Leviathan (55 page)

It was the Second World War which grossly distorted Thommo's margins. Hickie records the phenomenal amounts of cash which began to pass through the school in the 1940s, when American soldiers were the big punters and bets of £1000 were not unusual. The party continued into the fifties when celebrity punters like radio star Jack Davey could shrug off single spin losses of £2000. By that time the game had become an illicit staple of Sydney's night-life (for men only, women were strictly excluded) and was attracting the eclectic cross-section of crims, top hats and workmen the
Bulletin
noted. There was a Janus-faced quality about Thommo's too; on the one side the innocence of Runyonesque characters like the bouncer Big Itchy or the forty-five-kilo ring keeper Nixy the Flea with his coloured neckerchiefs and long cigars, and the backslapping bonhomie as when another radio man, 2KY's John Harper, kept his public promise to bare his arse to the ring when he failed to maintain his fourteen toss run of ‘heading ‘em'. On the other side, however, was the violent shadow, acknowledged in the school rule that nobody was allowed outside for fifteen or twenty minutes after the departure of a big winner to give him a sporting chance of getting away, and visible the night Big Itchy gave four men who had attempted to pass dud fivers a ‘scrubbing' on the roadway outside, smashing their teeth out and pocketing £500 reward from George Guest; or again when an innocent punter took a bullet meant for Guest at the entrance to the school. And of course there was the corruption such a profitable operation allowed, in fact required. A police driver called Muir stated baldly in 1953 that he had often driven police to collect bribes from Thommo's and accepted them himself. The standard procedure was to just ignore Thommo's – in 1968 Police Commissioner Norman ‘the Foreman' Allan gave Sydney a giggle by claiming Thommo's didn't exist – or, if public pressure grew too great, to collude in the setting up of a dummy game which could then be raided.

Baccarat, the European-style card game played in a host of illicit clubs which morphed into the casinos of the 1970s, followed a similar trajectory. Introduced early in the century by a former ship's steward, the game had spread to seven clubs in Kings Cross by 1940. Again the outbreak of war lifted them into the big league. In 1944 Siddy Kelly, a veteran of the razor gang wars, opened the first ‘luxury' baccarat club in Victoria Street, Darlinghurst – an up market joint with plush carpet, luxurious fittings and complimentary buffet-style meals for patrons. Here mug punters could gamble from seven at night until eight the next morning, be plied with food to keep up their strength, drink to weaken their judgment, and eyedrops and ‘patent medicines' to ward off the effects of fatigue. It was an instant success and the Cross was soon crowded with imitators. Kelly was making so much black money that when he died in 1948, Centennial Park was flooded with spade-wielding treasure hunters looking for £30 000 Kelly, who lived across the road, had supposedly buried there. When the windfall of returning servicemen's back pay ran out in 1947, the clubs were well enough established to continue and even expand, becoming a city-wide craze by the 1950s, and one enthusiastically adopted by women. One city alderman complained of the number of darts and chess clubs which were really nothing but baccarat schools, and a hundred-metre-long strip of Kings Cross where they flourished gained the appellation ‘the rip-roaring Barbary Coast'. Sydney's infatuation with illicit gambling amazed visiting US judge Harold Buchanan, who said in 1958 that the legal gambling state of Nevada had nothing on the harbour city. A booming twilight industry inevitably attracted a substratum of criminal heavies, assuming they weren't already the club principals: bouncers working at $100 a week to turn away undesirables, floor men who patrolled for would-be bash and rob merchants; gunnies who gave no service for their money other than not unloading a few rounds on the club or its patrons. Just as inevitably, the flow of money gouged out deeper and wider channels of police and political corruption.

In
The Prince and the Premier
Hickie describes a meeting hastily organised by police, politicians and underworld figures to resolve a threatened crisis when a new luxury baccarat school, Club Enchantment, backed by gambling figures from Melbourne, opened in the Cross without consultation. A compromise deal evolved with the action being cut three ways between the club, its major competitor and the minor schools. If it seems remarkable that political figures and police should meet with crims in such circumstances (one of the items on the agenda was the level of protection to be paid) it has to be understood in the context of the times. The tacit acceptance of illegal gambling was a political phenomenon. At the start of the 1960s the Labor Party had been in power in New South Wales for twenty years and it was no accident that the man who emerged from the ruck as the baccarat enforcer extraordinaire in the mid-sixties had extensive party contacts. This was Richard Gabriel Reilly, whom you may recall as the guy getting his head blown off by would-be pyromaniac Johnny Warren. Reilly, an ex-boxer who had worked his way up from bouncing, thieving and violent extortion to a commanding position in the baccarat schools and abortion rackets, had links with many ALP members, including the old radical Eddie Ward, for whose meetings Reilly would provide squads of heavies to deal with hecklers. The extent of the connections between the Labor machine and the criminal milieu was exposed by the upheavals in the aftermath of Reilly's murder.

Despite the violence of his business life Reilly was a man of good habits and a tidy mind. The detectives who arrived at the dress shop into which his Maserati had rolled after Warren had capped him found two address books in his pockets. The books were crammed with the names, addresses and telephone numbers of everyone Reilly had ever dealt with. Along with the crims, brothel owners, hookers, lawyers, cops and abortionists, the books listed contacts for a number of A-grade political and society figures. This potential political bomb was defused through the simple expedient of immediately suppressing the details of the investigation. Hickie recalls a detective who worked on the case voicing his surprise that, ‘as we checked the next groups of phone numbers each day the results were going straight to the Premier [by that time the Liberal Robert Askin]. It was the first and only time that happened on a murder case during my career and I thought it was most unusual.' Hickie, describing the fallout from Reilly's death relates an incident which illustrates how deeply corruption had soaked into the city's political fabric. Another detective working on the case said,

As Hickie notes, the incident spoke volumes, one MP so brazenly trying to shake down another. Why would it be so easy to bluff the wealthy politician into believing his name was in the books? And why was the potential blackmailer so confident of gaining the collaboration of the police in his obviously criminal venture?

As it happened, Reilly's death was not related to the political shake-up of 1965. Warren killed Reilly on a contract from a moneylender and in revenge for Reilly's having run him out of the baccarat rackets. But his death was emblematic. The underworld was realigning its power relationships at the same time as the State. The 1965 election, ironically the first modern law and order campaign, marked the end of Labor's hold on power. After twenty-four years the Liberal–Country coalition took office by dint of the centrist strategy hammered out by its leader, Robin (alias Robert) Askin. The change in the city and State's political superstructure also reshaped Sydney's criminal industries – streamlining and centralising them on the eve of an explosive period of growth, mirroring developments in the wider economy. At the start of Askin's administration Sydney was a city of easy virtue, crisscrossed by diffuse and
relatively
insubstantial currents of criminal enterprise which thrived on public tolerance and an absence of civic mores. Ten years later it was a city subverted, its politics enfeebled by the rise of a criminal counterstate.

In many ways Askin was as much a result of the shift in Sydney's politics as the cause. He was thought an anomaly – a battler who had ignored tradition to join the conservatives. To the Labor Party he was a class traitor, to the Liberals a freakish upstart. None of them understood that he was actually just representative of postwar political trends. Class-based politics were gradually being eaten from the inside out. All political parties were now bidding for the vote of an amorphous ‘aspirational' class. Askin's centrist platform was merely the first crafted explicitly in recognition of this fact. His father had been a tram driver and his family so poor they used a packing case for a table and once had to sleep in a park when evicted from their home. Askin had clerked in the State Government Savings Bank and served in the infantry during the Second World War. He was totally relaxed with the two basics of Sydney's working-class culture – drinking and gambling – and had actually run an SP operation himself. In the army he had conducted his battalion's two-up school.

His laid-back attitude to gambling stood him in good stead in his quest for the working-class vote. In fact, Askin exploited the punting vote in more ways than one. He was the first political leader to perceive the SP betting community as a constituency itself, and he spent a great deal of effort massaging it in the lead up to the 1965 election. It is ironic then that one of Askin's noted accomplishments was the introduction of law and order campaigning to Sydney. He hammered the theme in his first two elections, using phenomena such as the pack rape scare that swept Sydney in the late 1960s. And Sydney
was
becoming a more dangerous place to live. Figures from police department annual reports recorded strong increases in all violent crime except homicide, and astronomical growth in acquisitive crime and sexual assaults. This was largely due to demographics. The baby boom made for an extra one or two hundred thousand eighteen to twenty-four-year-old males, the most crime-prone age group. Postwar affluence, of course, also made for a lot more material to steal. But even in this field of
disorganised
crime Askin had no remedy. Violent assault continued to rise throughout his tenure, even before the first waves of drug-related crime began to break in the early seventies. It could hardly be otherwise as the agencies tasked with fighting crime in the city instead commodified it and cut themselves in for a piece of the action.

The baccarat schools, for example, continued to flourish, albeit with some factional realignment. Hickie's detective-informer who had been surprised at Premier Askin's interest in Reilly's diaries also related a meeting he later attended where baccarat operators asked senior police whether they would be allowed to continue. That, the senior police said, was for the Premier to decide. Askin decided they could, provided they paid for the privilege. A bagman was designated to collect regular payments for the Premier and the Commissioner of Police. Thus was instituted the peculiar division of political patronage that characterised Sydney's illegal gambling industry through the late sixties and early seventies – the outer suburbs baccarat clubs maintained the ALP connections they had held before Reilly's death, while the inner city schools passed over to Askin's sufferance and protection. It was the latter which became the big money illegal casinos when baccarat lost its sheen in the early seventies and was replaced by roulette as the favoured game.

These casinos – garishly plush leisure pits modelled on vulgar interpretations of European elegance, with drapes, circulating hors d'oeuvres, and scantily clad oriental babes – became a city-wide scandal in the seventies due to their brazen operations. Gambling dens like the Forbes Club, the Double Bay Bridge Club and its later incarnation the Telford Club marked their presence with prominent neon and painted signs and even circulated printed invitations to special events. Given their top-level political protection, there was little point in discretion. One female casino employee seemed surprised the casinos
were
illegal when the matter came up in a rape trial because, as she said, ‘The police knew all about it. Detectives and others in uniform [were] always in and out of the place.' Meanwhile the gambling barons raked it in. Dr Geoffrey Lewis, a Sydney University economics researcher who conducted a year-long survey of Perce Galea's Double Bay Bridge Club, estimated that the former wharfie was turning over $110 million a year, and making a profit of $2.3 million. And that was but one of the city's many casinos. So vast was the illicit trade that the Launceston
Sunday Examiner-Express
wrote anxiously that Sydney's illegal industry would eventually doom Tasmania's Wrest Point Casino, at that stage the only legal casino in Australia. Protests were occasionally raised, most often when some gangland atrocity spilled into the public arena, forcing Askin to act. He would refer these concerns to his police commissioner – Norm Allan until 1972, and Fred ‘Slippery' Hanson after that – for ‘detailed study'. Since, by Hanson's time, the Commissioner and the Premier were allegedly splitting $5000 a week between them from Galea's clubs alone, this study probably took the form of throwing handfuls of banknotes into the air and dancing around under the money shower with their underpants on their heads.

The city's legitimate commercial realm was soon cross-pollinated with the can-do spirit of its outlaw milieu. Askin involved himself in the Comalco shares scandal of 1970 by accepting, through his wife, 1500 shares offered to him by the company. He also made a bundle on a package of 5000 shares he took in a company called Gem Exploration and Minerals Ltd, despite the fact that the company had mining lease applications in front of his government's Mines Minister at the time. Much comment arose over the Premier's close relationship with a development company when, in 1974, a federal MP revealed that Askin had signed a lease with the company for the College Street police headquarters for $930 000, a ‘fabulous amount' at that time.