Sydney Noir: The Golden Years

By Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern

The first ever book devoted entirely to the golden years of the Sydney underworld. In the late 1960s Sydney was one of the most prosperous places on earth and one of the most corrupt. A large proportion of the population was engaged in illegal gambling and other activities that made colourful characters such as Lennie McPherson, Abe Saffron and George Freeman wealthy and, to many, folk heroes. Thousands of American soldiers on their seven-day leave from Vietnam turned Kings Cross, with its strip shows and night clubs, into one big party. The whole corrupt carnival was run by the police in an arrangement known as 'the joke'. They could just about get away with that term because heroin had not yet turned the underworld into the killing machine it would soon become. Two of the main jokers were also lovers: vice queen Shirley Brifman and violent detective Fred Krahe. In Sydney Noir Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern revisit this dark yet fascinating chapter of Sydney's history, telling stories that would be unbelievable were they not true. Finally, they make the bold argument that premier of the time, Sir Robert Askin, may not have been as guilty of corruption as many have claimed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Jul 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781742242729

Michael Duffy

Michael Duffy is Time’s executive editor and Washington bureau chief and directs coverage of presidents, politics, and national affairs for the magazine.

Book preview

SYDNEY NOIR

MICHAEL DUFFY has worked for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald as a reporter of crime and other urban issues. He is the author of crime books – novels and non-fiction – including Call Me Cruel, The Simple Death and Drive By.

NICK HORDERN is a former senior writer at the Australian Finanical Review who has also worked as a political staffer, diplomat and intelligence analyst.

SYDNEY NOIR

THE GOLDEN YEARS

MICHAEL DUFFY and NICK HORDERN

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern 2017

First published 2017

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Duffy, Michael, 1957– author.

Title: Sydney Noir: The golden years / Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern.

ISBN:    9781742235448 (paperback)

9781742242729 (ebook)

9781742248202 (ePDF)

Subjects: Crime – New South Wales – Sydney.

Corruption – New South Wales – Sydney.

Organised crime – New South Wales – Sydney.

Other Creators/Contributors: Hordern, Nick, author.

Design Avril Makula

Cover design Nada Backovic

Cover image William Street, Kings Cross, 1970. National Archives of Australia, A1200, L84006.

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

Introduction

1966 • How Sydney Worked

1967 • When Shirley Met Freddie

1968 • The End of The Lanes

1969 • The Venus of The Reef

1970 • Raking It In

1971 • Reading Paddy’s Book

1972 • An End and a Beginning

An Open Question: Was Robert Askin corrupt?

Notes

Sources

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

‘Do you know who was in the joke, and who was not?’

– Detective-Sergeant Brian ‘The Cardinal’ Doyle to Shirley Brifman.

‘Only fragments of what occurred were revealed.

The matter was stumbled upon by accident.

Beyond the fragments there was silence.’

– Moffitt Royal Commission, referring to one of its few discoveries of corrupt police behaviour.

INTRODUCTION

The Golden Years of the Sydney underworld ended on 2 September 1972, when the body of a young man named Jan O’Truba was found off the Wakehurst Parkway behind the Northern Beaches. He had been tied to a tree, tortured, and shot three times in the head. O’Truba had been ‘interviewed with a sharp knife’¹ and the bru-tality of his death shocked the city. But it was notable for another reason: O’Truba was a heroin dealer, albeit on a small scale, and his was the first in the parade of death that has led to the modern Sydney drug trade.

This is a history of the Sydney underworld in the years just before the drugs came, from 1966 to 1972. There is an irony in describing these as ‘the Golden Years’, but given what was to follow, that is what they were. We take 1966 as the beginning of our story because it was the year Inspector Ray Kelly, the dominant corrupt policeman of the post-war period, retired. We can’t understand the Golden Years without understanding the police culture he exemplified, which was based on prohibition.

All underworlds are shaped by the most lucrative crimes of the day, which are determined by prohibition. In effect, society decides what behaviour it wants to outlaw, and those laws create the crime and the criminals. In the New South Wales of the Golden Years, the major illegal activity was the very popular SP (‘starting price’ or off-course) betting on horses.

The SP and the other forms of pervasive illegality created the world we call Sydney Noir. At one end of this broad spectrum were the professional law-breakers who took SP bets, ran baccarat games and casinos, staffed the bars that sold alcohol out of hours, stole the new portable electrical goods, offered their bodies to strangers on the streets – or violently extorted money from those who did so. At the other were the customers, the ordinary punters who had a hot racing tip, the European migrant with a slim chance of finding a sexual partner in largely Anglo-Celtic Sydney, or just someone who wanted a drink after 10pm. All were breaking the law, but many did not see it like that.

A 1963 Royal Commission into the SP concluded that most citizens of New South Wales, even those who did not bet themselves, tolerated illegal betting on horses and were disinclined to assist the police in any efforts to close it down.² The inquiry also found that those efforts were not too strenuous, and if anyone was unlucky enough to be arrested, magistrates were uninterested in imposing heavy penalties. There was a certain amount of low level corruption in all this, with SP bookies paying police, but it was tolerated because almost no one really thought betting on horses away from a racetrack was wrong.

One of the authors of this book has a relative we will call Liz, who in the 1940s was a young teenager. On the weekends she would make pocket money by taking bets from some of the people who lived in her block of flats and run them down to the SP bookie out the back of the Coogee Bay Hotel. The interesting point about this is that Liz’s family were middle-class, church-going Anglicans who would not have considered doing anything ‘really’ immoral or criminal. Clearly, the SP existed in another category, for them and many others.

The 1963 inquiry estimated there were some 6000 illegal SP bookies in the state,³ in every large workplace and in every city hotel. Royal Commissioner Justice Edward Kinsella concluded ‘I think it is highly probable that there is no place in the state – city, town or village – with 250 or more inhabitants in which there is not a starting price bookmaker operating.’ A survey he commissioned of the metropolitan population found that 28.7 per cent of adults bet illegally.

So the SP was an industry, and the service it provided was so popular that you were unlikely to be promoted as a policeman or a politician if you made too much of a fuss. The evidence suggests most police leaders and politicians were not corrupt, but they tolerated the SP and the corruption that came with it because they had to.

The long-running tolerance of the SP created a widespread ambivalence towards the law, which had the effect of protecting other illegal activities, such as prostitution, even though they had far less social acceptance. Many who bet on the horses would have regarded abortion with abhorrence, and seen no equivalence at all between the two. But with corruption so widely accepted in one area, it was impossible to stop it spreading to others.

An underworld based on such popular support is difficult for us to grasp today, because of two great changes that occurred in the 1970s. The first was the legalisation of much hitherto prohibited behaviour – chiefly the replacement of the SP by the state-owned shopfront betting agencies known as TABs (they were run by the Totalizer Agency Board). The first TABs opened in 1964, but their spread was fairly slow, and they only began to affect SP bookies substantially in the 1970s. Other illegal activities such as abortion and pornography were decriminalised in the 1970s, destroying the rackets that had depended on their proscription. Gradually prostitution too was decriminalised.

The other great change was the replacement of illegal gambling by the drug trade as the main source of criminal revenue. This altered everything because, compared with illegal betting, the drug trade’s client base was much smaller and far more people died as a result of it. This produced a dramatic reduction in the popular support for organised criminals, no longer typified by ‘colourful characters’ and ‘well-known racing identities’, but by murderous gangsters peddling a product that killed sons and daughters. By the late 1970s, the public leaders who for decades had happily coexisted with the underworld began to describe it as evil and launched a war on drugs. This is why the death of Jan O’Truba marked such a turning point.

The police investigation into O’Truba’s murder was a comprehensive one: in the year after his death they interviewed a total of 2800 people, issuing a $10 000 reward for information about the killers.⁴ The offer of reward was signed by the Premier of New South Wales, Robert William Askin, whose own death in September 1981 helped define how the Golden Years have been interpreted.

Or misinterpreted.

Just four days after Askin died, the National Times weekly newspaper ran a story by young reporter David Hickie on its front page headed ‘Askin: Friend to Organised Crime’. It claimed that the former premier had received $100 000 a year in bribes from criminals from 1968 to 1975, as had Fred Hanson, who was assistant and deputy police commissioner before taking the top job in 1972. Hickie said the man Hanson replaced, Norm Allan, was also corrupt, and on Askin’s watch, ‘organised crime became institutionalised on a large scale in New South Wales for the first time’.⁵ Askin had close links to Perce Galea, illegal casino owner. Another illegal casino owner was Joe Taylor. Premier Askin, wrote Hickie, was ‘not so much a politician receiving payoffs as intimately involved in the Galea/ Taylor operations, one of those running the show.’

One of the challenges in ascertaining the truth about the Golden Years is that much of what we think we know about the period turns out to be unprovable. Hickie mentioned three sources for his explosive claims but named none of them. What normally happens in a case like this is that the information is later firmed up, as solid evidence is produced, and some sort of official investigation occurs. None of that happened in Askin’s case. Yet today, thirty-six years later, his guilt is still taken as given, shaping our view of the Golden Years.

We shall argue that while it might have made sense in the 1980s to believe a premier had been paid what was over a million dollars a year (in today’s terms) by criminals, it makes less sense now. After all this time, the conclusive evidence is still not there. Before making that argument we need to tell Askin’s story. The case against him remains largely circumstantial, and it is our argument that those circumstances, at least in retrospect, point to other explanations.

The Golden Years occurred at the peak of the post-war economic boom. Between 1966 and 1972, disposable income doubled, while prices increased by only one third.⁶ There was more money than ever to gamble, and more goods to steal,⁷ all in a climate of changing morality. The so-called affluent or consumer society was increasingly sectarian, with significant declines since the 1940s in the belief in God and church attendance.⁸

Crime had started to boom before Askin came to office. From 1963, rates of burglary, larceny, armed robbery, and robbery with assault showed sharp annual increases.⁹ A major reason was the baby boomers – the surge in the number of 18–24-year-old males, the most crime-prone group in society.¹⁰ The increase in the advertising of consumer products ensured that many were aware of just what they were missing out on.

Askin was unlucky to be premier during a boom not just in crime but in media interest in corruption. New media outlets such as This Day Tonight (launched 1967) and the National Times (1971) catered for a better educated middle class intrigued by the subject, especially after the release of the novel and film The Godfather (1969 and 1972), which popularised the concept of organised crime. The Sydney media became understandably fascinated by the illegal casinos the government would not close. But it was the level of interest rather than illegal gambling joints that were new. They had been there before Askin, and would be there long after he had gone.

We will consider other myths about the Golden Years. The most important is the overestimation of the impact of the American troops in Sydney on R&R (rest and recreation) leave from the Vietnam War, in particular the claim they fostered the heroin epidemic of the 1970s. In fact, this started well after they had left, and was caused by a range of factors, including the demand created by young Australians who encountered heroin in Asia on their return trips from Britain. Travel was expanding the Australian consciousness in many ways: Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance was published in 1966, just as more affordable air travel began to undercut its theme. Overseas air flights increased more than three-fold over the next six years.¹¹

It was a very different world to our own in so many ways, still a time of two postal deliveries a day, of degrees Fahrenheit, of miles and yards, pints and ounces, and pounds, shillings and pence – although not for much longer. Australian culture was markedly blue collar and sports-oriented. There was change. An older, superficially decorous Australia was being replaced by one characterised by youthful brashness on the one hand, gentrification on the other. Yet people still admired authority and kept secrets to an extent difficult for us to imagine. They drank beer – copious amounts of beer – but not much wine. Much of their food we would find inedible.

Anything to do with sex was incredibly exciting and often illegal. Much ‘vice’ occurred around Kings Cross, which lived by a different set of rules to the suburbs. On the whole, people were happy with this arrangement, although it, like much else, was breaking down during the Golden Years.

Indoors, the prevailing odour was stale cigarettes, out on the streets it was unleaded petrol. Wearing seatbelts became compulsory only in 1971, and getting sunburnt was proof you were having a good time. Life expectancy was a full decade less than it is now.

In Sydney Noir it was even lower.

HOW SYDNEY WORKED

THE JOKE

They hanged Ronald Ryan in Pentridge Prison at 8am on 3 February 1967. He was the last man executed in Australia, and 3 000 people gathered outside the gaol to protest. That was in Melbourne, but its instigating event, Ryan’s capture a year earlier, had occurred in Sydney. It crowned the career of the city’s most famous cop, Ray Kelly.

Many people know this. Not so many know that Kelly was helped by another king of the city, Lennie McPherson, one of Sydney’s most powerful criminals. Their cooperation is an example of how crime was organised for many decades by the most successful and longest-running public-private partnership in the history of the state of New South Wales, that between criminals and corrupt police. It was an arrangement known to those involved as ‘the joke’, a very Sydney term for so dubious an arrangement. It is the sort of joke that is not funny at all.

Ryan and another inmate, Peter Walker, had escaped from Pentridge on 19 December 1965. Ryan killed a prison officer on the way out. Realising they needed haven in a country with no extradition treaty with Australia, they fled to Sydney and asked McPherson for help to get to Brazil. Then they rented a flat in Mount Street, Coogee, and waited. The Victorian police thought they were still in Melbourne and offered a reward of £5000 for information.

McPherson was big, violent and smart. He was also Ray Kelly’s main informant, and for years had swapped information for a green light to stand over other criminals. He figured that if he helped Ryan and was found out, that would mean the end of his protection by police. Kelly had covered up for him before, including a couple of murders of other criminals, but the killing of a prison officer was a different matter. Also in account was that Ryan was intending to commit a string of armed bank robberies to raise the money for the false passports: more innocent people might die. As McPherson would later remark, bodies in the street were bad for business.

So McPherson told Kelly where he might catch Ryan, and an operation involving fifty cops was launched. The escapees were lured to Concord Repatriation Hospital on the evening of 6 January 1966, on the promise of meeting two women. The police pounced and the heavily armed men – who’d sworn to shoot it out if sur-rounded – were captured without any gunfire.

Kelly gave the honour of capturing Walker to Detective Sergeant Fred Krahe, one of the toughest and most experienced officers in the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB). When the time came, Krahe thrust a shotgun through the window of the car and yelled at Walker, ‘Put your hands up or I’ll blow your fucking head off!’¹

Like many people at the time, Ryan and Walker didn’t realise just how Sydney worked. They were not in on the joke.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF RAY KELLY

Two weeks after Ronald Ryan’s capture, in February 1966, Ray Kelly left the police force: he had reached the compulsory retirement age of sixty. But it is worth reflecting on his career, because he was considered Sydney’s most powerful corrupt policeman, and his protégés became major figures in their own right. Some writers have claimed he continued to be a major force in Sydney’s corruption for many years after his retirement.

Seven hundred men attended his retirement bash. He was leaving at his peak, having been commended for the capture of Ryan and Walker. The police service record card used at the time had a box for ‘Endorsement on discharge’ and the comment on Kelly’s record reads: ‘Outstandingly good’.

The function was held in the ballroom of Sydney’s flashest hotel, the Chevron on Macleay Street, Potts Point. The guests included politicians, judges, real estate bigwigs, actors, artists, bookmakers, doctors, horse trainers, pressmen and, according to the report the next day in Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Mirror, ‘the kings of Sydney’s baccarat dens, big wheels in the SP trade [and] … several men who simply do the best they can’. That last category was a euphemism for crooks. That such men could mix so easily with leading politicians and police – a situation reported but not condemned by the media – is an indication of the open tolerance for so much crime during this period.

Premier Robin Askin was there, and told the crowd that, ‘No fictional detective could hold a candle to Ray Kelly’. Police Commissioner Norman ‘The Foreman’ Allan was there. It was, he boasted, ‘an assemblage of big names that, I’ll swear, has never before gathered under one roof and may never do so again’.

Kelly himself said he would remain a police officer until he died, and possibly he did, at least so far as the organising of crime was one of the responsibilities of Sydney police. He said crooks were not taking over Sydney, unlike some foreign cities, and made the observation that ‘No one who has not been a policeman can ever understand our problems, no one at all’. He took a swipe at those who wanted to be protected from criminals while criticising the methods used by police to do so: ‘There is too much moral cow-ardice in the community’.²

Kelly wore spectacles and could be charming, but he was a tall, hard man. Born in 1906 in Wellington, on leaving school he worked in the Broken Hill mines and then on cattle stations, before joining the police force at the age of twenty-three. His police service record contains a long list of commendations, from his attempt to save a man from drowning off the Spit Bridge in 1938 to encounters with gunmen. He was brave and had a developed capacity for violence, and was known as ‘the Gunner’ on account of all the men he’d shot.

In his first year as a policeman some crooks in a car tried to run him down in Newtown: he shot three of them, killing one and earning his nickname. On another occasion his skull was fractured with an iron bar by one of the tenants he helped evict when he stormed a property. He was to kill again in 1953, after a car chase through Drummoyne.

Kelly became a detective in 1941 and joined the CIB, the prestigious central detective unit that handled most serious crime, including murder. Eventually he became an inspector, the highest operational rank, and was considered very much first among equals. When Brit gangster Billy Hill arrived in Sydney in 1955 with a view to setting up shop, it was Kelly who was sent on board the ship to persuade him to change his mind. Hill, who was accompanied by his wife Gypsy Hill, did not disembark. ‘It makes you sick when you think we have come this far,’ she told a London tabloid. ‘If only we had known sooner, we could have got off earlier – in Tahiti.’³

Kelly led a string of successful high-profile investigations, including the recapture of prison escapees Kevin Simmonds and Leslie Newcombe in 1959. In 1960 Kelly, along with other officers, was commended for his work on the famous Graham Thorne murder case. This involved many of the police we shall meet in this book.

Thorne was an eight-year-old pupil at The Scots College, a prestigious Presbyterian private school. His father Bazil was an early winner of the Opera House Lottery. A man named Stephen Bradley kidnapped the boy in what was Australia’s first kidnap for ransom case, but quickly panicked, killed Graham, and fled with his family by sea.

Two police flew to Sri Lanka and brought Bradley back after tricky extradition issues were resolved. One of those detectives was Brian Doyle, a Catholic known as ‘the Cardinal’ whom Kelly despised for his honesty.

Kelly had a knack for self-promotion and was helpful to crime reporters. One of them, Bill Jenkings of the Daily Mirror, eulogised him thus:

‘Kelly was responsible for keeping the lid on violent crime by locking up killers, gunslingers, druggies, safe-breakers, burglars, receivers and knockdown men. He was instrumental in bringing to justice some of the worst criminals in the country’s history. … [he] was an almost mythical figure in Sydney. … What a wonderful subject [Damon] Runyon would have had if he had known Kelly. Here was a policeman who could be hard as iron or smooth as silk. When there was a shooting or other violence, Kelly was in the van-guard. When there was a situation to be handled smoothly, it was Ray Kelly they called upon.

‘His ability to cope with all kinds of circumstances extended beyond police work. I often saw him resplendent in tails, whirling about a dance floor, holding the interest of his partner with amusing conversation. At the CIB balls, which we both attended for many years, Kelly never missed a dance. He always had a happy knack of making his friends feel at ease and laugh at things.’⁴

Whether using bullets or charm, Kelly chose his targets. There’s a rather creepy photo taken around 1960 of Kelly in Chequers Nightclub, with a friendly arm draped around the shoulders of a very youthful Alan Saffron, son of sleaze lord Abe Saffron.⁵

Bill Jenkings referred to rumours that Kelly verballed prisoners, but pretty well dismissed them. (Like all crime reporters his job depended on police goodwill.) In fact, Kelly was so notorious in this regard that ‘Verbal’ was his second nickname. When he became one of the senior detectives who would vet talented uniformed police wanting to work in plain clothes, he would ask if they’d be prepared to verbal a crook to obtain a conviction. If they said no, he would growl, ‘Send him back to the Cardinal. He’s no use to me.’

Fitting up crooks was helpful to police at a time when three of the most important techniques now at a detective’s disposal were largely unavailable. These are: phone taps and listening devices; forensics; and the ability to offer effective protection in prison to people who give evidence against their co-offenders. Working with a more restricted palette, Kelly was a master of the dark police arts, sometimes known as ‘noble cause corruption’, its two main techniques being the ‘load’ and the ‘verbal’.

Former Darlinghurst policeman Chris Jones explained the ratio-nale for ‘noble cause’ corruption thus: ‘There was the right way, the wrong way, and the Darlo Way, which meant that the police did whatever was necessary to convict a person who deserved it and protect the lives and property of the community … There’s no way Bumper (Inspector Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell) or any of us from the old days could exist in the police force today, but the Darlo Way was a method of policing that achieved the results desired by our senior officers and politicians and the public at that time in that district, so we got away with it.’⁶ The public had to trust that the corruption was indeed for a noble cause, and not merely a way of making money.⁷

Kelly used methods that police had always relied on, and would continue to use for quite a while. One example occurred after gunman John ‘Chow’ Hayes was arrested for shooting one William Lee at the Ziegfeld Club in 1951. (Hayes was so nicknamed because his narrow eyes gave him a Chinese appearance.⁸) When Kelly took Hayes back to the CIB headquarters in Liverpool Street, he said to him: ‘Now look, Chow. You know and I know that you killed Lee … I will tell as many lies as I can to convict you, and you tell as many lies as you can to beat it. Is that fair enough?’⁹ That was Hayes’ account given to David Hickie for his book Chow Hayes – Gunman, years after the event when he had no reason to lie. Indeed, in the book he admits to having killed Lee.

The trial played out as Kelly had predicted. None of the people who’d been at the Ziegfeld picked Hayes out of numerous line-ups, so it came down to Kelly’s lie that Hayes had confessed to him. Hayes’ barrister asked the detective if it was true he was known as ‘Verbal’ Kelly, and he denied this. But after two hung juries, Hayes was found guilty. On hearing the verdict, Hayes yelled out, ‘I hope to see Kelly die of cancer of the tongue’.¹⁰

Another gangster who recalled sharp practice was George Freeman, this time in the 1960s.

‘Kelly arrested me once for a safe job, which I denied,’ he recalled in his memoir. ‘He did his lolly during the questioning and punched me on the chin. I screamed abuse at him. I’ll never forget the look of hatred in his beady little eyes.

I’ll put you away for five years, he snarled, and when you come out I’ll get you another five years … you’ll come out and I’ll down you again. Yeah, well down me for the first time for five years and I might just come out and down you, I fired back. With that he belted me again and stormed out of the room in a wild rage. His partner, Maurie Wild, shook his head slowly. You’re mad, George. You can’t talk to him like that.’

A week later, Freeman says he was pulled over while driving and police found a pistol in his car he’d never seen before.¹¹

Kelly’s success as an investigator was due not just to such techniques but, as has already been noted, to his criminal informants such as Lennie McPherson. Their symbiotic relationship enabled each man to dominate his own world. By ignoring McPherson’s crimes, Kelly was able to prosecute others. If asked, Kelly might have said it was not particularly ethical, but preferable to the alternative – and it did his career no harm.

ENTER LENNIE MCPHERSON: MR BIG

Lennie McPherson was born in Balmain in 1921, the youngest of ten children. At the age of thirteen he did time at Mount Penang Training School near Gosford. He was a persistent petty crook, and married his pregnant sixteen-year-old girlfriend Dawn Allan in 1940. A police report from later that year observed, ‘since his marriage he has frequently quarrelled with his wife and her parents. He is a man of peculiar disposition – he is not addicted to drink and is regarded as a reasonably good worker but he believes that his wife’s people are tempted to do him some injury and when in this frame of mind, he is most peculiar in his manner.’¹²

Early in the 1940s McPherson worked at Mort’s Dockyard in Balmain, where he experimented with explosives. Now regarded as the preserve of terrorists, in the Golden Years expertise with explosives – whether for disposing of opponents or blowing safes open – was a key criminal skill. McPherson’s own inclinations in this direction were demonstrated by the police discovery in 1941 that he had used the skills acquired at Mort’s to make three bombs.¹³

Much of what we know about McPherson comes from Tony Reeves’ biography Mr Big. Reeves, who is now dead, was a significant crime reporter in the 1970s and 1980s. His later biographies of McPherson, George Freeman and Abe Saffron contain a great deal of original material that is almost entirely based on anonymous sources. We have accepted that information except where it appears highly unlikely in the context of everything we do know about the period. (A rare example of this is where Reeves says a government minister allowed Lennie McPherson into Parramatta Prison to hold court and pass death sentences on other criminals.¹⁴)

In 1946 McPherson was sentenced to prison for receiving stolen goods. In prison he became a snitch – a police informant – a practice he continued when he got out. This was risky, and before long he was called ‘Lennie the Pig’ and ‘Lennie the Squealer’, presumably not to his face. But