Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron Dossier

By Tony Reeves

Abe Saffron was one of Australia's most notorious and powerful crime figures. Yet, he spent his life denying any involvement in criminal activity, claiming he was just a successful businessman. Sydney knew otherwise. This was the man who controlled the city's underworld with an iron fist. Tony Reeves has been gathering information on Abe Saffron for over forty years. With Saffron's death in September 2006, he can finally and safely reveal all. And what a story it is. Saffron trafficked in drugs, ran prostitution and gambling rings, was not averse to extreme violence and was a master of bribery and a corrupter of police, politicians and the judiciary. The man with a voracious sexual appetite was a real-life Godfather of Australian crime. Mr Sin makes for shocking and disturbing reading. It reveals the heart of a vicious world of greed and evil and leaves no doubt that Abe Saffron well and truly deserved the moniker, Mr Sin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Aug 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781741762464

Book preview

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.

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

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

CONTENTS

Author note

Prologue

  1    For king and country . . . and a quick quid

  2    Sly grog sales: a bottler of a money-maker

  3    In and out of court and courting crims

  4    New players join the team: Abe moves into the big time

  5    Another war, another fortune: Vietnam blue puts crims in the black

  6    Pictures to die for: blackmail dossiers get out of hand

  7    Burning issues: murder and arson become the hot topics

  8    Snorting at drug slur: some customs are not so hard to break

  9    Murder most foul: Abe buys his cover

10    Tax break comes Abe’s way: whistleblower goes to jail

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

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 <http://www.rba.gov.au/calculator/calc.go> 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 sixty-eight 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 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)

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 inner-suburban 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-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 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 beer-and-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—purple-faced, cauliflower-eared with a nose to match—seated 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.’

‘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. 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.

1 FOR KING AND COUNTRY

. . . AND A QUICK QUID

Having 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 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, 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.

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:

That recording was never put to air. Saffron’s solicitors contacted the program producers and threatened legal 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 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 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.

2 SLY GROG SALES:

A BOTTLER OF A

MONEY-MAKER

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