Mr Big: Lennie McPherson and His Life of Crime

By Tony Reeves

When Nellie McPherson reached her eightieth year, her clan got together to give the sprightly grandmother a birthday bash. Her youngest son, Lennie, wasn't invited. He turned up nevertheless, with a small white rabbit. Instead of giving it to his mother, Lennie put one large hand around the rabbit's neck, grasped its head, twisted and pulled and, in a splash of blood, ripped the poor animal's head off. He threw the twitching remains to a horrified Nellie. This was someone who never forgave. Meet Lennie McPherson, the man who came to be known as the Mr Big of Australian 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 Tony Reeves uncovers a heart of evil and takes us deep into a dark and violent criminal world. It is a story that could only be told after Lennie's death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Aug 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781741763737

Book preview

TONY REEVES is an investigative journalist of many years standing. He first became interested in Lennie McPherson more than thirty years ago and has been following the miasma of corruption that has hung above Sydney ever since.

Tony has worked as a journalist with the ABC, Nation Review, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Australian, all the time peeling away deep layers of truth to expose the real workings of Australia’s underworld. His reporting helped bring about the Moffitt Royal Commission into organised crime. He now enjoys a quieter life in Brisbane.

Also by Tony Reeves

MRSIN[The ABE SAFFRON Dossier]

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

  TONY

REEVES

Copyright © Tony Reeves 2005

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Allen & Unwin

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Reeves, Tony, 1940–.

      Mr. Big: Lennie McPherson and his life of crime.

      Includes index.

      ISBN 978 1 74175 290 8 (pbk.).

      1. McPherson, Leonard Arthur, 1921–1996. 2. Criminals –

      New South Wales – Sydney – Biography. 3. Organised crime –

      New South Wales – Sydney. 4. Sydney (N.S.W.) – Biography.

      I. Title.

364.1092

Typeset in 11/14 pt Baskerville by Midland Typesetters,

Maryborough, Vic.

Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Prologue

  1 The early years: fines and iron bars

  2 The fix of the fifties

  3 Staying on top: it’s murder out there!

  4 Friends in the right places

  5 The murders go on: death in the Latin Quarter

  6 Funniest standover man in the business

  7 Sex, drugs, the CIA and a US free trade agreement

  8 The Moffitt Royal Commission

  9 The good judge reports

10 Life after Moffitt

11 Never-ending chores

12 Changing the guard

Epilogue: the morning after

Notes

Index

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

PROLOGUE

WHEN NELL MCPHERSON reached her three-score years and ten her clan got together to give the sprightly old dame of Balmain a great birthday bash. And what a clan: she’d brought ten children into the world, most of them now married, and with their numerous offspring they came in droves to give ‘old Nellie’ a good old knees-up.

A grandson—a stockily built, quietly spoken union organiser—came to her flat, gave her a hug and a kiss, pinned a corsage on her collar, handed her the crutches she’d been using since she lost a leg two years earlier in an operation, and drove her off to a local sports club for luncheon, a few drinks and a few yarns. At around four in the afternoon, Nell was feeling a little weary (some thought she might even be a tad woozy), so she said her thanks and farewells and the grandson drove her back to her little pensioner’s flat nearby, and saw her and a pile of presents and gift-wrapping safely indoors.

Moments later there was a rapping at the door. Nell was surprised to see her youngest son standing there—and even more surprised to see him holding what looked, to her, like a small white rabbit. She hoped he wasn’t going to offer it to her as a present—how could she look after a rabbit?

‘I came around to wish you a happy birthday, Mum. Did you have a nice party?’ asked the man, now in his late thirties.

‘Yes, it was very nice, what with all the family getting together . . .’

‘Not quite all the family, Mum,’ he interrupted. ‘I wasn’t invited!’

‘Well, you know how it is, son, what with the criminal stuff and all . . .’

At that he put one large hand around the neck of the rabbit, grasped its head with the other hand, twisted and pulled and, in a splash of blood, ripped off the poor animal’s head. He then threw the twitching remains on his horrified mother’s front doormat, shot an angry glare at her, turned on his heel and stormed off. Before this he hadn’t seen his mother since she was in hospital having the leg amputation, a circumstance he tried to use as an alibi for a murder. After this, he never saw her alive again. Meet Leonard Arthur McPherson.

That story says more to me about the man who became known as the Mr Big of Sydney crime than all the remaining words in this book on his life and times. It conveys the sense of brutality that punctuates almost every anecdote I’ve been able to gather about Lennie McPherson.

When he died in 1996, the Australian newspaper asked me to write an obituary. I accepted the commission on condition I was not required to say anything nice about him, the generally accepted function of obituaries. They agreed. The obituary began with these words:

Leonard Arthur McPherson, who died in prison yesterday (August 29), will be glorified by some over the coming months. But for this unofficial biographer, his passing has made it a better world. McPherson was a thug. He was described in an official NSW Police document in 1974 as a murderer, rapist, thief and standover man.

As I write this it’s about 30 years since I first took an interest in this man. I had been working as a journalist for the ABC in the mid-1960s and later News Limited, and I’d long been trying to understand what really made Sydney tick. I had begun peeling away layers of concealment as one might take an onion apart.

As a youngster I was advised by friends to fold a banknote into my driver’s licence. If I were pulled over the cop would probably take it and let me off with a warning. It really worked, they assured me. I found it offensive in the extreme that corruption could be tolerated and encouraged at such lowly levels. If this ‘tip of the iceberg’ example was commonplace around our suburbs, what on earth, I thought, could be happening higher up the food chain?

Good stories often cause embarrassment to governments. I was told at the ABC (by a man who bore the censoriously lofty title of Controller of News) that a series of stories I was writing on foreign students overstaying their visas was ‘upsetting the [Immigration] Department and embarrassing to the [Gorton] Federal Government’. This was not to compliment me on my good journalism: I was ordered to desist. (So much for left-wing bias at the ABC!)

In the late 1960s, like so many of my colleagues who could not get their mainstream media employers to publish their ‘good’ reports—stories that could rattle the foundations (or at least ‘tremble the partitions’ as reporters used to quip) of our social and political structures—I regularly contributed articles to the somewhat rebellious Melbourne-based weekly Nation Review. It was that paper which published a series (not mine) on the arrival of the Bally poker machine company into Australia, a company, the paper reported, that had clear links to the US Mafia. The stories whetted my appetite.

I talked with people I knew in the clubs and entertainment industry—managers, union officials and workers. Many were very scared by what they were seeing, scared that a young entertainment agent had been savagely beaten, scared that club secretaries were being corrupted by huge secret commissions to install Bally machines. Frightened people would meet me secretly, on park benches or in little out-of-town cafes.

I spent three months putting together a report that I took to Sunday Telegraph news editor Chris Forsyth. It detailed the arrival of US Mafia-linked people in Australia, and meetings they held with local criminals. I had drawn a managerial flow chart, showing the linkages between the US mobsters and prominent members of our own underworld milieu. At no stage in my investigation did I talk to any police, although I became aware that both the federal and NSW state police were making inquiries similar to mine.

Forsyth put a team of top crime reporters on the job: himself, Bob Bottom and Phil Cornford, to work with me, and as you’ll see later, we came up with a story titled ‘The night the Mafia came to Sydney’ which went into print in July 1972, later described by noted crime journalist Evan Whitton as ‘another seminal piece’.

For journalists who’d been trying for years to expose corruption and criminal activity at high levels among police and politicians, this was an exciting time. Stories were popping up all over the place. Politicians who’d been shouting across the State Legislature for years, threatening to expose each other’s closeted skeletons, were pushed into action by a rare outbreak of media revelations of serious allegations of high-level crime and corruption.

In 1973 the Askin government, under pressure from the flurry of media stories, finally announced a royal commission into allegations of crime in clubs, to be headed by Supreme Court Judge Athol Moffitt. Bottom, Cornford and myself were among the few journalists to volunteer statements and evidence to the inquiry. Others were compelled to appear on subpoena and were somewhat less helpful. A number of the journalist witnesses (including me) ran into problems with the inquiry over the industry-standard refusal to identify sources of material.

The experience enhanced my own reputation as an investigative journalist and soon people who had knowledge about criminal activities but who had virtually given up trying to get exposure started making contact with me. Plain brown paper envelopes (literally!) began to appear under my front door, containing interesting documents. A state ministerial press secretary passed on valuable (and to his minister, damaging) information. A newspaper executive, displeased at his own publication’s lack of action on this front, produced a bundle of highly incriminating documents about Lennie McPherson and his associations with allegedly corrupt police.

Working for a while at the Sunday Telegraph, I became something of a magnet for stories about crime and corruption. And information came to me from diverse sources. Well-known private eye Tim Bristow, for example, regularly contacted me to tell me stories about crooked goings-on, and even discussed with me a number of boat excursions he’d made at McPherson’s behest to get rid of troublesome characters. He explained that a person thrown overboard about 60 miles out to sea doesn’t have to be injured in any way: they’ll never make it back to shore.

This all helped shape my view that a great miasma of corruption hung over much of the public and private sector in Sydney, and that a book (or two) should be written to tell some of the real—and terrifying—stories of crime and corruption in a city that created its first police force from a band of criminals.

Having started with the transcript and final report of the Moffitt inquiry, my area of interest was expanded and then refocused onto Lennie McPherson. Through his remarkable story, I believe, can be shown a depth of corruption that plagued a series of NSW governments of all persuasions and their police administrations and, to some extent, allowed the public to be inured against caring about the social and moral cost this was having.

By 1975 another story distracted me: the murder of Kings Cross heiress Juanita Nielsen was to occupy much of my time (and that of another dedicated journalist, Barry Ward) for more than three years. Even in that incredible story of police and political duplicity, McPherson’s name kept popping up. But that’s another story.

Being aware of high levels of corruption and feeling powerless to do anything about it can be frustrating and tiring. When I quit Sydney in the early 1980s to live in the tranquillity of the NSW Central Coast, I was quoted in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying I had to leave the city to get rid of the stench out of my nostrils ‘ . . . and I’m not talking about air pollution’.

My first draft of the story in this book started gathering dust through the 1980s and ’90s. Meantime I had to earn a living. While I maintained my interest and collected every scrap of information I could lay my hands on, it took an event like the beginning of a new century to start the long process of getting it into print. That first resulted in a flurry of rejection slips, so it was back to the drawing board.

That it is now in your hands is a direct result of the energy that publishing consultant Richard Walsh has generated in me to get it reshaped and finished. For me it was never acceptable to try to foist a book onto the market that was simply a rehash of old press clippings. I have tried in this enterprise to bring to the reader a great deal of original information, as thoroughly fact-checked as is possible as to its veracity, to provide the most detailed portrait I could of the man who was a major force in Australian criminal activity for more than 50 years.

As my interest in this project became reactivated, considerable new information has been uncovered. Some people who might have been reluctant to talk earlier have now come forward with their stories, adding significant detail to our knowledge of a man and his times which rightfully commands a place in the dark side of our history.

Finally I would like to make it plain that this book is not intended as a dissertation on police corruption: there are many erudite studies of this problem available. But for readers not familiar with the nature of police corruption, let me simply say this: when this author complained personally in 1976 to newly elected NSW Premier and Police Minister Neville Wran about the urgent need to deal with corruption in the state’s police force, he suggested the problem was one of a ‘few rotten apples’. Identifying and removing them would ensure the problem did not spread throughout the barrel of apples, he said.

I am not the only person to reject this simplistic view. In April 1981 Mr Justice Edwin Lusher reported on his Royal Commission into NSW Police Administration. Pointing out that his terms had not required him to inquire into corruption, he nonetheless offered this generalised summation:

In an organisation such as a police force, where signs of corruption are perceived, the ‘rotten apple’ theory as a control measure should be firmly rejected by management.

While it is accepted as a control no real progress is likely to be made with the removal of corruption.

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

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

1 THE EARLY YEARS: FINES AND IRON BARS

ON THE HOT, humid morning of Thursday 19 May 1921, a dozen or so young bruisers were nursing the bumps and cuts they had received the previous night at the opening of the big boxing tournament at the Sydney Hippodrome. Old age pensioner Walter Alexander Sparrow would be at the second night of the fights, enjoying the freedom which had so nearly been taken away from him when a magistrate found him guilty of stealing cattle at suburban Botany, sentenced him to nine months’ jail and then suspended the sentence in deference to ‘his considerable age’.

Miss Maude Maddocks could do little for the battered boxers, but was making her contribution to the good looks and well-being of Australian women by offering cures for sunburn, freckles and the removal of 125 superfluous hairs for one guinea in her George Street salon, while the Chamber of Manufacturers was complaining that taxation in New South Wales had reached ‘oppressive levels’ (does nothing change?). Australia’s population had reached 5 435 734; Billy Hughes was in his fourth term as Australian prime minister and the newly formed Communist Party of Australia was celebrating its first six months of existence. Overseas, Sinn Fein members were exploding bombs in England and Northern Ireland and talks in London hoped to find a way to peace in the Shamrock Isle.

The closest thing to a crime wave in Sydney on 19 May 1921 was a warning by police that men were jumping onto trams, snatching ladies’ handbags and jumping off while the tram was in motion. Tom Mix was fighting the good fight against evil, starring in The Texan at the Strand cinema in Pitt Street, and Sydneysiders were at peace with the world as they eased towards the end of an autumn that had been only marginally cooler than the preceding months of a long, hot summer.

On that humid, thundery morning, with a hot breeze puffing in from the north-west, little Leonard Arthur McPherson came into the world as the tenth child of his metalworker father William and long-suffering mother Nellie. The event didn’t quite make headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald. In fact, Lennie’s arrival didn’t even rate a birth notice in that paper of record: the four lines for three shillings, extra lines a shilling each, would have been more than the hard-stretched budget of the McPherson household could run to. It would be some years before this Taurean baby of the family would get his name in printers’ ink.

Life was tough indeed in those lean, between-the-wars years in which were sowed the seeds of the so-called Great Depression. It wasn’t only the McPhersons in the harbourside suburb of Balmain, but families all over Australia, who were on bread and dripping and whatever they could beg, borrow or steal. Little wonder then that Leonard Arthur McPherson’s life of crime started just before the end of his brief schooling at the local Birchgrove State Primary School. On 7 December 1932, at the age of eleven and a half, he was put on probation—a good behaviour bond—in the Children’s Court on a charge of stealing. If he reoffended during that probationary period, he’d be in serious trouble.

Nell McPherson would have taken her son to the court that warm, dry Wednesday morning. Located in a stern two-storey brick building with barred windows that contained two courtrooms, a boys’ shelter and cells below the street-level offices, its imposing sandstone entrance still bears the words ‘Children’s Court’ carved into the lintel. It was handy to police CIB headquarters, not in the centre of the city but in a sort of no-man’s-land at 66 Albion Street, Surry Hills, a few blocks away from Central railway station.

Nell would have listened while the magistrate warned the lad that he would be ‘sent away to the boys’ home’ if he committed any wrong-doing during the probation period. The brief details were entered in the records by a policeman who would also have warned him of the perils of a life of crime. Later mother and son would have headed off towards George Street, to the Balmain tram stop.

It should be mentioned here that there’s actually a paucity of detail available about Lennie’s brushes with the law, from these early encounters on. In the late 1950s Lennie developed useful contacts in the police, prisons and justice records departments and ‘bought’ his files—the originals—thinking they could then not be used against him in later court appearances. An alert staffer in Justice made a photocopy of the main records held there and filed the bundle away obscurely under ‘Z’. Years later those records came into my hands by courtesy of a long-serving ministerial adviser who told me what he knew of the whole sorry saga.

Six months later Lennie quit Birchgrove Primary, leaving behind him what one relative, a cousin called Vic, years later described as: ‘an undistinguished school career—it’s rather touchy to talk about it though, with Lennie being the way he is’. On 13 June 1934, 18 months after his first appearance, he was back in court on another apparently minor stealing charge. His probation was renewed for a year and then, on 18 July, he was convicted on two stealing charges. Again his mother Nell would have been his only supporter in the Children’s Court: lawyers did not trawl for business in this lowly end of the justice system, and would in any case have been beyond the McPherson household budget.

This time—as my copies of the rather cryptic court records show—there was no clemency: he’d broken the terms of his earlier probation and was committed to an institution. No detail of his crime remains: what he stole and who he stole it from are not known. His mother Nell probably wept silently as the police took him away to the ‘naughty boys’ home’ at Mount Penang, overlooking Gosford on the NSW Central Coast, today an hour’s drive north of Sydney.

Initially Lennie must have been pleasantly surprised by his first glimpse of his new home. He would have been expecting a prison, with high walls and sentry towers, but Mount Penang looked like a holiday resort. A row of timber cottages resembled the main street of a small country town. There was a central hall where films were shown once a week, and an administrative building. There were no high fences, just a few strands of wire to keep in the cattle that roamed across the gently undulating fields surrounding the ‘village’. But its rustic charm was misleading, for life here was tough, with some youngsters who were destined to spend most of their lives behind bars treating the young Lennie as