Leviathan (53 page)

Exposure to what Wood called ‘the worst aspects of society' inevitably hardens the heart. But police are not alone in this. Journalism, for one, is another occupation in which the practitioners eventually develop a very scaly hide. But journalists do not carry guns. They are not permitted to use force or take lives in pursuit of their duties. Unlike police officers, they are not authorised to enter and search private homes and to seize personal belongings. Although they sometimes do, or at least try to. In common with police, journalists do occasionally form close relationships with criminal informants, and sometimes these working relationships become friendships. Like police, journalists are often exposed to the opportunity to benefit privately from their work, be it at a very low level such as taking freebies from companies during promotion drives, or more seriously through opportunities to engage in insider trading, or most harmfully through debauching the power of the media itself, as in the cash-for-comment talkback scandal of July 1999. At some stage almost all journalists indulge themselves in the milder forms of ‘corrupt' practice. Nowadays most police do not. After I had been to Macquarie Fields I ran a trace through a CD-rom of the Wood Commission transcripts, looking for any references to the station or its senior officers. There were about forty or fifty all told, none of them negative and most concerned with the excellent manner in which the station managed its informant program.

When exploring the nature of police work, to consider whether it was inherently corrupting, Wood also acknowledged that police officers find that many crimes, such as prostitution, gambling, drugs, porn and liquor licensing offences, are either victimless or in high demand by society. In working these areas a cop soon becomes ‘acutely aware of the substantial difference between their take home pay and the financial opportunities available through crime'. They are rarely rewarded for ethical behaviour but quickly punished for disciplinary infractions. They are prey to the whims of politics, ‘feel compelled to cut corners if they are to control the streets', and become cynical about the wider community which does not understand the dangers and difficulties they encounter. In the face of such strains it is surprising that corruption of the city's police is not universal.

 

Sydney had entered the Second World War as a fractured city, riven by class conflict, weak in any culture of civic responsibility which might curb the rapacity of its competing interests, and still carrying the incubus of its convict past. As late as 1946 it was still legally permissible for judges to hand out floggings, as one threatened to that year. The traditional antipathy of Sydney's inhabitants towards the police was likewise undiminished. One
Sydney Morning Herald
article lamented that bystanders could ‘hoot and jeer at policemen struggling on a city pavement with a suspect for the possession of a loaded pistol'. So deep was this antipathy that more than fifty years later Stephen Knight identified a sympathetic fascination with the criminal as hero as a defining characteristic of Australian literature. There is, as Knight points out, something decidedly unusual ‘about the readiness with which the Australian crime novel accepts the viewpoint of the criminal and outlines with sympathy the wrongs committed against him'. Almost as though his crime were a legitimate response to an unfair world. Whilst criminal heroes are occasionally celebrated in American and French culture, only Australian writing has observed a long, unbroken fascination for the prosaic, workaday concerns of the ne'er-do-well. Less dashing, less attractive and generally just much less inspiring than his foreign compadres, the criminal anti-hero of Australian literature has nonetheless proved more resilient. Knight describes him as a low-life plodder who is understood and sympathised with, but not for romantic reasons. ‘Without glamour, usually rather unimpressive in personal terms, the criminal seems to see a life of lawbreaking as the only path open to him, is not particularly thrilled by it, yet has a reasonable range of antisocial skills and illegal procedures that are carefully and approvingly revealed by the story'. Two hundred years of affection for this dodgy Everyman speak to Knight of ‘a deeply held and almost routinised sense that any move against conventional authority is to be admired'.

This may have made for an emptiness at Sydney's heart, a moral and structural vacuum which laid the city open to attack by the cancerous corruption it would become famous for. By the late 1970s the spread of that cancer was so advanced that key elements of the city's power structure and economy had drifted under the influence of a criminal counterstate; a dark alliance of corrupt police, businessmen, politicians and the underworld. Dr Al McCoy, an American specialist in the crosscultural analysis of crime, declared that ‘no city in the world could rival Sydney's tolerance for organised crime'. So integrated was the system that the organised criminal milieu even began to take on political allegiances mirroring those of the legitimate world, and the political developments of the postwar era can be as easily read in its bloody, periodic realignments as in any volume of Hansard.

The war itself started the ball rolling. Just as the Second World War finally jump-started Sydney's economy out of depression, so too did it jolt the city's underworld out of the small-time pursuits of thieving, sly-grogging and prescription-drug rackets. Suddenly the city was awash with cash – an abundance of wage packets which hadn't been seen since the Depression hit – and Sydney's petty crims found themselves loose in a very big lolly shop.

Wartime rationing created an ideal environment for black market rackets – a sudden jump in demand by way of the increased cash circulation corresponded with a restriction of supply. Sydney's criminal milieu were not slow in nutting out hundreds of ways to insinuate themselves in the distribution chain. Coupon forging, waterfront pilfering and adulteration were the mainstays. A casual glance at the arrest records of any of the standover men of the 1950s and 1960s – infamous ‘gunnies' like Chow Hayes, Richard Reilly or Johnny Warren – reveals how important the black market rackets were in nurturing the growth of Sydney's postwar organised crime. Most of them first graduated from petty thieving and thuggery at that time. Chow Hayes, the vicious heavy who later stood over illegal gambling enterprises like Thommo's two-up school and eventually did time for the murder of one of the school's bouncers, ripped off naive soldiers and greedy shopkeepers with the ‘cabbage leaf racket' – selling sealed cartons of black market smokes which were in reality packed with cabbage leaves, the foliage which most closely approximated real tobacco weight. Richard Reilly, a strongarm king of the underground baccarat games in the Cross during the early sixties, whose 1967 murder threatened to expose the underworld connections of hundreds of society and political figures recorded in his contact books, ran a wartime racket printing forged clothing ration coupons. His killer, the late Johnny Warren, had a petrol coupon rort so profitable it allowed him to finance a phone-order stealing business and attempt to muscle in on the Kings Cross baccarat games with his own clubs. To the modern ear the black market rackets sound quaint, with their cabbage leaves, bodgie coupons and bottles of Scotch half-filled with water and sold to soldiers for a couple of quid profit. But they were the finishing school for a number of violent and fairly odious guys. The huge safari rifle with which Warren blasted a hole in Reilly's larynx, severing his carotid artery, hadn't been the upstart heavy's first choice of weapon. Still in the thrall of his wartime experience, Warren's original plan had been to kill Reilly by dousing him with petrol and setting him alight. He had only been dissuaded by a friend's insistence that the plan was impractical.

More important than the opportunities for black market entrepreneurship it created, however, was the effect the Second World War had on the trifecta of ‘social' crimes that have been the staples of police corruption ever since – drinking, screwing and gambling. Drugs, the modern equivalent, were at that time almost unheard of, except for the relatively minor trade in cocaine to the city's prostitutes during the 1920s. The era's razor gangs, lineal descendants of the larrikin pushes, spent a few years frantically slicing and dicing each other in the fight to control that market. But back then grog was the thing. Tight opening hours and licensing restrictions in Sydney after the First World War created a thriving market for ‘black' liquor vended after hours at exorbitant rates to legions of thirsty customers. Similarly prostitution and gambling were a standing inducement to police corruption.

Sydney police were unusually vulnerable to the corrupting influence of proscribed but publicly tolerated crimes. The peculiarities of Sydney's social and legal structure – the long shadow of her convict past – multiplied the points of temptation. The New South Wales criminal law encompassed an extraordinarily wide range of behaviour, equalled nowhere else in the Anglo-Saxon world. Drunkenness was a case in point. By 1948, fifty-five per cent of all arrests were for Inebriates Act violations. One Legislative Assembly member complained it was no longer safe for his constituents to frequent their local pubs due to the raids of the police ‘trawler', which sometimes netted 800 arrests in a single weekend. The hangover of attitudes from the penal past can also be seen in the terminology of the pre-1970 versions of the Summary Offences Act. References to ‘rogues', ‘vagabonds' and ‘incorrigible rogues' abound. What it all added up to was an unusually broad range of unenforceable laws unsupported by the general public but which the establishment expected to be policed.

Aggravating the equation was the heightened public disavowal of
any
control of the so-called ‘social' or ‘victimless' crimes. Drinking, whoring and gambling which, along with profanity, preoccupied the minds of that rabble disgorged from the First Fleet had, over the two centuries, indelibly stained the soul of the new city. This was the dynamic behind Sydney's unrivalled tolerance of organised crime, manifested in the peculiar spectacle of the city's postwar elite embracing the criminal element. Outside observers like McCoy were constantly amazed at the complacency with which political figures and high-ranking police not only associated with underworld figures but allowed themselves to be seen doing so. Fred Hanson, for example, Police Commissioner from 1972 to 1977, was fond of duck shooting with ‘Aussie' Bob Trimbole, principal of the Calabrese marijuana operation in the Riverina district and a suspected conspirator in the murder of antidrugs campaigner Donald Mackay. Chief Stipendiary Magistrate Murray Farquhar stayed cool and hung loose when photographed with SP-betting operator George Freeman in the members' enclosure of Randwick Racecourse. And as David Hickie relates in his 1986 study of the New South Wales criminal milieu,
The Prince and the Premier
, one Labor premier even found himself elbowed out of his own home when partying crims, taking advantage of his hospitality, took to turning up with armloads of women for late-night roisters. The hapless leader was reduced to sitting out the night, alone on a park bench across the road, until the parties burned themselves out. Only when he complained personally to the Police Commissioner was a squad of detectives organised to turf out the heavies. United in the bonhomie of the track, the pub and the sly-grog dens, these establishment figures were simply playing out the national mythology of social crime. There was nothing wrong with it and only constipated wowsers and needledicks said otherwise.

Richard Hall, in his 1986 study of Australian ‘disorganised' crime, argues that a political schism exaggerated the city's burden of unenforceable social legislation. At the turn of the century the newly formed Labor Party, uniting the numerically dominant working class behind it, had become a serious threat to the established political order. It was imperative middle-class opinion be mobilised, but the key to its support lay with those punishers and straighteners for whom drinking and gambling ranked alongside mixed marriages and goat fucking as threats to the nation. Their impost for averting a red takeover was a raft of laws to curb the debauchery of the lower orders. Pub closing time was cut from eleven p.m. to six p.m. and off-course betting was outlawed entirely. The Labor Party, smeared as the ‘publican's party', bitterly decried the class bias of the movement, pointing out that none of the restrictions applied to the toffs in their racing clubs. Enduring political rancour in the racing world can be glimpsed in the 1976 complaint of Cliff Mallam MLA that racing in New South Wales was run by ‘a bunch of amateurs and blue bloods who treat people in the industry like serfs'.

Like King Phillip II of Spain and modern day antidrug campaigners, no experience of the failure of the moral crusaders' prohibition policy could shake their belief in its essential excellence. In spite of the clampdown, sly-grogging was a steady earner for basement dives like the Ziegfeld Cafe in King Street. According to one Maxwell Liquor Royal Commission informer, prostitutes, male perverts, sly-grog and dope were all to be had at the Ziegfeld, along with the ‘band and hot meal for six shillings six pence' the owner claimed to provide. The money was in after-hours sales; the commission heard of streets where hotels on one side followed the six o'clock close, while those on the other were inexplicably able to trade until late into the night. The situation changed with the outbreak of war. With hundreds of thousands of thirsty servicemen thronging the city, beer and liquor were in such demand that a quota system was introduced. The pubs, whose licences entitled them to a fixed ration every week, found themselves sitting on liquid gold. Liquor quotas quickly disappeared out the back door and onto the black market, where they were snapped up by unlicensed American-style nightclubs like Abe Saffron's Roosevelt Club or Sammy Lee's eponymous club (‘If there's a girl you want to please, take her along to Sammy Lee's') in Woollahra Street. A frantic trade in bogus hotel licensees ensued – the Maxwell Commission stated flatly that, despite his denials, Saffron had ‘a beneficial interest in a number of hotels using different persons as dummies'. Corruption of the vice squad accelerated. One of David Hickie's informants, a senior officer who joined the force in the early forties, confessed that one night-shift radio patrol car team was occupied full time touring the city's sly-grog, vice and gambling dens to collect kickbacks. Justice Maxwell expressed his displeasure that the Metropolitan Superintendent of Police, James Sweeney, should hold his retirement testimonial at Sammy Lee's, ‘one of the most notorious offenders against the liquor laws', collecting £600 from the two or three hundred guests present ‘in circumstances which lend themselves quite readily to suspicion and criticism'. Inevitably the dens began to attract the attention of standover merchants.