Gangland North South & West

By James Morton and Susanna Lobez

The last volume in the best-selling series, Gangland North, South & West looks at crime in South and Western Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania. In addition to contract killing, prostitution, robbery, illegal gambling and the stand-over game, in these regions there has been a healthy living to be made from gold, diamond and pearl thefts.

Eastern criminals travel west, south and north to meet and do business, or battle with home-grown stalwarts such as Shiner Ryan, said to be able to open a lock with his hand behind his back; Spadger Bray, suspected of three murders and himself shot dead a decade later; blackmailing brothel madam Shirley Finn, executed on a Perth golf course, and many, many others. Gangland North, South & West is everything that makes life worth living in the underworld.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780522864236

Book preview

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Gangland

NORTH

SOUTH &

WEST

Gangland

NORTH

SOUTH &

WEST

James Morton &

Susanna Lobez

MUP_Victory_Long(Black).jpg

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 West to East and Back Again—Some Early Commuters

2 The Squizzy Taylor Connection

3 All that Glitters Is Often Gold

4 North: The Early Day

5 Houses are Rarely Homes

6 Between the Wars

7 World War II and Its Aftermath

8 Drugs

9 Over the Wall …

10 The Family

11 Treasures of Diamonds and Gold

12 … And into the Bank

13 Bikers Great and Small

14 Snowtown and Other Murders

15 Northbridge Identities

16 Today and Tomorrow

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Our thanks are due to Gary Adshead, Sunil Badami, Sean Cowan, Sally Heath, John and Penelope Kollosche, Barbara Levy, Sybil Nolan, Mark Norman, Russell Robinson, Graeme Sisson of the Western Australian Police Historical Society and Adrian Tame, as well as to many who asked not to be named. Our thanks also go to the staff of the National Library of Australia and the State Libraries of New South Wales, Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, to the Department of Justice, Victoria and in England to the British Library, the Newspaper Library, Colindale and the National Archives, Kew. The websites austlii.edu.au and newspapers.nla.gov.au were invaluable.

Once again, this book could never have been completed without the priceless advice, critique, help and research of Dock Bateson.

Introduction

In the first five weeks of 2013 there were fifteen separate shootings in Adelaide, including an attack on the former home of Vince Focarelli, the leader of the New Boyz street gang. None of the shootings was random.

On 6 January 2013, the dismembered head of drug dealer and general hoon Stephen Ramon Cookson washed up in a bag on a beach at Porpoise Bay, Rottnest Island, off the coast of Western Australia. Because there was air in the bag when it was thrown in the sea, it had resurfaced. There was speculation that the killer had deliberately done this as a warning to others.

On 29 January 2013 the Northern Territory Police announced it had busted a Darwin drug ring and had arrested three members of the Rebels Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (OMCG) after a man was found with drugs stuffed in his rectum on his arrival from a flight from Alice Springs in central Australia. Welcome to Gangland North South & West.

If the widely held view is correct that a city must have at least 800 000 inhabitants to support organised crime, Perth and Adelaide would have avoided this qualification until the 1970s, and Darwin would still fall short today. Nevertheless, for the last century and a half they have all provided more than their fair share of crime and criminals, of contract killers, standover men, bludgers, prostitutes, bank robbers, brothel madams, horse-race fixers, fraudsters and, increasingly, drug manufacturers and dealers. In 1900 arrests for property offences per capita were twice as high in Western Australia as in New South Wales and three times higher than in Victoria. A century later, the Northern Territory, per capita, has the highest rates for homicide and assaults while, per capita, South Australia is not far behind, and Western Australia tops the charts for unlawful entry with intent, motor-vehicle and other thefts.

Some who have found life too tame, or indeed too hot, in the criminal sense, from these parts of Australia have made their way to, and their mark in, the eastern states. Some eastern-state criminals have come unstuck in the west and found themselves serving lengthy sentences. Others have not survived the trip.

With Darwin by far Australia’s closest airport to South-East Asia and with Perth closer to Asia than to Sydney, in the past sophisticated Sydneysider and Melburnian criminals may have looked down on their South and Western Australian counterparts as mere bush criminals, but they would have been wrong to do so. As the author Gertrude Stein might have said, a criminal is a criminal is a criminal … And Ben Hecht, who wrote The Front Page, had it right when he said:

The criminal has no hates and fears—except very personal ones. He is possibly the only human left in the world who looks longingly on society. He does not hanker to fight it, reform it or even rationalise it. He wants only to rob it. He admires it as a hungry man might admire a roast pig with an apple in its mouth.

North, South, East, West, crims are all the same. Only the opportunities sometimes differ.

This book then is about those north, south and west homegrown criminals as well as visitors and emigrants. They include Squizzy Taylor’s offsider Angus Murray and, nearly a century later, the dobber and drug dealer Terrence Hodson, both of whom travelled east from Perth with fatal consequences. And those easterners such as George ‘Spadger’ Bray and Sydney hoon George Wallace, who both crossed the country to make their ill-gotten living.

Since Australia’s foundation, crime everywhere has undergone cultural changes. The drastic legislation aimed at habitual criminals in Victoria in 1907 sent them flocking to South Australia, with a resulting spike in burglaries and robberies. Long gone are the likes of ‘The King’ of Australia’s professional letter thieves, Mick McIlveen, known as Panama Jack, who began his career in Adelaide, moved to Brisbane and then on to Western Australia. His trick was to saturate a handkerchief with the fixative birdlime, tie a length of string to it and weight it with lead. McIlveen would drop the handkerchief into letterboxes and, with a mixture of luck and skill, pull it out. Attached to the birdlime would be a letter or two, and cheques found in the envelopes would be cashed by women helpmates.

Gone too is the need for illegal abortionists such as Frederick Swann, known as ‘Dr’ Evans, and his offsider, the seventy-year-old palmist and fortune teller Johanna Walsh, known as Madame Lennard, who worked out of Mica Street, Broken Hill, in western New South Wales. In 1907 Swann received three years for a botched abortion on a girl who just survived the operation. On this occasion Walsh was acquitted. In May 1928 another abortionist, ‘Dr’ Robert Bruce, or Bennett, died in Fremantle Prison. He had been ill for some time and was due to be released after serving fifteen years of a life sentence for the murder of nineteen-year-old Doris Chandler, who died after a botched illegal operation. He had been sentenced to death and reprieved. ‘Dr’ was probably a self-given courtesy title, because he had served two earlier sentences for botched abortions: five years in 1899 and seven in 1903. In the latter case the newspapers had had particular contempt for Albert Stokes, a ‘thorough-paced young blackguard’ and ‘craven hearted cur’ who had first seduced the girl, then taken money from her to find an abortionist and finally turned king’s evidence and obtained a certificate exempting him from prosecution.

But as one crime disappears from the calendar another pops up; so, in the 1970s, a crackdown on brothels produced a rise in clients of rub and tugs. The proliferation of drugs since the Vietnam War has also produced a change not only in crime, but also in culture.

Serial killers are nothing new. Two of the more celebrated in the first half of the twentieth century from the west were Charles Spargo and twenty years later the better-known John Thomas Smith. In May 1900 Spargo received a year in jail for horse stealing. He had already served five years for similar offences but now moved on to greater things. In 1904 he was given three years for robbery with violence and in December 1912 he left Donnybrook, south of Perth, with a man named Bryant, who was never seen again. In quick succession a number of men who were known to have been with Spargo disappeared. On 15 December Spargo was the last man seen in the company of a man called Jones. Spargo had hired a horse, saying he was going to give Jones a lift to a sheep station. Later, Spargo said he had met a wool teamster who had agreed to take Jones the rest of the way. Reginald Dickerson from Derby was another who went missing at the end of 1912. His matchbox was found in Spargo’s possession and a steward on the vessel Paroo said that Spargo had given him a suit of clothes with the label of a tailor from Derby. A secondhand dealer bought Dickerson’s gold belt and felt jacket from an unidentified man.

However, it was for the January 1913 murder of another Jones, this time Gilbert Pickering Jones, for which Spargo eventually stood trial. Spargo had met Jones on board the Western Australia and, after it docked in Broome, the pair set off to do the town. Only Spargo returned. Later he went to the local bank and tried to withdraw £80 from Jones’s account. In February Jones’s body was found in a mangrove swamp near Broome racecourse. He had been shot in the head. Although no gun was found, the chain of evidence was fairly solid. Spargo had been seen leaving the boat with Jones and again with him near the racecourse. When he had also used Jones’s passbook to try to obtain money, he said he had changed his name to Jones. Spargo was arrested in Perth by Inspector Jack Walsh, himself killed a decade later in the Kalgoorlie Goldfields murders.

There was a flurry of excitement when, after the trial, a Busselton newspaper published a report that Gilbert Jones was alive. It was dismissed by the police as pure invention. Nevertheless, Spargo maintained his innocence to the end. Hanged at Fremantle Gaol on 1 July 1913, his last words were said to be ‘Pray for me’. It was not until the end of April 1914 that the body of a likely fifth victim, William Ernest Ellison, was found in the bush near Guildford. He was identified by a dentist, who had been asked to make him an upper set of false teeth.

John Thomas Smith, better known as Snowy Rowles was convicted in 1932 of the murder of Louis Carron in May two years earlier. Rowles was employed as a dingo and fox trapper near Wydgee in Western Australia, and said he was lonely and in need of a mate. Carron, who had received a cheque for about £25 when he quit his job, said as he was doing nothing he would be happy to travel with Rowles. They left Narndee station, in the Murchison district, on 18 May 1930 and nothing more was heard of Carron until a friend became concerned and reported him missing to the police.

Rowles was found with some of Carron’s possessions, which he’d been trying to sell. He had also cashed the severance cheque to buy beer. Although he went to the gallows maintaining no crime had been committed, Rowles was suspected of the murder of two other men, James Ryan and George Lloyd, who had also disappeared. A robber and prison escaper, Rowles was refused leave to appeal and was hanged on 13 June 1932. He had earlier met the novelist Arthur Upfield when they were both working at the Narndee Government Camel Station in October 1929. Upfield had been trying to devise a perfect murder for a new novel and had discussed with Rowles sifting the ashes of the dead man, flushing them down a well and burning kangaroo carcasses over any remains. It was thought Rowles had turned fiction into fact. Subsequently Upfield, who gave evidence at Rowles’ trial, used the case for the basis of his novel The Sands of Windee.

Fraudsters may not kill their victims but, in their own way, they leave lasting damage. The careers of rorters Alan Bond, Laurie Connell and Robin Greenburg, whose Western Women banking scam lost its investors $9 million and which led to a total sentence of seventeen years, are well documented and, as white collar crimes, really do not qualify for inclusion in this pantheon. However, Connell’s scams on the racetracks of Perth do merit some examination.

Financed by his swindle over the banking company Rothwells, which collapsed leaving its investors ruined, Laurie Connell, grandson of Western Australian Police Commissioner Robert Connell, was also a leading racehorse owner, and at least two of his horses (and very probably more) were ridden foul in highly publicised circumstances. The first was in January 1983 when nineteen-year-old apprentice jockey Danny Hobby literally jumped from his horse Strike Softly shortly after the start of the AHA Cup at Bunbury. The idea was to give Connell’s horse Saratoga Express, on which Connell had wagered heavily, a better chance. Unfortunately, loose horses can cause havoc in a field of runners and Strike Softly so badly interfered with Saratoga Express that the hot thing could only run second.

Hobby was promptly suspended for two years by the stewards, but Connell could not have expected things to be left there and he took action to avoid questions being asked. Hobby was paid $30 000 up-front, received a $3000-a-month salary and was sent on a round-the-world trip with his girlfriend. This was organised by Perth identity Sam Franchina, the uncle of the wife of Strike Softly’s trainer Bob Meyer. Hobby returned to Australia in 1986 and, when he threatened to reveal all, he was rewarded with another $300 000 to continue touring the world. Finally, he ended up in Kuala Lumpur.

Meanwhile, in 1987, Connell’s horse Rocket Racer, trained by Buster O’Malley, was doped in the 2 mile Perth Cup. Backed down to a 2–1 favourite after winning by nine lengths, the horse was so juiced up it took an extra circuit for its jockey John Miller to pull it up. Miller, who had wasted an extra 6 kilograms to make the weight, was in a state of collapse and so was the horse. Because of the horse’s condition it was not possible to take dope samples, but it was thought that the drug etorphine, known as elephant juice, had been the stimulant. At the time, as journo Max Presnell wrote, ‘elephant juice was the sting of the season’ and horses were ‘sprouting tusks’. Etorphine is said to be 10 000 times stronger than morphine and if administered properly, calms elephants and speeds up horses. Connell was said to have won $500 000 as well as $210 000 in stakes, having doubled the horse with the winner of the Railway Stakes. That night he threw a lavish dinner. One non-attender was a well-known Perth bookmaker whose doubles book had been got-at by one of Connell’s agents, making the prices the bookmaker was to offer known in advance. Rocket Racer ran again a month later and then died in mysterious circumstances while off the track.

A few weeks before Rocket Racer’s run in the Cup another Connell horse, Brash Son, this time trained by leading trainer George Way, had tested positive for etorphine. In February 1987 Way, who had a history of violence, was warned off for fifteen years over Brash Son’s test and that of another horse, Hollydoll Girl, owned by John Roberts, who was then the chairman of the Western Australian Turf Club. Way earned a further five years off the course after a battery device designed to give a shock to a horse and thereby sustain its efforts, was found in his stable. After the second disqualification Way became known as ‘Beyond 2000’, the date when his suspension would end. Hoop John Miller was warned by the stewards to stay away from Way, an intervention that he bitterly resented.

By 1991 Strike Softly’s Danny Hobby had reined in something in the region of $1 million and Connell could not, or would not, pay any more. When he received a visit from the Western Australian police, Hobby decided to tell all. For this he received a sentence of three years reduced from nine for his cooperation, to be served in the witness protection program in motels and private apartments until he was given parole.

Strike Softly’s trainer Bob Meyers, who told the court that he, along with about 90 per cent of Western Australia’s trainers, used an electric boot to improve their charges’ performances, went down for thirty months. The bagman Sam Franchina had died, and so that left Connell. At his trial, Hobby gave detailed evidence about race fixing, telling the jury he had done this for a variety of owners, trainers and bookmakers at every meeting, using drugs and batteries and, once the stalls were open, bumping other horses or fences and running wide to lose ground. The price for a country meeting was $1500 to $2000, and $3000 to $5000 in the city. If it was a cup race in the country then city prices applied.

Myers claimed that Connell had arrived in his yard in a Rolls-Royce and asked him to approach Hobby, offering a fee of $3000. Far from being shocked, the apprentice had negotiated a further $2000 for himself. Connell called an alibi that at the time of the approach he was miles away from the stables. His defence team also announced they would be calling evidence to name the mastermind behind the scheme. When it came to it, however, the witness was the brothel madam Lydia Cole and since Franchina, whom she proposed to name, was dead, she was not allowed to give evidence anyway.

The jury acquitted Connell of race fixing but guilty of perverting the course of justice by paying Connell to stay away, something his lawyers argued unsuccessfully on appeal was an inconsistent verdict. Hobby served a year of a five-year sentence before being given work release. In July 2011 the ban on Hobby attending racetracks was lifted. He had been clean for the seventeen years since his warning off. Connell died bankrupt following a heart attack on 27 February 1996. He owed $341 million worldwide.

As a postscript, Connell and Way’s offsider, owner, trainer and gambler Les Samba, was shot dead in Melbourne’s toney Middle Park in February 2011. At one time his daughter was married to the suspended hoop Danny Nikolic. Samba had himself been suspended because of his friendship with Way. He had also trained for Sydney identity Peter Farrugia, shot in a standover in Queensland in 1992. Two years later Samba had been charged with cultivating the then largest known crop of cannabis in South Australia, but in 1995 the Director of Public Prosecutions offered no evidence against him. Before his death Samba had been in a racing partnership with Ron Medich, accused in 2011 of the murder of Sydney identity Michael McGurk.

This will be the last book in a project that began back in 2006. Nothing in our research has changed our conviction that throughout the country, Australia punches above its weight in terms of major criminals. Inevitably, by the time the book is published there will have been a number of new arrests made, defendants convicted and acquitted and appeals allowed and dismissed. At the same time some may think that they, their relatives or friends have been unfairly omitted from this small pantheon. Again, if they are kind enough to supply us with details we will try to have them included in any future edition.

West to East and Back Again—Some Early Commuters

1

Some criminals, such as Ned Kelly and even the malevolent Squizzy Taylor, manage to achieve folk hero status. One such hero in South and Western Australia was the dark-haired, blue-eyed, 163-centimetre tall Ernest Joseph ‘Shiner’ Ryan. Born around 1885, he was a robber and safecracker, and undoubtedly South Australia’s greatest criminal of the early part of the twentieth century. Women who found him attractive thought his face glowed; less spiritually, his tattoos included a cross, an anchor, a pierced heart, the word love and a flag. In 1902 he was convicted of larceny in Adelaide and sentenced to a birching and to be kept in a reformatory until he was eighteen. He escaped within a month but was recaptured at Broken Hill in New South Wales, and received three months for vagrancy. The idea of detaining him until the age of eighteen must have foundered because, convicted of housebreaking at Gladstone in Queensland, he was released on a £100 bond the fol-lowing year. He headed south-east and was in Sydney when, in 1904, he served three months for theft. He went west and in Fremantle, in August 1905, he received two years and four months for stealing and receiving. This time he had been convicted with the New Zealand-born Henry Lewis, also known as James ‘Jewey’ Mackay. The 157-centimetre tall bootmaker had been in Western Australia since 1902 and had already served two sentences for theft and assaults on the police.

But Ryan never stayed in one place for long and in 1909 he, with others, was suspected of the murder of Constable William Hyde, shot and killed on 2 January at Marryatville in South Australia while investigating a series of breakings. In the previous weeks there had been a number of armed robberies in the area in which shots had been fired, and Hyde approached three men said to be acting suspiciously near the branch office of the Municipal Tramways Trust. Unfortunately he was not carrying his service revolver. The gunman was seen to have rested his hand on a fence to shoot Hyde. A tracker was brought in but a rainstorm had wiped out the men’s trails. Two hats and black Chesterfield coats with velvet collars thought to belong to the men were found but no charges were brought. There were also suggestions that the killers might have been members of the King Hit push which, at the time, was in the business of robbing tramcar offices. In the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century Hyde was one of only two South Australian police officers killed on duty. The other, killed the previous year in 1908, was Constable Albert Ring, shot after he arrested a fisherman named Joe Coleman for drunkenness at Glenelg.

In March 1909, two months after the shooting of Hyde, Ryan went to prison for three months in Sydney on an idle and disorderly charge. He tried to escape and consequently received a sentence of three years. Then, after yet another conviction while being moved from Adelaide to South Australia’s Gladstone Gaol to serve his sentence, Ryan jumped from a train going at speed between Hoyleton and Kybunga in South Australia. Despite a heavy fall, by the time the train had been stopped and a search commenced he was clean away. He was on the run for over a year before he was acquitted of jailbreaking on a technicality, but was promptly arrested for stealing a bicycle. Another prisoner who leaped from a train was a man named Wingella, known as Butcher’s Paddy. Convicted of the murder of another Aboriginal and sentenced to death, on the way to Fremantle he escaped near Southern Cross on 27 March 1903. It was thought that as he was an experienced bushman he would be difficult to recapture, and so it proved. There are no reports in contemporary newspapers that he was ever retrieved. Had he arrived at Fremantle he would have been the ninth man then on death row.

It was time for Ryan to move east again and who should he meet up with in Sydney but his old friend James ‘Jewey’ Mackay, now known as ‘Jewey’ Freeman, who was living with Kate Leigh, another of the great criminals of the early twentieth century. Between them they planned the first robbery in the country involving a motorcar, the theft of the payroll at the Eveleigh Street Railway Works.

The Eveleigh robbery took place on 10 June 1914, four days after Freeman had shot a watchman named Michael McHale in the face during a robbery at the Paddington post office in Oxford Street, Sydney. On 10 June two Eveleigh employees arrived on a horse and cart at the factory bringing the payroll, which totalled slightly more than £3300. Ryan drove up with Freeman in the passenger seat of an old grey car. Freeman put a gun to the head of one employee, Norman Twiss, and threatened to blow his brains out. A chest was loaded into the car and the pair drove away.

Unfortunately for Freeman and Ryan the number of their car had been taken. Even more unfortunately, they had not bothered to steal one, they had borrowed it from Arthur Tatham from Castlereagh, who had duly reported it stolen and who, when interviewed by the police, seemed to know far too much about the robbery. The man in charge of the payroll also told the police that it seemed Twiss had almost expected the attack. Freeman was dobbed in and picked up at Strathfield railway station on the night of 16 June and charged with both the post office and payroll attacks.

This left Shiner Ryan very much on his own. He stayed in Sydney, sending his share of the loot to his friend Sam Falkiner in Melbourne, but things began to unravel. First, Falkiner decamped to Tasmania with the takings. Then Ryan, who travelled to Melbourne disguised as a woman and carrying a baby, found Falkiner had left and told a girlfriend, a Mrs Edith Kelly, about the robbery. With the sound of reward money ringing in her ears, she went to the police.

Ryan was in bed with Edith in Richardson Street, Albert Park, when the police arrived. Three hundred pounds was found in a glass jar stuffed into the chimney, but that was all that was ever recovered. Ryan was returned to Sydney where he was charged along with Freeman, Twiss and Tatham. The quartet went on trial in September that year with mixed results. Twiss was acquitted and Tatham received a mere three months as an accessory.

Ryan’s defence was hopeless. He said the reason he had left Sydney was that he had seen a drawing in the paper of one of the robbers, which resembled him and, thinking of his criminal record, knew no one would believe him. Totally unable to explain away the money in the chimney, the evidence of Mrs Kelly and the fact he had admitted to the crime on his arrest, Ryan was right—the jury did not believe him.

Both Ryan and Freeman took their ten-year sentences well. Saying that he would make a good soldier, Freeman asked to be sent to the front. Mr Justice Sly seems to have had some admiration for the pair:

I believe you are right. Both of you are bold men apparently afraid of nothing and you would make very good soldiers. Still I cannot send you to be a soldier.

Freeman also asked that Detective Robson be given his revolver as a souvenir. Ryan said he wanted his to go to the war effort. He later told a warder he would see the sentence out in twenty-four hours. The next morning he was found in bed soaked in blood. He had tried and failed to commit suicide.

Freeman’s sentence was followed immediately by his trial for shooting the watchman, McHale. He