Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron dossier

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TONY REEVES is an investigative journalist of many years standing. He first became interested in Abe Saffron more than forty years ago and has been following the miasma of corruption that has hung above Sydney ever since. Tony has worked as a journalist with the ABC, Nation Review, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Australian, all the time peeling away deep layers of truth to expose the real workings of Australia’s underworld. His reporting helped bring about the Moffitt Royal Commission into organised crime. He now enjoys a quieter life in Brisbane.

Also by Tony Reeves

Meet Lennie McPherson, the man who came to be known as the Mr Big of Australia crime. Brutality punctuated his whole life. Corruption was his mark. He was a standover man, a murderer, a rapist and a thief. He ran crooked police and corrupt politicians. He was involved in drugs and prostitution. And, he did business with the Mafia and the CIA. In this chilling portrait of the godfather of Australian crime, Tony Reeves uncovers a heart of evil and takes us deep into a dark and violent criminal underworld. It is a story that could be told only after Lennie’s death.


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MR SIN The Abe Saffron dossier

Tony Reeves

Allen & Unwin


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First published in 2007 Copyright © Tony Reeves 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Reeves, Tony, 1940– . Mr Sin: the Abe Saffron dossier. Includes index. ISBN 978 1 74175 220 5 (pbk.). 1. Saffron, Abe, 1919-2006. 2. Criminals - New South Wales - Sydney - Biography. 3. Gangsters - New South Wales Sydney - Biography. 4. Businessmen - New South Wales Sydney - Biography. 5. Organized crime - New South Wales Sydney. 6. Sydney (N.S.W.) - Biography. I. Title. 364.106092 Set in 11/14 pt Baskerville by Bookhouse, Sydney. Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


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CONTENTS Contents

Author note Prologue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

vii 1

For king and country . . . and a quick quid Sly grog sales: a bottler of a money-maker In and out of court and courting crims New players join the team: Abe moves into the big time Another war, another fortune: Vietnam blue puts crims in the black Pictures to die for: blackmail dossiers get out of hand Burning issues: murder and arson become the hot topics Snorting at drug slur: some customs are not so hard to break Murder most foul: Abe buys his cover Tax break comes Abe’s way: whistleblower goes to jail [v]

7 14 48 69 98 112 136 154 168 184


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11 Troubles in the south: truth drug may be the answer 12 Rid me of these meddlesome attorneys: Abe plays Henry too 13 Takeover bid: top cop seeks monopoly on graft payments 14 Taxing times: Abe does a ‘Capone’ with little black books 15 Courting a new persona: writs say the past is all a lie Epilogue: and then he died Notes Index

192 208 223 245 265 286 292 297


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AUTHOR NOTE Author note

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK money amounts are shown in the actual amount involved at the time. For events prior to February 1966, before decimalisation, the amounts are shown in £/s/d (pounds, shillings and pence); after that in $ and ¢ (dollars and cents). To provide the reader with some sense of the contemporary value of these amounts, I have used the Reserve Bank of Australia’s on-line inflation calculator to provide a 2006 value (the latest available in the system), rounded to the nearest dollar where appropriate. For example, early in Chapter 1, we have our subject in 1938 being fined ‘£5 ($343.81)’, the latter figure in brackets reflects the impact of the intervening sixtyeight years of inflation at an average annual rate of 5.3 per cent. There will be some exceptions to this: where the year of the money event is uncertain, it is not dealt with; where items are repeated, they are dealt with on the first mention only, and nothing after the year 1998 is [ vii ]


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processed as there is little difference in the values. I hope this helps. With thanks

I must mainly thank Abraham Gilbert Saffron for making this possible: without his interest in me all those years ago, I might well have spent my life in ignorance of his bad behaviour, and I would never have thought of this book. I particularly thank Kamala for her patience and support and the 10,000-word ‘reward’ lunches, and Richard, Rebecca and Joanne for their enthusiasm and encouragement. Tony Reeves

The most important step in the war against organised crime is the unmasking of the facade of honesty and respectability that is maintained by the principal crime figures. All too often only the small-time crooks or the bottom line operatives of the major crime syndicates are caught and punished. In Australia we have seldom come close to unmasking the identity of the godfathers of organised crime. Frank Walker, NSW Attorney-General (speech in NSW Parliament, September 1980)


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PROLOGUE Prologue

IN MID-1965, SYDNEY tabloid the Daily Mirror published sketchy details of a notorious smoko that had been held for a social club of drinkers from the Phoenix Hotel in Woollahra. A city council community hall in innersuburban Surry Hills had been booked for the Saturday afternoon and evening event, and more than one hundred men had crammed in, paying their quid ($21) at the door to cover the entire cost of unlimited beer and spirits, prawns in great mounds and entertainment. I know a great deal about this story: I was there. I occasionally had a drink at the Phoenix with a commercial photographer I hired in connection with my job as a public relations officer for an oil company. He was a colourful, knockabout character called Jack Dabinett. ‘Dabbo’ (as we called him) had asked me if I could provide for the smoko a film projector and a couple of movies from the oil company’s extensive library, which at the time was under my control. The movies hardly seemed the stuff of beer[1]


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and-prawns events, but I was told they would just be running in the background as warm-up entertainment. I set the projector and screen up in the hall, threaded the first film through the sprockets, set the focus and got ready to start screening. At that moment a man briskly approached me, pushed me out of the way without a word, ripped my movie out and threaded one of several he’d brought with him, and hit the start button. It was a grainy, black-and-white, hard-core pornographic movie with no soundtrack. In response to my demand: ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I was told curtly to ‘Fuck off!’ Given that he was a few sizes larger than my ten stones, I was inclined to agree. My mate Dabbo shrugged, told me not to worry: who wanted to watch boring old films from BP when they could watch this stuff? He’d known the set-up all along; said he’d forgotten to tell me. After an hour or so of porno movies, beer and prawns, two attractive women appeared and performed explicit sex acts with each other, with the help of a large white plastic object, the like of which I had not only never seen before, but had never imagined might have existed. One of the women eventually retired and the other invited any ‘worthwhile male’ to come forward and satisfy her. A few volunteered—fit young blades from the Bondi Surf Club, Dabbo said—most of them only slightly embarrassed at having to perform in front of one hundred gawking men. Suffice to say there was about an hour of varied and at times hectic sexual activity under the spotlights. All of which was pretty well par for the course for your average all-male ‘smoko’, Dabbo assured me. One must live and learn, I thought. Most of the regulars at the


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Phoenix Hotel fell into one of three categories: petty criminals, an illegal starting price (SP) bookie’s agent and police ‘snouts’; a number of CIB and eastern suburbs detectives who drank in the saloon bar; and a few journalists who mixed with both the other groups. All were well represented at the smoko. Crims, cops and journos: not the usual mix to gather for a Saturday afternoon beerand-prawns bash. The next day a Daily Mirror journalist (who had not been present) wrote the brief story, and told his editor about the event and that another journalist, whom he named, knew the whole story. The other scribe steadfastly refused to write it up and eventually lost his job over the issue. But a weekend edition of the paper managed to dig up and publish some more details, specifically the fact that Abe Saffron had supplied the porno movies and the women for the live show, and that he was able to provide similar acts for a large number of smokos on any given night—for a considerable fee, of course (although given the police presence at the Phoenix event, it was probably part of a contra deal). Libel laws prevented the paper from naming Saffron, so there and then it coined the tag ‘Mr Sin’, which was blazed across the front page in massive type. This moniker was to stick to Abe Saffron like a brand for the rest of his life and beyond. A few weeks after the headlines hit, I was having a quiet ale with Dabbo at the Phoenix and a copper I knew beckoned me aside from our group. ‘Bumper Farrell would like a quick word with you’, he said. ‘Nothing to worry about!’ he said as he indicated to a man—purplefaced, cauliflower-eared with a nose to match—seated


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alone down the other end of the bar. Detective Sergeant Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell operated out of Darlinghurst Police Station, which covered the Kings Cross area. His public reputation was as large as his considerable physique: he was a tad under six feet tall and nearly as wide across the shoulders. Bumper had been a first-grade rugby league footballer for Newtown, making headlines when he bit off an opponent’s ear during a particularly rough game. By the mid-1950s he was the high-profile head of the vice squad, which meant he had plenty of contact with Abe Saffron, among others. He was a frequent non-paying guest at Saffron’s clubs over the years and one of the main collectors of contributions by the club operators to what was euphemistically called ‘the police benevolent fund’. Now he wanted to talk to me. ‘Bumper’, I said, ‘I’m Tony Reeves’. A low growl emerged as he turned to me: ‘I’m MISTER Farrell to you’, he snapped. ‘I just want you to sign a quick statement that you showed the movies at the smoko recently’, he said. ‘But I didn’t show them’, I replied. ‘I organised the projector, but my films were taken off and others put on by someone else. I have no idea who he was.’ ‘Yes, Tony, we know that, but there’s a big problem with all this. Mr Saffron has been under a lot of pressure over this whole thing and we can’t sort of find the person who did show the movies. So it’d be a great help to us if you could just sign a bit of paper saying you showed the movies. That’s all. There won’t be anything arising from it, and I can assure you Mr Saffron would be most appreciative.’


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‘I’m sorry, Mister Farrell, but that would be lying. I didn’t show the movies and so I won’t sign any statements saying I did.’ ‘Okay’, growled Bumper. ‘I can’t make you do it. But we’ll remember you!’ It was my one and only meeting with Mr Sin’s good mate and protector, ‘Mister’ Farrell. And what an eye-opener it was for me! From that moment on I became something of a ‘Saffron-watcher’: I was intrigued that Saffron could have a senior, high-profile policeman like Bumper Farrell approach an innocent private citizen (like me) and try to frame them with an illegal act they did not commit, just so some ‘pressure’ that he was feeling could be alleviated. I read back through the press clippings, made copies of them all and opened my ‘dossier’ on Abraham Gilbert Saffron, to which I continued to add material. If it was okay for him to try to interfere in my life, I thought, it was certainly okay for me to take a close look at his. In retrospect it was a defining moment for me: this book would not have been possible had I not taken that early interest in its main subject. It was also an event which stirred me to take a closer look at some of the other notable characters around town, like Lennie McPherson and the host of unpleasant crims and crooked cops I wrote about in Mr Big. If there is anything at all that I can thank Abe Saffron for, it is drawing my attention to him as a ‘person of interest’ by sooling Bumper on to me. It would be many years before he began to realise that I was indeed curious about his nefarious doings. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here: there are other matters in the sordid life of Saffron to be discussed first.


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Let me make one thing clear, though: it’s not my intention to write a biography here. That has already been done— if hagiography can be given membership of that genre. This book is intended to provide an exposé of a highly successful Australian criminal whose tentacles of vice, exploitation, gross abuse of the laws of the land, blackmail and corruption—oh yes, and tax evasion—extended across most of mainland Australia and probably overseas for more than half a century. Abe Saffron, as we will see, was far more than a maligned, successful businessman who the media loved to hate. He was a cunning, calculating manipulator, driven by greed, sex, lust for power, and an ego that constantly required renewal and reassurance to ensure the world would see him as a gentle family man, a benefactor to charities, a man castigated simply because of his success in business.


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1 FOR KING AND COUNTRY . . . AND A QUICK QUID For King and country . . . and a quick quid

H AVING ATTENDED SCHOOL with Frederick Charles Anderson—later nicknamed ‘Paddles’ and hailed as one of Sydney’s earliest movers and shakers of organised crime—Abe Saffron had a headstart in life. At Fort Street Boys’ High School in Petersham in Sydney’s inner-west, Anderson was a few years ahead of young Abe, and he was possibly Abe’s first—but certainly not last—brush with criminal fame. But let’s start further back than that. Sam Saffron had married Annie Gilbert in 1912. Of Russian–Jewish heritage, they set up home above their drapery store on Parramatta Road at Annandale in Sydney’s inner-west. Abe, the fourth of five children, was born on Monday, 6 October 1919. Philip, Henry and Beryl were his older siblings; a sister Flora was born later. The business helped the family survive the economic hardships of the First World War and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Later, to help the family cash flow, Sam set up a [7]


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black-market racket when clothes and popular items like nylon stockings were scarce and rationed during the Second World War. He made a tidy fortune out of it, some of which was later undoubtedly used to fund his son Abe’s activities. After school Abe always helped out in the shop, and from the age of about eight he operated a lucrative trade in black-market cigarettes. He had arranged a supply of these scarce items with a friendly local shopkeeper, and then resold at a profit to his father’s friends, and later to Fort Street schoolmates. Reselling was a corporate skill he honed over a lifetime, eventually learning how to acquire the stock free of charge. At no stage in his life did he ever have the required permit to sell tobacco products. Another of Abe’s early scams was buying textbooks from boys who no longer needed them, cleaning them up and selling them to those starting a new year. Selling books was another lifelong corporate activity, though the material he traded later in life was definitely unsuitable for young schoolboys. After making a good profit selling used books and black-market cigarettes, Saffron decided that the world of commerce needed his talents. Many years later he was to tell a journalist that he left school early because: ‘. . . I had no other desire than to go into business.’ In the mid-1930s the family drapery business moved into the city to a rented shop on Pitt Street. It was here that a nineteen-year-old Abe Saffron met American Hilton Glanville Kincaid, who had changed his surname by deed poll from Macossa. A twenty-one-year-old, Kincaid operated out of a tiny booth next to the Saffron shop,


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FOR KING AND COUNTRY . . . AND A QUICK QUID

[9

selling cigarettes and, from ‘under the counter’, any other scarce or rationed commodity he could supply illegally at rip-off prices. It was a similar line of business to Abe’s really, and the two joined forces for many years. Another venture to which young Saffron applied his ‘corporate skills’ was gambling. It seemed not to matter that his new business was illegal. Details are sketchy now, but on Monday, 19 September 1938, Saffron was summonsed to appear at North Sydney Magistrate’s Court on a charge of using a premises for gambling. ‘Guilty, Your Worship.’ Fine: £5 ($343.81), or ten days’ hard labour at Long Bay. Abe paid up promptly from his illicit profits. He either learned his lesson or learned discretion, or, more likely, invited the local cops into his illegal gambling club for a few free bets, as there are no more breaches of the gaming laws on Abe Saffron’s notably sparse criminal record. After a while he moved to a potentially more lucrative field: theft. He was twenty when he was hauled before the Central Court of Petty Sessions on Wednesday, 3 January 1940, on a charge of receiving stolen goods, to wit (as the police prosecutor intoned) a car radio worth £20 ($1309). ‘Guilty, Your Worship.’ He was sentenced to six months’ hard labour. But the magistrate suspended the problem of actually sending him to prison by allowing him to enter a good behaviour bond for £10 on the assurance he would behave nicely for the next two years instead. There was also a mention by the magistrate that he might better serve his country by enlisting in the army and going to war rather than by stealing things.


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Remarkably, the records show him back in the same court on the same day, facing four counts of receiving stolen goods and one of having stolen goods in custody. Unaccountably, the charges were dismissed under the versatile clause 556A of the Crimes Act, which allowed a magistrate to dismiss proven charges against a ‘first offender’. And that was it for a while: a humble beginning for a man who would go on to make millions from criminal activities. • Years later, in the mid-1970s, when John Little, a reporter for the TV show A Current Affair, interviewed Saffron, Abe suffered that perennial ailment of the criminal classes: a sudden, brief but virulent attack of amnesia. The interview Little pre-recorded included a segment that went something like this: Little: Do you have a criminal record? Saffron: No. Little: But our records show that you had a conviction for receiving many years ago. Was this so? Saffron: No. Little: Then our records are wrong? Saffron: It comes back to me now. Yes, there was something like that. Little: Was there anything else? Saffron: No. That recording was never put to air. Saffron’s solicitors contacted the program producers and threatened legal


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action if there was any reference to his criminal record. So it was dropped. Abe Saffron was a well-established entrepreneur and he was never going to allow his unsavoury biographical details to sully the public’s mind that he was anything other than a highly successful, sometimes controversial, yet unquestionably charitable businessman. That was a gambit he maintained for the rest of his life. And some people still believe him. • As was the case with many aspiring young entrepreneurs in those days, a little event called the Second World War put the brakes on Abe’s corporate ambitions. Called up for military service, he fronted at the army’s Victoria Barracks in Oxford Street, Paddington, on Monday, 5 August 1940, to enlist in the Citizen Military Forces. He declared he was single, a draper and mercer, of British nationality (as were all Australians in those days), a Hebrew, and his next of kin was his mother, Annie, of 16 Lamrock Avenue, Bondi. He was allocated Army Number N21771 and sent off to be checked by a medical officer, F.E. Barclay, who sized him up as: five feet six inches (1.68 metres) tall, 136 pounds (61.68 kilograms) weight, grey eyes, dark hair and dark complexion. He passed the medical with flying colours, being declared ‘fit for Class 1’. His slightly humped back—almost invisible under clothing—did not affect the medic’s judgement. Abe signed the pledge that he, Abraham Gilbert Saffron, would ‘. . . well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord, the King, in the military forces of the Commonwealth of


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Australia until the cessation of the present time of war or until sooner lawfully discharged, dismissed or removed . . .’, and so on. Lieutenant B. Fuller witnessed this solemnly sworn oath. Abe’s reluctance to get involved in the war effort was only shown when he completed his personal details on the opening page of his Record of Service. Under ‘If exemption claimed, reason’ he wrote: ‘My father’s business is wholly dependent on my presence.’ His attempt to opt out obviously did not convince the military brass, who had a war to win. Abe’s was not an inspiring military career. At the start of 1942 he was moved to the army camp at Liverpool and, within a week, he was in the hospital and out of action for a fortnight with an undisclosed ailment. Two years after he enlisted he was bumped up to the rank of corporal, but again the excitement of all this military action got to him: he was back in hospital and his fitness downgraded to ‘Class B’. On Tuesday, 18 January 1944, after 733 days in the army (102 days of which he was not on active duty) and without medals, decorations or an active service badge, he signed Discharge Certificate 9831, gladly accepting the army’s reason why they were letting him go as: ‘There being no suitable vacancy in which his services could be employed.’ Such a low-key recognition of his service did not prevent him in later years from proudly wearing on his lapel the RSL badge normally worn as an acknowledgement of overseas military service. He packed his bags and headed off to the family home, now at 27 Boonara Avenue, Bondi. After his discharge, Abe’s military wartime commitment was over, but he did perform a little more war-related


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activity with a six-month stint in the merchant navy from the end of January 1944, doing administrative chores on troopships on the Australian east coast. While on duty Saffron met up with his old mate Hilton Kincaid—the Pitt Street black marketeer who was still running a brisk trade in illicit booze and cigarettes. They both signed off at the end of a voyage in June 1944—their war was now over— and decided to team up ashore, an ideal business partner, Abe must have thought. For this pair, it was time to make some money out of the war.


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2 SLY GROG SALES: A BOTTLER OF A MONEY-MAKER Sly grog sales

THE WAR MAY have been over for Saffron in mid-1944, but there was another year to go for those actually fighting in the Pacific. Conveniently for Abe, in that year hordes of cashed-up American troops were either based in Sydney or visiting for leave breaks. Canadian-born Sammy Lee first visited Australia in 1937 as a drummer in a band and returned for keeps in 1940 when he opened the Roosevelt nightclub at 32 Orwell Street, a block off the main drag in Kings Cross. Although breaking the liquor laws on a nightly basis, he became a highly popular and successful nightclub operator around Sydney for more than twenty years. His business partner for many years was a flamboyant gambler, Reginald Frederick ‘Reg’ Boom, who also operated illegal baccarat games in Double Bay and Kings Cross. Abe met Sammy Lee and Reg Boom at the Roosevelt club, and the pair agreed to pass the business over to Saffron, then aged twenty-three. [ 14 ]


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Saffron ran the club in partnership with his mate Hilton Kincaid and a much older man, Mendel Brunen. Brunen’s parents, Elias and Rachel, had set up their son in a similar line of business as Abe’s father—mercery and clothing—and Mendel was a neighbour and close Saffron family friend. Kincaid, as an American, helped attract the US soldiers as the club’s main customers. Abe must have realised then that the nightlife of Kings Cross was where his fortune lay. As Mario Puzo wrote in his 1978 novel Fools Die: ‘If you want to get rich in this country, you have to get rich in the dark.’ The money started to roll in— but not for long. Before its first anniversary was celebrated, the club was closed by a court order declaring it a ‘disorderly house’. It appears certain that Abe’s father Sam had asked Brunen to get involved with Abe’s corporate adventures and to ‘keep an eye’ on how the money was used—much of which had undoubtedly been provided by Saffron senior. Brunen was to remain in that role until his death in 1965. Abe Saffron never spoke of the source of his startup funding; such revelations could have brought discredit to his father, who had made much of his fortune on the illegal wartime black market. But it was clear there was never a shortage of large lumps of cash. From the early 1940s on, Abe always seemed to get what he wanted, even for his foray north from Sydney to the Hunter Valley. There he and his ever-present and equal partner Kincaid bought into their first hotels: a pub at Kurri Kurri and, about a year later in 1944, another, the Newcastle Hotel. They paid £3000 ($161,421) for the latter, but Abe refused—even years later when giving


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evidence under oath—to say where he got the money from, mumbling confused replies about ‘saving it’ and ‘from winnings’. Around this time Abe had a brief stint at being a legal bookmaker, but at this he failed after he made an abortive attempt to take over the local jockey club. Perhaps the sheer legality of these ventures brought about a lack of interest, or perhaps it was the lure of the ‘big smoke’ that drew Saffron and Kincaid back to Sydney early in 1946, where they took over the West End Hotel in Balmain. (Kincaid’s involvement was not revealed because the licensing authorities had taken a dim view of his earlier illicit liquor business.) A few months later they acquired the licence of the Gladstone Hotel, about halfway up William Street, between Sydney’s CBD and Kings Cross. At the moment the second deal was signed, Saffron broke the law, which limited any individual to just one hotel licence. Abe knew that, of course, and went through a charade of transferring the licence of the West End pub—then worth around £5300 ($284,414)—to his eldest brother Philip to try to conceal the control of the business by himself and Kincaid. Philip moved into the pub for a while with his wife of ten years, Ruth Harriet, to put on a convincing show that he was the owner. It is, in retrospect, implausible that the Licensing Court and the police charged with enforcing the liquor laws would have been ignorant of this blatant breach for long. It was later revealed that from the earliest days of Saffron’s booze business he was systematically and regularly corrupting the very police and officials charged with prosecuting such lawbreakers.


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In that postwar period with its newfound sense of freedom and fun, the good citizens of Sydney had probably never heard the term ‘organised crime’ and, if they had, would have attributed it to the fascinating stories of the US Mafia they occasionally heard about. Few would have believed that here, in their own hometown, the building blocks of large-scale organised crime were being established by people like Abe Saffron and his running mates Hilton Kincaid and Mendel Brunen. [[boxbegin]]

WHAT CONSTITUTES ‘ORGANISED CRIME’? In 1973, an Australian judge provided what was probably the first local definition of ‘organised crime’. Under intense pressure in the parliament, NSW Premier Bob Askin had been forced to do something about mounting allegations of criminal activities under his watch. On Monday, 20 August 1973, Askin appointed respected judge Athol Randolph Moffitt to head a twelve-month royal commission into a range of crime allegations—an event in which Abe Saffron was given more than a passing mention. Moffitt was to spend many pages of his 1974 report on seeking to define organised crime. It is not intended here to enter that discussion in great depth, replete as it is with the potential for unending academic conflict, but Moffitt suggested that investigation of organised crime should have two threads: one to determine if a crime had been committed and the other to determine whether the crime could be shown to be part of an organised pattern. ‘For example’, wrote the judge, ‘bribery, blackmail or


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assault, in the course of a legitimate business gaining a monopoly, could be regarded as organised crime . . .’ He wrote that a weapon of organised crime is ‘. . . by planning to avoid generating evidence of its crimes, or if there is evidence, to suppress it by intimidation or corruption . . . of officials, particularly those, such as police, charged with investigating organised crime’. To avoid confusion, crimes defined in this book as ‘organised’ are those illegal acts that are planned as part of a continuing corporate strategy in which effort is made to conceal the existence of the crime and where officials charged with policing and prosecuting the breaches have, by bribery, blackmail or intimidation, been prevented from—or dissuaded from—carrying out their duties to investigate or prosecute the crimes. And that fits Abe Saffron’s activities to a T. [[boxend]]

There has long been police corruption in Australia, of course; that started with the arrival of the first white folk on these shores. In the early 1900s, Sydneysiders in particular were titillated from time to time by fantastic tabloid stories of sly grog shops, illegal SP bookies, vice queens and razor gangs. But organised crime was not considered to be a part of the Australian psyche. And so it would have remained if the organising criminals, their corrupt police and the shonky politicians had had their way. One of the basic tactics of organised crime, said Athol Moffitt (see box), is to try to conceal its existence. That is precisely what Saffron did with his Gladstone deal, and as he did time and again as he added new hotels to his chain.


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There was a deafening silence from the liquor authorities when Saffron took over the Mortdale Hotel with his sister Beryl and mate Kincaid; the Cumberland Hotel in Bankstown with Emil ‘Eddie’ Kornhauser (who was to become a long-term close friend); the Albert Hotel in North Sydney with brother Henry Saffron and Kincaid; and the Civic Hotel in Pitt Street, Sydney. The fact that Saffron used his friends and family as ‘dummies’ to front his illegally gained hotel licences came out eventually. Abe’s sister, by then Mrs Beryl Frack, concealed her relationship with him to the Licensing Court but later admitted that she, ‘thought it was necessary to tell lies to the court’. Kornhauser also broke down and told the truth some time later, admitting that he, too, had misled the Licensing Court by concealing the fact that the real control of the Cumberland Hotel rested with his friend Abe Saffron. Harold Taylour, Abe’s dummy at the Civic Hotel, later admitted that he misled the Licensing Court about Saffron’s interest in the hotel because he had ‘given a promise not to mention his [Saffron’s] name’. Hilton Kincaid’s presence in the thriving chain of pubs was never revealed to the court. And, it seemed, nobody made any inquiries, accepting the information on the licence application forms at face value. By 1947 Saffron had accumulated this huge chain of hotels and had once again taken over the Roosevelt club in Kings Cross in partnership with Kincaid and Mendel Brunen. In the same year Saffron was fined £5 ($261) and one of his barmaids was fined £15 ($784) for charging ‘an excessive price’ for beer sales at the Gladstone. A year later a waiter was fined £75 ($3657) for illegal wine and


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beer sales. One of Abe’s doormen at the Roosevelt club was thirty-eight-year-old Richard Gabriel Reilly, who in later years was to help Saffron boost his status from slygrogger to a major player among Sydney’s criminal elites. Among Reilly’s attributes was the fact that his brother Jack was a copper with good contacts. • It was also in 1947 that Saffron acquired a gun and possibly a wife. On Sunday, 23 November 1947, Abe Saffron married Doreen, the hairdresser daughter of Samuel Krantz and Rebecca née Cohen from the Brakpan district of Mpumalanga province in central northern South Africa. Marriage certificate 21664/1947 was signed in the presence of witnesses Henry Edwards and Abraham Toltz to make it legal. The groom was twenty-eight, and the bride, who had been living in Croydon Park in Sydney’s inner-west, was three years his junior. With the exception of a break in the relationship lasting about a year from 1956, Doreen was to stay with Saffron until her death in 1999. That’s what the official records show. But Duncan McNab in The Usual Suspect says their wedding date was 23 November 1948. McNab told me that Abe Saffron confirmed that to him. Abe’s only son Alan Saffron’s date of birth is 29 March 1949, which means that if McNab is correct, Doreen was five months’ pregnant at the time of their marriage. These days such a ‘shotgun’ wedding would barely raise an eyebrow, but in 1948 it was seen as something of a stigma. So what is to be made of the enigma of the two dates? One clear implication is that Saffron wanted the official


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records of his son’s life to appear as pure as the fantasy he would later create about his own, and so he persuaded a clerk at the births, deaths and marriages registry to make a slight alteration to his marriage certificate—it possibly would not have taken a very bulky brown paper bag to achieve that—to show that he and Doreen were married for well over a year before she became pregnant. Then, when telling his story to McNab, his memory of this little lie evaded him and for once he told the truth. Thorough research at both the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages and Sydney’s Great Synagogue indicate an integrity of their records of the event. According to both sets of records, it was on Sunday, 23 November 1947, that the couple exchanged their vows before fifty-seven-year-old Rabbi Leib Aisack Falk— described in the synagogue’s archives as ‘an ardent, militant Zionist’. It may have been that Abe got the date wrong when he talked to McNab. Sundays are considered auspicious for weddings among Jewish people. The date in 1948 fell on a Tuesday, not known to be a day of good omens. The gun, on the other hand, did not last anywhere near as long as the marriage. On Wednesday, 29 January 1947, Abe fronted the Central Court of Petty Sessions on a charge of having an unlicensed pistol in his possession. Licences, it seems, were a perpetual source of problems for the twenty-seven-year-old. A friendly magistrate found the matter proved, but generously did not enter a conviction. Saffron was released on another two-year, £10 ($522) good behaviour bond, with the matter to come up for conviction ‘if called upon’, meaning if he broke the bond. The pistol was forfeited.


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As with all busy executives, Saffron experienced a few setbacks in the climb up the sometimes slippery corporate ladder. In August 1948, for example, Saffron felt obliged to lay a charge of theft against his former accountant, David Molland Evans. Abe claimed the elderly man had stolen £170/19s ($8336). The Central Court was presented with a charge sheet against Evans, signed by Saffron, who did not front for the hearing. Abe’s barrister uncle, Simon Isaacs (later to become a Supreme Court judge), represented Saffron and the matter was sent to the Quarter Sessions Court to be heard by Judge Joseph Lamaro, then fifty-three, and a jury. A Detective Sergeant Windsor made out the case, telling the court that, when arrested, Evans had been told he had stolen £1300 ($63,389). Not so, said Evans: ‘Only about £900 [ $ 43,885]. I admit to that amount.’ Windsor added that Evans had made arrangements to repay the money. Told that Saffron had signed the charges brought against him, an outraged Evans said: ‘That’s lovely! But Saffron won’t go on with this case. It’s a matter of a thief catching a thief . . . I’m resigned to my fate. I’ll go to jail, but I’ll take Saffron with me.’ He’d been paid £16/6s ($794) a week as an accountant, said Evans. One of his duties was to fill in cheques to be signed by Saffron. In a statement from the dock Evans said he was not guilty of theft because he had altered cheques at Saffron’s direction: Saffron said to me: ‘If you keep your mouth shut, I’ll look after you.’ By transferring entries from the supper to the dinner account, and by other means, the firm


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saves £50 to £60 [$2438 to $2926] a week in taxation. When it appeared there would be trouble, Saffron said to me: ‘You might have to take the blame, but there will be no prosecution.’

This could well have become the first time Saffron found himself in trouble with the taxation department, for the spurned accountant had no qualms in explaining his exemployer’s tax dodge—and prosecuting barrister Alf Goran (later to become a judge) gave Saffron a grilling on this aspect of the affair. Saffron told Goran that Evans had changed the amounts on cheques after he (Saffron) had signed them. And he told Goran that no liquor was sold at the Roosevelt. Liquor was obtained for customers only when it was ordered. Charges for Liquor were then entered into a general services account. ‘On rare occasions’, Saffron said, ‘customers might bribe waiters to get liquor for them. Two waiters have been charged with having sold liquor, but the management was never charged’. The court reporters recorded the exchange between the barrister and Saffron: Goran: Has bottled beer from the Gladstone Hotel been sold at the Roosevelt for 3s 6d ($8.53) a bottle? Saffron: That’s untrue. Goran: Did not the brewery investigate that matter because of complaints by customers of the Gladstone Hotel? Saffron: No, sir. The brewery discussed the matter at my request. Gladstone Hotel customers get their quota of bottled beer. No customer of any hotel is satisfied with his bottled beer quota.


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The Roosevelt club ledgers showed that on Monday, 25 August 1947, seventy people attended the cabaret and 436 people ate the dinner served between 6.30 and 8 p.m. Questioned on this, Saffron said: Not necessarily 436 people for dinner; rather, 436 dinners were served. Some people might have had two dinners. The maximum charge was then 5s. [$12.20]. A customer might have a plate of oysters, then, a little later, order a steak. That would be entered as two dinners.

In the report of the case in that weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, Goran was reported to have huffed: ‘Sir! Would you charge five shillings for a dish of oysters? I put it to you that you cut down your entries in the taxable section— that is the cabaret—and showed more in the untaxable section?’ ‘That is absolutely ridiculous,’ replied a smiling Saffron, and he also denied that he ‘farmed out’ (rented) the men’s and women’s cloakrooms at £1 ($48.76) each a week. Goran: What about £1100 ($53,637) worth of American cigarettes which were found underneath the bandstand of the Roosevelt? Saffron: The cigarettes were found and the company was fined £300 ($14,628), but the ownership of the cigarettes was never determined. Goran: Did you say to Evans, when he first begged to work for you: ‘You cover up for me, and keep your mouth shut, and you’ll get your cut’?


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Saffron: That’s a gross lie. That’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Goran: Your partners knew nothing about that arrangement and when they questioned you, you dumped Evans? Saffron: That is a lie. Goran: I suggest that you were party to the whole scheme, that it was a way of getting cash for blackmarket purchases. Saffron: That is a terrible lie. Goran: Didn’t you allow the cheques to be incompletely filled in, so that they could go through Evans’ bank account? Saffron: That’s a terrible lie. At the end of evidence, Judge Lamaro, who was just completing his first year on the District Court bench, asked the jury of twelve men if they wished the case to be adjourned until the next day rather than be kept late. ‘We won’t take twenty minutes to decide, Your Honour’, replied the foreman. They were back in twentythree with an acquittal for Evans. But it appeared that nobody from the tax department took any notice of Evans’ testimony about Saffron cheating on his tax. It would not be the last time such strong evidence was ignored, as we shall see. Another problem for Abe later that year literally came as a shock to the ‘businessman’. He had possibly taken some public relations advice to repair a reputation that was becoming somewhat tarnished—and, for Abe Saffron, reputation was a matter of paramount concern and not


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infrequent manipulation for the remainder of his days. On Wednesday, 8 December 1948, Saffron launched his persona as a major charity fundraiser with a daytime party at the Roosevelt club for more than 180 children suffering from cerebral palsy. Radio personalities entertained, and a friendly policeman, Detective Inspector A. Wilks, stood in for Santa Claus. Slipping at the edge of the stage, Saffron grabbed two microphones, ripping them off their leads and almost electrocuting himself. It made headlines for nearly two weeks with a stream of media reports on his slow recovery in St Vincent’s Hospital. By then all of Sydney knew what a ‘kindly and benevolent’ man Abe Saffron was. • To keep the partying local imbibers in their place, Saffron employed Australian heavyweight champion boxer Alf Gallagher as a doorman and ‘peacekeeper’. The twelvestone, twelve-pound (about eighty-two kilograms) cauliflower-eared pugilist was never reluctant to use his few skills to subdue any patrons who became too excitable. Gallagher twice fought champion boxer Dave Sands who, in a fifteen-rounder at Sydney Stadium on 4 September 1950, put Gallagher down for the count. Not so successful was Douglas William McDonald, a physiotherapist from Greenwich on Sydney’s lower northside. He testified nearly a year later to Gallagher’s energetic efficiency. On the evening of 4 May 1951, McDonald and a couple of his pals, Rex Archibald Grant and Patrick Joseph Duggan, were out on the town for his stag party. They’d had a few drinks at the pleasant St James


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Hotel and around 11 p.m. found themselves at the Roosevelt, where they decided to have a spot of supper. Gallagher reckoned otherwise and refused them entry into Abe’s respectable establishment. A ‘few punches’ were thrown and the groom-to-be found himself prone in the street outside the club with only a vague memory of a large fist hitting his face. Six months later he got to tell his story to Judge Alan Stredwick Lloyd and a jury at the District Court, when he sued Saffron Enterprises and Gallagher for damages for assault. McDonald reportedly had a small win from the court case and later said that his stag night had been a ‘real knockout’. Abe’s involvement in the Roosevelt nightclub should not normally have been of interest to the liquor licensing authorities simply because it did not have a licence to sell booze. What should have been of interest, of course, is that it illegally sold a large amount of liquor and clearly did so at a price greater than the maximum fixed by law, making huge profits for the owners. The sly grog trade— always a feature of Sydney life—took off in earnest during the early years of the Second World War. There was a shortage of beer and pubs were provided with a quota of bottles. The 6 p.m. closing time for pubs—dubbed the ‘six o’clock swill’—helped to exacerbate Sydneysiders’ collective thirst. By the late 1940s the Roosevelt was one of the four or five more popular clubs that did a brisk trade in prohibited liquor sales. All the clubs bought their illicit beer from the limited stocks of friendly hotels. In Saffron’s case that was doubly profitable in the postwar period as most of the supplies for the Roosevelt came from his own brewery allocations to the six hotels in which


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he held an illegal controlling interest. The mark-ups from pub to club, and from club to patron indeed made drinking an expensive pursuit for the punters. It was a masterful operation of logistics and it gave the young Saffron some early experience in double-entry bookkeeping, which was to become a lifelong practice. From his pubs he was buying for the Roosevelt a bare minimum of 250 dozen bottles of beer a week—that’s three thousand bottles in total, or more than four hundred bottles a day, seven days a week. And he paid— to himself—the then ‘top price’ for black-market beer of £2 ($97.52) a dozen. The patrons at the club, it was finally figured out by someone in authority who had not been corrupted, could not possibly have consumed so much alcohol. What Saffron had managed to do—with only minor competition from the other nightclubs—was to corner the market in illicit grog sales. His competitors had supplies sufficient for their clubs, but Saffron was buying up as much of the surplus as he could. What he did not sell to patrons at the Roosevelt he sold at even greater profit to the dozens of sly grog shops—little rooms in back alleys where a bottle or two would be sold to ‘regulars’. Saffron had created a monopoly in this area and had total command of the price. That the clubs were allowed to flourish quite brazenly was due solely to the bribery which had corrupted licensing police and bureaucrats, with even Police Commissioner William J. ‘Bill’ MacKay turning a blind eye to the racket. Saffron had been guided in his earlier days by Sammy Lee and Reg Boom on how to ‘open up accounts’ with bribable cops, meeting key senior police


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and developing a clear understanding of the going rate (which had a direct relationship to rank). He developed a practice of wrapping up the bribe money in paper bundles and handing them over either directly to the police or to their appointed ‘bagman’ every Friday evening at the club. This became an ingrained habit, and over the next thirty years Saffron kept paying a phalanx of bent cops who, every Friday, formed a queue at one or another of his clubs. When Police Inspector Noonan retired in July 1950, after four-plus years running the metropolitan licensing division, a huge testimonial function was held for him at the swanky Australia Hotel in the city, at which he was presented—quite openly—with a cheque for £1000 ($41,467). Abe Saffron was one of the biggest contributors to the payment, which was the sly grog industry’s way of saying ‘thanks for all you have done for us’. When Police Metropolitan Superintendent Sweeney retired from the force a month later, he was happy to attend a farewell dinner organised by the sly-groggers at Sammy Lee’s club, attended by more than two hundred people. His ‘testimonial’ cheque was valued at £600 ($24,880). He’d been in the superintendent job for just a couple of years. These public displays of camaraderie between the law enforcers and the law breakers—later to be described by a judge as ‘systematic police corruption at the highest levels’—were mere tokenism compared to the back-room arrangements that Abe came to with police, politicians and a widening circle of influential people. And with troubles ahead—for 1951 was to be a year of great challenges—he’d need all the help he could get. •


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To further his budding reputation as a charity fundraiser, Abe opened up a housie (bingo) game at Bondi, supposedly for the NSW Spastic Centre. On 14 January 1951, the Sunday Sun published an article that said Saffron’s new venture was in breach of the Lotteries and Art Unions Act because it offered cash prizes. While it started as a fairly innocuous affair, the ‘Housie Scandal’ was to reverberate around the corridors of power and the courts for more than a year before other Saffron headlines eventually pushed it aside. The basic thrust of the newspaper articles was the illegality of the set-up and the claim that the returns to the charity were ‘well below what they should have been’. The paper called on NSW Chief Secretary Clive Evatt to prosecute the offender (Saffron) for a clear breach of the law. The politician initially agreed to take Saffron to court, but ten months later the paper complained in a page-one splash: Chief Secretary Evatt this week gave no indication of whether he would proceed with promised prosecutions for breaches of housie game permits.

There were more games in store when Saffron hit the newspaper with a writ for defamation of his good character. Some of the articles that Abe complained about were headed: ‘Cash Prizes in Housie. Police Investigate Bondi Charity Game Complaint’, and ‘Illegal Housie Game Still On. Cash Again Offered’. Deeply hurt by these accusations, Saffron said the articles made out that he was ‘a dishonest and corrupt person, who under the pretence of working for charity, made money for himself’.


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His claim said the stories implied he was a cheat, of bad character and was prepared, for selfish ends, to break the law. He had been accused of permitting children to be fleeced of small sums of money for his own enrichment, and of making use of an unlawful game to further his interests as a nightclub proprietor and the licensee of a hotel. All these ‘outrageous lies’, his writ suggested, could be somewhat salved with a decision of £10,000 ($361,628) in damages to help repair his public image. On Monday, 5 November 1951, the court entered a ‘verdict by consent’ in favour of the newspaper, with Saffron ordered to pay costs. In withdrawing his writ, the newspaper missed out on a gloat that it probably proved that all the damaging claims Abe had made now appeared to be true, by his own admission. The paper did not give up the chase, however. It still wanted the government to prosecute Saffron for the breach of the law. Over four weeks of operation, the housie game had returned only £68 ($2459) in total to three charities, despite the fact that hundreds of dollars changed hands every night. The Sydney Morning Herald also checked out the housie game, reporting that regular crowds of more than four hundred attended, with the operators making a profit of more than £900 ($32,546) a week. The Sunday Sun maintained its rage. In its 18 November edition it rhetorically asked: ‘How much longer can the government—and State—carry Mr Evatt in the important post of Chief Secretary?’ The issue about how Saffron, ‘a man with a criminal record’, was given a licence to conduct the housie game remained. A police report and the newspaper’s allegations showed the game was


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conducted in breach of the law, and there was a failure to prosecute Saffron for the breaches. The story suggested collusion between Evatt and Saffron, saying the Minister’s staff knew of Saffron’s defamation writ before it had been lodged in the court or served. Evatt’s response was that if the newspaper continued its attacks on him he would ask Premier James McGirr to appoint a royal commission ‘to vindicate him [Evatt]’. The next edition said the Sunday Sun would welcome a royal commission, and that it should be extended to inquire into ‘. . . the entire ramifications of the gambling rackets in the State—two-up, baccarat, housie and the rest’. The terms of reference, the paper said, should include why Evatt had not prosecuted Saffron for a breach of the law, and what relationship, if any, existed between Evatt and Saffron. ‘The challenge which Mr Evatt is trying to evade remains’, the editorial proclaimed, ‘let him table before Parliament all the files, letters, reports or documents, bulky or otherwise, relating to the granting and subsequent revocation of a housie licence to the notorious Abe Saffron’. The argument between the tabloid and the politician bubbled on, and finally Saffron was summonsed to appear at the Paddington Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday, 16 January 1952, to face a charge of a breach of the Lotteries and Art Union Act. His solicitor was Cedric Reuben Symonds—better known for his work in the divorce courts than down in the petty sessions before magistrates, and whose first wife was society madame Lady Mary Fairfax. At the January hearing Symonds sought an adjournment, as though it was the expected routine. Magistrate Everard


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Roy Harvey agreed to defer the matter until 12 February, and on that occasion the parties went through a similar ritualistic dance: ‘My client has not had sufficient time to brief me on this complex case’. An adjournment until 25 March was agreed. A month before that hearing date, an overconfident Saffron, with wife Doreen and son Alan, boarded the French steamer Chang Chow in Sydney on the evening of Wednesday, 27 February, for a voyage to Tahiti. The Sunday Sun reported their departure the following weekend, noting that the charge over the housie game was still unheard and that visitors to Tahiti could spend up to three months there. There was a suggestion in media reports that Saffron’s excursion was an almost contemptuous attempt to avoid facing the court. At the March sitting, Symonds no doubt felt obliged to deal with the media speculation about the location and purpose of his client’s absence, and told Magistrate Harvey that Saffron was on a business trip ‘somewhere in the Pacific Islands’, and was not on a ‘frivolous excursion’, as one media report had suggested. The magistrate agreed to again adjourn the case until 3 June, by which time, the lawyer assured him, the businessman was expected back in the country. Saffron’s return to home soil on 30 April was the stuff of more tabloid headlines, with Abe refusing to talk to the waiting media scrum, running to a waiting car and driving off at speed—leaving Doreen and Alan to be taken in another car—to avoid being snapped by photographers. Keen for all the details of his mystery Pacific Island ‘business venture’, a Daily Mirror reporter noted that


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Saffron had boarded the Sydney-bound plane at Nandi (as it was then spelt) in Fiji, with the supportive evidence that his luggage bore labels of a Fiji airline. Abe Saffron had become a media ‘person of interest’, and the tabloids commented on his every move. In the end the much-delayed court case all seemed something of an anticlimax. At the June hearing Magistrate Roy Harvey found Saffron guilty of failing to furnish a balance sheet for the housie games conducted for charity, but—ignoring the fact that Saffron had earlier convictions—dismissed the charges under the ‘first offender’ provisions offered under 556A of the Crimes Act on condition he pay £11 2s ($325.67) costs. The magistrate accepted Saffron’s excuse, without further examination, that the paperwork had been lost when a car was stolen. ‘I deem it inexpedient to impose any penalty’, said Harvey, unmoved by the high drama which had preceded his simple resolution. Magistrates, it was noted by the media some time later, never gave reasons for invoking the ‘first offender’ clause, the much-used (and some have suggested, much abused) ‘Five-Fifty-Six-A’. • While the housie game fiasco was running its course, another crisis hit Saffron and his illicit corporate booze empire. Fort Street alumnus Allan Victor Maxwell was charged with the job of calming down a growing public concern about the shortage of beer and the resulting illegal sly grog trade when the NSW Government appointed him to head a royal commission into liquor laws in 1951. In retrospect, Maxwell was an unlikely


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candidate for such a task: as a barrister he often appeared for the breweries and was a close personal friend of Tooth’s Brewery General Manager Tom Watson. The concept of ‘conflict of interest’ was not one which greatly aroused the concerns of politicians nor, it seems, judges, in those times. Born in Balmain on Thursday, 12 May 1887, Maxwell was called to the Bar a few days before his twenty-fifth birthday in 1913. He was of a conservative conviction: in 1917, when Australian unions held strikes over hunger and poverty they said was brought on by war inflation, Maxwell volunteered to be a strikebreaker on the wharves. In 1927 the conservative Bavin–Stevens Government appointed him to the bench of the District Court, and in 1934 he moved up a rung to the Supreme Court. He had played an active political role in 1931 by signing ‘The Call’, the New Guard’s notorious but abortive effort to mobilise fascists in Australia. A year later he was urging Governor Sir Philip Game to seek new advisers to resolve ‘the crisis with Premier Jack Lang’, who the New Guard described as ‘communist’. None of this, of course, was seen as rendering him unsuitable to inquire into the scandals fermenting in the grog industry. Maxwell went about his task methodically, exposing the ‘dummy’ arrangements in the Saffron hotels, the shifting of huge quantities of the scarce commodity— ‘liquid gold’ as one media scribe called it—from pubs to clubs at premium prices, and the ‘systematic police corruption’ at the ‘highest levels’. Even the barrister appearing for the NSW Police was compelled to admit before Maxwell that the ‘obvious lack of success’ in policing the


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rackets was ‘due to bribery of police officers’. It was clear from the evidence taken by Maxwell that the corruption was widespread, with the judge blaming senior police for the failure to enforce the laws. Despite that finding, and as a surprise to nobody who knew how corrupt the police force had become, no officer faced charges or any disciplinary action. Among the eight nightclubs he studied, Maxwell singled out Saffron’s Roosevelt club as the main perpetrator of the sly grog rackets. Abe, in an examination that ran to forty-three tightly spaced foolscap pages of transcript, strenuously denied any wrongdoing—as was his wont in legal environments. The judge would have none of it, saying Saffron had engaged in ‘systematic false swearing’ to his inquiry. In other words, he told a pack of lies. And the Roosevelt, said Maxwell, was: ‘. . . the most notorious and disreputable nightclub in the city’. With such strong statements, the Crown had little option but to indict Saffron in October 1952 for lying under oath, another drama that would keep him as a focus of media attention. Back in the familiar Paddington Courthouse on Monday, 20 October 1952, Saffron was formally charged with perjury before the commission and was committed for trial at the Sydney Quarter Sessions Court two weeks later. What followed was high farce, and a superb demonstration that, if you can afford the best lawyers in town, you can get away with murder . . . well, at least perjury. But before that drama began to unfold, Saffron was forced to divest himself of his illegal hotel interests. In this round of licence transfers, the Licensing Court—


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undoubtedly aware it was under intense public and media scrutiny after the waves of the Maxwell inquiry revelations—closely examined the recipients of the ‘fire sale’ licences. On 13 December 1951, Abe’s sister, Beryl Frack, said she was selling the Mortdale Hotel to a Mr Bamford for £9250 ($303,774) after she had confirmed to Maxwell she had been the manager of the hotel for her brother, and that he (Saffron) had told her she could sell the business. The licence had been worth £13,000 ($684,343) when she acquired it, she said. When the Licensing Court looked at the transfer application on 14 January 1952, the details had changed somewhat. The person who snapped up this bargain was Elliot Douglas Yabsley Hill, thirtyseven, of Bellevue Hill—son-in-law of federal MP Rowley James, described as the ‘big, gruff but amiable’ longserving Labor member for the seat of Hunter. The court satisfied itself that Hill had no connections whatsoever with Abe Saffron and approved the changeover. Five days later it was the turn of the Civic Hotel in Pitt Street, where Harold Taylour had been Abe’s ‘dummy’, to front the court. The new buyer, Frederick William Steen of Bondi, told Licensing Board Chairman Vincent Henry ‘Vince’ Wells he was paying £15,000 ($542,441) for the business. Steen said he had heard there had been a ‘tieup’ between Taylour and Saffron, and assured the court: ‘There will be no tie-up with us. There is no partnership apart from my wife. I have not been connected with Saffron in any of my other hotels.’ Vince Wells accepted the assurances and granted Steen the transfer of licence. In early February the court approved an application by Saffron’s close friend, Emil Kornhauser, to transfer the


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licence of the Cumberland Hotel at Bankstown to Eric Claude Norman of Dover Heights for £23,500 ($849,825), having been given an assurance by Norman that he would not supply liquor to Saffron or the Roosevelt club. But Saffron didn’t go down without a fight as he watched his liquor empire being dismantled. In August, Robert Melville Randall Buckingham applied to the court for the transfer of a spirit merchant’s licence at Anzac Parade, Kingsford, from one Minnie Emeline Duggan. Buckingham admitted he’d worked at the Mortdale Hotel when Mrs Frack ran it, but said he had not known that Minnie Duggan had illicitly supplied booze to Saffron for the Roosevelt. ‘Do you still say Abraham Saffron is not in the background of this application?’ asked Licensing Sergeant F. Brownette. ‘I definitely do’, replied Buckingham. The court didn’t believe this testimony for a moment. When the adjourned hearing resumed nine days later, chairman Vince Wells rejected the application, saying the facts showed there was a tie-up with Saffron. ‘We are not satisfied that the transaction is a bona fide one’, he said. Abe was still in there trying. Maybe the court was being discreet, or maybe they really didn’t know, but Robert Buckingham was at the time Beryl Frack’s lover (later they married). The Maxwell Royal Commission had brought about the collapse of Saffron’s business and, for the state government, the unavoidable decision was that Saffron, his relatives and anyone associated with him should be barred from operating in the liquor trade in which he had behaved


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so reprehensibly. Neither the close association he’d made with Chief Secretary Evatt nor his corrupt relationship with senior police was able to save him from that fate, which was to remain in force until 1966. He was, of course, able to keep the Roosevelt club going because it was not a licensed premises and—Abe kept assuring people—didn’t sell liquor. In the meantime he still had the perjury charge to face. That action finally got underway on Wednesday, 2 December 1952, and was to develop into a morass of legal contortions over the next nine months. Saffron’s lead lawyer, Garfield Edward Barwick QC, another Fort Street alumnus, started the action by seeking an adjournment. The charge that Saffron ‘knowingly gave false testimony’ to the liquor inquiry was one of a group of indictments ‘for somewhat similar matters’, Barwick told sixty-five-year-old Judge Bertie Vandeleur Stacey at the Darlinghurst Quarter Sessions Court. Before the cases had been listed there had been discussions between counsel as to the order in which they would be taken, the barrister said. ‘There was some difference now in recollections as to what had been precisely agreed to by counsel’, he said. The judge agreed to delay the case for a week, but Barwick was ‘on a roll’, so to speak: two days later he paid a morning visit to Judge Edward Parnell ‘Ted’ Kinsella in chambers and on Saffron’s behalf made an application directed against Judge Stacey and the state AttorneyGeneral, Clarence Edward Martin QC, for a rule nisi for a writ of certiorari, effectively removing the trial from the Quarter Session judge’s jurisdiction. Barwick left with what he went in for: a delay until February and a shift to the


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Supreme Court, to be tried before judge and jury. The Crown’s barrister, Wilfred Robert ‘Bill’ Dovey QC, was understandably miffed, and that afternoon made his countermove with an application to Chief Justice Kenneth Street at the Full Court to have the matter heard sooner. Dovey came away with only part of what he wanted: Street agreed to list the matter for mention the following Monday, when Dovey’s application could be renewed. The legal games had begun in earnest—and this was just over whether Saffron had told a few ‘porkies’ to Maxwell. Saffron’s team then hinted at their next ploy: they would challenge the power of the state Governor to have issued the royal commission to Maxwell. Barwick, using the idiosyncratic profundity he demonstrated throughout his illustrious career, argued that the Succession Act, passed in England during the reign of Queen Anne, required the sovereign to issue a warrant authorising the use of the Great Seal of the State, or Public Seal, with which judges’ commissions are made. Such warrants had not been issued since the accession of King George V, intoned the great barrister, and therefore all acts of government purporting to use the Great Seal or Public Seal since then were invalid. And on that basis he challenged whether the Letters Patent—the official document by which Maxwell’s appointment had been made—had been validly issued, and even whether the seal affixed to the Letters Patent was the Great Seal within the meaning of the relevant Act. Little wonder that a mind that could produce such a legally titillating argument as this could also later produce the advice which an unelected governor-general used to sack a legally elected


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democractic government! The defence crew probably thought it a good move to distract attention from one abundantly clear fact: that their mendacious client Abraham Gilbert Saffron had beyond any doubt lied to the royal commission. At the Monday hearing another sensation: Bill Dovey QC claimed in his rich, almost theatrical voice that a counsel for Saffron had disguised himself as a research student in a ‘subterfuge’ to get access to ‘documents of State’ related to the case, an accusation that was flatly denied by the defence team. Dovey soldiered on: the Crown agreed to transferring the trial to the Supreme Court to be heard by a judge and jury, he said, but in light of the challenge being made to the validity of the liquor royal commission, the matter should be dealt with ‘this month, rather than next year’. ‘If the grounds in the challenge were good, there would be no Supreme Court and no Parliament’, the barrister argued. Bill Dovey, with nods of approval from his back-up QCs—his son-in-law Edward Gough Whitlam (later to become prime minister) and a young Anthony Mason (later a High Court judge)—who was just twenty-eight at the time—said that, while it would be wrong for him to suggest that the application to bring the trial to the Supreme Court was a sham, the proceedings should not taken bona fide and were the penultimate link in a chain of events to put off the trial as long as possible. ‘There must be considerable public unease in this matter’, he said. One of Saffron’s lawyers, John William Smyth QC, known for decades as ‘the legendary J.W.’, rejected any


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suggestion that the application was made merely to delay the trial. He said that Saffron’s mother had died the previous Thursday and, according to Jewish law of strict mourning, Saffron had to confine himself to his house for seven days, thus making it difficult to interview him. He described as ‘most unusual’ the action of the Crown in launching the false-swearing prosecutions, and accused the Crown of putting ‘every obstacle’ in the way of the defence by claiming privilege for certain documents. In view of the Crown’s attitude, some evidence about the Great Seal might have to be sought in England, Smyth added. However, it was a win for the monocle-wearing Dovey: the trial date was set for just a week later, on Monday, 15 December 1952. Facing Judge John Henry ‘Jock’ McClemens in the Central Criminal Court that day, Smyth opened with a move to have the indictment against Saffron quashed. The specific charge being heard was that Saffron had, on 25 September 1951, knowingly given false testimony to the royal commission when he said that no person other than himself had any interest in the licence of the Gladstone Hotel. Among Smyth’s arguments was the claim that the indictment was ‘too general and ambiguous’, where the law required it to be ‘particular and precise’. The good judge was having none of it, suggesting they get on with their jobs by empanelling a jury. With that done, and Saffron entering a plea of ‘not guilty’, Dovey opened with the clear claim that there was ‘no possible shadow of doubt’ that Saffron had knowingly lied to the commission. ‘It will be proved to you that when he was being asked questions relating to the existing state of things at the time


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of the commission, he stated certain matters which were false’, Dovey told the jury. ‘There will be no difficulty about proving that. And equally, in the opinion of the Crown, there will be no doubt about proving that he did know that what he stated was in fact false.’ He further asked the jurors to forget all feelings they may have against restaurant or nightclub proprietors, or anybody else who sold liquor, and to forget also any unpleasant experiences they may have had in obtaining liquor in the past years (no doubt hoping to arouse some ire among them at the beer shortage). When Saffron had given his evidence before the commission, he was the proprietor of the Gladstone Hotel in William Street in the city and at the same time was the director or was in some way connected with the management of the Roosevelt restaurant in Kings Cross, Dovey added. ‘On 25 September he was asked questions at the Commission about various matters. This charge only relates to his interest in the Gladstone Hotel, and has nothing to do with people getting beer at reduced rates or such like matters’, Dovey said. He continued: He [Saffron] was asked two separate questions about the Gladstone Hotel. The facts were that at the time he was in the witness box he was conducting the Gladstone Hotel as licensee in partnership with a man named Kincaid. They had carried on this business by contributing financially to it on a 50–50 basis, and they had a banking account at the time called the Gladstone Banking Account on which either could operate.

Saffron had been told by the royal commission to return with documents, Dovey then explained. When the


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game was up, Saffron admitted that: ‘Yes, what I said the other day in effect was not true.’ There could only be one possible answer, said the barrister: that Saffron had given false testimony and that he knew it to be false when he gave it. Smyth, understandably, took a different tack, suggesting perjury concerned the administration of justice. Where a witness on oath said something and later corrected it, it did not amount in law to perjury or false testimony, he argued, adding the rather quaint rider: There can be no question of perjury arising in a Royal Commission, because a Royal Commission is concerned not with the administration of justice, but with the ascertainment of the truth. It does not matter how long it takes or what it costs to get. As long as it gets the truth in the long run, its serves its purpose as a Royal Commission.

At the end of that first day, Judge McClemens, who at that time had been on the bench for just over a year, refused to grant bail to Saffron, who spent the night in the police cells. The next day Hilton Glanville Kincaid was sworn in as a witness. ‘How long have you known Saffron’, asked Bill Dovey. Kincaid immediately refused to answer that or any other questions, saying that his answers might incriminate him. Dovey pressed on, producing a document that authorised Kincaid to sign cheques for the Gladstone and West End hotels. It was signed by Kincaid and Saffron. Reluctantly, Kincaid acknowledged it as authentic.


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Smyth QC then returned to his ‘great distraction’: the matter of Letters Patent, Great Seals, and the powers of kings and governors. Judge Maxwell, said the barrister, had not been appointed during the Governor’s pleasure only, but had been appointed for a fixed time. And for the royal commission to be valid it should have been appointed under the Public Seal used in the time of King George V. Judge McClemens interrupted the flow, asking Smyth: ‘If there is no Great Seal, certain consequences follow?’ ‘Yes, your honour’, replied Smyth. ‘No commission.’ To which his honour suggested that if the argument was right, it would mean not only that a number of judges had been improperly appointed, but for some years, at least, the state parliament had not been properly summonsed. Dovey QC added: ‘And think of all the thousands of people who have been improperly committed to prison, if that argument is right.’ Under the same argument, continued Dovey, the Chief Justice might be a Supreme Court judge, but would not be Chief Justice because, as such, he would be appointed under the Great Seal. This esoterica dragged on for the rest of the day. Back in court on Thursday, 18 December, Smyth pulled his master stroke, arguing that the whole of Saffron’s evidence at the royal commission should be ruled inadmissible in this trial. His client had been bound to answer questions before Judge Maxwell, said Smyth, whether they incriminated him or not, but if he did answer, the answers could not be used against him in any future proceedings. Judge McClemens claimed he had no choice but to agree;


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Dovey was left with no foundation for the prosecution, and the jury, without leaving the room, followed the judge’s direction and returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict. Saffron was free to go—for a short while. Dovey presented another indictment against Saffron and foreshadowed two others, all for telling lies to Maxwell. Smyth failed to quash the new charges and his client was released on bail of £100 ($2934). The saga was not yet over. • The ruling that Saffron’s evidence before the Maxwell inquiry was to be inadmissible at a criminal trial was wrong. After the trial collapsed the Crown appealed. On 27 March 1953, the Court of Criminal Appeal, in a majority decision, decided the evidence was admissible. This did not affect Saffron, though, as a jury had already acquitted him on the first charge. A new charge was listed for hearing in the Central Criminal Court on Monday, 7 September 1953. Saffron’s lawyers said a motion seeking special leave to appeal had been lodged with the High Court, to be heard on the same day. Before that eminent judicial gathering, Garfield Barwick argued that the Court of Criminal Appeal had been wrong in ruling that Saffron’s evidence before the Maxwell inquiry was admissible at a criminal trial. Barwick described the liquor commission as a ‘witchhunt of individuals’ with ‘something of the reputation of the Star Chamber’, and that the commissioner’s appointment was technically defective. A formidable bench of the nation’s most pre-eminent judges gathered in the High


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Court to hear the arguments that would protect Saffron’s reputation from being a liar. Appointed Chief Justice a year earlier, Sir Owen Dixon, at sixty-seven, was team leader. The support judges were Frank Kitto, fifty, and Alan Russell Taylor, fifty-two—coincidentally a Vaucluse neighbour of Saffron. They listened patiently, but unanimously rejected the argument and refused the application for special leave to appeal, giving new hope to the Crown prosecutors that Saffron might be brought to justice for his lying ways. But it was not to be: the remaining perjury charges against him mysteriously and quietly disappeared from view. It was, in retrospect, a bizarre episode. There is no doubt Saffron had told lies to Maxwell: he admitted it himself. But also in evidence before that inquiry, it was clear that Saffron was in blatant breach of the liquor laws on several counts and had paid bribes to police. There was, however, never a suggestion that he should be charged with those serious breaches of the law and, as mentioned earlier, none of the police he corruptly paid were given even a slap on the wrist. It had been the sort of year that the Queen of Australia might have described as an ‘annus horribilis’, but by the end of a torrid 1952 Abe Saffron still had plenty more court appearances to face in the months and years ahead.


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3 IN AND OUT OF COURT AND COURTING CRIMS In and out of court and courting the crims

DESPITE WINNING ON a dubious technicality in the perjury trial, Saffron had taken quite a psychological battering from all the legal actions. With his bruised ego in need of repair, and with more court appearances on his schedule by the start of 1953, he set about acquiring a bit of insurance to try to ward off possible future legal threats to his corporate success and personal wellbeing. Part of the Saffron strategy was to join the ‘in crowd’, a group of senior criminals who, through the astute application of the skills of bribery and corruption, managed to carry on their affairs with little or no intrusion from inquisitive police or interfering politicians. Saffron had undoubtedly thought his close association with Chief Secretary Clive Evatt might have provided such a level of protection, but that had not been the case. A breakthrough came early in the year when former doorman at the Roosevelt club and emerging illegal baccarat ‘king’ Richard Gabriel Reilly—‘Dick’ to his [ 48 ]


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friends—met Saffron to discuss the possibility of using the Roosevelt as home for one of his illegal gambling games. There’s no available evidence that the deal was consummated, but it was the start of a long association of which Abe appears to have been the main beneficiary. They met quite frequently until Dick Reilly’s shooting murder on Monday, 26 June 1967, at the age of fifty-eight. A close friend of both men told me once that while Abe was quite taken with the handsome, tough and influential Reilly, the gambler never really took to Saffron. Every time they met, my source said, Saffron would greet Dick warmly and politely—as was his manner—and would inevitably get the rejoinder from Reilly: ‘Get out of my way or I’ll put my hand up your dress.’ Saffron’s major gain from this association was that he did get to meet prominent players of the said in crowd, including the well-connected illegal abortionist Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones, who employed Reilly as a driver/bodyguard. Through those two Saffron met legendary corrupt policeman Raymond William ‘Ray’ Kelly, whose share of the proceeds of the illegal abortion racket was just one of his many sidelines. Nicknamed ‘The Gunner’ for his propensity to shoot criminals he cornered, Kelly was close to the heavyweights in the NSW Liberal Party during his police career from 1929 to February 1966. He cultivated close relationships with major criminals, including ‘Paddles’ Anderson and Lennie McPherson. Lennie was his most productive informer and, in later years, provided Kelly with a monthly ‘report’ on the activities of all Sydney criminals known to him on a reel-to-reel tape recording. In return, McPherson was granted


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immunity from prosecution for more than thirty years. Kelly was a tough cop who had a stunning arrest rate. He was also one of the main players in organised crime in New South Wales throughout his thirty-six years in the force until his retirement. A farewell testimonial dinner given in his honour at the Chevron Hotel was attended by many prominent people in the criminal set, including Abe Saffron, Dick Reilly, gamblers Joe Taylor and Perc Galea, and nightclub owner Sammy Lee. While these introductions in 1953 proved to be something of a turning point for Saffron, it would be some years before he would reap the full benefits of the associations. In effect, he was joining an elite group at the bottom rung and would spend time earning the promotions that eventually would enable him and his most trusted employees to describe themselves as ‘The Invincibles’. In the meantime there was a contribution to his wife Doreen’s home comfort: Abe splashed out £5850 ($159,592) for what was later described as a five-bedroom, four-bathroom mansion at 109 Hopetoun Avenue, Vaucluse. (Abe subsequently sold the property in August 2006 for $3.5 million.) It certainly was a secure home: in the mid-1970s the Saffrons invited their next-door neighbour’s son, Jed, to their grandson’s birthday party. Jed had a great time and, on his return home, told his father that there was a gun in the hall cupboard next to the front door. There were also a few pending court matters to resolve that year, the first of which was the Police Commissioner’s move to have the Roosevelt club declared a disorderly house. On 15 January 1953, Mr Justice Richardson


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approved Commissioner Colin John Delaney’s move against the club. Within a month establishment barrister Garfield Barwick was again in court fighting for Abe, using some highly arcane and obscure arguments to try to win the case and to persuade Chief Justice Street to overturn the earlier decision. In a tactic similar to that used in the perjury trial, Saffron’s legal team descended to high farce with the suggestion that the declaration was ineffective because Judge Richardson’s appointment was invalid. And, as it was in the perjury trial, the defence strategy appeared to require the use of any argument except the innocence of their client Saffron on the matter before the court. Barwick reverted—as he had in the perjury trial—to arcane arguments about the wrongful use of the Great Seal or Public Seal, this time suggesting the appointment of many judges was invalid. This went on for two days, with the court seemingly overlooking the fact they were there because the police were trying to close the Roosevelt due to Saffron illegally selling booze at the ‘notorious and disreputable’ nightclub. Both sides played the game, with Dovey—himself within a few months of being elevated to the bench of the Supreme Court—producing on behalf of the Crown letters written in 1829, 1839 and 1870 which, he said, showed that the Public Seal and Great Seal were ‘one and the same thing’. The seal then in use had been delivered in 1938 from the British Dominions Secretary and carried full royal authority for its use, the Crown argued. The matter was so complex, it appears, that Chief Justice Street alone could not resolve it and it was moved to the Full Court.


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On Friday, 27 February 1953, Street was joined by judges William Francis Langer Owen and Leslie Herron. After a learned discourse from the Chief Justice on the history and authority of Great and other seals, Street said that if Barwick’s contentions were proved correct: . . . there would not and could not be elected any properly constituted legislature as every legislative act of parliament, including the constitution of the legislative council, would be invalid and that, therefore, the court could not presume parliament to have intended this result without the use of the most imperative words.

In their collective wisdom the judges agreed to dismiss the Saffron suit with costs. The order of a disorderly house still stood, effectively closing the business. The Roosevelt had sold liquor illegally from 1947 to 1952, the court was told, but had ‘. . . never been accused of conducting gambling or anything disreputable’. Saffron sold the Roosevelt and on 3 March Judge Russell Le Gay Brereton in the Supreme Court rescinded the earlier order when he was convinced that Saffron was no longer involved in the business. The Roosevelt may no longer have been a part of Saffron’s business life, but its memory persisted to haunt him for months. Frank Lambeth, thirty-six, a waiter formerly employed at the club, told Chief Industrial Magistrate Mr Harry Isles, on 11 June 1953, that he had been sacked after he had appeared as a witness in a court case against the Saffron company, Macleay Enterprises Pty Ltd (later renamed Saffron Enterprises Pty Ltd), which owned the Roosevelt. A caterer, Darcy Frost, had sued the club for an unpaid


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debt of £240 ($6547), and Lambeth had given evidence in support of the claim. When he turned up for work, Lambeth was sacked. He was awarded £268 19s 10d ($7343) for unpaid overtime. The action by Frost led to the winding up of the Saffron company by an order made by Judge Charles McClelland in the Equity Court on 11 October 1953. The judge appointed Malcolm Charles Card the official liquidator. For Saffron, it was all somewhat of an academic exercise, as the club had already closed down. • Abe was not the only Saffron to find himself in battle with the liquor authorities. His brother Philip also felt the heat from the Licensing Court decision to keep Abe, his relatives and associates out of the booze business in the wake of the Maxwell inquiry. On Friday, 12 June 1953, Judge Henry Thomas Eulert Holt in the Quarter Sessions Court dismissed an appeal by Philip Saffron against a Licensing Court refusal to let him have the licence of the Lord Jersey Hotel in Chalmers Street at the southern end of the CBD. The judge said the state Full Court had held that the onus was on the applicant to prove he was a fit and proper person to hold a licence and had laid down that public interest was of paramount importance. Under the Full Court’s ruling earlier that afternoon, the judge said, he must direct attention to the serious allegations which had been made against Philip Saffron, which might amount to false swearing and even perjury. The Licensing Court was entitled to take into consideration Philip Saffron’s refusal to answer questions and the onus was on


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him to prove himself fit to have the licence. A police report tendered at the hearing said that in 1951 Philip Saffron gave evidence at the liquor royal commission. Saffron admitted that, when previously applying for the licence of the West End Hotel at Balmain, he had failed to disclose to the court the fact that his brother and a man named Kincaid were in partnership with him in the business. He also failed to disclose that he had in fact on another occasion borrowed sums of money to finance a city hotel. When Philip Saffron was asked questions at the Licensing Court designed to elicit from him admissions that the police objections to him were founded on fact, he refused to answer any of the questions on the grounds he might incriminate himself. Philip Saffron had been perfectly within his rights in claiming privilege in refusing to answer questions, but this refusal to answer was relevant when it was a question of proving that an applicant for the transfer had ‘. . . discharged the onus of proving himself a fit and proper person’ to hold a licence. Full Court judges Owen, Herron and Sydney James Clancy delivered their unanimous verdict in that obscurantist argot which seems to prevail in the legal profession: The fact that the appellant here elected to exercise his legal right to answer questions relevant to the inquiry as to his fitness to hold a licence affords, in our opinion, no evidence that he is unfit to hold one, but his refusal provides material proper to be considered by the Court in whether he discharged the onus of proving affirmatively that he is a person upon whom it would stamp the mark of approval.


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At around this time, Abe Saffron began looking for businesses outside the Sydney scene: the gossipy ‘Town Talk’ column in the Daily Telegraph hinted on 9 September 1953: ‘Perth is buzzing with a red-hot rumour that Abe Saffron of Sydney is trying to buy the Raffles Hotel, a slightly out-of-town luxury pub, for £100,000 [$2,728,070].’ The item was spot-on, and it led to a question in the Western Australian Parliament as to whether ‘Mr Saffron was involved in a takeover of a hotel in Perth’. The WA Justice Minister promised to have the Licensing Court investigate the matter, but nothing happened to prevent Abe from starting his national expansion during that year, and the Raffles Hotel at Canning Bridge was the first of many interstate properties he was to acquire in the coming years. His time as an illegal liquor profiteer had obviously been rewarding as he moved on to amass a huge property portfolio in Sydney, Adelaide and Perth, with some interests also in Melbourne and Brisbane. As with almost everything he did, some of the new projects were not—as we will see—without controversy. • It is not, of course, an act of organised crime to amass a property portfolio like Saffron’s; nor is it a criminal matter to go through the proper channels to obtain liquor licences for clubs and hotels occupying those premises. But by the mid-1950s it was too late for Abe Saffron to play the game straight. From the moment he paid his first bribe to a crooked cop to turn a blind eye, the path he would tread was set. Among those who determine it should be so are the crooked cops themselves.


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Those of us who have studied corruption within police forces—and that of New South Wales in particular—will know that the policeman on the take will often become greedy and keep pressing for more with the constant threat of exposure not only of current criminal behaviour, but also of the very fact of having paid bribes. It becomes an inescapable bind, if one ever did want to get off the treadmill, but Saffron showed no interest in mending his illicit ways from the moment he broke the liquor laws by buying the Gladstone Hotel. Memories of that hotel—like those of the Roosevelt club—must have been bitter in his mind, for between 1954 and 1956 he fought vigorously in court against the damages awarded to a Gladstone barmaid, and was even making noises about taking the matter to the Privy Council in London to resolve. Back in 1951 Mrs Ivy Lawrence suffered spinal injuries when she fell through an open trapdoor at the hotel. In April 1954, Mrs Lawrence, then thirty-eight, was awarded £5267 ($141,210) by a Supreme Court jury in compensation for her injuries. Saffron appealed against the decision. It was nearly a year later— March 1955—that the Full Bench heard the appeal. Saffron unsuccessfully claimed the amount was excessive. By the end of November 1956 Mrs Lawrence’s patience had expired: she still hadn’t received the money and she had heard that Saffron was about to leave for England on a lengthy trip with his wife and son. On Friday, 23 November 1956, Ivy Lawrence appeared before a lanky six foot three inches (191 centimetres) Judge Cyril Ambrose Walsh in the NSW Supreme Court seeking Saffron’s arrest unless he supplied securities or


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paid the damages bill before leaving the country. Demonstrating his reputation as an outstanding trial judge, Walsh acted quickly, saying he was not satisfied with the security Saffron had offered, and gave him until noon the next day to pay up the money—plus five per cent accumulative interest. At 10 a.m. that Saturday morning Saffron scrambled together banknotes and a cheque for the £5500 ($141,363), and after thirty minutes of counting, it was receipted into the Supreme Court account on Mrs Lawrence’s behalf. The judge was unimpressed when told that Saffron, who had already lost two appeals in the case, was planning to take the matter to the Privy Council—the British establishment based on the House of Lords, which was then the highest level of appeal for Australian legal matters (the High Court of Australia has held that responsibility since 1975). He ordered Saffron to also pay Mrs Lawrence’s legal costs. Outside the court Mrs Lawrence told reporters: ‘Why shouldn’t he pay up? He can afford to. He can afford to take his wife and family on a trip to England. My husband and I can’t afford to take our two children for a short holiday to the mountains.’ Saffron went off to London but did not take with him the threatened appeal to the Privy Council. • Through his new acquaintances—Reilly, Stuart-Jones, Kelly and some of their more nefarious partners in crime— Saffron found a new sense of freedom in the mid-1950s. They would have discussed ways to ensure their right to


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operate in their ‘free-enterprise’ system with as much flexibility for their activities as possible. Reginald Stuart-Jones, a prominent Macquarie Street surgeon from the 1930s, was one of a number of Sydney doctors who exploited the misery suffered by many women who wished to terminate unwanted pregnancies. During the decades leading up to the 1970s performing abortions was illegal, and women were forced into dangerous—and often fatal—‘backyard’ terminations. Those who could afford to pay the substantial fees demanded by StuartJones and a few of his colleagues could be assured of a safer treatment. Stuart-Jones established a close association with Detective Ray Kelly and his corrupt colleagues, and paid large and regular sums to the police to persuade them to turn a blind eye to his illegal activities. The fact that he was a long-time associate of criminals—including Dick Reilly—helped pave the way to a harmonious working relationship between the doctor and the crooked cops. This was the man with whom Saffron set up a new line of business, and the venture that took shape grew out of Saffron’s insatiable sexual appetite: he and the illegal abortionist decided to hold sex parties at Stuart-Jones’s house-cum-surgery, the palatial manor known as the White House nestling comfortably in Bellevue Hill, a suburb of Sydney’s wealthy elite. Similar events were later also held at the Appin private hotel in Springfield Avenue, Kings Cross, which Saffron owned. I have been given an account of these events by a person who was close to Saffron and Dick Reilly over those years. The person spoke to me on condition of anonymity, but I can certainly vouch for my source’s veracity. And this, as we will see, was not the only


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source of information about this remarkable—and previously unpublished—aspect of Abe Saffron’s life. The parties started for a few close friends, with prostitutes and ‘showgirls’ from the nightclubs. As word gradually spread—not only in their own tight group but to wider circles through Ray Kelly and the crooked cops— attendance increased. After some time Saffron decided he had struck on a brilliant scheme—the ultimate insurance policy for the sort of corporate freedom he craved—he would turn the freewheeling orgies into a blackmail business. Two-way mirrors were installed at both venues. Photographs were secretly taken during the height of each party and filed away for future reference. In the early days, my source told me, some ‘raunchy’ pictures moved from hand to hand among the more trusted denizens of the Kings Cross nightlife, but after a while this supply chain of titillation dried up. Sometimes a client would ask for a particular sexual peccadillo to be met. Over time young children were brought to the ‘parties’ as well as gay men, sadomasochists and others with what were then considered ‘weirdo’ sexual interests. The clientele grew to include some very important people in the Sydney world of business, politics, the judiciary and the law. All were assured of absolute discretion, of course, and if they guessed they were being photographed or that their names and the names of their sexual partners (or victims?) were being carefully recorded, they may have been less enthusiastic. But they were given no hint . . . at the time. There was never a demand for money for these events from Saffron, although most insisted on making a generous payment. He was the perfect host and would


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occasionally join upper-crust clients when group activity was called for. All Saffron wanted in exchange was recognition of him being the charming host and benevolent businessman he always aspired to be; to be welcomed in the best clubs, the inner circles of Sydney’s social elite; and to be left alone by the cops. It was at best only partially successful. Sydney in these middle years of the 1950s, well before the liberating dawning of the Age of Aquarius, remained shackled in a conservative sexual mind-set, and the Saffron orgies would have shocked the nation if word had ever got out. But all evidence of the participants’ activities remained under lock and key at the White House. StuartJones added a tidy sum to the regular contributions he already paid the police, to provide protection from other possibly aggressive police interest in the sex parties. Saffron’s notoriety among the participants would have soared, and most of the clients even made generous cash contributions to the hosts, grateful for the new excitement the events added to their lives. Abe would have been well pleased that he had at last produced a scheme whereby anyone who might ever have thought of prosecuting him would now be much less likely to do so, because of the damning evidence which was building in his files. Possibly Saffron thought his orgies truly represented a liberating of sexual mores—or that he really had become ‘invincible’—for in June 1956 he embarked on a more diverse series of group sexual activities that would land him in a flurry of court appearances over eighteen months, dubbed by the media as the ‘scandalous conduct’ cases. Even the explicit files from his more discreet orgies


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and bribery and protection payments could not save him from this embarrassment. On Sunday, 24 June 1956, Abe Saffron, then thirty-six, with his close friends Hilton Glanville Kincaid, forty, Wayne Bert Martin, twenty-four, and two women they knew, went to the house of hotel broker Max Murrell, fifty-six, at Palm Beach, on Sydney’s northern beaches. A party developed, clothes were removed and various ‘kinky’ sexual activities took place, including Saffron whipping a naked woman. The party moved to a flat at Kings Cross the next day, and the group was joined by Abe’s brother Henry. Four months later, one of the women who had taken part in the sexual capers fell out with the Saffron group and gave police from the vice squad—specifically, Detective Sergeant Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell—details of what had gone on, resulting in the scandalous conduct cases beginning on Tuesday, 23 October 1956, before Magistrate Kenneth MacDonald Dash at the Central Court. Saffron, Kincaid and a second woman (whose name was suppressed by the magistrate) were charged with ‘scandalous conduct which openly outraged public decency by taking part in lewd, obscene and disgusting exhibitions’. Vice squad Detective Constable Alfred Ernest Clark added fuel to the fire when he told the court he had found a number of obscene publications at Saffron’s flat. Doreen Saffron was by that time no doubt well aware of her errant husband’s deviate sexual proclivities, but this public outrage was more than she could bear: she packed her bags and took their son Alan on the first available flight to Switzerland, and there she stayed for a year before returning in late 1957 to an even more


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damaged relationship with her husband. We were never to learn what Henry Saffron’s wife of twenty years, Allanah Irene, thought of her husband’s capers when they became public knowledge. Police prosecutor Sergeant Roy Turner appeared before the court and said very grave matters were involved in the case. He suggested that the evidence would show that Saffron was ‘completely sexually depraved and has no moral sense whatsoever’. The next day nine more men and a woman were in the court charged with ‘scandalous conduct’ at other times and places. A few days later Abe Saffron was back in the dock charged with having committed ‘an unnatural offence’ with a woman at Potts Point on 11 August. All the charges were remanded to later dates. At a hearing on 17 December prosecutor Roy Turner opposed another adjournment sought by the defence. ‘It would be to the detriment of the community if the matter was not heard expeditiously’, he said. Then he dropped his bombshell: ‘I have information concerning allegations of interference to police witnesses in this matter, and the allegations go directly to Abraham Saffron.’ Barrister John ‘Jack’ Wentworth Shand QC, the short, ruddy-complexioned and freckled-faced lawyer appearing for Saffron, accused Turner of making statements ‘prejudicial’ to his client. ‘That might be’, said the prosecutor, ‘but it has to be said on the question of a lengthy remand. A witness in a country town has been interfered with. We also allege that several female witnesses here in the city have been approached and threats have been made’.


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The Sydney tabloids loved the whiff of scandal the court hearings provided. One report in the Truth newspaper milked it for all it was worth: After a prosaic start in an almost empty courtroom, this week’s scandalous conduct case bombshelled into one of the most startling in Sydney’s history. Three pretty girls, one of them coloured, and 11 men have been arrested on morals charges as the climax of police investigations which have caused the sensation of the year. The case started quietly in the almost deserted Central Police Court on Thursday afternoon when two men and a woman were charged. But, in later stages, hundreds of watchers milled outside the grimy building and crammed into the old-fashioned courtroom on Friday when nine more men and another woman were before the magistrates. Press cameras clicked and flashed as the people charged hurried from the precincts. Bystanders murmured excitedly as a pert, eye-catching redhead swathed her face in a filmy scarf to dodge the photographers.

Six months later, on Tuesday, 25 June 1957, Magistrate Cecil Hargraves Blackmore dismissed the scandalous conduct charges against Wayne Martin and Henry Saffron, saying the prosecution had failed to make a prima facie case. He did not refer to the fact that the witnesses Sergeant Turner had previously referred to as having been ‘threatened’ were now offering no assistance to the prosecution. Without them, the whole case crumbled. It took a while longer for Abe’s case to be resolved. On Tuesday, 1 October 1957, almost a year after the matters had first come to court, Stipendiary Magistrate Roy Harvey,


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in Central Court, dismissed the charges of scandalous conduct at Potts Point on 11 August 1956. Harvey was the same magistrate who had given Saffron a slap on the wrist over the illegal housie game back in 1952. Like Magistrate Blackmore, Roy Harvey said police had failed to establish a prima facie case against Saffron and Kincaid. On the remaining scandalous conduct charges, the attorney-general and Labor member for Waverley in the long-running government of John Joseph ‘Joe’ Cahill, Clarence Edward Martin, announced on the same day that he had decided not to prosecute Saffron further. As is the tradition, attorneys-general invariably do not give a reason for not continuing with a prosecution, known in the circles as a ‘no-bill’. In retrospect, and with a little information passed on to me from a Saffron insider, it’s not hard to see how the cases collapsed. After one of the women in the Palm Beach incident had gone to the vice squad in October, veteran Darlinghurst cop Bumper Farrell decided to raise the ante in his less-than-honest dealings with Abe Saffron. Hearing of another sexual ‘exhibition’ involving Saffron at a flat in Bondi, Farrell (my well-placed source told me) went to the flat and saw a partially open window. He drew a pencil from his pocket and carefully eased the curtain aside. What he saw was one of the participants, Arthur James ‘Jimmy’ Stebbins, a close friend of Abe’s, masturbating at a kitchen sink. Farrell undoubtedly considered that any legal action he could take against Saffron and his close acquaintances would enable him to negotiate a financially advantageous settlement.


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In the ensuing court hearings Farrell literally produced the kitchen sink, complete with its cupboard, to the courtroom as evidence. The magistrate made the obvious comment that Stebbins could not have reached up to the sink to perform his ‘scandalous’ act. With a flurry, Farrell produced a copy of the thick Sydney telephone directory of the day and plonked it down before the sink. ‘Apologies, your worship’, he said, ‘I had omitted to produce the phone book he was standing on!’ Despite such unshakable evidence, the fact remained that the events that had ‘openly outraged public decency’ were all carried out behind closed doors in private dwellings, well hidden from the morally sensitive general public. The first they knew about it was from the media headlines reporting on the court cases. It was the privacy in which these events were conducted that led to all the cases collapsing, with the view suggested by the various magistrates involved that you could not ‘outrage public decency’ unless the public could actually see what you were doing. As a footnote, Bumper Farrell—who never liked backing losers—a short while later took action against Abe Saffron and Jimmy Stebbins, alleging that refrigerators, televisions and a dishwasher in Saffron’s recently acquired Lodge 44 Motel at Edgecliff were stolen property. Saffron was committed for trial, but the jury threw out all the charges. Bumper Farrell by then was no doubt satisfied with his new financial arrangement with Saffron. But it wasn’t over yet. Later in October, on the 18th, Saffron was found guilty at the Central Court of Petty Sessions before Magistrate William Charles Avery on two charges relating to obscene publications. He was fined £10 ($259) on each charge, or


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twenty days’ hard labour in lieu. The charges—having obscene publications in his possession and occupying the premises where they were found—dated back to the previous year. The following month it was the turn of the Metropolitan Licensing Court of New South Wales. On Friday, 29 November 1957, magistrates Roy Mitchell Stewart and John Malcolm Joseph Kelly rejected an application for a liquor licence in the name of Florence Bunte Hawkins for the Napoli Restaurant, 44 Macleay Street, Kings Cross. They said Miss Hawkins was a suitable person to hold a liquor licence, but Saffron was a substantial shareholder in the company which owned the premises—and he was not such a person. Abraham Gilbert Saffron, they said, was of ‘low morality, debased, and not a fit and proper person’ to be connected with the conduct of a liquor licence. The ‘not a fit and proper person’ phrase would come back to haunt him for more than forty years. Florence Hawkins had applied for the licence as manager of Perren Productions, in which Apsley Investments was a major shareholder. Both those companies were controlled by Anson Investments, in which Saffron was a major stockholder. Perren Productions was also a tenant in another section of 44 Macleay Street owned by Argus Investments, in which Saffron also held substantial shares. The magistrates said the application was rejected on two grounds: first, Saffron’s disclosures at the Royal Commission into Liquor Licensing to breaches of the Liquor Act and self-confessed perjury and, second, his ‘recent misconduct’ resulting in his prosecution under the Obscene and Indecent Publications Act 1901. Saffron’s


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uncle, barrister Simon Isaacs, unsuccessfully objected, saying that both grounds were the subject of appeals. That’s not relevant, said Chairman of the Licensing Magistrates Roy Stewart: ‘the Board can arrive at no other conclusion than that Saffron was a person of low morality.’ Early in 1958 Saffron had a win in court. On Friday, 28 February, Judge Thomas Sinclair Holden in the Quarter Sessions Court upheld Abe’s appeal against the two convictions of obscene publications charges in the previous October, rejecting the Crown’s argument that mere possession by a householder of a banned book rendered him liable to prosecution. The element of gain—an intention to sell the publication for profit—was essential in such a prosecution, the judge ruled, adding that the prosecution had not established this element in the Saffron case. As if to celebrate—and as if to thumb his nose at the whole legal establishment—Saffron took delivery (my insider source told me) of four tons (more than 4000 kilograms) of pornographic books, paying just 2s ($2.34) per book, for a total of more than 35,000 books! He later sold them all at around £2 ($47.40) apiece, turning a cool profit estimated to be more than £66,500 ($1,576,088). Free enterprise Saffron-style at its best! The National Crime Authority (NCA) was later to look back on his history and report to federal parliament in 1994 that Saffron was ‘heavily involved in vice, obtaining financial benefit from vice engaged in by others. He controls prostitutes. He produces and imports pornography and distributes it around Australia’. •


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Before the decade wound to a close, Abe and his brother Henry had a couple more court events to attend to. On Thursday, 13 August 1959, Wollongong police opposed an application in the Licensing Court for the transfer of the licence of the Rex Hotel in Thirroul to Henry on the grounds that he was not a ‘fit and proper person’ to hold a licence. Henry’s solicitor said the main police objection to the application was that Henry Saffron was a brother of Abraham Saffron, but he was ‘not associated with Abraham except as a brother’, the local magistrate was told. Henry’s young brother Abe narrowly escaped bankruptcy a couple of months later. In a remarkably complex case—and for reasons which were never clearly explained— Saffron became involved in the importation of seven hundred tons (more than 700,000 kilograms) of chrome ore, valued at £5919 13s 4d ($139,470.93). Yes, chrome ore. Maybe he should have stuck with illicit booze and pornography. A Noumea company, Societe Miniere Cafrika, won a judgement against Saffron for the debt at the start of 1959. Without complicating our story with all the intricate detail, the case twice came before the High Court of Australia, which basically said the company was in the right. On 13 October a bankruptcy notice was served on Saffron, and the company now sought sequestration of his estate because he failed to comply with the notice. In a last-minute development, the company’s barrister, Richard Barbour QC, told the Bankruptcy Court that Saffron had finally paid the debt, so the bankruptcy petition was dismissed. We will never know what happened to the chrome ore, but a safe bet would be that Abe made a killing out of it—metaphorically speaking, of course.


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4 NEW PLAYERS JOIN THE TEAM: ABE MOVES INTO THE BIG TIME New players join the team

FOR ABE SAFFRON the end of the 1950s couldn’t come quickly enough. Despite his ‘insurance policy’ of numerous compromising photographs of prominent citizens, he had faced many court appearances over the decade. Although his win rate against a range of charges was good (and the photo albums may have contributed to that) the sheer regularity of fronting court was a distraction he could do without. As the new decade dawned, Saffron planned to open the first legal strip clubs in Australia—and sell liquor in them—without fear of harassment by authorities due to the liberalisation of social and sexual mores and improved liquor laws, enabling more civilised regulation of the food and entertainment industry. He opened a new club, Staccato, just down from the site of the old Roosevelt in Orwell Street, Kings Cross. He put a couple of friends in to run it: his long-time mate Wayne Martin and Louis Benedetto, known as ‘Last Card [ 69 ]


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Louis’. Regular observers at the strip shows included vice squad police—probably more interested in collecting the regular contributions to their retirement fund from Abe than looking for anything too explicit in the performances—and Darlinghurst behemoth Bumper Farrell, no doubt collecting his regular extracurricular pay packet, too. It all augured well, Saffron must have thought, for a new phase of wealth creation, spiced with the high level of sexual variety that was so much a part of his life. He also made some new and, it would seem, highly useful acquaintances in the early 1960s through his connections in the Jewish community, including Emil Kornhauser. He became a close associate of the forceful, up-and-coming business entrepreneur Emil Herbert Peter Abeles and some of his associates, including Arthur George, Paul Strasser and John Charody. He also made contact with a fiery, pugnacious Scot, James McCartney Anderson, on a visit to the Gold Coast, and offered him a job he couldn’t refuse. Those associations were to have a profound impact on Saffron’s life over the next two decades, the first group enormously advantageous, the other deeply damaging. Anderson, a large-framed, tough-guy thug, known to his acquaintances as ‘Big Jim’, would invariably present himself as a man of cheery disposition, something of an iron fist in a velvet glove. Born in Glasgow on Sunday, 20 April 1930, he was the fourth child and only son of the family. He joined the Royal Marines when he was sixteen, was discharged as medically unfit in 1952 and eventually found himself in New Zealand where he became a traffic policeman. In the late 1950s he visited Australia as


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manager of a Maori show band, the Hi-Fives, which played gigs in Sydney and the Gold Coast. He moved to Australia in 1957, knocked around the nightclub scene making a living by booking entertainment acts, was entertainment director for the Chevron Group on the Gold Coast for nearly five years, and then took up a similar job with the Rex Hotels group run by Gordon Aldridge. He said later that it was during his time at the Kings Cross Rex that: I came into the first contact with corruption and prostitution as we know it today. The Rex Hotel was a place for working ladies of a high standard and quality, with complete police protection . . . I studied the system pretty closely because I found it, having come from London where things were done a bit more discreetly, this was a bit blatant. It seemed to be accepted and that was the system.

Anderson then became the manager of Sammy Lee’s Latin Quarter nightclub for eight or nine months. Lee had been in the entertainment business for years and the Latin Quarter was a brave—and eventually highly successful—experiment in that it was situated at 250 Pitt Street, in Sydney’s central business district, which generally closed down after the pubs shut at 6 p.m. His combination of a chorus line of leggy showgirls, loud music, corny local comedians and plenty of liquor until after three o’clock each morning (quite illegally, of course) proved a winning formula. It was a favourite haunt of crooked cops, gangster Lennie McPherson and gunman Jacky Clark. Abe Saffron was a regular visitor, and infamous


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illegal gambling operator Perc Galea was a director. Anderson recollected: My period at the Latin Quarter was very informative, very educational. That is where I first really studied prostitution and corruption, where it was quite openly practised, without fear or favour. I left the Latin Quarter after one rather messy murder and took over full-time management of the Showbiz until Mr Bernie Houghton appeared. I tried to buy a strip club at that time called the Crazy Horse. It looked like being reasonably successful until there was a fire. Mr Saffron owned the business, by the way. That then became the Bourbon and Beefsteak. Kentucky Fried Chicken bought out the Showbiz from me, and I was offered a position with Mr Saffron if I was interested in running a new cocktail bar and grill called the Venus Room.

The Venus Room club, which had a twelve-metre frontage at 6–8 Orwell Street, was actually the old Staccato club with a fresh coat of paint. Anderson accepted the offer from Saffron to take over management on a verbal arrangement to a forty/sixty split of the takings—sixty being Saffron’s slice. Entry to the club was on the lower left-hand side of the building at number 6. A small cloakroom on the right was never used—it was not the style of club where top hats and expensive capes would need to be checked in. Behind that there was a small dance floor, juke-box driven. The main room housed a metal-framed bar along the left wall, with varnished chipboard bench top and front panels, and padded pseudo-leather highlights along the front. The lighting was appropriately dimmed during its long


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hours of doing business. Opposite the bar stood a row of freestanding small tables and chairs. Behind the rear wall a full-length kitchen gave access to the rear laneway, if anyone needed to disappear from the club in a hurry. The building and the business which operated there were both owned by Abe Saffron. A NSW police report compiled some years after Anderson joined Saffron showed that the premises was owned by Abbey Investments Pty Ltd, in which Saffron was a major shareholder, as he was in the firm PH Electrical Pty Ltd, which owned the Venus Room business. ‘The permit for the Venus Room under the Liquor Act’, the report said, ‘is held by James McCartney Anderson who resides at number 1 Tower Street, Vaucluse’. The report noted that Anderson had faced (by 1977 when it was written) charges for offences such as manslaughter, receiving stolen goods, discharging a firearm and trafficking in currency, but that ‘no convictions are recorded against him’. The part of the building not occupied by the club had been renovated into a number of small rooms. The police report recorded (somewhat naively): It is believed that prostitutes have operated from the Venus Room during the course of its normal trading. Those premises are invariably open for business between 12 midday and 3am the following day. On occasions they have remained open until much later in the morning. The information to hand indicated that prostitutes would solicit their clients from the customers at the Venus Room and take them to the rooms referred to earlier, No 8 Orwell St, through an adjoining door.


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Saffron always had a propensity for blaming others for any wrongdoing uncovered on his premises and in his businesses, and his apologists have been playing that same refrain up until his death. The plain truth is that he was a man with a long history of liquor law offences going back to the 1940s, who twenty years later owned a building and a business (the Venus Room) that was daily in breach of the liquor laws, and who allowed his premises to be illegally used for prostitution. When Detective Sergeant 3rd Class Norman Maroney and Detective Sergeant 2nd Class Karl Desroy Louis Arkins had compiled their 1977 report on the Venus Room they referred not only to the prostitution activities and the out-of-hours trading, but also wrote about the arrests of three people associated with the Venus Room on drugs charges. Their report said: Source of supply in these instances was not established. The inquiries did not establish that any of these persons were supplying the drugs from the Venus Room although there were suspicions that this would have been the case.

When asked by a journalist once if women renting the rooms over the bar were involved in prostitution, Anderson quipped: ‘I don’t think they were playing Scrabble.’ He told a parliamentary committee: ‘I managed that club for a number of years through all tiers of what you class as working ladies, corruption, kickbacks, slings.’ Later he said he was the ‘supervisor’ of the club, and had installed as its manager an acquaintance from his New Zealand days, Shayne Martin-Simmonds (a burglar


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and car thief who later came to notoriety in the Juanita Nielsen affair, but that’s another story). The liquor licence allowed the club to sell alcohol with a meal from six in the evening to midnight. It was blatantly ignored: staying open as long as there were punters there to spend money, often never closing, and always overlooking the requirement of a meal to be served before liquor could be bought. Martin-Simmonds was later convicted—and given a slap on the wrist by the magistrate—on a charge of managing premises used for prostitution. In a separate incident a police raid found heroin and unlicensed pistols in the safe, and stolen goods on the premises, and Martin-Simmonds was charged but acquitted. He too, by that stage, had joined The Invincibles. One of the prostitutes who made a sworn statement to police said the Venus Room in the mid-1970s was ‘nothing more than a brothel’. Up to fifteen prostitutes would mingle with customers every night, hustling a bit of trade. She said that when a customer was found, they would go together out of the club main entrance and into the door at number 8 Orwell Street, where a ‘sitter’—a member of the staff handy with his fists—would take a fee from the woman for use of the room. That fee was sixty per cent of the price the woman charged her client, and it was handed to Anderson. The sitter’s wages were paid from the amount, and the balance was split sixty per cent to Saffron and forty per cent to Anderson. Those payments almost certainly didn’t make it to the company’s accounts. Probably the most serious allegation made about the Venus Room was that child prostitution was quite openly


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offered to anyone interested. In a later court case involving Detective Warren Molloy and Saffron, Judge Kenneth Frederick Erskine ‘Ken’ Torrington told the District Criminal Court that the Venus Room was a ‘blot on the name of Sydney’. But more of Molloy later. Allegations of the Venus Room’s notoriety kept popping up wherever its management team hadn’t plugged the leaks. Noel McArthur, administrator of the Drug Referral Centre in Darlinghurst, had written a letter to Premier Neville Wran—another Fort Street alumnus— in 1978, raising serious allegations about the nightclub. His letter detailed what he said was the ‘open sale of drugs, juvenile prostitution and illegal liquor sales’ at the Venus Room and another Saffron establishment, Club Costello. The letter also said that uniformed and plain-clothed police had been seen in the Venus Room at 4.30 on a Sunday morning drinking with Jimmy Anderson. When asked in parliament whether he’d received the letter and what action had been taken, Wran assured the House that the Commissioner of Police had been asked to investigate the matter. Anyone interested in these things at the time might have had a bit of a chuckle: the Commissioner was the deeply corrupt Frederick John ‘Fred’ Hanson, an active participant in the Saffron franchise game. He and his trusted officers were not about to investigate allegations regarding one of Mr Saffron’s fine establishments! I checked more recently with the long-time Saffron acquaintance who prefers not to be identified, and he assured me that on any night of the week there were at least two quite young child prostitutes operating at the club. There were frequent media stories at the time about


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homeless young kids converging on the Cross and being pressed into prostitution. Saffron’s Venus Room was apparently one of the places where this vile trade was encouraged. There is no record of any further investigation into whether the premises was being used by drug dealers. The obvious reason—and the one for which clear evidence later emerged—was that Abe Saffron had by the mid- to late-1960s achieved his long-sought status of being among ‘The Invincibles’. A close acquaintance of mine who had worked at Saffron’s Carousel nightclub in those heady years explained: ‘We could do anything we wanted. Literally anything. We were untouchable as far as the cops went. We were “The Invincibles”.’ [[START SIDEBAR]]

THERE’RE DANGERS OUT THERE IF YOU’RE NOT INVINCIBLE In the early 1960s I was involved in the weekly dining and entertainment column, ‘Goings on About Town’, published by the Daily Mirror. It involved me going to restaurants and clubs across the city and suburbs, and many a late night was spent at Kings Cross. One club owner I got to know well was Gaston of the Tabou chez Gaston, where the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar now stands opposite the El Alamein fountain in the Cross. He specialised in Latin-American live music and (I think) Egyptian food. This was in the dark days of liquor licensing laws, where any restaurant (unless it was run by Abe or a few other ‘invincible’ people) could only serve liquor brought to the restaurant by the customer to be


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drunk with their meal. An acceptable variation on this was that diners could pre-order their grog and the restaurant buy it in on their behalf, but the bottles had to be clearly marked with a name and table number. One New Year’s Eve, Gaston was getting ready for the big night when Bumper Farrell and the Darlinghurst cops raided. They confiscated all his pre-ordered, correctly labelled liquor, made no secret of the fact to Gaston that it would be used at the Darlinghurst Police Station party that night, and locked Gaston in the paddy-wagon outside his club. ‘They kept me there for hours, like an animal in a cage, with my customers all looking in at me’, wept the big man to me. I told this story to the new, courageous editor of the Sunday Mirror, Zell Rabin, and he assigned a reporter to investigate. The reporter was severely bashed and his life threatened before Rabin told me he thought it was too dangerous to pursue further, and advised me to watch my step on my own rounds (which were seen to be more of a social nature). What did emerge from the inquiries that were made is that Abe Saffron was upset that Gaston was in a prime spot in the Cross, and presumably paid no bribes to police. For that, Gaston learned the dangers on New Year’s Eve 1961 of not being one of The Invincibles. [[boxend]]

A number of things had contributed to Saffron’s invincibility, which is well illustrated by his last court appearance for criminal matters before the taxman finally nailed him in 1987. On Tuesday, 23 October 1962, Saffron was hauled before a magistrate at North Sydney on ten counts of receiving a load of stolen household goods, obviously


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reverting to his old habit. The magistrate dismissed two of the charges and committed him to stand trial in the Quarter Sessions Court, where, on 25 February, he was acquitted on a further three of the charges. And then a friendly attorney-general, Labor’s Robert Reginald ‘Reg’ Downing, decided ‘not to proceed’ with the remaining five charges. The reliable old ‘no-bill’ revisited Saffron for the second time in his life, the former occasion being his illegal housie game in 1952. Once again, the attorneygeneral adhered to the tried-and-true practice of telling nobody why he’d made that decision. Observers of those interesting times would know that Downing knew all about brown paper bags and their intimate relationship with the ‘no-bill’ process. And that, until the tax case, was the end of official police interference in the life of Abraham Gilbert Saffron. No more trials, no more costly and highly creative barristers. It was not, however, an end to Saffron’s thieving ways. In the 1960s a Sydney wholesale whitegoods company run by the late Royce Smeal was importing (among other things) bar refrigerators from a central European country. Smeal received a call from a company not known to him, asking for immediate delivery of about twenty of the small units. They struck an arrangement for payment on delivery. To ensure nothing slipped up, Royce accompanied his delivery driver to the client’s building in Kings Cross, an open-plan office space with a number of people looking busy. The accountant promptly came out to meet them, chequebook in hand, and Royce told his driver to start unloading. The accountant then said he had to take a call, and went off some distance to his desk. When all


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the fridges were unloaded—with Royce concerned about the late hour and the driver’s knock-off time, and the accountant still apparently tied up on the phone—Royce told the receptionist he would call back in the morning for the cheque. When he arrived the next day there was an empty shell: no people, no desks, no refrigerators and certainly no cheque. Some time later Royce was in Melbourne where he attended a party at a serviced apartment block in Darling Street, South Yarra. He noticed the refrigerator was the same brand as those he had imported. He checked the serial number (he had a great memory for such things) and found it was one of the twenty missing units delivered to the disappearing company in Sydney. It didn’t take him long to discover the owner of the apartment block was none other than Abe Saffron. His attempts to get police in Melbourne or Sydney to take action fell on deaf ears. It was not uncoincidental to Saffron’s ‘liberation’ from prosecution during this period that Norman Thomas William Allan had been appointed Police Commissioner in February 1962, after a thirty-three-year desk job in the police force in which he had been fairly isolated from the real world. Among those to advise him on what was going on in the criminal milieu were the deeply corrupt Ray Kelly, his partner in crime, Don Fergusson, and the murderous Fred Krahe. Kelly arranged for Saffron to meet the new boss, and one of the first arrangements they reached was that—for a considerable fee paid in cash to Allan, to be passed on to a charity of his choice—the Commissioner would authorise the issue of special numberplates to the kindly


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and benevolent businessman Abe Saffron. Thus it was that the crook was issued with plates ABE-111 and ABE-222, which he used on his own two cars. He gave ABE-333 to Hilton Kincaid; and ABE-777 was donated to his close friend Emil Kornhauser, who had been associated with Abe’s Cumberland Hotel at Bankstown. Not surprisingly, neither the size of the fee nor the name of the charity was ever disclosed—Abe Saffron became one of the early contributors to the crooked new Commissioner’s retirement fund. There was a joke among Sydney journalists at the time: Norm Allan’s nickname was ‘The Mushroom’— senior cops kept him in the dark and fed him on bullshit. The other event of great magnitude in the 1960s was the election of Robin ‘Bob’ William Askin as Premier of New South Wales—later to beknight and rename himself as ‘Sir Robert’. Born on Thursday, 4 April 1907, at Sydney’s Crown Street Women’s Hospital, Askin was the first of three illegitimate children of William James Askin, a twenty-six-year-old knockabout sailor and railway worker born in Adelaide, and twenty-three-year-old Ellen Laura Halliday from the central west of New South Wales. On completing his intermediate certificate, Bob Askin left school at fifteen, spent two days in the electrical trade where he nearly electrocuted his boss, and then joined the Government Savings Bank of New South Wales as a clerk. As he moved up through banking jobs he opened up an illegal starting price (SP) bookmaking operation that enabled staff—among whom he was known as ‘Slippery Sam’—to have a bet on the races. During war service he became, according to crime writer David Hickie, ‘the battalion SP bookie, dabbled in


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a bit of loan-sharking and ran a two-up game’. He joined the Liberal Party in 1947, despite having not bothered to register to vote from 1937 to 1943. He climbed quickly through party ranks and in 1949 won preselection over twenty candidates for the safe Liberal state seat of Collaroy, later taking over Pittwater after a redistribution. He won the Liberal leadership in 1959 in a close-run 15–13 ballot over Philip Henry Morton after a poor state election result. His first tilt at becoming premier failed with a loss at the March 1962 election, but he finally won on 1 May 1965, ending Labor’s twenty-four-year reign in Macquarie Street. He retained the top job for an historic four consecutive terms until 1975—but let us not get too far ahead of ourselves. With Askin as Premier and Norm ‘The Mushroom’ Allan as long-serving Commissioner of a deeply corrupt police force, New South Wales moved into a period in which—as many writers have observed over the years—corruption was institutionalised. In his draft entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Murray Groot wrote of Askin: Elected in place of a Labor regime seen as ‘worm-eaten’ by ‘graft, corruption, nepotism and general chicanery’, the Coalition was responsible for a police force—led first by Norman Allan, a Labor appointee, and later by Fred Hanson—widely seen as even more corrupt. ‘Crime historians’, Hickie was to write, marked 1965 ‘as the turning point in the development of organised crime in Australia, and especially New South Wales’; campaigning for office, Askin had seen ‘both the potential votes and finance available to him through the SP [bookie] network.’ Certainly Askin, who attended assiduously to inequities


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in police pensions, did little to encourage the enforcement of the laws on gambling, other than to call for police reports; he rejected calls for a racing control board; and rather than bet off-course through the TAB, established in 1964, Askin, himself, maintained an account with one of the biggest SP firms in town. The recommendations of Justice Moffitt’s Royal Commission on Organised Crime in Clubs, an enquiry Askin established, he ‘almost completely’ ignored.

This was all good news, of course, for Abe Saffron, his chief lieutenant James McCartney Anderson, as well as the countless hundreds of others who lived off the proceeds of criminal activity through bribery, blackmail, theft and thuggery. It was good news, too, for some corporate high-fliers (or those soon destined to soar to dizzying heights in their pursuits of true free enterprise), among them a Saffron acquaintance, trucking company boss Peter Abeles. Their association was of a more private nature than the Saffron/Anderson link, although one or two of their business dealings did make controversial headlines over time. Abeles was born in Vienna on Friday, 25 April 1924, of Jewish parents. He grew up in Budapest, and after the 1944 German invasion of Hungary was sent to a Nazi work camp. He came to Australia in 1949, and had many ‘ragsto-riches’ stories written about him in the intervening years; hagiographers seem to have done well in their glorification of some of Australia’s major criminals! As is well known, Abeles became a trucking and transport tycoon, using Thomas Nationwide Transport (TNT) to


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expand into an international conglomerate operating in 180 countries. What is less known about Abeles is that he used this transport web to move—along with huge volumes of legitimate cargoes—large quantities of illegal drugs around Australia and the world, and was closely associated with the notorious Nugan Hand Bank. Michael Hand was involved in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s illegal drug activities in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War years. He teamed up with Australian Frank Nugan, who was involved in the wholesale vegetable industry in the NSW town of Griffith, which was also the centre of a massive illicit marijuana industry. With Sydney-based CIA operative Bernie Houghton they established in the mid1970s the Nugan Hand Bank which, in its short life, became involved in global drug- and gun-running activities. Criminologist Dr Alfred McCoy said the trio ‘cultivated corrupt Australian politicians, Sydney crime syndicates, a fraternity of ex-CIA arms dealers and the CIA’. Among the bank’s complex activities was the operation of largescale tax avoidance schemes in Australia. Abeles even had an association with the US West Coast Mafia and Chicago hit man Aladena ‘Jimmy the Weasel’ Fratianno to assist him in his business dealings with the Teamsters and Longshoremen’s unions in order to ease TNT’s entry into the United States. [[boxbegin]]

AN ‘ABELE’ FIXER . . . BUT LET’S SPREAD THE COSTS When Bob Askin won the 1965 NSW election, Peter Abeles and he became friends. As Marian Wilkinson


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reported on ABC-TV’s Four Corners, Askin found in Abeles ‘a man the State could do business with’. From what ensued over the years, there is no doubt that Abeles found that New South Wales was a state he could do business with. Abeles’ company, TNT, was awarded generous ninety-nine-year leases on large tracts of railway land, giving him unlimited access to move goods by train around the country at minimal cost, while being able to charge his clients full haulage rates. A number of officials of the Transport Workers Union held shares in TNT, a conflict of interest if ever there was one. When TNT expanded its business into the United States, Abeles continued his approach of ‘friendly dealings’ with the unions, in this case the powerful Teamsters Union, which controlled US transport coast to coast and was said to have close ties with the US Mafia. The Four Corners program reported that, back in the 1970s, Teamsters’ west coast vice-president, Rudy Tham, introduced Abeles and TNT General Manager Ross Cribb to west coast Mafia boss Jimmy Fratianno. Abeles claimed he hadn’t become aware that Fratianno was a mobster and hit man until some years later. Neither he nor TNT paid the gangster any money, he said. Not so, according to the mobster, however. Fratianno said: You know, he’s gotta give up money for them to help them, and he got in trouble with this—on the docks and he gave ’em 25 thousand to straighten it out. And now I think— the way he gives ’em money every year, although they do a lot for him, they get him work, they get him business, you know, Peter Abeles gives ’em the money legitimately, he


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don’t give it to ’em under the table, he gives it to a corporation which—he declares it you know, he’s not doin’ anything wrong.

Four Corners also claimed that TNT paid $US300,000 to companies associated with east coast Mafia lieutenant Benny Mangano after he was introduced to TNT officials. Ross Cribb later testified that the payments were for ‘shipping advice’ and were neither illegal not improper. In the 1970s I interviewed a TNT driver who regularly delivered vegetables from the Nugan depot in the NSW town of Griffith. On more than one occasion he was given money at the depot and told to ‘go and have a drink; we’ll load it tonight’, and would return to find his enclosed truck locked with a new padlock. On arrival at Sydney’s Flemington Markets, he was once again told to go to the pub: ‘We’ll unload it today.’ On each occasion he found scraps of marijuana leaves in his truck. Narcotics investigators I spoke to over the years said more marijuana was being produced in Australia at this time than could have been used by the domestic market. Brisbane author Dr John Jiggens sets out a strong case for this in his self-published book, The Sydney Connection, suggesting, for example, that a specific crop grown at Coleambally was always destined for the US market. TNT was the only transport company with links from the Griffith area to trans-Pacific ship transport, and coast-tocoast, and even door-to-door, delivery facilities in the United States. It’s not proof, but it’s a very strong case that TNT was involved in the distribution of drugs within Australia and to overseas destinations.


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Embattled businessmen Thomas and Alexander Barton, under prosecution in 1978 for fraud, alleged that in 1972 Abeles was ‘acting in association with’ Bela Csidei, who was later convicted for major drug offences. Allegations were also made during the long-running case that Abeles and Arthur George headed a syndicate which transferred large amounts of money to Swiss banks. Both denied the claims. Arthur George was a director of TNT from 1973, having been associated with Abeles since 1954. In August 1982, George was found guilty of misconduct by a solicitors statutory committee and fined $1000 ($2812). He later sold the law firm he had established in 1938 to David Baffsky of Simons & Baffsky, a lawyer who (wrote Evan Whitton in Can of Worms II ) was publicly identified as acting in property deals, setting up companies and operating trust funds for Abe Saffron. Peter Abeles and Arthur George were knighted on Askin’s recommendation in 1972. Their close ally, Paul Strasser of Parkes Development, earned his knighthood a year later. Rumours persisted for years that they had each paid Askin a ‘king’s ransom for a queen’s gong’. When Askin left politics he was asked by Abeles to join the TNT Board, and by 1978 had been given 110,000 shares in the multinational corporation. When deeply corrupt policeman and murderer Fred Krahe was forced out of the police force in 1972 he also briefly took up a place on the TNT Board. Krahe later played a crucial role in the removal of auditors from investigating the Nugan company, as they were causing the drug-linked company difficulties.


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In 1979 Premier Neville Wran and Abeles signed a $13 million ($48,946,731) contract for the state-owned Newcastle Shipyards to build a ship for TNT’s bulkships division. By the time the Atlas Dampier rolled down the slipway, the deal had cost New South Wales $7 million ($26,355,932) in losses, and there were suggestions the dockyard had been persuaded to put in a bid for the job that was far too low. The dockyard closed after the debacle with loss of jobs, and Peter Abeles sailed away with a new ship heavily subsidised by NSW taxpayers. In November 1974, federal MP Albert ‘Bert’ James called on the NSW Government to hand over to the Commonwealth the prosecution of ‘arch spivs and racketeers’ now in Latin America. James, a fomer policeman, said the NSW Police Department had paid $ 930,000 ($6,206,652) to Strasser’s Parkes Development for the lease of their headquarters in College Street. ‘Askin signed the lease, under which the police were now paying the company fabulous amounts in rent’, he said, and also claimed the company had raised $15 million ($100,107,296) in loans from the NSW Superannuation Fund. In March 1977, Labor state MP for Heathcote Clifford ‘Cliff’ Mallam took up the theme when he told state parliament that a ‘form of Mafia comprising crooked company directors, many of them close to Askin’, was operating in New South Wales. ‘Bela Csidei flitted out of the country with $1,800,000 ($12,012,875) and has been charged with this offence’, he said: He and Peter Abeles were mentioned in the reports. I refer to that organisation known as Askin’s Knights, or the Hungarian Mafia. Many of these crooked company directors


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use every loophole in the law to see that investigations into their affairs take as long as possible and hopefully are forgotten . . . Many of them travelled overseas with [Askin]. He even took some of them behind the iron curtain. Some of these people were able to borrow through the State Superannuation Fund to finance the construction of large buildings.

This, I hope, provides something of a feel for the less-publicised aspects of the late Peter Abeles and a few of his associates who, in turn, formed a close and beneficial partnership with Abe Saffron. [[boxend]]

Saffron had met Abeles through Jewish religious events— though neither was considered to be deeply committed to their faith. They had much else in common: both were prepared to go to any lengths to free themselves of government or bureaucratic interference in their pursuit of personal wealth and power; both used blackmail as a means of achieving their aims; both believed in cultivating powerful people in influential positions as a way of demonstrating publicly their own elevated social and corporate status. What must have intrigued Abeles in particular was one of the main weapons used by Saffron to achieve these aims: blackmail based on his possession of sexually explicit photographs of the rich and famous. Over time it must have become an open secret that Abe held some evidence of the sex romps. There was never a need to even hint at their possible release in order to apply subtle pressure to achieve some goal: all parties to this sordid charade respected the very power the existence of the photos and the details of their participants exerted, and were only too willing to respond positively to requests for favours.


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It was a society based on the illicit sexual activities of people prominent in Australia’s business, corporate, legal, political and social elite on one hand, and on the other the simple demands from Saffron that neither he nor his nominated friends and associates be prosecuted for doing slightly tamer versions of all that sweaty activity on stage in his clubs. Plus a bit of stealing. And prostitution. And flouting the liquor laws, corporation laws . . . Abeles, a man of great charm and determination with an envied skill for doing business, was more inclined to use his natural assets to win favours, though his name was attached to a number of death threats made over the years to people who might expose his lesser-known activities— myself included. In my case the word was passed down from a somewhat warped private eye from Newport, Tim Bristow, that a group of prominent people headed by Abeles believed (wrongly) that I was responsible for the publication of an anonymous ‘shit-sheet’ newsletter circulated among politicians, police, journalists and others, which made serious allegations of impropriety against Abeles, a state minister or two, and others. They had decided I had become too irritating and was to be removed from the Sydney scene. I telephoned Abeles at his TNT headquarters at Redfern to suggest that he would be most displeased, I was sure, that his name had been linked to a death threat against myself. In syrupy, charming tones oozing insincerity, he tried to assure me he knew nothing of the matter. I didn’t believe it for a moment. For my part I (truthfully) told him that I had nothing to do with the production of the scurrilous but highly interesting newsletter. The matters it had raised were within


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my knowledge—a fact that would have been known to quite a number of people—so I was, perhaps, a ‘natural’ target for a threat over the publication. Another person who was threatened by interests acting on behalf of Peter Abeles was Ken Thomas, the original owner of the trucking company that was taken over to provide the foundations of Abele’s Thomas Nationwide Transport. Thomas informed me in the 1970s he had been told—quite menacingly, he said—that it would be ‘unwise’ of him to try to resist the takeover of his company by Peter Abeles. Abeles’ discovery of the existence of Saffron’s explicit dossiers enabled him to add a new dimension to his powers of persuasive argument with the premiers, prime ministers and prominent businessmen he met regularly. Saffron’s quid pro quo was his increased access to Abeles’ influential circle of acquaintances. That circle included such corporate high-fliers as Arthur George, Paul Strasser, their bag-man John Charody, and the newly elected Premier, Bob Askin, who was quickly cultivated by the wily Peter Abeles—to the latter’s long-term and enormous financial benefit. The loose coalition of crooks and blackmailers, who had been fumbling along for more than a decade, was now coming of age; a tight-knit group was forming and it would develop into a major force in determining who got the nod for advancement, who got the chop, who would be ministers in important state portfolios, and who would not. As remarkable as this might sound, there is strong evidence that this grouping not only existed, but— as we will see—indeed did exert the power and influence


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I ascribe to it. I have dubbed this group ‘The Brotherhood’, and Abe Saffron was in it from the beginning. The group kept tabs on anyone of importance to them in their greater scheme of things: aspiring politicians, policemen on the move up the ladder, their competitors, journalists—and their editors—who poked around too much and the financiers of their grandiose schemes (often the public purse). People who looked like stepping out of line were quietly reminded of some embarrassing moment in their past which had been duly noted (or, if it was of a deviant sexual nature, photographed). People who could not be embarrassed by past actions (mainly because they simply didn’t care about possible exposure) were threatened with violence. To this latter end they engaged the services of thuggish standover gangsters like Leonard Arthur McPherson, who maintained a similar ‘watching and reporting’ brief on the movers and shakers in the criminal milieu. Sitting comfortably beside the main players of The Brotherhood were the crooked cops, who ensured a steady arrest rate of minor thugs to keep the statistics looking good, and guaranteed that their protected brethren were left alone to pay their bribes and ply their trades. It was all very comfortable, and most of Sydney didn’t have an inkling that this was really the way their city and state were being run. The age of The Invincibles had well and truly arrived by the mid- to late-1960s and, a few hiccups aside, would maintain its uninterrupted control of the way things were to function for at least a couple of decades, if not longer. Judge Donald Gerard Stewart, who presided over royal commissions on drug trafficking and the Nugan Hand


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Bank, and was later appointed to chair the National Crime Authority (NCA), found good reason to study Saffron’s activities over these years in each of those posts. He was later to write: Saffron was notorious in Sydney as being untouchable. Whilst a lot of things that I knew were anecdotal things, some of them were not, and he had been around for so long that it was suggested that he was able to do what he liked, when he liked, where he liked, and that he was a corrupter of police and others. I took the view that this man had been getting away with so much for so long, it was about time we tried to stop it. That was part of it . . . I did have some knowledge of him that I had come across in my Royal Commission, and it was quite sickening.

As a small illustration of how Saffron worked things at the street level, a knockabout man called Billy Green had leased a Kings Cross club called the Coconut Jungle at 101 Darlinghurst Road. The head lease was controlled by Abe Saffron. For reasons never explained, in the late 1960s Saffron wanted Green out of the club. The opportunity arose when Green assaulted and killed in his club an American serviceman on R&R leave from the Vietnam War. Green faced a possible murder charge, or at least a manslaughter rap, but Saffron was able to arrange with the police—and with no objection from the Minister of Justice—for the charge to be dropped to assault, on the proviso Green left the Cross and stayed away. Green did as he was bid and Saffron renamed the place Staccato in memory of his former club on Orwell Street. By that


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stage, The Invincibles could indeed get away with murder. Saffron hired a man called Jimmy Burrell as the Staccato’s manager and got his long-term friend, Peter Farrugia, to front the business for him. Of Maltese extraction, Farrugia (or ‘Farr’ as he preferred to be known) was originally from Broken Hill. He arrived in Kings Cross to try to take the area over (from Abe’s control), but ended up in partnership with Saffron, running clubs and brothels and dealing in drugs. That partnership took aim at another Saffron tenant in a club known as the Pink Panther, at 41 Darlinghurst Road. Nicholas Coumbis had a fixed-rent lease for ten years. In the late 1960s rents in Kings Cross were going through the ceiling, so Saffron wanted to get rid of Coumbis. But how to break the lease? Saffron persuaded Coumbis to sublet part of the premises to him (through one of his many companies, Metropolitan Trade Finance Pty Ltd) for three years from 3 July 1967 for a yearly rent of $8320 ($79,862). In other words, he was renting his own premises from himself via a sublease from his tenant. Saffron, the subtenant, then set about refusing to pay his rent, getting himself in breach of the terms of the head lease. It was too clever by half, but for Abe Saffron it proved a winner. In 1970, Coumbis, a resident of Double Bay and then aged sixty-two, sued the Saffron company for back rent of $5760 ($51,773) due from July 1969 to the end of March 1970, and the District Court backed Coumbis in its ruling. Saffron engaged a young solicitor called Frank Walker to take the case. In the strict terms of the complex laws covering landlord and tenancy, under which these matters


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were to be determined in the courts, Walker considered that Saffron was in the right. But not a single Australian judge agreed: possibly, Walker joked with me recently, because the name ‘Saffron’ was involved. The case went to the NSW Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the High Court—where Saffron’s former lawyer Garfield Barwick was heading a bench of four eminent jurists— and finally to the Privy Council in London in the mid-1970s, where the wise Lords agreed with Walker. Coumbis by then was long gone from the Cross. Walker, meanwhile, had been elected to state parliament in a by-election in 1971 to become the Labor Member for Georges River, in Sydney’s south. Walker was convinced his reading of the law was correct and had battled on, but some in the Saffron camp became a little concerned. Peter Farrugia threatened Walker—‘he heavied me’ was the lawyer’s term—because the case was being lost in the courts. Walker rang his client and the ever-gentlemanly Saffron apologised profusely and assured Walker he had nothing to do with Farrugia’s shocking behaviour. Walker never again worked for Saffron and, as we shall see, there was no lasting friendship or commitment between the two men. Nick Coumbis died in November 1981, aged seventy-three. • A few freelancers came into the business and managed to withstand the virtual monopolisation of the Kings Cross strip-and-sex joints by Abe Saffron. One was ‘Tubby’ Black, who for twenty years ran the Pussy Galore club opposite Saffron’s main clubs in Darlinghurst Road. Now living in


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genteel retirement in the country, Tubby thought Abe was a ‘perfect gentleman’. He had never been predatory about Tubby’s club, and the two had an unwritten understanding that they would help each other out if there was a problem like a shortage of performers on a given night. ‘He and I were friends and I won’t say anything bad about the man’, Tubby told me a few days after the news of Saffron’s death in September 2006. ‘I handed over loads of money demanded of me by crooked coppers over the years, and Lennie McPherson unsuccessfully tried to take my club over, but I never had a problem with Abraham or his business partners’, he added. Tubby Black has a rare charm, a sharp wit and a straight right: perhaps that combination is what kept him in the good books with the rapacious Abe Saffron. However, Saffron used Tubby Black indirectly to help get rid of a few ‘undesirables’ from his clubs and businesses. Charlie Seal was one. Seal was manager for a while with Billy Green at the Coconut Jungle, and considered widely to be a very unpleasant person. I have learned that Saffron spoke to Dick Reilly, the former Roosevelt’s doorman turned baccarat ‘king’, who was a close friend of Black’s. Tubby then spoke to Charlie Seal, who understood the serious ‘weight’ behind the message he was being given. Tubby Black took a call from a worried Seal and went to his home to investigate. He noticed gunman ‘Mad’ Ray Brouggy’s car parked nearby and a lot of bullet holes in Charlie Seal’s front door. (Seal had already been almost wiped out by gunshot from Mad Ray.) Then he spotted Brouggy on the roof of a nearby building, brandishing a


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rifle and laughing fit to bust. Black said he didn’t have to do a lot of convincing to get Charlie to climb in his truck and head for the bush for a while. After that event Saffron called Tubby Black ‘the magician’, saying: ‘You can make blokes just disappear!’ Black assured me no harm had come to the people he made vanish from the Cross: ‘They just went away to somewhere else.’


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5 ANOTHER WAR, ANOTHER FORTUNE: VIETNAM BLUE PUTS CRIMS IN THE BLACK Another war, another fortune

THE VIETNAM WAR was the news story of the 1960s. On Thursday, 24 May 1962, Australian Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies sent thirty-two Australian military ‘advisers’ to South Vietnam. To justify the move there was talk of the ‘domino theory’: that communism was on the march south and would eventually swamp Australia. The real reason for Australia’s commitment was because America had asked us; then, as now, Australia was subservient to Uncle Sam’s bidding. By the end of 1962, the United States had 10,000 troops in Vietnam. This number was to escalate to more than half a million fighting men by war’s end. Australia, too, committed increasing numbers of troops until their withdrawal a decade later with 424 dead, 2369 wounded, and many returning psychologically scarred for life. But while the fighting was in full force, there were people who [ 98 ]


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ANOTHER WAR, ANOTHER FORTUNE

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had never been to war who realised there was money to be made. It was ever thus in wars, as it will ever be. In 1967 Australia began to be used as one of the rest and recreation (R&R) destinations in the Pacific region for American military men on leave from the Vietnam conflict. During the next four years more than 300,000 American troops would spend their six-day leave in Sydney; it is estimated that during this time they spent a staggering $80 million ($763 million). Much of that, of course, was spent in and around Kings Cross. The men (many of them looked more like boys) were ripped off left, right and centre. I recall a cab driver boasting to me how he and his colleagues ‘made a killing’ night after night. They’d park outside Whisky Au Go Go on William Street, close to the fleshpots of Kings Cross, and cock their meter flags so it looked like they were for hire, but in fact the meters were already ticking over. When the drunken Americans left the club looking for more fun, they’d clamber into the cab and ask to be taken to the Cross. At their destination a few hundred yards up the road, the cabbie would point to a meter with $50 ($477) or more on it for what should have been at the most a couple of dollars in fare; their passengers rarely complained, either too drunk to care or not having any idea what the going rate should be anyway. But that was penny-ante stuff compared with what was going on in the clubs at the top of the hill—most of which were owned and controlled by Abe Saffron. For the second time in his life, the club owner would reap a fortune from the misfortune of war. •


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Abe had been adding Kings Cross properties and clubs to his portfolio to meet the growing demand for live strip shows. With Peter Farrugia, Saffron opened the iconic Pink Pussycat club and, in the same theme, the Pink Parrot. (The great historian Donald Horne was later to say that the ‘Pussycat’ should be declared a heritage building.) Farrugia—the man who had ‘heavied’ Saffron’s lawyer Frank Walker—became known as ‘The Black Prince’ around Kings Cross. Farrugia is not to be confused with another, independent, club operator, Lee Ramsay, who was also called ‘The Black Prince’. Ramsay was the wealthy son of a family that had made its fortune in the wrought-iron business. Ramsay Wrought-iron Gates and Fences, run by his widowed mother, was a regular advertiser in the afternoon tabloids from the 1950s. However, Lee chose another line of business, opening a cellar strip joint known as the Paradise Club and later the Foxhole. As his guest, doing my rounds for the Daily Mirror’s ‘Goings on About Town’ section, I sat in the wee small hours with the handsome, charming man and some of his male acquaintances. In the heady atmosphere of the club, and no doubt aided by a quiet ale or three, I momentarily forgot the warning that I should never mention the words ‘black prince’ in his company. Committing that ‘blue’, I asked him how come he’d acquired that moniker. He looked shocked, but no more than I when one of the men at the table leapt up beside me and, hand in jacket pocket, thrust what he pretended was a gun at my temple and said: ‘Don’t ever say that to Mr Ramsay again!’ While I was quite sure it wasn’t a gun in his pocket, I was


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not happy to see him! A discreet hand movement from Lee and the man growled, shrugged, removed his hand from his otherwise empty pocket and resumed his seat. My apology was instantly accepted and we resumed drinking and chatting and watching the women on stage as though nothing had happened. It was like an incident out of a movie set in Al Capone’s Chicago, except it was in Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia. Some of the players at night in that seedy suburb really took their roles seriously. But I digress. • The Saffron business mix was strip clubs, restaurants of dubious merit (but at least you could get an after-hours’ drink), sex shops selling porn, and brothels. The venues included the Crazy Horse, the Creole nightclub, Gilligans bar at Bondi (which he claimed Anderson owned), the brothel at the Kingsdore Hotel and Appin Private Hotel, La Bastille and Laramie restaurants, the Lodge 44 Motel at Edgecliff, the Napoli Restaurant in Macleay Street and, later, the Carousel and the Persian Room Theatre Restaurant, down a flight of stairs from the Darlinghurst Road strip. This latter one was his ‘prestige’ premises, with similar décor to the Pink Panther and a classier ambience than the Venus Room. After having deviously got rid of his long-term tenant Nick Coumbis, as we have seen, Saffron put ‘Last Card’ Louis Benedetto in charge at the pink-themed Pink Panther. A corridor led off Darlinghurst Road to a ticket office on the right-hand side of the ‘Panther’. The lighting and sound booth behind the ticket box contained a


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sophisticated lighting system designed by Peter Farrugia’s younger brother Vince. The main area was a rectangular room panelled with a laminex-type material in a pseudomarble finish. There was a small stage off the rear wall and a catwalk extending up the centre of the seating area, allowing more punters to get ‘up close and personal’ with the performers. Strippers had a cassette of the music for their performance pieces, which they carried from club to club. Peter Farrugia’s wife Yvonne would lay the tracks down on her master tape while the performers prepared in the dressing room at the rear. The Carousel—or Les Girls as it was known when he bought it—had a wide, commanding street frontage on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Roslyn Street. Glass display cases paraded saucy photos of the all-male drag queen performers. In the wide entrance in Roslyn Street, just down from the corner, a few stairs—with more display cases on show—led to a lobby and a curved stairway up to the first-floor landing. A ‘hat-check’ booth served as a ticket office and double doors led into the main multilevel showroom. Along the rear were three toilet doors marked ‘Men’, ‘?’, and ‘Women’. The colour scheme was red and gilt, and the waitresses wore black leotards and white mini-aprons. There were other establishments, and more to be added to the portfolio in time—and every one of them was operated in blatant breach of the liquor laws and prostitution laws, and most were in nightly breach of pornography controls. They were never prosecuted, despite a regular stream of policemen visiting at least one of the clubs on a nominated day each week. The money


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wrapped in bundles protected the clubs against raids by the police, who should have been kept busy with prosecutions. Jim Anderson, whose role by this time had expanded to managing several clubs, was later asked— after he had fallen out with Abe—whether the poker machines installed at the clubs were legal. ‘Nothing was legal at that stage’, he replied. A spot of illegality didn’t bother the R&R soldiers, and young American kids poured into the clubs in their thousands, almost manically seeking relief from the nightmares that no doubt haunted many after their ordeals in Vietnam. They wanted thrills, lots of liquor, raunchy entertainment, plenty of sex and a continuation of the drugs most of them had been using in the war zone. It took a few negotiations, but Abe Saffron and his acquaintances in Kings Cross could provide all those requirements. Liquor and raunchy entertainment was Saffron’s speciality. He never denied his involvement in prostitution, but there were just not enough women to go around to satiate the sex-starved soldiers. And there had not been a large-scale heroin trade in Sydney up till then—marijuana was doing the rounds, and among the social elite cocaine was the party drug of choice. But the reluctant warriors against the hypothetical communist dominoes had been fed CIA-provided heroin in the war zone to help them believe in their lost cause, and that’s what they wanted during their six days in Sydney. Help was at hand to bolster the number of women and ensure a steady and rapidly increasing supply of drugs. A loudmouth Texan millionaire, Bernie Houghton, had taken over the premises of Gaston’s old Tabou nightclub


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and expanded it to become the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar. He had also acquired another club, the Texas Tavern, just down the hill in Macleay Street, in which Saffron and close associates of Peter Abeles, Paul Strasser and John Charody, were also directors. Both establishments were aimed squarely at the R&R trade and both enjoyed a steady flow of police through the doors, anxious to ensure the franchise operations continued smoothly in these new sites. Houghton and Saffron became close associates, both interested in the common cause of providing goods and services demanded from this new wave of cashed-up Yankee soldiers. It was later established by government inquiries into the growing drug trade in Australia that the Bourbon and Beefsteak was the first place in the country where heroin was openly traded. The trade ran under police protection (in the usual manner) and had the added security of Lennie McPherson providing protection to Houghton’s establishments. McPherson also introduced into the arrangement a steady supply of women, who were brought into Australia in a lucrative white slave racket set up with the proprietors of a city social and gambling club with strong ties in a number of Asian countries. McPherson arranged the ‘franchise’ payments for this racket to the appropriate police. Another facet of Houghton’s life became a topic of interest to journalists and investigators from the late 1960s on: his involvement with the American Central Intelligence Agency. Journalist Brian Toohey later discussed the matter on ABC Radio, saying that Houghton had become the number three in the CIA-controlled Nugan Hand


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Bank. Toohey revealed that an ex-British intelligence officer, Peter Wilcott, had told him and Australian narcotics authorities that Houghton had been working as an undercover intelligence operative in Australia since the late 1960s. Respected author and criminologist, Dr Alfred W. McCoy, in his authoritative book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Drug Trade, described Houghton as a ‘mysterious American expatriate with impeccable intelligence contacts’. With Nugan Hand Bank founders Frank Nugan and Michael Hand, Houghton had undoubted links to the CIA-controlled opium trade in Southeast Asia, and also traded in poker machines and anything illicit out of which quick, tax-free money could be made. McPherson’s involvement with Houghton and others in the white slave trade was uncovered by the highly secretive Australian Security Intelligence Service (ASIS) in the late 1960s. An ASIS agent had been assigned to investigate illegal immigration arising from federal government concerns of ‘communist infiltration’. The agent detected no such movements but did discover a large-scale racket which brought women into Australia to be enslaved in the sex industry. The major involvement of McPherson and Houghton in the activity was included in the agent’s 1969 report to the government. As all ASIS reports were shared with the American CIA, it undoubtedly did not take long for Houghton to learn that this aspect of his activities had been discovered. The ASIS agent was told the assignment had been scrapped on instruction from a senior federal government official. The main beneficiary of the white slave importation, he later told me, was unquestionably the largest operator of prostitution in


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Australia at the time. That was a title which fitted only one person: Abraham Gilbert Saffron. Abe had brothels attached to, or incorporated into, some of his clubs, like the Venus Room, and he owned several hotel-like premises that were used solely as brothels, such as the Kingsdore Hotel and the Appin private hotel. His close association with Houghton and McPherson assured him of a constant flow of new bodies to be enslaved into those arms of his business. But, as in most of his business transactions, Saffron did his best to conceal his involvement in the trade through a maze-like corporate structure of his empire and—as he had done in his earliest days in the illicit liquor trade—he used friends and family as frontmen in his organisations. In the case of the drugs he was not directly involved in the trade: he merely permitted drugs to be made available on his premises (in itself a crime). They were supplied by people not connected to him in any corporate way, and then sold to people who were his clients. In this respect, the ex-ASIS intelligence officer suggested, Saffron was a ‘facilitator’ in the drug trade rather than an operative. Saffron was, however, a direct operative in prostitution, illegal at the time, although there was no evidence to link him directly with the white slave racket, even though as the operative at the end of the process he would clearly have been an accessory after the fact. Through his use of ‘dummies’, his corporate manoeuvres and his massive corruption of police, Saffron had moved close to the top in the ranks of Australia’s organised crime operators. It therefore becomes somewhat semantic to argue whether or not he had ‘direct links’ with the


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global gangsters who operated the Nugan Hand Bank, for example. Through his long and close association with one of the bank’s major executives, Bernie Houghton, Saffron would have been in a position to deal with the bank without the fact ever being disclosed, and it was later revealed that many clients’ identities were kept confidential. Houghton was later to tell a joint NSW–Commonwealth task force on drug trafficking that he had known Saffron for years, and Michael Hand produced a note which indicated a transaction in Hong Kong valued at $50,000 ($476,994) between Saffron and the bank, which Saffron subsequently denied. Saffron said that of those involved with Nugan Hand, he had met only Frank Nugan—clearly not the truth because he admitted he also knew Bernie Houghton. [[boxbegin]]

BROTHELS ON A ‘BULL RUN’ While Abe Saffron was building himself into the prostitution ‘supremo’ in Sydney, he faced some severe competition. In the laneways in East Sydney, a few minutes’ stroll from Saffron’s clubs and brothels in Kings Cross, a long-established prostitution racket had thrived in the tiny cottages in Woods Lane and Liverpool Lane which were rented out at $200 ($1908) for each eighthour shift. The laneways were packed with potential customers and ‘rubber-neckers’—men just out for a ‘bit of a look’—and the women did a roaring trade. Police in the vice squad were paid to stay away, and there was a roster for the working women to front the magistrates courts to reassure concerned members of the


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public that police, who quoted a vigorous arrest rate whenever asked, were ‘doing all they can’ to ‘stamp out’ illegal prostitution. Businesses in competition with this laneway trade would regularly make arrangements with other police divisions and factions to undertake what was known as ‘the bull run’. Twice a week a large Ford V8 police ‘paddy wagon’ would drive quietly into Liverpool Lane with its lights off, turn into the narrow Woods Lane, flick its headlights onto high beam and take off at a high speed into the crowds. Regulars—and the working women—always seemed forewarned when this extraordinarily dangerous practice was about to happen. Men were yanked into doors which were slammed shut before the vehicle roared through. Those caught unawares clung to the sandstone walls of the tiny houses, precariously perched on the footpath little wider than a size-nine shoe. There were never any reports of anyone being run down, but enough people were probably frightened into moving their loyalties up the hill to the Kings Cross establishments, making the whole ‘bull run’ a good corporate strategy for Abe Saffron. The man who controlled most of the laneway bordellos, Joe Borg, was blown to bits as he started his car at 11 a.m. on Thursday, 28 May 1968. He was at the time appealing against a conviction of bribing a consorting squad detective. A police informer, Keith Keillor, was charged with having incited two men of Maltese extraction (as was Borg) to commit the murder. They were sentenced to life imprisonment, Keillor to seven years. There was no evidence to link the murder


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to police or to Saffron interests. Those ‘brothel battles’, as crime writer David Hickie described them, seemed to rage between warring factions of East Sydney’s Maltese community. [[boxend]]

Many individuals and organisations had dealings with the bank, which pursued legitimate business vigorously while it developed its international financing of clandestine arms and drugs dealing for the CIA. The Sydney City Council, for example, placed one—and only one—of its overnight money-market investments with Nugan Hand. That did not make the council party to an illegal act any more than one Saffron transaction would have made a criminal of him. One can only wonder why, then, in the face of evidence from one of the bank’s founders, did Saffron even bother to deny the transaction—especially so vigorously. The task force report had this to say: There is little doubt that Saffron was at one time involved in at least this one transaction with Nugan Hand. That at least Saffron chose to lie about his association with Hand and both Houghton and Saffron chose to lie about the transaction only adds to suspicion that there was something either illegal or improper about it.

Saffron vigorously denied for the rest of his life any involvement in the drug trade, but never went so far as to deny an involvement in prostitution. • Saffron’s businesses in Kings Cross were booming fit to bust. He was also expanding into pubs, clubs and restau-


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rants in South Australia, and was on the lookout to add to his property list in Perth. He had not, it would appear, by the late 1960s thought of spreading his influence outside Australia. But a longtime friend tried to persuade him to consider such a move. Sydney-based yachtsman, gambler and king of the pinball parlours throughout Australia and Southeast Asia, cigar-chomping Jack Rooklyn, had in 1967 become the Australian arm of the American poker machine company, Bally—a corporation later revealed to be owned by some of the heavyweights of the US Mafia. Saffron later told the media that he had known Rooklyn ‘for many, many years’, and that he knew nothing adverse about the man. They had gone into a business venture together through Burbridge Properties Pty Ltd, which was one of the companies Saffron was using to expand his activities in South Australia. Rooklyn was one of half a dozen directors of the firm. In 1968 the pair met on a regular basis, Saffron later confirmed to the Moffitt Royal Commission. The US Mafia’s ‘man down-under’ already ran casinos in Djakarta, and Rooklyn wanted Saffron to add the dimensions of restaurant, nightclub and brothel to the Indonesian business. In the same year as his Indonesian talks with Rooklyn, another of Saffron’s acquaintances celebrated an important victory: Bob Askin had gone to the polls on 1 February and chalked up his second successive win as Premier of New South Wales. That event beyond doubt gave a boost in confidence to the businessmen who prided themselves as Askin’s supporters, particularly those who


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thought of themselves as ‘The Invincibles’. But as always in the hurly-burly of the life of Abe Saffron, there was a dark cloud looming to spoil the good times. So it was in the late 1960s.


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6 PICTURES TO DIE FOR: BLACKMAIL DOSSIERS GET OUT OF HAND Pictures to die for

SHE CAME INTO town that Friday night intent on making a killing. It all went horribly wrong: she was the one who ended up dead. The glamorous red-haired woman, expensively dressed, climbed out of a taxi outside Chequers nightclub in Sydney, paid and generously tipped the driver, and walked towards the doorway of the nightspot and the deal of her life. For far too long, prostitute and ‘society photographer’ Shirley Bega thought she’d been on the wrong end of the camera: now she was focused on a starring role in the rotten blackmail racket that had maintained a public perception of her criminal boss as a highly successful, sometimes controversial yet an unquestionably charitable businessman. Under her right arm she clutched her large black patent-leather handbag. It contained the keys to her wealth and liberation: images of more than a dozen of the city’s most prominent citizens who had unknowingly been photographed in sexually explicit [ 112 ]


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and highly compromising moments. Pictures undoubtedly worth not only a thousand words but also maybe quite a few thousand dollars. Pictures Shirley had taken herself through the two-way mirrors at the orgy venues. And details of the participants—a media magnate and a leading barrister together with a young boy (Shirley had the kid’s name and address); a Supreme Court judge with a schoolgirl (also known); a state minister with two prostitutes. Photos that Shirley had stolen from her employer and was about to put onto the open market to the highest bidder, potentially shattering the public’s chimera of her boss and the proud public reputations of his wealthy and influential victims. As she was about to step onto the club’s curved stairway down to where the action was, and where she’d made an appointment to meet a man she hoped would do business with her, a strong hand grabbed her left arm. Turning, she saw her estranged husband, Sonny Russell. Without speaking he dragged her away from the portal to her dreams, and around the corner to Pitt Street, outside a pawn shop—a place of broken dreams—near the entry to a winos’ bar—a house of broken spirits. In this setting it’s not hard to imagine what happened next. Sonny was under instructions from their criminal boss to recover the photographs and documents, whatever it took. ‘He’s found out the files are missing’, Sonny snapped. ‘You have to give me the pictures to take back to him, Shirl.’ He pulled at the purse against her strengthening grip on it. ‘All shit’s broken loose!’


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‘It’s too late, Sonny. I’ve got to go through with this’, she said. It was her escape route from her vile life. She’d thought about this long and hard, and no one was going to stop her. Sonny pulled a pistol from under his jacket, and that’s the last she knew; her dream of wealth and freedom shattered by a single bullet through her chest. To his horror, Sonny saw three men emerge from a large black car parked nearby. Police had watched as he murdered his wife. Detective Sergeant Herb Talarico grabbed Shirley’s bag from his hand. ‘We’ll take these’, he barked. But they did not arrest Sonny. They didn’t even take the gun from him. One of Talarico’s offsiders, a detective constable, just arranged for the dead (or dying) body on the pavement to be discreetly removed, as directed by his senior officer, and the telltale smear of blood to be washed away. All trace of Shirley Bega’s last moments were obliterated. No record of her death or burial was created. ‘Go and tell your boss we’ve got his dirty pictures now’, said Talarico. ‘Go and tell Abe that we will run his little blackmail racket from now on.’ The third, most junior, policeman in the Talarico team, horrified by the experience, was unprepared to risk his own career—or even his life—by reporting the incident to more senior officers. But years later he tried to tell the story of that dramatic night which changed forever the way the Australian underworld operated, an underworld in which one Abe Saffron was a major player. I picked up bits and pieces of the story, but nobody else really wanted to listen to the frustrated copper. His story was too


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fantastic, and by the time he’d decided to tell it he had long since left the police force and had drowned his misery in alcohol. I later attempted to track down Sonny Russell. He’d migrated to Canada a few years after the event and had died there some years hence. So Sydney had settled down to what it has done best from its very beginnings: it left the crooked cops and crims to run their business without too much publicity or interference. For the rest of us, well, it was the late 1960s, the music was rockin’ and the surf was up at Bondi, and a couple of cold Resch’s beers stopped us worrying about such trivialities. • The truth of Saffron’s blackmail racket has always been difficult to pin down. The Shirley Bega story came to me in scraps over the years and with slight variations, from a few sources—not all of them with a totally reliable reputation. But to understand the ‘real’ Abe Saffron I needed to unearth the truth about his blackmail dossiers, because this racket underpinned everything else: all the other illegalities and all the other examples of outrageous and scandalous behaviour that have peppered the media and maintained a public curiosity about the man we came to know as Mr Sin. One thing is certain, however: the dossiers the police took that night lived on for many decades, long after Shirley Bega had gone to her unpublicised and premature death. • Abe Saffron was fanatical about sex. He was, from direct accounts told to me, a tireless performer who longed for


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variety. He was an exhibitionist and believed his sexual appendage to be of great interest and fascination to all others (particularly, but not exclusively, females). One of his perversions was whipping naked women, and then having them whip him back. He was actually supplied with some of the ‘tools’ of sadomasochistic sexual activity by none other than Sydney’s best-known dominatrix, Madam Lash, who was a tenant of his. When word got out much later that the Costigan Royal Commission had given Saffron the codename ‘Gomorrah’, those who knew him had a quiet chuckle. [[boxbegin]]

UNASKED QUESTIONS ANSWERED: COSTIGAN DIGS DEEP There’s a rule-of-thumb in politics that you never launch an independent inquiry into a problem unless you know the answers you’re likely to get as a result. It appears Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser ignored that dictum when, in 1982, in league with the then Liberal Government in Victoria, he appointed Frank Xavier Costigan QC to head a royal commission into the alleged criminal activities of the Federated Ships Painters and Dockers Union. The decision was aimed to politically damage the Labor Party through its association with the union movement. After starting his inquiry on Wednesday, 1 October 1980, Costigan certainly uncovered some nasty behaviour among that group before spreading his wings in a way Fraser could never have contemplated. Digging deep into the huge area of ‘organised crime’, the most significant


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of Costigan’s findings was the massive tax avoidance schemes operated by big business and many prominent Liberal Party members. Abe Saffron was named as a major player in organised crime and a tax avoidance scheme beneficiary. [[boxend]]

Saffron moved on from photographing his sexual antics to filming those of the inner circle of family and friends who cavorted with him. A seemingly endless parade of showgirls and higher-class prostitutes had no qualms about getting naked among groups of Abe’s associates. In the mid-1960s I spoke to a couple of female participants in the orgies, and that was the picture they painted. I also recorded in 2006 lengthy interviews with a person close to Saffron, who confirmed and strengthened the details of the stories I had first collected more than forty years earlier. He confirmed that photographs of the orgies were circulated among a small group of trusted Kings Cross identities for their titillation, and to boost Saffron’s growing self-image as a sexual ‘marathon man’. His marriage to Doreen was a farce. In 1960 he had taken on a permanent lover, Biruta Hagenfelds, a Tivoli showgirl (as revealed in a 1977 article I wrote for Nation Review) for whom he built a comfortable home at Kensington and who was mother to his daughter, Melissa. But from all available accounts, he spent most nights in the company of many other showgirls and prostitutes. Saffron also had a sexual relationship with a close relative of his, a fact confirmed to me, remarkably, by the other person involved.


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As mentioned earlier, it was Saffron’s association with the illegal abortion racketeer Dr Stuart-Jones that led to the idea of formalising some of the sexual romps they offered. These specialised (or more precisely, ‘deviant’) opportunities satiated the sexual peccadilloes of prominent—and essentially wealthy—citizens who were happy to pay generously for a ‘kinky’ session once or twice a week. My Abe insider told me about the ‘romper-rooms’, as they became known, which were luxuriously furnished with lots of big soft cushions, richly brocaded chaise longues, and huge beds and a well-stocked bar. There was soft music, a screen for projecting pornographic movies on demand and mirrors all round, of which at least one was the two-way viewing post behind which the photographer was located. The rooms were brightly lit, to help provide better ‘exposure’ for the photographer. The informant also confirmed that the photographs were taken mainly by Shirley Bega. When she was sometimes a participant in the ‘romps’, somebody else would operate the camera. Bega organised the prostitutes, showgirls and children, and arranged their payment from the bundles of cash Saffron maintained in a small safe at each of the two locations, the White House and the Appin Private Hotel. Bega also maintained files on the names and contact details of the people she hired, and noted in the files which of Abe’s ‘clients’ had been with which of her people, with dates and times. The rolls of film were taken to a trusted processing laboratory that Saffron had used for his earlier, more amateur, photographic sessions with his playmates. The prints and negatives were attached to the files Shirley had compiled, and those from the


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sessions at the Appin were centralised at the White House. Shirley and Saffron were the only people who had access to the two safes. Shirley may not have comprehended why Saffron simply filed the information away and didn’t use it to demand money from his clients. But she must have seen an opportunity to make a quick sale to escape from Sydney and the lifestyle she would have felt degrading. It is understood she contacted a man who was prepared to pay a large sum of money for the files. We know this from the story the third policeman later told me. From that source we also know she took a number of sets of photographs and their associated files, placed them in a large black satchel, took the cab into the city and was about to enter Chequers nightclub when her estranged husband Sonny Russell grabbed her. From that we can deduce that Saffron had quickly discovered that files were missing and had despatched Sonny to recover them, at any cost. It is possible that Saffron might even have known of the planned treachery beforehand. We can also deduce that Saffron or Sonny had alerted a contact within the police force to a potential problem involving Shirley. It was certainly not a coincidence that one of the most corrupt police officers on the force at the time, Detective Sergeant Talarico, was parked where he would have had a clear view of the scene. And we also know that Talarico took possession of the black satchel containing the incriminating material and arranged for the removal of Shirley Bega’s body. Another part of this remarkable story comes from a most unusual source, and I would not have given it a


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moment’s consideration except for one salient fact: I was able to prove beyond doubt the existence of the ‘excerpts of dossiers’ this man referred to related clearly to the material that was snatched from under Sonny’s arm. The reason for casting doubt on the credibility of this informant is that he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, a mental condition in which he could have invented his whole extraordinary tale. Here’s how my research unfolded. In July 1975, a story broke in the Sydney media that Juanita Nielsen had vanished and fears were held for her safety. Juanita was the somewhat rebellious heir of the old Mark Foy’s retail dynasty who had gone to live in a small terrace house in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, from where she produced a fortnightly local newspaper. She sided with residents and squatters who opposed a large and controversial redevelopment in her street. There was a strong sense of ever-present violence in this confrontation between the pro- and anti-developer camps. A journalist colleague of mine, Barry Ward, spoke to me about Juanita’s disappearance and—just a couple of weeks after she had vanished—we began what evolved into a three-year-long investigation into that case. Beyond its relevance to this story, and specifically to Abe Saffron, that is a tale for another time and place. Suffice to say that from the outset we kept an open mind as to the possible causes for her disappearance, while many of our acquaintances—and people we met on that unusual journey—were adamant that she had been taken off the scene simply because of her vocal opposition to the rede-


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velopment in Victoria Street. We needed convincing that this, or any other reason, was the true cause. As part of our activities—and out of concern for our personal safety—we developed and maintained a high media profile during our investigations. Any new important information we came across we shared with supportive colleagues in radio, TV and the print media, a strategy we considered was our best possible life insurance policy. In response to one of our radio interviews, an inmate at Parramatta jail, Allan William Honeysett, wrote a lengthy letter to me care of my union office. Dated 14 October 1975, the letter opened (verbatim) with this: I heard your interview with Steve Liebman today and was rather amused at the incidents that you related to him. Let me assure you that you were on the right track or should I say the right ‘smell’. But let me suggest to you that if you are prepared to delve into something that is very much more than just the annihilation of Juanita Nielsen then I will say good luck and I am prepared to give you some information that will rock you back on your heels or for that matter I will let you know that Juanita Nielsen was in fact in the act of editing an expose-type autobiography for me. She approached one of my associates who is an undercover investigator and then between us we agreed to supply certain information to her which she required and in turn she would print 1000 copies of my Diary of Dynamite. So my associate photostated sixteen dossiers on certain prominent people and also the info that Juanita wanted. She claimed she would either instigate a Bigger


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than Watergate investigation or wind up dead. She was right, she wound up dead.

The letter went on to list names of many prominent people in Australia, with linked accusations of a range of corrupt and criminal behaviour. The list included the former premier, Bob Askin, and some of the people he had knighted, as well as Norm Allan, Abe Saffron, leading business people and a couple of judges. Then: I contacted John Glebe and showed him abbreviated excerpts of the 16 dossiers that were handed to Juanita Nielsen. This was done in the presence of one Mitchell [sic] Robertson solicitor from McClelland Wallace and Landa and with my permission on 28/8/75 these excerpts were sent to Mr Jim Cavanagh, Minister for Police and Customs, ACT.

His letter warned of dangers involved with this material and, most remarkably, Honeysett claimed he had been hired to rob a bank to: . . . retrieve information that is being used by four cops to blackmail two judges, a barrister, queens counsel and a very prominent businessman. This information consisted of photographic evidence, documented evidence of names and places and was compiled by Shirley Bega who ‘passed away’ in the police cells.

Honeysett went on to claim he had become a ‘number one enemy’ of crooked politicians and the ‘faceless men’ behind the political arena because of the ‘works dossiers’ he and his associates had compiled, and that this was shown


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in ‘the abortive sentence I received. 28 years. You see’, he continued, ‘I had a dossier on Justice Isaacs about his gambling debts and also a dossier on his nephew Abe Saffron for his general crime . . .’. There were other allegations about more people, and his two foolscap typewritten pages signed off with: ‘Respectfully yours, Allan William Honeysett, No 3 Parramatta Prison, ex-international industrial investigator’. It was an exceptional document, making—if they could be proven—remarkable allegations about many leading people in our society. There were enough leads in the letter to begin some immediate checking. Johnny Glebe was secretary of the Water Board employees union and had spoken of a work ban on the Victoria Street development. He had been having an affair with Juanita Nielsen prior to her disappearance and had offered a personal reward for information on her whereabouts. I knew him, so I rang him first. He was (understandably) deeply concerned at the potential dangers involved. If dossiers had been handed to Juanita, they could have contributed to her death. I didn’t get far with Glebe, but in talking to the solicitor for Glebe’s union, the one referred to in the letter, he eventually confirmed to me that what could be described as ‘excerpts of dossiers’ had indeed been handed to him by Honeysett at Parramatta jail. In response to my query, the solicitor said he gave them a ‘high degree of credibility’. So the dossiers (or at least excerpts of dossiers) did exist. Their content indicated that this might have been the same material Shirley Bega had spirited away from the White House.


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Police running sheets on the Nielsen inquiry, which I later examined, confirmed that police were aware of some of the claims made in Honeysett’s letter to me—and our knowledge of the prisoner’s state of mind. The first contact between Honeysett and John Glebe occurred on 27 July 1975, twenty-three days after Juanita disappeared. Glebe had already been interviewed by police, but at around 12.50 p.m. that Sunday he reported to police Special Crime Squad an anonymous phone call he had taken at his home moments earlier. He made a note of the call and it went like this: Caller: Mr Glebe? Glebe: Speaking. Caller: I cannot give you my name and I might have to hang up any second. Are you still interested in inquiring about Juanita Nielsen? Glebe: Definitely. Caller: This is big and there are a lot of heavy people involved in it. Either you or your solicitor, not the police, are to contact Allan Honeysett, No 3 Parramatta Gaol. He has given Juanita 3 dossiers on the goings-on at the Cross and the people involved in it. Glebe’s report was entered into running sheet 5/26 as an incident report. Detectives Arkins and Cox checked up on Honeysett and entered his details on the sheet: he was ‘the subject of NSW Special Photo 70/924’, they wrote, adding details of his sentence. The next day they added a report from Glebe on his visit to see Honeysett.


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At first the prisoner had been reluctant to talk to him, so Glebe had suggested he could come back with a solicitor, Mr Paul Landa, a principal partner of the law firm Glebe’s union used. The tennis-playing enthusiast— and casual acquaintance of Abe Saffron—David Paul Landa, who was thirty-four at the time of these events, was also a Labor member of that rather exclusive political club, the NSW Legislative Council. But Honeysett rejected the idea of talking with Landa, saying he did not want: ‘any Jewish solicitor or any solicitor with a Jewish background or association, as there was a lot of Jewish money involved in development and business in Kings Cross.’ Glebe told police that Honeysett briefly supported the story that he had passed information to Juanita Nielsen by way of a dossier ‘through a third person whom he refused to name’. Police arranged for Glebe to visit Honeysett again the next day. In his report back to Arkins at around 6 p.m. that evening, Glebe said he had been accompanied by solicitor Campbell (not ‘Mitchell’ as Honeysett referred to) Robertson, who had ‘received a number of documents’ from the prisoner. The following day, Arkins, Cox and their colleague Maroney visited Glebe at his office in Trades Hall in Goulburn Street at around 2 p.m. Glebe said the solicitor had all the documents Honeysett had handed over, and they all went over to the law firm’s nearby office at 104 Bathurst Street. The running sheet report at this stage says: We there saw Mr Brian Wallace in the firm who stated that Honeysett was their client and any information or


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documents they had were privileged and would not supply any information to assist police. It was impressed on Wallace the seriousness of the situation and he was also queried as to whether Honeysett was in fact his client or had they initially been instructed by Glebe. Wallace only replied that Honeysett was in fact his client. Glebe stated that although he had gone to the gaol he was present but did not hear any of the conversation nor was he aware of the contents of the documents or what had been said. This gives the lie to the conversation he had with Det-Sgt Arkins on the evening of the 29th inst.

And there, it appears, Arkins, Cox and Maroney left the matter for almost eighteen months. In that time it is understood they had tried to arrange an interview with Honeysett but the prisoner refused to see them. Through a third party, they finally got an interview with him at the jail on 7 December 1976. Honeysett made wideranging allegations on a number of issues, repeating that information had been handed to Nielsen before her death. Honeysett then said that Superintendent Don Fergusson had ‘utilised his services to commit the offence of armed robbery . . . in order to obtain documents for Sir Frank Packer, which included photographs of children being indecently assaulted by members of the judiciary’. Three days later the police again went out to Parramatta. Their report said in part: It was put to Honeysett that the late superintendent Fergusson had died approximately two years prior to the commission of the armed robbery at Coolah. At this Honeysett became hostile, aggressive and suggested we


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had fabricated the date of the late superintendent’s death. Honeysett did not provide any further information.

There was more to come. The police appended to their running sheets a psychiatric report on Honeysett dated 3 April 1975, prepared by state psychiatrist L. Blows for the prison department. It should be noted that this report pre-dates Nielsen’s disappearance and any involvement of John Glebe in the story. In the interview with the psychiatrist Honeysett had ‘. . . launched into a long tirade about various organisations engaged in criminal activities that he knew about’. Blows wrote in summary: . . . this man suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. He has no insight and is in danger if given the opportunity of harming people who he feels are involved in plots against him. He needs psychiatric treatment . . . The question arises whether this man was psychotic at the time he committed his crime, and how responsible he is for his actions at the time. Paranoid schizophrenia is a chronic illness, and it could well have been present at the time he committed the offence.

In 2006 I asked both a Sydney psychiatrist and a Brisbane psychologist about this condition and the report on Honeysett. The psychiatrist read a copy of Blows’ letter and assured me it appeared to be a professional report, properly made. Blows was a respected professional, she had added, and had clearly established Honeysett’s mental condition. The Brisbane psychologist agreed, but added that nothing in the report would either


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prevent the outlandish claims made by Honeysett from being true or support their veracity, with the notable exception of his reference to the then dead Superintendent Don Fergusson hiring him to rob a bank two years after the policeman had died. If such a conspiracy as the bank robbery had taken place, the psychologist told me, it is eminently feasible that its perpetrators could have concealed the true identity of the policeman involved. Quite possibly they deliberately engaged the services of a person (Honeysett) with a mental disorder to ensure— if it all unravelled later on—that they could deny it all with impunity, saying that a man who was a paranoid schizophrenic was just showing symptoms of his illness by inventing it all. Whatever way one looks at the Honeysett affair, you find contradictions. He knew about Shirley Bega and the Saffron files, both of which I had learned about years before the bank robbery had occurred, so he hadn’t made up that part of the story. How he had come across that information is anyone’s guess because very few people knew about it up till then. It had never been publicised in the media. The old police rounds reporters from whom I gleaned some of the story rarely spoke about it. If Honeysett had not acquired these files during the bank robbery, where did he come by this material? There were other matters of interest in all this. It took Barry Ward and I very little time to confirm that Justice Simon Isaacs was the judge who, at Newcastle Supreme Court on Friday, 4 August 1972, had sentenced Allan William Honeysett to twenty years’ (not twenty-eight as Honeysett had stated in his letter) hard labour, with twelve-


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and-a-half years (not fourteen) non-parole, for robbing the Bank of New South Wales at Coolah—a small town about 240 kilometres northwest of Newcastle. This seemed to us on the available information to be an extremely harsh sentence, and it took a little longer for us to confirm (with another member of the Isaacs family) that Isaacs was indeed Saffron’s uncle. What we were yet to prove was any connection between Honeysett’s robbery of a country bank with Saffron’s dirty photos. If that link could be proven, we thought, then the court case became very suspect—given that Judge Isaacs would most likely have known about his nephew’s unusual collection of snapshots. A bit of checking told us that Allan William Alfred Honeysett was born on Wednesday, 10 November 1926. At the NSW country town of Mudgee he had married Joyce Aileen MacMahon in 1949. Press clippings showed he had claimed to have invented a security screen that would drop down at the front of bank tellers’ cages at the touch of a foot button. We thought at the time that someone had beaten him to that: a commercial version of a drop-down screen was then being fitted into banks across the country. Soon after I received the letter, Barry and I visited Honeysett, then forty-eight, at Parramatta jail. This did not greatly add to what we had been told in the letter, except for Honeysett’s claim that the bank he robbed had been in a cottage-type building, that he had no difficulty in gaining entry at the weekend when the bank was closed, and that he had recovered the documents and some money he’d been advised to take as a cover.


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I made further inquiries about the story elsewhere and quickly got copies of more letters the productive Honeysett had written. He’d sent them to a number of people, with copies going to prominent TV current affairs reporter Mike Willessee, who was happy to hand them to me as he was aware of my involvement in the Nielsen story. One of the letters, written on 28 October 1976, was an eye-opener. It was addressed to Kerry Packer, head of the publishing and television conglomerate PBL established by his late father Sir Frank. This four-and-a-half pages of singlespaced typing opened: In October 1971 I was propositioned by detective sergeant Don Fergusson, who was acting on behalf of your father, to retrieve by any method I deemed necessary, a dossier containing proof of his and others’ involvement in some very unseemly acts against young girls. These acts were committed at a place called the ‘white house’ at Point Piper, which was owned by a doctor whom the statements claim was being blackmailed by Abe Saffron to hold the orgies at the ‘white house’. These orgies were hosted by a woman called Shirley Bega, whose main job was to photograph all the indecent and unnatural acts carried out on drugged juveniles, and to pass the photos to Abe Saffron for the purpose of making the men pay blackmail. However, Shirley Bega aspired to be a blackmailer too so she kept the photos and a list of the children’s names and addresses for her own use.

With a few variations of the events I had already heard— such as it was William Street, not Pitt Street, and that she shot the man, not the other way around—he told


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the story I outlined above. We know Fergusson was not involved because he had died on 15 February 1970, but the rest of the story fitted like a glove to the hand of information I’d been dealt. It was, to say the least, curious. I had never discussed Shirley Bega with Honeysett. His letter to Kerry Packer went on to say that the police who had taken possession of the files were making money demands; that Sir Frank had already paid out $460,000 ($4,415,432) and that ‘the demands were becoming steeper’. We learned (before Honeysett’s claimed involvement) that investigations by other police, acting in Frank Packer’s interest, indicated the ‘dossiers’ were in a safe deposit box at the Coolah bank, in a large manila envelope marked ‘Land Deeds’ with the name ‘EK Wilson, Coogee’. The envelope had been deposited there by the cops, including Herb Talarico, and by the type of arrangement only crooked cops can make—the transaction was never entered into the safety-deposit book. Honeysett claimed that Sir Frank had told him he was due to pay a further $100,000 ($810,546) to the blackmailers on 5 March 1972, ‘and he [Packer Senior] stressed the urgency of retrieving the documents and photos before that date’. The media magnate made Honeysett an offer (he claimed in the letter) of $25,000 ($200,386) to be paid on recovery and delivery of the dossiers and, if Honeysett were ‘recognised and convicted’, Packer would pay him $10,000 ($80,154) for every year or part of a year he spent in prison. ‘Finally’, wrote Honeysett, ‘he agreed he would use his influence to have me released within a short time if I were convicted’.


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Honeysett went to Coolah with his nephew, he said, and recovered the envelope, but somebody must have seen them. While monitoring police radio frequencies the robbers heard that a ‘shoot to kill’ order had been issued against them—which obviously did not succeed. Honeysett went into hiding for some days—he flew to Townsville—during which time he made copies of all the material in the envelope. He couriered the material to Packer and was then arrested. Police charged him with armed robbery—there had been no guns or shooting at the bank—but because of his claimed arrangement with Frank Packer he pleaded guilty to all charges and, as we have seen, copped a very heavy sentence from Judge Isaacs. Then Sir Frank Packer died. At first, Honeysett said, he tried quietly to get a retrial ‘in a closed court’ so he could tell the ‘real reason’ for robbing the bank. That failed. Nobody wanted to know. Allan William Honeysett was—quite correctly, it would appear—declared to be a paranoid schizophrenic by the system and his wild claims of conspiracy theories a figment of his tortured imagination, so his demands for a retrial were rejected as groundless. He was left to rot at Parramatta jail. All my attempts since to learn what did subsequently happen to Honeysett have been blocked by bureaucratic application of Freedom of Information laws. Honeysett was interviewed at the jail on the morning of Thursday, 6 January 1977 by L. Barnett, NSW UnderSecretary of Justice. In Barnett’s sixteen-page summary of their conversation, the question of the identity of Honeysett’s associates outside the prison arose. Reluctantly, he named them as Matthew and Carla Thompson.


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These were the people who—Honeysett claimed— provided material from his copies of the dossiers to Juanita Nielsen, so the threat of publication could be used as a lever for a new trial. Two months before Barnett’s interview on 19 November 1976, according to Honeysett, Matthew Thompson was bashed by police, with both arms broken. His wife Carla, heavily pregnant, was kicked until she miscarried. Their seven-year-old son King was severely bashed. They denied all knowledge of the documents the police demanded they hand over. They fled interstate for fear of their lives. The assault was almost certainly the catalyst for Honeysett to drop his eighteen-month-long veto on talking to detectives Arkins, Cox and Maroney, who interviewed the prisoner (as mentioned earlier) on 7 December 1976, just eighteen days after the Thompson assault. If indeed there had been sixteen dossiers taken by Shirley Bega, there would be at least seventeen people most anxious that they not fall into the wrong hands: the blackmailer and his victims. I am satisfied beyond any shadow of doubt that for those people these dossiers were worth killing for, and that they fell into the ‘wrong hands’. Allan William Honeysett has provided in his voluminous letter-writing enough details of proven fact to convince me that—mentally damaged as he was—he did not invent the whole sorry story. How much evidence do we need to believe most of what Honeysett claimed? Take out Fergusson and replace him with someone else who—for the purpose of deluding Honeysett—used Fergusson’s name, and the big flaw in his version of the story is diminished.


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Given that much of what Honeysett claimed correlates with known facts, the remaining question is: why did Judge Isaacs hand down a twenty-year sentence for a bank robbery? The chances are it was believed this troubled person would become in jail even more unbalanced, a totally discreditable witness, and nobody would take up his cause. For many years that is exactly what did happen. And the blackmailer and his victims settled back to life as they had known it. And Sydney once again basked in its sun, drank a few cold Resch’s and took a swim at Bondi. That, after all, is what life in Sydney is all about. Isn’t it? Well, not quite. Other people were about to look into the affairs of Mr Saffron. Among them was an eminent lawyer, Frank Costigan QC, who in his four-year royal commission delivered—among many wide-ranging reports—a devastating summary of Abe’s activities over the years. Costigan had adopted the practice of allocating codenames to prominent people he would report upon, creating a media buzz as pundits tried to pin the monikers on the real culprits. Who could forget the revelation that Costigan’s ‘The Goanna’ was none other than Kerry Packer. And surely he was demonstrating whimsical humour when he dubbed the sex-crazed Abe Saffron ‘Gomorrah’. Costigan, too, had pried into that secretive world when he wrote: ‘He had engaged in blackmail relying upon sexual indiscretions of others.’ Jim Anderson, the business partner who’d had a major falling out with Saffron, was also to make reference to Abe’s blackmail scam when he gave evidence to a NSW parliamentary committee on prostitution—after he’d fallen out with Abe, of course. Anderson said that if a


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politician or someone in authority was causing concern to corrupt elements (such as Saffron), that person would be ‘set up’. His sexual proclivities would be determined: ‘Does he like little girls, big girls, little boys, big boys? Is he on with his secretary? Is his wife playing around?’ he explained. The target person’s movement would be monitored and, at a suitable time, appropriate temptation would be placed in front of him—for example, at an adjacent table in a restaurant from where a conversation might be struck up. If the target fell for it, the ensuing sexual encounter would be photographed, filmed or taperecorded. ‘Later the target would be discreetly informed of the existence of the evidence and he would become a puppet’, Anderson told the committee. Blackmail, as all this clearly shows, was the way Saffron dealt with problems, and such was its success he was able to offer it as a service to friends and associates who may have been having their own difficulties.


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7 BURNING ISSUES: MURDER AND ARSON BECOME THE HOT TOPICS Burning issues

BEING AROUND ABE Saffron and his associates would not have allowed for many dull moments. They lived life at full bore and what many people would call ‘major crises’ bobbed up with remarkable regularity. The 1970s, which began with a spot of murder, were no different. At about 10.20 p.m. on Monday, 22 June 1970, the notorious and violent standover man Donald Hector Neville Smith entered the Venus Room. Donny, know as ‘The Glove’ because he wore a lead-lined glove (‘all the better to hit you with’), was a man with no tolerance for argumentative types, and on this night it seemed that Jim Anderson was exactly that. Anderson was sitting at the rear of the club in one of the booths behind a shoulder-height wall, doing the accounts, which would have been a fairly laborious task given the two sets of books he kept on Abe’s behalf. Some weeks previously Anderson had been warned by Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard from the consorting squad that Donny Smith should not be allowed into the Venus Room [ 136 ]


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as he was a ‘known criminal’. But some days after the warning Smith was arrested in the club by Ballard, who found he was carrying an unlicensed pistol. Ballard told Anderson that Smith had come to murder him. Naturally Anderson had some harsh words to say to Smith on the evening he entered the club for the second time. Up swung Donny’s lethal glove, knocking the solidly built Anderson off his feet, breaking his jaw. ‘When he hit you with that [glove] you stayed hit’, Anderson later told Sydney Morning Herald crime reporter Neil Mercer. ‘Enough’s enough . . . I just went “bang”’. Donny had not figured on Anderson carrying a gun. ‘Shot him straight in the heart’, Anderson said. ‘I knew what I was aiming at, but then he got up again.’ Thinking his attacker was going for his own gun, Anderson fired again, hitting him twice in the back. When you’re hit with that much lead, you stay hit. But Donny was not wearing his notorious lead-lined glove that night. His left hand was bandaged and plastered, as though protecting a broken bone. (It was later discovered he had no injury; the plaster cast was perhaps an innovative replacement weapon for the sheet of lead.) In an interview with Detective Sergeant C.V. Leatherbarrow on 2 July, Anderson gave his version of events. Smith came into the club, confronted him, and there was an ‘exchange of words’ in which Smith said he was going to kill him. Anderson’s licensed .32 calibre Browning pistol was visible in his shoulder holster, and Smith tried to grab it. In the tussle, Smith bashed Anderson across the face with his heavily plastered left


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hand, knocking Anderson to the ground. He sustained cuts and a couple of broken teeth (but no broken jaw, according to the official records). As Anderson scrambled to his feet he heard somebody shout a warning that Smith was going to kill him. He drew his pistol and fired a shot into Smith’s chest. As the wounded man ran towards the door of the club Anderson fired a second shot, which struck him in the thigh. Anderson said that as Smith reached his companions near the door, he thought they were fumbling for a pistol, so he fired his third shot which hit Smith in the back as he turned to leave. Smith fell out of the doorway and died straddled across the narrow footpath of Orwell Street, his left leg still lying over the front step of the Venus Room. Smith’s de facto wife, Betty June Bennett, had been waiting outside the club. In a signed statement she gave to Detective Sergeant Ross ‘Rocky’ Morrison, she said Anderson had murdered Smith. She had seen Smith trip and fall onto the footpath as he left the restaurant, and Anderson came out and shot him as he was getting up. Morrison noted that Bennett was ‘hysterical’ when he arrived on the scene. Not surprisingly, statements from other witnesses who were to a person clients at the Venus Room did not support that view. Within hours Jimmy Anderson was charged with murder and discharging a firearm near a public place. The following day he was granted bail of $2000 ($17,977). At the committal hearing the police prosecutor opposed bail, saying that in relation to the first shot Anderson no doubt acted in self-defence, ‘. . . but the fact that he [Smith] was shot three times, the defence of self-defence


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must fail’. Anderson pleaded that he was acting in selfdefence. The magistrate accepted the police prosecutor’s view and said he must face a charge for the manslaughter of Donny ‘The Glove’ at the September sittings of the Sydney Quarter Sessions Court, because ‘. . . he was prepared to go to any length to rid himself of Smith’s threat’. But there was intervention from on high: Saffron’s old mate, Labor Attorney-General Reg Downing, ‘no-billed’ the charge against Anderson—as usual providing no public reason for killing off a clear-cut case of homicide. It appears The Invincibles had flexed their muscles once again. Years later Anderson swore that no payments were made to police in the Donny Smith case. Perhaps it was the result of another snapshot in Abe’s photo album. The National Crime Authority over the years looked at the antics of Anderson and Saffron in considerable detail. In a March 1994 report by a parliamentary committee an interesting comment was made about the decision to ‘no-bill’ Anderson in the case: The [NCA] secretariat does not have evidence or knowledge of the full circumstances that would indicate why the decision not to prosecute was taken. It does not know whether the fact that Anderson was a police informant, or some other relationship that may have existed, were factors in the decision. There has been speculation over the years as to why the decision has been made.

How discreet of them not to mention the possibility of brown paper bags being delivered to Reg Downing.


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There still remained the charge of discharging a firearm near a public place—which Anderson had undoubtedly done and even bragged about. This came up for hearing at the Central Court of Petty Sessions on Thursday, 28 September 1972, but one wonders why the authorities bothered to even go through that formality: the charge was summarily dismissed. Anderson denied being a police informer as vigorously as he denied involvement in drugs. But Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard had told the inquest into Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance that Anderson was a ‘regular police informer’ in relation to Victoria Street protests and resident protester Arthur King. At that inquest Anderson accused Ballard of being a corrupt officer who had lied about him being a ‘snout’ to the cops, known in the trade as a ‘fizz-gig’. ‘This is a well-known ploy to get someone murdered’, Anderson said, ‘and then put it down to a gangland killing’. Ballard had a bit of explaining to do as to why he had ‘outed’ Anderson, ambiguously telling the Nielsen inquest: I am aware of the contents of Police Instruction 63, paragraph 9, which sets out that police should not disclose the identity of an informant. However, even though Anderson was an informant in information relative to the Juanita Nielsen inquest he was also a strong suspect as a person responsible for her disappearance and as such, to my mind, was disqualified from protection as an informant, he in fact on the surface was apparently supplying information to be used to his own advantage.


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People who worked with Anderson at first did not believe he would talk to police about criminal activities. ‘After all’, one of them told me recently, ‘we all knew he was paying police regularly to protect us from arrest, whatever we did, so it didn’t add up that he would be informing on anyone’. But over time the most senior staffers—who were protected under the ‘franchise’ arrangement that made them and their bosses invincible—learned that Anderson did in fact dob in junior staffers to police. A young man operating the lights at the Carousel was arrested one night on a drugs charge. It turned out that apart from the man’s totally loyal girlfriend, Anderson was the only one who knew details about the case he was charged with. Other staff (I was told by one of them later) believed Anderson had ‘dobbed’ in the young man. When three others from the Venus Room faced drugs charges, again the finger pointed at Anderson as being the informer—the ‘fizz-gig’. No wonder he denied it to the end: being an informer, considered by most in the criminal milieu to be the worst possible offence against the general philosophy of the ‘code of silence’, is a reputation any criminal would shun. • By the time Anderson’s murder and firearm charges had been resolved, Saffron was starting his moves into South Australia, opening an Adelaide strip joint called La Belle in 1971, quickly followed by the acquisition of the Castle Hotel and the Elephant and Castle. Geoffrey Roy Cassidy of Natalie Avenue, Salisbury, was listed as the only local involved in La Belle (with three Saffron ‘frontmen’ from


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Sydney also involved). Strict conditions were imposed on the granting of the cabaret licence for La Belle, with the Superintendent of Licensed Premises being given power to approve in writing any full-time or part-time employees, other than entertainers. Peter Farrugia, who had managed Saffron’s iconic Pink Pussycat and other Kings Cross clubs, moved to Adelaide to get the Elephant and Castle project underway, with two other locals listed as directors or shareholders. But Saffron, of course, held the reins in all three businesses. Entry into the South Australian market had not been easy: in that state Abe Saffron was not invincible. In September 1970 the Licensing Court in Adelaide refused an application by a Saffron company, Burbridge Properties, to build a hotel called The Sundowner at West Beach. Jack Rooklyn, the Sydney-based US-Mafia ‘man downunder’, was involved with Saffron in this project. That duo was also still looking at Indonesia as a jointventure possibility, having met there (according to Rooklyn’s later testimony) in August 1970 and again in July 1972. But Saffron’s attentions were being held firm in Sydney, as his troublesome lieutenant, James McCartney Anderson, had to be rescued from more scrapes with the law. And there was also an exciting business development in which his friend, influential businessman Peter Abeles, was to act as his frontman. Some things seemed to be looking up for Abe Saffron. • In April 1971, just two months after Premier Bob Askin’s triumphant third successive election win, the NSW Depart-


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ment of Railways invited tenders for the ninety-nine-year lease and development of vacant land at 107–109 Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross. The land was superfluous to its needs for creating an entrance to the yet-to-be-built Kings Cross Railway Station. A source in high ranks of the Askin Government at the time—a ministerial press secretary—told me that Peter Abeles had intervened directly with Askin to ensure that a company in which his associates had an interest was granted the lease. Subsequently, Abeles’ close friends, Paul Strasser and Robert Ryko, set up a company called Constance Developments and it, to nobody’s surprise, won the lease. There were many meetings with departmental officials to approve final building plans, and to the officials’ surprise Abe Saffron was present at most of them. When the building was finally complete on 1 November 1974, Constance subleased the whole site to the Persian Room Theatre Restaurant Pty Ltd, a company in which Saffron and Vincent Farrugia (Peter Farrugia’s brother) had controlling interests. Three years later Constance transferred their head lease to Togima Pty Ltd, another Saffron company. But there was a slight problem: Constance—as was required under its lease—didn’t mention the new arrangement to the Public Transport Commission, which owned the land and now found itself with a subtenant that ran an illegal brothel, operated illegal poker machines, enabled drug sale and use, and was operating in breach of the liquor laws. The Askin Government was in no hurry over the next four years to resolve the breach of the lease terms, and that in itself attracted some attention. Australian


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Democrats Senator Don Chipp was to later refer to it in a speech in the Senate. He claimed, after Saffron took over the building, that it housed a gambling club, a brothel and a sex shop. ‘The New South Wales government chose to buy out the lease’, said the senator. ‘This is almost incomprehensible. There is no record of any action against the gambling club or the brothel.’ Chipp then described Abe Saffron as: ‘. . . one of the most notorious, despicable human beings, if one can use that term loosely, living in this country.’ On 14 May 1976, the NSW ALP, under the leadership of Neville Wran, won the state election and formed the first Labor government in New South Wales for eleven years. To put an end to Saffron’s illegal activities on the railway property, the Wran Government bought out the lease from Togima for $ 2.6 million (around $ 12.4 million)—paid to the Saffron company. A spokesman for the government said that legal action had not been taken against Togima ‘. . . because this would only remedy matters in the short term and it was difficult to get evidence’. But as with all Saffron clubs, there would have been no difficulty in getting evidence: anyone could walk in, pay their cover charge, stroll around, watch strip shows, including the occasional live sex acts, play poker machines, pick up a prostitute and, if you didn’t look too suspicious, buy a deal of drugs. The problem was that governments generally want their police force to gather such evidence for ramping up court cases, and the NSW Police Force was not capable of finding the evidence because, as we’ve


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said, it was being well paid not to do so. The change of government made no difference to those arrangements. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Not long after the scandal over the railway land, Saffron had more problems to resolve with James McCartney Anderson. • On Friday, 21 May 1971, customs officers armed with a search warrant knocked on the door at 1 Tower Street, Vaucluse, wanting to see the owner. Jim Anderson let them in and while the search of the property was underway Anderson agreed to a recorded interview with investigator Peter Gribbon. He admitted to Gribbon that he took currency out of Australia without Reserve Bank permission, and failed to declare watches, jewellery and other items he’d bought in Singapore. In other words, he was smuggling. Customs found the contraband, took it away and widened its inquiries. It appears Anderson had used counterfeit $10 notes ($80) to buy his goods in Singapore and pay his hotel bills. What customs and the federal police didn’t reveal is that the banknotes were high-quality reproductions made by Sydney’s master of the forgery class, James Angus ‘Jim’ Donnelly. In a jolly moment at a pub near his Cleveland Street ‘factory’ in Redfern, Jim told me about the banknotes, and other ‘works of art’ he had produced including stamp-duty stamps. When arrested by police over the stamp-duty replicas, Donnelly said the cops had some of his stamps and some of the real things on their desk at the police station. Knowing a wind was gusting outside, Jim complained about being hot and


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opened a window. All the samples blew onto the floor. Police couldn’t sort out the forgeries from the genuine articles, so Donnelly helped them out—no doubt getting a slightly reduced penalty for ‘being cooperative with police’. Anderson and his travelling companion in Singapore, Frank Alfred Gilligan, had passed 407 notes in all (around $33,730). The Singapore Government wanted the two men extradited, and that application came before Sydney’s Central Court of Petty Sessions on Thursday, 23 December 1971. Magistrate James Ernest Fowler dismissed it on an obscure technicality. Demonstrating the skills probably learned at the Garfield Barwick school of legal esoterica, Fowler invoked the ‘double criminality rule’, under which the Crown had to show that New South Wales had an equivalent offence to the one under Singaporean law as the basis for which the extradition was sought. Just in case anybody began to think that passing forged banknotes was not a crime in New South Wales, the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department tried to explain what had happened in a letter dated 19 January 1972 to the Department of Foreign Affairs, who had to justify the failure to Singapore. It said: At the conclusion of the hearing the magistrate expressed the view that for the acts allegedly committed in Singapore to be an offence in New South Wales it would be necessary to show that they were knowingly committed. Mr McGee of counsel had argued strongly, both in relation to the New South Wales law and the Commonwealth Reserve Bank Act in respect of offences connected with bank notes, that the evidence submitted by the


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applicant country was sufficient for the purpose of the double criminality rule and therefore of offences in Australia to justify their committal for trial. However, the Magistrate found that the evidence before him disclosed no intent on the part of the fugitives in relation to offences in New South Wales if their alleged acts had been committed in New South Wales and therefore found that he was not satisfied that a prima facie case justifying their committal for trial, and so ordered the release of the accused persons.

What the writer of that letter was not able to say, of course, was that even the Commonwealth of Australia could not invoke the rule of law over The Invincibles when a ‘franchise’ activity had been bought into play. As if to rub salt into the wound, Anderson and Gilligan successfully sued for the return of the goods seized by customs—illegally imported goods which they had bought with counterfeit money. On 6 July 1972, a charge against Anderson over possession of stolen goods was dismissed, and on the same day a prima facie case of receiving stolen goods was made out against him. No one expressed surprise when it was decided there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to send him to trial. After all, this was James McCartney Anderson, close confidante of Abe Saffron. • At the end of 1972 there was a slight reshuffle of positions in the higher echelons of The Brotherhood, the organisation I have suggested was really running New South Wales through this most interesting decade. Norman ‘The Mushroom’ Allan had been Police Commissioner for


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eleven years, in which time he had served his seniors well. There was a lot of crime happening, of course, but with so many police either running criminal activities or being well paid to turn a blind eye, the lean statistics alarmed only a few busy journalists—until Allan decided to make the figures look a bit better with some falsification of the crime clean-up rates. A police sergeant, Philip Arantz, found out what was going on and blew the whistle; Allan’s fraud was revealed in the Sydney Morning Herald in November 1971. In scenes straight out of Kafka, Arantz was taken to hospital for psychiatric examination—in a fanfare of publicity orchestrated by Bob Askin’s media minders— but the doctors pronounced him sane. Then in January 1972, Arantz was sacked without a pension. Askin backed his wretched commissioner against an uproar from the media, but within a couple of months it was clear Allan had to go. It was announced he would take leave from May and that he would formally retire in November. Unlike Arantz, Allan left with a full pension and a lumpsum payment equivalent to eighteen months’ leave. His last official act was his most successful: he recommended Fred Hanson succeed him in the top spot. This was good news for The Brotherhood: it settled down to ‘business as usual’. • Anderson literally became a ‘hot’ story again when he nearly killed himself in a club fire. In a version of the story he told police (and which nobody has ever believed), Anderson claimed that at around 3.30 on the morning of


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Monday, 26 November 1973, having closed the Venus Room early, he was driving home past the Staccato club at 101 Darlinghurst Road. Formerly the Coconut Jungle, the club was run for Saffron by Peter Farrugia and Jimmy Burrell. Anderson saw two men acting suspiciously, so he parked around the corner and, leaving his pistol in the glove box, went to see what was going on. The club’s rear door was slightly ajar. He went in—and fell over. He was smoking a cigarette at the time and as he stood up an explosion ripped through the place, creating an instant inferno. Anderson, suffering burns to more than half of his body, staggered out, made it back to his car and— heroically—drove himself to St Vincent’s Hospital, a mile up the road, where he was interviewed by police in the hospital’s casualty department. There were obvious problems with the story: Why was he smoking a cigarette while investigating something suspicious that could lead to violence? Why on earth did he—consciously, it seems—leave his pistol in the car? Detective Sergeant Noel Morey paid Anderson another visit at the hospital at about 11 a.m. on Thursday, 12 December, to see if he had anything to add to his first account of the event. Apart from saying that he had nothing to gain from setting fire to the club, and that its owner (he was referring to Farrugia, not Saffron) was a friend of his, he stuck to his guns—metaphorically. When told that a police examination of his clothing immediately after he entered the hospital showed that the soles of his shoes and the upper of one of them reeked of petrol, Anderson could offer no explanation. The police


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didn’t believe a word of it and told the city coroner as much when an inquiry into the fire opened in June 1974. Investigators said the fire had been caused by a petrol explosion, but Anderson said he had not noticed the smell of petrol when he’d gone into the club. Equally unconvincing was Saffron’s evidence at the coroner’s hearing. Asked if he had an interest in any business at Kings Cross where stripping is performed, he replied: ‘No.’ Anderson was never charged over the incident nor was anyone else. From then on one of the sharp wits of Kings Cross nightlife, Tubby Black of Pussy Galore, always greeted Anderson with a cheerful, ‘G’day, Firebug’. Black told me that nobody doubted that Anderson had done the job— and botched it badly: I told him a few times that seeing as he came from Britain, he wouldn’t maybe have been aware that Australian petrol has a higher octane rating. If you poured petrol around a place and lit a match it would go up a lot quicker than what he might have been used to in the Old Dart.

Tubby Black’s taunt contains a ring of credibility: if Anderson had thrown a match into the petrol-drenched club from inside the rear door, the blast would have been instant. To escape the sort of injury he suffered, he would have had to have used a fuse, or thrown a lighted rag or paper from a safe distance. The petrol fumes would not have ignited from the cigarette he claimed he was smoking: that volatile gas requires a naked flame (not a


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smouldering ember) to set it off. But apart from a lot of scarring to his large body, Anderson didn’t suffer any significant long-term effects after they had patched him up. After five months in hospital he went back to work for Saffron, this time based mainly at the club he’d once wanted for his own—Les Girls, Saffron’s relatively new acquisition. • Jim Anderson may have been the firebug Tubby Black suggested, but he was not involved in a second fire in a Saffron establishment in that same year—mainly because it happened in Adelaide. The Trocadero striptease and drag show nightclub suffered $60,000 ($515,470) damage in the blaze. A man confessed to being involved in a conspiracy to defraud an insurance company and copped a five-year jail stretch. But nobody conspires on their own: it’s an act that requires at least two people, and the guilty man’s allegations against a second man were not able to be substantiated. The second man was said to be close to Saffron and to have acted as his accountant for some of his South Australian ventures. • One event that did not get much public attention—and undoubtedly very little official investigation—was a letter written in July 1973 by Commissioner of Commonwealth Police Jack Mervyn Davis to the venal NSW Police Commissioner Fred Hanson. The letter described Saffron’s illegal activities as widespread.


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‘He is chiefly notorious for his dealings in the vice and gambling areas’, the letter read. ‘Saffron covers his illegal activities by investing heavily in legitimate business enterprises.’ Hanson’s reply, if there ever was one, was not released, but one could imagine a response along the lines of: ‘Yes, of course we know all that, but we’re making a lot of money out of it, so we won’t be taking any action in the foreseeable future.’ It was later revealed during the 1973–74 royal commission by Judge Athol Moffitt that relations between the corrupt NSW Police and their more professional and ethical Commonwealth cousins had, by that time, hit an all-time low, itself a major contributing factor to the failure to bring crooks like Saffron to book. Indeed, the Commonwealth Police Crime Intelligence Unit in those years established a ‘watching brief’ on a number of its state counterparts, based on the Commonwealth Police belief that widespread criminal activity was originating from within the NSW force. Towards the end of 1973 there was good news and bad news for Saffron and his corrupt associates. First the good news: Askin, desperately fighting off accusations of corruption, US Mafia infiltration and his own involvement with the dark side of Australian life, scraped home to win his fourth election in October, becoming the first NSW premier to reach such a milestone. But the win had come at a price: this was the bad news. Askin bowed to pressure to hold an inquiry into organised crime infiltration of the club and entertainment industries, a twelve-month drama played out in the old Supreme Court under the leader-


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ship of Judge Athol Moffitt, who took up the appointment in August. The terms of reference for this inquiry expanded later—at the judge’s instigation—to include a specific reference to poker machine company Bally’s links to the US Mafia, and the activities of Bally’s Australian chief, Saffron’s close friend Jack Rooklyn. For a year there was to be a very public outing of some—but not all—of The Brotherhood, including Saffron and Rooklyn, as well as some corrupt cops and the knockabout members of Sydney’s criminal milieu, headed by Lennie McPherson. This was a major setback for Saffron, who had already been fighting for more than a year—albeit in less public domains—some major battles with Australian federal authorities, and their accusation that this leading Sydney businessman was involved in the booming illicit drug trade. How could they possibly make these accusations against such an upstanding pillar of society?


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8 SNORTING AT DRUG SLUR: SOME CUSTOMS ARE NOT SO HARD TO BREAK Snorting at drug slur

DRUGS HAVE ALWAYS been a topic of interest to those investigating any criminal’s activity, if for no other reason than the perverse enjoyment of watching the emphatic and totally predictable denials: ‘I would never have anything to do with drugs.’ In this, Abe Saffron was no exception: he wouldn’t have a bar of them, he kept on reassuring a doubting community. But as we have seen, drugs were sold and used on premises he controlled on a nightly basis. At the start of 1972, Australian Customs was convinced that Saffron was involved in the drug trade. His name was placed on customs’ alert list, which meant that Commonwealth Police narcotics officers were notified any time he left or entered Australia. On his re-entry to the country, he always received a ‘one hundred per cent’ baggage search. The alert spread to other countries, and by 1975 the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scotland Yard and crime investigation bodies in Fiji and the Philippines were monitoring his movements. The restraint was to [ 154 ]


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remain in force for three years, and was only withdrawn after political pressure was exerted on customs to ease off. As he increasingly did over the years, Saffron resorted to having expensive, big-name lawyers go in to bat for him, never protesting his actual innocence, but using peripheral arguments. In this case it was the mendacious solicitor Morgan Ryan who went straight to his friend, federal Attorney-General Lionel Murphy, and to Commonwealth Police Commissioner Jack Mervyn Davis, claiming his client was being ‘needlessly embarrassed and harassed’. Like many of these incidents, it was all a bit of a storm in a teacup: Saffron would never have been so stupid as to travel anywhere overseas, or return to Australia, with illicit drugs or any other contraband in his luggage, particularly while he was on the customs’ narcotics watch. He was far too smart for that. The decision to drop the alert was investigated by a public services committee and that, predictably, took some time. It was fully nine years— September 1984—before the committee made its report. In February 1975, Lionel Murphy had moved on to become Mr Justice Lionel Murphy of the High Court of Australia. Murphy told the committee that while AttorneyGeneral he had given no direction in the Saffron matter. The committee said the downgrading of surveillance of Saffron was ‘reasonable and appropriate’ as continued searching ‘alerted a suspect and was likely to achieve nothing’. Quite so. Not a bad nine years’ work. As occurs with all ‘persons of interest’ to crime investigators, allegations of drug involvement are frequently made for the simple reason that that is something criminals do, and if we were to believe the inevitable


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denials, we would all have to start looking elsewhere—at non-criminals—to find the culprits. Major international drug trafficking requires large investments and a wellorganised ‘protection system’, such as the ‘franchise’ arrangement Saffron had with the NSW Police. Saffron was not exempt from the drug accusations, and some of them came from close to home. Big Jim’s wife, Neathia Conrill Anderson, was to swear on oath in court that her husband had discovered Saffron was financing drugs or was in some way involved in the trade. No evidence was ever produced by Mrs Anderson, but one matter is beyond doubt: drugs were sold and used on premises owned and controlled by Abe Saffron, be they clients at a strip club or prostitutes in one of his brothels. And for that he could have been charged any day of the week—except for the operation of the ‘franchise’. Far more serious allegations were aimed at Abe, though. When the Costigan Royal Commission got underway in 1980 it looked back over all available information on Saffron and a great many other people. It’s important to remember that the allegations it and the National Crime Authority (NCA) subsequently made related to Saffron’s activities throughout the 1970s. When Costigan’s commission wound up in 1984, it passed on to the newly formed NCA forty-two matters the judge believed should be followed up. One of those involved Abraham Gilbert Saffron. Costigan had collected 12,749 pages of information on the man they codenamed Gomorrah and his companies, and had investigated only a part of that pile by the end of the inquiry. The commis-


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sion published a summary of its findings, an edited version of which found its way into the National Times edition of 14–20 September 1984. The article said in part: Gomorrah is notorious. He has been so for the past 30 years, if not longer. His activities span most areas of crime . . . Despite his protests of innocence, he is involved in drug trafficking. He imports. He distributes. He employs men who use violence to maintain his control and authority. Drug dealings are conducted in such a way that surveillance of couriers and purchasers, while revealing connection in one of his establishments, never reveals a person receiving or supplying. The drugs are always ‘left’ in an empty room, to be collected later after ensuring the coast is clear. So too with all other activities. He operates gambling establishments, not only for the profits that may be derived but also for the power it gives him over the unsuccessful gambler. There are cases of gambling debts being the device by which he has corrupted bank managers, financiers and others in positions of influence.

Most of the huge dossier on Saffron came from various law enforcement agencies. One witness was reported as saying to the commission: ‘The Saffron allegations are so many and so wide that you would wonder that there were enough hours in the day for one man to get around to being responsible for all that.’ The commission’s staff believed the Saffron activities it had looked at ‘definitely merited’ further investigation, ‘especially his involvement with illegal drugs’. So the NCA obtained a reference— an approval for it to act—from the Australian Government in October 1984. Part of that official document, signed


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by the Special Minister for State under which the new body would investigate Saffron’s affairs, said: . . . the general nature of and the circumstances or allegations [against Saffron] constituting the relevant criminal is the widespread financial and business activities, including activities associated with prostitution and movement of persons into Australia for that purpose, of a certain person, whose identity was communicated to me by the Authority on 17 October 1984, and associated persons or companies, suggesting tax evasion and the involvement in the importation of narcotic substances into Australia, their distribution in Australia and the financing by that person and associated persons or companies of such importation and distribution.

As the inquiry got underway, it became clear to the NCA that some ‘serious and credible allegations against Saffron’ involved breaches of NSW law. Under its charter the NCA would also need a reference from the NSW Government to properly investigate those matters, which it was granted on 4 April 1986. The criminal activities mentioned in that document were arson, fraud, bribery or corruption of state officers and the supply of illegal drugs. Away from the official investigations and back on the streets, it didn’t then—and doesn’t now—take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that drugs in Kings Cross are just about as easy to obtain as a cold beer. Many of the prostitutes in the Cross were then (and still are) heroin users. Amanda King worked there as a barmaid in 1977, and was later to tell the Nielsen inquest that ‘people in the Venus Room were involved in drugs’ and that the prostitutes were able to buy their supplies there. Anderson


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himself—who always claimed to be opposed to hard drugs—reaffirmed some of the drug story. In the late 1970s ‘drug dealers started operating from No. 8 Orwell Street’, he told the Nielsen inquest. When his brother-inlaw became manager of the Venus Room around that time, Anderson said ‘. . . his main problem was stopping heroin dealing from No. 8 Orwell Street’. It’s quite improbable, of course, that drug dealers would access the brothel at No. 8, which was guarded by the sitter, and not gain access to the working women in the club. But Anderson, like his boss Saffron, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Or possibly they preferred the drug deals to take place behind the closed doors of No. 8, rather than the public open space at No. 6, the Venus Room. One anecdote about drug abuse on Saffron premises came to me from a long-time associate of Abe, my ‘Saffron insider’. He was adamant the story was true, and was not just a one-off event—it happened with some regularity at the Carousel nightclub. A couple who looked like they were new to the glitter of the Cross—wide-eyed and giggling—would be seated at a table towards the rear, near a door which led to a room used by waiters and waitresses, next to the cool room and storage area. Their drinks would be spiked with a stupefying drug so that, after a couple of glasses, they would quietly go to sleep. The woman would be taken through the nearby door to a makeshift bunk and there be sexually abused by any member of the staff who was interested. She’d then be cleaned up and seated back at the table with her still-comatose boyfriend. Empty beer stubbies would be piled onto the table.


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When they gradually came round the staff would start saying to the boyfriend: ‘My, can you two sock ’em away’, indicating the empties. The couple might shake their heads in confusion, but they’d have little alternative than to accept the seemingly irrefutable evidence of the empty brown bottles in front of them. To reaffirm the deceit, their bill would be made out for the number of empties on the table, but they might be offered a discount ‘. . . seeing as what good customers you’ve been’. My source told me that staff used to openly joke about these questionable activities. When he discussed it with Saffron, with whom he had a close association, Abe shrugged it off with a ‘boys will be boys’ remark. ‘Lord knows how many of those kids were made pregnant in the nasty “game”’, my source said to me. • There was no mention of drugs, however, when the Bally poker machine boss Jack Rooklyn and Saffron answered their subpoenas to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth before Judge Athol Moffitt in courtroom number two at the old Supreme Court building in Sydney. Sticking to the requirements of the oath would be a bit of a problem for both men. The US Mafia’s local man, Rooklyn, was first in the witness box, on Friday, 16 November 1973. ‘I have known Mr Saffron and his family for twenty years’, he said. They met about once a month, and had met twice in Indonesia. Denials about Saffron and brothels were added to Rooklyn’s totally discredited denials of doing deals with the US Mafia, and paying money to police who were investigating him.


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Saffron, who was represented at the hearing by ‘solicitor of interest’ Morgan Ryan, gave the judge the names of a few of the companies he’d set up across Australia and claimed he had never known he was the ‘Mr Sin’ newspapers often referred to. He also denied he’d ever met Sydney gangster Lennie McPherson; agreed he knew Rooklyn but only had one business dealing with him in South Australia; and said he had never been interviewed by police in connection with this inquiry. [[boxbegin]]

BIG PRAISE FOR SIN Well, I have met this man they claim to be Mr Sin on about six or seven occasions in my life. You couldn’t get a softer spoken man than him. He is the loveliest person you could meet and in regards to saying any man is ‘Mr Sin’ I can only say that any man who is behind drugs would be classed as a Mr Sin and there are many Mr Sins, so you can just nominate a man and say this is Mr Sin.

So said Leonard Arthur McPherson—known for decades as the ‘Mr Big’ of Sydney crime—when asked during a radio interview in 1974 if he’d ever met Abe Saffron, who had told the Moffitt Royal Commission that he had never met Lennie. The two men did not have a friendly relationship but McPherson, for many years, provided protection to Saffron’s clubs against violence from people, including himself. That’s what he did best: that was what ‘standing over’ was all about. It was not recorded whether Abe pasted a copy of Lennie’s accolade in his personal scrapbook.

[[boxend]]


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The media gave these appearances fair coverage, but the story that didn’t make it to the headlines was an apparent approach in 1972 by Rooklyn to Saffron to see if Abe could ‘take heat out of’ the police inquiry into the crime allegations to come before Moffitt. On Thursday, 17 August 1972, Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard, one of the leading investigators in the NSW Police Consorting Squad, met a couple of officers from the Commonwealth Police, also investigating Mafia-infiltration allegations. After a general chat about the progress of their respective inquiries, Ballard raised the issue of a discussion Rooklyn had had with Saffron. The Commonwealth Police running sheet recorded the incident. It said in part: According to Ballard, Rooklyn has made an approach to Saffron to exert some pressure on an unidentified person in authority to take some of the ‘heat’ out of the current investigations. Ballard intimated his Commissioner’s office appears to be cooling towards the inquiry. He also stated he had received information from a reliable source, that although Rooklyn sold his distribution points to the Bally corporation, he retained his casinos and gambling interests in Djakarta, and now Saffron is purchasing or leasing premises to be used as brothels in conjuncture with Rooklyn’s casinos. This section has received no other information to confirm the above.

The two Commonwealth officers appeared before Moffitt and gave ‘confirmatory evidence’ (said Moffitt’s report) of the conversation with Ballard. Ballard’s boss, Inspector Jack McNeill, was under extreme pressure from


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the inquiry over his mishandling—motivated by arrogance or corruption or both—of the investigations by NSW Police. He undoubtedly passed on some of the pressure to Ballard before the detective sergeant entered Moffitt’s witness box. Ballard’s version of the conversation with his federal counterparts was somewhat different, suggesting that a NSW sergeant (by then dead) had been his source of information about Rooklyn’s approach to Saffron. This source said the poker machine magnate was merely seeking Abe’s advice on how to take ‘the heat out of the current publicity in the newspapers’, and not out of the police inquiry. As to the suggestion the NSW Commissioner’s Office was ‘cooling towards the inquiry’, Ballard told Moffitt: ‘Our bosses were becoming a bit concerned at the amount of men involved in the inquiry and the amount being spent on the inquiry and we were getting nowhere with it. We were having no support from any person we interviewed.’ In weighing this all up, Moffitt wrote in his final report: ‘I accept the contemporary note in the Commonwealth running sheets as setting out the probable version of what was said. There is no note or record whatever in the NSW Police documents concerning the receipt by Ballard of this information.’ Moffitt mentioned a number of times that his judgements on issues were necessarily based on information put before him by the various—and sometimes competing—interests. In that context, he said, there was ‘no evidence or other material to establish that Rooklyn or Saffron used pressure on some person in authority, police or otherwise, to take the heat out of the


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inquiry’, and that Saffron had denied ‘putting pressure on anybody’ over the inquiry. But he tempered all this by saying: No investigation was made of the matters concerning Saffron and Rooklyn, nor any attempt apparently made to inquire into any links between the two, despite the police files concerning Saffron’s activities, and suspected activities. McNeill conceded a relationship between Saffron and Rooklyn would have changed his views on the respectability of Bally’s Australian business.

Other than that, Moffitt didn’t pass comment on Saffron’s veracity as a witness, but he was unambiguous about Rooklyn. Bally in Australia, he said, ‘is directed by a man who has lied before me and that the parent company, which gives him his ultimate directions, is presided over by a man who also has lied to me’. Moffitt was to find that Rooklyn was ‘a man who has had some business relations with Saffron, and while the intelligence material constitutes no evidence, it is clear, on concessions in evidence, that he at least negotiated for some combined operations with Saffron in Djakarta’. Having written and investigated stories that probably contributed to the setting up of the Moffitt Royal Commission, I had followed its hearings closely, particularly those involving appearances of ‘persons of interest’ to me. I was therefore interested in Saffron’s observation that he had not been interviewed by police in respect of the investigations backing Moffitt’s inquiry. A possible reason for this apparent lapse was later offered by James McCartney Anderson at the Juanita Nielsen inquest.


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Saffron, Anderson said on oath, had paid $ 3000 ($20,021) to Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard. This claim was a bit hard to accept, particularly given that, by the time he made the allegation, Anderson had fallen out with Saffron and was making allegations against him in any arena that would take him on—and credibility has always been a bit ‘iffy’ when we’re talking about Anderson. But later evidence, as we will see, reveals that Saffron did pay large sums of money to either avoid being called to an inquiry or to try to entirely derail a proposal to set up an inquiry. • In March 1975 a Filipino man, Ramon Sala, was a guest of Saffron’s at the Lodge 44 Motel at Edgecliff, just to the east of Kings Cross. Sala was known to Interpol and Commonwealth Police as an international smuggler involved in—among other interests—the drug trade. While in Sydney the long arm of the law caught up with him, and he was convicted on currency and drug charges. As is usual in such events, Sala’s passport was confiscated until the legal proceedings were finalised. Saffron’s own lawyer, Morgan John Ryan, of Morgan Ryan & Brock Solicitors, appeared for Sala in court. Ryan took his role as legal representative seriously: he had a chat on his client’s behalf to federal AttorneyGeneral Lionel Murphy, who happened to be something of a mate of Ryan’s—they had met way back in 1952. Murphy at the time was also Minister for Customs and had ministerial responsibility for the Commonwealth Police. Following his discussion with Ryan, Murphy


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ordered that Sala’s passport be returned. As could be expected of a man facing charges that almost certainly would have resulted in a prison sentence, Sala got the next plane out of the country. This caused something of a stir in legal circles, and within a week Interpol had revealed that the passport was false. This was one of those curious decisions made by Murphy, who was widely respected as a pre-eminent lawyer, human rights champion, a progressive law reformer and— to those who knew him personally—a warm, highly intelligent and very social person. I later learned that Murphy had become one of Saffron’s blackmail victims. His press secretary, David Halpin, told me of this, well before he had a bitter falling out with Murphy. The brilliant lawyer and politician had a weakness: young and beautiful Filipino women. One man who could—and did—provide an unending supply of such women to Murphy was Abe Saffron. Saffron also provided a discreet room in a block of units near the top of the hill between Edgecliff and Double Bay, just up the road from Saffron’s Lodge 44 headquarters, for these not infrequent assignations. Halpin actually visited Murphy there on one occasion when a political crisis required the Minister and his media minder to meet urgently. Through this chink in Murphy’s armour, a great man had been made vulnerable. Lionel Murphy was damaged by his association with Saffron and, as we will see, he was not the only attorneygeneral to have the venom of that blackmailer’s malevolence directed at him. Two of the others, however, were not to succumb. But all this was still to come. First


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Saffron had the crises of 1975 to get through, the least of which was the timely resignation of Premier Askin on 3 January—‘getting out before his dirty past catches up with him’, observed one cynical scribe as a few of us celebrated the new political landscape at that Friday’s long lunch. Askin was farewelled a few months later at a party for about fifty of the ‘in crowd’—which included, I learned, Saffron, but not Anderson. As reported by David Hickie in his book, The Prince and the Premier, by the charming Sir Peter Abeles, who prudently assured people to ‘Just call me Peter like always’. The gratuitous knighthood Askin had bestowed upon him and a number of his mates for a handsome fee was not one to be flaunted in that company. At the function, Abeles talked to Askin about a further reward for his being so helpful over the years as Premier: a seat on the board of TNT, and bundles of shares.


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9 MURDER MOST FOUL: ABE BUYS HIS COVER Murder most foul

W ITHIN A FEW weeks of the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen from Kings Cross on Friday, 4 July 1975, a senior and deeply corrupt policeman, Detective Inspector Jack McNeill—then in charge of the Special Crimes Squad— saw an opportunity to make an unexpected quick quid from Abe Saffron. McNeill did not have direct involvement in the investigation into the newspaper publisher’s disappearance, but he had enough clout of seniority to guide it as he would wish. So he made an appointment to talk to Abe. McNeill also arranged for Tubby Black to be in on the meeting at Tubby’s strip club, Pussy Galore. When McNeill arrived he intimated to Black that he and Saffron were in serious bother with the Nielsen investigation. Abe arrived a little late, and they moved to the coffee shop downstairs, next to the club’s entrance. In a booth towards the rear of the coffee shop, McNeill played his pitch: police had been informed, he said—from a most reliable source—that Juanita Nielsen had been seen [ 168 ]


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talking to Abe and Tubby on the footpath right outside where they were now sitting, on the afternoon she disappeared. ‘It looks like you two were the last people to see her alive’, said McNeill. Black exchanged glances with his friend Saffron: they both knew this was rubbish, quickly realising what McNeill’s game plan was. McNeill had invented the whole scenario, and was after a quick payment to ensure investigators would not pursue this fictitious ‘new lead’. He wasn’t really interested in Black, who was presumably there only as a part of the preposterously concocted story. The alternative to not striking a deal was that both be questioned and, as they clearly understood, the media would be given full access to the details. After a bit more talk, McNeill told Black he could go. Saffron said to Black, ‘I’ll take care of this’. And then to McNeill, ‘I’ll contact you’. They left the coffee shop and Black watched the other two walk off down Darlinghurst Road in opposite directions. Two weeks later Saffron met Black again and assured him ‘that little matter’ had all been fixed up; neither of them would be interviewed by the investigating police. Saffron never mentioned to Black what the bill came to for that most expensive round of coffee, but for Abe it didn’t really matter: he had very compelling reasons for not wanting to be implicated in any way in the unfolding Nielsen drama. This had been just another instalment payment for ‘the franchise’ as far as he was concerned. He had again made himself—and his senior employees— invincible.


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The arrangement clearly was sound because the investigating officers, detective sergeants Karl Arkins, Norm Maroney and Dennis Gilligan, never went near Saffron— at least for a couple of years. Nor did they call on Tubby Black, either, but he was never really on their ‘to do’ list. It is not suggested that any of the three knew about the arrangement, but in the way that corrupt senior police issue instructions to more junior officers, McNeill probably barked at the squad to ‘Just leave Saffron to me’ which, in a disciplinary force, they would have done. Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance was no ordinary case: it attracted large newspaper headlines and a great deal of public interest. As I said earlier, I do not intend to traverse the whole Nielsen saga—with the exception of its direct relationship with Abe Saffron. Suffice it to say that my colleague Barry Ward and I spent three years intensively investigating her disappearance. As we said back in those heady days, we may not have been a hundred per cent right, but there was no way we could have been one hundred per cent wrong in our conclusions. One major move we made fairly early in our investigation was to allege a police cover-up of certain aspects of the case. With other Nielsen supporters, we joined a public chorus claiming police were interviewing ‘only her friends, not her enemies’. The basic police story was that Nielsen had gone to the Carousel to discuss advertising with the night manager, Eddie Trigg, had left the club and maybe got into a yellow car. She was never seen again. Given that Abe Saffron owned the nightclub at the centre of this story, it was not unreasonable to expect that he would have been inter-


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viewed early in the piece. Of course, we didn’t know then about that McNeill/Saffron ‘franchise’ arrangement. There was a widely held view that Nielsen had been ‘dealt with’ because of her opposition to a major redevelopment in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, by Frank Theeman (though that was not a view supported by Barry Ward and myself). The developer was well known to both Saffron and James McCartney Anderson. Money had changed hands between Theeman and Anderson, and the latter took the developer’s drug-troubled son, Timothy, ‘under his wing’ and set him up in a nightspot at Bondi—which was, unbeknown to the son, more than generously funded by Frank Theeman. When Detective Sergeant Karl Arkins interviewed Theeman at the CIB offices at 11.20 a.m. on Tuesday, 5 August 1975, the developer agreed he had known Saffron for ‘a number of years’ and that they both had ‘wayward’ sons. ‘I know he has been in trouble but I find him a likeable fellow’, Theeman said about Saffron. Saffron had not invested in any of Theeman’s companies and he had not had any business dealings with him. Theeman said he had arranged for Jim Anderson to set his son Tim up in a partnership in a club ‘without him [his son] knowing’, on the basis that he would work there and eventually earn his share of the business. ‘It is imperative that my son does not know of this arrangement’, Theeman told the policeman. He said he had heard of the Carousel, had been there a couple of times, and thought that Anderson owned it. It was all quite innocuous.


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But why ask developer Theeman about the Carousel a month after Nielsen’s disappearance and not ask the club’s owner? Now we know the answer. Arkins was going to begin arresting people who worked for Saffron in connection with the case long before Saffron was interviewed. But those arrests, it can now be told, came about because of political pressure being applied to—and within—the Wran Government. At every important stage of the investigation that Ward and I carried out, I wrote to Neville Wran—who, as well as being Premier, carried the responsibility of the police portfolio—and to his Attorney-General, Frank Walker, setting out what we had learned. It was important, we believed, that a source of information independent of the police inquiry—which we believed was tainted—should be available to the two people in government who could intervene if they chose to. It was equally important that everybody understood we were not the ‘sole proprietors’ of sensitive information. By early 1977, we met with Wran and called on him to set up a royal commission into our allegations of a police cover-up and the implications of that claim. We also discussed this personally with Walker. Acting on advice from the NSW Solicitor-General on Tuesday, 5 July 1977, Walker wrote to Wran. As investigations were continuing he observed that a real feeling existed ‘that any person with any useful information would not come forward (for obvious reasons) to give evidence, I consider that the holding of a royal commission into the disappearance of this person at this point in time would not be advisable’. But Walker raised the possibility of an alternative: using a section of the Coroners Act as


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‘a means of throwing light on’ Nielsen’s disappearance. It required the Supreme Court to agree to an application by the Minister of Justice for a magisterial inquiry. The Crown Solicitor, however, argued that the section required ‘proof that there is a body of the deceased lying within the State of New South Wales’, and that the circumstances ‘do not conclusively point to the certainty of death’. There were obviously two camps in conflict here: Walker and his senior advisers wanting some sort of inquiry, and the Crown law officials finding every reason to avoid it. I learned later that Walker wanted to see definite movement by the government towards either a resolution of the case by the police or an official inquiry to investigate—among other things—the allegations of corruption hampering the police investigations. In a somewhat heated face-to-face meeting with the Premier in the second half of 1977, Walker set out such a demand, saying (I understand from most reliable sources) that Wran could not have it both ways: either the police do their job or there must be an inquiry, preferably a royal commission. Wran undertook to discuss the matter with the Police Commissioner, the unimpressive Mervyn Woods, which, undoubtedly, he did. Within the police force the reaction was rapid: the idea of having a major inquiry into the affair did not appeal to the likes of Jack McNeill at all. I recall saying to Barry Ward at the time that ‘Walker was pressing for an inquiry, so Wran cracked the whip and the police went out and arrested a few people. Hopefully that would shut Walker—and Ward and Reeves—up for a while’. And to a large extent it was quite successful.


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In November 1977, Arkins and Maroney arrested three people and charged them with conspiring with ‘persons unknown’ to abduct the missing woman. Nothing in the charges suggested they had actually abducted Nielsen or that anything they had done had led to the woman being harmed, or indeed murdered—and there were few people in Sydney at the time who did not believe that had been her fate. Neither, from the documents I have studied since, were police acting on any new information. The order to the officers had clearly been a response to Wran’s demand for action, the alternative to which could well be an unwanted yet unavoidable judicial inquiry into the whole affair. That was certainly something that Abe Saffron, who had still not been interviewed, would go to great lengths to avoid. Of the three arrested—all Saffron employees—one was discharged for a want of evidence, another was convicted and served a year of a two-year jail sentence, and the third—the one of greatest relevance to this narrative—was eventually given a three-year term, but only after a great deal of high drama. Eddie Trigg, a man with a twenty-year police record in New South Wales and South Australia for petty theft, living off the earnings from prostitution and breaking and entering, had been the night manager of the Carousel. The official story goes that Juanita Nielsen met Trigg at the club on the day she disappeared. He had been interviewed a couple of weeks after that event, but not again until the 1977 burst of activity. Trigg was in Melbourne when Arkins and Maroney interviewed him and then arrested him on Friday, 11 November 1977. The process


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of justice can move ponderously slow at times; it wasn’t until 28 March the following year that committal hearings began in the Central Court before Magistrate Kevin Robert Webb. It was August 1978 before Trigg and his two companions were committed for trial. The actual trial didn’t get underway until Wednesday, 9 April 1980 before Judge Walter Perry Redapple in the District Court. It was now getting on to five years after Nielsen’s disappearance. The trial resulted in a hung jury and a retrial was ordered. The date for that was set at 15 September 1980. Eddie Trigg didn’t wait around. Free on bail, he fled the country and was tracked down in San Francisco by Arkins and Maroney, who had to visit the United States to bring him back. Then the story became really interesting. Trigg’s bail was revoked (understandably) and he waited at Long Bay jail for his retrial, set down for 1 February 1983. Trigg learned he had been given a credit account at Malcolm Johns & Company, a firm of solicitors that handled the affairs of James McCartney Anderson, among others. This generosity was never fully explained, nor has its actual source been revealed. Trigg had already been given a loan of nearly $5000 ($25,081)—on Saffron’s word—to cover earlier legal costs and, as solicitor Malcolm Johns was later to testify, that had been written off by Saffron in 1982 as an ‘uncollectable’ debt. In other words, Saffron had guaranteed the cost of Trigg’s legal tab as he was put through the process. But that benevolent gesture paled to insignificance beside the next move. No less than $70,000 ($176,704) was placed in a solicitor’s trust account (possibly not Malcolm Johns’) to be handed to Trigg if he pleaded guilty to the


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conspiracy to abduct charge and quietly served the resulting jail term. Evidence emerged that the man who put up this massive bribe was Abe Saffron. It has always been strenuously denied by Johns as ‘an untrue and scurrilous allegation’ that his trust account was used for the alleged payment. While he waited for his day in court, Trigg struck up a friendly relationship with a fellow prisoner, a law student whose identity and reason for imprisonment were not released throughout subsequent hearings as the man claimed he feared for his life. We’ll call him ‘Mr X’. In conversations about the impending trial, Trigg had outlined the history of the case. Mr X told him he ‘would be mad’ to plead guilty because, among other things, he’d had a hung jury at his first trial. Trigg had assured Mr X that he was going to enter a ‘not guilty’ plea and he had worked on the case on that basis with his trial solicitor, Richard Jankowski. The trial date came and Trigg was whisked off to court. On his return that evening he told Mr X that he had pleaded guilty. Mr X explained what had happened when he later appeared at the Nielsen inquest: Eddie said to me, and I quote: ‘Money has been placed in my solicitor’s trust account’. I said: ‘It would have to be a considerable amount of money if you’re looking at a possible three year sentence.’ He then quoted the figure to me of seventy thousand dollars and I also recall that he mentioned the solicitor’s trust account; he said: ‘Malcolm Johns’s Trust Account.’ Subsequently Eddie went to court on 8 February 1983 and when he returned that evening he told me he got three years but only


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expected to serve about 18 months or less. I said: ‘Well, that’s about thirty-five thousand dollars [$88,352] a year for sitting in the sun doing nothing.’ Eddie seemed very pleased about this and also said that he had one up on Abe Saffron as he [Saffron] would have expected Eddie to receive a sentence of three to five years, referring to the non-parole period.

Mr X explained that he clearly understood Trigg to have said that Saffron had calculated the amount of $70,000 on the basis that Trigg would probably be given a nonparole prison term of three to five years. Unlike the other man convicted, Trigg had added to his problems by having fled overseas while on bail so, Saffron must have thought, he would cop a stiffer sentence. Because he expected to serve around eighteen months of his three-year sentence, Trigg told Mr X he felt ‘he had the better part of the bargain with Saffron’. Trigg’s solicitor, Richard Jankowski, said he had been surprised by his client’s guilty plea. He’d arrived a little late at court on the day of the trial and learned that Trigg had already pleaded. ‘At all stages it was going to be “not guilty” and we’d prepared the case on that basis and a lot of work had been done, and I believe a competent counsel had been engaged’, he later told the Nielsen inquest. ‘The counsel believed that there was a good chance—as chances go in criminal proceedings—for Mr Trigg to be acquitted.’ Trigg’s guilty plea, of course, circumvented the need for any evidence to be offered at the trial. At the Nielsen inquest Trigg not only denied knowledge of any payment made to induce his guilty plea, but he also denied having


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had any ‘pertinent’ conversation with Mr X. Saffron, understandably, denied any knowledge of the affair. Trigg mentioned at the Nielsen inquest that he had wanted to subpoena Anderson, Saffron and Theeman to appear at his trial. The claim was taken up at the inquest by John Basten (now a Supreme Court judge), counsel for Juanita’s cousin, Mary Shaw. He told the jury: You may well ask yourselves why Mr Saffron’s evidence in a trial for conspiracy to abduct, a trial in which Mr Trigg was the accused, would have been of any assistance to Mr Trigg. Similarly you might ask why Mr Frank Theeman would have been able to give any evidence which would have assisted Mr Trigg. There is a clear inference which may be drawn that when Mr Trigg was in America and when he came back to Australia he did intend to name names. He has pleaded guilty to a conspiracy with diverse persons unknown. It may therefore be inferred that he did know the names of others who were involved. When he came back he intended to plead not guilty. That was changed under circumstances which remain a mystery. The suggestion contained in [Mr X’s] evidence that he changed his plea for a reason, for a financial incentive, is in my submission a credible explanation of what is otherwise an incredible set of circumstances.

Another overwhelmingly plausible reason why Saffron would have made the $70,000 payment is that Trigg’s guilty plea would end—for a long time, at least—any discussion about a royal commission or some other form of judicial inquiry into the whole Nielsen affair. Saffron would certainly have realised that such an inquiry could


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be devastating. Not only could it reveal his corrupt payment to Jack McNeill to avoid being interviewed, it could also possibly bring his entire shadowy blackmail scheme into the open. The dossiers referred to earlier would certainly have gone under the microscope in far greater detail than here. Evidence would probably have been given by the solicitor who spoke to me about the material contained in the ‘excerpts of dossiers’ he’d been handed by Honeysett at Parramatta jail, particularly when it was learnt the dossiers had been handed to Juanita Nielsen and that she was in the throes of organising for them to be published. Honeysett himself would no doubt be discredited again, but that would not alter the basic thrust of the story of the blackmail dossiers, and Honeysett’s extraordinary twenty-year jail sentence for robbing a bank. Neither Saffron nor any of the parties involved in the dossiers could afford for the Nielsen affair to spin out of control and segue into a full-blown inquiry. Far too much was at stake. And so Saffron took a bet on Eddie Trigg, believing that a generous fee for a short spin in jail would be the answer to all his worries. And in that, the master strategist was correct. Once again, he was king of The Invincibles, whatever the cost. • Before leaving our discussion of Saffron’s relevance to the Nielsen affair, I’d like to add a few final words about the efficacy of the police investigation. Ward and I made allegations of a cover-up back in 1977, at a time when we had no knowledge of Saffron’s corrupt payment to McNeill. We commented on the police reaction to the Walker/Wran


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face-off, suggesting it was a charade to try to stop criticism of the inquiry by ourselves and others. We said that the charges were flimsy, not based on any new information at the time, and that there was no attempt to identify (publicly at least) the unnamed person or persons with whom Trigg and his companions were supposed to have conspired. Would Anderson have been named—and charged? Would Saffron be added to the list? We always believed the public had a right to know. It was a major defect, among many, in the whole handling of the case by the police. Lawyer John Basten raised some related matters when he summed up the case to the jury at the 1983 Nielsen inquest. He said it was relevant to have regard to Anderson’s evidence of corrupt payments made by himself and Saffron to police to buy immunity from the licensing laws and other police attention: There is no doubt in my submission that in 1975 there was a close business relationship between Anderson and Saffron. In my submission, if at that time Mr Abraham Saffron enjoyed immunity from police action in certain regards then Mr Anderson would be protected too. Of course, if [evidence of corrupt payments to police] is accepted then it is clear that arrangements between Mr Saffron and possibly Mr Anderson and the police would have compromised both parties. The relevance to the investigation carried out here lies in just that fact. In my submission the police have not been in the past keen to investigate leads which go back to the Carousel Cabaret. My submissions to you have been that Mr Anderson’s allegations of corruption suggest that senior police officers in New South Wales were seriously compromised with persons in organised criminal activities in the Kings


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Cross area and elsewhere. I have suggested to you that the situation may have influenced police involved in this investigation whether consciously or unconsciously, to steer away from, or discount, evidence that would have led them to Messrs Anderson and Saffron. . . . Whatever you think of the control of the licensing laws or liquor sales in this state is irrelevant, the fact that corruption of police involved in enforcing those laws may have led and could easily lead again to persons connected with such activities committing unrelated crimes as serious as murder and doing so with impunity is a matter which in my submission should not go unnoticed by yourselves. If I am right in that submission, it follows that there will be no evidence available to show that Juanita Nielsen died or was killed at the hands of any person. The fact is that we cannot say whether Juanita Nielsen was murdered or not. If, ladies and gentlemen, you accept that preconditions were that such a corruption existed in 1975 and more recently and then that is the reason why we are unable to determine the nature and manner of Mrs Nielsen’s disappearance and probable death, then in my view it is your public responsibility to do so.

The jury took some heed of this well-argued advice: at the end of the thirteen-week inquest, it found that Juanita was dead, although it could not (as Basten had suggested) say when, where or how she died. It also found that there was evidence to show that the police investigation was ‘inhibited by an atmosphere of corruption, real or imagined, that existed at that time’. • After the three arrests had been made on charges that were lazy at best, devious in their intent at worst, Abe


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Saffron was finally interviewed on Monday, 27 March 1978, about any information he may have on the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen nearly three years earlier. Detective sergeants Arkins and Maroney tapped on the door of his home that evening and discussed some matters with him. Their visit barely rated the title ‘interview’: no statement was taken, and the police made only a brief note of the meeting in their running sheet. Abe said he had not met Nielsen, was not being blackmailed by her and, while he was friends with Frank Theeman, he had no business dealings with him. Saffron was not asked about the extent of his personal involvement with the Carousel; about his knowledge of the business lunch where the subject of advertising had been allegedly discussed with Nielsen; or anything relating to his three employees who had been arrested. He said he was unaware of the loan of almost $5000 to Trigg. The ‘interview’ took place on the doorstep and couldn’t have lasted more than fifteen minutes. Abe was not asked to attend a police station and he did not invite the two policemen in. After all, this was in clear breach of his franchise agreement with McNeill. Australia had to wait twenty-nine years, almost to the day, after Abe’s ‘interview’ with Arkins and Maroney to be given an assurance that he had not killed Nielsen. In what was dubbed by some media as ‘sensational revelations’, Alan Saffron alleged in March 2007 that his father had refused to become involved. Alan told long-time Saffron-watcher, the Sun-Herald ’s Alex Mitchell: ‘I can tell you that my father was asked to kill Juanita Nielsen but he refused to have any part of it.’ At the time this book


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went to press, Alan Saffron declined to reveal to me exactly who had asked his dad to arrange a murder, and why. He also told the newspaper that one of Abe’s business associates, ‘. . . a person whom he knew very well over many years’, was responsible for the murder. ‘He’s dead now’, Alan continued, ‘but there are still people who would do anything to protect his reputation, so I feel my life is in danger’. Clearly he was referring to James McCartney Anderson. Whether Alan Saffron will produce evidence of this allegation, or whether it will eventually be dismissed as a continuation of the bitter feud that erupted between Anderson and Abe Saffron remains to be seen. Jim Anderson wasn’t sure whether he’d landed a damaging blow on Saffron’s reputation—such as it was back in the 1970s—but he would keep on trying to do so. At the Nielsen inquest he was asked whether he had set out to discredit Mr Saffron. ‘No’, he replied, ‘he has done that very successfully himself’. In reality, though, Abe Saffron had once again escaped unscathed. And so the Nielsen saga was all over: for most people, at least. The police file on Nielsen is still open, a book has been written, and apart from a few flurries of new claims and old fibs revamped, there has been little real headway in the investigation to find out who killed her. There’s a person out there who did get away with murder, but maybe he (or she) is dead by now, too. Buy why worry about such things. The beer’s cold, the surf’s up, the music has changed its beat, but hey! This is Sydney!


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10 TAX BREAK COMES ABE’S WAY: WHISTLEBLOWER GOES TO JAIL Tax break comes Abe’s way

IT’S A QUAINT irony that a man who spent all his adult life avoiding tax should have kept such immaculate books: at least two sets of them! It was tax offences they got Abe for in the end, but he escaped prosecution a few times before that. The first was back in August 1948 when his accountant told a court about his tax fiddle as the owner of the Roosevelt club. Twenty-eight years were to pass before another of his accountants tried to blow the whistle. Edwin John ‘Ted’ Middleton was thirty-nine when he got a job as bookkeeper in the Carousel and Venus Room. He had a police file, with convictions dating back to 1953 for larceny and forgery—the latter a talent that could prove useful in the creative work to which he now applied his skills in accountancy. Middleton’s main problem was his reaction to the abrasive personality of his immediate boss, James McCartney Anderson. The two did not hit it off from day one, and after some months they had a serious falling out. [ 184 ]


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Middleton spoke to a Daily Mirror journalist and gave him a list of names of some of the police who regularly called at the Carousel to collect the graft money due to them from Abe Saffron. Heading the list of nine was Detective Sergeant Jack McNeill. When Middleton said he had information about Juanita Nielsen, the journalist suggested that Ted should talk to me directly, but Middleton was in fear of his life and was reluctant to do so. He also told the journalist that he was taking evidence of a massive tax avoidance scheme operated by Saffron in his clubs to the tax office. I was soon to get the whole story from the two solicitors who acted for the whistleblowing bookkeeper. In mid-1976 Middleton went to the taxation department with his first-hand knowledge of the two sets of books used in the Saffron enterprises. In a meeting with tax inspectors Dick Day and Ron Anderson, he told how Saffron and Anderson were laundering money to the tune of around $8,000,000 ($40,129,032) a year. The money was washed through veteran gambling operators Perc Galea and Joe Taylor, who ran their illegal clubs with impunity throughout the Askin years. When Joe died in August 1976 and Perc shortly after him, Saffron and Anderson put pressure on the big legal bookmakers to take over the laundering operation, in which the bookies would make a worthwhile percentage of the huge funds that would flow through their books as anonymous bets. High-profile bookie Bill Waterhouse was approached and threatened, but he went public in his rejection with a story in the Daily Mirror. Bookie Les


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Tidmarsh was also leaned on; he later died in mysterious circumstances. What happened next was not at all what Middleton had expected. Thinking the tax office would move on Saffron and Anderson, he was bitterly disappointed when nothing happened. He believed Saffron had some influence (dirty pictures, maybe?) on a senior officer in the tax department, and not only did Middleton’s complaints apparently get shelved, but a report was made to Saffron of his accountant’s whistleblowing activity. Seen in the Saffron camp as high treason, Middleton had to be taught a lesson for his betrayal. On Wednesday, 1 September 1976, Anderson, under direct orders from Saffron, sent his manager Eddie Trigg to get hold of the perfidious Middleton. Trigg found Ted, took him to Eliza’s restaurant in Double Bay and left him in the tender care of a gunman we know only as Derek, while he, Trigg, phoned Anderson with the news of the ‘citizen’s arrest’. Anderson arrived and informed Middleton he was going to jail. Protesting that he’d not committed any crimes, Anderson told Middleton that it was irrelevant; he was going to be ‘fitted’ with the recent and unsolved armed robbery at the home of society madam, Lady Walton. Anderson knew that two professional thieves, Gascoine and Callaghan, had actually committed the robbery, and that they’d ‘shot through’ until the dust had settled. There was nothing the hapless Middleton could do. He was being framed and he feared the worst: he’d have to wear it.


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Anderson then called the police, and Detective Senior Constable O’Hagan and his sidekick arrived at the restaurant. Big Jim told them that Middleton was going to confess to the Walton robbery, and it was Anderson who gave the police Middleton’s ‘confession’ statement. Middleton was charged and he appeared in court on 9 March 1977, to be released on $5000 ($22,025) bail. He quickly learnt about the dangerous world he’d been released into. First, he was badly beaten up in Kings Cross by people he claimed were ‘Anderson’s men’, suffering severe head wounds, broken ribs, and cuts and bruises. Then as he was leaving the office of his solicitor, Barry Perriman, a few days later, a man he knew approached him with the warning that a contract had been taken out on his life. ‘If you stay in New South Wales you will “commit suicide” or there will be an “accident”’, his acquaintance said. Middleton gave the warning a degree of credence. He had already been bashed at central police cells and in Wing 13 at Long Bay jail immediately after his arrest. Discretion being the better part of valour, he decided a move interstate would be good for his health. A condition of his bail required him to report daily to police at Darlinghurst, who were not remotely interested in acting on his report of the assault he’d suffered. On 30 March he made his last appearance at the cop shop. His trial had been set down for 1 April to face the charges of ‘assault and rob with an offensive weapon’, but he didn’t show up and a warrant was issued for his arrest. His NSW police photograph, number 76/12169, was circulated to all states with details of the warrant.


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Luck was not running his way. When Middleton walked into St Kilda Police Station in Melbourne to pay a parking fine, he was recognised from the recently arrived photo. He was arrested on the outstanding warrant and moves were made to return him into the tender mercies of the NSW Police. His Melbourne lawyer, Tony Fisher, contacted me at Middleton’s request to say his client was in real fear of his life if he was returned to Sydney. Fisher was concerned: Middleton must be protected from the police as well as from Anderson, Saffron and company. I assured him that NSW Attorney-General Frank Walker was a man whom I could trust, and I agreed to provide Walker with a background briefing note as a precursor to any discussion the two might have. But nothing could be done to prevent Middleton’s return to Sydney. There would be no bail for the runaway this time round. He was photographed again, mugshot number 77/5640, taken to court and given a sentence of four years for a robbery he had not committed. The police running sheet in the Juanita Nielsen case showed that Middleton was interviewed by Detective Sergeant Karl Arkins about his claims to have had information about the ‘missing woman’. Middleton added a few conflicting and speculative lines to our knowledge of that event, and then the world forgot that Edwin John Middleton existed. He served out his sentence and moved out of the limelight, a scared and broken man. • Maybe it was a coincidence, or just an oversight, but nobody ever interviewed Middleton about a subject of


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which he had firsthand and detailed knowledge: the huge tax scam operated by Saffron. Perhaps that was one of the areas of activity covered by ‘the franchise’ arrangement. We will never know why the tax department didn’t act on Middleton’s information, but the way it dealt with another Kings Cross club operator may provide a few clues. Tubby Black, who ran the Pussy Galore club for twenty years, had a visit at around eleven o’clock one morning from a tax inspector, who asked Black whether he owned the club. ‘No, the police department owns it’, said Black. He explained to the incredulous taxman that he paid so much money to the police there was nothing left at the end of the week, so there was no question of any tax being paid. The inspector asked Black if he could verify this remarkable story with anyone ‘higher than you’. Black suggested he ring the Police Commissioner. The man left, saying he would return. The next day two tax inspectors arrived and Tubby Black repeated his assertion, adding that if the tax department wanted to take him on he would go to court and explain in public where all his revenue went. ‘I pay every squad in the police force’, he said. The three of them talked it through and finally they came up with a way through their impasse: the tax inspectors accepted Tubby’s suggestion that they come into the club and operate the till for a while, and also stay around to check where the money goes. The first night of this strange operation coincided with a major football event—always a ‘big take’ night at the


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Kings Cross clubs. At around 10 p.m. one taxman was at the till and his mate was sitting nearby in the audience. ‘You’re doing well’, they told Black. ‘The night’s not over yet’, he replied. A little later Detective Sergeant Bumper Farrell lumbered his large form up the stairs to pick up his regular take. ‘Give him $200’, Tubby told the till operator. Before the club closed at 3 a.m., three more cops arrived to pick up their regular bundles. The following night the payout totalled $4000. The inspectors were convinced that Tubby had a real problem in assessing his taxable income and reported as much to their superiors. The next day a senior tax officer (‘Call me Joe’, he told Tubby) arrived and, remarkably, a few moments later Detective Sergeamt Jack McNeill joined them. Tubby told the pair that when he started in the club the payout was ‘a bottle of beer to the local sergeant’, whereas now it was to pay off a swimming pool or a BMW. ‘I can’t afford to pay tax on the money I’m giving to the police’, he told McNeill. After a private chat Joe the taxman and Jack the copper agreed they could not allow Tubby to stand up in court and make such claims. ‘Either we put you in jail or get rid of the whole police force’, Joe told Black. ‘This is just too hot to handle . . . It would be one of the biggest court cases in Australian history’. McNeill assured Black the problem would be put in the ‘slow basket’. For six months Black had regular contact with Joe, and finally the tax investigation was buried forever.


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For all that time, Tubby Black kept paying out to police. At no stage, it would appear, did anyone suggest that the tax department start asking the crooked cops for tax on the revenue they received from the illicit money they screwed out of people like Tubby Black and dozens of others.


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11 TROUBLES IN THE SOUTH: TRUTH DRUG MAY BE THE ANSWER Troubles in the south

ON WEDNESDAY, 20 October 1976, Saffron emerged from his very private life to tell a select group of journalists that the accusation he was involved in drugs was ‘so vile that I am compelled to deny it as vigorously as I can through the press’. He regarded drugs as totally evil, ‘even soft drugs like marijuana, because I believe they can lead on to hard drugs’, he told the scribes at his Lodge 44 Motel headquarters. One of the journos later quipped that maybe Abe should have been given a ‘truth drug’ for such a briefing. Some of the journalists there thought they’d heard it all before, even though it had been twenty-five years since Saffron had voluntarily spoken to the media. But even this time around it was not an all-in media scrum—for reasons never explained he limited the attendance to the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC-TV’s This Day Tonight and A Current Affair. The ‘vile’ accusation had its genesis in a Sunday newspaper report ten days earlier, which claimed a Sydney [ 192 ]


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businessman had halted the flow of soft drugs into South Australia and had stepped up supplies of the more addictive—and costly—heroin and other opiates. The businessman, the article said, had ‘almost total control’ of drug-pushing in Adelaide. The story was lacking in some important information, most notably the name of the alleged drug baron, so in the South Australian Legislative Council Dr John Cornwall asked the Chief Secretary, Mr Donald Hubert Louis Banfield, whether the article referred to a Mr Saffron. Abe was becoming well known in the southern capital through his growing chain of restaurants, clubs, sex shops and hotels. The Labor Government of Premier Don Dunstan, which had won an election on 1 June 1967, had been resisting the expansion of the Sydney criminal’s ventures with the state’s young, almost boyish-looking Attorney-General Peter Duncan setting in train a policy to ‘limit and where possible eradicate the influence of Mr Saffron and his associates in South Australia’. Mr Saffron’s reputation, it would appear, had preceded his arrival in the south. Based on Saffron’s known history in New South Wales, the main thrust of Duncan’s campaign was to block or reject applications for liquor licences for businesses which Saffron owned. In this Duncan enjoyed the full (and uncorrupted) support of the Superintendent of Licensed Premises. In December 1975, an application to transfer the licence of the Surabaia restaurant to another venue was, on Duncan’s direction, opposed by the Superintendent. In the following month the Saffron team tried again, but a ‘serious breach’ of the Licensing Act was proved and


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the premises had its licence voided for the whole of 1976. Abe’s frontman at Surabaia was Peter Vardon Fairweather, and in March that year objections were lodged by the government against renewal of the grog licences for all companies in which Fairweather was a director. They included Saffron’s main premises in Adelaide: the Castle Motor Inn, the Elephant and Castle, the Pooraka Hotel, Jeremiah’s restaurant and La Belle cabaret. In July 1976, the Licensing Court supported the government, ruling that the licence for the Surabaia would not be renewed so long as Fairweather remained a director. The court had taken into account evidence from the Superintendent and had come to the view that Fairweather, who had a ‘determination to preserve the licences for Saffron and [Peter] Farrugia’, was ‘not a fit and proper person’ to hold a liquor licence. In April 1976, Duncan stopped a loophole in the liquor laws which enabled a company to buy a licensed premises and so acquire the liquor licence attached to it, by default, as it were, without approval of the Licensing Court—a ploy Saffron had used a number of times. The revised law came into effect in December 1976. But before that setback came the drugs accusation. Chief Secretary Banfield, replying to Dr Cornwall’s question in the legislative council, said the name Abe Saffron was ‘the first one that came to mind, but of course the report was not specific on that. I should not be in the least bit surprised if they were referring to Abe Saffron in this regard’. The Chief Secretary said that Mr Saffron’s activities were ‘well known throughout the Commonwealth’, and that he was well known to the (South


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Australian) Police Department. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Dr Cornwall also asked whether every precaution had been taken to stop Mr Saffron or his agents from corrupting South Australia’s excellent drug force, as had occurred in New South Wales. Mr Banfield replied that he did not think the people concerned would get at the SA Police ‘in any way’. The report of Saffron’s press conference described him as ‘stockily built, dark-haired and softly spoken’—to which could be added, from my memory of him, ‘immaculately and conservatively dressed’. Throughout his business career, Saffron said, his name had been linked frequently ‘with a variety of nefarious activities—mostly not just untrue but totally absurd as well’. This, he said, was what must have happened in South Australia. ‘Even though a police witness told [the Moffitt Royal Commission] that “Mr Sin” was someone else and not me, I have been called that name again in Adelaide recently’, Saffron said. ‘Apparently, I have even corrupted the NSW Drug Squad, according to Dr Cornwall. But I have never had any contact with the Drug Squad and I don’t know any of its officers. My business interests are all perfectly legitimate. I have discotheques, hotels and motels in Sydney, Adelaide and elsewhere in Australia. In Adelaide, I own, or I am associated with, four hotels, restaurants and a cabaret. I would not in any way permit or condone any form of drug activity in the premises with which I am associated.’ Well . . . maybe. •


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Let’s move forward a year to 1977. Having tailed an international drug-ring boss from an overseas flight arrival and into the city, federal narcotics agents did a massive stakeout of Sydney’s Boulevarde Hotel, an opulent and popular rendezvous for—among other types—local ‘gunnies’. A virtual battalion of ‘narcs’ littered the foyers, vestibules and corridors, trying to disguise themselves as standard lamps, rubber plants, newspaper stands and blue-rinse lady bowlers. This major exercise was aimed at trapping and arresting the man and his local contact in the act of formulating a major drug deal. This big-time operator would deal only directly with his local counterpart, a man of similar standing, and that was the person the narcs were eager to identify. But they would need some hard proof the meeting involved a drugs deal before any arrests could be made. The narcs’ tip was right on: the overseas drug boss arrived on schedule and went to the pre-arranged spot in the coffee lounge. It was several minutes before his local contact walked in, shook hands, sat down across the table (with its discreet microphone hidden in the faux flower display) and struck up a bit of an innocuous chat. They had been talking quietly for a few minutes, under the watchful eye of the near-invisible agents, when all hell broke loose. A senior member of the hotel staff burst out from a lift, ran to the table and whispered to the two men: ‘Get out of here, quick! The narcs have got you staked out!’ It was all heard later on the tape. Both men fled. The local man, in panic, almost knocked over a coffee table as he charged towards the


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swinging glass doors and out into the parking area where he had left his Mercedes. The local man was Abe Saffron. Within a month Saffron and his lawyers were pounding the desk of a senior Commonwealth Police officer, whose office was located in Brisbane Street, in Sydney’s Darlinghurst. ‘I want to see my file’, Saffron demanded. ‘And I want your men to stop following me. I’ve done nothing wrong. Why are you dogging me all the time?’ Saffron was quietly assured he was not under surveillance and there was no file on him in the building. This was only half true. The Commonwealth Police were dogging him constantly. The bulky file they held on Saffron was not at that moment in the building—it had been moved to the nearby house of a trusted acquaintance of some senior Commonwealth Police. It made a good read. • Now, fast forward to February 1978. In Adelaide, at least, it was common knowledge, according to It’s Grossly Improper by Des Ryan and Mike McEwen, that South Australian Premier Donald Allan Dunstan was involved in a longterm homosexual relationship with John James Lang Ceruto, a man eighteen years his junior, a local restaurateur and a heroin addict. While there was widespread admiration for the social reforms introduced by the Dunstan Government in its more than ten years from 1967, some questioned whether this private relationship impaired the standards of accountability and integrity in government the Premier claimed as his hallmarks. Ryan and McEwen’s locally published book studied this issue


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in great detail. Dunstan divorced his first wife, Gretel Ellis, in 1974. Two years later he married Adele Koh, who died of cancer in 1978. His relationship with Ceruto spanned most, if not all, of the period of both marriages. Ceruto died in 1991. In 1978 Dunstan was outraged to learn that Abe Saffron had intended to somehow try to exploit his sexuality in response to the government’s continuing campaign to ‘limit and where possible eradicate’ his presence in South Australia. That Dunstan was able to learn early in the piece about the outrageous manoeuvre was an indication of how ineptly Peter Fairweather, Saffron’s frontman in Adelaide, handled his odious task. Dunstan and his Attorney-General, Peter Duncan, decided on a strategy of their own. Duncan had kept up his policy of opposing liquor licence renewals for Saffron premises, with the Tivoli Hotel licence being transferred to people outside the Saffron group in May 1977 after the local managers, Davidson and Schembri, were interviewed about ‘unsatisfactory conduct’ at the pub. In the same month the licensee of Saffron’s Pooraka Hotel was convicted of failing to keep a lodger’s book, as the Act required. If it seemed a little petty, the hotel’s guests who had not signed the register were NSW Police officers attending the national police gold titles in Adelaide—happy to accept gratis accommodation from their old Sydney mate, Abe Saffron. The policy of maintaining a detailed watching brief on the licensed Saffron premises would continue, but the Premier and Attorney-General both thought that still more needed to be done.


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In discussions with contacts in Sydney, Duncan was urged to get in touch with me, with one local colleague describing me to him as one of Sydney’s foremost Saffronwatchers. Modesty compelled me to assure the Attorney-General that I was but one of many in that category. By that time I had been involved in our Juanita Nielsen investigation for just under three years and had been interviewed at length—with Barry Ward—by Detective Sergeant Karl Arkins as to our knowledge of that matter. I had also written a major feature on Saffron for the Nation Review weekly news magazine. I accepted Duncan’s request to go to Adelaide to brief him on what I knew and to present him with a copy of a large bundle of documents to back up my story. Flights were booked and I discussed the trip with close contacts at the Commonwealth Police. Someone in that organisation—concerned for my wellbeing—did a bit of sleuthing and discovered that a senior Saffron partner, Peter Farrugia, had, some hours after my flights had been booked, organised a trip for himself from Melbourne to Adelaide. It concerned the Commonwealth Police that Farrugia had made his bookings such a short time after my flights had been arranged and, more importantly, that he was to arrive in Adelaide not only on the same day as me, but about thirty minutes before my early-morning flight was due to land. Allowing paranoia to govern at least some of our planning, it was arranged for Commonwealth Police Officer Ian Alcorn to accompany me on the trip, with the instruction not to let me out of his sight. Apparently there was no sign of Farrugia at the airport, the ministerial car which met us was not tailed and I


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arrived at Duncan’s office in one piece. The young Attorney-General was somewhat bemused when my ‘bodyguard’ insisted on sitting in on our lengthy, closeddoor discussions, but accepted my assurance that Alcorn was to be thoroughly trusted and was just obeying his orders. By the time we broke for lunch Duncan seemed well pleased with the work we’d done, and rang Dunstan in my presence to tell him so. The Premier asked Duncan to convey his thanks. For my ‘minder’ and me it was back to Sydney. For Duncan it was another week before he would draft the speech he was to make in the parliament. In the Legislative Council, Dr John Cornwall had placed a question on notice to Duncan regarding the business interests of Mr A.G. Saffron, providing the opportunity for Duncan to deliver his speech by way of a reply. ‘Under directions from the Premier, Mr Dunstan, I have kept a close watch on Mr Saffron and his associates’ activities’, Duncan responded. ‘With the close cooperation of members of the SA police force, officers of my department had at various intervals monitored the involvement of Mr Saffron in South Australia.’ The government had taken precise actions to ‘stop the spread of Mr Saffron’s activities and, where possible, to put a stop to his involvement in the SA business community’. Duncan reminded parliament that in October 1976 Dr Cornwall had asked questions about associated matters, ‘in particular Mr Saffron’s possible involvement in the illegal sale of drugs in South Australia’. The AttorneyGeneral then listed the four licensed premises in which Saffron held an interest, and eleven companies registered in South Australia of which he was a director. In naming


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fellow shareholders and directors of the companies, he said Peter Farrugia was involved in five of them, Farrugia’s brother Vincent in one, and Peter Vardon Fairweather in two. Saffron associates also had substantial interests in the Pooraka and Bel Air hotels. Duncan listed all the actions taken against Saffron’s South Australian premises by the licensing authorities. He also noted that Saffron companies ran five sex shops, an adult book shop and a movie club—all outlets for his pornography. ‘I make it clear to the House that I have been informed by the police that Mr Saffron is a key figure in organised crime in this country’, the Attorney-General said, adding to his thirty-five minute speech: The policy which I have applied, in consultation with the Premier on behalf of the Government, has been reasonably successful in controlling and limiting Mr Saffron’s activities in this area. There has been, in fact, a decrease in the number of licensed premises controlled by the Saffron interests in this State.

He had spoken on the matter, he said, to enable members of the parliament and the public to be aware of the operation and activities of Mr Saffron and his organisation in South Australia. ‘Mr Saffron had close links with Mr Jack Rooklyn of the Bally poker machine company. That organisation has close links with the Mafia in America.’ He added: When his activities are put in the total picture of his involvement and influence in other states, it is clear that the South Australian Government has placed a high


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priority on the possible infiltration of organised crime into this State. While it is true that Mr Saffron has not been charged with criminal offences since 1964, it is also clear that he is one of the principal characters in organised crime in Australia. The fact that he has been the subject of a number of governmental and independent inquiries and independent investigations, and that he is without doubt involved in more than 100 companies throughout Australia, makes it imperative that the public be aware of his influence.

When Duncan finished the speech, he moved that various documents—including those I had delivered to him—be tabled. The tabling of the documents was a great move which gave every word in them the protection of parliamentary privilege and enabling them to be reported on without fear of being sued for defamation— was a great move towards the media being able to write about these difficult issues. The National Times carried a major series of articles based on the documents. Saffron’s prison record (meagre as it was with just thirteen court appearances), statements linking him to notorious Sydney policeman Fred Krahe and to the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen, and a lengthy record of interview given to Queensland and NSW police by prostitute Shirley Brifman outlining corruption on a massive scale in the NSW force were among the documents now being freely quoted. The record of interview Barry Ward and I gave to Arkins was also included, as was the police mug shot that graces the cover of this book (NSW Police Special Photo 56/2804, taken during Saffron’s ‘scandalous behaviour’ court appearances in 1956).


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Duncan’s actions were supported by his premier, with Don Dunstan tabling a Cabinet minute on the crackdown against Saffron businesses. ‘The police felt that standover tactics, extortion and other rackets were possible and they were worried’, Dunstan said. Saffron’s reaction was predictable. He completely denied all the allegations made in South Australia, saying, while he didn’t know who was behind them, he felt the attack on him had been ‘politically motivated’, and could have come from competition as he had two successful hotels in South Australia. He challenged Peter Duncan to repeat the allegations outside the parliament. ‘It’s been a terrible ordeal for my family’, Saffron told reporters at his October 1976 media conference. ‘It was a very vicious attack on my character. I would like to answer all the allegations separately but I have been advised by the Queens Counsel not to’, he said. ‘These allegations are not true or justifiable. I share no criminal activities in any way, shape or form.’ He again denied any involvement in drugs. ‘I have no idea why my name is continually linked with organised crime. I, too, have heard the hearsay linking my name with drugs and prostitution but that is all it is . . . hearsay.’ Jack Rooklyn was a friend, he said, ‘that’s all’. He had been aboard Rooklyn’s fabled yacht, Ballyhoo, but only when it was launched. He denied he was ‘Mr Sin’ when he appeared before the Moffitt Royal Commission ‘. . . and I will deny it again’. Nobody mentioned his attempt to smear the good name of the South Australian Premier, but it seemed the few people who knew about it just accepted that blackmail


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was the way Abe Saffron did his business, that it was somehow okay for him to behave in such a repugnant way. [[boxbegin]]

BUYING A BENEVOLENT IMAGE FIX Abe Saffron, from his earliest years, was obsessed with his public image and, as we have mentioned elsewhere, strived often to polish off any tarnish that may have gathered there. So it was that after the South Australian allegations Abe, in what was described in a media report as ‘an example of his generous support of charities’, donated $1000 ($3295.40) to Sydney’s oldest and most respected charity, the Benevolent Society of New South Wales. Undoubtedly Abe knew that under the Society’s Act of 1902 a gift of exactly that amount allowed the donor to be nominated as a Life Governor. At its annual general meeting on 25 February 1980, the charity appointed Saffron and his wife Doreen as Life Governors, and they were presented with certificates to prove their generosity—and their good standing in the community— by Federal Health Minister Michael J. McKellar. The publicity the move generated was of inestimable value in getting people to forget about drugs and other ‘vile’ accusations emanating from South Australia, and help them to concentrate on the ‘real’ Abraham Gilbert Saffron: the benevolent but much-maligned businessman. [[boxend]]

One question I was asked at the time was why I had gone to South Australia to have the material tabled: Saffron was mainly a NSW character, so why not go to that state’s parliament? The reason was quite simple: nobody in the


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New South Wales parliament had been running a campaign against Saffron as the Dunstan Government had in South Australia; nobody there seemed really interested in exposing one of the state’s biggest and most successful operators of organised crime. To his credit, ten days after Peter Duncan’s speech, Premier Neville Wran did tell parliament that Saffron had been at a Liberal Party luncheon and had been visited by a Liberal state member of parliament. But that’s about as far as it went for quite a while—just a little political pointscoring rather than the exposure of a criminal. Saffron’s protection system worked superbly in New South Wales; it was non-existent in South Australia and the people running that state weren’t about to let him put it into practice there. [[boxbegin]]

MATES IN THE DEEP NORTH As many ‘persons of interest’ from Sydney moved north to bask in Queensland’s subtropical climate, so too did Saffron’s old mate, frontman for the Cumberland Hotel in Bankstown, Emil ‘Eddie’ Kornhauser. He settled on the Gold Coast in the early 1970s to make a few million dollars out of property development. On Wednesday, 31 December 1980, that pillar of public service integrity, Queensland Police Commissioner Sir Terence Lewis (who was later jailed for corruption), made a note in his diary of a meeting he’d had that day at Parliament House in Brisbane with the grossly rotund Russ Hinze, who proudly wore the jesting title ‘Minister for Everything’. (Hinze died ten years later, moments


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before he was to be tried for corrupt dealings with another property developer, George Herscu, who had already been jailed for bribing the minister.) The meeting, Lewis recorded, was also attended by Kornhauser (then fighting off problems with development plans he had before the Gold Coast City Council), his old mate Abe Saffron and Melbourne businessman Alfred Zion. This was, according to Lewis’ diaries, one of several meetings between Hinze, Kornhauser and the Police Commissioner during that period to discuss Gold Coast developments, but apparently the only one attended by Saffron. Eleven years later, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Kornhauser (who had by then amassed a fortune estimated to be $50 million [$500 million]) had been acquitted by a jury of three corruption charges relating to $250,000 ($2,276,549) he allegedly paid to Russ Hinze to get him to override opposition to a major development, the Paradise Centre in Surfers Paradise, and to obtain a casino licence for the centre. The story’s lead read: ‘Bob Hawke and Russ Hinze are breathing easier this weekend. Their friendship with Eddie Kornhauser— an association which has drawn slurs and criticism during the many years of the multi-million dollar property developer’s involvement with public figures—has finally been vindicated.’ The story went on to report that in the early 1980s, Kornhauser proved a generous host to Bob Hawke, lending him his Mercedes to see the sights. The paper also claimed that when prime minister, Bob Hawke had defended Kornhauser in federal parliament against claims by a Queensland frontbencher that he (Kornhauser) was an associate of Sydney ‘identity’ Abe


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Saffron. Hawke had described Kornhauser as an honourable man. Confidential police intelligence from the early 1980s, revealed at Kornhauser’s committal hearing, showed he was suspected of having links with Abe Saffron and the notorious US Teamsters Union and may have laundered $50 million ($445 million). The Australian Bureau of Intelligence report alleged Kornhauser was involved in loan-sharking and had links with associates of David Olenski, who was described as the ‘Jewish Godfather’. The report went on to allege he was associated with five businessmen suspected of involvement in the importation of heroin. Kornhauser always denied such claims, describing them as scurrilous. ‘They are still trying to bury me with this Abe Saffron business’, he once declared. ‘That was thirty years ago. I haven’t seen him since 1957 or 1958 . . . I made a mistake being in partnership with him.’ Kornhauser did not mention that in 1962 Saffron gave him the ABE-777 car numberplate he’d ‘acquired’ from Norm Allan. Kornhauser later unsuccessfully sued for defamation the four newspapers that reported the disclosures in the Lewis diaries. A particular point of distress to the developer was the reference to his association with Saffron. He was relieved of all the discomfort when he died quietly on 8 February 2006, to be outlived by Saffron by seven months. Here was obviously one old associate of Abe’s who did not subscribe to the belief ‘you never leave your mates behind’. [[boxend]]


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12 RID ME OF THESE MEDDLESOME ATTORNEYS: ABE PLAYS HENRY TOO rid me of these meddlesome attorneys

IN MY DISCUSSIONS with Peter Duncan over the years, he never hinted that he had ever been directly targeted by Saffron in the way his Premier, Don Dunstan, had. Over time, two of Duncan’s counterparts in Saffron’s home state of New South Wales were subjected to the ‘premiergrade’ Saffron set-up strategy. Desperate times call for desperate means, and taking a cue not from his brother Henry, but from the vexed royal Henry II, Saffron found a need to rid himself—over time—of two ‘meddlesome’ attorneys. • Francis John Walker was born in 1942 and gained his law degree at Sydney University after schooling at Coffs Harbour State High. He joined the Labor Party in 1960 and progressed through various branch and electorate council positions. He served as president of the Canter[ 208 ]


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bury/Bankstown and Barton Young Labor associations and had always identified with the socialist left faction of the party. Walker opened a law practice in 1967. In the late 1960s, as we mentioned earlier, he acted once for Abe Saffron on a property matter that ended up in the Privy Council before its resolution. He was elected to state parliament for the seat of Georges River in a 1971 byelection, and easily won the seat the following year at the full election. He joined the NSW Bar in June 1976, at the same time he was appointed Attorney-General in the Wran Labor Government. In parliament, Walker, boyish-faced with a slightly impish grin, took great delight in exposing Liberal Party members who had association with Lyenko Urbanchich, an alleged Nazi war criminal—seen as a Liberal factional heavyweight described by Walker as a leader of the ‘Uglies’ or the ‘Nazi faction’ of the state Liberals. In May 1987, for example, he accused the Liberal candidate for the federal seat of Phillip, Ray Collins, of having an association with the Uglies and of lying when he claimed he no longer acted as a solicitor for Abe Saffron. Walker produced a letter saying that Collins Markham Associates were acting in a matter on behalf of Saffron. ‘I do not have to spell out just who Collins and Markham are’, Walker told the parliament. ‘They are the Uglies’, he said. ‘They are the Nazi faction that the Leader of the Opposition refuses to expel from his party.’ Both men, he said, were ‘close associates of that Nazi war criminal Lyenko Urbanchich’.


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To be the first law officer of a state with a history of entrenched corruption, as was New South Wales when Walker became Attorney-General, would be stimulating indeed. To hold that office in a state where there was an extremely powerful extra-parliamentary group like The Brotherhood, which had a history of exerting its influence into the highest levels of government, would be a major challenge to a man like Walker, who had always intended that in politics he would act with unquestioned integrity. The pressure on him would be increased whenever The Brotherhood—or other powerful groups—leaned on fellow ministers to ‘persuade’ the Attorney-General to act in a particular manner in certain matters. Put in simple terms, there were some issues Walker was prosecuting in which he ‘got rolled’ by a majority vote in Cabinet. One such issue—too complicated to discuss in great detail here—was the Alexander and Thomas Barton affair in 1977. Alexander Barton had implicated Brotherhood supremo Peter Abeles in illegal activities. On the day Abeles was to appear as a witness, Walker, acting on a Cabinet decision, issued ex-officio indictments in the cases, meaning that the lower court did not have to have all the evidence presented to it. One effect was that Abeles did not have to appear. Walker was later to explain to me that if a Cabinet majority rules for a certain action against a minister’s advice, the affected minister has two choices: either resign the portfolio or ‘bite your tongue’ and live to fight another day. Walker was rolled more than once by a Cabinet that appeared at times to be operating more in the interests of external forces than in the pursuit of justice.


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Then came probably the greatest corporate tax scam in Australia’s history: the notorious ‘bottom of the harbour’ tax scheme. The practice had grown out of a number of decisions of the High Court of Australia, under the stewardship of Chief Justice Garfield Barwick (who years earlier had represented Saffron in the electrifying legal debates about the Great Seal). As eminent observer Evan Whitton remarked in Can of Worms II, this ‘gave powerful encouragement to the entrepreneurs of tax evasion’. A study by ANU Professor Peter Grabosky for Canberra’s Australian Institute of Criminology described the system: The deliberate stripping of a company’s assets so that it is unable to pay its debts is a time-honoured practice. It also happens to constitute a criminal fraud. During the 1970s in Australia, variations on this practice were employed by hundreds of more affluent members of the community to avoid paying taxes. This genre of tax evasion was to contribute a new term to the Australian lexicon: Bottom of the Harbour. At the time, a company with no debts and with an annual profit of $100,000 would have a tax liability of $46,000. To avoid this liability, the owner of the company had only to sell the company to a promoter for the value of the profits, less an agreed-upon commission (for example 10 per cent). Instead of finishing the year with $54,000, the former owner of the company would walk away with $90,000. The promoter, in turn, would keep the $10,000 commission and dispose of the company by turning it over to a person of limited means, with no knowledge of the company’s tax liabilities and no interest in retaining company records and books. The Australian


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Taxation Office and ultimately the honest taxpayers of Australia were $46,000 the poorer. More intricate variations on this ‘simple strip’ may or may not have involved fraud on the revenue, depending on whether the necessary elements of dishonesty could be established. Expertise within the Australian government, indeed, within the Australian legal profession, in prosecuting such matters, was all but non-existent. When the bottom of the harbour schemes were in full flower, the sums involved were millions of dollars, not hundreds of thousands. Indeed, the full cost of this chapter of Australian criminal history ran to thousands of millions of dollars. Some 7,000 companies were involved.

It was a scheme that Saffron—among the many others—found too good to resist. He enjoyed a tilt at the racket offered by the merchant banking firm Ward, Knight & Dunn, a company later named as a major exploiter of ‘bottom of the harbour’ devices. The scams were subsequently investigated by the Costigan royal commission, set up jointly by the Commonwealth and Victorian governments ostensibly to investigate allegations of criminal behaviour in the Federated Ships Painters and Dockers Union. Commissioner Frank Costigan warmly embraced the wide terms of reference he was given and the major focus of his inquiry became the huge corporate tax rort. The Costigan references to NSW participants in the schemes were eventually referred in the mid-1980s to that state’s government for consideration and possibly prosecution. And the references landed, obviously, on


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the desk of the first law officer, Attorney-General Frank Walker. There were quite a few names on the list, including those of Abraham Gilbert Saffron and the Nugan Hand Bank. Walker had been taunted in parliament a number of times for ‘being soft on Saffron’ because he had once acted for Abe in the tenancy matter, so he decided to place beyond doubt his impartiality as far as Saffron was concerned. After much thought he placed Saffron on top of the prosecution list, ahead of the Nugan Hand Bank. The moment Walker made that decision, his fate as Attorney-General was sealed. The phones rang hot. One senior minister was reminded that a high-ranking policeman had destroyed charges against the MP’s daughter, who had been caught red-handed shoplifting. Another’s memory was quietly prodded about a secret sexual liaison, a photograph of which existed in Abe Saffron’s ‘non-family’ album. Yet another, living in a failed marriage ‘for the sake of the children’, watched as his wife was seduced by a crooked cop who flaunted the liaison at the MP. Walker resisted the growing pressure from his fellow MPs. His tax-cheat opponents fought hard. They whipped up a pool of $60,000 ($145,843), which was lodged with the Nugan Hand Bank, to pay to ‘get dirt’ on Frank Walker. The figure bears a mystical similarity to the amount alleged to have been involved in Abe Saffron’s Nugan Hand deal. There were no photos of Frank Walker in Saffron’s foul collection; there was not a scintilla of evidence


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available that he had acted corruptly at any time in his career. There was no dirt to get, so it was invented. An attempt was first made to prove that Frank Walker had opened a Swiss bank account, but that was quickly found to be phoney. Then the big end of town went to the dirty end of town to do the job. Virginia Carlina Perger, a heroin-addicted prostitute whose lifestyle had aged her beyond her thirty-five years, was picked for the job. Perger, who worked for Saffron and was an associate of strong-man Ladislas (Joe) Meissner, said later that Saffron ‘did not like drugs’, but he made sure his girls (prostitutes) ‘had enough heroin to work and make him a dollar . . . he always took 60/40. He was a hoon.’ There would be no traditional ‘set-up’ in which she would try to lure Frank Walker into a sexual encounter that would be filmed: they didn’t believe Walker would fall for that. So they didn’t bother using Frank Walker at all: they got a man who looked like Frank from behind. Perger and the unknown man went on board Meissner’s boat, Kanzen, got themselves naked and he lay on top of her. Photographs were taken, their blurry quality adding to the subsequent mystique the photos enjoyed when they became public. The ‘Love Boat Scandal’ was born. Frank Walker, susceptible journalists were told, was the man in the blurry photographs, having sex with a prostitute, Virginia Perger. The backers of this ‘get Walker’ campaign must have been desperate to stage such a superficial stunt. The one vital mistake they made was their lack of knowledge of a distinctive birthmark on the AttorneyGeneral’s buttock, which was obviously absent from the photographs.


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It had all taken place quickly: Walker had begun the prosecution process against Saffron for his tax avoidance scheme early in 1983; the ‘love boat’ story surfaced within a couple of weeks; on Tuesday, 1 March 1983, Premier Neville Wran announced a cabinet reshuffle. Frank Walker was shifted from the attorney-general portfolio to the housing and arts ministries. One ‘meddling attorney’ down. • Walker’s replacement, David Paul Landa, a member of the ALP right faction and long-time seat-warmer in the state’s upper house, the Legislative Council, had a friendly association with Abe Saffron. They met occasionally at the synagogue, and played tennis with each other now and then. Landa allowed the Saffron tax avoidance file to quietly slip out of sight. The prosecution was never mentioned again. Landa stayed in the post as AttorneyGeneral until his death—on a tennis court—on Saturday, 24 November 1984. • In September 1985, Virginia Perger was charged by Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Newell of the major crime squad. He arraigned her for wilfully and corruptly ‘making false statements in respect to the conduct of a number of people’. In court the following month Perger’s barrister, David Rofe QC, said Perger had been telling the truth and suggested the case might be a lengthy one ‘because we will want to examine many of the witnesses’. On 3 March 1986, word went around that Perger was going to change her plea; Rofe and Perger’s solicitors


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withdrew from the case and her new solicitor, Christopher Murphy, told the court four days later that there was no truth in the Love Boat story, and that his client wanted to offer a total and unqualified apology to the people she may have caused discomfort to. From his desk as housing and arts minister, one would doubt that Frank Walker might have been very forgiving. Perger pleaded guilty and on 15 May Judge Alistair Muir said he was satisfied she was repentant and placed her on a two-year good behaviour bond. No charges in connection with the Love Boat incident were levelled against Meissner or any other person. They had done their job well, and collected what was left of their sixty thousand pieces of silver. • John Robert Arthur Dowd was thirty-five when he won the seat of Lane Cove for the Liberal Party on Saturday, 8 February 1975. Like Abe Saffron, he was an alumnus of Fort Street Boys High School, but he then took law at Sydney University, became a solicitor in 1963, and was admitted to the Bar in 1967. He kept winning his parliamentary seat until he retired from politics in May 1991. Not long after his elevation to leader of the opposition in 1981, I interviewed him for a magazine article I was writing. He spoke freely about visits a political powerbroker had made to Peter Abeles’ TNT headquarters at Redfern to have meetings with the corrupt former premier Askin. The comings and goings at that building were closely observed—and photographed—by Commonwealth Police, who had by then moved their Sydney headquar-


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ters to the second TNT tower building next door. Dowd suggested that the purpose of the talks was ‘to pick up the keys to the safe, without which you cannot run the state of New South Wales’. Dowd added: ‘Look, it doesn’t make much difference which political party forms the government in New South Wales, because the real power lies in the hands of an extra-parliamentary group; they really set the state’s agenda.’ I asked the opposition leader what would have happened if he won the election. We went ‘off the record’ for a while. (It all went back ‘on the record’ for me when we talked about it again in 2005.) He opened up with the most remarkable statement: ‘I cannot become Premier of New South Wales!’ A green journalist might think there was some deep, dark, hidden corruption Dowd knew would surface to ensure he never got the top job. I was far more cynical, and I put it to him that he couldn’t become premier because they had nothing on him. He agreed. ‘They’ve tried to set me up with small boys, big boys, small girls, big girls, even old hags’, he said. ‘None of it worked.’ It was classic Saffron ‘sexual profiling’ for blackmail. I suggested to him that powerful forces were at work against him. Who exactly were these people, this ‘extra-parliamentary group’ holding the ‘keys to the safe’? I can now reveal the answer he then gave me. ‘You know who I’m referring to,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m sure I do’, I replied, ‘but I just want to be certain we’re both talking about the same people’. So he told me: ‘Sir Peter Abeles, Sir Arthur George, Sir Paul Strasser, John Charody, Abe Saffron and a few others.’ We


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were talking about the same old gang, the gang I had dubbed ‘The Brotherhood’. Dowd had learned from James McCartney Anderson, who contacted him in 1979 after the falling-out with Saffron, that Deputy Police Commissioner Bill Allen and Abe Saffron had wanted Anderson to ‘get some blackmail dirt’ on Dowd, to make him vulnerable to their pressures, to compromise him to their corrupt ways. Dowd was a bright lawyer with a reputation for honesty and was clearly a politician on the way up, and they were willing to invest in a bit of future insurance as far as he was concerned. In Dowd’s version of the story, Anderson had said: ‘Allen contacted Saffron, who contacted me, to find out what Dowd’s “preferences” were.’ It ended in superb irony: Anderson gave Dowd a copy of the ‘second set’ of Saffron’s books and Dowd passed the material on to the National Crimes Authority. These books would eventually provide the evidence to send Saffron to jail on tax fraud charges. But Dowd was harassed for a long time: among many treats, the family cat was killed, its mangled body thrown on the front lawn; and the numberplates on his car were removed when it was in a locked garage. Saffron had rid himself of one ‘troublesome attorney’ (Walker), and had undoubtedly contributed to prevent another prominent lawyer, Dowd, from becoming premier of New South Wales. But Saffron’s victory was not complete in Dowd’s case: John Dowd served as AttorneyGeneral in the Greiner Government from 1988 to 1991. Both Walker and Dowd went on to become judges, their


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experiences at the sharp end of the rough-and-tumble of NSW politics no doubt giving them a clearer understanding of how the city, the state and, indeed, Australia, really worked. [[boxbegin]]

MY BRUSH WITH INFAMY: ABE SEEKS MY COUNSEL In 1981, as an alderman (as councillors were then titled) on the Sydney City Council, I found myself chairing the committee that oversees development applications. My full-time job was editing a sizeable trade union monthly paper, so life got a bit hectic at times. One afternoon, on my way out of the office to attend a meeting at the Town Hall, the phone rang. ‘Saffron here, Alderman Reeves’, said the soft voice. I was, of course, surprised. Abe Saffron would have had to be living in outer Mongolia to be unaware of my interest in him. But we had never met or spoken to each other. ‘What can I do for you?’ I asked. ‘I have a problem with a small development application’, he replied. ‘I wondered if you could pop over to my office so we can discuss it?’ ‘At Lodge 44 Motel?’ I queried. ‘Yes’, he said. There was no way I would meet any developer on a one-to-one basis, and given my knowledge of Saffron’s propensity for setting up blackmail scenarios I quietly suggested an alternative. We meet, I said, the next morning at nine o’clock at the Town Clerk’s office, where we could look at the files, consult the city planner and discuss the problem. He quietly agreed.


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I made the arrangements at the Town Hall. Saffron’s application for a change of use for a building in Surry Hills from ‘storing’ gaming machines to ‘storing and repairing’ gaming machines had been rejected by the planning department. The city planner, John Doran, said the application form looked like it had been filled in with a ‘thumbnail dipped in tar’ and was barely legible. With minor changes the application could be approved, but there were a few small problems as it stood. A new, revised application was required. At the appointed time I waited with John Doran and Town Clerk Leon Carter in his superbly decorated office on the first floor of the Town Hall. Saffron was about twenty minutes late, apologetic, immaculately dressed, except for the fact he had ‘last night’s shirt’ on. Only men who had not made it home would detect that. Nine o’clock appointments were probably not high in the preferences of this night dweller. We discussed the problem, I gave him the advice I’d been given, and that should have been the end of the meeting. But (audaciously) I asked how his son Alan was? ‘He’s a problem, that lad’, he said. ‘He doesn’t quite have the business sense I had hoped for him.’ We then chatted as though we were old friends about the cigarette vending machine business Abe had set his son up in. Abe had supplied the cigarettes—cost-free to Alan—so all the young Saffron had to do was fill the machines and remove the money, at one hundred per cent profit. ‘But didn’t he send that business broke?’ I asked. ‘Yes, he did’, said Abe. We discussed a few other ‘family matters’ and then went our separate ways. It was quite a


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bizarre meeting, but at least I had avoided a situation in which a bribe—or some sexual favour—would be offered to me. Some of his business partners were a little more upfront with their bribe attempts. A development application for 203 Victoria Street, Kings Cross (opposite Juanita Nielsen’s old house) had been lodged by a company in which Arthur George, Paul Strasser and John Charody were involved. A bit of digging showed that Abe Saffron was also listed as the ratepayer. There was local opposition to the plans, and as the development exceeded a few of the building code requirements there was valid reason for the council to reject it. A minister in the Wran Government, Rex ‘Buckets’ Jackson, invited me to lunch to discuss an unrelated matter—this was well before he was disgraced and jailed for taking bribes to arrange the early release of prisoners from jail. At the Pavilion restaurant in the park across from the Art Gallery of New South Wales we made small talk for a while: Buckets was waiting on another person to arrive. John Charody, the frontman for the ‘Askin Knights’, turned out to be the third man, and talk moved quickly to our city council ALP caucus’s consideration of the Victoria Street development. It was a set-up by Jackson, and I politely and quickly excused myself from the lunch. Some weeks later I was stranded by an air traffic controllers’ strike during a business trip to Melbourne. On my return Charody rang to say he’d been trying to contact me: he had wanted to send Sir Peter Abeles’ private jet to collect me and bring me back to Sydney, where the development application was still under consid-


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eration. This, I told him, was outrageous, and if he ever offered me a bribe again he’d be talking to the police and his name would grace the front pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. He said he was at a loss to understand my reaction to his offer; after all, he said, the Premier had used the private jet to take his annual holidays when they were threatened with delay by a pilots’ strike. ‘That’s him and this is me’, I said. ‘Heed my warning.’ I reported to the next council meeting that the development application had to be refused because it had been tainted by an attempt at coercion. It was unanimously rejected by the meeting, only to be later approved by a state government-appointed body. That’s Sydney for you. [[boxend]]


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13 TAKEOVER BID: TOP COP SEEKS MONOPOLY ON GRAFT PAYMENTS Takeover bid

‘B ILL’ W ILLIAM A LLAN Ruthven Allen had enjoyed a meteoric career in the NSW Police Force before he made a move against Abe Saffron. Popular mythology in Sydney has it that Allen was in league with Saffron, both of them bribing an honest cop to get him out of Saffron’s hair. Even the National Crime Authority pursued this belief through ultimately unsuccessful court cases. It can now be told that this in fact was not the case. Allen, acting in league with James McCartney Anderson, set about taking control of the graft payments to police, which had long been tightly controlled within Saffron’s very personal domain. To fully understand how this happened, you need to understand how the large-scale corruption of police worked. For that we can turn to, among other documents, the testimony of one of its perpetrators, Jim Anderson himself. •

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When Anderson fell out with Saffron at the end of the 1970s, he talked to anyone who would listen to him about the criminality of his former boss, invariably implicating himself in some of the illicit activities he described. In September and October 1983, he gave evidence at the coronial inquest into the disappearance—and presumed death—of Juanita Nielsen. In November he fronted the NSW Parliamentary Select Committee on Prostitution, and later spent many long interview sessions with the National Crime Authority. At every session he ‘dumped’ on his old boss, Abe Saffron. He was clearly a very angry man. Anyone who thought the break between the two men was inconsequential had misread their tea leaves. At one stage, according to a NSW Police intelligence report, Anderson was looking to hire a hit man to have Saffron killed. Detective Sergeant Jim Slade recorded in crime intelligence reports on 13 and 17 August 1981 that an informer had told him of the potential contract. Slade and Senior Constable Withers interviewed Anderson about the matter some five weeks later. Anderson denied the allegation, as one would. He said later there had been attempts on his life: an attack with poison pellets fired or injected into his shoulder (he also claimed he was dying from the effects of this), a petrol bomb in a restaurant, and a car bomb. At the Juanita Nielsen inquest in October 1983 Anderson said under oath that, over a ten-year period, Saffron had paid out ‘millions of dollars’ to senior police, including Jim Pyne who, since 1972, was an assistant commissioner, having earlier been the officer in charge of licensing—Saffron’s main area of concern. Pyne had


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been handed two parcels by Saffron, each containing $5000 (around $37,740), claimed Anderson. According to Anderson’s evidence at the Nielsen inquest, Saffron had also paid $3000 ($20,021) to Detective Sergeant Brian Ballard, one of the officers who had investigated Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance. Large sums of money in paper parcels were paid to other police at regular Friday afternoon meetings in his presence, Anderson told the inquest. The money was spread among a number of police, including the licensing sergeant, Cameron (whom Anderson did not identify in any more detail), the chief of the special licensing squad, Sergeant Keith Dunlop, and a former licensing squad officer, Jim Maloney. Jim’s wife Neathia Anderson also told the inquest that during the period under question very large sums of cash stored in boxes and parcels, which she understood belonged to Saffron, were kept at her home. As was the usual response in those days to any allegation of police misbehaviour, the government ordered the police to investigate Anderson’s claims. The police inquiry was headed by Deputy Commissioner John Perrin and assisted by Executive Chief Superintendent Russ Sadler. Anderson said he would welcome a federal inquiry, but would not cooperate with a state-based investigation. ‘I have said I will not be interviewed by or give information to NSW police’, he told Perrin and Sadler. Saffron, of course, willingly took part, denying the allegations completely, but Anderson stood his ground and refused to talk to the police. The Perrin–Sadler report hit the deck on Tuesday, 22 February 1983. Police Minister Peter Anderson (not a relative of Big Jim) told parliament


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that Anderson’s allegations had all proved to be ‘unsubstantiated and false’. The report said there was no evidence that any of the police and former police Anderson had made accusations against had ‘in any way’ been guilty of improper conduct. Like Saffron, undoubtedly, they had denied any corrupt money had changed hands. Nobody seemed to ask, however, why or how Saffron’s premises continued on a daily basis to openly flout liquor laws, drug laws, prostitution laws, and probably a few other laws. Anderson claimed to the various authorities to whom he was prepared to talk over this period that, in effect, two systems of corrupt payments to police operated in relation to Saffron’s clubs. One was run by Saffron and involved regular payments to buy immunity from the licensing laws. A 1994 National Crime Authority report summed that system up, saying: It was notorious in the 1970s that licensed premises in Kings Cross in which Saffron and Anderson were involved operated with apparent immunity from licensing laws. Referring to that period, Anderson told his bankruptcy hearing in 1984: ‘In those days there was a general understanding that Mr Saffron’s establishments could basically do as they wanted in the licensing field without any fear of hindrance.’

The other system was run by Anderson and senior club staff. It involved ad hoc payments to solve particular ‘problems’, such as patrons going to the police following assaults by club bouncers. Anderson was never (publicly, at least) asked to identify the police he made these ad


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hoc payments to. A staffer in the clubs in the early 1970s told me the money all went to a particular officer at the Darlinghurst Police Station, who dispersed it to the appropriate officers and even to politicians. My informant said one particular Darlinghurst detective was a frequent visitor to the Venus Room. An example of the immunity from licensing breaches that Saffron enjoyed was referred to in a later court case— Anderson’s bankruptcy hearing. Anderson was asked: ‘With you as general manager of these clubs, including the Venus Room, it traded past midnight, did it not?’ To which he replied: ‘Yes, sir, that’s correct, with police approval.’ This was in the times when licensing approval hours were from 6 p.m. to midnight. At other hearings Anderson explained the ‘two-tier’ system which operated at the licensed premises owned by Saffron: the official licence fee was calculated on the declared liquor trade of a given establishment; that figure did not include, it appears, liquor sold illegally, out-of-hours. ‘Then you’re allowed to trade late’, Anderson continued, ‘by paying the licensing police for a two-hour “late go” or a three-hour “late go” or anything else that you want.’ Elsewhere he referred to the system as ‘semi-legal’. Anderson also explained that a great deal of liquor was supplied illegally to the clubs from the Saffron-owned Crown Street Liquor Store. As no records were kept of these illegal purchases, Big Jim said, Saffron gained ‘considerable financial advantage’ as they were not included in the calculations for licensing fees for the clubs. Anderson explained he made a weekly trip to Saffron’s office to hand over money ‘to be used for payments to


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buy immunity’. If he arrived late afternoon, the police who received payments would be there. He said he wasn’t concerned about running into the police officers: ‘I just preferred not to be there.’ Asked whether he preferred to leave ‘that side of things’ to Mr Saffron, Anderson replied: ‘That’s what he was paid for, Sir; that was his job to look after that part.’ Things began to get complicated when Bill Allen came into the picture. Born on Sunday, 14 May 1922, he joined the NSW Police when he turned seventeen, and had climbed through the ranks to become a Special Crime Squad officer by 1971. In April 1979, just before Allen’s fifty-seventh birthday, Police Minister and Premier Neville Wran ignored the advice of his police commissioner, Mervyn Woods, and appointed Bill Allen Metropolitan Superintendent over the heads of sixteen more senior officers. That move placed Allen in charge of a number of squads that were (as the Sydney Morning Herald reported later): ‘sensitive to corruption—the CID, the CIU, 21 Division, Gaming and Licensing’. Soon after, Mr Wran promoted him to become one of five assistant commissioners. Wran ceded the ministerial police portfolio to Bill Crabtree, who in turn ignored the advice of a new commissioner, Jim Lees, in August 1981 and promoted Allen to the rank of Deputy Commissioner. When Lees announced he would be retiring, Allen saw the top job was within his grasp. But politics intervened—this time against his good fortunes. Crabtree was dumped as Police Minister and his replacement, former police prosecutor Peter Anderson, sent Allen to face graft allegations before the Police Tribunal.


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[[boxbegin]]

ASKIN DIES: HE DIDN’T TAKE IT WITH HIM A couple of old maxims were proven correct yet again after Askin’s death from hypostatic pneumonia on Wednesday, 9 September 1981, aged seventy-four. The first suggests that only the good die young; the other that you can’t take it with you. Askins had been grafting money for decades, and his estate was later valued at just under two million dollars ($5,950,843). Maybe his wife Mollie was the real grafter, or maybe Askin had been a sharing, caring husband, for her estate was assessed in 1984 as $3.725 million ($8,711,420). [[boxend]]

Allen had made contact with Saffron even before 1972— the year in which Jim Pyne became Assistant Commissioner and a big-ticket item on the Saffron payroll. Allen would have been aware of that association. Therefore his decision in 1981 to move Licensing Squad Sergeant Warren Molloy—widely recognised as honest and incorruptible—to the Licensing Squad that covered Saffron’s bailiwick, the Kings Cross area, was seen as highly unusual. Saffron’s business relied in large part on corrupting police, and placing honest Molloy onto his patch obviously spelled trouble. There no doubt would have been some grumbling in the Saffron ranks—as well as those of the police on Abe’s payroll—questioning what was behind the Allen move. Molloy got an early taste of Saffron’s style. He later testified that just after he first joined the Licensing Squad in 1973 (not in the Cross, but the eastern suburbs), Saffron had offered him a bribe of $70 ($531) and a monthly payment to ‘do something’ for


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some of Saffron’s friends in the liquor business. He turned down the offer. Anderson was to explain later how the corrupt system coped with a copper who refused to become part of the ‘franchise’ arrangements. In one of his many interviews with the NCA, Anderson discussed the arrangements at Gilligans, a club he ran for Saffron at Bondi Beach: It [Gilligans] probably ran till all hours unless Warren Molloy was on, then you would close up until you got the message he’d gone back home. The police would follow him home and then say okay, you can start running again. Other police, like from Waverley, would say, like, you know he’d come down at ten o’clock, I forget what the licence was there, 10, or 12, ’cos Warren used to come down and check that you’re closing up and then you’d get a call from the police saying ‘Is that you Jim? Sweet, go for your life’, and you went for your life.

As said previously, approved licensing hours were from 6 p.m. to midnight, but the clubs would keep trading until eight or nine in the morning, provided they had the business, and ‘providing Warren Molloy wasn’t on’. It was only with Molloy they had problems, Anderson said. ‘When he was on duty you ran by the book. Which you had to do, so as not to embarrass Waverley Licensing, and then once he’d gone you could open up and nobody else would come.’ When Molloy came around, they would shut the doors, turn out the lights—with the customers inside—so when the police car drove past ‘for all pretence and purposes we were closed. Then he’d go back up to Waverley and sign off and whatever he does when he


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goes back.’ Asked who had made these arrangements with the police, Anderson replied: ‘Abe.’ ‘That wasn’t your job?’ ‘No.’ Having failed in his attempt to directly bribe Molloy— who refused the ‘bent penny for a crooked copper’ —Saffron spoke with Molloy’s boss, Bill Allen. They eventually agreed to what Saffron believed would be a foolproof way of entrapping the intractable Molloy: Saffron would give Allen money, which Allen would then pass on to Molloy. That scheme went into action in August 1981 when Molloy called into his senior’s office for a chat before going on holidays. Molloy recalled the incident later: He [Allen] got up and said have a good holiday and shook my hand and passed from the palm of his hand into my hand a folded envelope. I said: ‘What’s this?’ He said: ‘Never mind.’ I said: ‘I don’t want it. What is it? What have I done?’ He said: ‘Take it and have a good holiday.’

It was the first of five envelopes, each containing $500 ($1555), that Allen passed to Molloy, who later claimed he did not know what to do about the situation. The second envelope was passed to him in Allen’s office, Molloy claimed, the third when Molloy visited Allen’s new home at St Ives, and the fourth in the company of members of parliament and other guests at the Commercial Travellers’ Association dinner. The envelope was handed over after Molloy and Allen had discussed problems at Tina’s restaurant, which was owned by Saffron.


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Molloy had told Allen that Tina’s had been ‘totally disregarding’ the liquor laws and that he could not show leniency. Allen had replied that Darlinghurst detectives wanted Molloy to ‘go easy’ on Tina’s because the licensee was ‘a good informer’. Molloy recalled that Allen had then told him to enforce the law as he saw fit. Rather audaciously, Saffron visited Bill Allen at least seven times during 1981 at police headquarters in College Street. A former superintendent, Lionel Killock, was later to testify that he could hardly believe his eyes when Abe Saffron caught the lift down with him at headquarters. Killock said that, on emerging on the ground floor, he went immediately to the visitors’ book and was astonished to see that Saffron had signed himself in to visit the then Deputy Commissioner, Bill Allen. The wily Killock took a photograph of the entry, ‘just in case the visitors’ book met a sticky end’. The upshot of these visits—and the entire association between Allen, Saffron and Molloy—would bubble on for years in tribunals and courts. Of more immediate interest was the real relationships that existed between the three men, particularly when James McCartney Anderson’s name was thrown into the volatile mix. It required a bit of digging through fine details of the Juanita Nielsen inquest transcripts and the 1994 NCA Report to put the jigsaw together. When asked at the inquest, on 29 September 1983, whether all the money that he and the club managers paid to Saffron actually went to the police, Anderson became quite agitated. ‘Good heavens!’ he barked. ‘That’s what caused all the trouble in Kings Cross: he [Saffron] was skimming off


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the top.’ It was an extraordinary revelation. Anderson explained it was common knowledge that if a club was paying, say, $1500 ($5880) a week to Saffron for the ‘twotiered licensing system’, he was paying only around $200 ($784) of that to the police. ‘There was a bit of concern at the official level’, Anderson told the NCA. ‘There seemed to be a bad case of evaporation and nobody was quite sure where the evaporation was happening but it was finally established it was happening in Saffron’s area.’ Evaporation is invariably a matter of concern when packets of used banknotes are vanishing into thin air. In further guarded statements, it was clear that Anderson discussed the matter with senior police—he described them as ‘certain officials well known to the eastern suburbs’—and that they compared lists of what the clubs were paying to Saffron for protection and what Saffron was paying to the police for providing it. Anderson discussed the matter with Bill Allen, according to confidential evidence given to the NCA by an informer, Lionel Okrim, and the plan was hatched to ‘regain for the police their rightful share’ of the payments. This was when Allen moved ‘honest cop’, Licensing Sergeant Warren Molloy, from his rounds in the eastern suburbs into the Kings Cross area and gave him free rein to crack down on any licensed premises he found to be in breach of the laws—including, particularly, Abe Saffron’s. Molloy’s vigorous enforcement would discredit Saffron’s ability to be the effective middleman in buying immunity from these licensing laws. Allen would then step in and collect the payments (using a bagman, possibly) direct from the licensed premises, restoring immunity and


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removing Molloy to another post when the arrangement was working smoothly. Saffron’s 1981 meetings with Allen, Anderson told the NCA, were to try to negotiate ways of ‘getting things back to normal’. The payments to Molloy were made to enable Allen to move him out of the area where he was being highly effective without Molloy being able to protest. But as Robbie Burns came to realise around two hundred years earlier: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain For promis’d joy!

Ironically, the only one of the conspirators who might have experienced some ‘promised joy’ from the events that unfolded was James McCartney Anderson. For Saffron and Allen the scheme definitely ‘gang aft agley’. Things went seriously awry. First, between October and November 1981, came an investigation into the association between Allen and Saffron conducted by Police Commissioner James Lees— one of his last functions before retiring. Arising out of that, on Tuesday, 1 December 1981, Bill Allen was suspended from his police duties. Then came the Police Tribunal inquiry into the affair, with hearings from January to March 1982, headed by Judge Edmund Theodore ‘Ted’ Perrignon, who was to describe Saffron as ‘unsavoury and involved in illicit activity’. As well as his association with Saffron, Allen was examined on questionable funding of


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a family holiday to the United States, and on his association with Jack Rooklyn. Judge Perrignon’s final report in April 1982 was inconclusive about the purpose of the meetings, but found that Allen, who at the time had been poised to take over the job of Police Commissioner, ‘has had a recent association with Abe Saffron and in the course of and arising from that association William Allan Ruthven Allen did act in a manner likely to bring discredit upon the Police Force of New South Wales’. Further: It is clearly established on evidence that A.G. Saffron is a person of ill repute in the community. It is not to the point that his actual character is claimed to be different. His Counsel presented many arguments to support his contention that Mr Saffron was in fact a person of good character but the question is whether he is of such a reputation that the repeated association with him by Mr Allen was likely to bring discredit on the Police Force. He was described by experienced and senior officers as being of ‘unsavoury’ reputation, known for his involvement in illicit activities. The Tribunal . . . finds that it is established that Mr Saffron has a reputation said to be unsavoury and of being involved in illicit activities. It agrees with their disapproval of Mr Allen’s actions in seeing Mr Saffron as he did . . . It is to be observed that Mr Allen himself accepted without question that Mr Saffron was a man of bad repute. He said in the preliminary report and investigations: ‘He had always had a reputation of being involved in vice and I still wouldn’t trust him . . .’ It is relevant on the question of suspicion to observe that counsel for Mr Allen chose directly to ask Mr Saffron whether he had paid any money or bribe to Mr Allen.


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On that point it must be said that there is no evidence that any money was paid to Mr Allen by Mr Saffron . . . Whereas the impropriety of holding such meetings has been established, there can be no finding that impropriety or misconduct actually occurred at those meetings but there remains in all the circumstances a high degree of suspicion that such did occur . . .

Allen had been given free air travel and overseas holidays, and the tribunal reckoned that his association with the likes of Saffron, Rooklyn and others was likely to ‘bring discredit’ on the force. The tribunal did find that Allen had paid Molloy $2500 ‘in an attempt to compromise him and to render him susceptible to “improper influence”’, and that he had lied to the tribunal. Allen’s glittering career as a corrupt cop was finished. He was allowed to accept demotion to sergeant first class and resign with a lump-sum superannuation payout of $37,000 ($98,976) and an indexed pension of $17,000 ($45,476) a year. Had he been sacked he would have received nothing. Nice work if you can get it—for a bent cop. The government accepted the arrangement immediately on the same day as the tribunal’s report was handed down on 21 April 1982. A month later, Solicitor-General Mary Gaudron advised the government there were insufficient grounds to begin criminal proceedings against anyone at the inquiry, meaning Allen, Saffron or Molloy. Another superb irony: Anderson was still making accusations against Saffron, but his grand scheme to take over


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the graft operation with Allen was shot down in flames with the once high-flying copper’s career. For Saffron— for a short while, at least—it appeared to be back to business as usual. But he should perhaps have paid more heed to Robbie Burns’ verse before toasting his success. • Just over one hour after the release of the tribunal’s report, Warren Molloy and I discussed the events while sharing a rogan josh lamb curry and a glass or three of white wine at my Kings Cross flat. I was preparing an article for Penthouse magazine, and he’d agreed to be interviewed. He was about to leave for a month’s holiday on Queensland’s Fraser Island—a million miles from the extraordinary stress he’d been under in Sydney for the past year. In his twenty-five years in the force he’d been insulated, he said, from the sorts of pressures exerted on police who spend most of their careers in the Sydney metropolitan area. His hands trembled a little as he turned the pages of the report. We were living in exciting times. ‘I’d heard stories, of course’, he told me, ‘but I just never experienced anything in the way of corruption myself. In fact, when I was on the motorcycle patrols in 1973, I arrested the first driver who offered me a bribe’. Molloy was considered by his mates to be a knockabout sort of bloke. He had no political affiliations, and his recreation was around surf boats and surf clubs. He lived in a world where a bit of boozing and fun is the norm. To his dismay he was to discover that in the NSW Police Force there was ‘institutionalised corruption’ and that hundreds of police officers had accepted money.


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‘I’m certainly not a wowser or a moralist’, he said. ‘And I don’t like the tag I was given of “cleaning up” Kings Cross.’ But what he found in that seedy, sordid district surprised, shocked and scandalised him, he told me. Clubs without kitchens—alcohol was supposed to be served only with meals—and other flagrant breaches of liquor laws made him question how the situation had been allowed to get so out of hand. It was Saffron’s Raft Room—the renamed Venus Room—that provided the greatest shock to Molloy. There he saw junk-soaked kids—boys and girls—hawking their bodies in a trade that most reasonable people accept is only fair enough for adults. Molloy said it turned his stomach and it was his actions that later closed the club on a court order. Molloy was genuinely confused and a little frightened by his discoveries during his ‘magical mystery’ tour of duty in Kings Cross: Allen put me there and he knew what sort of a bloke I was, so it never entered my head that he would want me to do anything other than do the job of an honest copper. I went to the job as I have always worked on the force: with a straight bat. When I first transferred into the Cross friends in and out of the force warned me against the possibility of physical violence: ‘You’re handling some very rough customers’, I was told.

Molloy drew some comfort from a snub-nosed .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver strapped to his calf as he went about his job of bringing the clubs and licensed premises into line with the law.


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‘I had no axe to grind and I wasn’t out to destroy any personalities. I was determined to do my job without fear or favour and to just let whoever wanted to make moves show their colours.’ The first person to do that was his friend Bill Allen in what was a bitter disappointment to Molloy. ‘My whole world tumbled down’, he told me. As a man who genuinely valued mateship, in this he faced the biggest dilemma of his career: mateship versus integrity. It was on this rock of conscience that many a young police officer has foundered when exposed to corruption that would otherwise have been reported. ‘They were pretty big things to weigh up’, Molloy said. ‘I had to weigh up my principles, and in the balance I found my respect for the police force and my responsibility to the community were bigger than my friendship with Bill Allen.’ And so he laid his complaint, and eventually his friend—who was within a whisper of moving into the top job in the force—was disgraced. But Molloy was told by his superiors that his return to Kings Cross would ‘not be in his best interests’. Saffron would be left to run his empire of entertainment palaces, his credibility battered but otherwise everything intact. ‘If it’s a game of winners and losers’, Molloy said over the last of our rogan josh, ‘the first prize in this rubber has gone to Abe Saffron’. • The National Crime Authority had been watching the Allen–Saffron–Molloy affair closely as part of their brief from the Commonwealth and NSW governments to inves-


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tigate Abraham Gilbert Saffron. The NCA was anxious to score a big win to convince some of its doubting political critics that it was not just an expensive, legalistic white elephant. It saw a possibility for advancing against Saffron if it could persuade James McCartney Anderson to talk. At first Big Jim was reluctant to do so, but over time the NCA persuaded him that it was almost certainly the only organisation in Australia that could really get at Saffron. Clearly the NSW Police was too compromised to deal with Saffron and, the NCA thought, some parts of the Commonwealth Police might have been compromised by the transfer of former NSW police into sensitive areas of that federal force. So by the mid-1980s the NCA sharpened it focus on Saffron in two areas: tax fraud (which will be discussed in the next chapter), and the systematic bribery of police to ensure that licensing and other laws were not ‘vigorously enforced’ in premises in which he had an interest. But what the NCA also discovered were claims of arson. In its 1994 report it noted that: Anderson had given information to Molloy in 1981 and to a coronial inquest in August 1983 that Saffron committed arson and insurance fraud in the case of the Creole [nightclub] fire. Information provided by Anderson to the Authority was a factor in its decision to investigate the fires.

But the authority dropped the arson investigation into eight suspicious fires and related insurance fraud in Sydney between 1979 and 1982 because it could not build


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a winnable case. Arsonists, it probably learned, generally burn the evidence of their crime. Not included on the NCA list of burned premises was a seedy private hotel above Lee Ramsay’s Paradise Club. The building was owned by Saffron. In the mid-1970s a fire gutted some of the building and five women lost their lives in the blaze. They were all strippers from the Pussy Galore and Paradise clubs, turning a few numbers in the beds between their numbers on the stages. There was no suggestion the fire had been deliberately lit, but the rear emergency fire door in the building had been locked— illegally—and the girls simply could not escape the blaze. Tubby Black’s Pussy Galore was the only club in the Darlinghurst Road strip that had been ungraded to proper fire safety standards. Building inspectors from the Sydney City Council, who were supposed to report on substandard buildings, were regularly paid graft by Saffron and the other club managers to ignore fire safety hazards of their premises. It was only a matter of luck over the years that a massive human tragedy had not occurred as a result. The relationship between the NCA and Anderson was a tense, prickly affair from the outset. The authority recognised that Anderson had a credibility problem, but accepted that he, probably more than anyone else, knew the innermost details of how Saffron’s businesses operated. And nobody else with such knowledge was putting their hands up to make statements to the NCA. Big Jim was the authority’s star informant on the tax and police bribery allegations. Officials were anxious that he would ‘last the distance’ of what could evolve into protracted legal haggling in both


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cases. A shiver of nervousness passed through the organisation on Wednesday, 2 April 1986, when ‘very reliable information’ came in that Anderson was planning to leave Australia and not return until the hearing of charges against Saffron was over and done with. The intelligence suggested that Anderson had been approached by a person, whose identity was not known but who was acting on behalf of Saffron, requesting that Anderson ‘withdraw’. Anderson had already been overseas a month earlier, so the NCA issued a summons to its star witness to appear before an internal hearing. He did that, gave assurances that his earlier statements about Saffron were correct, and reassured the officials he would appear at any committal hearings or trials of the charges against Saffron. Anderson had reason to be nervous: during this 1987 association with the NCA, when it had become clear he was supporting its actions against Saffron, he was attacked at a Kings Cross nightclub in May and was also shot at six times at his Vaucluse home in September. After that, the NCA placed him on a witness protection program. The police bribery allegations were to underscore one of the NCA’s star performances. In pressing ahead to build a specific case that Saffron and Allen had bribed Molloy, the authority appeared not to have taken into account NSW Solicitor-General Gaudron’s advice that criminal proceedings against the pair would fail. Perhaps it should have thought a moment about Robbie Burns’ timely warning, too. It was early 1987 before the NCA was ready to move. Investigating officers had spoken with Anderson around thirteen times, and had taken formal statements from him on 24 February and 5 March relating to police


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bribery. For reasons never clearly explained, the NCA waited until Thursday, 12 March 1987, when Saffron was in Perth, before moving to arrest him. The Sydney Morning Herald later reported that Saffron had been in bed in his beloved Raffles Hotel when the NCA and Commonwealth Police came for him. They took him to the East Perth Court, charged him with conspiring to bribe a police officer (Molloy) and obstructing the course of justice, and extradited him back to Sydney. Bill Allen was similarly charged in Sydney. As always in legal processes, there were delays in getting the matter heard. During the hearing, which finally took place on Thursday, 30 June 1988, at the Central Court, Allen’s counsel, Clive Evatt, accused Molloy of having made up the story of the bribes because he had ‘turned’ on Allen. ‘You know this evidence you have given about Mr Allen has caused him considerable harm and injury’, the lawyer said. Molloy quietly denied Evatt’s accusation, saying he did not enjoy giving evidence against Allen, who had become a close friend during the time they worked together. ‘It has also caused me a lot more harm. I have had death threats made through my sixteen-year-old daughter, who has had medical treatment. I feel for Mr Allen but I have to think about my family.’ Molloy said he had not known what to do when Allen, his boss and a man he admired, made him take the money. ‘I didn’t know where to turn. I had no precedent. The only precedent I had was a sergeant making allegations against the hierarchy of the Police Force and being carted away to a mental hospital,’ Molloy said, referring to the 1971 case of police


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whistleblower Philip Arantz. However, Molloy did admit that Allen had never asked him to go easy on Saffron and had in fact supported his clampdown on illegal licensed premises. It had not been revealed, of course, that Allen’s ‘bigger picture’ was to bring discredit upon Saffron as the lynchpin of the corrupt system. Later there would be much discussion about the NCA’s reliance on a man of such dubious credibility as James McCartney Anderson, but in this case he was its chief witness. The authority’s report on the matter explained: The principal evidence linking Saffron with Allen’s bribery of Molloy came from Anderson. During cross-examination at the committal proceedings, Anderson showed little credibility. The magistrate dismissed the case. Despite appeals, this dismissal was ultimately upheld as far as Saffron was concerned.

• In 1992 Bill Allen received an eighteen-month jail sentence on five counts of bribing Molloy to turn a blind eye to Saffron’s business activities. The magistrate dismissed the ‘conspiring to bribe a police officer’ charge against Saffron, but he was not out of the NCA woodwork by a long shot: they had already started court action against him on the tax charges, at which James McCartney Anderson would again be a star witness. By then Warren Molloy had left the police force and had joined a private legal practice. At the time of writing this he had retired to live a life well away from the tumultuous events that brought him into very public view.


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14 TAXING TIMES: ABE DOES A ‘CAPONE’ WITH LITTLE BLACK BOOKS Taxing times

His organisation is a myriad of corporations. He uses people as agents or nominees and shields himself from criminal activity so that if it is detected, he will escape. Should this fail, he corrupts law enforcement officers so as to protect himself and his organisation. The profits derived from these activities are protected from tax as if they were legitimate, making use of the latest fraudulent device as readily as the legitimate. Costigan Royal Commission 1984, summary on Abraham Gilbert Saffron

IT’S POSSIBLY A bit unkind to compare Saffron with Al Capone: unlike the Chicago mobster, it’s never been proven that Saffron ever killed anyone or had anyone killed. There, though, the dissimilarities end. Both were into illicit liquor in a big way (in that, at least, Capone had Prohibition to use as an excuse, whereas Abe’s grog involvement was motivated purely by greed); both into prostitution and illegal gambling; both were engaged in massive corruption of police, politicians and officials; both [ 245 ]


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used coercive blackmail; and both were finally busted and jailed for tax evasion. The Costigan summary also said of Saffron: He is now in his waning years. There are reports that his successors are already in place, and that his power is ebbing. If so it is in no way a measure of effective law enforcement. To the contrary, he has escaped all endeavours of law enforcement agencies to bring him to book. Not the least of those he has escaped is the Australian Taxation Office.

When Costigan linked Abe to a tax avoidance scheme, his lawyers said, incongruously, that Saffron had never had anything to do with the Nugan Hand Bank. The Costigan reference to him didn’t mention the rogue merchant bank, but the statement was a lie. Saffron had certainly had at least one dealing with Nugan Hand. When the National Crime Authority was handed Costigan’s unfinished business in 1984, Saffron’s tax avoidance was made its highest priority. But the NCA had taken on a huge task: Costigan had collected nearly thirteen thousand pages of material from the Commonwealth Police and the state forces about Saffron and his companies, of which only sixty per cent had been collated. In addition, the Costigan summary noted the tax office had ‘vast holdings, and totally inadequate resources to handle them’. The NCA was advised that it would take many months to collect, collate and analyse all the material before it could conduct a ‘massive investigation’ of Saffron’s assets: ‘This should permit a major inroad to be made into his organisation, with beneficial results in other


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areas of criminal activity’, the Costigan summary said. The legal aim should be to establish an offence of conspiracy to defraud the [government of taxation] revenue, ‘and this should be the starting point’. The summary also warned of the scope of the task ahead: Gomorrah [Saffron] engages in substantial planning in the execution of his schemes, not the least his taxation evasion. Documents in possession of Costcom [Costigan commission] reveal that he requested from a merchant bank elaborate plans for the disposal of several of his companies to the bottom of the harbour. This is indicative of the planning generally undertaken by him and his advisers. Gomorrah’s [Saffron’s] organisation is substantial. The Costcom computer will produce, on request, a network revealing the corporate structures through which he works. There are hundreds of companies and businesses recorded. His methods and techniques vary from the crude to the sophisticated. The taxation frauds are generally those concocted by the likes of the merchant bank, and are as sophisticated as they can make them (which is often very sophisticated).

Costigan may have paved the way for the National Crime Authority’s detailed and technical analysis of Saffron’s tax fraud systems, but it was the redoubtable James McCartney Anderson who told the authority how it actually worked at the coalface. For Big Jim this had been a main topic of his conversations with various authorities and inquiries since his falling out with Abe. It was all quite simple once you got the hang of it. Each of the clubs had two sets of books: ‘white’ books, which were


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used for tax purposes, and ‘black’ books, which hid the rest of the cash. Money to pay off licensing officers and other police, for example, was entered in the black books. An entry in the Venus Room black book for 1979–80 showed a payment of $800 ($3012) a week for almost all of that financial year—it was listed under ‘R & P’. Anderson explained that this meant ‘rent and police’. He also explained the operation of white and black cash registers at the clubs. At Les Girls, for instance, the black (non-tax) till would be used on the door on Thursday to Saturday from around 11 p.m. until around 3 a.m to collect the $2 or $3 cover charge paid by each patron. At 3.30 a.m., when liquor sales were supposed to stop, the black till would be moved to the bar. All sales from then until the club closed at 6, 7 or even 8 a.m. would be entered on that till. This was the period Anderson quaintly called the ‘semi-legal’ trading hours, when the licensing police operated their ‘two-tier’ system of protection. There was more than one black till, and all the Saffron clubs had them, Anderson explained. After expenses were taken out, the black till contents were split sixty–forty between Saffron and Anderson—every day and night of the week, never a night off. Oh, how the money rolled in! Of course, Anderson’s admissions implicated himself as much as they did Saffron. In September 1983 the Australian Tax Office sent him a bill for $936,179.60 ($2,275,579.86) for unpaid taxes on the cash payments they figured he had taken himself. For Anderson, bankruptcy was the only practical way to solve his financial difficulties—his statement of affairs on 22 November


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showed a deficiency of debts over assets of $451,670.29 ($1,097,878.89). Bankruptcy provided Anderson with protection against a possible jail term for his tax fraud. The decision also meant appearances in the Bankruptcy Court, which provided him another platform from where he could safely continue his attack on Saffron. Abe Saffron would not be so fortunate. On Thursday, 14 November 1985, he was arrested and charged with conspiring to defraud the Commonwealth of tax between 1969 and 1981, and with twelve counts of making false declarations under the Tax Assessment Act. But it seems that all the legal processes in which Abe Saffron was involved moved slowly indeed. His first court appearance was not until nearly a year later, October 1986, before Magistrate Peter Norton. Saffron was back in the headlines. Sydney’s Castlereagh Street Local Court was told that on the day of his arrest Saffron had denied he kept a dual set of books, that he paid large bribes to police or that he was involved in letting out rooms to prostitutes for cash payments. Peter Hely QC opened the batting for the director of public prosecutions by revealing to the court that Saffron kept ‘black’ and ‘white’ books. He said Saffron ‘skimmed off’ cash from nightclubs and restaurants, and did not pay tax on that money. When Mrs Lynette Reid, a bookkeeper, took the stand she explained how she kept two separate sets of books and gave cash payments to Saffron and his former business partner, James McCartney Anderson. She made those payments from the daily takings of businesses such as the Carousel club, the Venus Room and La Bastille restaurant


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in the Kings Cross area. The Laramie, Showbiz and Garrison were other businesses where this method of bookkeeping was also used. (Magistrate Norton asked that the woman’s name not be published ‘in the public interest’; the veto on publication of her name was lifted when Mrs Reid was openly identified in a further court hearing. It was later revealed in Saffron’s trial that she had been granted indemnity from prosecution for her co-operation.) Amounts paid to Saffron and Anderson were taken from the safe and recorded in the daily takings book, referred to as ‘the bible’, which also listed expenses such as liquor purchases. Mrs Reid would write beside the amount ‘Jim’ or ‘JA’ for Anderson and ‘AS’ for Saffron. Saffron came to her office regularly and she’d hand him bundles of money. Sometimes she handed Saffron’s money to an associate of Abe’s whom she knew only as Tosha. (Tosha was in fact the man who had become Saffron’s close and trusted friend, Todor Makisovich.) Anderson then regaled the court with his detailed descriptions of the white and black books and tills, the two-tiered ‘semi-legal’ licensing arrangements, and payments of huge sums by Saffron to the police. He spoke of $1000 ($3920) a week being paid by prostitutes for access to the rooms above the Venus Room nightclub, and of more than $1700 ($6664) a week from the black tills being split between him, Saffron and police. Saffron also received $250 ($980) a week in rent for the Venus Room, and there was an extra $20 ($78.40) a week for health and building inspectors to turn blind eyes to the cockroach-infested kitchens and inadequate fire safety systems.


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In reply, Saffron’s lawyer Bruce Stratton QC told the court the dual bookkeeping system had been all Anderson’s doing, not Saffron’s. When one looked at the evidence, he said, ‘one wonders why Mr Anderson was in the witness box and Saffron is being prosecuted’. On the afternoon of Friday, 10 October 1986, Magistrate Norton decided there appeared to be ample evidence that could be accepted by a jury against the sixtyseven-year-old company director and committed Saffron for trial by jury in the District Court. In his usual quietly spoken way, Saffron said: ‘I am not guilty of any of these charges’. It took nearly a year for the District Court to begin. A jury of eight women and four men were sworn in for the trial, which opened at the end of August 1987. Peter Hely QC told the jury there was ‘clear, logical inevitability’ that the allegedly false accounting records for five Kings Cross establishments were a loss of revenue to the tax office. Bookkeeper Lynette Reid—her name no longer suppressed—again told the court how she kept two sets of books, gave Saffron around $1000 ($3200) a week in cash, gave money to Anderson, and that, for the 1980 financial year, there was a difference of around $10,000 ($32,615) in the totals between the two sets of records. Her evidence had the effect of corroborating much of what Jim Anderson had said about the tax rorts—which was of benefit to the NCA, as Anderson’s credibility had frequently come under challenge. The hearing dragged on into October, frequently bogging down in legal exchanges. The first jury was discharged after one such


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discourse; a second jury was sent packing after four more days of delays, legal argument and little evidence. ‘Saffron’s second trial is aborted’, shouted the Sydney Morning Herald headline the next day. Two weeks later, on Monday, 14 September 1987, it got underway for the third time, but was adjourned early because a juror fell ill. Another former bookkeeper, Ms Anne Marie Von Stroheim, told the jury that bundles of money marked ‘Mr S’ were placed in the safe at the Venus Room. Jim Anderson told his story again, claiming he was ‘Saffron’s courier’, taking large amounts of cash to his boss. Accountants and experts paraded through the witness box, with one saying the Venus Room reputedly showed a loss in 1978 despite its daily takings book showing a profit of $249,812 ($1,016,904) that year. Then it was Saffron’s turn. He quietly told the jury that he had received no money from the takings of the Kings Cross businesses in which he had an interest in the 1970s. But in his summing up for the prosecution, Peter Hely reminded the jury that Saffron had skimmed $202,000 ($373,975) from the takings of Les Girls cabaret alone between 1976 and 1980. The jury agreed with Hely and, on 5 November 1987, found Abraham Gilbert Saffron: ‘Guilty as charged, Your Honour.’ He was sentenced to three years’ jail, but he would go down fighting. He lodged an appeal, which had the desirable effect of keeping him out of jail for thirteen months. • While all the travails of his criminal prosecution were in progress, there was still the Saffron business ‘empire’ to


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take care of. The Venus Room had been renamed The Raft, but in June 1982 Saffron’s Abbey Investments—which owned the business—lost an appeal against the cancellation of its restaurant licence for the premises. Judge Herron at that appeal said pornography would not be too harsh a word to describe what went on at the ‘restaurant’—with male and female strippers providing entertainment of a ‘ribald and somewhat bizarre’ nature. In the game of winners and losers, that rubber went to Warren Molloy. • A joint sitting of the NSW Court of Appeal and the Court of Criminal Appeal was held to rule on Saffron’s tax evasion appeal and determine some points of law that arose during his trial. On 17 June 1988 the court reserved its decision and the good judges kept everyone waiting until 6 October, when they announced the Saffron appeal had failed. In a final, desperate bid to avoid the inevitable, Saffron then appealed for a reduction in the sentence. That too failed, and he took up residence at Long Bay jail on Thursday, 27 October 1988. As David Hardaker wrote in the Sun Herald: The million-dollar Vaucluse mansion is far, far away. So too is wife Doreen. No sign of luxury or love here. Instead there is a tiny cell, a cold steel hand basin and toilet. The most attention paid to prisoner Saffron will come from curious prison guards anxious to peer at their new celebrity captive. To be fanged on the Al Capone option— tax evasion—seemed somehow inadequate, considering


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the man’s reputation, even if the amount he owed on evaded tax—$1.5 million including penalties and interest between 1969 and 1981—was enormous.

It had taken four years, but finally the NCA had ‘got its man’. It hoped the kudos that would go with that achievement might dissuade a growing chorus of politicians from questioning its continued existence. The authority struggled on under a cloud of political doubt and budget cutbacks, never again achieving the success it had in the Saffron prosecution. In 1990 it took aim at Victorian businessman and Liberal Party powerbroker John Elliott, but failed to win a prosecution against him. It had made a powerful enemy. Elliott’s barrister, Robert Richter QC, accused the NCA of acting illegally: ‘They didn’t give a fuck’, he told a media gathering. ‘They are not accountable to anyone.’ It was a slow death: the NCA was finally replaced with the new Australian Crime Commission on 1 January 2003. • Of course, Saffron could have landed in jail for tax fraud many years before he did. It was thirty-nine years since David Molland Evans told Judge Lamaro and a Sydney Quarter Sessions jury of Saffron’s tax fraud at the old Roosevelt club. But no one listened then. Twenty-eight years later, in mid-1976, another Saffron bookkeeper, Ted Middleton, went to the tax office with his detailed knowledge of the dual sets of records, and the eight million dollars a year being laundered out of the Saffron Kings Cross enterprises. Again, nothing happened. No


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doubt Evans—who was described as ‘elderly’ at the time of his 1948 revelations—has long since shuffled off this crooked old joint, and Middleton’s whereabouts are unknown. He would have been fifty-one at the time of Saffron’s incarceration. Somewhere there would have been a sense of long-overdue vindication if either had been able to relish the moment. In June 1998 the court finally got to hear the charges that Saffron and ex-policeman Bill Allen had conspired to bribe Sergeant Warren Molloy ‘to act in a manner contrary to his duty’. Roger Gyles QC, appearing for the Director of Public Prosecutions, told Magistrate David Hyde of the five payments totalling $2500 that Allen had made to Molloy. Allen, in breach of police practice, had many meetings alone with Saffron, ‘a leading figure in relation to the control of vice and other crime in Sydney’, said Gyles. Jim Anderson explained to the court that Saffron had told him he was trying ‘through political channels’ to organise a meeting with Allen. Then, shortly after Molloy’s appointment, Saffron confided to him over coffee at Hyatt Kingsgate, ‘Everything is okay. Warren Molloy is on the team.’ He knew this because Bill Allen had told him Molloy had ‘taken his first envelope’. Saffron’s lawyer, Ian Barker QC, told the court that if Saffron was bribing Molloy ‘he was not getting his money’s worth’, as his establishments had been raided many times for breaches of the Liquor Act and two of his licences had been cancelled. ‘It is ludicrous to suggest that Mr Saffron was content to go on giving money to Mr Molloy when Mr Molloy continued to raid places in which Saffron had


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an interest, including two businesses which had the licences cancelled’, Barker concluded. Lawyer Clive Evatt, appearing for Allen, blustered that five years after the Police Tribunal had dealt with his client, ‘the only extra piece of evidence in the prosecution case was given by a past manager of some of Saffron’s establishments, Mr James McCartney Anderson, who had shown himself to be a cunning, callous and vindictive liar—the Iago of Kings Cross’. After deliberating for a week, on Thursday, 7 July 1988, Magistrate Hyde ruled that Allen and Saffron had no prima facie case to answer and dismissed the charges. Luck seemed to be running Saffron’s way for a change. The Crown lodged an appeal against the decision. • A term in the clink can get a bit difficult when you’ve also got a sprawling business empire to run. In September 1989 Saffron audaciously applied for another liquor licence for Regines restaurant in Adelaide. True, he didn’t sign the form, but there was no hiding the Saffron name from the bid, which was, of course, doomed to fail. The application form was signed by Abe’s wife Doreen, his sister Beryl (who, so long before, had fronted for him at the Mortdale Hotel), and the man who acted as his accountant in South Australia, Peter Vardon Fairweather—described in 1976 by Adelaide liquor authorities as ‘not a fit and proper person’. Inspector Warren Molloy was called to Adelaide to tell the Liquor Licensing Court all he knew of the Saffron empire. Lawyer Nick Minicozzi, acting for Saffron, asked that the media be stopped from


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reporting on some of the hearing, complaining that the reports had caused a slump in trade at Regines. Neither his bid nor the application succeeded. In December 1989 the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions seized five million dollars worth of Saffron’s assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act, and the Supreme Court agreed with the move the following February. But prisoner Saffron chalked up another win when the Court of Appeal rejected the seizure’s legality and overturned the original ruling. When Saffron eventually lost the appeal against his three-year sentence, he finally accepted his lot and joined his old friend Tubby Black on the inside. Black was serving time for an armed robbery conviction he swears to this day was the result of a corrupt police set-up. Among his many talents, Black was a qualified masseur, and he applied his skills in that department to his old mate Abe, who was once known as King of the Massage Parlours. ‘He got on quite well in jail’, Tubby told me in 2006. ‘He’s a gentle man by nature, so he treated everyone politely and people respected him. One prisoner asked him one day: “Why does that Tubby Black always call you Abraham?”, and Abe replied quietly: “Because that is my name”.’ Saffron realised early in his stay that Tubby did not get many visitors, so when Doreen Saffron was visiting he invited Tubby to join them—Doreen knew him well. ‘After we got out he even shouted me to a holiday in Western Australia’, Black told me. Saffron also organised for his scantily clad entertainers from Les Girls’ all-male revue to put on a two-hour show in the jail.


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In November 1989 Saffron was transferred to the prison farm at Emu Plains, known in the inner circles as the ‘summer camp’. The move, reported the Herald, ‘will introduce him to an outdoor regime which will include a little gardening and lots of sunbathing’. But by January it was back to Long Bay, to the hospital wing, for a hernia operation and treatment for a dicky knee. But there was little fun: gone were the immaculate black suits, the dazzling white starched-collar shirts, pale silk ties—in Long Bay it was convict greens and some toil in the prison workshop for $20 ($34.52) a week. [[boxbegin]]

A PRISONER’S STORY: NO TAKERS FOR ABE’S MEMOIRS While he languished in jail, Abe may have turned his mind to his place in history. Alex Mitchell reported in the Sun Herald that a man acting as the family’s literary agent had written to Australian publishers trying to excite interest in a Saffron book publishing deal. Lance Reynolds of Los Angeles wrote in the letter in 1989: I have been approached by Mr Alan Saffron [son of Abe] to represent him and his father in securing a book publishing deal. As you are probably aware, Abe Saffron is one of Australia’s most notorious figures. His story is explosive and very controversial. He is currently in prison and will be freed in early March. For the first time he is prepared to tell all. You are the first person I have contacted and I would appreciate your reactions to such a venture. I am not au fait with the Australian marketplace and current values on such projects, but perhaps we could first get some idea of whether this book would be of interest.


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Inquiries around the industry indicate the letter did not excite any interest. My publishers said it would not have kept such a letter on its files for so long. The author of a later book on Saffron, Duncan McNab, said he had not heard about the offer from Los Angeles. ‘What might be the case’, McNab told me, ‘and this is speculation on my part, is his son Alan who lives in LA might have been doing a little freelance proposing and using his father’s name for credibility . . . that sort of thing wouldn’t come as a surprise’. I have been unable to trace Mr Reynolds to check out the story. Saffron reacted to the report with the comment that he is not now, nor will he ever be, writing a book about his ‘colourful’ life in Sydney. ‘Despite reports to the contrary’, said the Sun Herald article, ‘Saffron says he is letting bygones be bygones’. If only he’d remembered that commitment before he started suing for defamation in later years anyone who referred to him as Mr Sin! [[boxend]]

The seventy-year-old tax evader was finally paroled after the longest seventeen months of his life, walking out of the jail at eight o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 11 March 1990, to be met by his ever-faithful wife Doreen. Convict greens were replaced by the iconic, expensive hand-tailored suit. The couple reserved their media contact to one TV interview that evening, where Doreen said she was ‘delighted and bewildered’ to have her husband home again—possibly referring to his frequent absences before he went to jail.


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‘We want to get on peacefully with our lives, that’s all’, Doreen added. ‘It’s been bad for him . . . very difficult. But he’s a strong man, and he’s taken what he’s had to take with his head high. It’s over now. We want to put that behind us.’ The Sydney Morning Herald reported that: ‘A spokesman for the Department of Corrective Services confirmed last night that Mr Saffron would be expected to meet standard parole conditions, including the provision that he could not travel overseas without departmental approval.’ [[boxbegin]]

CAUGHT IN THE ACT: SAFFRON LINKED TO GLOBAL PORN RING On Tuesday, 16 April 1991, in the ACT Legislative Assembly, independent member Dennis Stevenson made a lengthy and detailed statement about pornography and its links to organised crime. He detailed visits to Australia by US organised crime figures Norman Arno and Theodore Gaswirth, both of whom, he said, were leading identities in a pornography racket, turning over an estimated US$4 billion a year. Here are some extracts of his speech: Theodore Gaswirth, who was also named as a Mafia associate of Michael Zaffarano, made three trips to Australia in 1981. The first was for five days in late January, the second for another five days in June, and the third for eight days in December. Like Arno and earlier Mafia visitors to Australia, Gaswirth did not come to put another shrimp on the barbie, but rather to set up criminal connections and operations.


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Shortly after Arno’s [1980] arrest, Arno applied to the court to have bail conditions relaxed so that he could visit Australia. Arno subsequently flew into Australia on 21 May 1980. During his stay of 15 days, initial corporate connections between Australian identities and the Mafia were made by Daniel M. Stein, an associate of Meyer Lansky. Lansky was one of the US Mafia leaders who was responsible for much of the overall direction of the Mafia. The main contact in Australia for Arno and Gaswirth was Alexander Gajic who . . . was named by Justice Woodward during the 1980 New South Wales royal commission on drugs as a major player in the drug ring established by Bruce ‘Snapper’ Cornwall and Barry Bull. Together with Joseph David Shellim, Gajic operated a web of companies which dealt in pornography across Australia. In attempting to expand his pornographic dealings and US connections, Alexander Gajic instructed Melbourne solicitor Leon Zwier to travel to the United States to buy porn titles for Gajic to distribute in Australia. Among Gajic’s written instructions to Zwier was a report on Al Tapper, the president of CPLC. In his instructions to Zwier, Gajic wrote: ‘Speak to him, he’s a top bloke, who virtually controls the West Coast market in pornographic books and accessories. I will be importing books etc. from him as well, as soon as I get more cash together. He knows Australia well, being a friend of Abe Saffron.’

Dennis Stevenson’s speech went on in great detail, under protected privilege of the ACT Legislative Assembly. For our purpose, he had made his point. [[boxend]]

• Saffron may have been handed the ‘Get out of jail’ card, but he did not get it for free: the Tax Office was still


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claiming that he owed them a lot of money, having reassessed his tax bills between 1974 and 1981 and coming up with a nice round total of one million dollars—plus a few penalties. And in June 1992 he opened his challenge to the assessment in the Federal Court. His argument that he had no interest in Les Girls or the Venus Room nightclubs other than as a lessor raised an eyebrow or three, given the evidence that had accrued from many previous hearings about his business interests. Saffron told Judge Bryan Alan Beaumont that he had no role in the daily running of the nightclubs; a statement that sat somewhat at odds with what we know of his regular collection of money from Anderson and bookkeepers, and with his own evidence in his tax case that he had received no money from the takings of the Kings Cross businesses in which he had an interest. It was possible that he occasionally received sums of cash at one of the nightclubs, but it would only have been rental money, he said. Mr Anderson paid him $255 ($1373) a week in rent, an amount Mr Saffron described as ‘very good’ commercially. Bank documents showing Abe as a ‘partner’ in the Venus Room and a guarantor for the business tended to give the lie to this. Garry Downes QC, appearing for the Tax Commissioner, said he wanted to show the court the account books used in Saffron’s 1987 trial—the ‘minstrel’ black-and-white sets of books kept by the clubs. One of the sets of books showed Saffron’s true takings, while the other showed what he had declared, Mr Downes said. In 1977, for instance, he was assessed for less than $400 ($1762.04) tax on a declared income of more than $10,000 ($44,051).


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He would show the court that Saffron and Anderson shared money from the clubs on a sixty–forty basis, the lawyer said. At a second sitting on 15 June 1993, Beaumont made a complex ruling to the effect that the tax office had not proven ‘evasion’ of tax because the evidence showed that Saffron had ‘made a claim to carry forward losses when, in truth, the losses were not so available’. They were ‘accounting omissions’, the judge said. It all meant that Saffron still had to pay the $520,000 ($742,516) tax he originally said he owed, but was excused from paying the penalties and interest which had nearly doubled the bill. Saffron was not satisfied with this outcome, however; he appealed against the Beaumont ruling to three judges of the Federal Court, who heard the arguments on Thursday, 24 February 1994. Saffron’s lawyer, Francis Peter Carnovale, argued that it was ‘improbable’ that payments in the Venus Room books against the name ‘Jim’ were received by Saffron—a point the lawyer said was overlooked by Judge Beaumont, as were a number of other matters (too detailed to enumerate here). But the three wise men of the Bench would have none of it, pointing out that contrary to Saffron’s claims, the evidence and records of a bank manager made it clear that Saffron had played an active part in the financial affairs of the Venus Room. The appeal was dismissed, with Saffron being ordered to pay costs. By the time of that court decision Abe Saffron was seventy-four years old, yet he showed no sign of easing up the pace. He had been in and out of courts—both as defendant and complainant—over the forty-odd years


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since his first appearances, as he drove a sometimes hectic schedule of appeals against any bureaucratic decision that went against him. He would continue that schedule almost until the day he died. While other people of his age were retiring to an easier life to reflect on the good and the bad years, Abe Saffron, it seemed, was going into denial that he had ever done anything wrong. As Saffron-watcher Alex Mitchell of the Sun Herald wrote after interviewing Abe in December 2005: When he was entertaining celebrities in the Cross, Saffron was himself a celebrity but when he was jailed for tax fraud for 17 months in 1987 he was shamed and shunned. You get the feeling he is determined to see his past reputation buried, bye bye ‘Mr Sin’, while he secures a new legend as a cherubic impresario who just wanted to give people a good time.


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15 COURTING A NEW PERSONA: WRITS SAY THE PAST IS ALL A LIE Courting a new persona

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. Hannah Arendt (1906–75)

ABE SAFFRON HAD probably not read the German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, but it is possible to imagine that she knew the Sydney criminal well when she penned the words above. For in his later years Saffron became the arch hypocrite, in serious denial of his past evils. Everyone, of course, has a right to tell their own story, to gild the lilies of their life, editing their unwritten autobiography as recollections make adjustments to a life they might have wished for, rather than the truth in which they have no pride. For all his crimes, for all the history that gave him infamy as ‘Mr Sin’, difficulty with the truth was always high on the list of Saffron’s foibles. [ 265 ]


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In the early days it was probably that he was just a glib liar: it would be a foolish criminal indeed who broke down and told the truth on his first confrontation with the law. But in later years it appeared increasingly that Saffron truly believed his own lies, the myth he’d created about the hard-done-by, benevolent businessman. Perhaps, like the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, he confused disenchantment with truth. There were signs of his rejection of realities in the way he continued to mount appeals against his tax conviction, and that—most strangely—continued until many years later when, in October 2001, he said he wanted the slate wiped clean. Fighting another court case in Perth in which that matter had been raised as evidence against him, Saffron again denied any knowledge of the two sets of books at his Kings Cross clubs, shifting the entire blame onto Anderson. ‘I had no knowledge of these books and disputed the charge,’ he said. ‘However, I was found guilty by the court and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.’ The evidence given by Anderson should be discounted, he said, because ‘Mr Anderson had since been discredited as a witness at other trials’. He did not specify which trials. ‘I have now instructed lawyers in Sydney to apply to the Federal Attorney-General for a pardon in relation to my taxation conviction of 1987’, Saffron told a stunned courtroom. There is no evidence that the federal AttorneyGeneral of the day, Daryl Williams, ever received such a request, so maybe this was just a tactical ploy for the case he was then fighting—or just another lie.


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Saffron’s troubles began in Western Australia in the late 1990s, and saw him fighting on numerous fronts. In April 1997 his company Arcadia Amusements in Perth was refused a certificate to sell or supply gaming equipment. Under the state law the Gaming Commission had to determine an applicant for the licence was a ‘fit and proper person’, and in looking at what it knew about Abe Saffron, it was quick to determine he did not fit the bill. The tax case was at the top of its list of concerns. On Remembrance Day, 11 November 1997, Saffron succeeded in having his appeal against the Gaming Commission’s decision moved to the Supreme Court, where four months later Judge Christopher David Steytler quashed the commission’s decisions. The commission had no choice but to treat the Saffron request for the certificate ‘as if it were a fresh application’. Once again Gaming Commission officials referred to Saffron’s ‘criminal conviction involving dishonesty’ as being ‘relevant, amongst other things, to the way in which business is conducted by you’, as they were required under law. The officials notified Saffron of a report by the WA Commissioner of Police, which said his companies had more than one hundred and seventy convictions and that Saffron himself ‘has associations with known criminals’. Saffron’s legal team wanted more details of the convictions and the alleged ‘known criminals’. The judge said the commission should provide that information, along with the contents of the police report. Round one to team Saffron. Perhaps being in denial about past convictions was a winning strategy rather than a sign of delusion.


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Then in 1998 Saffron negotiated to buy Perth’s Victoria Inn hotel for $4.5 million ($5,816,708) and to pay for its refurbishment into a ‘boutique’ hotel, the total price tag running to $12.5 million ($16,157,522). Before contracts were signed, another vendor became involved which tried to alter the terms of the deal. When it came time for Saffron to pay up, he took the new vendor to court. Ten days into the trial, on 15 April 2002, the warring parties made a truce, with a new price of $6.5 million ($8,401,912) to be paid in instalments—not a bad win for Saffron! But that was not the end of the complex legal tussle. In another related case, the judge made a finding against Saffron in a second case over the property deal. In his decision, the judge suggested that Saffron had been less than honest with him: I formed the impression, and I so find, that Mr Saffron was not telling the truth . . . that impression and finding caused me to have serious doubt about accepting other aspects of Mr Saffron’s evidence . . . it would not be safe, generally, to rely on Mr Saffron’s evidence unless it was inherently likely or corroborated by reliable documentary evidence or other reliable evidence.

With millions of dollars at stake, Saffron’s appeal against that decision was based on the fact that he had been called a liar. In response the Federal Court judges wrote: ‘This review of the inconsistencies in Mr Saffron’s evidence found by the trial judge shows that in every instance except one the challenge to the judge’s findings must fail.’ In other words, they accepted that he had lied. So why did he go through all the pain? As the great American


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Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it: ‘Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.’ In August 2000 the hotel was put up for auction by its then owners, Keywest. Abe Saffron arrived in his RollsRoyce bearing the flagship ABE-111 numberplates, but was barred from attending the auction. ‘It does seem there was something nefarious, sinister, perhaps’, Saffron said to a waiting reporter. The Financial Review reported: ‘Keywest principal John Abrusci would not comment on Mr Saffron’s claim that Keywest lawyers instructed the security guard to bar Mr Saffron from the auction.’ The vacant seventy-six-room hotel failed to attract a single bid before being passed in at $5 million. Saffron maintained his rage in the courts over the Victoria Inn fiasco until 2005, when his attempt to take the case to the High Court of Australia was refused. Again, the issue of Saffron’s credibility was a major point of argument. While Saffron was battling to reconfigure his reputation in the courts, in October 2001 the West Australian Liquor Licensing Court delivered another blow: it ruled that Saffron, owner of the Raffles Hotel and the Hilton Park Tavern, was not a fit and proper person to hold a liquor licence in the state. Saffron had already been in negotiations to sell Raffles, the Perth landmark he’d owned for fifty years, and had reached a deal with the multi-national financial services company AXA. With Saffron out of the picture, the West Australian Planning Commission gave its approval for a seventeen-storey apartment tower to be built on the site. AXA, through its offshoot National Mutual Life Nominees, had taken an


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$11.5 million security over the Raffles property and over one of Saffron’s companies, Appin Investments, which owned the prime Applecross site. Saffron had realised that the authorities in Western Australia had him beaten, and for probably the first time in his life he gave up without further fight. The sale of Raffles marked the start of a sell-down of his pub-and-club property empire across Australia. Back in Sydney Saffron had more fights on his hands. In March 2001, he applied for a wholesale licence for his Crown Street Liquor outlet. Licensing Magistrate Denis Collins rejected the application. It was the old ‘not a fit and proper person’ judgement back to haunt him. Off he went to the Full Bench of the Licensing Court to appeal. Referring to his tax evasion conviction, adverse findings against him at royal commissions, his failure to declare breaches of the NSW Liquor Act in a 1996 application for a liquor licence in Perth and the Federal Court judge’s comments that he had given ‘unreliable’ evidence, the Crown argued that the state did not want him in the booze business. In Saffron’s apparent fascination with legal processes, the case was still rattling around the courts two years later as he fought orders relating to costs. The NSW Government at last was prepared to crow about its tough stance on Abe Saffron. Within days of the rejection of the Crown Street licence, Paul Ronald Crittenden, Labor MP for Wyong, asked a ‘dorothy dixer’ of Racing and Gaming Minister Jack Richard Face. What was the latest information on the effort of ‘notorious Sydney


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crime figure Abe Saffron’ to re-enter the NSW liquor industry? As is the case with such pre-arranged questions, the Minister had the facts at his fingertips. ‘Yes’, replied Richard Face, ‘one of Australia’s most infamous underworld figures tried to make a comeback, but two weeks ago his plan came unstuck. The Licensing Court of New South Wales decided that he was unfit to hold a liquor licence’. He then waded through the familiar record of convictions and court appearances. ‘In his application for the Crown Street licence Saffron made no mention of previous convictions’, the Minister continued. This is where he came unstuck. Abe Saffron actually thought he could get a liquor licence. In his findings Licensing Court Magistrate Denis Collins commented that even making some allowance for Mr Saffron’s present age of 81, it is impossible to accept that he made an honest mistake in reading the relevant question and failing to declare his past. Abe Saffron is the type of person who is not welcome to hold a liquor licence under this Government . . . So far this year Saffron has the dubious distinction of being one of eight people refused an application by the Licensing Court as a consequence of that legislation. Over the years Saffron has been involved in everything that is evil. The Government is determined that people of his ilk are kept out of the liquor industry. It can do without them. I sincerely hope that he will stop wasting the court’s time and the State’s money by attempting to re-enter the liquor industry, an industry that has been disgraced and degraded over the years by his actions.


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Saffron finally gave up that fight and sold the Crown Street property and business. The premiership of Bob Carr seemed to have brought in a refreshing new attitude to this ageing criminal, who for decades had been treated with kid gloves by the state government. [[boxbegin]]

ANDERSON’S CURTAIN CALL: A BIRD GOT HIM IN THE END In July 2003, one of Abe Saffron’s worst nightmares came to an end: James McCartney Anderson died. He’d been off the scene for nearly eight years, having gone to live in Leura in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney after suffering a heart attack in 1995. A few weeks before his death he caught an infection—believed to have been avian pneumonia—while feeding the rosellas that regularly gathered in his garden. In hospital he was diagnosed with cancer. Abe Saffron did not attend his funeral at Leura on Tuesday, 15 July 2003. [[boxend]]

While the drama around Crown Street Liquor was unfolding in Sydney, the ‘not a fit and proper person’ tag raised its ugly head once again in Perth. The Western Australian liquor licensing authorities had applied the description to Saffron when they placed him on a threeyear good behaviour bond. They had received complaints about his behaviour as the licensee of the Raffles Hotel and Hilton Park Tavern. Saffron, of course, appealed the decision. In November 2003 the matter was argued before judges David K. Malcolm, David Steytler and Christopher James Lonsdale Pullin at the Western Australia Court of


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Appeal, who all agreed that Saffron’s appeal should be thrown out. In a lengthy judgement Pullin, who had been appointed two years previously to the court, looked at Saffron’s record: the tax conviction and a remarkable 105 convictions recorded against Saffron companies for breaches of liquor licensing laws in other states. It is no wonder that Saffron’s appeal failed as he audaciously argued that he was not required to mention those convictions when applying for a licence in Western Australia. In other words, he asked the court to ‘do what I am doing: ignore my past’. • Saffron’s most audacious court battles during these afternoon years of his life involved the use of defamation laws in his desperate bid to thwart any attempt to write his real history rather than the fantasy version of his life in which he appeared to have taken refuge. It began in 2003 when Saffron sued John Fairfax, publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald, for referring to him as ‘Mr Sin’. A somewhat satirical piece, written by Kate McClymont, had been published in the ‘Sauce’ column under the heading ‘Speaking up for Mr Sin’. The story, reproduced here from the court papers, and with Kate McClymont’s permission, read: The wages of sin must pay off. Looking surprisingly youthful, the legendary Mr Sin, aka Abe Saffron, now aged 83, was in court this week trying to reverse an earlier decision by the Licensing Court not to give him a liquor licence. Just because he had an unsavoury reputation—all of it undeserved and completely the fault of


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the media—was no reason to prevent him from wholesaling grog from his Crown St outlet in Surry Hills. Maybe this is why Abe chose defamation specialist Bruce McClintock, SC, to represent him in this matter. While the chain-smoking barrister has no claim to fame in liquor litigation, he does know his way around reputations alleged to have been sullied by the media. McClintock said his client’s reputation—undeserved and the result of biased media coverage—should have no bearing on his status as a ‘fit and proper person’. He argued that Saffron had served his time in jail for tax offences and had always maintained his innocence. And while he had been adversely mentioned in royal commissions and the like, his client had not been charged. McClintock went further telling the full bench of the Licensing Court that some evidence had later been discredited. Our favourite part was that Saffron’s failure to tell West Australian authorities about convictions under NSW liquor law was an ‘inadvertent mistake’ by his accountant. Terrence Lynch, for the Crown, argued that Saffron’s behaviour had been consistent over many years (i.e. consistently bad) and there was no evidence he had changed his ways. Listening attentively to all this was the man years ago dubbed by the media as Mr Sin. That was, of course, until Mr Sin’s hearing aid malfunctioned. Saffron was given permission to sit at the front of the court to enable him to hear the evidence more clearly, and an assistant was dispatched to his office to collect a back-up device. However, the new hearing aid didn’t prevent the afternoon’s evidence proving soporific for the octogenarian, who nodded off a few times. The court has reserved its decision.

The article was accompanied with a photo of Abe Saffron, aged eighty-three, arriving at the court, and another of


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him in 1951 at a nightclub he owned. This was the muchused snap of Saffron looking between the mesh-stockinged legs of a dancer. In his opening claim Saffron listed no less than thirteen imputations he said tainted his otherwise good repute: the article imputed that Saffron is Mr Sin; his income comes from crime; he has an unsavoury reputation; he is a prominent criminal who deliberately misled the Licensing Court; he is engaged in vice and immoral practices; he is an illicit vice operator; he is known as Mr Sin because of his bad behaviour over many years and receives wages from sin and vice; he is a criminal; he concealed convictions under NSW Liquor Law from the West Australian authorities; and, finally, that his business operations are connected with vice and immoral practices. The obvious problem with preparing such a list is that, if the action fails, it suggests that all the imputations are true: you blacken your own name. In the first Supreme Court skirmish, on 17 April 2003, Judge David Levine eased that potential problem for Saffron somewhat by striking out three of the imputations in the claim and ruling that another seven were ‘incapable as a matter of law of being carried by the matter complained of’. He gave Saffron a fortnight to file an amended statement of claims and listed a further round for 2 May. The bill so far for legal costs had to be met by Saffron. At the next session on 27 June, Saffron’s shopping list was down to seven items, but David Levine was still not satisfied, ruling four of them out. This left Saffron to claim damages over the imputation he had been dubbed by the media as Mr Sin because his behaviour had been consis-


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tently bad over many years; that he had an unsavoury reputation; and that he concealed convictions under the NSW Liquor Law from the West Australian authorities. Justice Levine gave Saffron another fourteen days to file his amended claim and placed the case on the list to be heard in a trial by judge and jury. That took place on 24 October, when the judge and jury entered a win for Fairfax. The jury rejected the claims that the first and third imputations were defamatory, but accepted that the second imputation—that Saffron had an unsavoury reputation—was conveyed as having that meaning to ‘the ordinary reasonable reader’. That led the jury to determine whether it was defamatory of Saffron, and to that they answered ‘No’. Saffron’s continuing hurt over the article must have been significant, because he was not prepared to accept that result. On Tuesday, 20 July 2004, judges Jim Spigelman, Simon Sheller and David Hodgson sat as the NSW Court of Appeal to determine whether the jury had got it wrong. The judges were unanimous: the jury got it right. Saffron was left with very public knowledge that he had an unsavoury reputation. And it had cost him a tidy sum to attain that tribute: he had to pay his own and Fairfax’s costs for the case. [[boxbegin]]

NO PLAQUE FOR ABE: HE’S GOT FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES! In 2004 the Sydney City Council embarked on a program devised by council historian Shirley Fitzgerald to give recognition to people who had played a part in the


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colourful, sometimes violent, history of Kings Cross. The plan called for the installation of 116 bronze footpath plaques bearing an appropriate inscription. One of them was to read: ‘Abe Saffron. Publican and nightclub owner from 1946. Convictions and court appearances from 1938. Friends in high places.’ Not even a mention of ‘Mr Sin’ or an ‘unsavoury reputation’, but Abe would have none of it. His lawyers were quick to let the Town Hall know that Saffron, then eighty-four, considered the wording ‘false and defamatory’. The other 115 plaques were installed and on 21 December 2004 Lord Mayor Clover Moore was reported as saying: ‘The [Saffron] plaque is on hold.’ And that’s where things stayed until December 2006 when I sent a message to Ms Moore to point out that, given Saffron’s death, the legal problem with the plaque was removed. I also asked whether she planned for the plaque to now be installed, ‘and if that is not the case, why?’ I also sent a message to Shirley Fitzgerald to learn if there was any movement on the matter. While the lord mayor had not replied, friends at Town Hall let me know that no decision would be made until after the March 2007 state election, at which the lord mayor was a candidate. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to ‘frighten the natives’ with any discussion about Abraham Gilbert Saffron in the lead-up to that event. With the election out of the way, the matter started to move. The wording ‘friends in high places’ was queried by a senior city official: those words could possibly remain, the message was conveyed down the line, only if an assurance could be given that there was


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no suggestion those ‘friends’ included Neville Wran or Gough Whitlam! Commonsense finally prevailed, and approval was given at the end of March for the plaque, with its original wording, to be installed into the pavement of Darlinghurst Road, just a bit to the east of the former Carousel club on the corner of Roslyn Street. The lord mayor finally confirmed all this in a letter to me on 1 May 2007, almost six months after my request for information. [[boxend]]

• One problem with defamation law is that one case does not set precedents for any other. So it was, that having had his case against Fairfax thrown out by the trial judge and jury, Saffron was able to mount another two cases over the use of the hated moniker. It was all nice work for the Evatt law family. Clive Evatt Jnr had taken over the Saffron files in 1980 after his father Clive Snr—brother of former Labor leader Doctor Herbert Vere Evatt—had tended to Abe’s legal needs for three decades. When Melbourne crime writers Andrew Rule and John Silvester reserved an entry for Abe in the ‘Colourful Sydney Identities’ section of their book, Tough: 101 Australian Gangsters, they probably didn’t foresee what was coming. Abe was listed as number eighty-three, among such unsavoury characters as Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith and Lennie McPherson. The piece read: Abraham Gilbert Saffron, the man who became known as Australia’s ‘Mr Sin’, was born just after World War I


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ended. His first years were spent with his family in a small flat above his father’s drapery shop in Sydney. By the time he turned eight, Abe had already learned that vice paid more than tailoring: he earned his pocket money selling cigarettes to his father’s poker-playing friends. He left school at 15 and joined the family business, Saffron and Son, on Pitt Street. His family wanted him to be a doctor. Had he done so, given the nature of his later business, he would have been a gynaecologist. As it turned out, he didn’t need a medical degree to make money out of the naked female form. In 1938, Saffron was charged over a minor starting price bookmaking offence. In those days he lacked the police contacts to have the charge fixed—but he was a quick learner. He soon learned that where illegal bookmaking was concerned, the only crime in Sydney was to offer police an insufficient bribe. Two years later, in 1940, Saffron was convicted of receiving stolen car radios and received a suspended sentence. This apparent leniency might have been connected with the fact that he almost immediately joined the army; war-time courts were known to encourage young lawbreakers to avoid jail with a sudden display of patriotism. Regardless of the reasons why he joined up, young Saffron soon decided the army wasn’t for him and transferred to the merchant navy. It might have been a shrewd decision, for he survived the war when many of his contemporaries didn’t. And he learned first hand there was more money in servicing servicemen than serving the nation. By 1947, Saffron had opened the first of his many clubs, the Roosevelt. It was later described as ‘the city’s most notorious and disreputable nightclub’ and closed on court orders. In one court case, Saffron was alleged to have whipped a girl at a party and was described as ‘completely


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sexually depraved’. Today he would have been offered his own game show and a spot on Celebrity Big Brother. In the Vietnam years, he set up strip and vice businesses to cater for American and Australian soldiers on leave. He knew what had been known for thousands of years: sex sells. In 1976, he was named in the South Australian Parliament as one of the principal characters in organised crime in Australia. The SA Attorney-General, Peter Duncan, told Parliament that some of Saffron’s employees were linked to the disappearance and suspected murder of Sydney newspaper publisher Juanita Nielsen, who had led a crusade to clean up Kings Cross. Saffron was subsequently subjected to intense investigations by the Costigan Royal Commission into organised crime. A later hearing of the Licensing Commission was told he was known as Mr Sin, involved in pornography, connected with massage parlours and the underworld. He was alleged to have offered bribes to police. In Sydney, where premiers on either side of politics were routinely on the take, this was hardly headline news. It would have been had Saffron not offered bribes. Despite an Australia-wide reputation as a crime boss he was able to visit senior police in their Sydney offices as if he were a respected business figure. Again, this wasn’t considered unusual in the city that produced Sir Robert Askin, one of the rustiest of all rusty knights. Saffron had his share of luck—good and bad. It was hard to tell whether six suspicious fires in nightclubs he owned or controlled were good or bad luck. Were they lit by jealous competitors, or were they torched for insurance? Typically, it was not the NSW police who broke Saffron’s vice-like grip on vice. In 1985, he was arrested by the National Crime Authority and charged with tax evasion involving


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millions of dollars. He was later jailed. Finally, Mr Sin was in the bin.

Saffron was off again to the NSW Supreme Court before Judge Timothy Studdert, with the usual bundle of imputations tucked under Clive Evatt Jnr’s arm. The eighty-three-year-old said the chapter carried ‘numerous defamatory imputations’ and diminished his public reputation. This time the jury decided in Abe’s favour, that in having described him as a ‘crime boss’ the journalists had defamed him. The four-man jury also found defamatory the description of Saffron as ‘a completely depraved gangster’; that he had an Australia-wide reputation as a crime boss; that he had offered bribes to police; and that he had been arrested and jailed by the National Crime Authority for tax evasion worth millions of dollars. But the jury found he had not been defamed by the claim that police knew him as Mr Sin, that he once whipped a girl at a party and could have torched six of his own nightclubs for the insurance payouts. As Stephen Mayne, describing himself as a ‘defamation veteran’, wrote in crikey.com, it might seem surprising that Saffron would sue on some of those meanings. But as Evatt was at pains to point out, even a person with a ‘bad or damaged reputation’ was entitled to protect ‘such reputation as he has’. As Tom Blackburn, for the journalists, publisher and distributor, said, ‘This case is absurd’, and, referring to a small dog on the back cover of the book, ‘It [the dog] had a better chance in this case than Mr Abe Saffron.’


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A final word went to John Silvester, who wrote a piece for The Age to mark Saffron’s death (the dead cannot sue for defamation in Australia—thank goodness!). The chapter had outraged Saffron so much, Silvester explained, that he wanted his day in court—having spent most of his adult life paying bribes and blackmailing witnesses to avoid it. Aware of his mortality, Saffron did not want his epitaph to read ‘Gangster’. However, he only had a ‘paper win’ in the defamation, Silvester said: This was not, as widely reported, a victory for Saffron. It was simply round one. A full trial where the allegations would be tested was yet to come. Former police, authors, colourful racing identities and a few gangsters were prepared to make sure Abe would never win round two. In the end Saffron chose to withdraw on the condition some of his legal fees were paid. The deal was done. No money went to Saffron. More importantly the allegations were never withdrawn and the book remains in print. In fact, the Saffron writ increased sales. As usual, when push came to shove, Saffron backed down. Yesterday he died. Some will try to remember him as a likeable rogue. He wasn’t. He was scum. He will not be missed.

I spoke with Silvester shortly after that article was published. The settlement was for $30,000, he said, which would have been less than Saffron’s legal fees. ‘There was no apology, no retraction, no withdrawal of the book— in fact it’s been reprinted’, the journalist said. ‘What he wanted was a paper victory, the next step to intimidation.’ Silvester’s point is well made. In arriving at a settlement over 101 Gangsters, Saffron got the sort of headlines


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he wanted: headlines that would be read as a stern warning to any journalist or author wanting to suggest that Abe Saffron was, indeed, Mr Sin, and that he had a reputation that was on the nose. It was an intimidation not acceded to, however, by the person who compiled the crosswords for Queensland’s Gold Coast Bulletin daily newspaper. On 2 January 2004 a clue read: ‘Sydney underworld figure, nicknamed Mr Sin (3, 7).’ The next day provided the answer: ‘Abe Saffron.’ Imagine the enormous damage that would do to Abe’s reputation! It was enough to get Clive Jnr back into the Supreme Court later that year. In his statement of claim Evatt said his client ‘has been greatly injured in his character, credit and reputation and has been brought into public hatred, ridicule and contempt’, and that ‘the damages to which he is entitled have been affected by his knowledge that the imputation is false’. So it was not okay to call him a ‘Sydney underworld figure’ or ‘Mr Sin’, Evatt claimed. If it is said that a person is a Sydney underworld figure it means he is a man of the criminal element in Sydney. Any imputation that suggests a person has offended the moral code of the community is defamatory . . . any imputation that tends to lower that person’s standing in the community is defamatory.

Saffron was entitled to defend his good name, regardless of what has been said about him in the past. Using the same argument he applied to the action against Andrew Rule and John Silvester, Clive Evatt Jnr told the


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four-person jury: ‘Even a person with a bad reputation is entitled to protect what reputation he has’. The crossword question carried two defamatory imputations that diminished Mr Saffron’s public reputation, Evatt said: ‘to be described as an underworld figure, and to be described as having the nickname “Mr Sin”, has injured his reputation, and would cause people to shun him and avoid him. It is a serious matter to describe a person as Mr Sin, it has a deadly effect.’ The Bulletin’s counsel Lucy McCallum urged the jury to consider the context of the puzzle and the offending statement: ‘Newspaper readers visited the puzzles pages for entertainment, and not news’, she said. ‘Unlike the front page of a tabloid where people are only looking for the news . . . we tend to think that since they have turned to the puzzles page the readers approach it from a different perspective and judgment about what’s said about a person is suspended.’ Eighteen months after the crossword was first published, a jury in the NSW Supreme Court found the paper guilty of defamation. The jury had a bit of an eachway punt on the matter, however. It did not agree with Clive Jnr that using the Mr Sin moniker ‘has a deadly effect’, and dismissed the claim on that count, but it found the paper guilty of the ‘Sydney underworld figure’ claim. Outside the court an effusive Clive Jnr said Saffron was ‘on a roll’, and tipped a payout of $500,000. That, he said, should stop the use of the crime monikers. ‘That’s what he wants. He says he’s been unfairly maligned for years’. The defence team responded: ‘The Bulletin has no cross words for the judge or jury but remains puzzled why


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the plaintiff brought the action. We have no choice but to defend it.’ The matter was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum exactly a week before Saffron died. At the time of writing it is yet to be resolved whether his estate will have a claim over the money, the amount of which was reported to be ‘at the lower end of the scale’. This was one of those cases that sends shivers through the normally tough spines of the publishing fraternity. As in all these matters, the defendants must start spending big dollars with lawyers to prepare their defence, even if the case does not get to trial. The Fairfax and 101 Gangsters cases were thought to be, in some legal circles, a trifle overzealous on Saffron’s part, but the Gold Coast Bulletin matter was seen to be an almost psychopathic abuse of the defamation laws. Any published reference to Saffron containing the words ‘Mr Sin’ would be in the danger zone of a potential action. My publishers and I were directly affected by this: we were finalising the editing for my book on Lennie McPherson, Mr Big, and were advised to change a piece about how Abe Saffron first became known as ‘Mr Sin’. It was quickly replaced with another piece which we titled: ‘Abe Saffron: maintaining the rage against “Sin”’, the content of which is well covered here. Readers have not missed out on the original piece: with slight adaptations, it is used as the prologue for this book. A long time ago that passage became the opening entry in my Saffron dossier. You have now read the remainder of that bulky file.


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EPILOGUE: AND THEN HE DIED ABE SAFFRON’S FINAL years weren’t always as he had wanted his life to be: peaceful, quiet, and uninterrupted by intrusions from police, officials, politicians or the media. However, it was he who had chosen other paths that had made that an impossibility for most of his eighty-six years. After the initial flurry of defamation cases Abe sold his businesses and moved into retirement at Potts Point, the suburb next to the Kings Cross where he had made his fortune—and his ‘unsavoury reputation’. He was holidaying in Israel in July 2006 when he suffered a heart attack and came home. He recovered from that, but two months later was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital with a problem in his lower leg and possible pneumonia and food poisoning. While there, at around midday on Friday, 15 September 2006, a month short of his eighty-seventh birthday, he died. His longtime partner, Teresa ‘Terry’ Tkaczyk, was at the bedside. [ 286 ]


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Three days later his funeral service was held at the Chevra Kadisha funeral temple at 172 Oxford Street, Woollahra. Rabbi Mendel Kastel described Saffron as ‘a great Australian icon’. Those attending then went to the Jewish cemetery at Rookwood, west of the city, where Saffron was interred next to his wife Doreen, who had died in 1999. As one cynical Saffron-watcher said to me later: ‘He’ll be spending more time with Doreen now than he ever did when they were alive.’ Another epitaph to Abe Saffron came from the highly respected writer on crime and corruption, Evan Whitton, who told reporter Mark Colvin on ABC Radio’s PM program: Abe will be remembered as Mr Sin, of course. You know, he might have sued and got money for it but he was Mr Sin and there isn't any doubt about that. You just had to be careful what you said about him because he used the libel laws to shut people up.

Buried he may have been, but the remains of Abraham Gilbert Saffron would not be allowed to rest in peace. As if to destroy any remaining vestige of the image he had sought to portray—without great success—over the years of being a devoted family man, it was members of his family who attacked first and fiercest. As so often happens after the death of a wealthy person, arguments erupted over Saffron’s last will and testament, a five-page document that was finalised only days before his death. On 4 November 2006, AAP reported the Saffron estate of $20 million would go mostly to charities. In March 2007,


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Alex Mitchell, the Sun-Herald’s noted Saffron-watcher, said the amount was $30 million. Three months later Sydney Morning Herald crime reporter Kate McClymont suggested the estate was worth $25 million in a report that outlined some bitter responses to the carve-up of the crime empire’s assets. The will provided one million dollars each for Alan Saffron’s five children, and for the three children of Melissa Hagenfelds, Saffron’s daughter to one of his early extra-marital lovers, Biruta ‘Rita’ Hagenfelds. Another of Saffron’s long-term lovers, Teresa Tkaczyk, and Melissa were the major beneficiaries in the will, with major bequests of money and property. Teresa inherited Abe’s blue Rolls-Royce, a property on Queensland’s Gold Coast and apartments in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay and Surry Hills. Melissa picked up the silver Rolls-Royce, flats in Poate Road, Centenial Park, and an apartment in Elizabeth Bay. They each also receive a life-long annuity worth $50,000. Not so well treated was Abe’s son Alan, who received $500,000 from the estate on the basis that he did not contest the will. Abe had written: ‘I give and bequeath to my son Alan Saffron the sum of $500,000 on the basis that he does not contest this my will.’ The last paragraph of the document, reported Alex Mitchell, said: I declare that I have not provided for my son Alan Saffron other than set out in this my will because among other reasons of the financial and other support I have provided to him, his business interests and his family throughout my life.


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Alan was not amused. After his mother had died, Alan had been the main beneficiary of her will, and stood to receive about $5 million. But Abe Saffron contested that will and after a bitter and lengthy legal tussle, Alan accepted a settlement of around $1 million cash from his father. Alan was also later to complain that his late mother’s extensive art collection has ‘mysteriously disappeared’. The bequest provided by Abe’s will left him deeply embittered. ‘I’m so devastated by what happened in the will’, he told Kate McClymont for her article in June 2007. ‘What you leave in your legacy is an indication of your feelings and I’ve been left out in a terrible way.’ There appeared to be confusion in his bitterness. He told McClymont that his father had not meant to be so cruel, but then added: My half-sister Melissa, who is his daughter—maybe, she’s probably going to walk away with close to four million. I only get $500,000. I am the only son, the only legitimate child.

He would not challenge the stipulation that he not contest the will, he said, undoubtedly recalling the bruising, losing tussle he’d had over his mother’s estate. A challenge to his father’s bequest could see him loose the lot, and possibly delay the large payments to his five children. But another relative, not bound by such a stipulation, professed no qualms, claiming she would challenge Abe’s will. Anne Buckingham, the daughter of Beryl Buckingham who had fronted for her brother Abe in the Mortdale


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Hotel, was left $10,000 in Saffron’s will and she has made it clear she wants more. In her interview with the Sydney Morning Herald’s Kate McClymont, she announced she would challenge the will. She said she believed the estate was worth more than $25 million, that some money was ‘off-shore’. But she went further: she told the reporter that her uncle Abe had been ‘behind’ the fire in the ghost train ride at Sydney’s Luna Park in June 1979, in which seven people had died. She offered not a shred of evidence to support this claim, and after her interview asked the reporter to not run the story. There have been over the years many allegations of Saffron’s involvement in that fire, but no clear evidence has ever been produced. Whether Anne Buckingham has anything to add to this claim is still to be seen at the time of writing. Possibly she wanted to withdraw the allegation because of some perception of inherent danger that may arise from mentioning her late uncle in less than favourable light. Certainly her cousin Alan Saffron has suffered such an unpleasant experience. He told Kate McClymont that, since he announced he was writing a book about Abe, he has received three death threats, which he has reported to police. He has not publicly identified the source of the threats, but possibly ponders the relevance of the old maxim: ‘When they bury you in a box, the grubs come out of the woodwork.’ In life Abe Saffron was a ruthless businessman who undoubtedly made many enemies over the years. He exhibited a meanness of spirit that saw him fight doggedly to deny many of his obligations to employees and business partners. He doubtlessly condoned the violence


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perpetrated in his name to many people who he perceived were ‘not on his team’. He corrupted police, politicians and bureaucrats to ensure minimal interruption to his illicit activities. He stole money from his trusting managers who believed it was going in bribe payments to police. He resorted to sordid blackmail to suborn people of influence to act corruptly in his interests. He dealt in hard drugs and was a major exploiter of women through prostitution. Throughout his life he was a liar and a cheat in every aspect of his life. In his attempts to reinvent himself as a decent, benevolent, law-abiding citizen, he coercively used defamation law to try to silence critics and stifle exposure of the truth. In death, I can add little, in the balance, to Melbourne journalist John Silvester’s summary of Abraham Gilbert Saffron: ‘He was scum. He will not be missed.’


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NOTES Notes

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK there is a reference to the 1994 NCA Report. Its full title is ‘The National Crime Authority and James McCartney Anderson. A report by the Parliamentary Joint Committee of the National Crime Authority’ published in March 1994. I have also used as primary reference sources: • • •

Can of Worms II, Evan Whitton (The Fairfax Library, 1987); The Prince and the Premier, David Hickie (Angus & Robertson, 1985); Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia, Alfred W. McCoy (Harper & Row, 1980).

As is to be expected with stories of this nature, a large amount of information has come from sources I cannot disclose. In each instance I have tried to verify information with independent sources (not always possible), and can vouch for the veracity of each person whose identity I have agreed should not be revealed at their request. A number of source references are included in the body of the story, and those are not repeated here.

Prologue Events outlined in the prologue were personally experienced by the author.

1 For King and Country . . . and a quick quid ‘Paddles’ Anderson and Saffron’s attendance at Fort Street from Can of Worms II. Leaving school early: quote from Saffron interview with Alex Mitchell, Sun Herald, 6 Novemver 2005. Court dates, charges and appearances from a copy of Saffron’s criminal record obtained by the author. John Little segment obtained in direct interview. Military records obtained from National Australian Archives. RSL Badge reference: Alex Mitchell, Sun Herald, 17 September 2006.

2 Sly grog sales: a bottler of a money-maker Sammy Lee and Reg Boom’s earlier involvement in Roosevelt: Prince and the Premier. Saffron and Kincaid’s involvement in 1943; and Judge Maxwell’s quote: Can of Worms; and private research. Move to the Hunter Valley: Drug Traffic p. 164. Moffitt references from the Moffitt Report into Allegations of Organised Crime in Clubs, 15 August 1974. Hotel and Roosevelt data: from McCoy (1980); Whitton (1987); Hickie (1985); media reports of Maxwell: Maxwell Report.

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Doorman Gallagher assault case: from Sydney Truth, 18 November 1951; other detail of Alf Gallagher from Australian Dictionary of Biography, . Dave Sands details: Sporting Oz, . Saffron marriage: some information from The Usual Suspect, the life of Abe Saffron, Duncan McNab (PanMacMillan, Sydney, 2005). Electrocution story from many media reports. Justice Maxwell biography from Australian Dictionary of Biography; Tribune newspaper; media reports. Sale of Saffron interest in hotels: state archives; media reports. Accountant David Molland Evans case: Sunday Telegraph, 22 August 1948. Winding up of Macleay Enterprises: Daily Mirror, 12 October 1953. Housie scandal: mainly from Sunday Sun files. Perjury trial manoeuvres: Sydney Daily Mirror, 2 December 1952; Truth 7 December 52; Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1952; Daily Telegraph, 8 September 1953, and other media coverage.

3 In and out of court and courting crims Meeting with Richard Gabriel Reilly and resulting associations: info from confidential source; some from Prince and the Premier; ‘The Invincibles’ tag told to the author by a former Saffron employee. Disorderly house hearings: from extensive media coverage. Court action by former waiter: from media reports. Scandalous conduct cases: from extensive media coverage; Farrell’s antics: from confidential source. Ivy Lawrence case: from extensive media coverage. Ditto other court cases. Four tons of pornography: told in confidence by a former Saffron associate; NCA comment from 1994 NCA Report. Chrome ore case: High Court judgements; media coverage of Bankruptcy Court. Stolen refrigerators story supplied to author by private source.

4 New players join the team: Abe moves into the big time Staccato club acquisition: Prince and the Premier, pp. 502, 504. Anderson details; NSW Select Committee of the Legislative Assembly on Prostitution, transcript of evidence, 14 November 1983, pp. 49–51. Askin biographical data: Murray Goot, draft entry for Dianne Langmore (ed.), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 17, Melbourne University Press, ; Prince and the Premier. Venus Room details from various sources, mostly the 1994 NCA Report. Amanda King spoke of drugs at the Venus Room at the Nielsen inquest on 8 September 1983, (transcript p. 1279); Anderson’s reference to drugs also at the Nielsen inquest on 29 September 1983 (transcript p. 2215); Arkins/Maroney Report from police running sheets, Juanita Nielsen investigation.


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State Parliament question re Venus Room: Hansard, Legislative Assembly, 16 November 1978, p. 427. Abeles details from many sources; ABC Radio PM, 25 June 1999; ABC TV Four Corners, 2 November 1987; association with Saffron Prince and the Premier, p. 82; association with Fratianno, Drug Traffic (McCoy); through his involvement with Bela Csidei; and from personal investigation over time; Can of Worms II; The Sydney Connection: Nugan Hand, Murray Riley and the murder of Donald Mackay, John Jiggens (selfpublished, Brisbane, 2004, ISBN 0-9578684-1-3); personal interviews. Judge D.G. Stewart reference from the 1994 NCA Report. Coconut Jungle/Billy Green from personal interviews.

5 Another war, another fortune: Vietnam blue puts crims in the black Vietnam War statistics: Australian Encyclopaedia, (fourth edition, Grolier Society of Australia Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1983). Club ownership traced through extensive corporate affairs searches carried out by the author in the 1970s. Bernie Houghton background: Prince and the Premier, p. 120; Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred W. McCoy (Harper & Row, New York, 1973); ABC Radio, Watching Brief, 29 October 1986; Association with McPherson: Mr Big: the true story of Lennie McPherson and his life of crime, Tony Reeves, pp. 150–51 (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005); Saffron’s links with Houghton: Prince and the Premier, p. 120; Saffron’s links with Nugan Hand: 1994 NCA Report. Rooklyn and Indonesia dealings: Moffitt Royal Commission.

6 Pictures to die for: blackmail dossiers get out of hand The Shirley Bega story came in small parts from a former policeman, a police rounds’ journalist and later, in similar form, from Allan William Honeysett, then resident in Parramatta jail. The Shirley Bega referred to here should not be confused with Sydney model Shirley Beiger, who murdered her boyfriend Arthur Griffith outside Chequers nightclub on 9 August 1954—and got away with it. That event was more than a decade earlier and had nothing to do with Abe Saffron or blackmail dossiers. Confirmation of the activities at the ‘white house’ and Appin private hotel came from a close long-term friend of Abe’s who did not want to be identified in this story. Copies of the Honeysett letters referred to are held by the author. Police record references are taken direct from a copy of the running sheet on the Juanita Nielsen investigation. Costigan references from 1994 NCA report. Anderson gave evidence of blackmail to the NSW Parliamentary Committee on Prostitution (transcript of evidence, 14 November 1983, pp. 40–1).

7 Burning issues: murder and arson become the hot topics Anderson interview with Neil Mercer recounted in an obituary to Anderson published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 22 July 2003. Police interview with Detective Sergeant Leatherbarrow was taken on 2 July 1970.


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The 1994 NCA Report was the source of the reference by the NCA Secretariat on the no-billing decision in the Smith murder case. Ballard’s explanation for ‘outing’ Anderson as a police informer: Nielsen inquest transcript, 30 August 1983, p. 752. Details of the lease of railways land at 107–109 Darlinghurst Road from answer to question in parliament by Peter Cox, 25 March 1980; speech by Don Chipp in the Senate, September 1983; Prince and the Premier. Anderson counterfeit information from 1994 NCA Report. Arantz sacking: Can of Worms II, p. 17–18. Commonwealth Police letter to Hanson re Saffron: Prince and the Premier, p. 118. Commonwealth Police watch on NSW Police: from personal interviews at the time.

8 Snorting at drug slur: some customs are not so hard to break Customs drug alert: NCA 1994 Report; drug dealing method from Costigan Royal Commission 1984 summary on Saffron; Prince and the Premier, p. 22–4. Moffitt Royal Commission statements: from transcript and report of the inquiry.

9 Murder most foul: Abe buys his cover Police version of events from Nielsen inquest (1983). Theeman interview from Nielsen investigation police running sheets. References to solicitor-general, Crown law advices and related correspondence from NSW Government sources. Arrests in November 1977 from various sources: media; Nielsen inquest transcript; 1994 NCA Report; and personal observations. Details of Trigg’s trials and evidence of $70,000 from Saffron: media; Nielsen inquest transcript; 1994 NCA Report. Details of Saffron 1978 interiew re Nielsen: 1994 NCA Report.

10 Tax break comes Abe’s way: whistleblower goes to jail Middleton information: solicitors B. Perriman (Sydney) and Anthony Fisher (Melbourne); personal interviews with a Daily Mirror journalist; Middleton’s wife; Francis Foy (cousin of Juanita Nielsen who met Middleton a number of times); NSW Police running sheet.

11 Troubles in the south: truth drug may be the answer Saffron drugs accusation: media coverage; SA Parliamentary Hansard; author’s interview with Peter Duncan. Drugs meeting at the Boulevarde Hotel: interview by author with narcotic agents involved. Duncan speech: 1 March 1978, SA Hansard. Saffron’s response: Prince and the Premier; media clips. Details of Dunstan’s affairs: It’s Grossly Improper (by Des Ryan and Mike McEwen, Wenman Pty Ltd, 1979); and Australian Encyclopaedia, 1977, Vol. 3, p. 248. All licence actions included in Duncan’s speech in Parliament. Terence Lewis diaries reference to Emile Kornhauser: Fitzgerald inquiry; and media coverage.


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12 Rid me of these meddlesome attorneys: Abe plays Henry too Walker biog details from: Labor Year Book 1973 (Mass Communications Pty Ltd, 1973); Can of Worms II; p. 436. Allegations against Collins, Markham, Urbanchich: Sydney Morning Herald, Eastern Herald Section, 20 May 1987. Walker and Cabinet decisions: private discussions. Costigan and Bottom of the Harbour scheme: Can of Worms II, p. 121; ‘Australian Studies In Law, Crime And Justice: The Deputy Crown Solicitor and the bottom of the harbour scheme’, in Wayward governance: illegality and its control in the public sector (Australian Institute of Criminology, PN Grabosky Canberra: 1989), pp. 143–159, . Setting up Walker: Nugan Hand fund: author interview with Frank Walker, 2006. ‘Love boat’ data: media clips; Can of Worms II. Attempts to set up Dowd: direct interviews with author; ‘The Dowd Dossier’ by Keith Gosman, Sun Herald, 24 November 1991.

13 Takeover bid: top cop seeks monopoly on graft payments Crime intelligence reports on Anderson’s ‘hit-man’ report: 1994 NCA Report; Perrin/Sadler report: Can of Worms. Arkins’ responses to our allegations: government correspondence viewed by author. Molloy appointment and activities: Anderson interviews with NCA. Allen bribe allegations: NCA; Police Tribunal; wide media coverage. Lionel Killock’s testimony to Woods Royal Commission into Police Corruption.

14 Taxing times: Abe does a ‘Capone’ with little black books Costigan’s ‘Gomorrah’ summary reproduced in 1994 NCA Report. Tax fraud court hearings: court transcripts; NCA report; media coverage.

15 Courting a new persona: writ say the past is all a lie Western Australian court cases: from transcripts and/or judgements. Parliamentary question/answer on Crown Street Liquor: Hansard. Reproduction of the Sydney Morning Herald ‘Sauce’ item on Mr Sin with kind permission of its author, Kate McClymont. Reproduction of Saffron item from Tough: 101 Australian Gansters: A crime companion, John Silvester and Andrew Rule (Floradale Productions/Sly Inc., Melbourne, 2002, ISBN-10: 0957912129) with kind permission of John Silvester.

Epilogue: and then he died Kate McClymont’s article on Saffron’s legacy, containing interviews with Alan Saffron and Anne Buckingham, appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald’s the (sydney) magazine issue No. 50, June 2007.


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INDEX INDEX

556A first offender provision, 10, 34

Avery, William Charles, magistrate, 65 AXA, financial services company, 269

A Current Affair, 10, 192 AAP news service, 287 Abbey Investments Pty Ltd, 73, 253 Abeles, Emil Herbert Peter, 70, 83–91, 104, 142–43, 167, 210, 216–17, 221 a biographical note, 83–89 Abrusci, John (WA), 269 Albert Hotel, North Sydney, 19 Alcorn, Ian, 199–200 Aldridge, Gordon, 71 Allan, Norman Thomas William, 80–82, 122, 147–48, 207 nicknamed ‘The Mushroom’, 81–82, 147 Allen, William Allan Ruthven (Bill), 218, 223, 228–29, 231–39, 242–56 Anderson, Frederick Charles ‘Paddles’, 7, 49 Anderson, James McCartney, 70, 72–76, 83, 101, 103, 134–42, 145–51, 156, 158–59, 164–65, 167, 171, 175, 178, 180–81, 183–88, 218, 223–27, 230–34, 236, 240–42, 244, 247–52, 255–56, 262–63, 266, 272 Anderson, Neathia Conrill, 156, 225 Anderson, Peter, police minister, 225, 228 Anderson, Ron, tax inspector, 185 Anson Investments, 66 Appin Investments, 270 Appin private hotel, site of ‘sex romps’, 58–59, 101, 106 Apsley Investments, 66 Arantz, Sgt Philip, 148, 244 Arcadia Amusements, 267 Arendt, Hanna, 265 Argus Investments, 66 Arkins, Det-Sgt KDL, 74, 124–26, 133, 170–72, 174–75, 182, 188–99, 202 Arno, Norman (US), 260–61 Askin, Mollie, 229 Askin, Robin (later Sir Robert), corrupt premier, 17, 81–85, 87–89, 91, 110, 122, 14–43, 148, 152, 167, 185, 216, 229, 280 Askin, William James, 81 Australia Hotel, 29 Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, 207 Australian Crime Commission, 254 Australian Dictionary of Biography, 82 Australian Financial Review newspaper, 269 Australian Institute of Criminology, 211

Baffsky, David, 87 Ballard, Det-Sgt Brian, 137, 140, 162–63, 165, 225 Bally Poker Machine company, 110, 153, 162, 164, 201 Ballyhoo, Jack Rooklyn’s yacht, 203 Banfield, Donald Hubert Louis (SA), 193–95 Barbour, Richard, QC, 68 Barker, Ian, QC, 255 Barnett, L, Under-Secretary of Justice, 132–33 Barton, Alexander, 87 Barton, Alexaner & Thomas, 210 Barton, Thomas, 87 Barwick, Garfield Edward QC, 39–40, 46, 51–52, 146, 211 Basten, John, solicitor, 178, 180–81 Beaumont, judge Bryan Alan, 262–63 Bega, Shirley, 112–14, 119, 122–23, 128, 130–31, 133, 294 Beiger, Shirley, 294 Bel Air Hotel (SA), 201 Benedetto, ‘Last Card’ Louis, 69, 101 Benevolent Society of NSW, 204 Bennett, Betty June, 138 Black Prince, The (Farrugia), 100 Black Prince, The (Ramsay), 100 Black, ‘Tubby’, 95–97, 150–51, 168–70, 189–91, 241, 257 Blackburn, Tom QC, 281 Blackmore, Cecil Hargraves, magistrate, 63–64 Blows, L, state psychiatrist, 127 Bondi Surf Club, 2 Boom, Reg, 14, 28 Borg, Joe, 108 Boulevarde Hotel, 196 Bourbon and Beefsteak, 72, 77, 104 Brereton, judge Rusell Le Gay, 52 Brifmann, Shirley, prostitute, 202 Bristow, Tim, 90 brothels, 75, 101, 106–7, 109–10, 143–44, 156, 159–60, 162 Brothels on a ‘bull run’, 111 Brotherhood, The, 92, 147–48, 153, 210 Brouggy, ‘Mad’ Ray, 96 Brunen, Elias and Rachel, 15 Brunen, Mendel, 15, 17, 19 Buckingham, Anne, 289–90

[ 297 ]


298 ]

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3:20 PM

Page 298

MR SIN

Buckingham, Beryl. See Frack, Beryl. See Frack, Beryl Buckingham, Robert Melville Randall, 38 Bull, Barry, 261 Burbridge Properties Pty Ltd, 110, 142 Burns, Robbie, 234, 237, 242 Burrell, Jimmy, 94, 149 Cahill, Joe, NSW Premier, 64 Callaghan, robber, 186 Campsie Freehold Pty Ltd, 101 Capone, Al, 101, 245, 253 Card, Malcom Charles, 53 Carnovale, Francis Peter, lawyer, 263 Carousel nightclub, 77, 101–2, 141, 159, 170–72, 174, 180, 182, 184–85, 249, 278 Carr, Bob, NSW Premier, 272 Carter, Leon, 220 Cassidy, Geoffrey Roy, 141 Castle Hotel, SA, 141 Castle Motor Inn (SA), 194 Cavanagh, Jim, 122 Central Intelligence Agency, 84, 103–5, 109 Ceruto, John James Lang (SA), 197–98 Charody, John, 70, 91, 104, 217, 221 Chequers nightclub, 112, 119, 294 Chevra Kadisha funeral temple, 287 Chipp, Senator Don, 144 Civic Hotel, 19, 37 Clancy, judge Sydney James, 54 Clark, Det-Const Alfred Ernest, 61 Clark, Jacky, gunman, 71 Club Costello, 76 Coconut Jungle, 93, 96, 149 Collins Markham Associates, 209 Collins, Denis, magistrate, 270–71 Collins, Ray, 209 Colvin, Mark ABC-Radio presenter, 287 Commercial Travellers’ Association, 231 Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, 249, 255, 257 Commonwealth Police, 151–52, 154, 162, 165, 197, 199, 216, 240, 246 Constance Developments, 143 Cornwall, Bruce ‘Snapper’, 261 Cornwall, Dr John (SA), 193–95, 200 Costigan Royal Commission, 116–17 Costigan, Frank QC, 116, 134, 212, 246, 247 Coumbis, Nicholas, Saffron tenant, 94–95 Cox, Det-Sgt, 124–26, 133 Crabtree, Bill, Police Minister, 228 Crazy Horse, 72, 101 Creole club, 101, 240 crikey.com, 281 Crittenden, Paul Ronald, MP, 270 Crown Street Liquor, 227, 270

Csidei, Bela, 87–88, 294 Cumberland Hotel, 19, 38, 81, 205 Customs, Dept of, 122, 145, 147, 154–55 Dabinett, Jack ‘Dabbo’, 1–3 Daily Mirror, 1, 3, 33, 77, 100, 185 Daily Telegraph, 55 Dash, Kenneth MacDonald, magistrate, 61 Davis, Jack Mervyn, Commonwealth Police Commissioner, 151, 155 Day, Dick, tax inspector, 185 defamation cases, 207, 281–82, 284–85, 265–85 1951 over illegal housie game, 30, 32 Gold Coast Bulletin crossword clue, 283–85 Rule and Silvester, 278–83 Sydney Morning Herald case, 273–76 Delaney, Police Commissioner Colin, 51 Dixon, Sir Owen, Chief Justice, 47 Donnelly, James Angus, forger, 145–46 Doran, John, 220 Dovey, Wilfred Robert ‘Bill’, QC, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51 Dowd, John Robert Arthur, 216–18 Downes, Gary, QC, 262 Downing, Robert Reginald, AttorneyGeneral, 79, 139 Drug Referral Centre, 76 drug trade, 74–77, 84, 86–87, 92, 103–6, 109, 140–41, 143–44, 153–61, 165, 171, 192–96, 200, 203, 207, 214, 226, 261 Duggan, Minnie Emeline, 38 Duggan, Patrick Joseph, 26 Duncan, Peter, A-G (SA), 193–94, 198– 203, 205, 208, 280 Dunlop, Sgt Keith, 225 Dunstan, Don, Premier (SA), 193, 197–98, 200, 202–3, 205, 208 Edwards, Henry, witness to Saffron wedding, 20 Elephant and Castle, (SA), 141–42, 194 Ellis, Gretel, 198 Evans, David Molland, 22–25, 254–55 Evatt, Clive Jnr, lawyer, 243, 256, 278, 281, 283–84 Evatt, Clive Snr, lawyer, 278 Evatt, Clive, Chief Secretary, 30–32, 39, 48 Evatt, Herbert Vere, 278 Face, Jack Richard, MP, 270–71 Failk, Rabbi Leib Aisack, officiated at Saffron marriage, 21 Fairfax, Lady Mary, 32 Fairweather, Peter Vardon (SA), 194, 198, 201, 256


18/6/07

3:20 PM

INDEX

Farrell, Frank ‘Bumper’, 3–5, 61, 64–65, 70, 78, 190 Farrugia, Peter, 94–95, 100, 102, 142, 149, 194, 199, 201 Farrugia, Vincent, 102, 143, 201 Farrugia, Yvonne, 102 FBI, 154 Federal Police. See Commonwealth Police Fergusson, Supt. Don, 80, 126, 128, 130–31, 133 Fisher, Tony, solicitor (Vic), 188 Fitzgerald, Shirley, 276–77 Fort Street High School, 7, 34, 39, 216 Four Corners, ABC-TV current affairs program, 85–86, 294 Fowler, James Ernest, magistrate, 146–47 Foxhole club, 100 Frack, Beryl, 19, 37–38 Fratianno, Aladena ‘Jimmy the Weasel’, 84–85 Frost, Darcy John, 53 Fuller Lieut. B, 12 Gajic, Alexander, 261 Galea, Perc, gambler, 72, 185 Gallagher, Alf, 26–27 Game, Sir Philip, 35 Garrison restaurant, 250 Gascoine, robber, 186 Gaston, of the Tabou, 77–78, 103 Gaswirth, Theodore (US), 260–61 Gaudron, Mary, solicitor-general, 236, 242 George, Arthur, 40, 45, 70, 87, 91, 217, 221 Gilbert, Annie. See Saffron, Annie Gilligan, Det-Sgt Dennis, 170 Gilligan, Frank Alfred, 146–47 Gilligans bar, 101, 230 Gladstone Hotel, 16, 18–19, 23, 42–44, 56 Glebe, John, 122–27 Goanna (Costigan’s code-name for Kerry Packer), 134 Gold Coast Bulletin, 283–84 Gomorrah (Costigan’s code-name for Saffron), 116, 134, 157, 246–47 Goran, Alf, 23–25 Grabosky, Professor Peter, 211 Grant, Rex Archibald, 26 Green, Billy, 93, 96 Gribbon, Peter, Customs investigator, 145 Groot, Murray, 82 Gyles, Roger, QC, 255 Hagenfelds, Biruta, 117 Hagenfelds, Melissa, 117, 288–89 Halliday, Ellen Laura, 81 Halpin, David, 166 Hand, Michael, 84, 105

Page 299

[ 299

Hanson, Fred, corrupt police commissioner, 82, 148, 151–52 Hardaker, David, journalist, 253 Harvey, Everard Roy, magistrate, 33–34, 63–64 Hawke, Bob, 206–7 Hawkins, Florence Bunte, 66 Hely, Peter, QC, 249, 251–52 heroin trade, 75, 103–4, 158–59, 193, 207, 214 Herron, judge Leslie, 52, 54, 253 Herscu, George (Qld), 206 Hickie, David, 81–82, 109, 167 High Court of Australia, 41, 47, 68, 95, 155, 211, 269 Hill, Elliot Douglas Yabsley, 37 Hilton Park Tavern (WA), 269, 272 Hinze, Russ (Qld), 205–6 Hodgson, judge David, 276 Holden, judge Thomas Sinclair, 67 Holt, judge Henry Thomas Eulert, 53 Honeysett, Allan William, 121–34, 179 Horne, Donald, 100 Houghton, Bernie, 72, 103–7, 109 Housie scandal, 30–31, 34 Hyde, David, magistrate, 255–56 Interpol, 165 Isaacs, Simon, 22, 67, 123, 128–29, 132, 134 Isles, Harry, Industrial court magistrate, 52 Jackson, Rex ‘Buckets’, 221 James, Rowley, MP, 37 Jankowski, Richard, solicitor, 176–77 Jeremiah’s restaurant (SA), 194 John Elliott, 254 John Fairfax. See Sydney Morning Heraldd Johns, Malcolm, solicitor, 175–76 Kanzen, Meissner’s boat, 214 Kastel, Rabbi Mendel, 287 Keillor, Keith, 108 Kelly, John Malcolm Joseph, licensing magistrate, 66 Kelly, Ray, corrupt police inspector, 49, 50, 57–59, 80 keys to the safe, 217 Killock, Supt. Lionel, 232 Kincaid, Hilton Glanville, 8, 13, 15–17, 19, 43–44, 54, 61, 64, 81 King George V, 45 King George VI, 40 King, Amanda, 158 King, Arthur, 140 Kings Cross Rex Hotel, 71 Kingsdore Hotel brothel, 101, 106 Kinsella, judge Edward Parnell ‘Ted’, 39


18/6/07

300 ]

3:20 PM

Page 300

MR SIN

Kitto, High Court judge Frank, 47 Koh, Adele, 198 Kornhauser, Emil ‘Eddie’, 19, 37, 70, 81, 205–7 Krahe, Frederick, corrupt cop, 80, 87, 202 Krantz, Rebecca née Cohen, mother of Doreen, 20 Krantz, Samuel, father of Doreen, 20 Kurri Kurri Hotel, 15 La Bastille restaurant, 101, 249 La Belle, club, (SA), 141–42, 193–94 Lamaro, judge Joseph, 25, 254 Lambeth, Frank, 52–53 Landa, David Paul, 125, 215 Lang, Jack, Premier, 35 Lansky, Meyer (US), 261 Laramie restaurant, 101, 250 Latin Quarter, 71–72 Lawrence, Ivy, injured barmaid, 56–57 Leatherbarrow, Det-Sgt CV, 137 Lee, Sammy, 14, 28–29, 71 Les Girls club, 102, 151, 248, 252, 257, 262 Levine, judge David, 275–76 Lewis, Terence, police commissioner (Qld), 205–6 Liebman, Steve, 121 Little, John, 10 Lloyd, judge Alan Stredwick, 27 Lodge 44 Motel, 65, 101, 165, 192, 219 Longshoremen’s Union (US), 84 Lord Jersey Hotel, 53 Love Boat scandal, 214, 216 Luna Park fire, 1979, 290 Lynch, Terence, lawyer, 274 MacKay, William J, police commissioner, 28 Macleay Enterprises, 52 MacMahon, Joyce Aileen, 129 Macossa. See Kincaid, Hilton Glanville Madam Lash, 116 Mafia, Australia, 88 Mafia, US, 17, 84–86, 110, 142, 152–53, 160, 162, 201, 260–61 Makisovich, Todor ‘Tosha’, 250 Malcolm, judge David K (WA), 272 Mark Foys retalier dynasty, 120 Maroney, Det-Sgt Norman, 74, 125–26, 133, 170, 174–175, 182 Martin, Clarence Edward, AttorneyGeneral, 39, 64 Martin, Wayne, 61, 63, 69 Martin-Simmonds, Shayne, 74–75 Mason, Anthony, QC, 41 Maxwell, judge Allan Victor, 29, 34–35, 40, 45 Mayne, Stephen, 281

McArthur, Noel, 76 McCallum, Lucy QC, 284 McClelland Wallace and Landa, 122 McClelland, judge Charles, 53 McClemens, judge John Henry, 42, 44–45 McClintock, Bruce, SC, 274 McClymont, Kate, journalist, 273, 288–90 McCoy, Alfred W (author), 105 McCoy, Dr Alfred, 84 McDonald, Douglas William, 26 McEwen, Mike, writer (SA), 197 McGirr, Premier James, 32 McKellar, Michael J, Federal Health Minister, 204 McNab, Duncan, writer, 20–21, 259 McNeill, Det-Insp Jack, 162, 164, 168–71, 173, 179, 182, 185, 190 McPherson, Lennie, 5, 71, 92, 96, 104–6, 153, 161, 278, 285 Meissner, Ladislas (Joe), 214, 216 Menzies, Robert Gordon, Prime Minister, 98 Mercer, Neil, journalist, 137 Middleton, Edwin John (Ted), 184–88, 254–55 Minicozzi, Nick, lawyer (SA), 256 Mitchell, Alex, journalist, 122, 125, 182, 258, 264, 288 Moffitt, judge Athol, 17–18, 83, 152–53, 160, 162, 203 Molloy, Det-Sgt Warren, 75–76, 229–34, 236–40, 242–44, 253, 255–56 interview with author, 237–39 Moore, Clover, Lord Mayor, 277–78 Morey, Det-Sgt Noel, 149 Morrison, Det-Sgt Ross ‘Rocky’, 138 Mortdale Hotel, 19, 37–38, 290 Morton, Philip Henry (Liberal leader), 82 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 269 Mr Sin, 3, 5, 115, 161, 195, 203, 259, 264–65, 273–75, 277, 278, 280–81, 283–85, 287 Muir, judge Alistair, 216 Murphy, Christopher, solicitor, 216 Murphy, Lionel, 155, 165–66 Napoli Restaurant, 66, 101 National Crime Authority, 67, 93, 139, 156–58, 218, 223–24, 226, 230, 232–34, 239, 240–44, 246–47, 251, 254, 280–81 National Mutual Life Nominees, 269 National Times newspaper, 157, 202 NCA. See National Crime Authority New Guard, 35 Newcastle Hotel, 15 Newell, Det-Ch-Insp Douglas, 215 Nielsen, Juanita, 75, 120–27, 130, 133,


18/6/07

3:20 PM

INDEX

140, 158–59, 164, 168–83, 185, 188, 199, 202, 221, 224–25, 232, 280 Noonan, Inspector, 29 Norton, Peter, magistrate, 249–51 NSW Spastic Centre, 30 Nugan Hand Bank, 84, 92, 105, 107, 109, 213, 246 Nugan, Frank, 84, 105, 107 O’Hagan, Det. Sen-Cont, 187 Okrim, Lionel, NCA informer, 233 Olenski, David, 207 Owen, judge William Francis Langer, 52, 54 Packer, Kerry, 130–31 Packer, Sir Douglas Frank Hewson, 126, 130–32 Painters and Dockers Union, Federated, 212 Paradise Club, 100, 241 Penthouse magazine, 237 Perger, Virginia Carlina, prostitue, 214–16 Perren Productions, 66 Perrignon, judge Edmund Theodore ‘Ted’, 234–35 Perriman, Barry, solicitor, 187 Perrin, John, deputy commissioner, 225 Perrin-Sadler report, 225 Persian Room theatre restaurant, 101 PH Electrical Pty Ltd, 73 Phoenix Hotel, 1, 3 Pink Panther club, 101 Pink Pussycat club, 100 Police commissioner Delaney, Colin John, 51 Fred Hanson, 76, 148, 151–52 Jim Lees, 228, 234 MacKay, William J, 28 Mervyn Woods, 173, 228 Norm Allan, 80–82, 122, 147–48 Terence Lewis (Qld), 205–6 Pooraka Hotel (SA), 194, 198, 201 Privy Council, 56, 95, 209 prostitution, 59, 67, 7–77, 90, 102–3, 105–9, 113, 117–18, 134, 144, 156, 158, 174, 202–3, 214, 224, 226, 245, 249–50 Pullin, judge Christopher James Lonsdale, (WA), 273 Pussy Galore club, 95, 150, 168, 189, 241 Puzo, Mario, 15 Pyne, Jim, Assist. Commissioner, 224, 229 Queen Anne, 40 R&R (Rest & Recreation leave), 93, 99, 103–4 Rabin, Zell, 78

Page 301

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Raffles hotel, Perth, 55, 243, 269–70, 272 Raft Room (formerly Venus Room), 238, 253 Railways, NSW Dept of, 143–44 Ramsay, Lee, 100–1, 241 Redapple, judge Walter Perry, 175 Regines restaurant (SA), 256–57 Reid, Lynette, bookkeeper, 249–51 Reilly, Richard Gabriel, 20, 48–49, 57–58, 96 Reserve Bank of Australia, ix, 145–46 Rex Hotel, Thirroul, 68 Reynolds, Lance (US), 258–59 Richardson, judge, 51 Ritcher, Robert, QC, 254 Robertson, Campbell, solicitor, 125 Rofe, David, QC, 215 Rooklyn, Jack, 110, 142, 153, 16–64, 201, 203, 235–36 Roosevelt nightclub, 14, 19–20, 23–24, 26–28, 36, 38–39, 43, 48–52, 56, 69, 184, 254, 279 Royal Commissions: 1951, Maxwell, into liquor, 34–38, 40–43, 45–47, 53–54, 66 1973-4, Moffitt, into organised crime, 17–18, 83, 110, 152, 160–64, 195, 203 1980, Costigan, tax evasion etc, 116–17, 134, 156, 212, 245, 246–47, 280 1980, Woodward, into drugs, 261 Rule, Andrew, writer (Vic), 278, 283 Russell, Sonny, 113–15, 119–20 Ryan, Des, writer (SA), 197 Ryan, Morgan, solicitor, 155, 161, 165 Ryko, Robert, 143 Sadler, Russ, exec. ch. supt., 225 Saffron Enterprises Pty Ltd, 52 Saffron, Abraham Gilbert, vi, 3–20, 2–28, 30–52, 55–62, 64–70, 72–81, 83, 87, 89–97, 99–101, 103–4, 106–11, 114–20, 122–23, 128–30, 134–36, 139, 141–45, 147, 149–72, 17–75, 177–83, 185–86, 188–89, 192–95, 197–209, 211–21, 223–37, 239–91, 295 1927 sold black market cigarettes, 8 1936 met Kincaid, 8–9 1938 fined, illegal gambling, 9 1940 military call-up up, 11 suspended sentence, stolen goods, 9 1944 bought Kurri Kurri, Newcastle, Hotels, 15


302 ]

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Page 302

MR SIN

discharged from army, 12 takes over Roosevelt Club, 14 1946 bought Gladstone Hotel, 16 bought West End Hotel, Balmain, 16 1947 given bond over unlicensed pistol, 21 married Doreen née Krantz, 20 1948 electric shock at charity do, 26 laid theft charges against accountant Evans, 22 1951 illegal house charges dismissed, 34 lied to Maxwell, 25 Sept., 42 loses defamation case, 31 opened illegal housie game, Bondi, 30 1952 charged with perjury to Maxwell inquiry, 36 Harold Taylour sells Civic Hotel, 37 perjury trial date set for 15 Dec., 42 sister Bracks sells Mortdale Hotel, 37 summonsed over illegal housie game, 32 1952 perjury court case opens, 39 1953 bought home at 109 Hopetoun Ave, Vaucluse, 50 bought Raffles Hotel in Perth, 55 Kornahuser sells Cumberland Hotel, 37 sells Roosevelt club, 52 wrongful dismissal case 11 June, 52 1954 appeals against injured barmaid damages award, 56 1956 force to pay injured barmaid damages award, 56 scandalous conduct case begins, 61 1957 fined for obscene publications, 65 scandalous conduct charge dismissed, 64 1958 wins appeal against obsescene publications conviction, 67 1959 bankruptcy threat over chrome ore deal, 68 staves off bankruptcy, 68 1962 buys personalised number plates from Norm Allan, 81 1963

Downing no-bills stolen goods 25 Feb., 79 trial over stolen goods charges, 79 1972 Bill Allen had made contact, 229 Rooklyn asks ‘take heat off’, 162 Rooklyn discussion re Djakarta brothels’, 162 1973 appears before Moffitt Royal Commission, 161 offered $70 bribe to Molloy, 229 1976 denies ‘vile’ drug accusation, 192 linked to S. Aust. Drug trade, 195 orders punitive action against whistle-blower accountant, 186 1977 demands Compol file, 197 sighted at meeting with drug ‘boss’, 197 1978 Duncan’s major speech in SA Parliament, 200 interviewed re Nielsen, 182 tries to exploit Dunstan’s sexuality (SA), 198 1980, appointed Life Governor, Benevolent Society of NSW, 204 1981 Jim Lees investigates Allen bribe allegations, 234 meets with author, 219 report that Anderson was hiring a hit-man, 224 visits Bill Allen at police hdq seven times, 232 1982 ‘person of ill repute’ says police tribunal, 235 denies any association with Nugan Hand, 246 describd as ‘unsavoury’ by judge Perrignon, 234 loses appeal against cancellation of Raft Room license, 253 1983 allegation of $70,000 bribe to Trigg, 176, 177, 178, 179 cleared of police bribery allegations in Perrin-Sadler report, 226 1984 NCA granted C’wealth approval to investigate, 158 Walker prepares prosecution over tax scam, 213 1985 arrested on tax fraud charges, 249 1986


18/6/07

3:21 PM

INDEX

committed for trial for tax fraud, 251 may have tried to buy Anderson’s silence, 242 NCA granted NSW approval to investigate, 158 1987 arrest in Perth by NCA on Allen bribery charges, 243 guilty verdict on tax fraud, 5 Nov., 252 tax fraud trial, 251 1988 Allen bribe charges dismissed, 256 first day in jail, 27 Oct., 253 loses appeal against duration of sentence for tax conviction, 253 loses appeal against tax conviction, 253 1989 DPP seize $5m assets, Dec., 257 1990 $5m assets seizure overturned, Mar., 257 end prison sentence, 11 Mar., 259 1992 Allen bribe charge dismissed, 244 Fed Court challenge to tax assessment, Jun., 262 1994 loses appeal against Fed Court tax ruling, Feb., 263 1997 refused WA gaming macine permit, Apr., 267 WA gaming macine permit refusal quashed, 11 Nov., 267 1998 signs contract to buy Victoria Inn, Perth, 268 2000 barred from Victoria Inn auction, Aug., 269 2001 liquor license for Crown St Liquor rejected, Mar., 270 ruled in was unfit to hold liquor license, Oct., 269 2002 lengthy court case over Victoria Inn, Perth, 268 WA judge says he lied, 268 2003 judge rules out most defamation imputations, 17 Apr, 275 loses defamation action against SMH, 24 Oct., 276 loses WA appeal against liquor license bond, 273 2004

Page 303

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loses appeal against SMH defamation decision, 20 Jul., 276 2006 died in Sydney, 15 Sept., 286 estate reported to be valued at $20 million, 287 Saffron, Alan, 33, 182–83, 220, 258–59, 288–90 Saffron, Annie née Gilbert, 7 Saffron, Beryl. See Frack, Beryl Saffron, Doreen, 20–21, 33, 50, 61, 117–18, 253, 256–57, 259–60, 287 Saffron, Henry, 7, 19, 61–63, 68, 208 Saffron, Philip, 7, 16, 53–54 Saffron, Ruth Harriet née Levy, 16 Saffron, Sam, 7, 15 Sala, Ramon, 165–66 Sands, Dave, 26 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 266 Scotland Yard, 154 Seal, Charlie, 96–97 Shand, John ‘Jack’ Wentworth, QC, 62 Shaw, Mary, 178 Sheller, judge Simon, 276 Shellim, David, 261 Ships Painters and Dockers Union, Federated, 116 Showbiz restaurant, 72, 250 Silvester, John, writer (Vic), 278, 282–83, 291 Simons and Baffsky, lawyers, 87 Slade, Det-Sgt Jim, 224 Slippery Sam. See Askin sly grog trade, 18, 27–29, 106 Smeal, Royce, 79, 80 Smith, Arthur ‘Neddy’, 278 Smith, Donald Hector Neville. See Smith, Donny ‘The Glove’ Smith, Donny ‘The Glove’, 136–39 Smyth, JW, QC, 41, 42, 44–46 Societe Miniere Cafrika, 68 Spigelman, judge Jim, 276 St James Hotel, 27 St Vincent’s hospital, 26, 149, 286 Staccato (Darlinghurst Rd), 93–94, 149 Staccato club (Orwell St), 69, 72 Stacey, judge Bertie Vandeleur, 39 Stebbins, Arthur James ‘Jimmy’, 64–65 Steen, Frederick William, 37 Stein, Daniel M (US), 261 Stevenson, Denis (ACT), 260–61 Stewart, judge Donald Gerard, 92 Stewart, Roy Mitchell, licensing magistrate, 66–67 Steytler, judge Christopher David (WA), 267, 272 Strasser, Paul, 70, 87–88, 91, 104, 143, 217, 221 Stratton, Bruce QC, 251


304 ]

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3:21 PM

Page 304

MR SIN

Street, Kenneth, Chief Justice, 40, 51–52 Stuart-Jones, Dr Reginald, illegal abortionist, 49, 57–58, 60, 118 Studdert, judge Timothy, 281 Sunday Mirror, 78 Sunday Sun, 30–31 Sunday Telegraph, 24 Sundowner Hotel, SA, 142 Sun-Herald, 182, 253, 258–59, 264, 288 Surabaia restaurant (SA), 193–94 Sweeney, Met. Supt, 29 Sydney City Council, 109, 219, 241, 276 Sydney Morning Herald, 31, 137, 148, 192, 195, 206, 222, 228, 243, 252, 258, 260, 273, 288, 290 Symonds, Cedric Reuben, solicitor, 32–33 Tabou chez Gaston, 77 Talarico, Det-Sgt Herb, 114, 119 Tapper, Al (US), 261 Tax avoidance, 247 1948 evidence, 22–25 1970s Nugan Hand, 84 1976 evidence, 184–91 1980s evidence, 246–58 Bottom of the Harbour scheme, 211–16 Tax avoidance scheme, 23, 25, 84, 117, 185, 189, 211, 212 taxation department, 23, 25, 78, 185, 186, 189–91, 246, 248, 251, 254, 261, 263 Taylor, Joe, gambler, 185 Taylour, Harold, 19, 37 Teamsters Union (US), 84–85, 207 Texas Tavern, 104 The Invincibles, 50, 75, 77, 92, 94, 111, 139, 147, 179 Theeman, Frank, 171–72, 178, 182 Theeman, Timothy, 171 This Day Tonight, 192 Thomas Nationwide Transport, 83–88, 90–91, 167, 216–17 Thomas, Ken, 91 Thompson, Carla, 132–33 Thompson, King, 133 Thompson, Matthew, 132–33 Tidmarsh, Les, bookmaker, 186 Tina’s restaurant, 231–32 Tivoli Hotel (SA), 198 Tkaczyk, Teresa ‘Terry’, 286, 288 Togima Pty Ltd, 143–44 Toltz, Abraham, witness to Saffron wedding, 20 Toohey, Brian, journalist, 104–5 Tooth’s Brewery, 35 Torrington, judge Kenneth Frederick Erskine, 76

Tough: 101 Australian Gangsters, 278, 281–82, 285 Transport Workers Union, 85 Trigg, Eddie, 170, 174–80, 182, 186 Trocadero club, SA, 151 Truth newspaper, 63 Turner, Sgt Roy, police prosecutor, 62–63 Urbanchich, Lyenko, 209 Venus Room, 72–77, 101, 106, 136, 138, 141, 149, 158, 184, 227, 238, 248–50, 252–53, 262–63 Victoria Inn hotel (WA), 268–69 Victoria Street, 120–21, 140, 171, 221 Vietnam war, 93, 98–99, 103, 280 Von Stroheim, Anne Marie, bookkeeper, 252 Walker, Frank, x, 94–95, 100, 172–73, 179, 188, 208–10, 213–16, 218 Wallace, Brian, 125–26 Walsh, judge Cyril Ambrose, 56–57 Walton, Lady (robbery victim), 186–187 Ward, Barry, writer, 120, 128, 170–73, 179, 199, 202 Ward, Knight and Dunn, 212 Waterhouse, Bill, bookmaker, 185 Watson, Tom, 35 Webb, Kevin Robert, magistrate, 175 Wells, Vincent Henry, chair, Licensing Board, 37–38 West End Hotel, 16, 44, 54 Whisky Au Go Go, 99 White House, site of ‘sex romps’, 58, 60, 123 white slave trade, 104–06 Whitlam, Edward Gough, 278 Whitlam, Edward Gough, QC, 41 Whitton, Evan, writer, 87, 211, 287 Wilcott, Peter, 105 Wilkinson, Marian, reporter, 84 Wilks, Det-Insp A, 26 Willessee, Mike, 130 Williams, Daryl, Federal A-G, 266 Windsor, Det-Sgt, 22 Withers Sen. Const, 224 Woods, Mervyn, Police Commissioner, 173, 228 Woodward, judge Phillip Morgan, 261 Wran, Premier Neville, 76, 88, 144, 172–74, 179, 205, 209, 215–16, 228, 278 Zaffarano, Michael, 260 Zion, Alfred, 206 Zwier, Leon, solicitor (Vic), 261

Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron dossier

The Saffron Kitchen

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The Saffron Wave

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Abe, Kobo - The Ark Sakura

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Abe, Kobo - The Ark Sakura

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Abe Lincoln at Last!

Abe Lincoln u McDonalda

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Het Dossier

Dossier 64

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Dossier Goteborg

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dossier Blaauw

Saffron: Crocus sativus L

Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron dossier

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Abe, Kobo - The Ark Sakura

Abe, Kobo - The Ark Sakura

Abe, Kobo - The Ark Sakura

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Abe Lincoln at Last!

Abe Leiberman-Cofession

Abe Lincoln at Last!

Abe Lincoln u McDonalda

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Dossier Tobias

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Dossier 2

Dossier Blaauw

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Dossier Goteborg

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