Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron dossier

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TONY REEVES is an investigative journalist of many years standing. He first became interested in Abe Saffron more than forty 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

Meet Lennie McPherson, the man who came to be known as the Mr Big of Australia crime. Brutality punctuated his whole life. Corruption was his mark. He was a standover man, a murderer, a rapist and a thief. He ran crooked police and corrupt politicians. He was involved in drugs and prostitution. And, he did business with the Mafia and the CIA. In this chilling portrait of the godfather of Australian crime, Tony Reeves uncovers a heart of evil and takes us deep into a dark and violent criminal underworld. It is a story that could be told only after Lennie’s death.

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MR SIN The Abe Saffron dossier

Tony Reeves

Allen & Unwin

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First published in 2007 Copyright © Tony Reeves 2007 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 Sin: the Abe Saffron dossier. Includes index. ISBN 978 1 74175 220 5 (pbk.). 1. Saffron, Abe, 1919-2006. 2. Criminals - New South Wales - Sydney - Biography. 3. Gangsters - New South Wales Sydney - Biography. 4. Businessmen - New South Wales Sydney - Biography. 5. Organized crime - New South Wales Sydney. 6. Sydney (N.S.W.) - Biography. I. Title. 364.106092 Set in 11/14 pt Baskerville by Bookhouse, Sydney. Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS Contents

Author note Prologue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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For king and country . . . and a quick quid Sly grog sales: a bottler of a money-maker In and out of court and courting crims New players join the team: Abe moves into the big time Another war, another fortune: Vietnam blue puts crims in the black Pictures to die for: blackmail dossiers get out of hand Burning issues: murder and arson become the hot topics Snorting at drug slur: some customs are not so hard to break Murder most foul: Abe buys his cover Tax break comes Abe’s way: whistleblower goes to jail [v]

7 14 48 69 98 112 136 154 168 184

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11 Troubles in the south: truth drug may be the answer 12 Rid me of these meddlesome attorneys: Abe plays Henry too 13 Takeover bid: top cop seeks monopoly on graft payments 14 Taxing times: Abe does a ‘Capone’ with little black books 15 Courting a new persona: writs say the past is all a lie Epilogue: and then he died Notes Index

192 208 223 245 265 286 292 297

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AUTHOR NOTE Author note

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK money amounts are shown in the actual amount involved at the time. For events prior to February 1966, before decimalisation, the amounts are shown in £/s/d (pounds, shillings and pence); after that in $ and ¢ (dollars and cents). To provide the reader with some sense of the contemporary value of these amounts, I have used the Reserve Bank of Australia’s on-line inflation calculator to provide a 2006 value (the latest available in the system), rounded to the nearest dollar where appropriate. For example, early in Chapter 1, we have our subject in 1938 being fined ‘£5 ($343.81)’, the latter figure in brackets reflects the impact of the intervening sixtyeight years of inflation at an average annual rate of 5.3 per cent. There will be some exceptions to this: where the year of the money event is uncertain, it is not dealt with; where items are repeated, they are dealt with on the first mention only, and nothing after the year 1998 is [ vii ]

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processed as there is little difference in the values. I hope this helps. With thanks

I must mainly thank Abraham Gilbert Saffron for making this possible: without his interest in me all those years ago, I might well have spent my life in ignorance of his bad behaviour, and I would never have thought of this book. I particularly thank Kamala for her patience and support and the 10,000-word ‘reward’ lunches, and Richard, Rebecca and Joanne for their enthusiasm and encouragement. Tony Reeves

The most important step in the war against organised crime is the unmasking of the facade of honesty and respectability that is maintained by the principal crime figures. All too often only the small-time crooks or the bottom line operatives of the major crime syndicates are caught and punished. In Australia we have seldom come close to unmasking the identity of the godfathers of organised crime. Frank Walker, NSW Attorney-General (speech in NSW Parliament, September 1980)

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PROLOGUE Prologue

IN MID-1965, SYDNEY tabloid the Daily Mirror published sketchy details of a notorious smoko that had been held for a social club of drinkers from the Phoenix Hotel in Woollahra. A city council community hall in innersuburban Surry Hills had been booked for the Saturday afternoon and evening event, and more than one hundred men had crammed in, paying their quid ($21) at the door to cover the entire cost of unlimited beer and spirits, prawns in great mounds and entertainment. I know a great deal about this story: I was there. I occasionally had a drink at the Phoenix with a commercial photographer I hired in connection with my job as a public relations officer for an oil company. He was a colourful, knockabout character called Jack Dabinett. ‘Dabbo’ (as we called him) had asked me if I could provide for the smoko a film projector and a couple of movies from the oil company’s extensive library, which at the time was under my control. The movies hardly seemed the stuff of beer[1]

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and-prawns events, but I was told they would just be running in the background as warm-up entertainment. I set the projector and screen up in the hall, threaded the first film through the sprockets, set the focus and got ready to start screening. At that moment a man briskly approached me, pushed me out of the way without a word, ripped my movie out and threaded one of several he’d brought with him, and hit the start button. It was a grainy, black-and-white, hard-core pornographic movie with no soundtrack. In response to my demand: ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I was told curtly to ‘Fuck off!’ Given that he was a few sizes larger than my ten stones, I was inclined to agree. My mate Dabbo shrugged, told me not to worry: who wanted to watch boring old films from BP when they could watch this stuff? He’d known the set-up all along; said he’d forgotten to tell me. After an hour or so of porno movies, beer and prawns, two attractive women appeared and performed explicit sex acts with each other, with the help of a large white plastic object, the like of which I had not only never seen before, but had never imagined might have existed. One of the women eventually retired and the other invited any ‘worthwhile male’ to come forward and satisfy her. A few volunteered—fit young blades from the Bondi Surf Club, Dabbo said—most of them only slightly embarrassed at having to perform in front of one hundred gawking men. Suffice to say there was about an hour of varied and at times hectic sexual activity under the spotlights. All of which was pretty well par for the course for your average all-male ‘smoko’, Dabbo assured me. One must live and learn, I thought. Most of the regulars at the

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Phoenix Hotel fell into one of three categories: petty criminals, an illegal starting price (SP) bookie’s agent and police ‘snouts’; a number of CIB and eastern suburbs detectives who drank in the saloon bar; and a few journalists who mixed with both the other groups. All were well represented at the smoko. Crims, cops and journos: not the usual mix to gather for a Saturday afternoon beerand-prawns bash. The next day a Daily Mirror journalist (who had not been present) wrote the brief story, and told his editor about the event and that another journalist, whom he named, knew the whole story. The other scribe steadfastly refused to write it up and eventually lost his job over the issue. But a weekend edition of the paper managed to dig up and publish some more details, specifically the fact that Abe Saffron had supplied the porno movies and the women for the live show, and that he was able to provide similar acts for a large number of smokos on any given night—for a considerable fee, of course (although given the police presence at the Phoenix event, it was probably part of a contra deal). Libel laws prevented the paper from naming Saffron, so there and then it coined the tag ‘Mr Sin’, which was blazed across the front page in massive type. This moniker was to stick to Abe Saffron like a brand for the rest of his life and beyond. A few weeks after the headlines hit, I was having a quiet ale with Dabbo at the Phoenix and a copper I knew beckoned me aside from our group. ‘Bumper Farrell would like a quick word with you’, he said. ‘Nothing to worry about!’ he said as he indicated to a man—purplefaced, cauliflower-eared with a nose to match—seated

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alone down the other end of the bar. Detective Sergeant Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell operated out of Darlinghurst Police Station, which covered the Kings Cross area. His public reputation was as large as his considerable physique: he was a tad under six feet tall and nearly as wide across the shoulders. Bumper had been a first-grade rugby league footballer for Newtown, making headlines when he bit off an opponent’s ear during a particularly rough game. By the mid-1950s he was the high-profile head of the vice squad, which meant he had plenty of contact with Abe Saffron, among others. He was a frequent non-paying guest at Saffron’s clubs over the years and one of the main collectors of contributions by the club operators to what was euphemistically called ‘the police benevolent fund’. Now he wanted to talk to me. ‘Bumper’, I said, ‘I’m Tony Reeves’. A low growl emerged as he turned to me: ‘I’m MISTER Farrell to you’, he snapped. ‘I just want you to sign a quick statement that you showed the movies at the smoko recently’, he said. ‘But I didn’t show them’, I replied. ‘I organised the projector, but my films were taken off and others put on by someone else. I have no idea who he was.’ ‘Yes, Tony, we know that, but there’s a big problem with all this. Mr Saffron has been under a lot of pressure over this whole thing and we can’t sort of find the person who did show the movies. So it’d be a great help to us if you could just sign a bit of paper saying you showed the movies. That’s all. There won’t be anything arising from it, and I can assure you Mr Saffron would be most appreciative.’

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‘I’m sorry, Mister Farrell, but that would be lying. I didn’t show the movies and so I won’t sign any statements saying I did.’ ‘Okay’, growled Bumper. ‘I can’t make you do it. But we’ll remember you!’ It was my one and only meeting with Mr Sin’s good mate and protector, ‘Mister’ Farrell. And what an eye-opener it was for me! From that moment on I became something of a ‘Saffron-watcher’: I was intrigued that Saffron could have a senior, high-profile policeman like Bumper Farrell approach an innocent private citizen (like me) and try to frame them with an illegal act they did not commit, just so some ‘pressure’ that he was feeling could be alleviated. I read back through the press clippings, made copies of them all and opened my ‘dossier’ on Abraham Gilbert Saffron, to which I continued to add material. If it was okay for him to try to interfere in my life, I thought, it was certainly okay for me to take a close look at his. In retrospect it was a defining moment for me: this book would not have been possible had I not taken that early interest in its main subject. It was also an event which stirred me to take a closer look at some of the other notable characters around town, like Lennie McPherson and the host of unpleasant crims and crooked cops I wrote about in Mr Big. If there is anything at all that I can thank Abe Saffron for, it is drawing my attention to him as a ‘person of interest’ by sooling Bumper on to me. It would be many years before he began to realise that I was indeed curious about his nefarious doings. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here: there are other matters in the sordid life of Saffron to be discussed first.

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Let me make one thing clear, though: it’s not my intention to write a biography here. That has already been done— if hagiography can be given membership of that genre. This book is intended to provide an exposé of a highly successful Australian criminal whose tentacles of vice, exploitation, gross abuse of the laws of the land, blackmail and corruption—oh yes, and tax evasion—extended across most of mainland Australia and probably overseas for more than half a century. Abe Saffron, as we will see, was far more than a maligned, successful businessman who the media loved to hate. He was a cunning, calculating manipulator, driven by greed, sex, lust for power, and an ego that constantly required renewal and reassurance to ensure the world would see him as a gentle family man, a benefactor to charities, a man castigated simply because of his success in business.

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1 FOR KING AND COUNTRY . . . AND A QUICK QUID For King and country . . . and a quick quid

H AVING ATTENDED SCHOOL with Frederick Charles Anderson—later nicknamed ‘Paddles’ and hailed as one of Sydney’s earliest movers and shakers of organised crime—Abe Saffron had a headstart in life. At Fort Street Boys’ High School in Petersham in Sydney’s inner-west, Anderson was a few years ahead of young Abe, and he was possibly Abe’s first—but certainly not last—brush with criminal fame. But let’s start further back than that. Sam Saffron had married Annie Gilbert in 1912. Of Russian–Jewish heritage, they set up home above their drapery store on Parramatta Road at Annandale in Sydney’s inner-west. Abe, the fourth of five children, was born on Monday, 6 October 1919. Philip, Henry and Beryl were his older siblings; a sister Flora was born later. The business helped the family survive the economic hardships of the First World War and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Later, to help the family cash flow, Sam set up a [7]

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black-market racket when clothes and popular items like nylon stockings were scarce and rationed during the Second World War. He made a tidy fortune out of it, some of which was later undoubtedly used to fund his son Abe’s activities. After school Abe always helped out in the shop, and from the age of about eight he operated a lucrative trade in black-market cigarettes. He had arranged a supply of these scarce items with a friendly local shopkeeper, and then resold at a profit to his father’s friends, and later to Fort Street schoolmates. Reselling was a corporate skill he honed over a lifetime, eventually learning how to acquire the stock free of charge. At no stage in his life did he ever have the required permit to sell tobacco products. Another of Abe’s early scams was buying textbooks from boys who no longer needed them, cleaning them up and selling them to those starting a new year. Selling books was another lifelong corporate activity, though the material he traded later in life was definitely unsuitable for young schoolboys. After making a good profit selling used books and black-market cigarettes, Saffron decided that the world of commerce needed his talents. Many years later he was to tell a journalist that he left school early because: ‘. . . I had no other desire than to go into business.’ In the mid-1930s the family drapery business moved into the city to a rented shop on Pitt Street. It was here that a nineteen-year-old Abe Saffron met American Hilton Glanville Kincaid, who had changed his surname by deed poll from Macossa. A twenty-one-year-old, Kincaid operated out of a tiny booth next to the Saffron shop,

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selling cigarettes and, from ‘under the counter’, any other scarce or rationed commodity he could supply illegally at rip-off prices. It was a similar line of business to Abe’s really, and the two joined forces for many years. Another venture to which young Saffron applied his ‘corporate skills’ was gambling. It seemed not to matter that his new business was illegal. Details are sketchy now, but on Monday, 19 September 1938, Saffron was summonsed to appear at North Sydney Magistrate’s Court on a charge of using a premises for gambling. ‘Guilty, Your Worship.’ Fine: £5 ($343.81), or ten days’ hard labour at Long Bay. Abe paid up promptly from his illicit profits. He either learned his lesson or learned discretion, or, more likely, invited the local cops into his illegal gambling club for a few free bets, as there are no more breaches of the gaming laws on Abe Saffron’s notably sparse criminal record. After a while he moved to a potentially more lucrative field: theft. He was twenty when he was hauled before the Central Court of Petty Sessions on Wednesday, 3 January 1940, on a charge of receiving stolen goods, to wit (as the police prosecutor intoned) a car radio worth £20 ($1309). ‘Guilty, Your Worship.’ He was sentenced to six months’ hard labour. But the magistrate suspended the problem of actually sending him to prison by allowing him to enter a good behaviour bond for £10 on the assurance he would behave nicely for the next two years instead. There was also a mention by the magistrate that he might better serve his country by enlisting in the army and going to war rather than by stealing things.

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Remarkably, the records show him back in the same court on the same day, facing four counts of receiving stolen goods and one of having stolen goods in custody. Unaccountably, the charges were dismissed under the versatile clause 556A of the Crimes Act, which allowed a magistrate to dismiss proven charges against a ‘first offender’. And that was it for a while: a humble beginning for a man who would go on to make millions from criminal activities. • Years later, in the mid-1970s, when John Little, a reporter for the TV show A Current Affair, interviewed Saffron, Abe suffered that perennial ailment of the criminal classes: a sudden, brief but virulent attack of amnesia. The interview Little pre-recorded included a segment that went something like this: Little: Do you have a criminal record? Saffron: No. Little: But our records show that you had a conviction for receiving many years ago. Was this so? Saffron: No. Little: Then our records are wrong? Saffron: It comes back to me now. Yes, there was something like that. Little: Was there anything else? Saffron: No. That recording was never put to air. Saffron’s solicitors contacted the program producers and threatened legal

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action if there was any reference to his criminal record. So it was dropped. Abe Saffron was a well-established entrepreneur and he was never going to allow his unsavoury biographical details to sully the public’s mind that he was anything other than a highly successful, sometimes controversial, yet unquestionably charitable businessman. That was a gambit he maintained for the rest of his life. And some people still believe him. • As was the case with many aspiring young entrepreneurs in those days, a little event called the Second World War put the brakes on Abe’s corporate ambitions. Called up for military service, he fronted at the army’s Victoria Barracks in Oxford Street, Paddington, on Monday, 5 August 1940, to enlist in the Citizen Military Forces. He declared he was single, a draper and mercer, of British nationality (as were all Australians in those days), a Hebrew, and his next of kin was his mother, Annie, of 16 Lamrock Avenue, Bondi. He was allocated Army Number N21771 and sent off to be checked by a medical officer, F.E. Barclay, who sized him up as: five feet six inches (1.68 metres) tall, 136 pounds (61.68 kilograms) weight, grey eyes, dark hair and dark complexion. He passed the medical with flying colours, being declared ‘fit for Class 1’. His slightly humped back—almost invisible under clothing—did not affect the medic’s judgement. Abe signed the pledge that he, Abraham Gilbert Saffron, would ‘. . . well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord, the King, in the military forces of the Commonwealth of

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Australia until the cessation of the present time of war or until sooner lawfully discharged, dismissed or removed . . .’, and so on. Lieutenant B. Fuller witnessed this solemnly sworn oath. Abe’s reluctance to get involved in the war effort was only shown when he completed his personal details on the opening page of his Record of Service. Under ‘If exemption claimed, reason’ he wrote: ‘My father’s business is wholly dependent on my presence.’ His attempt to opt out obviously did not convince the military brass, who had a war to win. Abe’s was not an inspiring military career. At the start of 1942 he was moved to the army camp at Liverpool and, within a week, he was in the hospital and out of action for a fortnight with an undisclosed ailment. Two years after he enlisted he was bumped up to the rank of corporal, but again the excitement of all this military action got to him: he was back in hospital and his fitness downgraded to ‘Class B’. On Tuesday, 18 January 1944, after 733 days in the army (102 days of which he was not on active duty) and without medals, decorations or an active service badge, he signed Discharge Certificate 9831, gladly accepting the army’s reason why they were letting him go as: ‘There being no suitable vacancy in which his services could be employed.’ Such a low-key recognition of his service did not prevent him in later years from proudly wearing on his lapel the RSL badge normally worn as an acknowledgement of overseas military service. He packed his bags and headed off to the family home, now at 27 Boonara Avenue, Bondi. After his discharge, Abe’s military wartime commitment was over, but he did perform a little more war-related

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activity with a six-month stint in the merchant navy from the end of January 1944, doing administrative chores on troopships on the Australian east coast. While on duty Saffron met up with his old mate Hilton Kincaid—the Pitt Street black marketeer who was still running a brisk trade in illicit booze and cigarettes. They both signed off at the end of a voyage in June 1944—their war was now over— and decided to team up ashore, an ideal business partner, Abe must have thought. For this pair, it was time to make some money out of the war.

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2 SLY GROG SALES: A BOTTLER OF A MONEY-MAKER Sly grog sales

THE WAR MAY have been over for Saffron in mid-1944, but there was another year to go for those actually fighting in the Pacific. Conveniently for Abe, in that year hordes of cashed-up American troops were either based in Sydney or visiting for leave breaks. Canadian-born Sammy Lee first visited Australia in 1937 as a drummer in a band and returned for keeps in 1940 when he opened the Roosevelt nightclub at 32 Orwell Street, a block off the main drag in Kings Cross. Although breaking the liquor laws on a nightly basis, he became a highly popular and successful nightclub operator around Sydney for more than twenty years. His business partner for many years was a flamboyant gambler, Reginald Frederick ‘Reg’ Boom, who also operated illegal baccarat games in Double Bay and Kings Cross. Abe met Sammy Lee and Reg Boom at the Roosevelt club, and the pair agreed to pass the business over to Saffron, then aged twenty-three. [ 14 ]

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Saffron ran the club in partnership with his mate Hilton Kincaid and a much older man, Mendel Brunen. Brunen’s parents, Elias and Rachel, had set up their son in a similar line of business as Abe’s father—mercery and clothing—and Mendel was a neighbour and close Saffron family friend. Kincaid, as an American, helped attract the US soldiers as the club’s main customers. Abe must have realised then that the nightlife of Kings Cross was where his fortune lay. As Mario Puzo wrote in his 1978 novel Fools Die: ‘If you want to get rich in this country, you have to get rich in the dark.’ The money started to roll in— but not for long. Before its first anniversary was celebrated, the club was closed by a court order declaring it a ‘disorderly house’. It appears certain that Abe’s father Sam had asked Brunen to get involved with Abe’s corporate adventures and to ‘keep an eye’ on how the money was used—much of which had undoubtedly been provided by Saffron senior. Brunen was to remain in that role until his death in 1965. Abe Saffron never spoke of the source of his startup funding; such revelations could have brought discredit to his father, who had made much of his fortune on the illegal wartime black market. But it was clear there was never a shortage of large lumps of cash. From the early 1940s on, Abe always seemed to get what he wanted, even for his foray north from Sydney to the Hunter Valley. There he and his ever-present and equal partner Kincaid bought into their first hotels: a pub at Kurri Kurri and, about a year later in 1944, another, the Newcastle Hotel. They paid £3000 ($161,421) for the latter, but Abe refused—even years later when giving

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evidence under oath—to say where he got the money from, mumbling confused replies about ‘saving it’ and ‘from winnings’. Around this time Abe had a brief stint at being a legal bookmaker, but at this he failed after he made an abortive attempt to take over the local jockey club. Perhaps the sheer legality of these ventures brought about a lack of interest, or perhaps it was the lure of the ‘big smoke’ that drew Saffron and Kincaid back to Sydney early in 1946, where they took over the West End Hotel in Balmain. (Kincaid’s involvement was not revealed because the licensing authorities had taken a dim view of his earlier illicit liquor business.) A few months later they acquired the licence of the Gladstone Hotel, about halfway up William Street, between Sydney’s CBD and Kings Cross. At the moment the second deal was signed, Saffron broke the law, which limited any individual to just one hotel licence. Abe knew that, of course, and went through a charade of transferring the licence of the West End pub—then worth around £5300 ($284,414)—to his eldest brother Philip to try to conceal the control of the business by himself and Kincaid. Philip moved into the pub for a while with his wife of ten years, Ruth Harriet, to put on a convincing show that he was the owner. It is, in retrospect, implausible that the Licensing Court and the police charged with enforcing the liquor laws would have been ignorant of this blatant breach for long. It was later revealed that from the earliest days of Saffron’s booze business he was systematically and regularly corrupting the very police and officials charged with prosecuting such lawbreakers.

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In that postwar period with its newfound sense of freedom and fun, the good citizens of Sydney had probably never heard the term ‘organised crime’ and, if they had, would have attributed it to the fascinating stories of the US Mafia they occasionally heard about. Few would have believed that here, in their own hometown, the building blocks of large-scale organised crime were being established by people like Abe Saffron and his running mates Hilton Kincaid and Mendel Brunen. [[boxbegin]]

WHAT CONSTITUTES ‘ORGANISED CRIME’? In 1973, an Australian judge provided what was probably the first local definition of ‘organised crime’. Under intense pressure in the parliament, NSW Premier Bob Askin had been forced to do something about mounting allegations of criminal activities under his watch. On Monday, 20 August 1973, Askin appointed respected judge Athol Randolph Moffitt to head a twelve-month royal commission into a range of crime allegations—an event in which Abe Saffron was given more than a passing mention. Moffitt was to spend many pages of his 1974 report on seeking to define organised crime. It is not intended here to enter that discussion in great depth, replete as it is with the potential for unending academic conflict, but Moffitt suggested that investigation of organised crime should have two threads: one to determine if a crime had been committed and the other to determine whether the crime could be shown to be part of an organised pattern. ‘For example’, wrote the judge, ‘bribery, blackmail or

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assault, in the course of a legitimate business gaining a monopoly, could be regarded as organised crime . . .’ He wrote that a weapon of organised crime is ‘. . . by planning to avoid generating evidence of its crimes, or if there is evidence, to suppress it by intimidation or corruption . . . of officials, particularly those, such as police, charged with investigating organised crime’. To avoid confusion, crimes defined in this book as ‘organised’ are those illegal acts that are planned as part of a continuing corporate strategy in which effort is made to conceal the existence of the crime and where officials charged with policing and prosecuting the breaches have, by bribery, blackmail or intimidation, been prevented from—or dissuaded from—carrying out their duties to investigate or prosecute the crimes. And that fits Abe Saffron’s activities to a T. [[boxend]]

There has long been police corruption in Australia, of course; that started with the arrival of the first white folk on these shores. In the early 1900s, Sydneysiders in particular were titillated from time to time by fantastic tabloid stories of sly grog shops, illegal SP bookies, vice queens and razor gangs. But organised crime was not considered to be a part of the Australian psyche. And so it would have remained if the organising criminals, their corrupt police and the shonky politicians had had their way. One of the basic tactics of organised crime, said Athol Moffitt (see box), is to try to conceal its existence. That is precisely what Saffron did with his Gladstone deal, and as he did time and again as he added new hotels to his chain.

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There was a deafening silence from the liquor authorities when Saffron took over the Mortdale Hotel with his sister Beryl and mate Kincaid; the Cumberland Hotel in Bankstown with Emil ‘Eddie’ Kornhauser (who was to become a long-term close friend); the Albert Hotel in North Sydney with brother Henry Saffron and Kincaid; and the Civic Hotel in Pitt Street, Sydney. The fact that Saffron used his friends and family as ‘dummies’ to front his illegally gained hotel licences came out eventually. Abe’s sister, by then Mrs Beryl Frack, concealed her relationship with him to the Licensing Court but later admitted that she, ‘thought it was necessary to tell lies to the court’. Kornhauser also broke down and told the truth some time later, admitting that he, too, had misled the Licensing Court by concealing the fact that the real control of the Cumberland Hotel rested with his friend Abe Saffron. Harold Taylour, Abe’s dummy at the Civic Hotel, later admitted that he misled the Licensing Court about Saffron’s interest in the hotel because he had ‘given a promise not to mention his [Saffron’s] name’. Hilton Kincaid’s presence in the thriving chain of pubs was never revealed to the court. And, it seemed, nobody made any inquiries, accepting the information on the licence application forms at face value. By 1947 Saffron had accumulated this huge chain of hotels and had once again taken over the Roosevelt club in Kings Cross in partnership with Kincaid and Mendel Brunen. In the same year Saffron was fined £5 ($261) and one of his barmaids was fined £15 ($784) for charging ‘an excessive price’ for beer sales at the Gladstone. A year later a waiter was fined £75 ($3657) for illegal wine and

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beer sales. One of Abe’s doormen at the Roosevelt club was thirty-eight-year-old Richard Gabriel Reilly, who in later years was to help Saffron boost his status from slygrogger to a major player among Sydney’s criminal elites. Among Reilly’s attributes was the fact that his brother Jack was a copper with good contacts. • It was also in 1947 that Saffron acquired a gun and possibly a wife. On Sunday, 23 November 1947, Abe Saffron married Doreen, the hairdresser daughter of Samuel Krantz and Rebecca née Cohen from the Brakpan district of Mpumalanga province in central northern South Africa. Marriage certificate 21664/1947 was signed in the presence of witnesses Henry Edwards and Abraham Toltz to make it legal. The groom was twenty-eight, and the bride, who had been living in Croydon Park in Sydney’s inner-west, was three years his junior. With the exception of a break in the relationship lasting about a year from 1956, Doreen was to stay with Saffron until her death in 1999. That’s what the official records show. But Duncan McNab in The Usual Suspect says their wedding date was 23 November 1948. McNab told me that Abe Saffron confirmed that to him. Abe’s only son Alan Saffron’s date of birth is 29 March 1949, which means that if McNab is correct, Doreen was five months’ pregnant at the time of their marriage. These days such a ‘shotgun’ wedding would barely raise an eyebrow, but in 1948 it was seen as something of a stigma. So what is to be made of the enigma of the two dates? One clear implication is that Saffron wanted the official

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records of his son’s life to appear as pure as the fantasy he would later create about his own, and so he persuaded a clerk at the births, deaths and marriages registry to make a slight alteration to his marriage certificate—it possibly would not have taken a very bulky brown paper bag to achieve that—to show that he and Doreen were married for well over a year before she became pregnant. Then, when telling his story to McNab, his memory of this little lie evaded him and for once he told the truth. Thorough research at both the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages and Sydney’s Great Synagogue indicate an integrity of their records of the event. According to both sets of records, it was on Sunday, 23 November 1947, that the couple exchanged their vows before fifty-seven-year-old Rabbi Leib Aisack Falk— described in the synagogue’s archives as ‘an ardent, militant Zionist’. It may have been that Abe got the date wrong when he talked to McNab. Sundays are considered auspicious for weddings among Jewish people. The date in 1948 fell on a Tuesday, not known to be a day of good omens. The gun, on the other hand, did not last anywhere near as long as the marriage. On Wednesday, 29 January 1947, Abe fronted the Central Court of Petty Sessions on a charge of having an unlicensed pistol in his possession. Licences, it seems, were a perpetual source of problems for the twenty-seven-year-old. A friendly magistrate found the matter proved, but generously did not enter a conviction. Saffron was released on another two-year, £10 ($522) good behaviour bond, with the matter to come up for conviction ‘if called upon’, meaning if he broke the bond. The pistol was forfeited.

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As with all busy executives, Saffron experienced a few setbacks in the climb up the sometimes slippery corporate ladder. In August 1948, for example, Saffron felt obliged to lay a charge of theft against his former accountant, David Molland Evans. Abe claimed the elderly man had stolen £170/19s ($8336). The Central Court was presented with a charge sheet against Evans, signed by Saffron, who did not front for the hearing. Abe’s barrister uncle, Simon Isaacs (later to become a Supreme Court judge), represented Saffron and the matter was sent to the Quarter Sessions Court to be heard by Judge Joseph Lamaro, then fifty-three, and a jury. A Detective Sergeant Windsor made out the case, telling the court that, when arrested, Evans had been told he had stolen £1300 ($63,389). Not so, said Evans: ‘Only about £900 [ $ 43,885]. I admit to that amount.’ Windsor added that Evans had made arrangements to repay the money. Told that Saffron had signed the charges brought against him, an outraged Evans said: ‘That’s lovely! But Saffron won’t go on with this case. It’s a matter of a thief catching a thief . . . I’m resigned to my fate. I’ll go to jail, but I’ll take Saffron with me.’ He’d been paid £16/6s ($794) a week as an accountant, said Evans. One of his duties was to fill in cheques to be signed by Saffron. In a statement from the dock Evans said he was not guilty of theft because he had altered cheques at Saffron’s direction: Saffron said to me: ‘If you keep your mouth shut, I’ll look after you.’ By transferring entries from the supper to the dinner account, and by other means, the firm

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saves £50 to £60 [$2438 to $2926] a week in taxation. When it appeared there would be trouble, Saffron said to me: ‘You might have to take the blame, but there will be no prosecution.’

This could well have become the first time Saffron found himself in trouble with the taxation department, for the spurned accountant had no qualms in explaining his exemployer’s tax dodge—and prosecuting barrister Alf Goran (later to become a judge) gave Saffron a grilling on this aspect of the affair. Saffron told Goran that Evans had changed the amounts on cheques after he (Saffron) had signed them. And he told Goran that no liquor was sold at the Roosevelt. Liquor was obtained for customers only when it was ordered. Charges for Liquor were then entered into a general services account. ‘On rare occasions’, Saffron said, ‘customers might bribe waiters to get liquor for them. Two waiters have been charged with having sold liquor, but the management was never charged’. The court reporters recorded the exchange between the barrister and Saffron: Goran: Has bottled beer from the Gladstone Hotel been sold at the Roosevelt for 3s 6d ($8.53) a bottle? Saffron: That’s untrue. Goran: Did not the brewery investigate that matter because of complaints by customers of the Gladstone Hotel? Saffron: No, sir. The brewery discussed the matter at my request. Gladstone Hotel customers get their quota of bottled beer. No customer of any hotel is satisfied with his bottled beer quota.

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The Roosevelt club ledgers showed that on Monday, 25 August 1947, seventy people attended the cabaret and 436 people ate the dinner served between 6.30 and 8 p.m. Questioned on this, Saffron said: Not necessarily 436 people for dinner; rather, 436 dinners were served. Some people might have had two dinners. The maximum charge was then 5s. [$12.20]. A customer might have a plate of oysters, then, a little later, order a steak. That would be entered as two dinners.

In the report of the case in that weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, Goran was reported to have huffed: ‘Sir! Would you charge five shillings for a dish of oysters? I put it to you that you cut down your entries in the taxable section— that is the cabaret—and showed more in the untaxable section?’ ‘That is absolutely ridiculous,’ replied a smiling Saffron, and he also denied that he ‘farmed out’ (rented) the men’s and women’s cloakrooms at £1 ($48.76) each a week. Goran: What about £1100 ($53,637) worth of American cigarettes which were found underneath the bandstand of the Roosevelt? Saffron: The cigarettes were found and the company was fined £300 ($14,628), but the ownership of the cigarettes was never determined. Goran: Did you say to Evans, when he first begged to work for you: ‘You cover up for me, and keep your mouth shut, and you’ll get your cut’?

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Saffron: That’s a gross lie. That’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Goran: Your partners knew nothing about that arrangement and when they questioned you, you dumped Evans? Saffron: That is a lie. Goran: I suggest that you were party to the whole scheme, that it was a way of getting cash for blackmarket purchases. Saffron: That is a terrible lie. Goran: Didn’t you allow the cheques to be incompletely filled in, so that they could go through Evans’ bank account? Saffron: That’s a terrible lie. At the end of evidence, Judge Lamaro, who was just completing his first year on the District Court bench, asked the jury of twelve men if they wished the case to be adjourned until the next day rather than be kept late. ‘We won’t take twenty minutes to decide, Your Honour’, replied the foreman. They were back in twentythree with an acquittal for Evans. But it appeared that nobody from the tax department took any notice of Evans’ testimony about Saffron cheating on his tax. It would not be the last time such strong evidence was ignored, as we shall see. Another problem for Abe later that year literally came as a shock to the ‘businessman’. He had possibly taken some public relations advice to repair a reputation that was becoming somewhat tarnished—and, for Abe Saffron, reputation was a matter of paramount concern and not

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infrequent manipulation for the remainder of his days. On Wednesday, 8 December 1948, Saffron launched his persona as a major charity fundraiser with a daytime party at the Roosevelt club for more than 180 children suffering from cerebral palsy. Radio personalities entertained, and a friendly policeman, Detective Inspector A. Wilks, stood in for Santa Claus. Slipping at the edge of the stage, Saffron grabbed two microphones, ripping them off their leads and almost electrocuting himself. It made headlines for nearly two weeks with a stream of media reports on his slow recovery in St Vincent’s Hospital. By then all of Sydney knew what a ‘kindly and benevolent’ man Abe Saffron was. • To keep the partying local imbibers in their place, Saffron employed Australian heavyweight champion boxer Alf Gallagher as a doorman and ‘peacekeeper’. The twelvestone, twelve-pound (about eighty-two kilograms) cauliflower-eared pugilist was never reluctant to use his few skills to subdue any patrons who became too excitable. Gallagher twice fought champion boxer Dave Sands who, in a fifteen-rounder at Sydney Stadium on 4 September 1950, put Gallagher down for the count. Not so successful was Douglas William McDonald, a physiotherapist from Greenwich on Sydney’s lower northside. He testified nearly a year later to Gallagher’s energetic efficiency. On the evening of 4 May 1951, McDonald and a couple of his pals, Rex Archibald Grant and Patrick Joseph Duggan, were out on the town for his stag party. They’d had a few drinks at the pleasant St James

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Hotel and around 11 p.m. found themselves at the Roosevelt, where they decided to have a spot of supper. Gallagher reckoned otherwise and refused them entry into Abe’s respectable establishment. A ‘few punches’ were thrown and the groom-to-be found himself prone in the street outside the club with only a vague memory of a large fist hitting his face. Six months later he got to tell his story to Judge Alan Stredwick Lloyd and a jury at the District Court, when he sued Saffron Enterprises and Gallagher for damages for assault. McDonald reportedly had a small win from the court case and later said that his stag night had been a ‘real knockout’. Abe’s involvement in the Roosevelt nightclub should not normally have been of interest to the liquor licensing authorities simply because it did not have a licence to sell booze. What should have been of interest, of course, is that it illegally sold a large amount of liquor and clearly did so at a price greater than the maximum fixed by law, making huge profits for the owners. The sly grog trade— always a feature of Sydney life—took off in earnest during the early years of the Second World War. There was a shortage of beer and pubs were provided with a quota of bottles. The 6 p.m. closing time for pubs—dubbed the ‘six o’clock swill’—helped to exacerbate Sydneysiders’ collective thirst. By the late 1940s the Roosevelt was one of the four or five more popular clubs that did a brisk trade in prohibited liquor sales. All the clubs bought their illicit beer from the limited stocks of friendly hotels. In Saffron’s case that was doubly profitable in the postwar period as most of the supplies for the Roosevelt came from his own brewery allocations to the six hotels in which

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he held an illegal controlling interest. The mark-ups from pub to club, and from club to patron indeed made drinking an expensive pursuit for the punters. It was a masterful operation of logistics and it gave the young Saffron some early experience in double-entry bookkeeping, which was to become a lifelong practice. From his pubs he was buying for the Roosevelt a bare minimum of 250 dozen bottles of beer a week—that’s three thousand bottles in total, or more than four hundred bottles a day, seven days a week. And he paid— to himself—the then ‘top price’ for black-market beer of £2 ($97.52) a dozen. The patrons at the club, it was finally figured out by someone in authority who had not been corrupted, could not possibly have consumed so much alcohol. What Saffron had managed to do—with only minor competition from the other nightclubs—was to corner the market in illicit grog sales. His competitors had supplies sufficient for their clubs, but Saffron was buying up as much of the surplus as he could. What he did not sell to patrons at the Roosevelt he sold at even greater profit to the dozens of sly grog shops—little rooms in back alleys where a bottle or two would be sold to ‘regulars’. Saffron had created a monopoly in this area and had total command of the price. That the clubs were allowed to flourish quite brazenly was due solely to the bribery which had corrupted licensing police and bureaucrats, with even Police Commissioner William J. ‘Bill’ MacKay turning a blind eye to the racket. Saffron had been guided in his earlier days by Sammy Lee and Reg Boom on how to ‘open up accounts’ with bribable cops, meeting key senior police

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and developing a clear understanding of the going rate (which had a direct relationship to rank). He developed a practice of wrapping up the bribe money in paper bundles and handing them over either directly to the police or to their appointed ‘bagman’ every Friday evening at the club. This became an ingrained habit, and over the next thirty years Saffron kept paying a phalanx of bent cops who, every Friday, formed a queue at one or another of his clubs. When Police Inspector Noonan retired in July 1950, after four-plus years running the metropolitan licensing division, a huge testimonial function was held for him at the swanky Australia Hotel in the city, at which he was presented—quite openly—with a cheque for £1000 ($41,467). Abe Saffron was one of the biggest contributors to the payment, which was the sly grog industry’s way of saying ‘thanks for all you have done for us’. When Police Metropolitan Superintendent Sweeney retired from the force a month later, he was happy to attend a farewell dinner organised by the sly-groggers at Sammy Lee’s club, attended by more than two hundred people. His ‘testimonial’ cheque was valued at £600 ($24,880). He’d been in the superintendent job for just a couple of years. These public displays of camaraderie between the law enforcers and the law breakers—later to be described by a judge as ‘systematic police corruption at the highest levels’—were mere tokenism compared to the back-room arrangements that Abe came to with police, politicians and a widening circle of influential people. And with troubles ahead—for 1951 was to be a year of great challenges—he’d need all the help he could get. •

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To further his budding reputation as a charity fundraiser, Abe opened up a housie (bingo) game at Bondi, supposedly for the NSW Spastic Centre. On 14 January 1951, the Sunday Sun published an article that said Saffron’s new venture was in breach of the Lotteries and Art Unions Act because it offered cash prizes. While it started as a fairly innocuous affair, the ‘Housie Scandal’ was to reverberate around the corridors of power and the courts for more than a year before other Saffron headlines eventually pushed it aside. The basic thrust of the newspaper articles was the illegality of the set-up and the claim that the returns to the charity were ‘well below what they should have been’. The paper called on NSW Chief Secretary Clive Evatt to prosecute the offender (Saffron) for a clear breach of the law. The politician initially agreed to take Saffron to court, but ten months later the paper complained in a page-one splash: Chief Secretary Evatt this week gave no indication of whether he would proceed with promised prosecutions for breaches of housie game permits.

There were more games in store when Saffron hit the newspaper with a writ for defamation of his good character. Some of the articles that Abe complained about were headed: ‘Cash Prizes in Housie. Police Investigate Bondi Charity Game Complaint’, and ‘Illegal Housie Game Still On. Cash Again Offered’. Deeply hurt by these accusations, Saffron said the articles made out that he was ‘a dishonest and corrupt person, who under the pretence of working for charity, made money for himself’.

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His claim said the stories implied he was a cheat, of bad character and was prepared, for selfish ends, to break the law. He had been accused of permitting children to be fleeced of small sums of money for his own enrichment, and of making use of an unlawful game to further his interests as a nightclub proprietor and the licensee of a hotel. All these ‘outrageous lies’, his writ suggested, could be somewhat salved with a decision of £10,000 ($361,628) in damages to help repair his public image. On Monday, 5 November 1951, the court entered a ‘verdict by consent’ in favour of the newspaper, with Saffron ordered to pay costs. In withdrawing his writ, the newspaper missed out on a gloat that it probably proved that all the damaging claims Abe had made now appeared to be true, by his own admission. The paper did not give up the chase, however. It still wanted the government to prosecute Saffron for the breach of the law. Over four weeks of operation, the housie game had returned only £68 ($2459) in total to three charities, despite the fact that hundreds of dollars changed hands every night. The Sydney Morning Herald also checked out the housie game, reporting that regular crowds of more than four hundred attended, with the operators making a profit of more than £900 ($32,546) a week. The Sunday Sun maintained its rage. In its 18 November edition it rhetorically asked: ‘How much longer can the government—and State—carry Mr Evatt in the important post of Chief Secretary?’ The issue about how Saffron, ‘a man with a criminal record’, was given a licence to conduct the housie game remained. A police report and the newspaper’s allegations showed the game was

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conducted in breach of the law, and there was a failure to prosecute Saffron for the breaches. The story suggested collusion between Evatt and Saffron, saying the Minister’s staff knew of Saffron’s defamation writ before it had been lodged in the court or served. Evatt’s response was that if the newspaper continued its attacks on him he would ask Premier James McGirr to appoint a royal commission ‘to vindicate him [Evatt]’. The next edition said the Sunday Sun would welcome a royal commission, and that it should be extended to inquire into ‘. . . the entire ramifications of the gambling rackets in the State—two-up, baccarat, housie and the rest’. The terms of reference, the paper said, should include why Evatt had not prosecuted Saffron for a breach of the law, and what relationship, if any, existed between Evatt and Saffron. ‘The challenge which Mr Evatt is trying to evade remains’, the editorial proclaimed, ‘let him table before Parliament all the files, letters, reports or documents, bulky or otherwise, relating to the granting and subsequent revocation of a housie licence to the notorious Abe Saffron’. The argument between the tabloid and the politician bubbled on, and finally Saffron was summonsed to appear at the Paddington Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday, 16 January 1952, to face a charge of a breach of the Lotteries and Art Union Act. His solicitor was Cedric Reuben Symonds—better known for his work in the divorce courts than down in the petty sessions before magistrates, and whose first wife was society madame Lady Mary Fairfax. At the January hearing Symonds sought an adjournment, as though it was the expected routine. Magistrate Everard

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Roy Harvey agreed to defer the matter until 12 February, and on that occasion the parties went through a similar ritualistic dance: ‘My client has not had sufficient time to brief me on this complex case’. An adjournment until 25 March was agreed. A month before that hearing date, an overconfident Saffron, with wife Doreen and son Alan, boarded the French steamer Chang Chow in Sydney on the evening of Wednesday, 27 February, for a voyage to Tahiti. The Sunday Sun reported their departure the following weekend, noting that the charge over the housie game was still unheard and that visitors to Tahiti could spend up to three months there. There was a suggestion in media reports that Saffron’s excursion was an almost contemptuous attempt to avoid facing the court. At the March sitting, Symonds no doubt felt obliged to deal with the media speculation about the location and purpose of his client’s absence, and told Magistrate Harvey that Saffron was on a business trip ‘somewhere in the Pacific Islands’, and was not on a ‘frivolous excursion’, as one media report had suggested. The magistrate agreed to again adjourn the case until 3 June, by which time, the lawyer assured him, the businessman was expected back in the country. Saffron’s return to home soil on 30 April was the stuff of more tabloid headlines, with Abe refusing to talk to the waiting media scrum, running to a waiting car and driving off at speed—leaving Doreen and Alan to be taken in another car—to avoid being snapped by photographers. Keen for all the details of his mystery Pacific Island ‘business venture’, a Daily Mirror reporter noted that

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Saffron had boarded the Sydney-bound plane at Nandi (as it was then spelt) in Fiji, with the supportive evidence that his luggage bore labels of a Fiji airline. Abe Saffron had become a media ‘person of interest’, and the tabloids commented on his every move. In the end the much-delayed court case all seemed something of an anticlimax. At the June hearing Magistrate Roy Harvey found Saffron guilty of failing to furnish a balance sheet for the housie games conducted for charity, but—ignoring the fact that Saffron had earlier convictions—dismissed the charges under the ‘first offender’ provisions offered under 556A of the Crimes Act on condition he pay £11 2s ($325.67) costs. The magistrate accepted Saffron’s excuse, without further examination, that the paperwork had been lost when a car was stolen. ‘I deem it inexpedient to impose any penalty’, said Harvey, unmoved by the high drama which had preceded his simple resolution. Magistrates, it was noted by the media some time later, never gave reasons for invoking the ‘first offender’ clause, the much-used (and some have suggested, much abused) ‘Five-Fifty-Six-A’. • While the housie game fiasco was running its course, another crisis hit Saffron and his illicit corporate booze empire. Fort Street alumnus Allan Victor Maxwell was charged with the job of calming down a growing public concern about the shortage of beer and the resulting illegal sly grog trade when the NSW Government appointed him to head a royal commission into liquor laws in 1951. In retrospect, Maxwell was an unlikely

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candidate for such a task: as a barrister he often appeared for the breweries and was a close personal friend of Tooth’s Brewery General Manager Tom Watson. The concept of ‘conflict of interest’ was not one which greatly aroused the concerns of politicians nor, it seems, judges, in those times. Born in Balmain on Thursday, 12 May 1887, Maxwell was called to the Bar a few days before his twenty-fifth birthday in 1913. He was of a conservative conviction: in 1917, when Australian unions held strikes over hunger and poverty they said was brought on by war inflation, Maxwell volunteered to be a strikebreaker on the wharves. In 1927 the conservative Bavin–Stevens Government appointed him to the bench of the District Court, and in 1934 he moved up a rung to the Supreme Court. He had played an active political role in 1931 by signing ‘The Call’, the New Guard’s notorious but abortive effort to mobilise fascists in Australia. A year later he was urging Governor Sir Philip Game to seek new advisers to resolve ‘the crisis with Premier Jack Lang’, who the New Guard described as ‘communist’. None of this, of course, was seen as rendering him unsuitable to inquire into the scandals fermenting in the grog industry. Maxwell went about his task methodically, exposing the ‘dummy’ arrangements in the Saffron hotels, the shifting of huge quantities of the scarce commodity— ‘liquid gold’ as one media scribe called it—from pubs to clubs at premium prices, and the ‘systematic police corruption’ at the ‘highest levels’. Even the barrister appearing for the NSW Police was compelled to admit before Maxwell that the ‘obvious lack of success’ in policing the

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rackets was ‘due to bribery of police officers’. It was clear from the evidence taken by Maxwell that the corruption was widespread, with the judge blaming senior police for the failure to enforce the laws. Despite that finding, and as a surprise to nobody who knew how corrupt the police force had become, no officer faced charges or any disciplinary action. Among the eight nightclubs he studied, Maxwell singled out Saffron’s Roosevelt club as the main perpetrator of the sly grog rackets. Abe, in an examination that ran to forty-three tightly spaced foolscap pages of transcript, strenuously denied any wrongdoing—as was his wont in legal environments. The judge would have none of it, saying Saffron had engaged in ‘systematic false swearing’ to his inquiry. In other words, he told a pack of lies. And the Roosevelt, said Maxwell, was: ‘. . . the most notorious and disreputable nightclub in the city’. With such strong statements, the Crown had little option but to indict Saffron in October 1952 for lying under oath, another drama that would keep him as a focus of media attention. Back in the familiar Paddington Courthouse on Monday, 20 October 1952, Saffron was formally charged with perjury before the commission and was committed for trial at the Sydney Quarter Sessions Court two weeks later. What followed was high farce, and a superb demonstration that, if you can afford the best lawyers in town, you can get away with murder . . . well, at least perjury. But before that drama began to unfold, Saffron was forced to divest himself of his illegal hotel interests. In this round of licence transfers, the Licensing Court—

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undoubtedly aware it was under intense public and media scrutiny after the waves of the Maxwell inquiry revelations—closely examined the recipients of the ‘fire sale’ licences. On 13 December 1951, Abe’s sister, Beryl Frack, said she was selling the Mortdale Hotel to a Mr Bamford for £9250 ($303,774) after she had confirmed to Maxwell she had been the manager of the hotel for her brother, and that he (Saffron) had told her she could sell the business. The licence had been worth £13,000 ($684,343) when she acquired it, she said. When the Licensing Court looked at the transfer application on 14 January 1952, the details had changed somewhat. The person who snapped up this bargain was Elliot Douglas Yabsley Hill, thirtyseven, of Bellevue Hill—son-in-law of federal MP Rowley James, described as the ‘big, gruff but amiable’ longserving Labor member for the seat of Hunter. The court satisfied itself that Hill had no connections whatsoever with Abe Saffron and approved the changeover. Five days later it was the turn of the Civic Hotel in Pitt Street, where Harold Taylour had been Abe’s ‘dummy’, to front the court. The new buyer, Frederick William Steen of Bondi, told Licensing Board Chairman Vincent Henry ‘Vince’ Wells he was paying £15,000 ($542,441) for the business. Steen said he had heard there had been a ‘tieup’ between Taylour and Saffron, and assured the court: ‘There will be no tie-up with us. There is no partnership apart from my wife. I have not been connected with Saffron in any of my other hotels.’ Vince Wells accepted the assurances and granted Steen the transfer of licence. In early February the court approved an application by Saffron’s close friend, Emil Kornhauser, to transfer the

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licence of the Cumberland Hotel at Bankstown to Eric Claude Norman of Dover Heights for £23,500 ($849,825), having been given an assurance by Norman that he would not supply liquor to Saffron or the Roosevelt club. But Saffron didn’t go down without a fight as he watched his liquor empire being dismantled. In August, Robert Melville Randall Buckingham applied to the court for the transfer of a spirit merchant’s licence at Anzac Parade, Kingsford, from one Minnie Emeline Duggan. Buckingham admitted he’d worked at the Mortdale Hotel when Mrs Frack ran it, but said he had not known that Minnie Duggan had illicitly supplied booze to Saffron for the Roosevelt. ‘Do you still say Abraham Saffron is not in the background of this application?’ asked Licensing Sergeant F. Brownette. ‘I definitely do’, replied Buckingham. The court didn’t believe this testimony for a moment. When the adjourned hearing resumed nine days later, chairman Vince Wells rejected the application, saying the facts showed there was a tie-up with Saffron. ‘We are not satisfied that the transaction is a bona fide one’, he said. Abe was still in there trying. Maybe the court was being discreet, or maybe they really didn’t know, but Robert Buckingham was at the time Beryl Frack’s lover (later they married). The Maxwell Royal Commission had brought about the collapse of Saffron’s business and, for the state government, the unavoidable decision was that Saffron, his relatives and anyone associated with him should be barred from operating in the liquor trade in which he had behaved

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so reprehensibly. Neither the close association he’d made with Chief Secretary Evatt nor his corrupt relationship with senior police was able to save him from that fate, which was to remain in force until 1966. He was, of course, able to keep the Roosevelt club going because it was not a licensed premises and—Abe kept assuring people—didn’t sell liquor. In the meantime he still had the perjury charge to face. That action finally got underway on Wednesday, 2 December 1952, and was to develop into a morass of legal contortions over the next nine months. Saffron’s lead lawyer, Garfield Edward Barwick QC, another Fort Street alumnus, started the action by seeking an adjournment. The charge that Saffron ‘knowingly gave false testimony’ to the liquor inquiry was one of a group of indictments ‘for somewhat similar matters’, Barwick told sixty-five-year-old Judge Bertie Vandeleur Stacey at the Darlinghurst Quarter Sessions Court. Before the cases had been listed there had been discussions between counsel as to the order in which they would be taken, the barrister said. ‘There was some difference now in recollections as to what had been precisely agreed to by counsel’, he said. The judge agreed to delay the case for a week, but Barwick was ‘on a roll’, so to speak: two days later he paid a morning visit to Judge Edward Parnell ‘Ted’ Kinsella in chambers and on Saffron’s behalf made an application directed against Judge Stacey and the state AttorneyGeneral, Clarence Edward Martin QC, for a rule nisi for a writ of certiorari, effectively removing the trial from the Quarter Session judge’s jurisdiction. Barwick left with what he went in for: a delay until February and a shift to the

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Supreme Court, to be tried before judge and jury. The Crown’s barrister, Wilfred Robert ‘Bill’ Dovey QC, was understandably miffed, and that afternoon made his countermove with an application to Chief Justice Kenneth Street at the Full Court to have the matter heard sooner. Dovey came away with only part of what he wanted: Street agreed to list the matter for mention the following Monday, when Dovey’s application could be renewed. The legal games had begun in earnest—and this was just over whether Saffron had told a few ‘porkies’ to Maxwell. Saffron’s team then hinted at their next ploy: they would challenge the power of the state Governor to have issued the royal commission to Maxwell. Barwick, using the idiosyncratic profundity he demonstrated throughout his illustrious career, argued that the Succession Act, passed in England during the reign of Queen Anne, required the sovereign to issue a warrant authorising the use of the Great Seal of the State, or Public Seal, with which judges’ commissions are made. Such warrants had not been issued since the accession of King George V, intoned the great barrister, and therefore all acts of government purporting to use the Great Seal or Public Seal since then were invalid. And on that basis he challenged whether the Letters Patent—the official document by which Maxwell’s appointment had been made—had been validly issued, and even whether the seal affixed to the Letters Patent was the Great Seal within the meaning of the relevant Act. Little wonder that a mind that could produce such a legally titillating argument as this could also later produce the advice which an unelected governor-general used to sack a legally elected

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democractic government! The defence crew probably thought it a good move to distract attention from one abundantly clear fact: that their mendacious client Abraham Gilbert Saffron had beyond any doubt lied to the royal commission. At the Monday hearing another sensation: Bill Dovey QC claimed in his rich, almost theatrical voice that a counsel for Saffron had disguised himself as a research student in a ‘subterfuge’ to get access to ‘documents of State’ related to the case, an accusation that was flatly denied by the defence team. Dovey soldiered on: the Crown agreed to transferring the trial to the Supreme Court to be heard by a judge and jury, he said, but in light of the challenge being made to the validity of the liquor royal commission, the matter should be dealt with ‘this month, rather than next year’. ‘If the grounds in the challenge were good, there would be no Supreme Court and no Parliament’, the barrister argued. Bill Dovey, with nods of approval from his back-up QCs—his son-in-law Edward Gough Whitlam (later to become prime minister) and a young Anthony Mason (later a High Court judge)—who was just twenty-eight at the time—said that, while it would be wrong for him to suggest that the application to bring the trial to the Supreme Court was a sham, the proceedings should not taken bona fide and were the penultimate link in a chain of events to put off the trial as long as possible. ‘There must be considerable public unease in this matter’, he said. One of Saffron’s lawyers, John William Smyth QC, known for decades as ‘the legendary J.W.’, rejected any

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suggestion that the application was made merely to delay the trial. He said that Saffron’s mother had died the previous Thursday and, according to Jewish law of strict mourning, Saffron had to confine himself to his house for seven days, thus making it difficult to interview him. He described as ‘most unusual’ the action of the Crown in launching the false-swearing prosecutions, and accused the Crown of putting ‘every obstacle’ in the way of the defence by claiming privilege for certain documents. In view of the Crown’s attitude, some evidence about the Great Seal might have to be sought in England, Smyth added. However, it was a win for the monocle-wearing Dovey: the trial date was set for just a week later, on Monday, 15 December 1952. Facing Judge John Henry ‘Jock’ McClemens in the Central Criminal Court that day, Smyth opened with a move to have the indictment against Saffron quashed. The specific charge being heard was that Saffron had, on 25 September 1951, knowingly given false testimony to the royal commission when he said that no person other than himself had any interest in the licence of the Gladstone Hotel. Among Smyth’s arguments was the claim that the indictment was ‘too general and ambiguous’, where the law required it to be ‘particular and precise’. The good judge was having none of it, suggesting they get on with their jobs by empanelling a jury. With that done, and Saffron entering a plea of ‘not guilty’, Dovey opened with the clear claim that there was ‘no possible shadow of doubt’ that Saffron had knowingly lied to the commission. ‘It will be proved to you that when he was being asked questions relating to the existing state of things at the time

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of the commission, he stated certain matters which were false’, Dovey told the jury. ‘There will be no difficulty about proving that. And equally, in the opinion of the Crown, there will be no doubt about proving that he did know that what he stated was in fact false.’ He further asked the jurors to forget all feelings they may have against restaurant or nightclub proprietors, or anybody else who sold liquor, and to forget also any unpleasant experiences they may have had in obtaining liquor in the past years (no doubt hoping to arouse some ire among them at the beer shortage). When Saffron had given his evidence before the commission, he was the proprietor of the Gladstone Hotel in William Street in the city and at the same time was the director or was in some way connected with the management of the Roosevelt restaurant in Kings Cross, Dovey added. ‘On 25 September he was asked questions at the Commission about various matters. This charge only relates to his interest in the Gladstone Hotel, and has nothing to do with people getting beer at reduced rates or such like matters’, Dovey said. He continued: He [Saffron] was asked two separate questions about the Gladstone Hotel. The facts were that at the time he was in the witness box he was conducting the Gladstone Hotel as licensee in partnership with a man named Kincaid. They had carried on this business by contributing financially to it on a 50–50 basis, and they had a banking account at the time called the Gladstone Banking Account on which either could operate.

Saffron had been told by the royal commission to return with documents, Dovey then explained. When the

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game was up, Saffron admitted that: ‘Yes, what I said the other day in effect was not true.’ There could only be one possible answer, said the barrister: that Saffron had given false testimony and that he knew it to be false when he gave it. Smyth, understandably, took a different tack, suggesting perjury concerned the administration of justice. Where a witness on oath said something and later corrected it, it did not amount in law to perjury or false testimony, he argued, adding the rather quaint rider: There can be no question of perjury arising in a Royal Commission, because a Royal Commission is concerned not with the administration of justice, but with the ascertainment of the truth. It does not matter how long it takes or what it costs to get. As long as it gets the truth in the long run, its serves its purpose as a Royal Commission.

At the end of that first day, Judge McClemens, who at that time had been on the bench for just over a year, refused to grant bail to Saffron, who spent the night in the police cells. The next day Hilton Glanville Kincaid was sworn in as a witness. ‘How long have you known Saffron’, asked Bill Dovey. Kincaid immediately refused to answer that or any other questions, saying that his answers might incriminate him. Dovey pressed on, producing a document that authorised Kincaid to sign cheques for the Gladstone and West End hotels. It was signed by Kincaid and Saffron. Reluctantly, Kincaid acknowledged it as authentic.

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Smyth QC then returned to his ‘great distraction’: the matter of Letters Patent, Great Seals, and the powers of kings and governors. Judge Maxwell, said the barrister, had not been appointed during the Governor’s pleasure only, but had been appointed for a fixed time. And for the royal commission to be valid it should have been appointed under the Public Seal used in the time of King George V. Judge McClemens interrupted the flow, asking Smyth: ‘If there is no Great Seal, certain consequences follow?’ ‘Yes, your honour’, replied Smyth. ‘No commission.’ To which his honour suggested that if the argument was right, it would mean not only that a number of judges had been improperly appointed, but for some years, at least, the state parliament had not been properly summonsed. Dovey QC added: ‘And think of all the thousands of people who have been improperly committed to prison, if that argument is right.’ Under the same argument, continued Dovey, the Chief Justice might be a Supreme Court judge, but would not be Chief Justice because, as such, he would be appointed under the Great Seal. This esoterica dragged on for the rest of the day. Back in court on Thursday, 18 December, Smyth pulled his master stroke, arguing that the whole of Saffron’s evidence at the royal commission should be ruled inadmissible in this trial. His client had been bound to answer questions before Judge Maxwell, said Smyth, whether they incriminated him or not, but if he did answer, the answers could not be used against him in any future proceedings. Judge McClemens claimed he had no choice but to agree;

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Dovey was left with no foundation for the prosecution, and the jury, without leaving the room, followed the judge’s direction and returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict. Saffron was free to go—for a short while. Dovey presented another indictment against Saffron and foreshadowed two others, all for telling lies to Maxwell. Smyth failed to quash the new charges and his client was released on bail of £100 ($2934). The saga was not yet over. • The ruling that Saffron’s evidence before the Maxwell inquiry was to be inadmissible at a criminal trial was wrong. After the trial collapsed the Crown appealed. On 27 March 1953, the Court of Criminal Appeal, in a majority decision, decided the evidence was admissible. This did not affect Saffron, though, as a jury had already acquitted him on the first charge. A new charge was listed for hearing in the Central Criminal Court on Monday, 7 September 1953. Saffron’s lawyers said a motion seeking special leave to appeal had been lodged with the High Court, to be heard on the same day. Before that eminent judicial gathering, Garfield Barwick argued that the Court of Criminal Appeal had been wrong in ruling that Saffron’s evidence before the Maxwell inquiry was admissible at a criminal trial. Barwick described the liquor commission as a ‘witchhunt of individuals’ with ‘something of the reputation of the Star Chamber’, and that the commissioner’s appointment was technically defective. A formidable bench of the nation’s most pre-eminent judges gathered in the High

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Court to hear the arguments that would protect Saffron’s reputation from being a liar. Appointed Chief Justice a year earlier, Sir Owen Dixon, at sixty-seven, was team leader. The support judges were Frank Kitto, fifty, and Alan Russell Taylor, fifty-two—coincidentally a Vaucluse neighbour of Saffron. They listened patiently, but unanimously rejected the argument and refused the application for special leave to appeal, giving new hope to the Crown prosecutors that Saffron might be brought to justice for his lying ways. But it was not to be: the remaining perjury charges against him mysteriously and quietly disappeared from view. It was, in retrospect, a bizarre episode. There is no doubt Saffron had told lies to Maxwell: he admitted it himself. But also in evidence before that inquiry, it was clear that Saffron was in blatant breach of the liquor laws on several counts and had paid bribes to police. There was, however, never a suggestion that he should be charged with those serious breaches of the law and, as mentioned earlier, none of the police he corruptly paid were given even a slap on the wrist. It had been the sort of year that the Queen of Australia might have described as an ‘annus horribilis’, but by the end of a torrid 1952 Abe Saffron still had plenty more court appearances to face in the months and years ahead.

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3 IN AND OUT OF COURT AND COURTING CRIMS In and out of court and courting the crims

DESPITE WINNING ON a dubious technicality in the perjury trial, Saffron had taken quite a psychological battering from all the legal actions. With his bruised ego in need of repair, and with more court appearances on his schedule by the start of 1953, he set about acquiring a bit of insurance to try to ward off possible future legal threats to his corporate success and personal wellbeing. Part of the Saffron strategy was to join the ‘in crowd’, a group of senior criminals who, through the astute application of the skills of bribery and corruption, managed to carry on their affairs with little or no intrusion from inquisitive police or interfering politicians. Saffron had undoubtedly thought his close association with Chief Secretary Clive Evatt might have provided such a level of protection, but that had not been the case. A breakthrough came early in the year when former doorman at the Roosevelt club and emerging illegal baccarat ‘king’ Richard Gabriel Reilly—‘Dick’ to his [ 48 ]

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friends—met Saffron to discuss the possibility of using the Roosevelt as home for one of his illegal gambling games. There’s no available evidence that the deal was consummated, but it was the start of a long association of which Abe appears to have been the main beneficiary. They met quite frequently until Dick Reilly’s shooting murder on Monday, 26 June 1967, at the age of fifty-eight. A close friend of both men told me once that while Abe was quite taken with the handsome, tough and influential Reilly, the gambler never really took to Saffron. Every time they met, my source said, Saffron would greet Dick warmly and politely—as was his manner—and would inevitably get the rejoinder from Reilly: ‘Get out of my way or I’ll put my hand up your dress.’ Saffron’s major gain from this association was that he did get to meet prominent players of the said in crowd, including the well-connected illegal abortionist Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones, who employed Reilly as a driver/bodyguard. Through those two Saffron met legendary corrupt policeman Raymond William ‘Ray’ Kelly, whose share of the proceeds of the illegal abortion racket was just one of his many sidelines. Nicknamed ‘The Gunner’ for his propensity to shoot criminals he cornered, Kelly was close to the heavyweights in the NSW Liberal Party during his police career from 1929 to February 1966. He cultivated close relationships with major criminals, including ‘Paddles’ Anderson and Lennie McPherson. Lennie was his most productive informer and, in later years, provided Kelly with a monthly ‘report’ on the activities of all Sydney criminals known to him on a reel-to-reel tape recording. In return, McPherson was granted

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immunity from prosecution for more than thirty years. Kelly was a tough cop who had a stunning arrest rate. He was also one of the main players in organised crime in New South Wales throughout his thirty-six years in the force until his retirement. A farewell testimonial dinner given in his honour at the Chevron Hotel was attended by many prominent people in the criminal set, including Abe Saffron, Dick Reilly, gamblers Joe Taylor and Perc Galea, and nightclub owner Sammy Lee. While these introductions in 1953 proved to be something of a turning point for Saffron, it would be some years before he would reap the full benefits of the associations. In effect, he was joining an elite group at the bottom rung and would spend time earning the promotions that eventually would enable him and his most trusted employees to describe themselves as ‘The Invincibles’. In the meantime there was a contribution to his wife Doreen’s home comfort: Abe splashed out £5850 ($159,592) for what was later described as a five-bedroom, four-bathroom mansion at 109 Hopetoun Avenue, Vaucluse. (Abe subsequently sold the property in August 2006 for $3.5 million.) It certainly was a secure home: in the mid-1970s the Saffrons invited their next-door neighbour’s son, Jed, to their grandson’s birthday party. Jed had a great time and, on his return home, told his father that there was a gun in the hall cupboard next to the front door. There were also a few pending court matters to resolve that year, the first of which was the Police Commissioner’s move to have the Roosevelt club declared a disorderly house. On 15 January 1953, Mr Justice Richardson

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approved Commissioner Colin John Delaney’s move against the club. Within a month establishment barrister Garfield Barwick was again in court fighting for Abe, using some highly arcane and obscure arguments to try to win the case and to persuade Chief Justice Street to overturn the earlier decision. In a tactic similar to that used in the perjury trial, Saffron’s legal team descended to high farce with the suggestion that the declaration was ineffective because Judge Richardson’s appointment was invalid. And, as it was in the perjury trial, the defence strategy appeared to require the use of any argument except the innocence of their client Saffron on the matter before the court. Barwick reverted—as he had in the perjury trial—to arcane arguments about the wrongful use of the Great Seal or Public Seal, this time suggesting the appointment of many judges was invalid. This went on for two days, with the court seemingly overlooking the fact they were there because the police were trying to close the Roosevelt due to Saffron illegally selling booze at the ‘notorious and disreputable’ nightclub. Both sides played the game, with Dovey—himself within a few months of being elevated to the bench of the Supreme Court—producing on behalf of the Crown letters written in 1829, 1839 and 1870 which, he said, showed that the Public Seal and Great Seal were ‘one and the same thing’. The seal then in use had been delivered in 1938 from the British Dominions Secretary and carried full royal authority for its use, the Crown argued. The matter was so complex, it appears, that Chief Justice Street alone could not resolve it and it was moved to the Full Court.

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On Friday, 27 February 1953, Street was joined by judges William Francis Langer Owen and Leslie Herron. After a learned discourse from the Chief Justice on the history and authority of Great and other seals, Street said that if Barwick’s contentions were proved correct: . . . there would not and could not be elected any properly constituted legislature as every legislative act of parliament, including the constitution of the legislative council, would be invalid and that, therefore, the court could not presume parliament to have intended this result without the use of the most imperative words.

In their collective wisdom the judges agreed to dismiss the Saffron suit with costs. The order of a disorderly house still stood, effectively closing the business. The Roosevelt had sold liquor illegally from 1947 to 1952, the court was told, but had ‘. . . never been accused of conducting gambling or anything disreputable’. Saffron sold the Roosevelt and on 3 March Judge Russell Le Gay Brereton in the Supreme Court rescinded the earlier order when he was convinced that Saffron was no longer involved in the business. The Roosevelt may no longer have been a part of Saffron’s business life, but its memory persisted to haunt him for months. Frank Lambeth, thirty-six, a waiter formerly employed at the club, told Chief Industrial Magistrate Mr Harry Isles, on 11 June 1953, that he had been sacked after he had appeared as a witness in a court case against the Saffron company, Macleay Enterprises Pty Ltd (later renamed Saffron Enterprises Pty Ltd), which owned the Roosevelt. A caterer, Darcy Frost, had sued the club for an unpaid

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debt of £240 ($6547), and Lambeth had given evidence in support of the claim. When he turned up for work, Lambeth was sacked. He was awarded £268 19s 10d ($7343) for unpaid overtime. The action by Frost led to the winding up of the Saffron company by an order made by Judge Charles McClelland in the Equity Court on 11 October 1953. The judge appointed Malcolm Charles Card the official liquidator. For Saffron, it was all somewhat of an academic exercise, as the club had already closed down. • Abe was not the only Saffron to find himself in battle with the liquor authorities. His brother Philip also felt the heat from the Licensing Court decision to keep Abe, his relatives and associates out of the booze business in the wake of the Maxwell inquiry. On Friday, 12 June 1953, Judge Henry Thomas Eulert Holt in the Quarter Sessions Court dismissed an appeal by Philip Saffron against a Licensing Court refusal to let him have the licence of the Lord Jersey Hotel in Chalmers Street at the southern end of the CBD. The judge said the state Full Court had held that the onus was on the applicant to prove he was a fit and proper person to hold a licence and had laid down that public interest was of paramount importance. Under the Full Court’s ruling earlier that afternoon, the judge said, he must direct attention to the serious allegations which had been made against Philip Saffron, which might amount to false swearing and even perjury. The Licensing Court was entitled to take into consideration Philip Saffron’s refusal to answer questions and the onus was on

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him to prove himself fit to have the licence. A police report tendered at the hearing said that in 1951 Philip Saffron gave evidence at the liquor royal commission. Saffron admitted that, when previously applying for the licence of the West End Hotel at Balmain, he had failed to disclose to the court the fact that his brother and a man named Kincaid were in partnership with him in the business. He also failed to disclose that he had in fact on another occasion borrowed sums of money to finance a city hotel. When Philip Saffron was asked questions at the Licensing Court designed to elicit from him admissions that the police objections to him were founded on fact, he refused to answer any of the questions on the grounds he might incriminate himself. Philip Saffron had been perfectly within his rights in claiming privilege in refusing to answer questions, but this refusal to answer was relevant when it was a question of proving that an applicant for the transfer had ‘. . . discharged the onus of proving himself a fit and proper person’ to hold a licence. Full Court judges Owen, Herron and Sydney James Clancy delivered their unanimous verdict in that obscurantist argot which seems to prevail in the legal profession: The fact that the appellant here elected to exercise his legal right to answer questions relevant to the inquiry as to his fitness to hold a licence affords, in our opinion, no evidence that he is unfit to hold one, but his refusal provides material proper to be considered by the Court in whether he discharged the onus of proving affirmatively that he is a person upon whom it would stamp the mark of approval.

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At around this time, Abe Saffron began looking for businesses outside the Sydney scene: the gossipy ‘Town Talk’ column in the Daily Telegraph hinted on 9 September 1953: ‘Perth is buzzing with a red-hot rumour that Abe Saffron of Sydney is trying to buy the Raffles Hotel, a slightly out-of-town luxury pub, for £100,000 [$2,728,070].’ The item was spot-on, and it led to a question in the Western Australian Parliament as to whether ‘Mr Saffron was involved in a takeover of a hotel in Perth’. The WA Justice Minister promised to have the Licensing Court investigate the matter, but nothing happened to prevent Abe from starting his national expansion during that year, and the Raffles Hotel at Canning Bridge was the first of many interstate properties he was to acquire in the coming years. His time as an illegal liquor profiteer had obviously been rewarding as he moved on to amass a huge property portfolio in Sydney, Adelaide and Perth, with some interests also in Melbourne and Brisbane. As with almost everything he did, some of the new projects were not—as we will see—without controversy. • It is not, of course, an act of organised crime to amass a property portfolio like Saffron’s; nor is it a criminal matter to go through the proper channels to obtain liquor licences for clubs and hotels occupying those premises. But by the mid-1950s it was too late for Abe Saffron to play the game straight. From the moment he paid his first bribe to a crooked cop to turn a blind eye, the path he would tread was set. Among those who determine it should be so are the crooked cops themselves.

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Those of us who have studied corruption within police forces—and that of New South Wales in particular—will know that the policeman on the take will often become greedy and keep pressing for more with the constant threat of exposure not only of current criminal behaviour, but also of the very fact of having paid bribes. It becomes an inescapable bind, if one ever did want to get off the treadmill, but Saffron showed no interest in mending his illicit ways from the moment he broke the liquor laws by buying the Gladstone Hotel. Memories of that hotel—like those of the Roosevelt club—must have been bitter in his mind, for between 1954 and 1956 he fought vigorously in court against the damages awarded to a Gladstone barmaid, and was even making noises about taking the matter to the Privy Council in London to resolve. Back in 1951 Mrs Ivy Lawrence suffered spinal injuries when she fell through an open trapdoor at the hotel. In April 1954, Mrs Lawrence, then thirty-eight, was awarded £5267 ($141,210) by a Supreme Court jury in compensation for her injuries. Saffron appealed against the decision. It was nearly a year later— March 1955—that the Full Bench heard the appeal. Saffron unsuccessfully claimed the amount was excessive. By the end of November 1956 Mrs Lawrence’s patience had expired: she still hadn’t received the money and she had heard that Saffron was about to leave for England on a lengthy trip with his wife and son. On Friday, 23 November 1956, Ivy Lawrence appeared before a lanky six foot three inches (191 centimetres) Judge Cyril Ambrose Walsh in the NSW Supreme Court seeking Saffron’s arrest unless he supplied securities or

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paid the damages bill before leaving the country. Demonstrating his reputation as an outstanding trial judge, Walsh acted quickly, saying he was not satisfied with the security Saffron had offered, and gave him until noon the next day to pay up the money—plus five per cent accumulative interest. At 10 a.m. that Saturday morning Saffron scrambled together banknotes and a cheque for the £5500 ($141,363), and after thirty minutes of counting, it was receipted into the Supreme Court account on Mrs Lawrence’s behalf. The judge was unimpressed when told that Saffron, who had already lost two appeals in the case, was planning to take the matter to the Privy Council—the British establishment based on the House of Lords, which was then the highest level of appeal for Australian legal matters (the High Court of Australia has held that responsibility since 1975). He ordered Saffron to also pay Mrs Lawrence’s legal costs. Outside the court Mrs Lawrence told reporters: ‘Why shouldn’t he pay up? He can afford to. He can afford to take his wife and family on a trip to England. My husband and I can’t afford to take our two children for a short holiday to the mountains.’ Saffron went off to London but did not take with him the threatened appeal to the Privy Council. • Through his new acquaintances—Reilly, Stuart-Jones, Kelly and some of their more nefarious partners in crime— Saffron found a new sense of freedom in the mid-1950s. They would have discussed ways to ensure their right to

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operate in their ‘free-enterprise’ system with as much flexibility for their activities as possible. Reginald Stuart-Jones, a prominent Macquarie Street surgeon from the 1930s, was one of a number of Sydney doctors who exploited the misery suffered by many women who wished to terminate unwanted pregnancies. During the decades leading up to the 1970s performing abortions was illegal, and women were forced into dangerous—and often fatal—‘backyard’ terminations. Those who could afford to pay the substantial fees demanded by StuartJones and a few of his colleagues could be assured of a safer treatment. Stuart-Jones established a close association with Detective Ray Kelly and his corrupt colleagues, and paid large and regular sums to the police to persuade them to turn a blind eye to his illegal activities. The fact that he was a long-time associate of criminals—including Dick Reilly—helped pave the way to a harmonious working relationship between the doctor and the crooked cops. This was the man with whom Saffron set up a new line of business, and the venture that took shape grew out of Saffron’s insatiable sexual appetite: he and the illegal abortionist decided to hold sex parties at Stuart-Jones’s house-cum-surgery, the palatial manor known as the White House nestling comfortably in Bellevue Hill, a suburb of Sydney’s wealthy elite. Similar events were later also held at the Appin private hotel in Springfield Avenue, Kings Cross, which Saffron owned. I have been given an account of these events by a person who was close to Saffron and Dick Reilly over those years. The person spoke to me on condition of anonymity, but I can certainly vouch for my source’s veracity. And this, as we will see, was not the only

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source of information about this remarkable—and previously unpublished—aspect of Abe Saffron’s life. The parties started for a few close friends, with prostitutes and ‘showgirls’ from the nightclubs. As word gradually spread—not only in their own tight group but to wider circles through Ray Kelly and the crooked cops— attendance increased. After some time Saffron decided he had struck on a brilliant scheme—the ultimate insurance policy for the sort of corporate freedom he craved—he would turn the freewheeling orgies into a blackmail business. Two-way mirrors were installed at both venues. Photographs were secretly taken during the height of each party and filed away for future reference. In the early days, my source told me, some ‘raunchy’ pictures moved from hand to hand among the more trusted denizens of the Kings Cross nightlife, but after a while this supply chain of titillation dried up. Sometimes a client would ask for a particular sexual peccadillo to be met. Over time young children were brought to the ‘parties’ as well as gay men, sadomasochists and others with what were then considered ‘weirdo’ sexual interests. The clientele grew to include some very important people in the Sydney world of business, politics, the judiciary and the law. All were assured of absolute discretion, of course, and if they guessed they were being photographed or that their names and the names of their sexual partners (or victims?) were being carefully recorded, they may have been less enthusiastic. But they were given no hint . . . at the time. There was never a demand for money for these events from Saffron, although most insisted on making a generous payment. He was the perfect host and would

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occasionally join upper-crust clients when group activity was called for. All Saffron wanted in exchange was recognition of him being the charming host and benevolent businessman he always aspired to be; to be welcomed in the best clubs, the inner circles of Sydney’s social elite; and to be left alone by the cops. It was at best only partially successful. Sydney in these middle years of the 1950s, well before the liberating dawning of the Age of Aquarius, remained shackled in a conservative sexual mind-set, and the Saffron orgies would have shocked the nation if word had ever got out. But all evidence of the participants’ activities remained under lock and key at the White House. StuartJones added a tidy sum to the regular contributions he already paid the police, to provide protection from other possibly aggressive police interest in the sex parties. Saffron’s notoriety among the participants would have soared, and most of the clients even made generous cash contributions to the hosts, grateful for the new excitement the events added to their lives. Abe would have been well pleased that he had at last produced a scheme whereby anyone who might ever have thought of prosecuting him would now be much less likely to do so, because of the damning evidence which was building in his files. Possibly Saffron thought his orgies truly represented a liberating of sexual mores—or that he really had become ‘invincible’—for in June 1956 he embarked on a more diverse series of group sexual activities that would land him in a flurry of court appearances over eighteen months, dubbed by the media as the ‘scandalous conduct’ cases. Even the explicit files from his more discreet orgies

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and bribery and protection payments could not save him from this embarrassment. On Sunday, 24 June 1956, Abe Saffron, then thirty-six, with his close friends Hilton Glanville Kincaid, forty, Wayne Bert Martin, twenty-four, and two women they knew, went to the house of hotel broker Max Murrell, fifty-six, at Palm Beach, on Sydney’s northern beaches. A party developed, clothes were removed and various ‘kinky’ sexual activities took place, including Saffron whipping a naked woman. The party moved to a flat at Kings Cross the next day, and the group was joined by Abe’s brother Henry. Four months later, one of the women who had taken part in the sexual capers fell out with the Saffron group and gave police from the vice squad—specifically, Detective Sergeant Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell—details of what had gone on, resulting in the scandalous conduct cases beginning on Tuesday, 23 October 1956, before Magistrate Kenneth MacDonald Dash at the Central Court. Saffron, Kincaid and a second woman (whose name was suppressed by the magistrate) were charged with ‘scandalous conduct which openly outraged public decency by taking part in lewd, obscene and disgusting exhibitions’. Vice squad Detective Constable Alfred Ernest Clark added fuel to the fire when he told the court he had found a number of obscene publications at Saffron’s flat. Doreen Saffron was by that time no doubt well aware of her errant husband’s deviate sexual proclivities, but this public outrage was more than she could bear: she packed her bags and took their son Alan on the first available flight to Switzerland, and there she stayed for a year before returning in late 1957 to an even more

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damaged relationship with her husband. We were never to learn what Henry Saffron’s wife of twenty years, Allanah Irene, thought of her husband’s capers when they became public knowledge. Police prosecutor Sergeant Roy Turner appeared before the court and said very grave matters were involved in the case. He suggested that the evidence would show that Saffron was ‘completely sexually depraved and has no moral sense whatsoever’. The next day nine more men and a woman were in the court charged with ‘scandalous conduct’ at other times and places. A few days later Abe Saffron was back in the dock charged with having committed ‘an unnatural offence’ with a woman at Potts Point on 11 August. All the charges were remanded to later dates. At a hearing on 17 December prosecutor Roy Turner opposed another adjournment sought by the defence. ‘It would be to the detriment of the community if the matter was not heard expeditiously’, he said. Then he dropped his bombshell: ‘I have information concerning allegations of interference to police witnesses in this matter, and the allegations go directly to Abraham Saffron.’ Barrister John ‘Jack’ Wentworth Shand QC, the short, ruddy-complexioned and freckled-faced lawyer appearing for Saffron, accused Turner of making statements ‘prejudicial’ to his client. ‘That might be’, said the prosecutor, ‘but it has to be said on the question of a lengthy remand. A witness in a country town has been interfered with. We also allege that several female witnesses here in the city have been approached and threats have been made’.

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The Sydney tabloids loved the whiff of scandal the court hearings provided. One report in the Truth newspaper milked it for all it was worth: After a prosaic start in an almost empty courtroom, this week’s scandalous conduct case bombshelled into one of the most startling in Sydney’s history. Three pretty girls, one of them coloured, and 11 men have been arrested on morals charges as the climax of police investigations which have caused the sensation of the year. The case started quietly in the almost deserted Central Police Court on Thursday afternoon when two men and a woman were charged. But, in later stages, hundreds of watchers milled outside the grimy building and crammed into the old-fashioned courtroom on Friday when nine more men and another woman were before the magistrates. Press cameras clicked and flashed as the people charged hurried from the precincts. Bystanders murmured excitedly as a pert, eye-catching redhead swathed her face in a filmy scarf to dodge the photographers.

Six months later, on Tuesday, 25 June 1957, Magistrate Cecil Hargraves Blackmore dismissed the scandalous conduct charges against Wayne Martin and Henry Saffron, saying the prosecution had failed to make a prima facie case. He did not refer to the fact that the witnesses Sergeant Turner had previously referred to as having been ‘threatened’ were now offering no assistance to the prosecution. Without them, the whole case crumbled. It took a while longer for Abe’s case to be resolved. On Tuesday, 1 October 1957, almost a year after the matters had first come to court, Stipendiary Magistrate Roy Harvey,

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in Central Court, dismissed the charges of scandalous conduct at Potts Point on 11 August 1956. Harvey was the same magistrate who had given Saffron a slap on the wrist over the illegal housie game back in 1952. Like Magistrate Blackmore, Roy Harvey said police had failed to establish a prima facie case against Saffron and Kincaid. On the remaining scandalous conduct charges, the attorney-general and Labor member for Waverley in the long-running government of John Joseph ‘Joe’ Cahill, Clarence Edward Martin, announced on the same day that he had decided not to prosecute Saffron further. As is the tradition, attorneys-general invariably do not give a reason for not continuing with a prosecution, known in the circles as a ‘no-bill’. In retrospect, and with a little information passed on to me from a Saffron insider, it’s not hard to see how the cases collapsed. After one of the women in the Palm Beach incident had gone to the vice squad in October, veteran Darlinghurst cop Bumper Farrell decided to raise the ante in his less-than-honest dealings with Abe Saffron. Hearing of another sexual ‘exhibition’ involving Saffron at a flat in Bondi, Farrell (my well-placed source told me) went to the flat and saw a partially open window. He drew a pencil from his pocket and carefully eased the curtain aside. What he saw was one of the participants, Arthur James ‘Jimmy’ Stebbins, a close friend of Abe’s, masturbating at a kitchen sink. Farrell undoubtedly considered that any legal action he could take against Saffron and his close acquaintances would enable him to negotiate a financially advantageous settlement.

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In the ensuing court hearings Farrell literally produced the kitchen sink, complete with its cupboard, to the courtroom as evidence. The magistrate made the obvious comment that Stebbins could not have reached up to the sink to perform his ‘scandalous’ act. With a flurry, Farrell produced a copy of the thick Sydney telephone directory of the day and plonked it down before the sink. ‘Apologies, your worship’, he said, ‘I had omitted to produce the phone book he was standing on!’ Despite such unshakable evidence, the fact remained that the events that had ‘openly outraged public decency’ were all carried out behind closed doors in private dwellings, well hidden from the morally sensitive general public. The first they knew about it was from the media headlines reporting on the court cases. It was the privacy in which these events were conducted that led to all the cases collapsing, with the view suggested by the various magistrates involved that you could not ‘outrage public decency’ unless the public could actually see what you were doing. As a footnote, Bumper Farrell—who never liked backing losers—a short while later took action against Abe Saffron and Jimmy Stebbins, alleging that refrigerators, televisions and a dishwasher in Saffron’s recently acquired Lodge 44 Motel at Edgecliff were stolen property. Saffron was committed for trial, but the jury threw out all the charges. Bumper Farrell by then was no doubt satisfied with his new financial arrangement with Saffron. But it wasn’t over yet. Later in October, on the 18th, Saffron was found guilty at the Central Court of Petty Sessions before Magistrate William Charles Avery on two charges relating to obscene publications. He was fined £10 ($259) on each charge, or

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twenty days’ hard labour in lieu. The charges—having obscene publications in his possession and occupying the premises where they were found—dated back to the previous year. The following month it was the turn of the Metropolitan Licensing Court of New South Wales. On Friday, 29 November 1957, magistrates Roy Mitchell Stewart and John Malcolm Joseph Kelly rejected an application for a liquor licence in the name of Florence Bunte Hawkins for the Napoli Restaurant, 44 Macleay Street, Kings Cross. They said Miss Hawkins was a suitable person to hold a liquor licence, but Saffron was a substantial shareholder in the company which owned the premises—and he was not such a person. Abraham Gilbert Saffron, they said, was of ‘low morality, debased, and not a fit and proper person’ to be connected with the conduct of a liquor licence. The ‘not a fit and proper person’ phrase would come back to haunt him for more than forty years. Florence Hawkins had applied for the licence as manager of Perren Productions, in which Apsley Investments was a major shareholder. Both those companies were controlled by Anson Investments, in which Saffron was a major stockholder. Perren Productions was also a tenant in another section of 44 Macleay Street owned by Argus Investments, in which Saffron also held substantial shares. The magistrates said the application was rejected on two grounds: first, Saffron’s disclosures at the Royal Commission into Liquor Licensing to breaches of the Liquor Act and self-confessed perjury and, second, his ‘recent misconduct’ resulting in his prosecution under the Obscene and Indecent Publications Act 1901. Saffron’s

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uncle, barrister Simon Isaacs, unsuccessfully objected, saying that both grounds were the subject of appeals. That’s not relevant, said Chairman of the Licensing Magistrates Roy Stewart: ‘the Board can arrive at no other conclusion than that Saffron was a person of low morality.’ Early in 1958 Saffron had a win in court. On Friday, 28 February, Judge Thomas Sinclair Holden in the Quarter Sessions Court upheld Abe’s appeal against the two convictions of obscene publications charges in the previous October, rejecting the Crown’s argument that mere possession by a householder of a banned book rendered him liable to prosecution. The element of gain—an intention to sell the publication for profit—was essential in such a prosecution, the judge ruled, adding that the prosecution had not established this element in the Saffron case. As if to celebrate—and as if to thumb his nose at the whole legal establishment—Saffron took delivery (my insider source told me) of four tons (more than 4000 kilograms) of pornographic books, paying just 2s ($2.34) per book, for a total of more than 35,000 books! He later sold them all at around £2 ($47.40) apiece, turning a cool profit estimated to be more than £66,500 ($1,576,088). Free enterprise Saffron-style at its best! The National Crime Authority (NCA) was later to look back on his history and report to federal parliament in 1994 that Saffron was ‘heavily involved in vice, obtaining financial benefit from vice engaged in by others. He controls prostitutes. He produces and imports pornography and distributes it around Australia’. •

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Before the decade wound to a close, Abe and his brother Henry had a couple more court events to attend to. On Thursday, 13 August 1959, Wollongong police opposed an application in the Licensing Court for the transfer of the licence of the Rex Hotel in Thirroul to Henry on the grounds that he was not a ‘fit and proper person’ to hold a licence. Henry’s solicitor said the main police objection to the application was that Henry Saffron was a brother of Abraham Saffron, but he was ‘not associated with Abraham except as a brother’, the local magistrate was told. Henry’s young brother Abe narrowly escaped bankruptcy a couple of months later. In a remarkably complex case—and for reasons which were never clearly explained— Saffron became involved in the importation of seven hundred tons (more than 700,000 kilograms) of chrome ore, valued at £5919 13s 4d ($139,470.93). Yes, chrome ore. Maybe he should have stuck with illicit booze and pornography. A Noumea company, Societe Miniere Cafrika, won a judgement against Saffron for the debt at the start of 1959. Without complicating our story with all the intricate detail, the case twice came before the High Court of Australia, which basically said the company was in the right. On 13 October a bankruptcy notice was served on Saffron, and the company now sought sequestration of his estate because he failed to comply with the notice. In a last-minute development, the company’s barrister, Richard Barbour QC, told the Bankruptcy Court that Saffron had finally paid the debt, so the bankruptcy petition was dismissed. We will never know what happened to the chrome ore, but a safe bet would be that Abe made a killing out of it—metaphorically speaking, of course.

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4 NEW PLAYERS JOIN THE TEAM: ABE MOVES INTO THE BIG TIME New players join the team

FOR ABE SAFFRON the end of the 1950s couldn’t come quickly enough. Despite his ‘insurance policy’ of numerous compromising photographs of prominent citizens, he had faced many court appearances over the decade. Although his win rate against a range of charges was good (and the photo albums may have contributed to that) the sheer regularity of fronting court was a distraction he could do without. As the new decade dawned, Saffron planned to open the first legal strip clubs in Australia—and sell liquor in them—without fear of harassment by authorities due to the liberalisation of social and sexual mores and improved liquor laws, enabling more civilised regulation of the food and entertainment industry. He opened a new club, Staccato, just down from the site of the old Roosevelt in Orwell Street, Kings Cross. He put a couple of friends in to run it: his long-time mate Wayne Martin and Louis Benedetto, known as ‘Last Card [ 69 ]

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Louis’. Regular observers at the strip shows included vice squad police—probably more interested in collecting the regular contributions to their retirement fund from Abe than looking for anything too explicit in the performances—and Darlinghurst behemoth Bumper Farrell, no doubt collecting his regular extracurricular pay packet, too. It all augured well, Saffron must have thought, for a new phase of wealth creation, spiced with the high level of sexual variety that was so much a part of his life. He also made some new and, it would seem, highly useful acquaintances in the early 1960s through his connections in the Jewish community, including Emil Kornhauser. He became a close associate of the forceful, up-and-coming business entrepreneur Emil Herbert Peter Abeles and some of his associates, including Arthur George, Paul Strasser and John Charody. He also made contact with a fiery, pugnacious Scot, James McCartney Anderson, on a visit to the Gold Coast, and offered him a job he couldn’t refuse. Those associations were to have a profound impact on Saffron’s life over the next two decades, the first group enormously advantageous, the other deeply damaging. Anderson, a large-framed, tough-guy thug, known to his acquaintances as ‘Big Jim’, would invariably present himself as a man of cheery disposition, something of an iron fist in a velvet glove. Born in Glasgow on Sunday, 20 April 1930, he was the fourth child and only son of the family. He joined the Royal Marines when he was sixteen, was discharged as medically unfit in 1952 and eventually found himself in New Zealand where he became a traffic policeman. In the late 1950s he visited Australia as

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manager of a Maori show band, the Hi-Fives, which played gigs in Sydney and the Gold Coast. He moved to Australia in 1957, knocked around the nightclub scene making a living by booking entertainment acts, was entertainment director for the Chevron Group on the Gold Coast for nearly five years, and then took up a similar job with the Rex Hotels group run by Gordon Aldridge. He said later that it was during his time at the Kings Cross Rex that: I came into the first contact with corruption and prostitution as we know it today. The Rex Hotel was a place for working ladies of a high standard and quality, with complete police protection . . . I studied the system pretty closely because I found it, having come from London where things were done a bit more discreetly, this was a bit blatant. It seemed to be accepted and that was the system.

Anderson then became the manager of Sammy Lee’s Latin Quarter nightclub for eight or nine months. Lee had been in the entertainment business for years and the Latin Quarter was a brave—and eventually highly successful—experiment in that it was situated at 250 Pitt Street, in Sydney’s central business district, which generally closed down after the pubs shut at 6 p.m. His combination of a chorus line of leggy showgirls, loud music, corny local comedians and plenty of liquor until after three o’clock each morning (quite illegally, of course) proved a winning formula. It was a favourite haunt of crooked cops, gangster Lennie McPherson and gunman Jacky Clark. Abe Saffron was a regular visitor, and infamous

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illegal gambling operator Perc Galea was a director. Anderson recollected: My period at the Latin Quarter was very informative, very educational. That is where I first really studied prostitution and corruption, where it was quite openly practised, without fear or favour. I left the Latin Quarter after one rather messy murder and took over full-time management of the Showbiz until Mr Bernie Houghton appeared. I tried to buy a strip club at that time called the Crazy Horse. It looked like being reasonably successful until there was a fire. Mr Saffron owned the business, by the way. That then became the Bourbon and Beefsteak. Kentucky Fried Chicken bought out the Showbiz from me, and I was offered a position with Mr Saffron if I was interested in running a new cocktail bar and grill called the Venus Room.

The Venus Room club, which had a twelve-metre frontage at 6–8 Orwell Street, was actually the old Staccato club with a fresh coat of paint. Anderson accepted the offer from Saffron to take over management on a verbal arrangement to a forty/sixty split of the takings—sixty being Saffron’s slice. Entry to the club was on the lower left-hand side of the building at number 6. A small cloakroom on the right was never used—it was not the style of club where top hats and expensive capes would need to be checked in. Behind that there was a small dance floor, juke-box driven. The main room housed a metal-framed bar along the left wall, with varnished chipboard bench top and front panels, and padded pseudo-leather highlights along the front. The lighting was appropriately dimmed during its long

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hours of doing business. Opposite the bar stood a row of freestanding small tables and chairs. Behind the rear wall a full-length kitchen gave access to the rear laneway, if anyone needed to disappear from the club in a hurry. The building and the business which operated there were both owned by Abe Saffron. A NSW police report compiled some years after Anderson joined Saffron showed that the premises was owned by Abbey Investments Pty Ltd, in which Saffron was a major shareholder, as he was in the firm PH Electrical Pty Ltd, which owned the Venus Room business. ‘The permit for the Venus Room under the Liquor Act’, the report said, ‘is held by James McCartney Anderson who resides at number 1 Tower Street, Vaucluse’. The report noted that Anderson had faced (by 1977 when it was written) charges for offences such as manslaughter, receiving stolen goods, discharging a firearm and trafficking in currency, but that ‘no convictions are recorded against him’. The part of the building not occupied by the club had been renovated into a number of small rooms. The police report recorded (somewhat naively): It is believed that prostitutes have operated from the Venus Room during the course of its normal trading. Those premises are invariably open for business between 12 midday and 3am the following day. On occasions they have remained open until much later in the morning. The information to hand indicated that prostitutes would solicit their clients from the customers at the Venus Room and take them to the rooms referred to earlier, No 8 Orwell St, through an adjoining door.

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Saffron always had a propensity for blaming others for any wrongdoing uncovered on his premises and in his businesses, and his apologists have been playing that same refrain up until his death. The plain truth is that he was a man with a long history of liquor law offences going back to the 1940s, who twenty years later owned a building and a business (the Venus Room) that was daily in breach of the liquor laws, and who allowed his premises to be illegally used for prostitution. When Detective Sergeant 3rd Class Norman Maroney and Detective Sergeant 2nd Class Karl Desroy Louis Arkins had compiled their 1977 report on the Venus Room they referred not only to the prostitution activities and the out-of-hours trading, but also wrote about the arrests of three people associated with the Venus Room on drugs charges. Their report said: Source of supply in these instances was not established. The inquiries did not establish that any of these persons were supplying the drugs from the Venus Room although there were suspicions that this would have been the case.

When asked by a journalist once if women renting the rooms over the bar were involved in prostitution, Anderson quipped: ‘I don’t think they were playing Scrabble.’ He told a parliamentary committee: ‘I managed that club for a number of years through all tiers of what you class as working ladies, corruption, kickbacks, slings.’ Later he said he was the ‘supervisor’ of the club, and had installed as its manager an acquaintance from his New Zealand days, Shayne Martin-Simmonds (a burglar

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and car thief who later came to notoriety in the Juanita Nielsen affair, but that’s another story). The liquor licence allowed the club to sell alcohol with a meal from six in the evening to midnight. It was blatantly ignored: staying open as long as there were punters there to spend money, often never closing, and always overlooking the requirement of a meal to be served before liquor could be bought. Martin-Simmonds was later convicted—and given a slap on the wrist by the magistrate—on a charge of managing premises used for prostitution. In a separate incident a police raid found heroin and unlicensed pistols in the safe, and stolen goods on the premises, and Martin-Simmonds was charged but acquitted. He too, by that stage, had joined The Invincibles. One of the prostitutes who made a sworn statement to police said the Venus Room in the mid-1970s was ‘nothing more than a brothel’. Up to fifteen prostitutes would mingle with customers every night, hustling a bit of trade. She said that when a customer was found, they would go together out of the club main entrance and into the door at number 8 Orwell Street, where a ‘sitter’—a member of the staff handy with his fists—would take a fee from the woman for use of the room. That fee was sixty per cent of the price the woman charged her client, and it was handed to Anderson. The sitter’s wages were paid from the amount, and the balance was split sixty per cent to Saffron and forty per cent to Anderson. Those payments almost certainly didn’t make it to the company’s accounts. Probably the most serious allegation made about the Venus Room was that child prostitution was quite openly

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offered to anyone interested. In a later court case involving Detective Warren Molloy and Saffron, Judge Kenneth Frederick Erskine ‘Ken’ Torrington told the District Criminal Court that the Venus Room was a ‘blot on the name of Sydney’. But more of Molloy later. Allegations of the Venus Room’s notoriety kept popping up wherever its management team hadn’t plugged the leaks. Noel McArthur, administrator of the Drug Referral Centre in Darlinghurst, had written a letter to Premier Neville Wran—another Fort Street alumnus— in 1978, raising serious allegations about the nightclub. His letter detailed what he said was the ‘open sale of drugs, juvenile prostitution and illegal liquor sales’ at the Venus Room and another Saffron establishment, Club Costello. The letter also said that uniformed and plain-clothed police had been seen in the Venus Room at 4.30 on a Sunday morning drinking with Jimmy Anderson. When asked in parliament whether he’d received the letter and what action had been taken, Wran assured the House that the Commissioner of Police had been asked to investigate the matter. Anyone interested in these things at the time might have had a bit of a chuckle: the Commissioner was the deeply corrupt Frederick John ‘Fred’ Hanson, an active participant in the Saffron franchise game. He and his trusted officers were not about to investigate allegations regarding one of Mr Saffron’s fine establishments! I checked more recently with the long-time Saffron acquaintance who prefers not to be identified, and he assured me that on any night of the week there were at least two quite young child prostitutes operating at the club. There were frequent media stories at the time about

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homeless young kids converging on the Cross and being pressed into prostitution. Saffron’s Venus Room was apparently one of the places where this vile trade was encouraged. There is no record of any further investigation into whether the premises was being used by drug dealers. The obvious reason—and the one for which clear evidence later emerged—was that Abe Saffron had by the mid- to late-1960s achieved his long-sought status of being among ‘The Invincibles’. A close acquaintance of mine who had worked at Saffron’s Carousel nightclub in those heady years explained: ‘We could do anything we wanted. Literally anything. We were untouchable as far as the cops went. We were “The Invincibles”.’ [[START SIDEBAR]]

THERE’RE DANGERS OUT THERE IF YOU’RE NOT INVINCIBLE In the early 1960s I was involved in the weekly dining and entertainment column, ‘Goings on About Town’, published by the Daily Mirror. It involved me going to restaurants and clubs across the city and suburbs, and many a late night was spent at Kings Cross. One club owner I got to know well was Gaston of the Tabou chez Gaston, where the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar now stands opposite the El Alamein fountain in the Cross. He specialised in Latin-American live music and (I think) Egyptian food. This was in the dark days of liquor licensing laws, where any restaurant (unless it was run by Abe or a few other ‘invincible’ people) could only serve liquor brought to the restaurant by the customer to be

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drunk with their meal. An acceptable variation on this was that diners could pre-order their grog and the restaurant buy it in on their behalf, but the bottles had to be clearly marked with a name and table number. One New Year’s Eve, Gaston was getting ready for the big night when Bumper Farrell and the Darlinghurst cops raided. They confiscated all his pre-ordered, correctly labelled liquor, made no secret of the fact to Gaston that it would be used at the Darlinghurst Police Station party that night, and locked Gaston in the paddy-wagon outside his club. ‘They kept me there for hours, like an animal in a cage, with my customers all looking in at me’, wept the big man to me. I told this story to the new, courageous editor of the Sunday Mirror, Zell Rabin, and he assigned a reporter to investigate. The reporter was severely bashed and his life threatened before Rabin told me he thought it was too dangerous to pursue further, and advised me to watch my step on my own rounds (which were seen to be more of a social nature). What did emerge from the inquiries that were made is that Abe Saffron was upset that Gaston was in a prime spot in the Cross, and presumably paid no bribes to police. For that, Gaston learned the dangers on New Year’s Eve 1961 of not being one of The Invincibles. [[boxend]]

A number of things had contributed to Saffron’s invincibility, which is well illustrated by his last court appearance for criminal matters before the taxman finally nailed him in 1987. On Tuesday, 23 October 1962, Saffron was hauled before a magistrate at North Sydney on ten counts of receiving a load of stolen household goods, obviously

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reverting to his old habit. The magistrate dismissed two of the charges and committed him to stand trial in the Quarter Sessions Court, where, on 25 February, he was acquitted on a further three of the charges. And then a friendly attorney-general, Labor’s Robert Reginald ‘Reg’ Downing, decided ‘not to proceed’ with the remaining five charges. The reliable old ‘no-bill’ revisited Saffron for the second time in his life, the former occasion being his illegal housie game in 1952. Once again, the attorneygeneral adhered to the tried-and-true practice of telling nobody why he’d made that decision. Observers of those interesting times would know that Downing knew all about brown paper bags and their intimate relationship with the ‘no-bill’ process. And that, until the tax case, was the end of official police interference in the life of Abraham Gilbert Saffron. No more trials, no more costly and highly creative barristers. It was not, however, an end to Saffron’s thieving ways. In the 1960s a Sydney wholesale whitegoods company run by the late Royce Smeal was importing (among other things) bar refrigerators from a central European country. Smeal received a call from a company not known to him, asking for immediate delivery of about twenty of the small units. They struck an arrangement for payment on delivery. To ensure nothing slipped up, Royce accompanied his delivery driver to the client’s building in Kings Cross, an open-plan office space with a number of people looking busy. The accountant promptly came out to meet them, chequebook in hand, and Royce told his driver to start unloading. The accountant then said he had to take a call, and went off some distance to his desk. When all

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the fridges were unloaded—with Royce concerned about the late hour and the driver’s knock-off time, and the accountant still apparently tied up on the phone—Royce told the receptionist he would call back in the morning for the cheque. When he arrived the next day there was an empty shell: no people, no desks, no refrigerators and certainly no cheque. Some time later Royce was in Melbourne where he attended a party at a serviced apartment block in Darling Street, South Yarra. He noticed the refrigerator was the same brand as those he had imported. He checked the serial number (he had a great memory for such things) and found it was one of the twenty missing units delivered to the disappearing company in Sydney. It didn’t take him long to discover the owner of the apartment block was none other than Abe Saffron. His attempts to get police in Melbourne or Sydney to take action fell on deaf ears. It was not uncoincidental to Saffron’s ‘liberation’ from prosecution during this period that Norman Thomas William Allan had been appointed Police Commissioner in February 1962, after a thirty-three-year desk job in the police force in which he had been fairly isolated from the real world. Among those to advise him on what was going on in the criminal milieu were the deeply corrupt Ray Kelly, his partner in crime, Don Fergusson, and the murderous Fred Krahe. Kelly arranged for Saffron to meet the new boss, and one of the first arrangements they reached was that—for a considerable fee paid in cash to Allan, to be passed on to a charity of his choice—the Commissioner would authorise the issue of special numberplates to the kindly

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and benevolent businessman Abe Saffron. Thus it was that the crook was issued with plates ABE-111 and ABE-222, which he used on his own two cars. He gave ABE-333 to Hilton Kincaid; and ABE-777 was donated to his close friend Emil Kornhauser, who had been associated with Abe’s Cumberland Hotel at Bankstown. Not surprisingly, neither the size of the fee nor the name of the charity was ever disclosed—Abe Saffron became one of the early contributors to the crooked new Commissioner’s retirement fund. There was a joke among Sydney journalists at the time: Norm Allan’s nickname was ‘The Mushroom’— senior cops kept him in the dark and fed him on bullshit. The other event of great magnitude in the 1960s was the election of Robin ‘Bob’ William Askin as Premier of New South Wales—later to beknight and rename himself as ‘Sir Robert’. Born on Thursday, 4 April 1907, at Sydney’s Crown Street Women’s Hospital, Askin was the first of three illegitimate children of William James Askin, a twenty-six-year-old knockabout sailor and railway worker born in Adelaide, and twenty-three-year-old Ellen Laura Halliday from the central west of New South Wales. On completing his intermediate certificate, Bob Askin left school at fifteen, spent two days in the electrical trade where he nearly electrocuted his boss, and then joined the Government Savings Bank of New South Wales as a clerk. As he moved up through banking jobs he opened up an illegal starting price (SP) bookmaking operation that enabled staff—among whom he was known as ‘Slippery Sam’—to have a bet on the races. During war service he became, according to crime writer David Hickie, ‘the battalion SP bookie, dabbled in

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a bit of loan-sharking and ran a two-up game’. He joined the Liberal Party in 1947, despite having not bothered to register to vote from 1937 to 1943. He climbed quickly through party ranks and in 1949 won preselection over twenty candidates for the safe Liberal state seat of Collaroy, later taking over Pittwater after a redistribution. He won the Liberal leadership in 1959 in a close-run 15–13 ballot over Philip Henry Morton after a poor state election result. His first tilt at becoming premier failed with a loss at the March 1962 election, but he finally won on 1 May 1965, ending Labor’s twenty-four-year reign in Macquarie Street. He retained the top job for an historic four consecutive terms until 1975—but let us not get too far ahead of ourselves. With Askin as Premier and Norm ‘The Mushroom’ Allan as long-serving Commissioner of a deeply corrupt police force, New South Wales moved into a period in which—as many writers have observed over the years—corruption was institutionalised. In his draft entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Murray Groot wrote of Askin: Elected in place of a Labor regime seen as ‘worm-eaten’ by ‘graft, corruption, nepotism and general chicanery’, the Coalition was responsible for a police force—led first by Norman Allan, a Labor appointee, and later by Fred Hanson—widely seen as even more corrupt. ‘Crime historians’, Hickie was to write, marked 1965 ‘as the turning point in the development of organised crime in Australia, and especially New South Wales’; campaigning for office, Askin had seen ‘both the potential votes and finance available to him through the SP [bookie] network.’ Certainly Askin, who attended assiduously to inequities

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in police pensions, did little to encourage the enforcement of the laws on gambling, other than to call for police reports; he rejected calls for a racing control board; and rather than bet off-course through the TAB, established in 1964, Askin, himself, maintained an account with one of the biggest SP firms in town. The recommendations of Justice Moffitt’s Royal Commission on Organised Crime in Clubs, an enquiry Askin established, he ‘almost completely’ ignored.

This was all good news, of course, for Abe Saffron, his chief lieutenant James McCartney Anderson, as well as the countless hundreds of others who lived off the proceeds of criminal activity through bribery, blackmail, theft and thuggery. It was good news, too, for some corporate high-fliers (or those soon destined to soar to dizzying heights in their pursuits of true free enterprise), among them a Saffron acquaintance, trucking company boss Peter Abeles. Their association was of a more private nature than the Saffron/Anderson link, although one or two of their business dealings did make controversial headlines over time. Abeles was born in Vienna on Friday, 25 April 1924, of Jewish parents. He grew up in Budapest, and after the 1944 German invasion of Hungary was sent to a Nazi work camp. He came to Australia in 1949, and had many ‘ragsto-riches’ stories written about him in the intervening years; hagiographers seem to have done well in their glorification of some of Australia’s major criminals! As is well known, Abeles became a trucking and transport tycoon, using Thomas Nationwide Transport (TNT) to

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expand into an international conglomerate operating in 180 countries. What is less known about Abeles is that he used this transport web to move—along with huge volumes of legitimate cargoes—large quantities of illegal drugs around Australia and the world, and was closely associated with the notorious Nugan Hand Bank. Michael Hand was involved in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s illegal drug activities in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War years. He teamed up with Australian Frank Nugan, who was involved in the wholesale vegetable industry in the NSW town of Griffith, which was also the centre of a massive illicit marijuana industry. With Sydney-based CIA operative Bernie Houghton they established in the mid1970s the Nugan Hand Bank which, in its short life, became involved in global drug- and gun-running activities. Criminologist Dr Alfred McCoy said the trio ‘cultivated corrupt Australian politicians, Sydney crime syndicates, a fraternity of ex-CIA arms dealers and the CIA’. Among the bank’s complex activities was the operation of largescale tax avoidance schemes in Australia. Abeles even had an association with the US West Coast Mafia and Chicago hit man Aladena ‘Jimmy the Weasel’ Fratianno to assist him in his business dealings with the Teamsters and Longshoremen’s unions in order to ease TNT’s entry into the United States. [[boxbegin]]

AN ‘ABELE’ FIXER . . . BUT LET’S SPREAD THE COSTS When Bob Askin won the 1965 NSW election, Peter Abeles and he became friends. As Marian Wilkinson

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reported on ABC-TV’s Four Corners, Askin found in Abeles ‘a man the State could do business with’. From what ensued over the years, there is no doubt that Abeles found that New South Wales was a state he could do business with. Abeles’ company, TNT, was awarded generous ninety-nine-year leases on large tracts of railway land, giving him unlimited access to move goods by train around the country at minimal cost, while being able to charge his clients full haulage rates. A number of officials of the Transport Workers Union held shares in TNT, a conflict of interest if ever there was one. When TNT expanded its business into the United States, Abeles continued his approach of ‘friendly dealings’ with the unions, in this case the powerful Teamsters Union, which controlled US transport coast to coast and was said to have close ties with the US Mafia. The Four Corners program reported that, back in the 1970s, Teamsters’ west coast vice-president, Rudy Tham, introduced Abeles and TNT General Manager Ross Cribb to west coast Mafia boss Jimmy Fratianno. Abeles claimed he hadn’t become aware that Fratianno was a mobster and hit man until some years later. Neither he nor TNT paid the gangster any money, he said. Not so, according to the mobster, however. Fratianno said: You know, he’s gotta give up money for them to help them, and he got in trouble with this—on the docks and he gave ’em 25 thousand to straighten it out. And now I think— the way he gives ’em money every year, although they do a lot for him, they get him work, they get him business, you know, Peter Abeles gives ’em the money legitimately, he

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don’t give it to ’em under the table, he gives it to a corporation which—he declares it you know, he’s not doin’ anything wrong.

Four Corners also claimed that TNT paid $US300,000 to companies associated with east coast Mafia lieutenant Benny Mangano after he was introduced to TNT officials. Ross Cribb later testified that the payments were for ‘shipping advice’ and were neither illegal not improper. In the 1970s I interviewed a TNT driver who regularly delivered vegetables from the Nugan depot in the NSW town of Griffith. On more than one occasion he was given money at the depot and told to ‘go and have a drink; we’ll load it tonight’, and would return to find his enclosed truck locked with a new padlock. On arrival at Sydney’s Flemington Markets, he was once again told to go to the pub: ‘We’ll unload it today.’ On each occasion he found scraps of marijuana leaves in his truck. Narcotics investigators I spoke to over the years said more marijuana was being produced in Australia at this time than could have been used by the domestic market. Brisbane author Dr John Jiggens sets out a strong case for this in his self-published book, The Sydney Connection, suggesting, for example, that a specific crop grown at Coleambally was always destined for the US market. TNT was the only transport company with links from the Griffith area to trans-Pacific ship transport, and coast-tocoast, and even door-to-door, delivery facilities in the United States. It’s not proof, but it’s a very strong case that TNT was involved in the distribution of drugs within Australia and to overseas destinations.

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Embattled businessmen Thomas and Alexander Barton, under prosecution in 1978 for fraud, alleged that in 1972 Abeles was ‘acting in association with’ Bela Csidei, who was later convicted for major drug offences. Allegations were also made during the long-running case that Abeles and Arthur George headed a syndicate which transferred large amounts of money to Swiss banks. Both denied the claims. Arthur George was a director of TNT from 1973, having been associated with Abeles since 1954. In August 1982, George was found guilty of misconduct by a solicitors statutory committee and fined $1000 ($2812). He later sold the law firm he had established in 1938 to David Baffsky of Simons & Baffsky, a lawyer who (wrote Evan Whitton in Can of Worms II ) was publicly identified as acting in property deals, setting up companies and operating trust funds for Abe Saffron. Peter Abeles and Arthur George were knighted on Askin’s recommendation in 1972. Their close ally, Paul Strasser of Parkes Development, earned his knighthood a year later. Rumours persisted for years that they had each paid Askin a ‘king’s ransom for a queen’s gong’. When Askin left politics he was asked by Abeles to join the TNT Board, and by 1978 had been given 110,000 shares in the multinational corporation. When deeply corrupt policeman and murderer Fred Krahe was forced out of the police force in 1972 he also briefly took up a place on the TNT Board. Krahe later played a crucial role in the removal of auditors from investigating the Nugan company, as they were causing the drug-linked company difficulties.

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In 1979 Premier Neville Wran and Abeles signed a $13 million ($48,946,731) contract for the state-owned Newcastle Shipyards to build a ship for TNT’s bulkships division. By the time the Atlas Dampier rolled down the slipway, the deal had cost New South Wales $7 million ($26,355,932) in losses, and there were suggestions the dockyard had been persuaded to put in a bid for the job that was far too low. The dockyard closed after the debacle with loss of jobs, and Peter Abeles sailed away with a new ship heavily subsidised by NSW taxpayers. In November 1974, federal MP Albert ‘Bert’ James called on the NSW Government to hand over to the Commonwealth the prosecution of ‘arch spivs and racketeers’ now in Latin America. James, a fomer policeman, said the NSW Police Department had paid $ 930,000 ($6,206,652) to Strasser’s Parkes Development for the lease of their headquarters in College Street. ‘Askin signed the lease, under which the police were now paying the company fabulous amounts in rent’, he said, and also claimed the company had raised $15 million ($100,107,296) in loans from the NSW Superannuation Fund. In March 1977, Labor state MP for Heathcote Clifford ‘Cliff’ Mallam took up the theme when he told state parliament that a ‘form of Mafia comprising crooked company directors, many of them close to Askin’, was operating in New South Wales. ‘Bela Csidei flitted out of the country with $1,800,000 ($12,012,875) and has been charged with this offence’, he said: He and Peter Abeles were mentioned in the reports. I refer to that organisation known as Askin’s Knights, or the Hungarian Mafia. Many of these crooked company directors

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use every loophole in the law to see that investigations into their affairs take as long as possible and hopefully are forgotten . . . Many of them travelled overseas with [Askin]. He even took some of them behind the iron curtain. Some of these people were able to borrow through the State Superannuation Fund to finance the construction of large buildings.

This, I hope, provides something of a feel for the less-publicised aspects of the late Peter Abeles and a few of his associates who, in turn, formed a close and beneficial partnership with Abe Saffron. [[boxend]]

Saffron had met Abeles through Jewish religious events— though neither was considered to be deeply committed to their faith. They had much else in common: both were prepared to go to any lengths to free themselves of government or bureaucratic interference in their pursuit of personal wealth and power; both used blackmail as a means of achieving their aims; both believed in cultivating powerful people in influential positions as a way of demonstrating publicly their own elevated social and corporate status. What must have intrigued Abeles in particular was one of the main weapons used by Saffron to achieve these aims: blackmail based on his possession of sexually explicit photographs of the rich and famous. Over time it must have become an open secret that Abe held some evidence of the sex romps. There was never a need to even hint at their possible release in order to apply subtle pressure to achieve some goal: all parties to this sordid charade respected the very power the existence of the photos and the details of their participants exerted, and were only too willing to respond positively to requests for favours.

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It was a society based on the illicit sexual activities of people prominent in Australia’s business, corporate, legal, political and social elite on one hand, and on the other the simple demands from Saffron that neither he nor his nominated friends and associates be prosecuted for doing slightly tamer versions of all that sweaty activity on stage in his clubs. Plus a bit of stealing. And prostitution. And flouting the liquor laws, corporation laws . . . Abeles, a man of great charm and determination with an envied skill for doing business, was more inclined to use his natural assets to win favours, though his name was attached to a number of death threats made over the years to people who might expose his lesser-known activities— myself included. In my case the word was passed down from a somewhat warped private eye from Newport, Tim Bristow, that a group of prominent people headed by Abeles believed (wrongly) that I was responsible for the publication of an anonymous ‘shit-sheet’ newsletter circulated among politicians, police, journalists and others, which made serious allegations of impropriety against Abeles, a state minister or two, and others. They had decided I had become too irritating and was to be removed from the Sydney scene. I telephoned Abeles at his TNT headquarters at Redfern to suggest that he would be most displeased, I was sure, that his name had been linked to a death threat against myself. In syrupy, charming tones oozing insincerity, he tried to assure me he knew nothing of the matter. I didn’t believe it for a moment. For my part I (truthfully) told him that I had nothing to do with the production of the scurrilous but highly interesting newsletter. The matters it had raised were within

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my knowledge—a fact that would have been known to quite a number of people—so I was, perhaps, a ‘natural’ target for a threat over the publication. Another person who was threatened by interests acting on behalf of Peter Abeles was Ken Thomas, the original owner of the trucking company that was taken over to provide the foundations of Abele’s Thomas Nationwide Transport. Thomas informed me in the 1970s he had been told—quite menacingly, he said—that it would be ‘unwise’ of him to try to resist the takeover of his company by Peter Abeles. Abeles’ discovery of the existence of Saffron’s explicit dossiers enabled him to add a new dimension to his powers of persuasive argument with the premiers, prime ministers and prominent businessmen he met regularly. Saffron’s quid pro quo was his increased access to Abeles’ influential circle of acquaintances. That circle included such corporate high-fliers as Arthur George, Paul Strasser, their bag-man John Charody, and the newly elected Premier, Bob Askin, who was quickly cultivated by the wily Peter Abeles—to the latter’s long-term and enormous financial benefit. The loose coalition of crooks and blackmailers, who had been fumbling along for more than a decade, was now coming of age; a tight-knit group was forming and it would develop into a major force in determining who got the nod for advancement, who got the chop, who would be ministers in important state portfolios, and who would not. As remarkable as this might sound, there is strong evidence that this grouping not only existed, but— as we will see—indeed did exert the power and influence

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I ascribe to it. I have dubbed this group ‘The Brotherhood’, and Abe Saffron was in it from the beginning. The group kept tabs on anyone of importance to them in their greater scheme of things: aspiring politicians, policemen on the move up the ladder, their competitors, journalists—and their editors—who poked around too much and the financiers of their grandiose schemes (often the public purse). People who looked like stepping out of line were quietly reminded of some embarrassing moment in their past which had been duly noted (or, if it was of a deviant sexual nature, photographed). People who could not be embarrassed by past actions (mainly because they simply didn’t care about possible exposure) were threatened with violence. To this latter end they engaged the services of thuggish standover gangsters like Leonard Arthur McPherson, who maintained a similar ‘watching and reporting’ brief on the movers and shakers in the criminal milieu. Sitting comfortably beside the main players of The Brotherhood were the crooked cops, who ensured a steady arrest rate of minor thugs to keep the statistics looking good, and guaranteed that their protected brethren were left alone to pay their bribes and ply their trades. It was all very comfortable, and most of Sydney didn’t have an inkling that this was really the way their city and state were being run. The age of The Invincibles had well and truly arrived by the mid- to late-1960s and, a few hiccups aside, would maintain its uninterrupted control of the way things were to function for at least a couple of decades, if not longer. Judge Donald Gerard Stewart, who presided over royal commissions on drug trafficking and the Nugan Hand

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Bank, and was later appointed to chair the National Crime Authority (NCA), found good reason to study Saffron’s activities over these years in each of those posts. He was later to write: Saffron was notorious in Sydney as being untouchable. Whilst a lot of things that I knew were anecdotal things, some of them were not, and he had been around for so long that it was suggested that he was able to do what he liked, when he liked, where he liked, and that he was a corrupter of police and others. I took the view that this man had been getting away with so much for so long, it was about time we tried to stop it. That was part of it . . . I did have some knowledge of him that I had come across in my Royal Commission, and it was quite sickening.

As a small illustration of how Saffron worked things at the street level, a knockabout man called Billy Green had leased a Kings Cross club called the Coconut Jungle at 101 Darlinghurst Road. The head lease was controlled by Abe Saffron. For reasons never explained, in the late 1960s Saffron wanted Green out of the club. The opportunity arose when Green assaulted and killed in his club an American serviceman on R&R leave from the Vietnam War. Green faced a possible murder charge, or at least a manslaughter rap, but Saffron was able to arrange with the police—and with no objection from the Minister of Justice—for the charge to be dropped to assault, on the proviso Green left the Cross and stayed away. Green did as he was bid and Saffron renamed the place Staccato in memory of his former club on Orwell Street. By that

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stage, The Invincibles could indeed get away with murder. Saffron hired a man called Jimmy Burrell as the Staccato’s manager and got his long-term friend, Peter Farrugia, to front the business for him. Of Maltese extraction, Farrugia (or ‘Farr’ as he preferred to be known) was originally from Broken Hill. He arrived in Kings Cross to try to take the area over (from Abe’s control), but ended up in partnership with Saffron, running clubs and brothels and dealing in drugs. That partnership took aim at another Saffron tenant in a club known as the Pink Panther, at 41 Darlinghurst Road. Nicholas Coumbis had a fixed-rent lease for ten years. In the late 1960s rents in Kings Cross were going through the ceiling, so Saffron wanted to get rid of Coumbis. But how to break the lease? Saffron persuaded Coumbis to sublet part of the premises to him (through one of his many companies, Metropolitan Trade Finance Pty Ltd) for three years from 3 July 1967 for a yearly rent of $8320 ($79,862). In other words, he was renting his own premises from himself via a sublease from his tenant. Saffron, the subtenant, then set about refusing to pay his rent, getting himself in breach of the terms of the head lease. It was too clever by half, but for Abe Saffron it proved a winner. In 1970, Coumbis, a resident of Double Bay and then aged sixty-two, sued the Saffron company for back rent of $5760 ($51,773) due from July 1969 to the end of March 1970, and the District Court backed Coumbis in its ruling. Saffron engaged a young solicitor called Frank Walker to take the case. In the strict terms of the complex laws covering landlord and tenancy, under which these matters

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were to be determined in the courts, Walker considered that Saffron was in the right. But not a single Australian judge agreed: possibly, Walker joked with me recently, because the name ‘Saffron’ was involved. The case went to the NSW Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the High Court—where Saffron’s former lawyer Garfield Barwick was heading a bench of four eminent jurists— and finally to the Privy Council in London in the mid-1970s, where the wise Lords agreed with Walker. Coumbis by then was long gone from the Cross. Walker, meanwhile, had been elected to state parliament in a by-election in 1971 to become the Labor Member for Georges River, in Sydney’s south. Walker was convinced his reading of the law was correct and had battled on, but some in the Saffron camp became a little concerned. Peter Farrugia threatened Walker—‘he heavied me’ was the lawyer’s term—because the case was being lost in the courts. Walker rang his client and the ever-gentlemanly Saffron apologised profusely and assured Walker he had nothing to do with Farrugia’s shocking behaviour. Walker never again worked for Saffron and, as we shall see, there was no lasting friendship or commitment between the two men. Nick Coumbis died in November 1981, aged seventy-three. • A few freelancers came into the business and managed to withstand the virtual monopolisation of the Kings Cross strip-and-sex joints by Abe Saffron. One was ‘Tubby’ Black, who for twenty years ran the Pussy Galore club opposite Saffron’s main clubs in Darlinghurst Road. Now living in

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genteel retirement in the country, Tubby thought Abe was a ‘perfect gentleman’. He had never been predatory about Tubby’s club, and the two had an unwritten understanding that they would help each other out if there was a problem like a shortage of performers on a given night. ‘He and I were friends and I won’t say anything bad about the man’, Tubby told me a few days after the news of Saffron’s death in September 2006. ‘I handed over loads of money demanded of me by crooked coppers over the years, and Lennie McPherson unsuccessfully tried to take my club over, but I never had a problem with Abraham or his business partners’, he added. Tubby Black has a rare charm, a sharp wit and a straight right: perhaps that combination is what kept him in the good books with the rapacious Abe Saffron. However, Saffron used Tubby Black indirectly to help get rid of a few ‘undesirables’ from his clubs and businesses. Charlie Seal was one. Seal was manager for a while with Billy Green at the Coconut Jungle, and considered widely to be a very unpleasant person. I have learned that Saffron spoke to Dick Reilly, the former Roosevelt’s doorman turned baccarat ‘king’, who was a close friend of Black’s. Tubby then spoke to Charlie Seal, who understood the serious ‘weight’ behind the message he was being given. Tubby Black took a call from a worried Seal and went to his home to investigate. He noticed gunman ‘Mad’ Ray Brouggy’s car parked nearby and a lot of bullet holes in Charlie Seal’s front door. (Seal had already been almost wiped out by gunshot from Mad Ray.) Then he spotted Brouggy on the roof of a nearby building, brandishing a

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rifle and laughing fit to bust. Black said he didn’t have to do a lot of convincing to get Charlie to climb in his truck and head for the bush for a while. After that event Saffron called Tubby Black ‘the magician’, saying: ‘You can make blokes just disappear!’ Black assured me no harm had come to the people he made vanish from the Cross: ‘They just went away to somewhere else.’

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5 ANOTHER WAR, ANOTHER FORTUNE: VIETNAM BLUE PUTS CRIMS IN THE BLACK Another war, another fortune

THE VIETNAM WAR was the news story of the 1960s. On Thursday, 24 May 1962, Australian Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies sent thirty-two Australian military ‘advisers’ to South Vietnam. To justify the move there was talk of the ‘domino theory’: that communism was on the march south and would eventually swamp Australia. The real reason for Australia’s commitment was because America had asked us; then, as now, Australia was subservient to Uncle Sam’s bidding. By the end of 1962, the United States had 10,000 troops in Vietnam. This number was to escalate to more than half a million fighting men by war’s end. Australia, too, committed increasing numbers of troops until their withdrawal a decade later with 424 dead, 2369 wounded, and many returning psychologically scarred for life. But while the fighting was in full force, there were people who [ 98 ]

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had never been to war who realised there was money to be made. It was ever thus in wars, as it will ever be. In 1967 Australia began to be used as one of the rest and recreation (R&R) destinations in the Pacific region for American military men on leave from the Vietnam conflict. During the next four years more than 300,000 American troops would spend their six-day leave in Sydney; it is estimated that during this time they spent a staggering $80 million ($763 million). Much of that, of course, was spent in and around Kings Cross. The men (many of them looked more like boys) were ripped off left, right and centre. I recall a cab driver boasting to me how he and his colleagues ‘made a killing’ night after night. They’d park outside Whisky Au Go Go on William Street, close to the fleshpots of Kings Cross, and cock their meter flags so it looked like they were for hire, but in fact the meters were already ticking over. When the drunken Americans left the club looking for more fun, they’d clamber into the cab and ask to be taken to the Cross. At their destination a few hundred yards up the road, the cabbie would point to a meter with $50 ($477) or more on it for what should have been at the most a couple of dollars in fare; their passengers rarely complained, either too drunk to care or not having any idea what the going rate should be anyway. But that was penny-ante stuff compared with what was going on in the clubs at the top of the hill—most of which were owned and controlled by Abe Saffron. For the second time in his life, the club owner would reap a fortune from the misfortune of war. •

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Abe had been adding Kings Cross properties and clubs to his portfolio to meet the growing demand for live strip shows. With Peter Farrugia, Saffron opened the iconic Pink Pussycat club and, in the same theme, the Pink Parrot. (The great historian Donald Horne was later to say that the ‘Pussycat’ should be declared a heritage building.) Farrugia—the man who had ‘heavied’ Saffron’s lawyer Frank Walker—became known as ‘The Black Prince’ around Kings Cross. Farrugia is not to be confused with another, independent, club operator, Lee Ramsay, who was also called ‘The Black Prince’. Ramsay was the wealthy son of a family that had made its fortune in the wrought-iron business. Ramsay Wrought-iron Gates and Fences, run by his widowed mother, was a regular advertiser in the afternoon tabloids from the 1950s. However, Lee chose another line of business, opening a cellar strip joint known as the Paradise Club and later the Foxhole. As his guest, doing my rounds for the Daily Mirror’s ‘Goings on About Town’ section, I sat in the wee small hours with the handsome, charming man and some of his male acquaintances. In the heady atmosphere of the club, and no doubt aided by a quiet ale or three, I momentarily forgot the warning that I should never mention the words ‘black prince’ in his company. Committing that ‘blue’, I asked him how come he’d acquired that moniker. He looked shocked, but no more than I when one of the men at the table leapt up beside me and, hand in jacket pocket, thrust what he pretended was a gun at my temple and said: ‘Don’t ever say that to Mr Ramsay again!’ While I was quite sure it wasn’t a gun in his pocket, I was

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not happy to see him! A discreet hand movement from Lee and the man growled, shrugged, removed his hand from his otherwise empty pocket and resumed his seat. My apology was instantly accepted and we resumed drinking and chatting and watching the women on stage as though nothing had happened. It was like an incident out of a movie set in Al Capone’s Chicago, except it was in Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia. Some of the players at night in that seedy suburb really took their roles seriously. But I digress. • The Saffron business mix was strip clubs, restaurants of dubious merit (but at least you could get an after-hours’ drink), sex shops selling porn, and brothels. The venues included the Crazy Horse, the Creole nightclub, Gilligans bar at Bondi (which he claimed Anderson owned), the brothel at the Kingsdore Hotel and Appin Private Hotel, La Bastille and Laramie restaurants, the Lodge 44 Motel at Edgecliff, the Napoli Restaurant in Macleay Street and, later, the Carousel and the Persian Room Theatre Restaurant, down a flight of stairs from the Darlinghurst Road strip. This latter one was his ‘prestige’ premises, with similar décor to the Pink Panther and a classier ambience than the Venus Room. After having deviously got rid of his long-term tenant Nick Coumbis, as we have seen, Saffron put ‘Last Card’ Louis Benedetto in charge at the pink-themed Pink Panther. A corridor led off Darlinghurst Road to a ticket office on the right-hand side of the ‘Panther’. The lighting and sound booth behind the ticket box contained a

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sophisticated lighting system designed by Peter Farrugia’s younger brother Vince. The main area was a rectangular room panelled with a laminex-type material in a pseudomarble finish. There was a small stage off the rear wall and a catwalk extending up the centre of the seating area, allowing more punters to get ‘up close and personal’ with the performers. Strippers had a cassette of the music for their performance pieces, which they carried from club to club. Peter Farrugia’s wife Yvonne would lay the tracks down on her master tape while the performers prepared in the dressing room at the rear. The Carousel—or Les Girls as it was known when he bought it—had a wide, commanding street frontage on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Roslyn Street. Glass display cases paraded saucy photos of the all-male drag queen performers. In the wide entrance in Roslyn Street, just down from the corner, a few stairs—with more display cases on show—led to a lobby and a curved stairway up to the first-floor landing. A ‘hat-check’ booth served as a ticket office and double doors led into the main multilevel showroom. Along the rear were three toilet doors marked ‘Men’, ‘?’, and ‘Women’. The colour scheme was red and gilt, and the waitresses wore black leotards and white mini-aprons. There were other establishments, and more to be added to the portfolio in time—and every one of them was operated in blatant breach of the liquor laws and prostitution laws, and most were in nightly breach of pornography controls. They were never prosecuted, despite a regular stream of policemen visiting at least one of the clubs on a nominated day each week. The money

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wrapped in bundles protected the clubs against raids by the police, who should have been kept busy with prosecutions. Jim Anderson, whose role by this time had expanded to managing several clubs, was later asked— after he had fallen out with Abe—whether the poker machines installed at the clubs were legal. ‘Nothing was legal at that stage’, he replied. A spot of illegality didn’t bother the R&R soldiers, and young American kids poured into the clubs in their thousands, almost manically seeking relief from the nightmares that no doubt haunted many after their ordeals in Vietnam. They wanted thrills, lots of liquor, raunchy entertainment, plenty of sex and a continuation of the drugs most of them had been using in the war zone. It took a few negotiations, but Abe Saffron and his acquaintances in Kings Cross could provide all those requirements. Liquor and raunchy entertainment was Saffron’s speciality. He never denied his involvement in prostitution, but there were just not enough women to go around to satiate the sex-starved soldiers. And there had not been a large-scale heroin trade in Sydney up till then—marijuana was doing the rounds, and among the social elite cocaine was the party drug of choice. But the reluctant warriors against the hypothetical communist dominoes had been fed CIA-provided heroin in the war zone to help them believe in their lost cause, and that’s what they wanted during their six days in Sydney. Help was at hand to bolster the number of women and ensure a steady and rapidly increasing supply of drugs. A loudmouth Texan millionaire, Bernie Houghton, had taken over the premises of Gaston’s old Tabou nightclub

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and expanded it to become the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar. He had also acquired another club, the Texas Tavern, just down the hill in Macleay Street, in which Saffron and close associates of Peter Abeles, Paul Strasser and John Charody, were also directors. Both establishments were aimed squarely at the R&R trade and both enjoyed a steady flow of police through the doors, anxious to ensure the franchise operations continued smoothly in these new sites. Houghton and Saffron became close associates, both interested in the common cause of providing goods and services demanded from this new wave of cashed-up Yankee soldiers. It was later established by government inquiries into the growing drug trade in Australia that the Bourbon and Beefsteak was the first place in the country where heroin was openly traded. The trade ran under police protection (in the usual manner) and had the added security of Lennie McPherson providing protection to Houghton’s establishments. McPherson also introduced into the arrangement a steady supply of women, who were brought into Australia in a lucrative white slave racket set up with the proprietors of a city social and gambling club with strong ties in a number of Asian countries. McPherson arranged the ‘franchise’ payments for this racket to the appropriate police. Another facet of Houghton’s life became a topic of interest to journalists and investigators from the late 1960s on: his involvement with the American Central Intelligence Agency. Journalist Brian Toohey later discussed the matter on ABC Radio, saying that Houghton had become the number three in the CIA-controlled Nugan Hand

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Bank. Toohey revealed that an ex-British intelligence officer, Peter Wilcott, had told him and Australian narcotics authorities that Houghton had been working as an undercover intelligence operative in Australia since the late 1960s. Respected author and criminologist, Dr Alfred W. McCoy, in his authoritative book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Drug Trade, described Houghton as a ‘mysterious American expatriate with impeccable intelligence contacts’. With Nugan Hand Bank founders Frank Nugan and Michael Hand, Houghton had undoubted links to the CIA-controlled opium trade in Southeast Asia, and also traded in poker machines and anything illicit out of which quick, tax-free money could be made. McPherson’s involvement with Houghton and others in the white slave trade was uncovered by the highly secretive Australian Security Intelligence Service (ASIS) in the late 1960s. An ASIS agent had been assigned to investigate illegal immigration arising from federal government concerns of ‘communist infiltration’. The agent detected no such movements but did discover a large-scale racket which brought women into Australia to be enslaved in the sex industry. The major involvement of McPherson and Houghton in the activity was included in the agent’s 1969 report to the government. As all ASIS reports were shared with the American CIA, it undoubtedly did not take long for Houghton to learn that this aspect of his activities had been discovered. The ASIS agent was told the assignment had been scrapped on instruction from a senior federal government official. The main beneficiary of the white slave importation, he later told me, was unquestionably the largest operator of prostitution in

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Australia at the time. That was a title which fitted only one person: Abraham Gilbert Saffron. Abe had brothels attached to, or incorporated into, some of his clubs, like the Venus Room, and he owned several hotel-like premises that were used solely as brothels, such as the Kingsdore Hotel and the Appin private hotel. His close association with Houghton and McPherson assured him of a constant flow of new bodies to be enslaved into those arms of his business. But, as in most of his business transactions, Saffron did his best to conceal his involvement in the trade through a maze-like corporate structure of his empire and—as he had done in his earliest days in the illicit liquor trade—he used friends and family as frontmen in his organisations. In the case of the drugs he was not directly involved in the trade: he merely permitted drugs to be made available on his premises (in itself a crime). They were supplied by people not connected to him in any corporate way, and then sold to people who were his clients. In this respect, the ex-ASIS intelligence officer suggested, Saffron was a ‘facilitator’ in the drug trade rather than an operative. Saffron was, however, a direct operative in prostitution, illegal at the time, although there was no evidence to link him directly with the white slave racket, even though as the operative at the end of the process he would clearly have been an accessory after the fact. Through his use of ‘dummies’, his corporate manoeuvres and his massive corruption of police, Saffron had moved close to the top in the ranks of Australia’s organised crime operators. It therefore becomes somewhat semantic to argue whether or not he had ‘direct links’ with the

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global gangsters who operated the Nugan Hand Bank, for example. Through his long and close association with one of the bank’s major executives, Bernie Houghton, Saffron would have been in a position to deal with the bank without the fact ever being disclosed, and it was later revealed that many clients’ identities were kept confidential. Houghton was later to tell a joint NSW–Commonwealth task force on drug trafficking that he had known Saffron for years, and Michael Hand produced a note which indicated a transaction in Hong Kong valued at $50,000 ($476,994) between Saffron and the bank, which Saffron subsequently denied. Saffron said that of those involved with Nugan Hand, he had met only Frank Nugan—clearly not the truth because he admitted he also knew Bernie Houghton. [[boxbegin]]

BROTHELS ON A ‘BULL RUN’ While Abe Saffron was building himself into the prostitution ‘supremo’ in Sydney, he faced some severe competition. In the laneways in East Sydney, a few minutes’ stroll from Saffron’s clubs and brothels in Kings Cross, a long-established prostitution racket had thrived in the tiny cottages in Woods Lane and Liverpool Lane which were rented out at $200 ($1908) for each eighthour shift. The laneways were packed with potential customers and ‘rubber-neckers’—men just out for a ‘bit of a look’—and the women did a roaring trade. Police in the vice squad were paid to stay away, and there was a roster for the working women to front the magistrates courts to reassure concerned members of the

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public that police, who quoted a vigorous arrest rate whenever asked, were ‘doing all they can’ to ‘stamp out’ illegal prostitution. Businesses in competition with this laneway trade would regularly make arrangements with other police divisions and factions to undertake what was known as ‘the bull run’. Twice a week a large Ford V8 police ‘paddy wagon’ would drive quietly into Liverpool Lane with its lights off, turn into the narrow Woods Lane, flick its headlights onto high beam and take off at a high speed into the crowds. Regulars—and the working women—always seemed forewarned when this extraordinarily dangerous practice was about to happen. Men were yanked into doors which were slammed shut before the vehicle roared through. Those caught unawares clung to the sandstone walls of the tiny houses, precariously perched on the footpath little wider than a size-nine shoe. There were never any reports of anyone being run down, but enough people were probably frightened into moving their loyalties up the hill to the Kings Cross establishments, making the whole ‘bull run’ a good corporate strategy for Abe Saffron. The man who controlled most of the laneway bordellos, Joe Borg, was blown to bits as he started his car at 11 a.m. on Thursday, 28 May 1968. He was at the time appealing against a conviction of bribing a consorting squad detective. A police informer, Keith Keillor, was charged with having incited two men of Maltese extraction (as was Borg) to commit the murder. They were sentenced to life imprisonment, Keillor to seven years. There was no evidence to link the murder

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to police or to Saffron interests. Those ‘brothel battles’, as crime writer David Hickie described them, seemed to rage between warring factions of East Sydney’s Maltese community. [[boxend]]

Many individuals and organisations had dealings with the bank, which pursued legitimate business vigorously while it developed its international financing of clandestine arms and drugs dealing for the CIA. The Sydney City Council, for example, placed one—and only one—of its overnight money-market investments with Nugan Hand. That did not make the council party to an illegal act any more than one Saffron transaction would have made a criminal of him. One can only wonder why, then, in the face of evidence from one of the bank’s founders, did Saffron even bother to deny the transaction—especially so vigorously. The task force report had this to say: There is little doubt that Saffron was at one time involved in at least this one transaction with Nugan Hand. That at least Saffron chose to lie about his association with Hand and both Houghton and Saffron chose to lie about the transaction only adds to suspicion that there was something either illegal or improper about it.

Saffron vigorously denied for the rest of his life any involvement in the drug trade, but never went so far as to deny an involvement in prostitution. • Saffron’s businesses in Kings Cross were booming fit to bust. He was also expanding into pubs, clubs and restau-

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rants in South Australia, and was on the lookout to add to his property list in Perth. He had not, it would appear, by the late 1960s thought of spreading his influence outside Australia. But a longtime friend tried to persuade him to consider such a move. Sydney-based yachtsman, gambler and king of the pinball parlours throughout Australia and Southeast Asia, cigar-chomping Jack Rooklyn, had in 1967 become the Australian arm of the American poker machine company, Bally—a corporation later revealed to be owned by some of the heavyweights of the US Mafia. Saffron later told the media that he had known Rooklyn ‘for many, many years’, and that he knew nothing adverse about the man. They had gone into a business venture together through Burbridge Properties Pty Ltd, which was one of the companies Saffron was using to expand his activities in South Australia. Rooklyn was one of half a dozen directors of the firm. In 1968 the pair met on a regular basis, Saffron later confirmed to the Moffitt Royal Commission. The US Mafia’s ‘man down-under’ already ran casinos in Djakarta, and Rooklyn wanted Saffron to add the dimensions of restaurant, nightclub and brothel to the Indonesian business. In the same year as his Indonesian talks with Rooklyn, another of Saffron’s acquaintances celebrated an important victory: Bob Askin had gone to the polls on 1 February and chalked up his second successive win as Premier of New South Wales. That event beyond doubt gave a boost in confidence to the businessmen who prided themselves as Askin’s supporters, particularly those who

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thought of themselves as ‘The Invincibles’. But as always in the hurly-burly of the life of Abe Saffron, there was a dark cloud looming to spoil the good times. So it was in the late 1960s.

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6 PICTURES TO DIE FOR: BLACKMAIL DOSSIERS GET OUT OF HAND Pictures to die for

SHE CAME INTO town that Friday night intent on making a killing. It all went horribly wrong: she was the one who ended up dead. The glamorous red-haired woman, expensively dressed, climbed out of a taxi outside Chequers nightclub in Sydney, paid and generously tipped the driver, and walked towards the doorway of the nightspot and the deal of her life. For far too long, prostitute and ‘society photographer’ Shirley Bega thought she’d been on the wrong end of the camera: now she was focused on a starring role in the rotten blackmail racket that had maintained a public perception of her criminal boss as a highly successful, sometimes controversial yet an unquestionably charitable businessman. Under her right arm she clutched her large black patent-leather handbag. It contained the keys to her wealth and liberation: images of more than a dozen of the city’s most prominent citizens who had unknowingly been photographed in sexually explicit [ 112 ]

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and highly compromising moments. Pictures undoubtedly worth not only a thousand words but also maybe quite a few thousand dollars. Pictures Shirley had taken herself through the two-way mirrors at the orgy venues. And details of the participants—a media magnate and a leading barrister together with a young boy (Shirley had the kid’s name and address); a Supreme Court judge with a schoolgirl (also known); a state minister with two prostitutes. Photos that Shirley had stolen from her employer and was about to put onto the open market to the highest bidder, potentially shattering the public’s chimera of her boss and the proud public reputations of his wealthy and influential victims. As she was about to step onto the club’s curved stairway down to where the action was, and where she’d made an appointment to meet a man she hoped would do business with her, a strong hand grabbed her left arm. Turning, she saw her estranged husband, Sonny Russell. Without speaking he dragged her away from the portal to her dreams, and around the corner to Pitt Street, outside a pawn shop—a place of broken dreams—near the entry to a winos’ bar—a house of broken spirits. In this setting it’s not hard to imagine what happened next. Sonny was under instructions from their criminal boss to recover the photographs and documents, whatever it took. ‘He’s found out the files are missing’, Sonny snapped. ‘You have to give me the pictures to take back to him, Shirl.’ He pulled at the purse against her strengthening grip on it. ‘All shit’s broken loose!’

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‘It’s too late, Sonny. I’ve got to go through with this’, she said. It was her escape route from her vile life. She’d thought about this long and hard, and no one was going to stop her. Sonny pulled a pistol from under his jacket, and that’s the last she knew; her dream of wealth and freedom shattered by a single bullet through her chest. To his horror, Sonny saw three men emerge from a large black car parked nearby. Police had watched as he murdered his wife. Detective Sergeant Herb Talarico grabbed Shirley’s bag from his hand. ‘We’ll take these’, he barked. But they did not arrest Sonny. They didn’t even take the gun from him. One of Talarico’s offsiders, a detective constable, just arranged for the dead (or dying) body on the pavement to be discreetly removed, as directed by his senior officer, and the telltale smear of blood to be washed away. All trace of Shirley Bega’s last moments were obliterated. No record of her death or burial was created. ‘Go and tell your boss we’ve got his dirty pictures now’, said Talarico. ‘Go and tell Abe that we will run his little blackmail racket from now on.’ The third, most junior, policeman in the Talarico team, horrified by the experience, was unprepared to risk his own career—or even his life—by reporting the incident to more senior officers. But years later he tried to tell the story of that dramatic night which changed forever the way the Australian underworld operated, an underworld in which one Abe Saffron was a major player. I picked up bits and pieces of the story, but nobody else really wanted to listen to the frustrated copper. His story was too

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fantastic, and by the time he’d decided to tell it he had long since left the police force and had drowned his misery in alcohol. I later attempted to track down Sonny Russell. He’d migrated to Canada a few years after the event and had died there some years hence. So Sydney had settled down to what it has done best from its very beginnings: it left the crooked cops and crims to run their business without too much publicity or interference. For the rest of us, well, it was the late 1960s, the music was rockin’ and the surf was up at Bondi, and a couple of cold Resch’s beers stopped us worrying about such trivialities. • The truth of Saffron’s blackmail racket has always been difficult to pin down. The Shirley Bega story came to me in scraps over the years and with slight variations, from a few sources—not all of them with a totally reliable reputation. But to understand the ‘real’ Abe Saffron I needed to unearth the truth about his blackmail dossiers, because this racket underpinned everything else: all the other illegalities and all the other examples of outrageous and scandalous behaviour that have peppered the media and maintained a public curiosity about the man we came to know as Mr Sin. One thing is certain, however: the dossiers the police took that night lived on for many decades, long after Shirley Bega had gone to her unpublicised and premature death. • Abe Saffron was fanatical about sex. He was, from direct accounts told to me, a tireless performer who longed for

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variety. He was an exhibitionist and believed his sexual appendage to be of great interest and fascination to all others (particularly, but not exclusively, females). One of his perversions was whipping naked women, and then having them whip him back. He was actually supplied with some of the ‘tools’ of sadomasochistic sexual activity by none other than Sydney’s best-known dominatrix, Madam Lash, who was a tenant of his. When word got out much later that the Costigan Royal Commission had given Saffron the codename ‘Gomorrah’, those who knew him had a quiet chuckle. [[boxbegin]]

UNASKED QUESTIONS ANSWERED: COSTIGAN DIGS DEEP There’s a rule-of-thumb in politics that you never launch an independent inquiry into a problem unless you know the answers you’re likely to get as a result. It appears Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser ignored that dictum when, in 1982, in league with the then Liberal Government in Victoria, he appointed Frank Xavier Costigan QC to head a royal commission into the alleged criminal activities of the Federated Ships Painters and Dockers Union. The decision was aimed to politically damage the Labor Party through its association with the union movement. After starting his inquiry on Wednesday, 1 October 1980, Costigan certainly uncovered some nasty behaviour among that group before spreading his wings in a way Fraser could never have contemplated. Digging deep into the huge area of ‘organised crime’, the most significant

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of Costigan’s findings was the massive tax avoidance schemes operated by big business and many prominent Liberal Party members. Abe Saffron was named as a major player in organised crime and a tax avoidance scheme beneficiary. [[boxend]]

Saffron moved on from photographing his sexual antics to filming those of the inner circle of family and friends who cavorted with him. A seemingly endless parade of showgirls and higher-class prostitutes had no qualms about getting naked among groups of Abe’s associates. In the mid-1960s I spoke to a couple of female participants in the orgies, and that was the picture they painted. I also recorded in 2006 lengthy interviews with a person close to Saffron, who confirmed and strengthened the details of the stories I had first collected more than forty years earlier. He confirmed that photographs of the orgies were circulated among a small group of trusted Kings Cross identities for their titillation, and to boost Saffron’s growing self-image as a sexual ‘marathon man’. His marriage to Doreen was a farce. In 1960 he had taken on a permanent lover, Biruta Hagenfelds, a Tivoli showgirl (as revealed in a 1977 article I wrote for Nation Review) for whom he built a comfortable home at Kensington and who was mother to his daughter, Melissa. But from all available accounts, he spent most nights in the company of many other showgirls and prostitutes. Saffron also had a sexual relationship with a close relative of his, a fact confirmed to me, remarkably, by the other person involved.

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As mentioned earlier, it was Saffron’s association with the illegal abortion racketeer Dr Stuart-Jones that led to the idea of formalising some of the sexual romps they offered. These specialised (or more precisely, ‘deviant’) opportunities satiated the sexual peccadilloes of prominent—and essentially wealthy—citizens who were happy to pay generously for a ‘kinky’ session once or twice a week. My Abe insider told me about the ‘romper-rooms’, as they became known, which were luxuriously furnished with lots of big soft cushions, richly brocaded chaise longues, and huge beds and a well-stocked bar. There was soft music, a screen for projecting pornographic movies on demand and mirrors all round, of which at least one was the two-way viewing post behind which the photographer was located. The rooms were brightly lit, to help provide better ‘exposure’ for the photographer. The informant also confirmed that the photographs were taken mainly by Shirley Bega. When she was sometimes a participant in the ‘romps’, somebody else would operate the camera. Bega organised the prostitutes, showgirls and children, and arranged their payment from the bundles of cash Saffron maintained in a small safe at each of the two locations, the White House and the Appin Private Hotel. Bega also maintained files on the names and contact details of the people she hired, and noted in the files which of Abe’s ‘clients’ had been with which of her people, with dates and times. The rolls of film were taken to a trusted processing laboratory that Saffron had used for his earlier, more amateur, photographic sessions with his playmates. The prints and negatives were attached to the files Shirley had compiled, and those from the

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sessions at the Appin were centralised at the White House. Shirley and Saffron were the only people who had access to the two safes. Shirley may not have comprehended why Saffron simply filed the information away and didn’t use it to demand money from his clients. But she must have seen an opportunity to make a quick sale to escape from Sydney and the lifestyle she would have felt degrading. It is understood she contacted a man who was prepared to pay a large sum of money for the files. We know this from the story the third policeman later told me. From that source we also know she took a number of sets of photographs and their associated files, placed them in a large black satchel, took the cab into the city and was about to enter Chequers nightclub when her estranged husband Sonny Russell grabbed her. From that we can deduce that Saffron had quickly discovered that files were missing and had despatched Sonny to recover them, at any cost. It is possible that Saffron might even have known of the planned treachery beforehand. We can also deduce that Saffron or Sonny had alerted a contact within the police force to a potential problem involving Shirley. It was certainly not a coincidence that one of the most corrupt police officers on the force at the time, Detective Sergeant Talarico, was parked where he would have had a clear view of the scene. And we also know that Talarico took possession of the black satchel containing the incriminating material and arranged for the removal of Shirley Bega’s body. Another part of this remarkable story comes from a most unusual source, and I would not have given it a

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moment’s consideration except for one salient fact: I was able to prove beyond doubt the existence of the ‘excerpts of dossiers’ this man referred to related clearly to the material that was snatched from under Sonny’s arm. The reason for casting doubt on the credibility of this informant is that he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, a mental condition in which he could have invented his whole extraordinary tale. Here’s how my research unfolded. In July 1975, a story broke in the Sydney media that Juanita Nielsen had vanished and fears were held for her safety. Juanita was the somewhat rebellious heir of the old Mark Foy’s retail dynasty who had gone to live in a small terrace house in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, from where she produced a fortnightly local newspaper. She sided with residents and squatters who opposed a large and controversial redevelopment in her street. There was a strong sense of ever-present violence in this confrontation between the pro- and anti-developer camps. A journalist colleague of mine, Barry Ward, spoke to me about Juanita’s disappearance and—just a couple of weeks after she had vanished—we began what evolved into a three-year-long investigation into that case. Beyond its relevance to this story, and specifically to Abe Saffron, that is a tale for another time and place. Suffice to say that from the outset we kept an open mind as to the possible causes for her disappearance, while many of our acquaintances—and people we met on that unusual journey—were adamant that she had been taken off the scene simply because of her vocal opposition to the rede-

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velopment in Victoria Street. We needed convincing that this, or any other reason, was the true cause. As part of our activities—and out of concern for our personal safety—we developed and maintained a high media profile during our investigations. Any new important information we came across we shared with supportive colleagues in radio, TV and the print media, a strategy we considered was our best possible life insurance policy. In response to one of our radio interviews, an inmate at Parramatta jail, Allan William Honeysett, wrote a lengthy letter to me care of my union office. Dated 14 October 1975, the letter opened (verbatim) with this: I heard your interview with Steve Liebman today and was rather amused at the incidents that you related to him. Let me assure you that you were on the right track or should I say the right ‘smell’. But let me suggest to you that if you are prepared to delve into something that is very much more than just the annihilation of Juanita Nielsen then I will say good luck and I am prepared to give you some information that will rock you back on your heels or for that matter I will let you know that Juanita Nielsen was in fact in the act of editing an expose-type autobiography for me. She approached one of my associates who is an undercover investigator and then between us we agreed to supply certain information to her which she required and in turn she would print 1000 copies of my Diary of Dynamite. So my associate photostated sixteen dossiers on certain prominent people and also the info that Juanita wanted. She claimed she would either instigate a Bigger

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than Watergate investigation or wind up dead. She was right, she wound up dead.

The letter went on to list names of many prominent people in Australia, with linked accusations of a range of corrupt and criminal behaviour. The list included the former premier, Bob Askin, and some of the people he had knighted, as well as Norm Allan, Abe Saffron, leading business people and a couple of judges. Then: I contacted John Glebe and showed him abbreviated excerpts of the 16 dossiers that were handed to Juanita Nielsen. This was done in the presence of one Mitchell [sic] Robertson solicitor from McClelland Wallace and Landa and with my permission on 28/8/75 these excerpts were sent to Mr Jim Cavanagh, Minister for Police and Customs, ACT.

His letter warned of dangers involved with this material and, most remarkably, Honeysett claimed he had been hired to rob a bank to: . . . retrieve information that is being used by four cops to blackmail two judges, a barrister, queens counsel and a very prominent businessman. This information consisted of photographic evidence, documented evidence of names and places and was compiled by Shirley Bega who ‘passed away’ in the police cells.

Honeysett went on to claim he had become a ‘number one enemy’ of crooked politicians and the ‘faceless men’ behind the political arena because of the ‘works dossiers’ he and his associates had compiled, and that this was shown

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in ‘the abortive sentence I received. 28 years. You see’, he continued, ‘I had a dossier on Justice Isaacs about his gambling debts and also a dossier on his nephew Abe Saffron for his general crime . . .’. There were other allegations about more people, and his two foolscap typewritten pages signed off with: ‘Respectfully yours, Allan William Honeysett, No 3 Parramatta Prison, ex-international industrial investigator’. It was an exceptional document, making—if they could be proven—remarkable allegations about many leading people in our society. There were enough leads in the letter to begin some immediate checking. Johnny Glebe was secretary of the Water Board employees union and had spoken of a work ban on the Victoria Street development. He had been having an affair with Juanita Nielsen prior to her disappearance and had offered a personal reward for information on her whereabouts. I knew him, so I rang him first. He was (understandably) deeply concerned at the potential dangers involved. If dossiers had been handed to Juanita, they could have contributed to her death. I didn’t get far with Glebe, but in talking to the solicitor for Glebe’s union, the one referred to in the letter, he eventually confirmed to me that what could be described as ‘excerpts of dossiers’ had indeed been handed to him by Honeysett at Parramatta jail. In response to my query, the solicitor said he gave them a ‘high degree of credibility’. So the dossiers (or at least excerpts of dossiers) did exist. Their content indicated that this might have been the same material Shirley Bega had spirited away from the White House.

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Police running sheets on the Nielsen inquiry, which I later examined, confirmed that police were aware of some of the claims made in Honeysett’s letter to me—and our knowledge of the prisoner’s state of mind. The first contact between Honeysett and John Glebe occurred on 27 July 1975, twenty-three days after Juanita disappeared. Glebe had already been interviewed by police, but at around 12.50 p.m. that Sunday he reported to police Special Crime Squad an anonymous phone call he had taken at his home moments earlier. He made a note of the call and it went like this: Caller: Mr Glebe? Glebe: Speaking. Caller: I cannot give you my name and I might have to hang up any second. Are you still interested in inquiring about Juanita Nielsen? Glebe: Definitely. Caller: This is big and there are a lot of heavy people involved in it. Either you or your solicitor, not the police, are to contact Allan Honeysett, No 3 Parramatta Gaol. He has given Juanita 3 dossiers on the goings-on at the Cross and the people involved in it. Glebe’s report was entered into running sheet 5/26 as an incident report. Detectives Arkins and Cox checked up on Honeysett and entered his details on the sheet: he was ‘the subject of NSW Special Photo 70/924’, they wrote, adding details of his sentence. The next day they added a report from Glebe on his visit to see Honeysett.

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At first the prisoner had been reluctant to talk to him, so Glebe had suggested he could come back with a solicitor, Mr Paul Landa, a principal partner of the law firm Glebe’s union used. The tennis-playing enthusiast— and casual acquaintance of Abe Saffron—David Paul Landa, who was thirty-four at the time of these events, was also a Labor member of that rather exclusive political club, the NSW Legislative Council. But Honeysett rejected the idea of talking with Landa, saying he did not want: ‘any Jewish solicitor or any solicitor with a Jewish background or association, as there was a lot of Jewish money involved in development and business in Kings Cross.’ Glebe told police that Honeysett briefly supported the story that he had passed information to Juanita Nielsen by way of a dossier ‘through a third person whom he refused to name’. Police arranged for Glebe to visit Honeysett again the next day. In his report back to Arkins at around 6 p.m. that evening, Glebe said he had been accompanied by solicitor Campbell (not ‘Mitchell’ as Honeysett referred to) Robertson, who had ‘received a number of documents’ from the prisoner. The following day, Arkins, Cox and their colleague Maroney visited Glebe at his office in Trades Hall in Goulburn Street at around 2 p.m. Glebe said the solicitor had all the documents Honeysett had handed over, and they all went over to the law firm’s nearby office at 104 Bathurst Street. The running sheet report at this stage says: We there saw Mr Brian Wallace in the firm who stated that Honeysett was their client and any information or

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documents they had were privileged and would not supply any information to assist police. It was impressed on Wallace the seriousness of the situation and he was also queried as to whether Honeysett was in fact his client or had they initially been instructed by Glebe. Wallace only replied that Honeysett was in fact his client. Glebe stated that although he had gone to the gaol he was present but did not hear any of the conversation nor was he aware of the contents of the documents or what had been said. This gives the lie to the conversation he had with Det-Sgt Arkins on the evening of the 29th inst.

And there, it appears, Arkins, Cox and Maroney left the matter for almost eighteen months. In that time it is understood they had tried to arrange an interview with Honeysett but the prisoner refused to see them. Through a third party, they finally got an interview with him at the jail on 7 December 1976. Honeysett made wideranging allegations on a number of issues, repeating that information had been handed to Nielsen before her death. Honeysett then said that Superintendent Don Fergusson had ‘utilised his services to commit the offence of armed robbery . . . in order to obtain documents for Sir Frank Packer, which included photographs of children being indecently assaulted by members of the judiciary’. Three days later the police again went out to Parramatta. Their report said in part: It was put to Honeysett that the late superintendent Fergusson had died approximately two years prior to the commission of the armed robbery at Coolah. At this Honeysett became hostile, aggressive and suggested we

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had fabricated the date of the late superintendent’s death. Honeysett did not provide any further information.

There was more to come. The police appended to their running sheets a psychiatric report on Honeysett dated 3 April 1975, prepared by state psychiatrist L. Blows for the prison department. It should be noted that this report pre-dates Nielsen’s disappearance and any involvement of John Glebe in the story. In the interview with the psychiatrist Honeysett had ‘. . . launched into a long tirade about various organisations engaged in criminal activities that he knew about’. Blows wrote in summary: . . . this man suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. He has no insight and is in danger if given the opportunity of harming people who he feels are involved in plots against him. He needs psychiatric treatment . . . The question arises whether this man was psychotic at the time he committed his crime, and how responsible he is for his actions at the time. Paranoid schizophrenia is a chronic illness, and it could well have been present at the time he committed the offence.

In 2006 I asked both a Sydney psychiatrist and a Brisbane psychologist about this condition and the report on Honeysett. The psychiatrist read a copy of Blows’ letter and assured me it appeared to be a professional report, properly made. Blows was a respected professional, she had added, and had clearly established Honeysett’s mental condition. The Brisbane psychologist agreed, but added that nothing in the report would either

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prevent the outlandish claims made by Honeysett from being true or support their veracity, with the notable exception of his reference to the then dead Superintendent Don Fergusson hiring him to rob a bank two years after the policeman had died. If such a conspiracy as the bank robbery had taken place, the psychologist told me, it is eminently feasible that its perpetrators could have concealed the true identity of the policeman involved. Quite possibly they deliberately engaged the services of a person (Honeysett) with a mental disorder to ensure— if it all unravelled later on—that they could deny it all with impunity, saying that a man who was a paranoid schizophrenic was just showing symptoms of his illness by inventing it all. Whatever way one looks at the Honeysett affair, you find contradictions. He knew about Shirley Bega and the Saffron files, both of which I had learned about years before the bank robbery had occurred, so he hadn’t made up that part of the story. How he had come across that information is anyone’s guess because very few people knew about it up till then. It had never been publicised in the media. The old police rounds reporters from whom I gleaned some of the story rarely spoke about it. If Honeysett had not acquired these files during the bank robbery, where did he come by this material? There were other matters of interest in all this. It took Barry Ward and I very little time to confirm that Justice Simon Isaacs was the judge who, at Newcastle Supreme Court on Friday, 4 August 1972, had sentenced Allan William Honeysett to twenty years’ (not twenty-eight as Honeysett had stated in his letter) hard labour, with twelve-

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and-a-half years (not fourteen) non-parole, for robbing the Bank of New South Wales at Coolah—a small town about 240 kilometres northwest of Newcastle. This seemed to us on the available information to be an extremely harsh sentence, and it took a little longer for us to confirm (with another member of the Isaacs family) that Isaacs was indeed Saffron’s uncle. What we were yet to prove was any connection between Honeysett’s robbery of a country bank with Saffron’s dirty photos. If that link could be proven, we thought, then the court case became very suspect—given that Judge Isaacs would most likely have known about his nephew’s unusual collection of snapshots. A bit of checking told us that Allan William Alfred Honeysett was born on Wednesday, 10 November 1926. At the NSW country town of Mudgee he had married Joyce Aileen MacMahon in 1949. Press clippings showed he had claimed to have invented a security screen that would drop down at the front of bank tellers’ cages at the touch of a foot button. We thought at the time that someone had beaten him to that: a commercial version of a drop-down screen was then being fitted into banks across the country. Soon after I received the letter, Barry and I visited Honeysett, then forty-eight, at Parramatta jail. This did not greatly add to what we had been told in the letter, except for Honeysett’s claim that the bank he robbed had been in a cottage-type building, that he had no difficulty in gaining entry at the weekend when the bank was closed, and that he had recovered the documents and some money he’d been advised to take as a cover.

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I made further inquiries about the story elsewhere and quickly got copies of more letters the productive Honeysett had written. He’d sent them to a number of people, with copies going to prominent TV current affairs reporter Mike Willessee, who was happy to hand them to me as he was aware of my involvement in the Nielsen story. One of the letters, written on 28 October 1976, was an eye-opener. It was addressed to Kerry Packer, head of the publishing and television conglomerate PBL established by his late father Sir Frank. This four-and-a-half pages of singlespaced typing opened: In October 1971 I was propositioned by detective sergeant Don Fergusson, who was acting on behalf of your father, to retrieve by any method I deemed necessary, a dossier containing proof of his and others’ involvement in some very unseemly acts against young girls. These acts were committed at a place called the ‘white house’ at Point Piper, which was owned by a doctor whom the statements claim was being blackmailed by Abe Saffron to hold the orgies at the ‘white house’. These orgies were hosted by a woman called Shirley Bega, whose main job was to photograph all the indecent and unnatural acts carried out on drugged juveniles, and to pass the photos to Abe Saffron for the purpose of making the men pay blackmail. However, Shirley Bega aspired to be a blackmailer too so she kept the photos and a list of the children’s names and addresses for her own use.

With a few variations of the events I had already heard— such as it was William Street, not Pitt Street, and that she shot the man, not the other way around—he told

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the story I outlined above. We know Fergusson was not involved because he had died on 15 February 1970, but the rest of the story fitted like a glove to the hand of information I’d been dealt. It was, to say the least, curious. I had never discussed Shirley Bega with Honeysett. His letter to Kerry Packer went on to say that the police who had taken possession of the files were making money demands; that Sir Frank had already paid out $460,000 ($4,415,432) and that ‘the demands were becoming steeper’. We learned (before Honeysett’s claimed involvement) that investigations by other police, acting in Frank Packer’s interest, indicated the ‘dossiers’ were in a safe deposit box at the Coolah bank, in a large manila envelope marked ‘Land Deeds’ with the name ‘EK Wilson, Coogee’. The envelope had been deposited there by the cops, including Herb Talarico, and by the type of arrangement only crooked cops can make—the transaction was never entered into the safety-deposit book. Honeysett claimed that Sir Frank had told him he was due to pay a further $100,000 ($810,546) to the blackmailers on 5 March 1972, ‘and he [Packer Senior] stressed the urgency of retrieving the documents and photos before that date’. The media magnate made Honeysett an offer (he claimed in the letter) of $25,000 ($200,386) to be paid on recovery and delivery of the dossiers and, if Honeysett were ‘recognised and convicted’, Packer would pay him $10,000 ($80,154) for every year or part of a year he spent in prison. ‘Finally’, wrote Honeysett, ‘he agreed he would use his influence to have me released within a short time if I were convicted’.

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Honeysett went to Coolah with his nephew, he said, and recovered the envelope, but somebody must have seen them. While monitoring police radio frequencies the robbers heard that a ‘shoot to kill’ order had been issued against them—which obviously did not succeed. Honeysett went into hiding for some days—he flew to Townsville—during which time he made copies of all the material in the envelope. He couriered the material to Packer and was then arrested. Police charged him with armed robbery—there had been no guns or shooting at the bank—but because of his claimed arrangement with Frank Packer he pleaded guilty to all charges and, as we have seen, copped a very heavy sentence from Judge Isaacs. Then Sir Frank Packer died. At first, Honeysett said, he tried quietly to get a retrial ‘in a closed court’ so he could tell the ‘real reason’ for robbing the bank. That failed. Nobody wanted to know. Allan William Honeysett was—quite correctly, it would appear—declared to be a paranoid schizophrenic by the system and his wild claims of conspiracy theories a figment of his tortured imagination, so his demands for a retrial were rejected as groundless. He was left to rot at Parramatta jail. All my attempts since to learn what did subsequently happen to Honeysett have been blocked by bureaucratic application of Freedom of Information laws. Honeysett was interviewed at the jail on the morning of Thursday, 6 January 1977 by L. Barnett, NSW UnderSecretary of Justice. In Barnett’s sixteen-page summary of their conversation, the question of the identity of Honeysett’s associates outside the prison arose. Reluctantly, he named them as Matthew and Carla Thompson.

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These were the people who—Honeysett claimed— provided material from his copies of the dossiers to Juanita Nielsen, so the threat of publication could be used as a lever for a new trial. Two months before Barnett’s interview on 19 November 1976, according to Honeysett, Matthew Thompson was bashed by police, with both arms broken. His wife Carla, heavily pregnant, was kicked until she miscarried. Their seven-year-old son King was severely bashed. They denied all knowledge of the documents the police demanded they hand over. They fled interstate for fear of their lives. The assault was almost certainly the catalyst for Honeysett to drop his eighteen-month-long veto on talking to detectives Arkins, Cox and Maroney, who interviewed the prisoner (as mentioned earlier) on 7 December 1976, just eighteen days after the Thompson assault. If indeed there had been sixteen dossiers taken by Shirley Bega, there would be at least seventeen people most anxious that they not fall into the wrong hands: the blackmailer and his victims. I am satisfied beyond any shadow of doubt that for those people these dossiers were worth killing for, and that they fell into the ‘wrong hands’. Allan William Honeysett has provided in his voluminous letter-writing enough details of proven fact to convince me that—mentally damaged as he was—he did not invent the whole sorry story. How much evidence do we need to believe most of what Honeysett claimed? Take out Fergusson and replace him with someone else who—for the purpose of deluding Honeysett—used Fergusson’s name, and the big flaw in his version of the story is diminished.

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Given that much of what Honeysett claimed correlates with known facts, the remaining question is: why did Judge Isaacs hand down a twenty-year sentence for a bank robbery? The chances are it was believed this troubled person would become in jail even more unbalanced, a totally discreditable witness, and nobody would take up his cause. For many years that is exactly what did happen. And the blackmailer and his victims settled back to life as they had known it. And Sydney once again basked in its sun, drank a few cold Resch’s and took a swim at Bondi. That, after all, is what life in Sydney is all about. Isn’t it? Well, not quite. Other people were about to look into the affairs of Mr Saffron. Among them was an eminent lawyer, Frank Costigan QC, who in his four-year royal commission delivered—among many wide-ranging reports—a devastating summary of Abe’s activities over the years. Costigan had adopted the practice of allocating codenames to prominent people he would report upon, creating a media buzz as pundits tried to pin the monikers on the real culprits. Who could forget the revelation that Costigan’s ‘The Goanna’ was none other than Kerry Packer. And surely he was demonstrating whimsical humour when he dubbed the sex-crazed Abe Saffron ‘Gomorrah’. Costigan, too, had pried into that secretive world when he wrote: ‘He had engaged in blackmail relying upon sexual indiscretions of others.’ Jim Anderson, the business partner who’d had a major falling out with Saffron, was also to make reference to Abe’s blackmail scam when he gave evidence to a NSW parliamentary committee on prostitution—after he’d fallen out with Abe, of course. Anderson said that if a

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politician or someone in authority was causing concern to corrupt elements (such as Saffron), that person would be ‘set up’. His sexual proclivities would be determined: ‘Does he like little girls, big girls, little boys, big boys? Is he on with his secretary? Is his wife playing around?’ he explained. The target person’s movement would be monitored and, at a suitable time, appropriate temptation would be placed in front of him—for example, at an adjacent table in a restaurant from where a conversation might be struck up. If the target fell for it, the ensuing sexual encounter would be photographed, filmed or taperecorded. ‘Later the target would be discreetly informed of the existence of the evidence and he would become a puppet’, Anderson told the committee. Blackmail, as all this clearly shows, was the way Saffron dealt with problems, and such was its success he was able to offer it as a service to friends and associates who may have been having their own difficulties.

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7 BURNING ISSUES: MURDER AND ARSON BECOME THE HOT TOPICS Burning issues

BEING AROUND ABE Saffron and his associates would not have allowed for many dull moments. They lived life at full bore and what many people would call ‘major crises’ bobbed up with remarkable regularity. The 1970s, which began with a spot of murder, were no different. At about 10.20 p.m. on Monday, 22 June 1970, the notorious and violent standover man Donald Hector Neville Smith entered the Venus Room. Donny, know as ‘The Glove’ because he wore a lead-lined glove (‘all the better to hit you with’), was a man with no tolerance for argumentative types, and on this night it seemed that Jim Anderson was exactly that. Anderson was sitting at the rear of the club in one of the booths behind a shoulder-height wall, doing the accounts, which would have been a fairly laborious task given the two sets of books he kept on Abe’s behalf. Some weeks previously Anderson had been warned by Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard from the consorting squad that Donny Smith should not be allowed into the Venus Room [ 136 ]

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as he was a ‘known criminal’. But some days after the warning Smith was arrested in the club by Ballard, who found he was carrying an unlicensed pistol. Ballard told Anderson that Smith had come to murder him. Naturally Anderson had some harsh words to say to Smith on the evening he entered the club for the second time. Up swung Donny’s lethal glove, knocking the solidly built Anderson off his feet, breaking his jaw. ‘When he hit you with that [glove] you stayed hit’, Anderson later told Sydney Morning Herald crime reporter Neil Mercer. ‘Enough’s enough . . . I just went “bang”’. Donny had not figured on Anderson carrying a gun. ‘Shot him straight in the heart’, Anderson said. ‘I knew what I was aiming at, but then he got up again.’ Thinking his attacker was going for his own gun, Anderson fired again, hitting him twice in the back. When you’re hit with that much lead, you stay hit. But Donny was not wearing his notorious lead-lined glove that night. His left hand was bandaged and plastered, as though protecting a broken bone. (It was later discovered he had no injury; the plaster cast was perhaps an innovative replacement weapon for the sheet of lead.) In an interview with Detective Sergeant C.V. Leatherbarrow on 2 July, Anderson gave his version of events. Smith came into the club, confronted him, and there was an ‘exchange of words’ in which Smith said he was going to kill him. Anderson’s licensed .32 calibre Browning pistol was visible in his shoulder holster, and Smith tried to grab it. In the tussle, Smith bashed Anderson across the face with his heavily plastered left

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hand, knocking Anderson to the ground. He sustained cuts and a couple of broken teeth (but no broken jaw, according to the official records). As Anderson scrambled to his feet he heard somebody shout a warning that Smith was going to kill him. He drew his pistol and fired a shot into Smith’s chest. As the wounded man ran towards the door of the club Anderson fired a second shot, which struck him in the thigh. Anderson said that as Smith reached his companions near the door, he thought they were fumbling for a pistol, so he fired his third shot which hit Smith in the back as he turned to leave. Smith fell out of the doorway and died straddled across the narrow footpath of Orwell Street, his left leg still lying over the front step of the Venus Room. Smith’s de facto wife, Betty June Bennett, had been waiting outside the club. In a signed statement she gave to Detective Sergeant Ross ‘Rocky’ Morrison, she said Anderson had murdered Smith. She had seen Smith trip and fall onto the footpath as he left the restaurant, and Anderson came out and shot him as he was getting up. Morrison noted that Bennett was ‘hysterical’ when he arrived on the scene. Not surprisingly, statements from other witnesses who were to a person clients at the Venus Room did not support that view. Within hours Jimmy Anderson was charged with murder and discharging a firearm near a public place. The following day he was granted bail of $2000 ($17,977). At the committal hearing the police prosecutor opposed bail, saying that in relation to the first shot Anderson no doubt acted in self-defence, ‘. . . but the fact that he [Smith] was shot three times, the defence of self-defence

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must fail’. Anderson pleaded that he was acting in selfdefence. The magistrate accepted the police prosecutor’s view and said he must face a charge for the manslaughter of Donny ‘The Glove’ at the September sittings of the Sydney Quarter Sessions Court, because ‘. . . he was prepared to go to any length to rid himself of Smith’s threat’. But there was intervention from on high: Saffron’s old mate, Labor Attorney-General Reg Downing, ‘no-billed’ the charge against Anderson—as usual providing no public reason for killing off a clear-cut case of homicide. It appears The Invincibles had flexed their muscles once again. Years later Anderson swore that no payments were made to police in the Donny Smith case. Perhaps it was the result of another snapshot in Abe’s photo album. The National Crime Authority over the years looked at the antics of Anderson and Saffron in considerable detail. In a March 1994 report by a parliamentary committee an interesting comment was made about the decision to ‘no-bill’ Anderson in the case: The [NCA] secretariat does not have evidence or knowledge of the full circumstances that would indicate why the decision not to prosecute was taken. It does not know whether the fact that Anderson was a police informant, or some other relationship that may have existed, were factors in the decision. There has been speculation over the years as to why the decision has been made.

How discreet of them not to mention the possibility of brown paper bags being delivered to Reg Downing.

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There still remained the charge of discharging a firearm near a public place—which Anderson had undoubtedly done and even bragged about. This came up for hearing at the Central Court of Petty Sessions on Thursday, 28 September 1972, but one wonders why the authorities bothered to even go through that formality: the charge was summarily dismissed. Anderson denied being a police informer as vigorously as he denied involvement in drugs. But Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard had told the inquest into Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance that Anderson was a ‘regular police informer’ in relation to Victoria Street protests and resident protester Arthur King. At that inquest Anderson accused Ballard of being a corrupt officer who had lied about him being a ‘snout’ to the cops, known in the trade as a ‘fizz-gig’. ‘This is a well-known ploy to get someone murdered’, Anderson said, ‘and then put it down to a gangland killing’. Ballard had a bit of explaining to do as to why he had ‘outed’ Anderson, ambiguously telling the Nielsen inquest: I am aware of the contents of Police Instruction 63, paragraph 9, which sets out that police should not disclose the identity of an informant. However, even though Anderson was an informant in information relative to the Juanita Nielsen inquest he was also a strong suspect as a person responsible for her disappearance and as such, to my mind, was disqualified from protection as an informant, he in fact on the surface was apparently supplying information to be used to his own advantage.

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People who worked with Anderson at first did not believe he would talk to police about criminal activities. ‘After all’, one of them told me recently, ‘we all knew he was paying police regularly to protect us from arrest, whatever we did, so it didn’t add up that he would be informing on anyone’. But over time the most senior staffers—who were protected under the ‘franchise’ arrangement that made them and their bosses invincible—learned that Anderson did in fact dob in junior staffers to police. A young man operating the lights at the Carousel was arrested one night on a drugs charge. It turned out that apart from the man’s totally loyal girlfriend, Anderson was the only one who knew details about the case he was charged with. Other staff (I was told by one of them later) believed Anderson had ‘dobbed’ in the young man. When three others from the Venus Room faced drugs charges, again the finger pointed at Anderson as being the informer—the ‘fizz-gig’. No wonder he denied it to the end: being an informer, considered by most in the criminal milieu to be the worst possible offence against the general philosophy of the ‘code of silence’, is a reputation any criminal would shun. • By the time Anderson’s murder and firearm charges had been resolved, Saffron was starting his moves into South Australia, opening an Adelaide strip joint called La Belle in 1971, quickly followed by the acquisition of the Castle Hotel and the Elephant and Castle. Geoffrey Roy Cassidy of Natalie Avenue, Salisbury, was listed as the only local involved in La Belle (with three Saffron ‘frontmen’ from

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Sydney also involved). Strict conditions were imposed on the granting of the cabaret licence for La Belle, with the Superintendent of Licensed Premises being given power to approve in writing any full-time or part-time employees, other than entertainers. Peter Farrugia, who had managed Saffron’s iconic Pink Pussycat and other Kings Cross clubs, moved to Adelaide to get the Elephant and Castle project underway, with two other locals listed as directors or shareholders. But Saffron, of course, held the reins in all three businesses. Entry into the South Australian market had not been easy: in that state Abe Saffron was not invincible. In September 1970 the Licensing Court in Adelaide refused an application by a Saffron company, Burbridge Properties, to build a hotel called The Sundowner at West Beach. Jack Rooklyn, the Sydney-based US-Mafia ‘man downunder’, was involved with Saffron in this project. That duo was also still looking at Indonesia as a jointventure possibility, having met there (according to Rooklyn’s later testimony) in August 1970 and again in July 1972. But Saffron’s attentions were being held firm in Sydney, as his troublesome lieutenant, James McCartney Anderson, had to be rescued from more scrapes with the law. And there was also an exciting business development in which his friend, influential businessman Peter Abeles, was to act as his frontman. Some things seemed to be looking up for Abe Saffron. • In April 1971, just two months after Premier Bob Askin’s triumphant third successive election win, the NSW Depart-

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ment of Railways invited tenders for the ninety-nine-year lease and development of vacant land at 107–109 Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross. The land was superfluous to its needs for creating an entrance to the yet-to-be-built Kings Cross Railway Station. A source in high ranks of the Askin Government at the time—a ministerial press secretary—told me that Peter Abeles had intervened directly with Askin to ensure that a company in which his associates had an interest was granted the lease. Subsequently, Abeles’ close friends, Paul Strasser and Robert Ryko, set up a company called Constance Developments and it, to nobody’s surprise, won the lease. There were many meetings with departmental officials to approve final building plans, and to the officials’ surprise Abe Saffron was present at most of them. When the building was finally complete on 1 November 1974, Constance subleased the whole site to the Persian Room Theatre Restaurant Pty Ltd, a company in which Saffron and Vincent Farrugia (Peter Farrugia’s brother) had controlling interests. Three years later Constance transferred their head lease to Togima Pty Ltd, another Saffron company. But there was a slight problem: Constance—as was required under its lease—didn’t mention the new arrangement to the Public Transport Commission, which owned the land and now found itself with a subtenant that ran an illegal brothel, operated illegal poker machines, enabled drug sale and use, and was operating in breach of the liquor laws. The Askin Government was in no hurry over the next four years to resolve the breach of the lease terms, and that in itself attracted some attention. Australian

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Democrats Senator Don Chipp was to later refer to it in a speech in the Senate. He claimed, after Saffron took over the building, that it housed a gambling club, a brothel and a sex shop. ‘The New South Wales government chose to buy out the lease’, said the senator. ‘This is almost incomprehensible. There is no record of any action against the gambling club or the brothel.’ Chipp then described Abe Saffron as: ‘. . . one of the most notorious, despicable human beings, if one can use that term loosely, living in this country.’ On 14 May 1976, the NSW ALP, under the leadership of Neville Wran, won the state election and formed the first Labor government in New South Wales for eleven years. To put an end to Saffron’s illegal activities on the railway property, the Wran Government bought out the lease from Togima for $ 2.6 million (around $ 12.4 million)—paid to the Saffron company. A spokesman for the government said that legal action had not been taken against Togima ‘. . . because this would only remedy matters in the short term and it was difficult to get evidence’. But as with all Saffron clubs, there would have been no difficulty in getting evidence: anyone could walk in, pay their cover charge, stroll around, watch strip shows, including the occasional live sex acts, play poker machines, pick up a prostitute and, if you didn’t look too suspicious, buy a deal of drugs. The problem was that governments generally want their police force to gather such evidence for ramping up court cases, and the NSW Police Force was not capable of finding the evidence because, as we’ve

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said, it was being well paid not to do so. The change of government made no difference to those arrangements. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Not long after the scandal over the railway land, Saffron had more problems to resolve with James McCartney Anderson. • On Friday, 21 May 1971, customs officers armed with a search warrant knocked on the door at 1 Tower Street, Vaucluse, wanting to see the owner. Jim Anderson let them in and while the search of the property was underway Anderson agreed to a recorded interview with investigator Peter Gribbon. He admitted to Gribbon that he took currency out of Australia without Reserve Bank permission, and failed to declare watches, jewellery and other items he’d bought in Singapore. In other words, he was smuggling. Customs found the contraband, took it away and widened its inquiries. It appears Anderson had used counterfeit $10 notes ($80) to buy his goods in Singapore and pay his hotel bills. What customs and the federal police didn’t reveal is that the banknotes were high-quality reproductions made by Sydney’s master of the forgery class, James Angus ‘Jim’ Donnelly. In a jolly moment at a pub near his Cleveland Street ‘factory’ in Redfern, Jim told me about the banknotes, and other ‘works of art’ he had produced including stamp-duty stamps. When arrested by police over the stamp-duty replicas, Donnelly said the cops had some of his stamps and some of the real things on their desk at the police station. Knowing a wind was gusting outside, Jim complained about being hot and

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opened a window. All the samples blew onto the floor. Police couldn’t sort out the forgeries from the genuine articles, so Donnelly helped them out—no doubt getting a slightly reduced penalty for ‘being cooperative with police’. Anderson and his travelling companion in Singapore, Frank Alfred Gilligan, had passed 407 notes in all (around $33,730). The Singapore Government wanted the two men extradited, and that application came before Sydney’s Central Court of Petty Sessions on Thursday, 23 December 1971. Magistrate James Ernest Fowler dismissed it on an obscure technicality. Demonstrating the skills probably learned at the Garfield Barwick school of legal esoterica, Fowler invoked the ‘double criminality rule’, under which the Crown had to show that New South Wales had an equivalent offence to the one under Singaporean law as the basis for which the extradition was sought. Just in case anybody began to think that passing forged banknotes was not a crime in New South Wales, the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department tried to explain what had happened in a letter dated 19 January 1972 to the Department of Foreign Affairs, who had to justify the failure to Singapore. It said: At the conclusion of the hearing the magistrate expressed the view that for the acts allegedly committed in Singapore to be an offence in New South Wales it would be necessary to show that they were knowingly committed. Mr McGee of counsel had argued strongly, both in relation to the New South Wales law and the Commonwealth Reserve Bank Act in respect of offences connected with bank notes, that the evidence submitted by the

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applicant country was sufficient for the purpose of the double criminality rule and therefore of offences in Australia to justify their committal for trial. However, the Magistrate found that the evidence before him disclosed no intent on the part of the fugitives in relation to offences in New South Wales if their alleged acts had been committed in New South Wales and therefore found that he was not satisfied that a prima facie case justifying their committal for trial, and so ordered the release of the accused persons.

What the writer of that letter was not able to say, of course, was that even the Commonwealth of Australia could not invoke the rule of law over The Invincibles when a ‘franchise’ activity had been bought into play. As if to rub salt into the wound, Anderson and Gilligan successfully sued for the return of the goods seized by customs—illegally imported goods which they had bought with counterfeit money. On 6 July 1972, a charge against Anderson over possession of stolen goods was dismissed, and on the same day a prima facie case of receiving stolen goods was made out against him. No one expressed surprise when it was decided there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to send him to trial. After all, this was James McCartney Anderson, close confidante of Abe Saffron. • At the end of 1972 there was a slight reshuffle of positions in the higher echelons of The Brotherhood, the organisation I have suggested was really running New South Wales through this most interesting decade. Norman ‘The Mushroom’ Allan had been Police Commissioner for

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eleven years, in which time he had served his seniors well. There was a lot of crime happening, of course, but with so many police either running criminal activities or being well paid to turn a blind eye, the lean statistics alarmed only a few busy journalists—until Allan decided to make the figures look a bit better with some falsification of the crime clean-up rates. A police sergeant, Philip Arantz, found out what was going on and blew the whistle; Allan’s fraud was revealed in the Sydney Morning Herald in November 1971. In scenes straight out of Kafka, Arantz was taken to hospital for psychiatric examination—in a fanfare of publicity orchestrated by Bob Askin’s media minders— but the doctors pronounced him sane. Then in January 1972, Arantz was sacked without a pension. Askin backed his wretched commissioner against an uproar from the media, but within a couple of months it was clear Allan had to go. It was announced he would take leave from May and that he would formally retire in November. Unlike Arantz, Allan left with a full pension and a lumpsum payment equivalent to eighteen months’ leave. His last official act was his most successful: he recommended Fred Hanson succeed him in the top spot. This was good news for The Brotherhood: it settled down to ‘business as usual’. • Anderson literally became a ‘hot’ story again when he nearly killed himself in a club fire. In a version of the story he told police (and which nobody has ever believed), Anderson claimed that at around 3.30 on the morning of

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Monday, 26 November 1973, having closed the Venus Room early, he was driving home past the Staccato club at 101 Darlinghurst Road. Formerly the Coconut Jungle, the club was run for Saffron by Peter Farrugia and Jimmy Burrell. Anderson saw two men acting suspiciously, so he parked around the corner and, leaving his pistol in the glove box, went to see what was going on. The club’s rear door was slightly ajar. He went in—and fell over. He was smoking a cigarette at the time and as he stood up an explosion ripped through the place, creating an instant inferno. Anderson, suffering burns to more than half of his body, staggered out, made it back to his car and— heroically—drove himself to St Vincent’s Hospital, a mile up the road, where he was interviewed by police in the hospital’s casualty department. There were obvious problems with the story: Why was he smoking a cigarette while investigating something suspicious that could lead to violence? Why on earth did he—consciously, it seems—leave his pistol in the car? Detective Sergeant Noel Morey paid Anderson another visit at the hospital at about 11 a.m. on Thursday, 12 December, to see if he had anything to add to his first account of the event. Apart from saying that he had nothing to gain from setting fire to the club, and that its owner (he was referring to Farrugia, not Saffron) was a friend of his, he stuck to his guns—metaphorically. When told that a police examination of his clothing immediately after he entered the hospital showed that the soles of his shoes and the upper of one of them reeked of petrol, Anderson could offer no explanation. The police

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didn’t believe a word of it and told the city coroner as much when an inquiry into the fire opened in June 1974. Investigators said the fire had been caused by a petrol explosion, but Anderson said he had not noticed the smell of petrol when he’d gone into the club. Equally unconvincing was Saffron’s evidence at the coroner’s hearing. Asked if he had an interest in any business at Kings Cross where stripping is performed, he replied: ‘No.’ Anderson was never charged over the incident nor was anyone else. From then on one of the sharp wits of Kings Cross nightlife, Tubby Black of Pussy Galore, always greeted Anderson with a cheerful, ‘G’day, Firebug’. Black told me that nobody doubted that Anderson had done the job— and botched it badly: I told him a few times that seeing as he came from Britain, he wouldn’t maybe have been aware that Australian petrol has a higher octane rating. If you poured petrol around a place and lit a match it would go up a lot quicker than what he might have been used to in the Old Dart.

Tubby Black’s taunt contains a ring of credibility: if Anderson had thrown a match into the petrol-drenched club from inside the rear door, the blast would have been instant. To escape the sort of injury he suffered, he would have had to have used a fuse, or thrown a lighted rag or paper from a safe distance. The petrol fumes would not have ignited from the cigarette he claimed he was smoking: that volatile gas requires a naked flame (not a

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smouldering ember) to set it off. But apart from a lot of scarring to his large body, Anderson didn’t suffer any significant long-term effects after they had patched him up. After five months in hospital he went back to work for Saffron, this time based mainly at the club he’d once wanted for his own—Les Girls, Saffron’s relatively new acquisition. • Jim Anderson may have been the firebug Tubby Black suggested, but he was not involved in a second fire in a Saffron establishment in that same year—mainly because it happened in Adelaide. The Trocadero striptease and drag show nightclub suffered $60,000 ($515,470) damage in the blaze. A man confessed to being involved in a conspiracy to defraud an insurance company and copped a five-year jail stretch. But nobody conspires on their own: it’s an act that requires at least two people, and the guilty man’s allegations against a second man were not able to be substantiated. The second man was said to be close to Saffron and to have acted as his accountant for some of his South Australian ventures. • One event that did not get much public attention—and undoubtedly very little official investigation—was a letter written in July 1973 by Commissioner of Commonwealth Police Jack Mervyn Davis to the venal NSW Police Commissioner Fred Hanson. The letter described Saffron’s illegal activities as widespread.

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‘He is chiefly notorious for his dealings in the vice and gambling areas’, the letter read. ‘Saffron covers his illegal activities by investing heavily in legitimate business enterprises.’ Hanson’s reply, if there ever was one, was not released, but one could imagine a response along the lines of: ‘Yes, of course we know all that, but we’re making a lot of money out of it, so we won’t be taking any action in the foreseeable future.’ It was later revealed during the 1973–74 royal commission by Judge Athol Moffitt that relations between the corrupt NSW Police and their more professional and ethical Commonwealth cousins had, by that time, hit an all-time low, itself a major contributing factor to the failure to bring crooks like Saffron to book. Indeed, the Commonwealth Police Crime Intelligence Unit in those years established a ‘watching brief’ on a number of its state counterparts, based on the Commonwealth Police belief that widespread criminal activity was originating from within the NSW force. Towards the end of 1973 there was good news and bad news for Saffron and his corrupt associates. First the good news: Askin, desperately fighting off accusations of corruption, US Mafia infiltration and his own involvement with the dark side of Australian life, scraped home to win his fourth election in October, becoming the first NSW premier to reach such a milestone. But the win had come at a price: this was the bad news. Askin bowed to pressure to hold an inquiry into organised crime infiltration of the club and entertainment industries, a twelve-month drama played out in the old Supreme Court under the leader-

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ship of Judge Athol Moffitt, who took up the appointment in August. The terms of reference for this inquiry expanded later—at the judge’s instigation—to include a specific reference to poker machine company Bally’s links to the US Mafia, and the activities of Bally’s Australian chief, Saffron’s close friend Jack Rooklyn. For a year there was to be a very public outing of some—but not all—of The Brotherhood, including Saffron and Rooklyn, as well as some corrupt cops and the knockabout members of Sydney’s criminal milieu, headed by Lennie McPherson. This was a major setback for Saffron, who had already been fighting for more than a year—albeit in less public domains—some major battles with Australian federal authorities, and their accusation that this leading Sydney businessman was involved in the booming illicit drug trade. How could they possibly make these accusations against such an upstanding pillar of society?

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8 SNORTING AT DRUG SLUR: SOME CUSTOMS ARE NOT SO HARD TO BREAK Snorting at drug slur

DRUGS HAVE ALWAYS been a topic of interest to those investigating any criminal’s activity, if for no other reason than the perverse enjoyment of watching the emphatic and totally predictable denials: ‘I would never have anything to do with drugs.’ In this, Abe Saffron was no exception: he wouldn’t have a bar of them, he kept on reassuring a doubting community. But as we have seen, drugs were sold and used on premises he controlled on a nightly basis. At the start of 1972, Australian Customs was convinced that Saffron was involved in the drug trade. His name was placed on customs’ alert list, which meant that Commonwealth Police narcotics officers were notified any time he left or entered Australia. On his re-entry to the country, he always received a ‘one hundred per cent’ baggage search. The alert spread to other countries, and by 1975 the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scotland Yard and crime investigation bodies in Fiji and the Philippines were monitoring his movements. The restraint was to [ 154 ]

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remain in force for three years, and was only withdrawn after political pressure was exerted on customs to ease off. As he increasingly did over the years, Saffron resorted to having expensive, big-name lawyers go in to bat for him, never protesting his actual innocence, but using peripheral arguments. In this case it was the mendacious solicitor Morgan Ryan who went straight to his friend, federal Attorney-General Lionel Murphy, and to Commonwealth Police Commissioner Jack Mervyn Davis, claiming his client was being ‘needlessly embarrassed and harassed’. Like many of these incidents, it was all a bit of a storm in a teacup: Saffron would never have been so stupid as to travel anywhere overseas, or return to Australia, with illicit drugs or any other contraband in his luggage, particularly while he was on the customs’ narcotics watch. He was far too smart for that. The decision to drop the alert was investigated by a public services committee and that, predictably, took some time. It was fully nine years— September 1984—before the committee made its report. In February 1975, Lionel Murphy had moved on to become Mr Justice Lionel Murphy of the High Court of Australia. Murphy told the committee that while AttorneyGeneral he had given no direction in the Saffron matter. The committee said the downgrading of surveillance of Saffron was ‘reasonable and appropriate’ as continued searching ‘alerted a suspect and was likely to achieve nothing’. Quite so. Not a bad nine years’ work. As occurs with all ‘persons of interest’ to crime investigators, allegations of drug involvement are frequently made for the simple reason that that is something criminals do, and if we were to believe the inevitable

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denials, we would all have to start looking elsewhere—at non-criminals—to find the culprits. Major international drug trafficking requires large investments and a wellorganised ‘protection system’, such as the ‘franchise’ arrangement Saffron had with the NSW Police. Saffron was not exempt from the drug accusations, and some of them came from close to home. Big Jim’s wife, Neathia Conrill Anderson, was to swear on oath in court that her husband had discovered Saffron was financing drugs or was in some way involved in the trade. No evidence was ever produced by Mrs Anderson, but one matter is beyond doubt: drugs were sold and used on premises owned and controlled by Abe Saffron, be they clients at a strip club or prostitutes in one of his brothels. And for that he could have been charged any day of the week—except for the operation of the ‘franchise’. Far more serious allegations were aimed at Abe, though. When the Costigan Royal Commission got underway in 1980 it looked back over all available information on Saffron and a great many other people. It’s important to remember that the allegations it and the National Crime Authority (NCA) subsequently made related to Saffron’s activities throughout the 1970s. When Costigan’s commission wound up in 1984, it passed on to the newly formed NCA forty-two matters the judge believed should be followed up. One of those involved Abraham Gilbert Saffron. Costigan had collected 12,749 pages of information on the man they codenamed Gomorrah and his companies, and had investigated only a part of that pile by the end of the inquiry. The commis-

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sion published a summary of its findings, an edited version of which found its way into the National Times edition of 14–20 September 1984. The article said in part: Gomorrah is notorious. He has been so for the past 30 years, if not longer. His activities span most areas of crime . . . Despite his protests of innocence, he is involved in drug trafficking. He imports. He distributes. He employs men who use violence to maintain his control and authority. Drug dealings are conducted in such a way that surveillance of couriers and purchasers, while revealing connection in one of his establishments, never reveals a person receiving or supplying. The drugs are always ‘left’ in an empty room, to be collected later after ensuring the coast is clear. So too with all other activities. He operates gambling establishments, not only for the profits that may be derived but also for the power it gives him over the unsuccessful gambler. There are cases of gambling debts being the device by which he has corrupted bank managers, financiers and others in positions of influence.

Most of the huge dossier on Saffron came from various law enforcement agencies. One witness was reported as saying to the commission: ‘The Saffron allegations are so many and so wide that you would wonder that there were enough hours in the day for one man to get around to being responsible for all that.’ The commission’s staff believed the Saffron activities it had looked at ‘definitely merited’ further investigation, ‘especially his involvement with illegal drugs’. So the NCA obtained a reference— an approval for it to act—from the Australian Government in October 1984. Part of that official document, signed

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by the Special Minister for State under which the new body would investigate Saffron’s affairs, said: . . . the general nature of and the circumstances or allegations [against Saffron] constituting the relevant criminal is the widespread financial and business activities, including activities associated with prostitution and movement of persons into Australia for that purpose, of a certain person, whose identity was communicated to me by the Authority on 17 October 1984, and associated persons or companies, suggesting tax evasion and the involvement in the importation of narcotic substances into Australia, their distribution in Australia and the financing by that person and associated persons or companies of such importation and distribution.

As the inquiry got underway, it became clear to the NCA that some ‘serious and credible allegations against Saffron’ involved breaches of NSW law. Under its charter the NCA would also need a reference from the NSW Government to properly investigate those matters, which it was granted on 4 April 1986. The criminal activities mentioned in that document were arson, fraud, bribery or corruption of state officers and the supply of illegal drugs. Away from the official investigations and back on the streets, it didn’t then—and doesn’t now—take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that drugs in Kings Cross are just about as easy to obtain as a cold beer. Many of the prostitutes in the Cross were then (and still are) heroin users. Amanda King worked there as a barmaid in 1977, and was later to tell the Nielsen inquest that ‘people in the Venus Room were involved in drugs’ and that the prostitutes were able to buy their supplies there. Anderson

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himself—who always claimed to be opposed to hard drugs—reaffirmed some of the drug story. In the late 1970s ‘drug dealers started operating from No. 8 Orwell Street’, he told the Nielsen inquest. When his brother-inlaw became manager of the Venus Room around that time, Anderson said ‘. . . his main problem was stopping heroin dealing from No. 8 Orwell Street’. It’s quite improbable, of course, that drug dealers would access the brothel at No. 8, which was guarded by the sitter, and not gain access to the working women in the club. But Anderson, like his boss Saffron, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Or possibly they preferred the drug deals to take place behind the closed doors of No. 8, rather than the public open space at No. 6, the Venus Room. One anecdote about drug abuse on Saffron premises came to me from a long-time associate of Abe, my ‘Saffron insider’. He was adamant the story was true, and was not just a one-off event—it happened with some regularity at the Carousel nightclub. A couple who looked like they were new to the glitter of the Cross—wide-eyed and giggling—would be seated at a table towards the rear, near a door which led to a room used by waiters and waitresses, next to the cool room and storage area. Their drinks would be spiked with a stupefying drug so that, after a couple of glasses, they would quietly go to sleep. The woman would be taken through the nearby door to a makeshift bunk and there be sexually abused by any member of the staff who was interested. She’d then be cleaned up and seated back at the table with her still-comatose boyfriend. Empty beer stubbies would be piled onto the table.

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When they gradually came round the staff would start saying to the boyfriend: ‘My, can you two sock ’em away’, indicating the empties. The couple might shake their heads in confusion, but they’d have little alternative than to accept the seemingly irrefutable evidence of the empty brown bottles in front of them. To reaffirm the deceit, their bill would be made out for the number of empties on the table, but they might be offered a discount ‘. . . seeing as what good customers you’ve been’. My source told me that staff used to openly joke about these questionable activities. When he discussed it with Saffron, with whom he had a close association, Abe shrugged it off with a ‘boys will be boys’ remark. ‘Lord knows how many of those kids were made pregnant in the nasty “game”’, my source said to me. • There was no mention of drugs, however, when the Bally poker machine boss Jack Rooklyn and Saffron answered their subpoenas to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth before Judge Athol Moffitt in courtroom number two at the old Supreme Court building in Sydney. Sticking to the requirements of the oath would be a bit of a problem for both men. The US Mafia’s local man, Rooklyn, was first in the witness box, on Friday, 16 November 1973. ‘I have known Mr Saffron and his family for twenty years’, he said. They met about once a month, and had met twice in Indonesia. Denials about Saffron and brothels were added to Rooklyn’s totally discredited denials of doing deals with the US Mafia, and paying money to police who were investigating him.

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Saffron, who was represented at the hearing by ‘solicitor of interest’ Morgan Ryan, gave the judge the names of a few of the companies he’d set up across Australia and claimed he had never known he was the ‘Mr Sin’ newspapers often referred to. He also denied he’d ever met Sydney gangster Lennie McPherson; agreed he knew Rooklyn but only had one business dealing with him in South Australia; and said he had never been interviewed by police in connection with this inquiry. [[boxbegin]]

BIG PRAISE FOR 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—known for decades as the ‘Mr Big’ of Sydney crime—when asked during a radio interview in 1974 if he’d ever met Abe Saffron, who had told the Moffitt Royal Commission that he had never met Lennie. The two men did not have a friendly relationship but McPherson, for many years, provided protection to Saffron’s clubs against violence from people, including himself. That’s what he did best: that was what ‘standing over’ was all about. It was not recorded whether Abe pasted a copy of Lennie’s accolade in his personal scrapbook.

[[boxend]]

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The media gave these appearances fair coverage, but the story that didn’t make it to the headlines was an apparent approach in 1972 by Rooklyn to Saffron to see if Abe could ‘take heat out of’ the police inquiry into the crime allegations to come before Moffitt. On Thursday, 17 August 1972, Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard, one of the leading investigators in the NSW Police Consorting Squad, met a couple of officers from the Commonwealth Police, also investigating Mafia-infiltration allegations. After a general chat about the progress of their respective inquiries, Ballard raised the issue of a discussion Rooklyn had had with Saffron. The Commonwealth Police running sheet recorded the incident. It said in part: According to Ballard, Rooklyn has made an approach to Saffron to exert some pressure on an unidentified person in authority to take some of the ‘heat’ out of the current investigations. Ballard intimated his Commissioner’s office appears to be cooling towards the inquiry. He also stated he had received information from a reliable source, that although Rooklyn sold his distribution points to the Bally corporation, he retained his casinos and gambling interests in Djakarta, and now Saffron is purchasing or leasing premises to be used as brothels in conjuncture with Rooklyn’s casinos. This section has received no other information to confirm the above.

The two Commonwealth officers appeared before Moffitt and gave ‘confirmatory evidence’ (said Moffitt’s report) of the conversation with Ballard. Ballard’s boss, Inspector Jack McNeill, was under extreme pressure from

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the inquiry over his mishandling—motivated by arrogance or corruption or both—of the investigations by NSW Police. He undoubtedly passed on some of the pressure to Ballard before the detective sergeant entered Moffitt’s witness box. Ballard’s version of the conversation with his federal counterparts was somewhat different, suggesting that a NSW sergeant (by then dead) had been his source of information about Rooklyn’s approach to Saffron. This source said the poker machine magnate was merely seeking Abe’s advice on how to take ‘the heat out of the current publicity in the newspapers’, and not out of the police inquiry. As to the suggestion the NSW Commissioner’s Office was ‘cooling towards the inquiry’, Ballard told Moffitt: ‘Our bosses were becoming a bit concerned at the amount of men involved in the inquiry and the amount being spent on the inquiry and we were getting nowhere with it. We were having no support from any person we interviewed.’ In weighing this all up, Moffitt wrote in his final report: ‘I accept the contemporary note in the Commonwealth running sheets as setting out the probable version of what was said. There is no note or record whatever in the NSW Police documents concerning the receipt by Ballard of this information.’ Moffitt mentioned a number of times that his judgements on issues were necessarily based on information put before him by the various—and sometimes competing—interests. In that context, he said, there was ‘no evidence or other material to establish that Rooklyn or Saffron used pressure on some person in authority, police or otherwise, to take the heat out of the

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inquiry’, and that Saffron had denied ‘putting pressure on anybody’ over the inquiry. But he tempered all this by saying: No investigation was made of the matters concerning Saffron and Rooklyn, nor any attempt apparently made to inquire into any links between the two, despite the police files concerning Saffron’s activities, and suspected activities. McNeill conceded a relationship between Saffron and Rooklyn would have changed his views on the respectability of Bally’s Australian business.

Other than that, Moffitt didn’t pass comment on Saffron’s veracity as a witness, but he was unambiguous about Rooklyn. Bally in Australia, he said, ‘is directed by a man who has lied before me and that the parent company, which gives him his ultimate directions, is presided over by a man who also has lied to me’. Moffitt was to find that Rooklyn was ‘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’. Having written and investigated stories that probably contributed to the setting up of the Moffitt Royal Commission, I had followed its hearings closely, particularly those involving appearances of ‘persons of interest’ to me. I was therefore interested in Saffron’s observation that he had not been interviewed by police in respect of the investigations backing Moffitt’s inquiry. A possible reason for this apparent lapse was later offered by James McCartney Anderson at the Juanita Nielsen inquest.

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Saffron, Anderson said on oath, had paid $ 3000 ($20,021) to Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard. This claim was a bit hard to accept, particularly given that, by the time he made the allegation, Anderson had fallen out with Saffron and was making allegations against him in any arena that would take him on—and credibility has always been a bit ‘iffy’ when we’re talking about Anderson. But later evidence, as we will see, reveals that Saffron did pay large sums of money to either avoid being called to an inquiry or to try to entirely derail a proposal to set up an inquiry. • In March 1975 a Filipino man, Ramon Sala, was a guest of Saffron’s at the Lodge 44 Motel at Edgecliff, just to the east of Kings Cross. Sala was known to Interpol and Commonwealth Police as an international smuggler involved in—among other interests—the drug trade. While in Sydney the long arm of the law caught up with him, and he was convicted on currency and drug charges. As is usual in such events, Sala’s passport was confiscated until the legal proceedings were finalised. Saffron’s own lawyer, Morgan John Ryan, of Morgan Ryan & Brock Solicitors, appeared for Sala in court. Ryan took his role as legal representative seriously: he had a chat on his client’s behalf to federal AttorneyGeneral Lionel Murphy, who happened to be something of a mate of Ryan’s—they had met way back in 1952. Murphy at the time was also Minister for Customs and had ministerial responsibility for the Commonwealth Police. Following his discussion with Ryan, Murphy

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ordered that Sala’s passport be returned. As could be expected of a man facing charges that almost certainly would have resulted in a prison sentence, Sala got the next plane out of the country. This caused something of a stir in legal circles, and within a week Interpol had revealed that the passport was false. This was one of those curious decisions made by Murphy, who was widely respected as a pre-eminent lawyer, human rights champion, a progressive law reformer and— to those who knew him personally—a warm, highly intelligent and very social person. I later learned that Murphy had become one of Saffron’s blackmail victims. His press secretary, David Halpin, told me of this, well before he had a bitter falling out with Murphy. The brilliant lawyer and politician had a weakness: young and beautiful Filipino women. One man who could—and did—provide an unending supply of such women to Murphy was Abe Saffron. Saffron also provided a discreet room in a block of units near the top of the hill between Edgecliff and Double Bay, just up the road from Saffron’s Lodge 44 headquarters, for these not infrequent assignations. Halpin actually visited Murphy there on one occasion when a political crisis required the Minister and his media minder to meet urgently. Through this chink in Murphy’s armour, a great man had been made vulnerable. Lionel Murphy was damaged by his association with Saffron and, as we will see, he was not the only attorneygeneral to have the venom of that blackmailer’s malevolence directed at him. Two of the others, however, were not to succumb. But all this was still to come. First

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Saffron had the crises of 1975 to get through, the least of which was the timely resignation of Premier Askin on 3 January—‘getting out before his dirty past catches up with him’, observed one cynical scribe as a few of us celebrated the new political landscape at that Friday’s long lunch. Askin was farewelled a few months later at a party for about fifty of the ‘in crowd’—which included, I learned, Saffron, but not Anderson. As reported by David Hickie in his book, The Prince and the Premier, by the charming Sir Peter Abeles, who prudently assured people to ‘Just call me Peter like always’. The gratuitous knighthood Askin had bestowed upon him and a number of his mates for a handsome fee was not one to be flaunted in that company. At the function, Abeles talked to Askin about a further reward for his being so helpful over the years as Premier: a seat on the board of TNT, and bundles of shares.

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9 MURDER MOST FOUL: ABE BUYS HIS COVER Murder most foul

W ITHIN A FEW weeks of the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen from Kings Cross on Friday, 4 July 1975, a senior and deeply corrupt policeman, Detective Inspector Jack McNeill—then in charge of the Special Crimes Squad— saw an opportunity to make an unexpected quick quid from Abe Saffron. McNeill did not have direct involvement in the investigation into the newspaper publisher’s disappearance, but he had enough clout of seniority to guide it as he would wish. So he made an appointment to talk to Abe. McNeill also arranged for Tubby Black to be in on the meeting at Tubby’s strip club, Pussy Galore. When McNeill arrived he intimated to Black that he and Saffron were in serious bother with the Nielsen investigation. Abe arrived a little late, and they moved to the coffee shop downstairs, next to the club’s entrance. In a booth towards the rear of the coffee shop, McNeill played his pitch: police had been informed, he said—from a most reliable source—that Juanita Nielsen had been seen [ 168 ]

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talking to Abe and Tubby on the footpath right outside where they were now sitting, on the afternoon she disappeared. ‘It looks like you two were the last people to see her alive’, said McNeill. Black exchanged glances with his friend Saffron: they both knew this was rubbish, quickly realising what McNeill’s game plan was. McNeill had invented the whole scenario, and was after a quick payment to ensure investigators would not pursue this fictitious ‘new lead’. He wasn’t really interested in Black, who was presumably there only as a part of the preposterously concocted story. The alternative to not striking a deal was that both be questioned and, as they clearly understood, the media would be given full access to the details. After a bit more talk, McNeill told Black he could go. Saffron said to Black, ‘I’ll take care of this’. And then to McNeill, ‘I’ll contact you’. They left the coffee shop and Black watched the other two walk off down Darlinghurst Road in opposite directions. Two weeks later Saffron met Black again and assured him ‘that little matter’ had all been fixed up; neither of them would be interviewed by the investigating police. Saffron never mentioned to Black what the bill came to for that most expensive round of coffee, but for Abe it didn’t really matter: he had very compelling reasons for not wanting to be implicated in any way in the unfolding Nielsen drama. This had been just another instalment payment for ‘the franchise’ as far as he was concerned. He had again made himself—and his senior employees— invincible.

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The arrangement clearly was sound because the investigating officers, detective sergeants Karl Arkins, Norm Maroney and Dennis Gilligan, never went near Saffron— at least for a couple of years. Nor did they call on Tubby Black, either, but he was never really on their ‘to do’ list. It is not suggested that any of the three knew about the arrangement, but in the way that corrupt senior police issue instructions to more junior officers, McNeill probably barked at the squad to ‘Just leave Saffron to me’ which, in a disciplinary force, they would have done. Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance was no ordinary case: it attracted large newspaper headlines and a great deal of public interest. As I said earlier, I do not intend to traverse the whole Nielsen saga—with the exception of its direct relationship with Abe Saffron. Suffice it to say that my colleague Barry Ward and I spent three years intensively investigating her disappearance. As we said back in those heady days, we may not have been a hundred per cent right, but there was no way we could have been one hundred per cent wrong in our conclusions. One major move we made fairly early in our investigation was to allege a police cover-up of certain aspects of the case. With other Nielsen supporters, we joined a public chorus claiming police were interviewing ‘only her friends, not her enemies’. The basic police story was that Nielsen had gone to the Carousel to discuss advertising with the night manager, Eddie Trigg, had left the club and maybe got into a yellow car. She was never seen again. Given that Abe Saffron owned the nightclub at the centre of this story, it was not unreasonable to expect that he would have been inter-

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viewed early in the piece. Of course, we didn’t know then about that McNeill/Saffron ‘franchise’ arrangement. There was a widely held view that Nielsen had been ‘dealt with’ because of her opposition to a major redevelopment in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, by Frank Theeman (though that was not a view supported by Barry Ward and myself). The developer was well known to both Saffron and James McCartney Anderson. Money had changed hands between Theeman and Anderson, and the latter took the developer’s drug-troubled son, Timothy, ‘under his wing’ and set him up in a nightspot at Bondi—which was, unbeknown to the son, more than generously funded by Frank Theeman. When Detective Sergeant Karl Arkins interviewed Theeman at the CIB offices at 11.20 a.m. on Tuesday, 5 August 1975, the developer agreed he had known Saffron for ‘a number of years’ and that they both had ‘wayward’ sons. ‘I know he has been in trouble but I find him a likeable fellow’, Theeman said about Saffron. Saffron had not invested in any of Theeman’s companies and he had not had any business dealings with him. Theeman said he had arranged for Jim Anderson to set his son Tim up in a partnership in a club ‘without him [his son] knowing’, on the basis that he would work there and eventually earn his share of the business. ‘It is imperative that my son does not know of this arrangement’, Theeman told the policeman. He said he had heard of the Carousel, had been there a couple of times, and thought that Anderson owned it. It was all quite innocuous.

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But why ask developer Theeman about the Carousel a month after Nielsen’s disappearance and not ask the club’s owner? Now we know the answer. Arkins was going to begin arresting people who worked for Saffron in connection with the case long before Saffron was interviewed. But those arrests, it can now be told, came about because of political pressure being applied to—and within—the Wran Government. At every important stage of the investigation that Ward and I carried out, I wrote to Neville Wran—who, as well as being Premier, carried the responsibility of the police portfolio—and to his Attorney-General, Frank Walker, setting out what we had learned. It was important, we believed, that a source of information independent of the police inquiry—which we believed was tainted—should be available to the two people in government who could intervene if they chose to. It was equally important that everybody understood we were not the ‘sole proprietors’ of sensitive information. By early 1977, we met with Wran and called on him to set up a royal commission into our allegations of a police cover-up and the implications of that claim. We also discussed this personally with Walker. Acting on advice from the NSW Solicitor-General on Tuesday, 5 July 1977, Walker wrote to Wran. As investigations were continuing he observed that a real feeling existed ‘that any person with any useful information would not come forward (for obvious reasons) to give evidence, I consider that the holding of a royal commission into the disappearance of this person at this point in time would not be advisable’. But Walker raised the possibility of an alternative: using a section of the Coroners Act as

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‘a means of throwing light on’ Nielsen’s disappearance. It required the Supreme Court to agree to an application by the Minister of Justice for a magisterial inquiry. The Crown Solicitor, however, argued that the section required ‘proof that there is a body of the deceased lying within the State of New South Wales’, and that the circumstances ‘do not conclusively point to the certainty of death’. There were obviously two camps in conflict here: Walker and his senior advisers wanting some sort of inquiry, and the Crown law officials finding every reason to avoid it. I learned later that Walker wanted to see definite movement by the government towards either a resolution of the case by the police or an official inquiry to investigate—among other things—the allegations of corruption hampering the police investigations. In a somewhat heated face-to-face meeting with the Premier in the second half of 1977, Walker set out such a demand, saying (I understand from most reliable sources) that Wran could not have it both ways: either the police do their job or there must be an inquiry, preferably a royal commission. Wran undertook to discuss the matter with the Police Commissioner, the unimpressive Mervyn Woods, which, undoubtedly, he did. Within the police force the reaction was rapid: the idea of having a major inquiry into the affair did not appeal to the likes of Jack McNeill at all. I recall saying to Barry Ward at the time that ‘Walker was pressing for an inquiry, so Wran cracked the whip and the police went out and arrested a few people. Hopefully that would shut Walker—and Ward and Reeves—up for a while’. And to a large extent it was quite successful.

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In November 1977, Arkins and Maroney arrested three people and charged them with conspiring with ‘persons unknown’ to abduct the missing woman. Nothing in the charges suggested they had actually abducted Nielsen or that anything they had done had led to the woman being harmed, or indeed murdered—and there were few people in Sydney at the time who did not believe that had been her fate. Neither, from the documents I have studied since, were police acting on any new information. The order to the officers had clearly been a response to Wran’s demand for action, the alternative to which could well be an unwanted yet unavoidable judicial inquiry into the whole affair. That was certainly something that Abe Saffron, who had still not been interviewed, would go to great lengths to avoid. Of the three arrested—all Saffron employees—one was discharged for a want of evidence, another was convicted and served a year of a two-year jail sentence, and the third—the one of greatest relevance to this narrative—was eventually given a three-year term, but only after a great deal of high drama. Eddie Trigg, a man with a twenty-year police record in New South Wales and South Australia for petty theft, living off the earnings from prostitution and breaking and entering, had been the night manager of the Carousel. The official story goes that Juanita Nielsen met Trigg at the club on the day she disappeared. He had been interviewed a couple of weeks after that event, but not again until the 1977 burst of activity. Trigg was in Melbourne when Arkins and Maroney interviewed him and then arrested him on Friday, 11 November 1977. The process

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of justice can move ponderously slow at times; it wasn’t until 28 March the following year that committal hearings began in the Central Court before Magistrate Kevin Robert Webb. It was August 1978 before Trigg and his two companions were committed for trial. The actual trial didn’t get underway until Wednesday, 9