Everyone around Kings Cross, Sydney, agreed Izzy Berger was harmless to anyone but himself. They could see what he wanted to be – a gangster and an American – but he didn’t have the build for it, the temperament or the nationality. Underneath the yellow hat, Izzy Berger was true blue and, it was universally held, a nice guy. Sure, his mates sent him on futile or dangerous errands, picked his pocket, glued his locks, stole his watch and even, after one drunken afternoon in Aphrodite’s, sold his car, but he was accepted and, if not quite loved, then cheerfully tolerated by the men who mattered.
As for Berger himself, he felt he was American in every way except the obvious: he wasn’t born in America, and he didn’t live there. But that, he reasoned, was simply an accident of fate. His father, Hans Berger, a noted recording artist in Berlin, had fled Hitler in 1936, when it was still possible to leave Germany with a Stradivarius in a suitcase.
Hans’s mother, his father, his uncles, his brothers and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. This was a story often told to Izzy when he was growing up, the point being a man had to know when to leave. Hans kept a violin in a valise under his bed for the rest of his life.
Izzy Berger was raised in an Art Deco apartment on Macleay Street. He earned pocket money as a shabbas goy, pressing elevator buttons and turning off lights for orthodox families in nearby buildings. As an adult, he would boast he’d been the only Jewish shabbas goy in Sydney, but there was at least one other.
At school, Izzy was beaten up by Protestant boys for being Jewish and Jewish boys for being German. A junior rugby-league footballer named Simon Sleeth forced his head into the toilet, slammed down the seat and flushed it. He did this every morning for a term because, he said, Berger was shit.
Sleeth was six foot tall with fair hair and a firm jaw, and looked to Izzy like Chesty Bond. As he was both popular and feared, Sleeth’s judgement of Berger was broadly accepted by the rest of the school, including Berger himself, who wanted only to be Sleeth’s mate and walk with him through the playground spitting gum.
Sleeth, instinctively gifted in the arts of cruelty, amused himself by offering Berger his approval in exchange for humiliating and shameful acts, ranging from minor sexual favours to eating Sleeth’s cigarette butts. But Sleeth generally withdrew his patronage either at the moment he complied or, worse still, at the point where Berger publicly agreed to his newest degradation. Only joking, Jewstick! What kind of shit-dick Yiddelsky would do something like that?
So Berger stopped going to school, and spent his days hiding from his parents and his tormentors in Darlinghurst Road. He ran errands for a German-Jewish prostitute, and became a brothel boy in his early teens. He felt comfortable around prostitutes because they didn’t judge him for being short and slight and Jewish and German and shit. Berger, in turn, saw each girl as a tragedy worthy of sympathy, rather than a victim to be exploited.
Izzy Berger had learned to read and write music before he could read and write English. He could play a little piano and passable violin, and he taught himself guitar. Hans hoped one day father and son could perform together, in classical concerts at Sydney Town Hall. But Berger was a child of rock ’n’ roll. Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran sang his anger, pain and lust. He formed a dance band named the Ice Bergs (and briefly called himself Ice Berger) and played popular concerts around the eastern suburbs of Sydney. The Ice Bergs were in great demand for bar mitzvahs, until all four members and their roadie were beaten up by a bunch of swimmers who accused them of stealing their title. From this, Berger learned to legally register the name of any band with whom he came into contact.
The Ice Bergs were robbed by club owners, promoters and a record label. They sold out the big dances and had a hit single in Melbourne, but they rarely saw a penny of the takings or the profits. From this, Berger learned the money in music was in management.
When Berger tracked down a particular promoter who had simply fled the club with the door money at the end of the night, the man held a paring knife to his throat and threatened to cut out his Adam’s apple. Berger contacted some men he knew who worked as sitters in a brothel in Kings Cross, who paid a visit to the promoter and set his house on fire. They recovered Berger’s money, but kept it for themselves. From this, Berger learned you needed muscle in the business world, but you also needed to keep it under control.
Berger watched from the coffee bars as Kings Cross gradually fell under the control of a gang with no name, a group of Jewish returned servicemen with connections to corrupt cops, led by a man named Jake Mendoza who was no taller – but much broader – than Berger’s father. From this, Berger learned that short people could succeed in the milieu, even Jews.
Berger was twenty years younger than the new hard men of Darlinghurst Road, but there were things he knew, and small assistances he could offer, that made him useful to them. He amused them by being Jewish and talking quickly, and always having a scheme. They backed some of his more outlandish plans with insignificant amounts of money, for the simple joy of seeing him fail.
Berger liked to write to stars of stage, screen and radio, and ask for autographed photographs. As both an artist’s manager and fellow performer, he sent a letter to Frank Sinatra in the US, inviting him to come to Australia to sing his then popular song about ants. Berger received a note in return from Sinatra’s management, expressing his client’s interest in a visit to Austria, if a suitable fee could be negotiated and certain other conditions met. Berger, frightened and excited, passed on the correspondence to Mendoza who, through certain business connections, was already known to Sinatra and his organisation. He was also able to raise the money for Sinatra’s pay, and the women for his conditions, and so it was that Bold Screw Thighs, as Mendoza named him, flew to Sydney in 1959 to record a classic live album, and have sex with a Tasmanian Aborigine, whose race he’d believed to be extinct.
After this success, Berger began to dress like an impresario – spivvy, chequered and yellow, colourful, confident and soaked in pomade. He found bands to manage, and had them play in Mendoza’s clubs, which required some form of legitimate entertainment to take place on the premises occasionally, if only to save face for the licensing cops. Berger divided the takings evenly: fifty per cent for him and fifty per cent for the group – which, he reasoned, was fifty per cent more than the Ice Bergs ever got. Unfortunately, this earned Berger the early nickname Mr Fifty Per Cent, which made him sound as if he – or, worse, his cock – was only half the normal size.
Berger came to specialise in what he called ‘disciple acts’, Australian performers who dressed and played like top American artists, but were considerably more economical to hire. He co-managed, with Jake Mendoza, a stable of artistes including Arnold Zwaybil, ‘the eastern suburbs Frank Sinatra’; Col Tanner, ‘the Aussie Tony Bennett’; Frankie Freed, ‘the Dover Heights Dean Martin’; and David Rowbotham, ‘the Collaroy Col Joye’.
He told his father he was training as a classical violinist. As Hans Berger’s mind began to decay, Izzy would play Hans his own recordings – 78 rpm records, smuggled out of Germany – and tell him it was Izzy on the violin.
‘You play just like me,’ said Hans, ‘when I was young.’
Hans would hug Izzy tightly and say, ‘My son, my son.’
From this, Berger learned it was possible to be both crooked and kind.
Gradually, Berger became accepted as a member of the gang with no name. At first, he was a junior associate, a much mocked affiliate who came under their protection. But he helped them run Aphrodite’s, a nightclub which, like all their businesses, doubled as a brothel, and he had a natural way with the girls. He realised he had been fully initiated – granted a gunsel bar mitzvah – when the manager of Aphrodite’s, who went by the name of the Little Fish, passed him a Browning in a paper bag, and taught him how to use it at the Maccabee gun club.
At twenty-five years old, Izzy Berger was happy with the way his life had turned out. He had women, money and, if not respect, at least affection. On the Strip, they may have called him the Twat in the Hat, but never to his face. He was popular: a big talker, but also a big tipper. He saw himself as a new American style of Australian, from his trilby to his spats. He wasn’t afraid to take risks, to look a fool, to stand out from the crowd of big-shouldered, squint-eyed, slack-jawed, quick-fisted footballers, with their pitiless humour and slow, empty drawl.
One summer morning, Berger was walking down the Strip, tipping his hat to the girls as they crept into the doorways for the breakfast shift, when he came upon Simon Sleeth, lying unconscious in a pool of piss.
Berger finally had his chance to truly be a friend to Sleeth. He carried him to Aphrodite’s, cleaned up the wounds on his face and helped him into the girls’ shower. Sleeth’s suit was soaked in blood, so Berger lent him a shirt and pants that had been left behind by a retreating customer. He checked the man’s wallet and saw it was empty – he didn’t even have a driver’s licence – so he slipped a twenty-dollar note inside.
Sleeth didn’t remember Berger, but was grateful to his old schoolfriend for helping him out. Times were tough, and had been for a while. Berger asked if he had a wife and family. Sleeth said he was single. He’d just got out of jail for assault. He’d almost killed a man with a cricket bat, he said, over a ten-dollar debt.
Berger asked after his parents, who used to run a milk bar on William Street. Sleeth’s father was dead, he said, and his mother did not speak to him. He felt alone in the world except, perhaps – from this moment – for his former classmate, Izzy Berger. He believed the police might be looking for him after a fight the night before, in which he may have pushed a glass into a deserving man’s eye.
Berger was used to stories like these, told night after night by the gang with no name. He didn’t judge a man by his words, or his actions. He just liked to help people along, to get them to where they were going.
Berger patted Simon Sleeth on the back, told him you never knew what might be around the next corner, and escorted him out of the club. He led him down an alleyway, and into another, to avoid the cops who patrolled the strip. He took him through a brothel and out of a barber’s shop, along a secret route you could only know if you’d grown up trying to disappear into the ground on Darlinghurst Road, and they finished up behind a hotel in East Sydney that was run by the Maltese mafia.
‘You’ll be all right from here,’ Berger assured him.
Sleeth shook his hand and turned away, and Berger took out his pistol and shot him in the back of the head.
Simon Sleeth’s brain splattered over the wall of the pub. Izzy Berger watched it, grey and pulpy, slide down the brickwork and into the cracks.
Berger lit a cigarette, whispered a Kaddish, and hurried back to the strip to grab bacon and eggs from the Hasty Tasty.
Two weeks later, he flew to South Vietnam to chase a US Army police sergeant who, like so many big, cruel guys before him, had tried to rob Berger over a band.