Bagman of the Brothel

By John Edward Kruger

Tell no-one anything. Don't ask questions. Be invisible.

This was the mantra of mafia associate John Kruger.

Born into a family of criminals, John Kruger began his life of crime while still in primary school. Bagman of the Brothel follows his tumultuous upbringing in southern Sydney and into adulthood, where he found himself employed by a mafia organisation during the 1980s.

Set against a background of police corruption, seedy characters, and violence, John's memoir provides an eye-opening insight into the life of a career criminal.Told with unflinching honesty, this unique Australian story will leave you wondering: can a bad man be good?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ocean Reeve Publishing
• Release date: Apr 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781922956286

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Hungover

We were in a brown Ford Falcon and I was in the back seat with my girlfriend. I can distinctly remember the song ‘I’d Do Anything for Love’ on the radio. Denise was singing along in her gregarious way. That girl could make me smile, and she could do a great Meatloaf impersonation. Ironically, when I’d met Denise in a pub eight months earlier, I’d been struck by her elegance. This girl had a presence about her, as her personality was bigger than life.

I had spent the evening before binging on beer. At the age of fifty-two, I was a seasoned drinker. And I have to admit, I wasn’t drinking for the taste—I was after effect. Immediate, hard, and strong. If it was amber, it was going down that night. Even today, I still refer to this as the worst hangover in my history.

My head was pounding with the intensity of a knife’s edge, my throat was sandpaper, and nausea was swelling every time Barry took a corner.

I had a deep desire to be in bed, to succumb to the bliss of sleep, which was the only cure for my poisoned body. I felt like I had spent the night with Lucrezia Borgia.

To make things worse, my mate Barry, who was an ex-marine, was taking us to cruise on his yacht down at Victor Harbour in Adelaide.

Unfortunately, the day didn’t plan for me to get on a yacht that day. Things were conspiring against me. This was the day that the trajectory of my criminal life threw me in another direction.

It was the ending and the beginning of things.

You see, we were flying down the main highway south of Adelaide when we decided to stop in at a BP service station. Barry was filling up the tank, and we had stepped out to stretch our legs. It seemed like an ordinary day.

Shit suddenly got real.

I heard a voice say, ‘Are you John Kruger?’ Didn’t much like the sound of it, either.

‘No,’ I said. Rule number one: admit nothing to nobody.

I looked up to see that I was surrounded by four federal police officers who had travelled from Sydney to extradite me on charges.

The first thing I noticed was that they had fucked their protocols. This is because they had surrounded me, so if any one of those boys was a bit trigger-happy, they could shoot me easily, but they would also get their mate standing behind me. I recall thinking it was a bit sloppy as my hypervigilance went into overdrive.

I mean, I’m pathological about being meticulous and careful. Clearly, these guys were not.

But back to the four annoying automatic pistols pointing directly at my aching head.

I was so hungover that they could have shot me and I wouldn’t have cared.

Of all bloody days, why did the feds pick this one?

Detective Sergeant Wayne Morrison continued with the standard procedure. ‘We have reason to believe that you are John Kruger, and we are taking you into custody.’

I glanced at Denise. Her once-rosy cheeks were pale, and her adrenaline surge was almost visceral. She had no idea that I worked for a mafia. Rule number two: the less your partner knows, the better. I lunged forward, and I told her that it would be okay, to continue onto the yacht with Barry and Sandra, and that I would explain later. During that conversation, I moved towards her and quickly slipped my wallet with all my identification into her purse. I wanted them to take a ghost into custody.

They cuffed me with my hands behind me because, to them, I was an unknown—maybe I was a threat, maybe not.

The next minute, I found myself wedged in the back seat of an unmarked blue Holden sedan between two cops. It felt like a shit sandwich.

It was at that point I completely blacked out. The need to sleep off the hangover was more important than the police, the charges, and the impending prison.

I slept the whole fifty-kilometre ride back to town and woke up when we got to the secure driveway of the Adelaide watch house.

As my eyes opened, I became aware of the sensation of my head resting on the copper’s shoulder. Yeah, that’s how much I cared about what was happening to me. And I had slept like a baby.

I can only imagine their conversations while I was enjoying my dozing. ‘Jeez, this guy doesn’t intimidate easily.’

I think that this moment was significant to me because I had spent my whole life being a ghost. I didn’t really exist.

But from the moment of that arrest, I became real. I was on the radar. The feds had resuscitated the spectre.

When you work in organised crime, you can’t afford to be noticeable. Blending into the ordinary was essential for success. But my life of crime was anything but a shade of beige.

I hope some of you have Kings Cross somewhere in your memories. It was a magic town in the seventies and eighties. I loved the energy, the lights, the greasy touts outside strip joints, and the gaudy hooker outfits. Such fun. Throw in Chinese gambling houses, Sydney and Adelaide brothels, the porn industry, and weapons importation and you may just begin to get a sense of my life.

My life in an Eastern European mafia based in Sydney were good days. And, by the way, whoever said that crime doesn’t pay was clearly bullshitting.

So how did I get a job as an underworld figure in a large mafia, you may ask? Well, let me take you back to where I learned the tools of my trade.

Chapter 2:

My Invisible Apprenticeship

Iwas born to be a criminal.

When I say that, I don’t exactly mean it is some sort of DNA conspiracy, but perhaps that may have been a small part.

The truth is that I was born into a family of criminals. When your father is a fair-to-middling safecracker and your mum has tendencies towards psychopathic cruelty, it isn’t exactly a normal environment for a child. But it was normal for me.

It’s not that my parents told me to ‘join the family business’. Nothing was said. There were no guns pointed at my head—well, not at that stage in my life. The gun-pointing was saved for later, as you may already have predicted.

My developing criminality just naturally evolved. Petty crimes and my interest in making money seemed like a normal progression from any other childhood rite of passage. I liked to think I had a mind for it. I had a strong desire for it, too. A deep, intrinsic motivation.

Little Johnny learned to talk. Little Johnny learned to walk. Little Johnny learned to break-and-enter. He was a natural, all right.

In fact, my childhood and youth were a training ground for me to become a successful career criminal, even exceeding my parents’ expectations.

***

If you follow Sydney to the west and keep going, you will reach a country town called Katoomba. Back in the 1950s, it was still a simple place. Rows of Federation houses faded by the western sun, big bush backyards, and cheeky kookaburras.

This was the town where I was born. I see no irony in the fact that the roads from Sydney to Katoomba were made from the sweat of convicts’ brows. I was literally born at the end of the convict road. Some may see this as some type of destiny, and it certainly was for some time. Some great times.

I suppose that the relationship I had with my parents, the petty thieves, was the beginning of my invisible apprenticeship into crime.

I can recall my very first crime. Nowadays, it would be classified as aggravated assault causing bodily injury. I was just seven years old.

But before you judge me, hear me out. In the early sixties, child/ adult relationships were handled differently. And I was a young kid who had just learned probably one of the most important lessons to spur my criminality onto a pathway of success.

Back then, of course, I didn’t know that. I was just a poor kid trying to survive my family, school, and my mother. Yes, my mother gets her own category because she was the most callous, cold-hearted woman that I have ever encountered.

My earliest memories are of my mother ridiculing and belittling me. I can see her face in my memories, contorting with cruelty. She did cook us dinner and clean our clothes, but I don’t really view that as the most crucial role of a mother.

Under her glare, I felt her disdain. And it wasn’t like I felt hatred radiating from her. Well, sometimes I felt hatred, but there is something much worse than the hatred that a mother can give.

And that was complete ambivalence.

Generally, she just didn’t care. Even at the age of seven, if I had left the house for hours without telling her where I would be, she wouldn’t notice. This caused me great distress as a little fella. All I wanted was for my mother to care for me, maybe even nurture me a little.

At an early age, I knew I would do anything for my mother. Anything to make her see me.

But instead, I tended to get a throat full of insults. If I was at the dinner table and I accidentally knocked the fork off the table, it would be, ‘You fucking fool.’

Or if I commented on something that my parents were talking about, just trying to be a part of the discussion, it would be, ‘Shut up, you fucking idiot.’

Even my father, who was a friendly kind of character, would warn me not to talk to her. He would catch my eye and shake his head, or he would say something just before I was about to, to take the heat off me. I can see he was being protective of me. And that is because he knew what an absolutely wretched monster his missus was.

My consolation for this maternal rejection was the wonderful love of my father’s golden labrador, named Champion. He seemed to know when I was feeling lost and alone. He liked to be my shadow when my father wasn’t demanding his attention.

My life began to spiral out of control in Grade 3 when I had my eyes tested. To my horror, I had to wear glasses. I was a tall, skinny kid, and even though I had accepted the glasses situation, I was a bit worried about how it was going to go down at school.

My red-brick house on Gloucester Road, Hurstville was about a twenty-minute walk to school. To my little legs, it felt like an hour. But the first challenge of that walk was getting from the front porch to the front gate without being shredded by Tiger, our feral cat.

Tiger would lacerate anything moving. She had a propensity to hold everyone in complete contempt, her gaze unholy and her expression permanently snarling, and she would hiss and spit until she launched herself at my bare legs. My only option was to kick her as hard as I could and run towards the footpath. More often than not, a quick, hard boot would do the trick. In fact, I often wondered if my mother had somehow transferred her very own soul to this arsehole of a cat.

My walk to school was a solitary journey. I was happy enough to get away from the toxicity that my mother sprayed around the house like her cheap perfume.

My teacher at the time liked to call himself Professor Thorsby, but he was known by us kids as ‘the Little Pig’. This was mainly due to his repulsive, rotund body and his tiny, plump hands. Although, personality-wise, he was also a pig of a man. Life in his class was bearable, but I was always looking forward to playlunch.

I can conjure flashes of this early time in my life. I remember I had a stick in my hand and was dragging it in the dirt when a trio of boys from the class above decided to pay me a visit. They were self-imposed shit-kickers, and they had decided that I was the shit of the day.

‘You look like a fucking idiot in ya glasses,’ Tommy said.

Being trained to be invisible and calm during times of stress was such a household action that I didn’t bite and just kept dragging the stick in the dirt. I didn’t even look up.

‘Didn’t ya hear him, dickhead?’ Paul chimed in.

I began to feel bad. It was a dark, fluttery feeling that clouded over me, like when Mum was having one of her spiky outbursts.

The third one—let’s just call him Arsehole—reached out and grabbed each side of my collar. I felt my body being lifted and I was on my toes.

‘You little idiot. You look just like Scrooge in those glasses.’ Arsehole dropped me and I fell to the ground, breaking my best stick.

The prefect came out into the yard with a bell on a wooden handle to signify it was time to go in for the afternoon lesson.

‘Watch out, Scrooge; we’re gonna get ya!’ Arsehole ran off with his pathetic little underlings, yelling with the enthusiasm of nasty dogs.

By the time the bell went for home time, I was feeling a little uncomfortable. So, when the Little Pig dismissed us, I shot off like a thoroughbred.

I must have been about halfway home and feeling quite pleased with myself when I got a sense that someone was watching me. I pretended to accidentally drop the stone I was holding so I could take a peek without looking too paranoid. And there I saw Tommy, Paul, and Arsehole trailing about two hundred metres behind me.

My head began to pound. I had seen these guys in action before. They were tough. So, I did what any self-respecting seven-year-old would do: I ran for my bloody life towards home. But of course, these boys wanted a chase, so they began to speed up, too.

I can still feel the pain of my feet slapping on the pavement in my desperate attempt to get to safety. The boys, who had longer legs than me, were picking up the pace and were gaining on me.

I decided to cut through the old Goshen Private Hospital, which is now Hurstville Private Hospital. These boys were so close that I could almost feel their hands on my back.

My fear was rising to the point of adrenaline explosion when Champion flew around the corner to greet me. He saw the boys in pursuit and began to bark, displaying his teeth.

That’s my boy, I thought. I turned the corner, moving out of the hospital alleyway, and the boys decided to heed Champion’s warning.

As I lay in bed that night, it dawned on me that this problem was only going to happen again the next day.

I’m so fucked, was my thought before I fell asleep.

***

The next day, the trio ignored me in the playground. I was naive. I was beginning to think that they had forgotten all about me. What a sucker I was. Maybe it was denial.

The walk home was as equally stressful as the previous day. When I detected the boys, it was in exactly the same place—in the hospital alleyway. In vain, I glanced up hoping to see Champion run to my rescue, but he must have been at work with my dad.

Tommy seized the opportunity and pushed me up against a wall that was just outside of the alleyway. Within seconds, I was surrounded by meatheads. It seemed like an impenetrable wall of ragged blue school shirts with gaps where buttons should have been.

‘You know what, Scrooge? You’re a little smart-arse,’ Paul said.

I looked down to see six pairs of black Clarks school shoes in various states of scuffed decay.

‘And do you know what happens to smart-arses, Scrooge?’

I kept looking down. I noticed one shoe was completely missing a shoelace.

‘This!’ And with that, the Arsehole thrust his fist with all his might into my stomach and winded me.

I was gasping for air. My stomach was spasming so much I couldn’t suck air into my burning lungs. I thought I was dying. And what comes to a young lad’s mind when he thinks he is dying?

His mother.

My last thoughts were hoping that my mum would finally realise how much she loved me during her grief. I wished for a mother who would give a fuck that her son was murdered outside the local hospital. The irony of my location wasn’t lost on me, even as a kid.

But to my simultaneous disappointment and relief, I finally managed to inflate my lungs, although my ego was deflated considerably.

I dragged my feet towards the front door, seeking the refuge of Champion’s gentle companionship. But as luck would have it, the monster was standing in the kitchen after just getting off the phone with my nana. They had just had an argument about money.

Her ability to notice anything out of the ordinary placed her eyes sharply on the missing button of my school shirt. ‘What bullshit have you been getting up to, you bloody idiot?’

I felt my heart rate rise. It was the last thing I wanted to hear. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about what had happened to me. Somehow, I had already picked up from my family that we ‘don’t talk’. So, I stood there and said nothing.

The phone rang again, so I saw this distraction as the perfect time to escape into the backyard to seek solace with Champion. The grass was cool, and I felt Champion licking my face as I heard Mum telling Nana to get stuffed. My family life was the opposite of Leave it to Beaver.

‘Hey, John.’ I heard the one friendly voice I had in my life. It was Uncle Sid. He came and sat next to me on the grass and patted me on the back.

Uncle Sid was a significant person in my life. I always felt like he was the only adult that was interested in me. He was balding, with hair that stuck out on the sides like a mad scientist. His clothes were never quite the right fit. He was an oddball who seemed to fit right into my family scene.

While we played ball with Champion, we talked about our days. I mean, I didn’t tell him what had happened to me, but it wasn’t out of the question that I could. Our conversations were easy. He stayed over at our house from time to time. I enjoyed his companionship.

By the time I got to bed, that knot in my stomach had relaxed and the darkness of my fear had lightened.

***

Weeks later, Professor Thorsby was turning an alcoholic shade of purple as he dragged some poor student out in front of the class. His fury seemed a little overdramatic for the actual crime. It could have been as silly as a student whispering to the kid next to them.

He loved using a very thin cane on anyone who infringed upon his strict code of discipline. He would slice that wood down so hard, it felt like it would melt through your skin.

I hated to watch him in action. He would work himself into such a frenzy. This event helped to