear in the document, which McNeill did not concern himself to see’. Moffitt said he found he could not rely on McNeill’s testimony except where there was ‘independent support from other acceptable evidence or inferences’. As the author of the final police report, Moffitt wrote, McNeill ‘cannot be relied on as a witness, has no notes and claims he lost his diaries’. Jack Rooklyn was accused by Judge Moffitt of a ‘dishonest silence’. He was singularly uncooperative at the Commission, having suffered an attack of amnesia that had swept like a virus through a number of those asked to stand in that particular witness box. Of Rooklyn Moffitt observed: ‘In demeanour he was evasive and unconvincing. In content, much of his evidence was unacceptable . . . To escape difficult questions he resorted to almost complete lapses of memory, which I am convinced did not exist.’ Of Lennie’s mate Wally Dean the judge was scathing, concluding that Wally had used his office as president of South Sydney Juniors to enter into business dealings with the club and to receive money from people who had contracts with the club. ‘The transcript of evidence is available for those who ought to

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inform themselves of the revelations concerning this grasping, dishonest man . . .’, he wrote. On many matters Dean ‘knowingly gave false evidence. Except where his testimony was a concession or supported by other acceptable evidence, it is impossible to be relied upon.’ Murray Riley was one of Lennie’s mates who copped a major Moffitt blast. The judge formed the view that there were provable crimes against Riley that could be classified as acts of organised crime, and that, as Riley was connected to Dean, such criminal activity as they were both involved in could be described as ‘organised’. He noted that there were organisational links between Riley, McPherson, Wally Dean, Testa, Freeman and Milan (Ironbar Miller) Petricevic.

MURRAY RILEY: SCULLER ON THE RUN Born in 1926, Murray Stewart Riley joined the New South Wales police at the age of 17 and rose to detective-sergeant (third class). With Mervyn Wood (police commissioner from December 1976 to June 1979) he won double sculls at the Commonwealth Games in Auckland in 1950 and again in Vancouver in 1954 and a bronze medal at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. A major drugs inquiry reported that through the 1960s and ’70s Riley had associations with owners and managers of illegal gambling casinos in Sydney and Wollongong, through which he became involved in drugs. In the mid-1960s reports emerged that he was involved in drug importation and cashing stolen

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American Express traveller’s cheques, using female croupiers from the illegal casinos. In 1966 in New Zealand he was sentenced to a year in jail, having been found guilty of attempting to bribe a police inspector. In 1967 he linked up with Wally Dean: he became poker machine supervisor at South Sydney Leagues Club and both men immersed themselves in schemes to systematically gouge money out of licensed clubs, with scams ranging from skimming poker machine takings to selling to the clubs—at outrageous prices—all manner of goods and services, and booking entertainment acts. This behaviour, described by Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill as ‘hoodlum’ activity, carried on until the Moffitt inquiry forced them to change their ways. Before he could be called before the Royal Commission, Riley disappeared and then re-emerged in September 1974 to help Wally Dean’s unsuccessful campaign to get elected to South Sydney Council. (Also on this election team was Joe Meissner, a selfstyled world karate champion.) Then, on 8 October 1974, Riley entered full-time employment. He was given a job by Lennie, looking after ‘collections’ from about 20 clients, which included clubs, gambling dens, SP bookmakers and so on, to which McPherson provided protection. He was arrested in Adelaide in June 1978 and pleaded guilty to being the ‘transportation agent’ for 1.5 tonnes of cannabis discovered on board the yacht Anoa at Polkington Reef, east of Papua New Guinea, in May 1978. Judge Kenneth Torrington sentenced him

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to ten years, to serve a minimum of five, and fined him $4000. While still in jail he pleaded guilty before Judge David Hicks to charges of possession of an unlicensed pistol, forging a passport application and defrauding American Express of $274 000. The judge sentenced him to an additional seven years. The Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking (1980) named Riley and others as members of a drug gang known in the late 1970s as the Double Bay Mob. The report said Riley and William Sinclair were involved in heroin importation from Bangkok but that Riley had ripped off Sinclair to the tune of $20 000. During the 1984–85 Sydney gang wars, Riley was identified as being involved in planning a $40 million heroin importation from New Guinea with Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith and disgraced policemen Roger Rogerson and Bill Duff. Once again he disappeared from view, with a few warrants in his name left unfulfilled. He resurfaced a few years later in the UK, where he’d been arrested and imprisoned for a $100 million fraud. In January 1993 his escape from Aldington Prison in Kent hit the headlines. A month later the Sydney Sun-Herald reported that the search for the escapee went on, but ‘police don’t seem to have their heart in it’. Airport security at Heathrow, the paper said, had never heard of him. But no one as flamboyant as Murray Riley can remain invisible for ever. An ex-commonwealth policeman and a former Australian secret intelligence agent have invited the author to join them for drinks on

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Queensland’s Gold Coast with the errant Riley. ‘His appearance has changed, of course,’ one of them said to me. ‘But there’s no doubt it’s him.’ The invitation for drinks has been declined at this stage. The sensational hearings of the Moffitt Royal Commission provided up to a year of great headlines for the tabloids, a year of public exposure that the likes of Lennie and Wally, Jack Rooklyn and a few of the NSW coppers who couldn’t get their story right could have done without. The recommendation that Bally posed a serious threat of organised crime infiltration bounced down to Canberra and, briefly, around the corridors of power there. And within a month of the Moffitt report’s August 1974 release, Sydney’s weather was warming up, the surf was rising and there were sufficient hedonistic distractions to help everyone forget all about it.

Jack Rooklyn was not one to seek the limelight of publicity, unless it was to discuss his love of ocean-going yachting. But after the initial upheaval of the first few months of Moffitt’s inquiry had calmed down and Sydney basked and drank itself into the hot February of 1974, a feature writer for the Daily Telegraph, John Burney, made an appointment to interview him at his Rose Bay mansion, ostensibly to talk about his ocean-going yacht (cheekily named Bally-hoo). Rooklyn was puffing on his cigar and his daughter, aged about 17, was sitting on a sofa reading a book when

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Burney was ushered into the massive and luxurious room. They exchanged a few remarks about the yacht and Rooklyn’s wife entered, pushing a trolley bearing a silver tea service, and offered Burney tea. To Burney’s astonishment, Rooklyn introduced the woman thus: ‘This bitch is my wife.’ She didn’t react and the daughter didn’t look up from her book. Rooklyn poured himself a stiff brandy, Burney declining the offer of one saying 10 o’clock in the morning was a bit early for him to drink. Rooklyn again referred to his wife, variously calling her a bitch and a cunt. Again the daughter did not stir. Burney then asked Rooklyn a question about the Moffitt inquiry, to which he reacted with immediate anger: ‘Out, you bastard! Out!’ he bellowed at the reporter. Burney protested that this was why he had made the appointment and that Rooklyn was aware of his wish to discuss this subject matter. Bally’s man down-under was not moved by this reasoned plea. ‘Out!’ he yelled again, and snapped his fingers. A very large Oriental-looking man appeared, came up close to Burney and said: ‘He said “out”.’ Taking a very firm grip of Burney’s arm, he escorted him through the front door and threw him onto the lawn. After a while Burney, a persistent reporter, thought he would try again and knocked on the door. This time it was answered by Mrs Rooklyn, who invited him in and led him to a room at the rear of the house. She offered Burney information about Rooklyn, who, she said, was about to divorce her. Burney was aware of this, as earlier

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Rooklyn had said—in front of his wife and daughter— that he was ‘fucking this great bird in Manila’ and was ‘going to piss this bitch [his wife] off ’. ‘He’s a real cunt,’ said Mrs Rooklyn. That was about all she got to say before Rooklyn threw open the door and shouted: ‘Why are you talking to that cunt? He’s a reporter,’ and to Burney: ‘Out!’ This time Burney left quietly, without needing the services of the large bodyguard to be called into action. Later, back at the newspaper office, he received a phone call. The caller identified himself as ‘Smith’ and asked whether Burney had a wife and family. Yes, he said, he did. ‘Then you’d better stop your inquiries, or they could be in trouble.’ Click. There was no explicit reference to the Rooklyn episode, but there was no need for it. Unfortunately for readers of his paper, the editorin-chief refused to run Burney’s story about how he had been manhandled and threatened by the Australian head of a company that had squarely been accused of being Mafia-controlled.

10 LIFE AFTER MOFFITT

FOR A WHILE it seemed as though some heed was being taken of Judge Moffitt’s criticism, for, even though McNeill was promoted to the rank of inspector during the sitting of the Royal Commission, he was demoted from chief of the consorting squad and put back into uniform duty at suburban Kogarah police station a week before the Moffitt report was released. Those who actually cared about such matters shrugged and said it was probably a satisfactory result, even though McNeill should undoubtedly have been thrown out of the force for being so inept and bent a policeman. But that is not where the story ended. Firstly the police department chose none other than Detective Sergeant (First Class) Frank Charlton to take over as head of the consorting squad. This is the same Frank Charlton who had taken so long to work out whether Lennie McPherson was or was not still involved in active crime, and who believed that Snowy Rayner, a constant and faithful companion of Lennie, had given away the life of [ 221 ]

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crime. It was the same Frank Charlton who had buggered up a rare and valuable chance of keeping a whole bunch of top criminals under surveillance—or booking the lot for consorting—by barging in to Karl Bonnette’s Double Bay premises and asking whether there were any criminals there. But if Charlton’s promotion was bad, worse was in store. Jack McNeill’s exile to suburbia was to be of a very temporary nature indeed. In less than a year he was back at the CIB. No announcement was made, and it took a bit of ferreting to confirm that he was back, in plainclothes. But not only was he back, he was now in charge of three crime squads: consorting, breaking and the special crime squad which had been established on Judge Moffitt’s recommendations! On hearing that McNeill was back in CIB in such an elevated position, this author confirmed it with the police department and wrote a story for the Nation Review. Jack McNeill made noises of considerable displeasure at having been sprung. He had crept quietly back, and preferred nosy journalists to stay out of his way. The entire exercise showed the contemptible disrespect that Police Commissioner Fred Hanson, the entire department, Police Minister John Waddy and the entire New South Wales Cabinet in the Lewis government had for the 84 days of evidence and subsequent report of such a prominent Supreme Court judge as Mr Justice Moffitt.

It was not until 1974 that Leonard Arthur McPherson rated an entry in the ACR supplement—a regular listing

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of the top 100 criminals in Australia, complete with mug shots. The ACR had been compiled by the NSW police fingerprint section and distributed to all police forces in Australia, the Pacific islands and South-East Asia. Even then Lennie’s entry was somewhat circumspect when compared with the details included for some criminals. It has been suggested to me that its compilers could no longer ignore Lennie after his very public—and publicised—appearances at the Moffitt inquiry. The 1974 supplement was the last ever produced. But the entry did serve the purpose of showing that the New South Wales police accepted as fact that McPherson was a murderer. This is how it listed his track record: 74. Leonard Arthur McPherson, alias Leonard McPherson, alias Lennie McPherson, alias Mr Big, alias Big Lennie . . . born 19th May, 1921, 5 feet 10 inches (1.77 metres), strong build, medium complexion, brown hair, brown eyes, a manager and native of New South Wales. Modus Operandi 1. Receiver, car thief, housebreaker, assailant, murderer, gunman, thief, false pretender. 2. A record in New South Wales. 3. Has been arrested on seventy-three occasions for assault, receiving, stealing, false pretences, consorting, breaking, entering and stealing, possession of housebreaking implements, goods in custody, unlicensed pistol in possession, rape, murder, culpable driving, malicious injury, shoot with intent to murder.

The murder referred to was that of George Hackett. The ‘shoot with intent to murder’ was the incident in which Lennie and Snowy Rayner tried to murder the errant SP bookmaker, John Joseph Unwin—the incident in

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William Street, Kings Cross, when a bullet smashed and crippled Rayner’s right arm. The rape was of two girls at a party, the male aggressors being McPherson and three of his mates, who are named in the report. What the official police record did not say is that nearly all the offences dated back to the 1950s or earlier, with the exception of the consorting arrests that were not proceeded with. Neither does it explain why Lennie McPherson never appeared in the Australasian Criminal Register until its 1974 supplement, despite the fact that all the crimes listed had happened long ago. But these questions are largely academic irrelevancies: the fact of the matter is that, until his death, Lennie McPherson— in the considered opinion of the NSW police force— remained a murderer at large. Within days of the release of the Moffitt report, Lennie arrogantly demonstrated that the inquiry had indeed not ‘laid a glove’ on him. His reputation as ‘Mr Big’ had been enhanced by the publicity, and he still enjoyed absolute immunity from police interference. He also intended to maintain his all-powerful position at the top of the food chain, and that meant removing anyone who was a threat to him. Jackie Clark became another victim, on 23 August 1974, and probably the last to be gunned down in public. Clark, who was 51, was a vicious gunman who at times had worked with Lennie, and at other times bragged how he was tougher and braver than Big Mac and would one day have to kill him. He never got to do so. Clark was having a drink at his local pub, the Newington Inn at Petersham, seated around a table in

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the lounge bar with the publican, Phillip Birnie, Birnie’s wife and four hotel staff. It was just after 10 pm—the public bar had closed and the patrons had gone on their merry way—when a window at the rear of the lounge was smashed in and one shot fired. The heavy-calibre bullet hit Clark in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Mr Birnie was quick to reassure police and reporters that ‘no-one saw the gunman’. Police said they believed Clark had been sentenced to death in a ‘kangaroo court’, though nobody mentioned that this was almost a copyrightable McPherson trademark. ‘We know Clark had an argument recently with a violent criminal,’ one detective was quoted as saying. ‘The word is out that an underworld group decided he should be eliminated.’ Police found no trace of a weapon or cartridge at the scene, and were hoping an autopsy might reveal some clues. The killer was thought to have run out a back gate and across a car park behind the hotel. Police said Clark had a long criminal record and had served several jail terms. They were following a lead that suggested Clark had begun standover activities at a number of ethnic gambling clubs operating in the Newtown area. This was McPherson territory (though at the time the police didn’t mention that). A detective acknowledged that ‘for many years the major illegal gambling casinos have paid “protection” money to a small group of standover men. Any new group attempting to take over the racket will be put out of business permanently.’ A coroner later found that Clark had died of a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, fired by an unknown assailant. Despite a lengthy police investigation,

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no charge was laid prior to the inquest, and the coroner recommended none. After Jackie Clark was knocked, Lennie changed his style: he had made his mark with a pile-up of bodies in the streets of Sydney. He now resorted to more subtle methods of removal. As we shall see, one of Mad Dog Miller’s offsiders was dumped over the continental shelf 60 miles from shore. More economical and just as effective was dumping undesirables into a deep ocean channel just 23 miles from Sydney. In either option the victim was faced with an impossible swim back to shore. His adviser and boat skipper for many of these nautical entombments was none other than Tim Bristow, the private eye from Palm Beach. Bristow once bragged to the author that he had personally made five such voyages on Lennie’s behalf. Just when Lennie thought he could slide gently into semi-retirement, another challenger to his throne emerged. The criminal concerned—one of the few of Lennie’s most hated opponents who actually survived— was ‘Mad Dog’ Lou Miller. Not to be confused with Big Mac’s old friend ‘Ironbar Miller’, Mad Dog was younger, scar-faced, violent, aggressive and immensely jealous of Lennie’s great power. This Miller even went into print with his claim to McPherson’s throne in an article in a short-lived Melbourne weekly scandal-rag, Top Secrets, in August 1972: ‘I’m the Godfather. I’m going to take over this city!’ A line from a Chicago detective story? No! This was said last week by a man who wants to take over crime in Sydney— Australia’s fastest growing sin city.

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His graduation from petty standover crimes to aspirations of becoming Sydney’s top crime czar have sparked off scuffles that could erupt into a full-scale underworld war. The Godfather’s main target is Australia’s undisputed crime boss, Mr Big. He seems undaunted that his adversary has recently been forming links with the American Mafia and seems to enjoy considerable rapport with Mafia-linked businessmen and crime organisers in Sydney, Las Vegas and Chicago. At the tender age of 25, the Godfather is on the move, and he is mustering a small army of thugs, gunmen, bombers, friendly police, politicians and businessmen as the sides line up for the battle Royale. His armoury includes a range of pistols, silencers, small and large calibre rifles, shotguns, hand grenades and one or two sub-machine guns—hardly a match for the huge stock of weaponry boasted by Mr Big’s army. But what the Godfather may lack in muscle-power he makes up for in psychopathic egomania. For him there is no measuring of the enemy’s firepower before going off into battle. He satisfies himself with off-the-top lines on how and why his enemy is weak. Of Mr Big, a man twice his age, he says dryly: ‘All he wants to do is go to sleep.’ And of Mr Big’s longhaired and violent bodyguard [Stan Smith] he quips: ‘His nerves are gone from mainlining. He’s mad on heroin.’ The Godfather is laying careful groundwork in preparation for the take-over. He is enlisting the friendship—or at least the respect for his violence—of a string of politicians, politically involved people, a couple of company directors, a senior and long-term employee of a major international chemical company who in turn has a close friendship with a Stipendiary magistrate, a prominent barrister who specialises in criminal law and a host of other ‘influential’ contacts. While newspaper reference files and police records bulge with details of the nefarious activities of Mr Big, relatively little is known of the Godfather. He appears as a young, longhaired but slightly balding executive-on-theway-up. In true Godfather style, he is very close to his family. Every Sunday he takes off from the arduous business of

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crime to devote ‘quality time’ to his family. He often takes his aging grandmother for a drive in his late-model purple automatic MG sports car on these family days. On Saturdays he and his prostitute wife sleep in late and then often play with their pretty five-year-old daughter before rising and brunching at Doyle’s, a popular and trendy seafood restaurant on the shores of Sydney harbour overlooking Watsons Bay. His only other night at home is Monday, but that is not a family affair: he is transfixed to the televised boxing events from Melbourne. His only constant ally is the chemical company executive who shares the Godfather’s avid interest in professional and amateur boxing. The Godfather quite rightly claims that he has paid for any ‘indiscretions’ he may have been caught at by serving some short periods in Her Majesty’s Prisons. Now he claims police are persecuting him, and every time he is even asked a question by a policeman he dashes off a letter of complaint to the Police Commissioner and a dozen or so politicians. The Godfather is a new moniker, self-selected. Mad Dog, as he has been known, wandered into Sydney’s world of crime about six years ago [i.e. 1966]. For some time his scene was throwing bricks through windows in houses of people he thought had crossed him, firing a few wild shots at those he simply did not like and a slight (one-woman) interest in prostitution. Then one of his wild bullets hit and killed a man, and he carved the first notch on his gun. Which put him at the same level as Mr Big, who had HIMSELF only shot dead one man. The Godfather didn’t like becoming a murderer any more than Mr Big would claim to, but unlike his archenemy, the Godfather has been unable to build a great reputation on his first killing. Since then he has only been able to wound people with his gun, and unlike Mr Big has been unable to arrange any assassinations. His scene has been prostitution, standover and protection rackets and an open refusal to repay loans or gambling

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debts. From these crude activities he musters up an average income of $1500 to $2000 a week, a fact that has recently drawn the close attention of the taxation department. On checking their files they found the Godfather, under any other name, has never paid a cent in tax. But despite this huge, tax-free income he persistently overdraws his cheque account at his bank in suburban Alexandria, much to the annoyance, apparently, of his bank manager. So where does all the money go? His culinary tastes are modest: he loves Lebanese food and frequents two inexpensive Lebanese restaurants in Redfern, a slum suburb of Sydney. He dresses his six-footplus frame poorly and in bad taste. But he does gamble—he LOVES to gamble. He spends one and often three nights a week at the infamous Thommos Two-up school in Oxford Street and is known to make a lot of noise about his winning bets. But the ringmasters at Thommos claim he is only a small punter, in terms of hard cash. He doesn’t put his money where his big mouth is, they say. At a Waterloo pub and a Kings Cross gambling den he places large bets with illegal SP bookies. On one night alone, last Easter weekend, after a losing day at the gallops he lost nearly $4000 on the dogs meeting. But he did not— and still has not—paid the debt. His ‘favourite’ SP bookmakers ‘respect’ him. They know he carries a gun and rarely complain when he fails to pay for his losses. Neither do they call in the debt-collecting services of Mr Big, fearing the repercussions that may cause. One big expenditure the Godfather involved himself in recently was the purchase of a house at Rosebery. Well, more accurately, the expenditure was HUGE and the house is more like Fort Knox. He used what little he raised by selling his modest little Alexandria cottage as a downpayment on the Rosebery address, but not having a good credit rating he had to rake up a total of $30 000 in cash for the mansion. And since moving into the luxurious, chandeliered fortress he has spent many thousands of dollars on interior

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decorations, furnishings and the construction of a high brick wall right around the property. He also installed an elaborate burglary alarm that sets off bells ringing and lights flashing the moment a would-be intruder scales the wall. Into the mansion he moved his wife and daughter and his wife’s sister, who minds the baby while the mother plies her trade around Kings Cross at night. So now, with contact book and ego loaded, the Godfather is ready to strike. At stake are the lucrative, multimillion dollar illegal gambling, drug, prostitution and entertainment rackets. At stake too are the lives of the Godfather, Mr Big and any number of their ranks and even—horror the thought—innocent bystanders. The battle plans are being drawn. The date for the main skirmish has not yet been set: it will probably come accidentally, or as a result of mounting tensions as bruisers from either army start getting themselves bruised.

The author of the Top Secrets article on Mad Dog omitted some relevant information. He was born on 6 August 1946 and used any of the following aliases: Lou Miller, Louis Miller, Ashton, Graham John Ashton, ‘Mad Dog’, ‘Big Louis’, ‘Louis the Boxer’ and ‘King Hit Louis’. Mad Dog was the one that stuck. Police records have him as a six foot one inch (185 centimetre) man of solid build, hair receding at the temples, long sidelevers and tattoos, including a knife through a rose on the right arm, a swallow on the right forearm and the name ‘Jan’ in a scroll on the upper arm. He has a lump and scar over the right eyebrow and a scar over the left eyebrow, legacies of his pugilistic activities. Mad Dog was once the New South Wales amateur heavyweight boxing champion. Police records describe him as a gunman, assailant, thief and procurer of prostitutes. Up to 1973 he had been

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arrested 38 times, with charges ranging from possession of a hand grenade to living off the earnings of a prostitute, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, consorting with criminals, stealing a car and being in possession of stolen goods. He is an inveterate gambler who is hated by all hardened criminals. ‘A dangerous criminal with his fists and tongue’. The battle forecast in this article nearly got under way in May 1975. Mad Dog Miller hired a gunman from Brisbane for $6000. His first target was to be a criminal called John Francis Eastlakes, a prostitute’s pimp who was highly regarded in the McPherson camp. Mad Dog’s ‘hit list’ began with Eastlakes and ran up six or so other names, ending with Lennie himself—he was starting at the bottom and working his way up. The trouble with Mad Dog was his lack of professionalism: he paid top dollars for a third-rate hood to do this important job for him—and the hood messed it up. Mad Dog’s hired gun set up an ambush for Eastlakes in an eastern suburbs location. He knew his target would walk past a certain place at a certain time. He stood in his hiding spot, waiting. What he did not know was that one of Lennie’s men was standing not far behind him, with a shotgun aimed at the back of his head. Eastlakes came into view—he sauntered along quite casually, even though he was aware of the set-up, because he had donned a bulletproof vest for the occasion. Mad Dog’s man raised his .22 calibre rifle and aimed at his head. There was only one noise—the .22 and the shotgun were both fired in the same instant. The bullet aimed for Eastlakes clipped his shoulder. The spray of lethal shot

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from the other weapon blew the gunman’s head off. His body was removed and dumped at sea. Police in New South Wales were never really interested in finding it. After all, he was just a criminal and now he was out of the way. Mad Dog went back to the drawing board—it was a hell of a way to start fighting a war. He went into hiding for a while when it became the buzz around the traps that a big contract was out on him—certain persons were prepared to pay $10 000 to have him knocked. Mad Dog never deluded himself that this was idle talk, for he well knew the cavalcade of death the McPherson empire had inflicted upon the criminal classes. Lennie, the slightly sore Eastlakes and Stan Smith winged out of Sydney for Manila on 8 June 1975: if the contract was going to be carried out, these three wanted a watertight alibi. Mad Dog survived the crisis but, despite his toughness, he was forced to rethink his ambition to take over as Australia’s crime czar. A large part of his army had been obliterated. One of his men, he was told, had been dumped off the side of a speedboat 60 miles east-south-east from Sydney, over the side of the deep trench off the continental shelf. He had not been wounded or marked in any way, just tossed overboard as shark fodder, where a strong current would take him towards New Zealand. The car used by another of Mad Dog’s trusties had been found in an inner suburb with bloodstains on the front seat. This man was never seen again, but it’s a safe bet he either ‘went over the shelf ’ or ended up like others who were perceived as a threat to Lennie: unofficially

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buried in an old grave (or a new one not yet used) at Rookwood, Sydney’s biggest public cemetery. Bristow told me that McPherson authorised a number of dual burials at Rookwood as well as dual cremations at a large northside crematorium. Consorting squad officer Detective Sergeant Frank Charlton had told the Moffitt Royal Commission that Lennie despised Mad Dog. ‘He dislikes Mad Dog over his association with prostitutes and living off the earnings of prostitutes. He has quoted that himself recently when he was on the air.’ Whether Lennie was really that puritanical is open to considerable debate, but there was no doubt he hated Mad Dog and would have eliminated him if he had continued to claim the ‘throne’ after the disappearance of his deputies. In the end Mad Dog skulked off, grumbling that he should really take over from Big Mac. But nobody was listening anymore. His ego had been shattered, his army destroyed, and his friends deserted him. And Leonard Arthur McPherson remained undisputed leader. In this bloody decade of public assassinations, no less than nine opponents had been gunned down Chicagostyle (or so Lennie thought) as McPherson sought and gained supremacy over the Sydney crime scene through violence and intimidation of the gangs and toadying to the state’s most senior and corrupt police. But now at last this era was finally drawing to a close.

Despite the Moffitt inquiry’s failure to expose details of Lennie’s overseas business interests, there is no doubt

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he was running prostitution rackets in Manila, and had been involved since the 1960s in the ‘white slave’ trade, importing young women into Australia, both Filipina and other nationalities. Not all of them were destined for slavery in Australian brothels: some were to become ‘au pair’ girls for wealthy and influential people. A former federal policeman told me that state police—driving marked police cars—would meet the new arrivals at Sydney airport and deliver them safely to a renowned brothel called A Touch of Class, where they would be indoctrinated into the trade. There were persistent rumours—which remain unconfirmed—that he was involved in a wider range of criminal activities in the Philippines, including standover rackets, drugs and even gun-running. It was revealed later, in the Woodward Royal Commission’s report in 1980, that wanted criminal Martin Olson was running a bar in Manila for Lennie and was looking after Lennie’s prostitution business there. Woodward also reported that once a month a person was alleged to have gone to Manila ‘to bring back white powder’ for McPherson. There was reliable evidence the courier travelled in the company of George Freeman and another criminal, Danny Stein. Lennie denied ever dealing in drugs. To his outrage, Lennie was deported from the Philippines in 1975. Up to then, he had been a frequent visitor to Manila: in the 18 months from July 1971, for example, he went overseas no less than a dozen times, sometimes taking his wife and two sons. And from the beginning of 1973 to mid-1974 he made a further nine trips, mainly to Manila, travelling on Australian passport

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number G845761 until March 1974 when he had to renew his travel documents. He claimed the pages in his old passport were all filled with stamps, but in fact his wife had thrown it in the fire during an argument about his interests and activities in Manila, and it was badly damaged. The renewed passport number was H530927. His deportation was mainly the result of improved liaison between Australia’s federal police and Interpol after the latter’s Australian agency was transferred from the Victorian state police force to the federal force. The expulsion infuriated Lennie. He’d been expanding his business activities there, and this move caused him huge problems. On his arrival in Manila on 11 June 1975, he was arrested by Filipino police; he claimed that he and the two Australian businessmen who had accompanied him on this trip, George Quani and former boxer Trevor Christian, had been thrown into death row in Manila’s Fort Benefacio prison. Held there for three days, Lennie was convinced he was facing death by firing squad. What he claimed was a ‘monstrously false’ dossier on him from the commonwealth police had alleged he had gone to Manila to assassinate President Marcos. He finally persuaded his captors to let the three of them make contact with the Australian consul in Manila and arrangements were made for their deportation back to Sydney. On their return Lennie stormed up to the first commonwealth policeman he saw on duty at the airport and screamed abuse at him for the ‘bullshit’ commonwealth report containing the Marcos allegation. ‘Why would I want to kill him?’ he yelled. ‘I like the little cunt.’ The officer, a man called Bruce, reported the incident

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to his superiors and joked about it with his work pals, one of whom was Ian Alcorn, a close friend of mine who for a year was in charge of the force’s Crime Intelligence Unit growing report on Lennie. In 1975 I tipped off veteran pressman Gordon MacGregor, news editor of the Sunday Mirror, about Lennie’s expulsion from the Philippines and his outburst to the commonwealth cop on his arrival back in Sydney. He told me a few days later he and another reporter had interviewed Lennie and the story would make front page that weekend. Later in the week I was going down in the lift at News Limited and MacGregor and the other journalist were riding down too. They were thumbing through a pile of the green copy paper slips (complete with carbons) upon which Sunday Mirror stories were typed. To my raised eyebrow Gordon said: ‘It’s the Lennie story you gave us. It’s come up really good. We’re just going out to [Lennie’s home at] Gladesville so he can check through it.’ I said nothing at this time about such an unusual way of dealing with someone who was about to be the subject of a tabloid newspaper story. But of course this was the norm then when dealing with stories on Lennie. Some reporters did try hard to break through the sometimes impenetrable barriers which prevented searching investigation of the crime scene and the key figures involved, like McPherson and the crooked cops, but not all journalists wanted to write such stories, even if they could have. Some members of the Fourth Estate found entrée to Lennie McPherson and his cohorts and crooked cops such good sources of copy they were

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prepared to pay the price of ‘no further inquiry’ that goes with it. For example, not long after the Moffitt Royal Commission got under way, the Sunday Mirror ran a frontpage story saying, in effect, that Lennie was anxious to appear before the inquiry and give evidence ‘to clear my name of the various allegations against me’. The story carried the joint by-line of the former detective Laurie Smith and his news editor, Gordon MacGregor. Getting that story involved two trips to Lennie’s house at Gladesville. The first was in response to a call from Lennie to Smith—and other media reporters—to attend a press conference at which he made it known he was anxious to give evidence. (When reminded of this claim when he eventually appeared in the witness box Lennie had apparently gone through a change of heart and answered every question ‘unwillingly’.) The second trip to Gladesville represented a radical departure from the journalistic norms. The draft of the story, typed onto ‘sets’ of green Sunday Mirror copy paper, was taken to McPherson with its carbon copies intact to enable the criminal to check, and presumably edit, what the mass circulation weekly paper was going to say about him in its next edition. This was a courtesy rarely, if ever, extended to its interviewees. Laurie Smith would have had ample opportunities to meet Lennie during the years he spent on the NSW police force. He told the Moffitt inquiry he had known Lennie for about 15 years. Smith once told me, with a bit of a grin on his face, that Lennie was a ‘nice bloke’. Smith was involved in other stories of interest. For example, when striptease artists at Kings Cross became

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unionised and went on strike, Smith wrote the story about the strike-breaker strippers employed at Pussy Galore. The story commended the girls for not depriving Sydney of their art form. There was no mention of the fact they were scabbing, or that they had been imported from Adelaide establishments connected with Abe Saffron. It should not be misunderstood from this that Laurie Smith was the only journalist who had contact with Lennie. Some less reputable scribes sought to curry favour with the criminal. Lennie once introduced another reporter as ‘my boy from the Telegraph’. And there were others. Their existence on the various papers contributed to the media’s conspiracy of silence for a very long time about crime in NSW; they ensured that Lennie’s name only ever appeared in stories he had personally approved. In his subsequent attempts to regain access to the Philippines—and to his considerable business investments there—Lennie made contact with noted Filipino richman and big-time gambler Felipe ‘Baby’ Yshmael, then resident in Australia. Each man had something to offer the other. Yshmael, it had been reported, had run into a serious liquidity problem by mid-1975 and wanted to lay his hands quickly on around one million dollars. At the same time, Yshmael was repairing his somewhat fractured relationship with President Marcos. Lennie’s side of the deal was that he could come up with the money Yshmael needed if the gambler used his connections to get Lennie’s visa restored. They met privately a number of times, but it’s not known whether Lennie paid over

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any cash. Certainly Baby Yshmael was unable to help him. However, Lennie did make one final major attempt to regain his visa. For this he reverted to his old practice of ‘fizzing’: telling police real information about crimes and criminals. But talking with the New South Wales cops (which he did all the time) was no use in this situation, because they had no clout at the international level. A commonwealth police officer, however, might be able to swing things with Interpol or even a consular official. So Lennie made contact with a senior commonwealth policeman in Sydney and arranged a meeting. He was quite frank about what he wanted the policeman to do, and the officer was equally frank that he doubted there was anything he could do. Nonetheless, they explored the possibilities. Which meant Lennie had to provide the officer with some real information. Among the gems he contributed was the story that he had been ‘offered the contract’ to bump Kings Cross heiress and publisher Juanita Nielsen, who was murdered in July 1975 and whose remains were never found. Lennie told the Compol man he had declined the contract because Juanita was ‘too hot, politically’ but the man who did take it up, he said, ‘was the same man who knocked [Superintendent] Don Fergusson at the CIB’. That, too, is another story, but suffice it to say that this pointed the finger firmly at former police officer Fred Krahe: the same Fred Krahe who had arrested Lennie back in 1959 and charged him with the murder of George Hackett. Was this just a bit of revenge? Quite possibly. But with considerable knowledge about Juanita’s disappearance, I still give credibility to the story, despite Lennie’s

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denial at the coronial inquest into Juanita’s death that he had even spoken to the federal cop. Aware of my keen interest at the time in the Juanita Nielsen case, the federal cop told me of that aspect of his meeting with McPherson. I know who I’d rather believe. But Lennie didn’t get his visa back and was never to visit the Philippines again. So he decided to look for other investment opportunities, and in late 1975 he took a northern autumn holiday, visiting Rome and other European spots. He decided that this was where his new expansion plans would unfold, if he were no longer allowed into the lucrative Filipino markets. But, even after his death, no clear picture has emerged of the true nature or value of all his business activities, including anything he initiated in Europe at the time. Extensive searching through Australian corporate affairs offices has failed to turn up his name as a director or shareholder in any company or trading partnership.

11 NEVER-ENDING CHORES THE MOFFITT ROYAL Commission had come and gone. All the players went on with their lives and the media frenzy about organised crime abated and then disappeared. Judge Moffitt had said that the Bally poker machine company, if it were to continue to be allowed to trade in Australia, posed a real threat of the infiltration of organised crime into this country. But few people were listening. Lennie McPherson’s dreams in some ways had come true: the Mafia had come to Australia. But his fantasy that, as a result, untold wealth would flow in his direction turned out to be a pipedream. His ideas ran more along the lines of gangsters wearing black shirts and white ties than the slick business machine that was Bally. Their operation was only slightly interested in McPherson and the other crims on the local scene, and then only for handling the occasional bribe to an official. Basically Bally ran its own operation, under the direction of Jack Rooklyn, but the established crims did know how to bend [ 241 ]

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the rules and whose arm could be twisted, and Bally was ready to exploit that knowledge when required. They were told, for example, that Chief Secretary Eric Willis would no doubt be cooperative in licensing their five-slot machine if there was subtle mention of his penchant for going to a photo studio in suburban Dulwich Hill and taking Polaroid snaps of naked women in sexually explicit poses. They were told by the local crims which club officials were most susceptible to ‘persuasive’ secret commission payments, and which police officers should be taken up as allies. But after those bits of consultancy, there was not much else for the locals. Lennie got no additional contracts for standing over; there were no more noisy newcomers that had to be done away with. While he and Rooklyn had a friendly association, the latter had a stronger association with Abe Saffron than with other locals. So the arrival of Bally onto the Australian scene did little to boost the wealth of Lennie and his mates, nor did it do anything to upgrade their job descriptions from gangsters and hoodlums to fully-fledged dons. Lennie’s businesses in Sydney, although winding down due to the lack of his physical presence (an important aspect in any standover business), were still bubbling along. For a while after the Moffitt Commission’s adverse impact on the business activities of some of his mates in 1974, he hired Murray Riley as a ‘collection agent’, doing the rounds of the clubs and other establishments from which money was regularly milked to provide them with ‘protection’. The work meshed in well with Riley’s heavy involvement in the drug trade.

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Life went on and, with Lennie still effectively barred from the Philippines, he turned his attention to the domestic real estate market, and began buying up properties on Queensland’s Gold Coast, to which he hoped he would eventually retire, a disappointed old crook. He’d previously purchased (in his wife’s name) a unit in a block of flats, the Everglades, at 45 Whelan Street, Surfers Paradise, just 750 metres from the famous golden-sanded beach. A while later, after some unfortunate local publicity about Lennie’s arrival in the area, the Gold Coast City Council—ever conscious of the need to promote a positive image for the tourist mecca—changed the name of the street to ‘Peninsular Drive’ in an attempt to refurbish the street’s reputation. In Lennie’s hazardous profession, if you live past the age of 50 it’s wise to retire early and count your blessings. So by the time he’d turned 63 Lennie was looking to slow down the pace and relax on the Gold Coast. But still there were demands on his time. Gang warfare erupted in Sydney on 8 November 1984 between rival criminals—and involving two opposing factions of police—starting with the fatal shooting of Daniel Chubb outside his mother’s house in The Rocks. In tit-for-tat battles over the next year, the body count rose to four, including eventually Christopher Dale Flannery, dubbed ‘Mr Rent-a-Kill’ (last seen on 9 May 1985). The other two victims were heroin trader Anthony Eustace Anderson (shot dead on 23 April 1985) and drug supplier Michael John Sayers (shot dead on 16 February 1985). At stake was control of the massive and growing hard drug trade.

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Lennie initially appeared disinterested in the proceedings. His relationship with senior police was now in decline, particularly since his latest mentor, Detective Roger Rogerson, had been suspended from the force without pay on 28 November 1984, and was fighting for his professional survival under increasing allegations of corruption and involvement in drugs. But behind the scenes McPherson was in a frenzy of activity—his old paranoia had taken hold again and he told the cops he feared for his own life. In this warfare, a later inquiry was told, the lineup on one side included Detective Sergeant Bill Duff (who was later dismissed from the police and was somehow ‘given’ the Iron Duke Hotel by Neddy Smith), suspended cop Roger Rogerson (who was later sentenced to nine years’ jail for perverting the course of justice), Flannery (until his murder) and the Maltesedescended drug dealer Graham ‘Abo’ Henry. This was the team Lennie was notionally supporting. The other team was led by Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ Smith and included Daniel Chubb (until his murder), karate expert Joe Meissner, Tommy Domican, Barry McCann, Billy Stevens and their police backers. But loyalties and trust among these people was a scarce commodity. Everyone but the most foolhardy, in the end, wanted to back the winners. The involvement of a number of senior NSW police in the fray attracted the interest of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), who for many years had assessed their state counterparts as playing an active role in the organised crime scene. In the first half of 1985 the AFP organised legal

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phone taps on a number of the players in what they called ‘Operation Window’. Recordings of phone conversations with various people from both sides—including Lennie— were later revealed at a inquiry held by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) into the relationships between police and criminals. By the time of the taps, the warring parties were trying to arrange peace talks to stop the carnage—an activity in which Lennie played a leading role. As Neddy Smith said: ‘It had to stop. Nobody was making any money.’ Everyone’s efforts were now focused on arranging a series of meetings to broker a peace. To that end, at 8 o’clock on the morning of 15 April 1985—with the death toll standing at Chubb and Sayers—Lennie rang Duff. Referring to Flannery, Lennie said: ‘Listen, mate, if you see that ah, Melbourne fellow . . . will you tell him to give George a ring?’ ‘All right, mate, good as gold,’ replied Duff. ‘I seen him yesterday ’cept that I couldn’t think of how to . . . I tried to ring Roger [Rogerson] but I thought it was better to ring you.’ ‘Yeah, how you been, Len?’ ‘Oh, good.’ ‘Yeah, mate, I’ll . . . ah . . . I’ll try and have a talk to you in the next day or so . . . and bring you right up to date with things,’ said Duff. ‘All right, mate.’ Lennie then told him: ‘There’s a few things you can relay back to, I’ve ah, I’ve uncovered, you know?’ ‘All right, mate. Well, well I’ll try and get across to see you today or tomorrow.’

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Their almost coded, cryptic speech style was a sure sign they at least suspected their phones were bugged. Duff later agreed that in this exchange he was being asked by McPherson to get Flannery to ring George David Freeman, a close criminal associate of McPherson. In other words, policeman Duff was being asked by criminal McPherson, on behalf of criminal Freeman, to arrange a meeting of Freeman and a hired killer, Flannery. Duff was to say later that he thought that was ‘appropriate behaviour’ for a detective sergeant of police. Another central player in the peace talks process was Detective Sergeant Aarne (Arnie) Tees of the homicide squad. Bodies were piling up in the street, so he had a professional responsibility to find out what was happening. But from the evidence it would appear he had other motives for his involvement, particularly assisting in setting up meetings to broker a peace. In a conversation with Bill Duff seeking to set up a meeting of criminals, Tees referred to ‘the old man’ having given him some information about another criminal. It was revealed later that ‘the old man’ was Lennie McPherson, still squealing at age sixty-three. Around this time Lennie told Duff that he was in fear for his own safety and agreed to ‘try and pull everyone together and sort out the murders in the best interests of everyone’, Duff said. To that end, Duff had met with McPherson, Rogerson, Flannery, Kings Cross heavy Louis Bayeh, and perhaps Smith in the presence of Arnie Tees. Neddy Smith had met Duff through Rogerson, and regularly socialised with Duff, including drinking and lunching with him. He’d met Duff ’s family and they

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visited each other’s homes for dinners, and he thought Duff was ‘squarely in our camp’ during the negotiations. Duff ’s job, said Smith, was ‘to supply us with information about the other side or any information he could and to tell us when the dog squad was watching certain members of their gang in case we wanted to do something to them and on one or two occasions he called the dog squad off McCann’s house so something could be done.’ Smith said he attended three of the meetings to broker the peace, and knew there had been others. Of Lennie he said: ‘He was on both sides and serving Detective Inspector Arnie Tees, who was also involved in the meetings.’ Eventually peace was restored—or at least the killing stopped. And Lennie McPherson—so late in his life, when most people have retired and taken up lawn bowls or gardening—was still there in the front line of criminal activity, still with the same awesome power and earning the same grudging respect from his peers that he had for most of his life of crime. Perhaps he just wasn’t much good at growing roses. But the Gold Coast was where he spent most of his time after the gang war settled down. In 1978 he’d changed his name by deed poll to Leonard Murray, maybe thinking that would give him some peace, but his reputation remained intact. Back in Sydney, a few standover commissions for Lennie continued to flow in; details of some of these emerged in the 1991 Royal Commission into the Building Industry run by Roger Gyles, QC. As with his earlier testimony at the Moffitt inquiry, McPherson appeared to treat this outing as a chance to have a bit of fun. He started by asking Roger Gyles whether it would be OK for him

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to tell a few lies. ‘In regard to taking the oath,’ Lennie said, ‘if I take the oath and then if I tell a lie I will be charged with perjury and I will go to jail for a long time. What if I tell you the truth and occasionally tell a few lies—what about that?’ he asked the bemused Commissioner Gyles, who retorted: ‘Then you would be up in the Supreme Court before you could say Jack Robinson.’ Sketchy evidence was given to the inquiry that in 1985 Lenny’s private eye mate, Tim Bristow, took him to a home building company where he met one Richard Knebel. Knebel had sold most of his company to Masterton Homes, but had managed to hang on to a little part of the business. Masterton wanted him off the scene. Enter McPherson: Knebel felt intimidated and left. The Commission did not pursue any detail of this odd story. After all, McPherson could well tell lies about the detail, if asked. He also seemed to be bending the truth about a visit he made in Bristow’s company to a Civil and Civic building site at Campbelltown, where unions were having problems and were mounting industrial action. Bristow said to some workers: ‘This is Lennie McPherson’, and (Lennie told the inquiry) Bristow suggested he have a chat with some of the men. The unions considered Lennie’s presence extremely intimidating. Lennie later claimed he chatted with bricklayers, but only about bricklaying. He tried to put an innocent, friendly spin on what was in fact intimidation of the workers. He said in evidence he had had an ‘amiable chat’ with the men. ‘That is all that happened and those poor bludgers left the job the next day because they were frightened of me.’

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What he omitted to tell the inquiry was that Bristow had paid him money for these standover services, and there was even evidence that Bristow had pocketed $9000 in fees for this work that he was supposed to have shared with Lennie. While he maintained his fortress of a home in Gladesville, Lennie was now living most of the time on the Gold Coast, not in retirement, but in order to spend the autumn of his illustrious career in the sun. A number of his former Sydney associates had already made the move north, and Lennie was welcomed with a party in mid-1982 put on by the old passport forger Leo ‘the Liar’ Callaghan and former Sydney butcher Nick Karlos. Sydney friends were happy to visit—people like ALP heavyweight and ex-senator Graham ‘Richo’ Richardson, who’d had a long acquaintanceship with Lennie. It was Karlos, now a Gold Coast restaurateur, who arranged a pair of call girls to entertain Richo on one of his visits in 1993, and Lennie who paid for them.

GRAHAM RICHARDSON: THE ‘FIXER’ GETS FIXED UP Graham Frederick ‘Richo’ Richardson was born in Sydney on 27 September 1949. With support from powerful brokers in the NSW Right political machine, he became a NSW senator in 1983. During his meteoric rise through the ranks, Richardson made some hazardous acquaintances, not the least of which was his close friendship with the proprietor of the Balmain Welding Company, Danny Casey, who was a close mate of Lennie McPherson and (on paper, at least) the

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employer for more than a decade of Lennie’s drug addicted enforcer, Stan ‘the Man’ Smith. In 1978 Richardson and Casey set up a joint business in the container industry, using ‘front-men’ as nominees for their involvement. Marian Wilkinson, in her salient book on Richo, The Fixer, said: ‘Richardson appeared to have no ethical compass to guide him in his association with Casey’. Wilkinson quotes Richardson saying of Casey, whom he met in 1974: ‘I found Danny an enormously attractive character and he treated me like a son.’ Through his close association with NSW ALP Assistant Secretary, later Federal MP, Leo McLeay, Richardson also had links with the notorious NuganHand Bank, which became a contributor to a ‘slush fund’ the NSW ALP Right used to covertly fund rightwing candidates in union elections. Another associate of Richardson was Lennie’s close friend Nick Karlos, who would eventually involve the senator in a foolhardy escapade that would see Richo’s hasty retirement from his high-profile political career. Karlos had been a wholesale butcher in Sydney in the 1960s. He’d later left Sydney and become a major restaurant owner on Queensland’s ritzy Gold Coast, rubbing shoulders with old mates from Sydney like Eddie Kornhauser, a millionaire Gold Coast developer and former close friend of Abe Saffron, and eventually Lennie himself when he moved to Surfers Paradise. On 10 August 1993 Karlos arranged two prostitutes at a cost of $4000 for Senator Richardson, who was visiting the tourist mecca. One of the women, Sarah Gee, told Queensland’s Criminal Justice Commission

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(CJC) on oath that she and another woman had spent three hours providing sexual favours to Richardson at the Hyatt Sanctuary Cove resort. Other witnesses corroborated her story and hotel documents showed Richo was at the hotel on that date. Richardson has steadfastly denied claims of the sex romp. Evidence was produced showing Lennie McPherson was in frequent contact with Karlos for six months from the date of the sex party. Liberal Senator Grant Chapman asked Justice Minister Duncan Kerr on 12 May 1994 whether he was aware that the National Crime Authority (NCA) had provided information to the CJC inquiry on Lennie’s Queensland activities. The NCA had been running a major inquiry into Lennie’s activities for a few years at this stage. In September 1995 Nick Karlos pleaded guilty in the Southport Magistrates Court to two counts of procuring prostitutes. At the time police confirmed to the Brisbane daily, the Courier-Mail, that if Karlos had pleaded not guilty the matter would have gone to trial and Graham Richardson would have been subpoenaed to give evidence. A former Australian secret intelligence agency operative and a Gold Coast private investigator both told me that the money for the prostitutes was paid to Nick Karlos by Lennie McPherson, who was a friend of one of the ‘madams’ who ran the escort agency which provided the prostitutes, though investigators and reporters have not supported this view. In February 1994, when a close associate of Karlos and Richo, Bob Burgess, was subpoenaed to appear at

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the CJC investigation, Richardson suddenly resigned from the Senate. He told Marian Wilkinson that he’d made the decision to resign at the end of January, after a trip to the Northern Territory, before he knew Burgess had been summoned to the inquiry. ‘And that’s what’s always irritated me about the course of saying I resigned because of it,’ he told her.

After the old man of crime had spent some years enjoying the relative peace of semi-retirement, a new breed of cop began to show interest in him. The National Crime Authority said that its Reference Number Six, codenamed ‘Operation Curtains’, had been issued some years earlier, in April 1986. With it was launched NSW Police Reference Number Four, and a joint task force was set up with the Australian Tax Office and the NCA on 7 March 1990 as the law enforcement agencies’ probes continued. Investigators were raking over a wide range of criminal activity. The brief issued by the federal and NSW governments called on them to investigate and report on ‘importation, distribution and supply of narcotics, bribery or corruption and widespread activities associated with illegal gambling, tax evasion, murder and violence by a group or groups of persons and companies associated with them’. NCA officers, accompanied by NSW and Queensland policemen, came for Lennie one Tuesday evening in 1991 at the holiday apartment he’d bought a block away from the abscesses of towering concrete and glass which deface Surfers Paradise, Australia’s subtropical playground. Now

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70, Leonard Murray knew better than to resist—he didn’t have the energy of his younger days and, having spent sixty years as a criminal, he figured he could talk his way around this latest problem. ‘Leonard Arthur McPherson, I want to talk to you about a number of crimes . . .’ the National Crime Authority officer was saying while state and federal police looked on. ‘It’s Murray. Leonard Murray,’ he interrupted. ‘Sure, sure!’ said the officer. ‘Look, Lennie, I don’t care what handle you’re going under at the moment, but we’re going to put a number of questions to you, and I’d suggest you think seriously about your position and give us correct answers.’ The officer had never met McPherson before, but knew of his rich reputation as a major criminal and police informer. Lennie’s home base with its coterie of cooperative coppers was New South Wales, and this was Queensland. Lennie, too, realised that he did not yet have the clout on the Gold Coast that he had south of the border. ‘Listen,’ he said to the inspector. ‘You don’t reckon you could take me back across the border to New South Wales and charge me there, do you? I’ve got mates there, you see.’ The officer pointed out that at this stage, at least, no one was being charged. He didn’t bother telling Lennie that had he been home in Sydney, in his fortress at 22 Prince Edward Street, Gladesville, other officers would have knocked on his door and said the same things. Or had he been staying at the block of flats his wife owned in nearby Whelan Street (later renamed Peninsular Drive), he would also have been visited.

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In fact raids had been coordinated across Australia, with more than 50 premises in Sydney targeted, plus a number on the Gold Coast and more in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. No one was arrested in the raids, but an unnamed policeman involved told a Gold Coast Bulletin reporter that Lennie was a central target. ‘After all these years, it’s about time Lennie was targeted by the NCA,’ he was quoted as saying. The report said the NCA would ‘vigorously maintain’ the investigation. Being tracked to his holiday apartment and questioned by the NCA was an upsetting intrusion into Lennie’s new life in the Sunshine State. Back home in Sydney, he had a long and distinguished track record bobbing around near the top of organised criminal activity for decades through his skill in playing off aspiring criminals against each other and informing to police about what was going on. And for decades he had never been in a situation he could not control. The interview went on for some hours, and it would have been clear to Lennie that a major focus of the inquiry was his income and tax history. The NCA raid started to worry him seriously: here was a development over which it seemed he had no control, no way of subverting or corrupting, and it was something that could cost him dearly. But there was nothing he could do. His hero Al Capone had, after all, gone to jail for tax evasion, and if that was to be Lennie’s fate, then so be it. But it was not to be. Set up in July 1984, the NCA was plagued by political interference and instability, arising in no small measure from the requirement for

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agreement between all states and the commonwealth on operational briefs. In 2000 the Law Reform Commission criticised the NCA and called for its replacement by a new body, and in January 2003 the NCA was disbanded and replaced by the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) after open criticism of the NCA by Prime Minister John Howard. In 2004 a search of the ACC website could find no reference to ‘McPherson’. But back in the 1990s their investigation into Lennie dragged on to a compromise settlement. Senior journalist Warren Owens was later to report in the Sunday Telegraph that Lennie had paid the tax office around $1 million to settle the huge back-tax claim identified in Operation Curtains. No jail nowadays for tax cheats, just heavy fines, negotiated carefully with the offender. The NCA may have appeared to apply the soft pedal in dealing with Lennie’s tax evasion, but there were some in the organisation who maintained their surveillance of his comings and goings, and—as we will see—at least some of his phone conversations.

12 CHANGING THE GUARD THEY FINALLY GOt him, of course, and put him in jail. Following an argument in 1990 businessman Darron Burt resigned from a liquor importing company fronted by Lennie McPherson’s nephew Norman Foster for Lennie’s son Danny. Burt took with him a bourbon importation contract worth $26 million a year. It was all totally legal, but it was not the way Lennie thought people should behave when they were doing business with his family, so he ordered that the man be beaten up. On the morning of Tuesday 23 April 1991, Burt was viciously assaulted as he left his suburban Haberfield home. He sustained a fracture of his right arm and multiple facial lacerations. Lennie was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent. It was the aspect of malice and the intent—meaning it was a planned violent attack—that made the second charge much more serious than the first. He did not know the policemen who came for him [ 256 ]

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this time: they were young, and politely ignored his imprecations and his claims of innocence in the matter. No longer was he ‘the biggest toughest man in Sydney’. Indeed, Lennie had not physically assaulted Burt, but was charged because there was evidence that he had directed others to do the dirty work. The law does not differentiate between the organiser and the perpetrators of such crimes. Also charged were Branko Balic and Nicholas Constantin. Prosecutor John Kiely told the Downing Centre Local Court that the Crown’s case was based on conversations secretly taped by the National Crime Authority. He said Burt joined the Drummoyne-based Kentucky Importers Pty Ltd—Australia’s sole importers of Jim Beam bourbon—in 1988 and rose to become its general manager. Burt resigned in August 1990 and was put on a retainer by Jim Beam, which set up a new company to handle distribution in Australia. Kentucky Importers wrote to the new company claiming it stood to lose $26 million a year. The prosecutor said McPherson was alleged to have given one Branko Balic $20 000 to arrange for Burt to be beaten up. Balic then engaged Kostas Kontorinakis, who hired Jim Taousanis and Nicholas Constantin to carry out the assault. The arrangements were aimed to ensure the assault would not be traced back to McPherson or his nephew. Darron Burt was in his garage, about to leave for a meeting with the Jim Beam representatives, when the bashing took place. His wife Michelle came to his aid when she heard his screams, but was slapped to the ground and told to ‘shut up’. The attackers fled on foot

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and Burt, his face covered in blood, was taken to hospital to be treated for a broken arm, cuts and bruises. In the taped evidence played to the court was a phone conversation on 21 May 1991 in which Lennie said to Balic: ‘The boys just done a job for me, a fucking good job . . . they got this fucking bloke and broke his fucking arm and bashed his head.’ Lennie was committed to stand trial, but his lawyers were able to fend off what he saw as the inevitable for more than three years, using their full arsenal of legalistic devices to extend his period of freedom on bail. In that time it appeared a transformation of lifestyle overtook him. He now spent most of his time at his Gladesville home, making only occasional visits to his Gold Coast retreat. He began doing voluntary work once a week at the inner suburban Matthew Talbot Hostel for homeless men at Woolloomooloo, serving dinner in the dining room. There he met Dominican nun Sister Yvonne Heffernan, OAM, pastoral assistant at the hostel and parttime chaplain at Parramatta jail. Sr Yvonne told me later that she took McPherson as she found him, and she found him to be a kind, gentle and compassionate man with a wonderful sense of humour. ‘He came to the hostel for three years, every Sunday night and sometimes on Saturday,’ she said. ‘Most of the men at the hostel knew who he was and respected him.’ So was Lennie trying to atone for his wicked life? Some believed this possible, but the more cynical among Sydney’s McPherson-watchers suggested another motivation for this exuberant display of altruism: he was

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convinced he would be found guilty and sentenced to a jail term, and he was doing all in his power to create the illusion—to impress the judge—that he was a changed and repentant man. Lennie, now aged 73, had orchestrated some media before one of the court hearings. If he was sent to jail, he told the media, it would be a death sentence. His pathetic pleas made it appear that he was really scared of going to prison. He was also admitted to hospital to add emphasis to his concerns. In October 1994, a week before his trial, he was admitted into the northside psychiatric clinic at Greenwich, suffering severe depression. At a court hearing where Lennie’s counsel was putting the view that Lennie’s health rendered it difficult for him to attend a trial, the court was told Lennie had been talking suicide. He had been placed on a ‘brown alert’, a category that allowed him to move around the hospital but not to leave its confines. When it came time for the real thing, the trial, Lennie made it to court. In court Lennie, who had maintained his innocence throughout, had tried a bit of plea-bargaining: he offered to plead guilty to the lesser charge (assault occasioning actual bodily harm) if the more serious charge (maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent) was dropped. But the Crown prosecutor would have none of this, so his offer was withdrawn. With the jury back in court on 18 November, Lennie said: ‘I’m not guilty of assaulting Mr Burt or even wanting him assaulted.’ Once again, nobody believed him: he was found guilty of the lesser of the two charges. On Friday 16 December 1994, he faced sentencing before Judge

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Roger Court. He hoped in vain his three years of charity work would stand him in good stead. The judge said gravely: ‘An accused person can’t have it both ways. To demonstrate contrition or remorse, guilt must be admitted. ‘The offender has expressed fear that he might now die in jail,’ said the judge. ‘That obviously is a risk. However, the simple and obvious answer to that complaint is that anyone who does not want to die in jail should not engage in criminal activity.’ He sentenced Lennie to a maximum four years’ jail and made him eligible for parole in two and a half years, having regard to ‘the special circumstances and his health’. They took him away to the Cessnock Correctional Centre, a prison in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, 150 kilometres north-west of Sydney. For the first time in 35 years—since he and Snowy Rayner were in the observation section of Long Bay jail in 1959 awaiting court hearings over the murder of Hackett—Lennie was back behind bars. This time there was no ‘Major’ to come to his aid. This time there would be no letter signed ‘Len’. In the jail, despite regular work in the kitchen to occupy his mind, Lennie fell into a deep depression. It was almost as though he was willing himself to fulfil the prophecy that had been made on his behalf in court, that his imprisonment would become a death sentence. He was unable to distract himself from the inevitable ignominy of ending his life a prisoner—a low-grade criminal with no greater status than any of the other 460-odd inmates, and for once in his life having no clout with any of the 127 staff and officers of the jail that held him captive.

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His wife Marlene would visit each week, and for a while would bring a cooked meal for him—Mondays in the McPherson home had always been roast dinner night (who could forget?) and it helped cheer him a little to maintain this link with his old life. But after a while the prison authorities stopped visitors bringing food. It was a general clampdown on drugs being smuggled into prisons—not that Marlene was bringing any in for Lennie—and it stopped the baked dinners. Among his few visitors were a couple of young detectives from a ‘new, clean’ faction of the state police force. They gently tried to persuade him to tell them what he knew of people and events involved in the extraordinary life of crime he had lived for six decades. But Lennie, already fearing death, would have none of it: ‘Arnie [Tees] would have me knocked if I spoke to you blokes,’ he said, referring to a senior policeman—and old ally from the ‘good old days’—who had survived the purges of yet another new police commissioner. The young cops shrugged and went back to Sydney empty-handed: Lennie was not about to break down and tell the truth at this late stage in his career. He wrote letters to friends, including Sister Yvonne at the Matthew Talbot, but the missives were about present-day problems and issues. There was to be no acknowledgment of sins past, let alone any confessions. The ravages of Lennie’s misspent years were catching up with him fast, turning his nightmare into reality. He was feeling really unwell. At about 7.10 pm on 28 August 1996—just after finishing dinner and ten minutes before inmates were locked down for the night—Lennie made

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a phone call to his wife, Marlene. She tried to cheer him up with the suggestion that it was only two months before he was eligible for parole. But he was just too old and tired to go the distance. He said his last goodbye, cradled the phone, collapsed and died of a massive heart attack. Within minutes the jail’s chaplain, a High Anglican preacher from Newcastle, the Reverend Rod Moore, was beside his inert body on the concrete floor administering the last rites. Moore later phoned Marlene McPherson to break the news and to advise her that he had delivered his holy Anglican blessing on Lennie’s soul despite the fact he thought the dead man was a Roman Catholic. Marlene McPherson assured him that was not the case—that Lennie was a ‘good Anglican’—and thanked him for his actions. The family, she said, had a long association with the All Saints Anglican church at Hunters Hill in Sydney’s leafy northern suburbs. Lennie’s two sons by her had been involved in the church youth group and had played in the soccer team. They began making arrangements for the funeral at that church. Unlike his anonymous arrival on earth on 19 May 1921, his departure on 28 August 1996 was marked by a large funeral and death notice (referring to him as ‘Lenny’ rather than the more commonly used ‘Lennie’) in that journal of record, the Sydney Morning Herald. It read: McPHERSON, Leonard Arthur (Lenny). August 28, 1996 late of Gladesville, formerly of Balmain. Loving husband of Marlene, devoted father of Janelle, Danny, Craig, Stephen and Mark, father-in-law of Terry,

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grandfather of Michelle, Scott, Jodie, Jarrod and Brooke, proud great-grandfather of his great-grandchildren. Aged 75 years. Lenny was dearly loved and highly respected and will be sadly missed by all his family and friends. The relatives and friends of the late LEONARD ARTHUR (LENNY) McPHERSON are invited to attend his funeral service to be held at the All Saints Anglican Church, corner Ambrose and Ferry Streets, Hunters Hill, this Tuesday (September 3, 1996) to commence at 1.30 pm. At the conclusion of the service the cortege will proceed to the Field of Mars Cemetery, Cressy Road, Ryde.

They came from all walks of life to say their farewells. Old pickpocket Nana ‘Dip’ Brown, aged 82, William ‘Snowy’ Rayner (now retired), Stan ‘the Man’ Smith, Tim Bristow, Con Karageorges, brothers Sam and John Ibrahim and ‘Bigfella’ McMillan mingled among the mourners and inquisitive media types. From his family were wife Marlene, carrying a single red rose, four sons, a daughter, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Eulogies were given by John McDougall, Janelle Olive, Craig Steinbeck (reading Lennie’s sons’ perspectives prepared by Craig and Danny and a poem by Mark) and Sister Yvonne Heffernan. Sister Yvonne spoke of the way she had found him, and referred to the Roman Catholic quotation ‘Fear not to speak of me until we meet again’. Lennie’s daughter to his first wife Dawn, Janelle Olive, said in her eulogy that her father had chosen ‘a path in life that you and I might not have chosen, but at least he was at the top of his profession’. As reporter Phil Cornford from the Sydney Morning Herald was to write: ‘It was a brave remark, and minutes later Mrs Olive

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dissolved in tears as about 400 mourners farewelled a criminal whose ruthlessness and intelligence earned him the unchallenged title of Mr Big for many of his 75 years’. Cornford reported that the Reverend Rod Moore, chaplain at Cessnock jail, said: ‘There’s hope for us all.’ And the rector for the Anglican parish of Hunters Hill, the Reverend Clive H Norton, said: ‘Life is a mystery. No one here is entirely good or entirely bad.’ He read (from the Good News Bible) from Luke 23:26-28, 32-46 and Assistant Minister the Reverend Raewynne Whiteley from Romans 12:9-21. After the sermon Graham Anderson, the organist from St Johns Anglican Church, Gordon, led into the tear-stirring strains of ‘Abide With Me’ before prayers. Then, as is often done in funeral services of members of the milieu, they played a tape of Frank Sinatra singing ‘I Did It My Way’. The dark wooden coffin was carried out of the church by his sons and two family friends to the music of Handel’s Largo. As the Australian reported: ‘Wearing a cream Panama hat, Nana Brown, who met Lennie in 1952, leant into the hearse and patted the coffin. “There’s not many of us left,” he said.’ The Reverend Norton told reporter Janet FifeYeomans from the Australian that he had received several calls from people critical that he was allowing the funeral of such a man in the church. ‘I wish the community could be equally critical or at least consistent when it is a successful businessman who rips off the community or a board member of a chemical company making napalm to drop on innocent people . . . when they are buried here we don’t get this criticism’, the paper quoted him as saying.

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The Reverend Rod Moore told this author that he’d received a ‘couple of nasty phone calls and letters’ after speaking at the funeral service. ‘I said at the service and responded to the callers that nobody has a right to judge anyone else,’ he said. ‘I knew of McPherson’s reputation, of course, but I personally only knew him from being at Cessnock. I found him to be a gentleman, a hard worker and very friendly. He would often drop into my office in the jail for a cup of tea and a chat.’ But as with Sister Yvonne, nothing in the way of a confession of past sins came from Lennie to the kindly vicar. Most of the mourners followed the procession to the cemetery at Ryde where Lennie was interred in what an official told me was a ‘large but tastefully designed’ family crypt. Phil Cornford reported that ‘One by one, sobbing women and severe faced men went inside to touch the coffin, paying their final respects.’ A church official involved in the funeral told me he thought the tomb looked like a ‘Mafia mausoleum like you see in the gangster movies’. Marlene McPherson had purchased the vault (officially designated ‘Stage II, Block G, Vault 5’) new from noted monumental stone mason Eddie Cirillo of Castle Hill, who had built a few large tombs ‘on spec’, for an undisclosed sum, probably around $50 000 if she paid the going market rate for such edifices. The marble lintel of the tomb bore in large gold-leaf lettering ‘McPherson Family’. Between the two words is the badge of the Scottish Clan McPherson, descendants of the Murdochs of Kingussie. The badge shows a cat rearing up on its hind legs, one sinister paw extended. The clan motto around the badge reads: ‘Touch Not The

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Cat Bot A Glove’, the word ‘bot’ meaning ‘without’. One clan history suggests the motto meant: ‘Mess with my children and you’ll never need gloves again’. The arrangements were all made by Marlene at the time of Lennie’s death, and according to a worker at the cemetery Marlene indicated they were in accord with Lennie’s last wishes to be buried in a large family vault—shades of his affection for the style of many US Mafiosi whom he so admired. He remains at this stage the only occupant of the vault. One wit said to me later, ‘At last they’ve got Lennie in solitary!’ Lennie may have been in solitary in Vault 5, but he was not without friends in the cemetery: Barry McCann, who died shortly after the 1984 gang war, lies in a plot nearby. Janet Fife-Yeomans wrote: ‘But the McPherson empire did involve prostitution, illegal gambling and armed robbery, and as well as yesterday’s criminals among the mourners were identities fresh from giving evidence at the NSW Police Royal Commission and some of his protégés eager to move in on McPherson’s territory.’ With the passing of Leonard Arthur McPherson, so too passed into history an era of crime and a style of criminal never to be seen again. Already Lennie had looked on in amazement as the white-collar criminals of the greedy 1980s—Alan Bond and Christopher Skase high in their ranks—were exposed and imprisoned (or in Skase’s case, self-exiled in Majorca, Spain, until his death) for ripping off millions of dollars of other people’s money. This was not the way things were done in Lennie’s heyday! Now he was gone, and the new crooks of the

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1990s were even smarter than those of the previous decade. Lennie’s surviving contemporaries were in their 70s and 80s, and the good life they had enjoyed was gone forever. Perhaps the changing nature of crime will mean there will be no Mr Bigs in the future: the decisions will be made silently and anonymously in boardrooms of corporations with budgets bigger than nation-states. If so, then Lennie went to his grave as the first, last and only recognised Mr Big of Crime Australia Inc.

EPILOGUE: THE MORNING AFTER LENNIE MCPHERSON DIED a broken man, not a broke one. But unless and until his close family decide to reveal the full worth of his estate, that detail will remain a mystery. McPherson’s last Will and Testament was made on 27 November 1991 at Potts Point, Sydney. It was witnessed by solicitor RG Weaver and his legal secretary Maree Martha Wright. He was described as ‘Property Manager’. His wife Marlene McPherson was made the executrix and trustee of the estate. The will empowered her to retain or ‘sell, call in and convert into money’ any part of his estate at her discretion. He left his entire estate both real and personal to Marlene if she survived him for 30 days, otherwise it was to be shared between sons Danny Richard and Craig Andrew equally. If they were to die first then the estate was to be shared equally between his son Stephen Vey-Cox of Ramsgate and godsons Mark Corpus Dance and John Kennedy, both of Gladesville. [ 268 ]

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On 24 June 1995, at Cessnock jail, he signed a codicil to the will: ‘I give devise and bequeath my Real Property situate and known as 7 Irvine Crescent Ryde, NSW to Mark Dance of . . . Gladesville NSW’. The codicil was witnessed by HC Gatliff of 171 Brisbane Water Drive, Point Clare 2250 and Justice of the Peace R Symington, of Palm Court, 464 The Entrance Road, Erina Heights 2260. Probate was granted on 6 July 1997. The document attached to the will, the ‘estate file’ which gives the estimated worth of the estate, was not revealed. The probate division of the NSW Supreme Court advised this author that only the executor and beneficiaries are entitled to have access to that document: the only official record of Lennie’s professed value when he died. If a case of ‘exceptional circumstances’ is made, the Registrar in Probate may decide to release the document. This author applied for its release on the basis that McPherson was a noted major criminal, and that knowledge of his wealth (gained from his life of crime) would be justified in the public interest. Registrar Jonathan Finlay declined my request. I had previously asked the solicitor who lodged the will for access to the document. He curtly refused and said the family had been ‘deeply distressed’ by some publicity over the will. He emphatically denied that there was any property in the Philippines, Noumea or other foreign lands. But failing the family’s desire to set the record straight, it is that publicity which now provides the sole insight into Lennie’s probable worth. In the Sunday Telegraph three weeks after the grant of probate, senior journalist Warren

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Owens reported that McPherson had left an estate worth $10 million. The NCA identified six properties ‘suspected of being linked’ to McPherson. At Runaway Bay, just north of Surfers Paradise, there were two luxury waterfront homes; and in nearby Labrador there was a vacant canalfront block in an exclusive estate plus three other properties, including a unit and vacant block fronting a golf course. All up these six properties had a total value of around $20 million. In addition, his wife Marlene owned two units in the Everglades building at 45 Whelan Street. She sold one of those in November 1994. Queensland police said they could not touch McPherson’s Queensland property ‘empire’, even though it may have been amassed by ill-gotten gains. Both the police and NCA said that his death ‘closed the book’ on their investigations. ‘We would need a conviction to investigate confiscation of his estate under Proceeds of Crime legislation,’ one police source said. ‘Now we have no scope to investigate his assets.’ One McPherson-watcher this author has come to respect says Lennie would have resolved his estate in the three years after his conviction and before his sentencing on the assault charge. ‘He knew he was going to jail and had really convinced himself he would die there, so he got things straightened out for the family and friends. We may never know how he did it,’ the source said. Which probably now leaves only a couple questions: did anyone really take over in the role of Mr Big, and if so, who is it? A couple of names have been bandied

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about, but this author and his good publishers would undoubtedly cop too much ‘flack’ if we identified anyone here.

NOTES

THE AUTHOR ACCESSED a great many resources and spoke to a great many people in gathering material for this book on and off over three decades. Because of the nature of the story, many sources will have to remain anonymous. Wherever possible, sources are provided in the text (or here) to assist the reader’s assessment of the credibility of the information. Material from diverse sources is interspersed throughout the manuscript: often interwoven into one paragraph or anecdote. It is therefore difficult—indeed well nigh impossible—to acknowledge each piece of information, chapter by chapter, as to its source. In building the portraits of the leading characters, the author used (freely, with the copyright owners’ willing approval) the following works, each of which in its own way pioneered a style and depth of publishing of information which newspapers shun as too risky: [ 272 ]

NOTES

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David Hickie, The Prince and the Premier: The story of Perc Galea, Bob Askin and the others who gave organised crime its start in Australia, Angus & Robertson, 1985 Alfred W McCoy, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia, Harper & Row, 1980; and The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Harper & Row, 1972 Hank Messick and Burt Goldblatt, The Mobs and the Mafia, Spring Books, 1972 Evan Whitton, A Can of Worms: A citizen’s reference book to crime and the administration of justice, Fairfax Library, 1986 Marian Wilkinson, The Fixer: The Untold Story of Graham Richardson, William Heinemann, 1996 Personal conversations with some of these writers also added to this author’s knowledge and understanding. In gathering my material, I have gleaned knowledge from a broad range of books, reports, newspaper clippings, magazine articles etc., all of which has been melded into the story. Bob Bottom’s writings come particularly to mind. Richard Neville happily provided his recollection of a gem of conversation he had with Lennie, and Ian Alcorn, a former Commonwealth Police Criminal Investigation Unit officer and later a private investigator on the Gold Coast, was a constant source of help, information and encouragement over many years. A significant source which more than any other defined the relationship which existed between police and criminals in the time up to (and maybe beyond?) the mid-1970s was the transcript of the lengthy Moffitt Royal Commission (1973–74) and the judge’s official report.

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Other royal commissions are referred to, but none conducted such a detailed and public examination of Lennie McPherson as did Moffitt. Athol Moffitt’s own book, A Quarter to Midnight (Angus & Robertson, 1985) was also on the author’s reading list. The author was also privileged to have brief access to files on some major criminals which were once (but are no longer) held by the commonwealth police. How that came about cannot, however, be revealed. A few state police, apparently disgusted with the behaviour of some of their crooked colleagues, also gave great (and essentially anonymous) assistance to the author. A few state public servants, dismayed at corrupt behaviour they saw, provided rare copies of official documents which criminals believed had been destroyed. A couple of media executives, equally appalled at their organisations’ failure to show some courage in dealing with this difficult (but not impossible) subject, provided the author with more unique documents. Over the years a few members of Lennie’s family have spoken to me and other journalists, and this knowledge is pooled here. Chris Forsyth and the late David Halpin deserve special thanks for their generosity with their own information on Lennie and the Sydney crime scene after the failure of News Limited to publish it. Other journalists, union officials, politicians, ex-secret service agents, private investigators, researchers, archivists and librarians have all contributed important pieces of this story. So too have members of the criminal milieu, some of whom talked at length and in great detail to the author about the matters raised here and the general

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issue of crime and its perpetrators. Specific mention is made in the story of a few of the police roundsmen who worked for the Sydney press. They were a ‘breed apart’, much closer to the senior policemen from whom they got their stories than the journalists who were their professional colleagues. Some of them treated some of us investigative reporters with contempt: we were so often coming upon stories that involved police corruption that they should have uncovered over the years. In many cases the material that I’ve indicated came from a couple of those sources was delivered as a scathing criticism of my ignorance. They’d say something like: ‘You know nothing about what goes on! Look, Ray Kelly was telling me only the other day that . . .’ (and then would come an unreported gem, which I would note down as soon as practical). ‘He’d never give the real stories to the likes of you johnnycome-latelies!’ Many of these ‘secrets’ were gleaned this way. In their own quaint way, they were more helpful than they ever imagined. To all those who assisted and remain unheralded in these pages, a great vote of thanks. Unheralded you may be, overlooked or forgotten you are not. This story would not be so thorough were it not for the generous sharing of information by all who have made their contribution, large or small.

INDEX

Adams, Augustus 113 Alcorn, Ian, private investigator 236, 251, 273 Aldorisio, Felix 160 Anderson, Anthony Eustace 243 Anderson, Charles ‘Paddles’ 26, 75, 95, 170–1 Andrews, Reg 162 Arden, Harry 43, 48 Askin, Robert 5, 50, 61, 74, 77, 103, 105, 114–15, 120, 129, 142, 182–5, 273 Associated Motor Club 122, 124 Attard, Paul 116–7 Australasian Criminal Register 1973 entry for Arthur ‘The Duke’ Delaney 171 1973 entry for ‘Ironbar’ Miller 170 1973 entry for Karl Bonnette 171 1973 entry for Lou ‘Mad Dog’ Miller 230 1973 entry for Maxie Best 48 1973 entry for Stan ‘The Man’ Smith 79 1974 entry for David Kelleher 155 1974 entry for Lennie 222 Australian The 2, 61–2, 178, 264 Australian Crime Commission 255 Australian Labor Party 16, 22, 94, 170, 172 Balic, Branko 164, 25–8

Ballard, Det-Sgt Brian 118, 120, 173–6, 212–13 Bally poker machine company 4, 128–9, 137, 164, 168, 178, 180–3, 185, 206, 209, 211, 213, 214, 218–19, 241–2 Barber, Horace, witness 38 Bates, Det–Sgt Les 116–17 Bayeh, Louis 246 Best, Ernie 36, 41 Best, Maxie 43, 48 Birnie, Phillip, publican 225 Black, Tubby, Pussy Galore manager 138–9 Bonnette, Karl 170–1, 174, 176, 222 Boom, Reg 107 Borg, Joe, vice king 116–17 Bottom, Bob, journalist 5, 124–7, 180, 273 Bourke, Charlie 86 Bowen, Nigel 154 Brereton, Mr Justice 57 Brifman, Shirley 51 Bristow, Tim, investigator 6, 226, 233, 248–9, 263 Brown, Frank, journalist 85 Brown, Nana ‘Dip’ 263 Buckle, Ken, resident 38 Burgess, Bob 251–2 Burney, John, journalist 218–20 Burns, Billy 34 Burt, Darron 256–59

[ 276 ]

INDEX

Callaghan, Leo ‘The Liar’ 172, 249 Campbell, Chris 42–4, 46, 61–2, 64–6 Capone, Al, Chicago mobster 27, 30, 166, 189, 194, 254 Carroll, Kenneth, alias used by Freeman 144 Casey, Danny 249–50 Cashman, John Charles 43, 65 Chamber of Manufacturers 10 Chapman, Senator Grant 251 Charlton, Det-Sgt Frank 114, 146, 154, 157, 173–6, 199–205, 221–2, 233 Chaseling, Det Trevor 69 Chowne, Det-Sgt Les 40, 44, 54, 111–13, 118–20, 122 Christian, Trevor 235 Chubb, Daniel 243–5 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 150–1 City Tattersalls Club 68 Clark, Jackie 107, 112, 154, 201–2, 224–6 Clayton, Hilton Mervyn 37, 55, 57 Commonwealth Police 146, 163, 166–7, 169, 173, 176, 183, 235, 245 Communist Party of Australia 11 Constantin, Nicholas 257 Cornford, Phil, journalist 5, 180, 263–4, 266 Court, Judge Roger 260 Craig, Keith Raymond 35 Criminals’ 1972 Sydney meetings 169 Crook, Sgt Frank, police prosecutor 53–6 Culbert, Ced, journalist 81, 84, 103 Curlewis, Judge Adrian 27–8 Daily Mail 178 Daily Mirror 102, 108-9, 126–7, 136, 200 Daily Telegraph 198-9, 218, 238 Dance, Mark Corpus 268-9 Davenport, Phil, coroner 53–7 Davies, Const ME 34 Dean, Wally 123, 129–32, 142, 177, 200, 211, 214–16 Delaney, Arthur ‘The Duke’ 162–3, 171–2 Domican, Tom 244 Donohue, Bill, SP bookie 48 Downing, RR (Reg), NSW Justice Minister 22, 57–60 Ducker, John 206 Duff, Det-Sgt Bill 217, 244–7

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Eastlakes, John Francis 231–2 Erskine Norman, comedian 107, 162 Farquhar, Murray, magistrate 113–15, 139, 144–5 Featherstone, Jim, magistrate 113–14 Fergusson, Supt Don 50–1, 74, 239 Fife-Yeomans, Janet, journalist 264, 266 Finlay, Jonathan, NSW Probate Registrar 269 Fiorelli, Vic 207 Fisher, Bill, QC 80 Fitzgerald, BJ, handwriting analyst 61–2 Flannery, Christopher Dale 243–6 Flarrity, Albert, murdered in Brisbane 33–5 Forsyth, Chris, journalist 4, 5, 61–3, 73, 178–80, 274 Foster, Norman 31, 188, 256 Freeman, George David 107, 115, 122, 142–6, 154, 158–65, 170, 201, 215, 234, 246 Galea, Perc, gambler 75 Gang warfare, 1984 outbreak 243–7 Gee, Sarah 250 Gilligan, Marlene Carrol 77 Giordano, Nick 164 Goldsmith, Ronald John see Smith, Stan ‘The Man’ Goode, Martin 24, 27 Goran, Alf 28 Gorton, John, Prime Minister 3, 153 Griffiths, Gilbert Bryce 27 Gyles, Roger QC 247–8 Hackett, George Joseph 33–42, 44, 48, 52–6, 58, 60–1, 63, 67, 114, 179, 223, 239, 260 Hall, Reginald Norman see Andrews, Reg Halpin, David, journalist 30, 61–3, 70, 73, 178–9, 274 Hand, Michael 151, 156 Hanson, Fred, Police Commissioner 50, 51, 61, 77, 183, 222 Harper, Len (COMPOL Commissioner) 183 Harvey, Roy, magistrate 48, 52 Hayes, John Frederick ‘Chow’ 20, 76 Heffernan, Sister Yvonne 258, 263 Henry, Graham ‘Abo’ 244

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Henry, Sue, Hackett’s girlfriend 35 Hewitt, James 96 Hickie, David, author 50, 74, 76, 116, 134, 170, 273 Hills, Pat, NSW Opposition leader 182 Hodson, George Henry 96 Holland, Frank, Melbourne CIB Chief Inspector 97–8, 101 Hollibone, Joey 24 Houghton, Bernie 149–53, 165 Hudson, Eddie, US boxer 26 Hughes, Billy, prime minister 11 Hughes, CR, Secretary NSW Prisons Dept 22 Hughes, Tom, QC 153, 187 Hunt, Lewis William see Rayner, Snowy Hutchinson, John Henry 24, 29 Ibrahim, Sam and John 263 Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) 245 Isaacs, Simon (later Justice) 76 Jenkings, Bill, journalist 102 Jitterbug Kid, The see Keillor, Keith Kangaroo Club, Australian international shoplifting gang 172 Karageorges, Con 263 Karlos, Nick 130–1, 249–51 Kean, John Eric see Smith, Stan ‘The Man’ Keane, Kenneth Laurence, alias used by Freeman 145 Keillor, Keith 116–17 Kelleher, David 155–7 Kelly, Det Keith 69 Kelly, Det-Sgt Ray 44–5, 49, 50, 52, 62, 70, 73–7, 81, 83–7, 93, 95–6, 99, 100–4, 119, 133, 145, 275 Kelly, John Trevor 16 Kennedy, John 268 Kerr, Senator Duncan 251 Kiely, John, prosecutor 257 Killen, Sir James 153 Kincaid, Hilton Granville 134 Kincaid, JJB, barrister 76 Knebel, Richard 248 Knight, Det-Sgt Doug 165, 213–14 Kommer, Walter, editor The Australian 62 Kornhauser, Eddie 250

Krahe, Det-Sgt Fred 36, 39–41, 44, 47, 49–52, 54–5, 57, 74, 95, 100, 103, 153, 239 Latin Quarter, Pitt St nightclub 107 Laws, John 132 Leary, Andrew, barrister 113–14, 132, 186–8 Lee, Ronnie, gambler 159, 162 Lee, Sammy 107, 109–10 Lennie the Pig, nickname for Lennie 25 Lennie the Squealer, nickname for Lennie 25 Letter signed Len 42–9 Lewer, Magistrate Wally 79–80 Lewis, Stanley Raymond see Smith, Stan ‘The Man’ Lion Manufacturing, pre-cursor to Bally 182 Loomes, Jim, Coroner 83–6, 108 Lucas, Sgt Ray 52 Lusher, Mr Justice Edwin 8–9 McCann, Barry 244, 247, 266 McCoy, Dr Alfred W, author 150, 273 McDougall, John 263 MacGregor, Gordon, news editor Sunday Mirror 236–7 McGeechin, Wal, NSW Comptroller of Prisons 64 McHugh, Michael 61, 63 McKenzie, CJ (Cec), journalist 177 McLeay, Leo 250 McMillan, ‘Bigfella’ 263 McNeill, Det–Sgt Jack 84, 118–22, 128–30, 140–2, 145–6, 166–7, 173–6, 180, 185, 203, 205–7, 211, 213–14, 216, 221–2 tells Lennie where he can and cannot go 120–3 McPherson, Craig 82, 263, 268 McPherson, Danny 82, 256, 263, 268 McPherson, Dawn Joy, 18–21, 23, 31, 62–3, 70–3, 77, 263 McPherson, Lennie 1921 born in Balmain 11 1932 put on probation for stealing 12 quit Birchgrove school 13

INDEX

1934 probation renewed for stealing charge 13 sentenced to institution for stealing 13 sexually assaulted at Mt Penang Boys Home 14 1938 fined for tram fare evasion 15 1939 gets call-up exempt job at start of war 17 1939–45 series of traffic fines 17 1940 fathers one child, weds another 18 1946 fined for stolen goods in custody, appealed 18 given 12 months for stolen goods in custody 18 given 18 months on stealing charges 19 moved to Glen Innes prison farm 20 problems with murderer Chow Hayes in jail 20 released on parole 23 1947 fined for indecent language 26 1950s ‘buys’ his criminal records from State departments 13 1950s–60s involved in ‘white slave’ trade 149 1951 first trip to US, meets mafia thugs 27 1953 gets ‘first offender’ dismissal on consorting charge 29 gets three-and-a-half years for break/enter 29 1954 Appeal against balance of sentence rejected 30 Freeman and he first meet 144 1955 sentenced 12 months for unlicensed pistol 31 1956 freed on parole, Oct 31 invents a job at Balmain ‘motel’ 31 murder eye witness intimidated 36

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1959 Hackett murder arrest and hearings 33–67 committed for trial for Hackett murder 57 1960 attempt with Rayner on Unwin’s life 68 can’t get his dinner on time, assaults wife 71 1962 arrested for consorting, released 69 1963 second marriage, weds Marlene Carrol Gilligan 77 murders Pretty Boy Walker at Randwick with Stan Smith 78–82 1964 persuades police to raid O’Connor’s home 85 sets Charlie Bourke shooting 86 1965 murders Jacky Steele 87–93 Steele blames Lennie for shooting attack on him 89 1966 meets Ryan and Walker in Sydney, informs Kelly 97 takes SE Asia sea cruise with Stan Smith 104 1967 hands ‘death sentence’ to Ducky O’Connor 106 murdered O’Connor at the Latin Quarter 107 1968 issues $100 000 writ against Daily Mirror 127 named as criminal in ‘Ironbar’ consorting case 112 1969 Chowne charges Lennie with consorting 113 Fined token $100 on consorting charge 114 posted $200 bail for Keillor in Borg case 117 shows Testa ‘lots of hospitality 164 tax office investigates his affairs 196 1970 McNeill tells him where he can and can’t go 120–3

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1971 invited Sunday Telegraph to Souths Juniors 123 telephone call to Bob Bottom 124–7 1972 Bristow claims he ‘dumped bodies at sea’ for him 6 Pussy Galore standover charge dismissed 139 1973 questioned at Moffitt inquiry 186–98 1974 admits use of false passport in 1951 US trip 27 gives Moffitt his definition of ‘standover’ 133 ‘I’m lily-white’– Sunday Mirror story 210 issues threat to Daily Telegraph reporter 198 Moffitt finds ‘organised’ links with criminals 215 Moffitt report seen before it was published 209 Murray Riley hired as ‘collection agent’ 242 1975 deported from Philippines 234 said Krahe contracted to murder Nielsen 239 1978 changed his name to Leonard Murray 247 1980 involvement in prostitution, drugs in Manila 234 1984–85 ‘frenzy of activity’ over gang warfare 244 1985 Bristow sets up standover jobs 248 1990s pays Tax Office $1m in back taxes 255 1991 appears at building industry Royal Commission 247 charged with assault of Darron Burt 256 made his last Will and Testament 268

1993–94 contact with Karlos over Richardson sex romp 251 1993 interviewed by NCA in Operation Curtains 253 1994 jailed 4 years for assault of Burt 259 1996 Aug 28 dies of heart attack in Cessnock jail 262 funeral notice in Sydney Morning Herald 262 obituray written by author 3 1997 probate granted on his Will 269 2003 info that Lennie paid for Richardson prostitutes 251 fortifications to Gladesville house 189–93 involvement in drug trade 154–7 kills rabbit in front of mother 2 took cut from liquor licence transfers 146 took protection money from illegal casinos 142 McPherson, Marlene, executrix of Lennie’s estate 268 McPherson, Nell 1, 11–13, 49 McPherson, William 11 Maddison, John, NSW Justice Minister 105 Maddocks, Maude 10 Major, The, nickname for John Cashman 16 Mandarin Club 122 Manners, John William ‘Joey’ 35–6 Mansfield, Mr Justice 35 Marcos, Philippines President 235, 238 Martin, Thomas John, barrister 205 Masters, Chris, ABC reporter 115 Maxwell, Mr Justice 48, 135–6 Meissner, Joe 244 Mifsud, Paul (alias Zammit) 116–17 Millard, Sgt Dennis, police prosecutor 113 Miller, ‘Ironbar’ 112, 162–3, 170, 201, 215 Miller, ‘Mad Dog’ Lou 226–33 Miller, Roger, entertainer 164 Mix, Tom, screen star 11

INDEX

Moffitt, Athol, Judge 5–6, 28, 120, 128–30, 137, 141–2, 145, 160, 166–8, 174–5, 184–8, 195, 199, 202–7, 209–15, 218, 221–2, 241, 274 1973 appointed Royal Commissioner on crime in clubs 184 1974 publishes report into his inquiry 206–21 Moore, Rev Rod 262, 264–5 Morrison, Det Ross (Rocky) 76 Moylan, Mick, owner the 33 Club 121–2 Mr Rent-a-Kill see Flannery, Christopher Dale Murdoch, Rupert 63 Murray, Harold 98–9 Murray, Leonard, 1978 Lennie changed his name by deed poll 247 Nation Review 4, 178, 222 National Crime Authority 1993 interview Lennie on crime, tax 252 2003 disbanded and replaced after political row 255 Needham, Garth, QC 131–2, 185, 196–7, 199, 200, 202, 204 Neville, Cliff, journalist 123 Neville, Richard 88–9, 273 Nielsen, Juanita 7, 51, 239–40 Night the Mafia Came to Sydney, The, author’s story in Sunday Telegraph 5, 161, 181 Northside Polonia Soccer Club 122, 124 Norton, Rev Clive H. 264 Nugan, Frank 151 O’Brien, Joe Condon see Keillor, Keith O’Connor, ‘Ducky’ 84–5, 88, 106–12 Olive, Janelle, Lennie’s daughter 263 Olson, Martin 234 Owens, Raymond Arthur see Smith, Stan ‘The Man’ Owens, Warren, journalist 270 Oz Guide to the Sydney Underworld 88 Oz Magazine 85, 88–9 Paltos, Nick 115, 145

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Paterson, Robert, Pentridge warder 101 Patrick, Vic, boxer 26 Petricevic, George see Miller ‘Ironbar’ Philips, Brian, journalist 90 Pink, Jeannie 48 Quani, George 235 Rayner, Lily M. 39 Rayner, Snowy 37–41, 44–5, 49, 53–60, 63–4, 67–8, 154, 202–3, 221, 223–4, 260, 263 Razor Gangs 29 Reeves, Chicka 24, 106, 111 Reeves, Ted 24 Rice, Bob, journalist 102 Richardson, Graham 249–52, 273 Richardson, Mr Justice 35 Riley, Murray Stewart 123, 161, 211, 215–18, 242 Riley, Qld criminal 86 Roach, Phil, solicitor 43, 45–7, 49, 52, 54, 57, 60 Rogerson, Roger 50, 95, 103–5, 217, 244–6 Rooklyn, Jack 137, 164, 181–2, 209, 213, 218–21 Rooney, Charles, Crown prosecutor 27 Ross, Det-Sgt William 53–4 Royal Commissions 1951 Maxwell liquor inquiry 135 1973–74 Moffitt inquiry 5–6, 27, 104, 118, 120–3, 127, 130–1, 133, 139–40, 142, 145–6, 154, 158, 165, 170, 177, 180, 184–6, 190, 199, 203, 206–9, 216, 218–19, 223–4, 233, 237, 241–2, 273 1978 Woodward, into drugs 80 1981 Lusher inquiry into NSW Police Administration 8 1986 Justice Stewart, drug trafficking 146 1991 into the Building Industry 247 Ryan and Walker escape and recapture 96–102 Ryan, Maurice Bernard (Barney) 110–11 Saffron, Abe 76, 133–8, 162, 238, 242, 250 Savoy, George 160 Saw, Ron, journalist 85

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Sayers, Michael John 243 Senate Select Committee on Foreign Ownership and Control 128 Shaw, Frank B Editorial Manager News Ltd 62–3 Sheehan, Tom, MHR 21–2, 58 Sinn Fein 11 Sloss, Albert Ross (Alby) 172–6 Smith, Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ 154, 244 Smith, Laurie, journalist 209, 211, 237–8 Smith, Stan ‘The Man’ 78–81, 84–5, 89, 104–5, 112, 122, 144, 155, 158–9, 161, 163, 170, 200–2, 207, 224, 227, 232, 250, 263 Snedden, Billy Mackie, Federal Treasurer 183 Sommerlad, Marjorie Constance 16 South Sydney Juniors 122–4, 130, 132, 177, 214 South Sydney Seniors 124 Southern, George 113 Southern, John 113 Sparrow, Walter Alexander 10 Steele, Jacky, murdered 1965 87–93 Stein, Danny 234 Steinbeck, Craig 263 Stevens, Billy 244 Stuart, John Andrew 89 Stuart-Jones, Dr Reginald 75 Sunday Mirror 90, 209–10, 236–7 Sunday Telegraph 4, 6, 123–4, 127, 161, 169, 179–81, 255, 269 Sun–Herald 83–4, 217 Sweetman, James Randolph 79–80 Sydney Morning Herald 7, 11, 102, 138, 262–3 Talarico, Herb 95 Taylor, Joe, gambler 75 Teece, John, magistrate 112–13 Tees, Det-Sgt Aarne (Arnie) 246–7, 261 Testa, Joseph Dan 158–67, 169, 174, 179, 215 Theeman, Frank 51

33 Club 121, 142 Toms, Leonard Vaugahn 34–5 Toohey, Brian, journalist 150 Touch of Class, brothel 234 Turner, Sgt Roy, police prosector 135 Unwin, John Joseph SP bookie 48, 67–8, 203, 223 US Embassy 183 US Mafia 4–5, 27, 128, 137, 160–1, 164–5, 167–8, 178–9, 183–4, 214, 220, 227, 241, 273 Vagg, HR, prison superintendent 19–20 Verbal see Kelly, Det-Sgt Ray Vey-Cox, Stephen 268 Wainer, Dr Bertram 50 Walker and Ryan escape and recapture 96–102 Walker, ‘Pretty Boy’ killed at Randwick 1963 75, 78, 80–6 Walsh, Billy (alias Kruger) 105–6 Walsh, Richard 7, 88 Ward, Barry, writer 7 Warren, Patrick William see Callaghan, Leo ‘The Liar’ Watson, Insp. Patrick 146 Watson, King, Editor, Sunday Telegraph 180 Whiteley, Rev Raewynne 264 Whitton, Evan, writer 5, 171, 182, 273 Wild, Det-Sgt Morrie 107–8 Wilkinson, Marian, author 250, 252 Williams, Bill 48 Williams, John 113 Williams, Mrs Sylvia Mavis 37, 45, 55, 57 Willis, Eric (Chief Secretary) 183, 242 Wood, Mervyn, police commissioner 215 Wran, Neville 8, 51, 115, 183–4 Yshmael, Felipe ‘Baby’ 238–9 Zimmerman Frank and Art 160