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Stewart John Regan: ʻThe Magician’

In the early 1970s in Sydney, the hoodlums ran the streets much the same as the Mafia ran the streets of New York in the 1930s and ’40s. But Sydney’s hoodlums were far from as organised as their American counterparts.

With a severely corrupt police force, anyone was fair game for control of the illegal casinos, SP betting joints, brothels and protection rackets that were the bread and butter of the thugs that rose out of the gutter and who, with fists, knives and guns, made the streets their personal rivers of gold.

One such thug was Stewart John Regan, who would murder you as soon as look at you. But Regan didn’t restrict his murders to just the enemy. Seems as though lots of people, including a woman and her child, went missing when last seen with Regan. Regan was nicknamed ‘the Magician’ because he was good at making people disappear.

Regan was born in the New South Wales bush in 1945 and moved to Sydney with his family when he was 10. When the army rejected him due to his flat feet, the well-built teetotaler with a vicious right hook and a reputation for extreme violence, took to crime and earned a living collecting debts for some of the better known hoodlums of the time.

In and out of prison for a variety of offences that included robbery and assault, by the time he was 25 Regan was running a string of street-front brothels with a large number of prostitutes hanging out of the doorways beneath the red lights.

Not known to be benevolent with a quid and rather to invest it wisely, soon Regan’s many business interests included country properties throughout New South Wales and Queensland, a menswear shop in Kings Cross, a fashionable ladies boutique in toffy Double Bay, a TV shop, a renovating business, a ring of furniture thieves who stole the furniture and appliances for the houses he renovated, and one of New South Wales’s biggest car-stealing rackets.

Throughout the late 1960s and early ’70s Regan was implicated in numerous murders of underworld associates, many of whom went missing when last seen in his company. Regan’s technique was to arrange a meeting with the victim, usually in a public place such as a hotel or restaurant, and when he left with them they were never seen again.

It was believed that their bodies wound up in the foundations of one of Regan’s renovations in the Darlinghurst district that was being filled with concrete the following day. None of his victims ever turned up either dead or alive. But while police suspected that he was Sydney’s leading killer of the time there was no way they could prove it. Besides, Regan was really only cleaning up the streets and doing them a favour.

In the early 1970s the Sydney underworld was in conflict over the spoils of a $500,000 – that’s about $6 million in today’s money – armed robbery from Maine Nickless that had taken place in Guilford in Sydney’s west. The three members of the Melbourne underworld who did the job disappeared soon after, believed to have fallen victim to a gang called the Toe Cutters, who used bolt cutters to remove the robber’s digits to extract information from them as to the whereabouts of the cash.

One of the Toe Cutters, the notorious Sydney criminal, Kevin Victor Gore, was last seen walking down Oxford Street, Darlinghurst with Regan. He was never seen again. One of Gore’s associates, William Donnelly, suffered a similar fate. It was rumoured that both Donnelly and Gore were tortured by Regan and his associates until they told what they knew and then they were taken out to sea, barely alive, where their bodies were wired, weighted down and thrown overboard. It is believed that Regan wound up with a substantial amount of the proceeds of the Maine Nickless robbery.

Then, as if to spit in the eye of police who protected him, Regan formed a group named ‘the Independent Action Group for a Better Police Force’ which sent a series of letters to the police commissioner naming people involved in paying off the police and other officials in high places ‘for the purposes of protection’.

Then, when one of Regan’s numerous girlfriends – who it was believed knew too much about his activities – went missing after last being seen walking hand in hand with Regan and her six-year-old son down Oxford Street, it was decided by both police and the villains that this time he had broken all of the rules. The little boy was also missing – presumed murdered with his mother.

Stewart John Regan had become a liability the Sydney underworld and police would be better off without. But Regan wouldn’t just disappear as did his victims. Oh no, they had a much better send-off planned, just to let the world know that he was well and truly dead.

One Sunday evening in September 1974, Regan was crossing Chapel Street in Marrickville on his way to a nearby illegal gambling casino. Usually accompanied by at least two of his four bodyguards, this night Regan was alone. As Regan was about to enter a laneway he was ambushed by three gunmen who emptied their .38 revolvers into him at point-blank range, hitting him in the head, chest and liver eight times. As he lay dying in a pool of blood they reloaded and emptied their guns into him again. Three different guns had been used.

And so, it had been decided in the firmest possible way that the world – at least the underworld – was a much better place without Stewart John Regan in it.

The following day it was back to business as usual.