When the first seven vessels containing 2100 American troops arrived in Sydney in 1941, an estimated crowd of half a million greeted their arrival with streamers, confetti and petals. And among those who gave the men the greatest welcome was the underworld.
War is a good time for criminals. Frankie Fraser, the London villain and friend of the Kray twins, whose career spanned half a century, thought that war made criminals out of everyone. While Australia may not have had the looting that followed the bombing of London or the rationing that so damaged Britain, it did have soldiers—visiting soldiers, deserting soldiers, soldiers on leave—all to be catered for and, particularly in the case of visiting soldiers, there for the plucking.
As the war progressed, American troops arrived in their tens of thousands, causing a wholesale boom in sly-grog shops, gambling and prostitution at all levels—from escorts for the top brass to street walkers and low-class brothels. There were pregnancies to be terminated and venereal diseases to be cured. There was the opportunity to work variations of the ginger game and the even greater opportunity to steal from drunken clients.
The Americans were sold cigarettes filled with cabbage leaves, and cold tea and tobacco water passed off as beer and whisky. They were overcharged by the girls and mugged by their pimps. Business expanded to fill the opportunities available, and now, to add to all the other enterprises of the underworld, a new market developed in forgery and black marketeering—making available not only papers for deserting troops but also items that were rationed.
Sometimes the ginger game turned out very badly. In May 1942 the 5-foot, 15-stone prostitute Barbara Phyllis Surridge (who worked under the unfortunate name of Stella Croke) was involved in the death of Ernest Hoffman, a chef at the Royal Sydney Golf Club. She took him to a ginger joint in Langley Street, Darlinghurst, and while there he caught her and another woman going through his pockets. When he struggled with the women, two men rushed in and beat him unconscious before dumping him in an allotment in his shirt and singlet. He died in St Vincent’s Hospital ten days later, but not before identifying Surridge. She, her husband William and the other man, James Harris, known as Skinny Jones, were all convicted of murder. They were sentenced to death, but were later reprieved and given life imprisonment. For a time Phyllis Surridge was in the prison next door to her husband and they were allowed to meet once a year in the men’s chapel. After her release from prison in 1956 she returned to prostitution and the ginger game, but died a year later as a result of an infected cut on her finger.
In July 1940 the Empire Club, a sly-grog shop on George Street, was closed by the authorities. It reopened in September and within a month the proprietor, Maltese-born Anthony Pisani, whose convictions for sly-grog selling went back to 1929, was sentenced to six months’ hard labour and fined 100 pounds for selling beer without a licence. What was really up the nose of the authorities was that it was a hangout for black servicemen and white girls, many of whom were drunk. In September 1940 a magistrate called it ‘One of the worst conducted clubs in Sydney’.
Two years later, in October 1942, Phil Jeffs’s 400 Club was shut down and from then on he lived off his substantial investments at Ettalong, where he had built a library consisting mainly of philosophical works and where he surrounded himself with these as well as a series of good-looking women.
But no sooner had one club closed its doors than another opened, very often on the same premises. Some were ritzier and longer lasting than others and some established their owners as kings of the nightclub and underworld scene.
The war was the making of the small, dapper Abraham Gilbert Saffron, one of five children of a draper in Annandale. His mother wanted him to become a doctor but from an early age Saffron showed he had a head for business, selling cigarettes to players at his father’s poker games. Educated at Fort Street High School, whose other alumni included the New South Wales premier Neville Wran and James ‘Paddles’ Anderson, a leading figure in the East Coast Milieu (an all-powerful, loosely linked association of criminals), Saffron left at the age of fifteen and began work in his father’s shop. He was, however, destined to follow his uncle, Mr Justice Isaacs, in a career that involved many appearances in court, albeit as plaintiff and defendant rather than as advocate and judge.
In 1938 he acquired his first bookmaking conviction and the next year he was sentenced to six months’ hard labour, suspended provided he join the armed forces. Over the years there were few prosecutions and even fewer convictions, and of those a number were overturned on appeal. When in 1940 he was convicted for possession of stolen car radios, Saffron had identifiable assets of ten pounds. Despite this he was able to open a number of clubs, often owned in partnership with his offsider Hilton G Kincaid (originally Hilton Maccossa). Among them was the Roosevelt Club at 32 Orwell Street, which catered for resting American troops and was described by Mr Justice Maxwell, who ordered its closure in 1943, as ‘the most notorious and disreputable nightclub in the city’.
Saffron moved north to Newcastle, where he obtained a bookmaker’s licence from the less than demanding Newcastle Jockey Club, and also took a licence on the Newcastle Hotel in the city. By the end of the war he was one of the biggest illegal liquor dealers in Sydney, owning a string of clubs and hotels and often using his relations as fronts. By the early 1950s he owned public house and hotel licences worth more than 84 000 pounds.
Sadly, some old friends did not see out the war. Henry Slater, once a friend of Snowy Cutmore, did not even last the first year. Since his run-in with Squizzy Taylor’s offsider Harry Stokes in the fight for control of the Melbourne underworld twenty years earlier, and his self-imposed exile from that city, Slater had become something of a peripatetic villain, gravitating between Sydney and Adelaide, living by theft and the standover of SP bookmakers. Now, in a somewhat prosaic end for one of Sydney’s senior standover men, Slater was shot at La Perouse near the Yarra Bay shantytown after he had left his home to catch a tram. The shooter pumped two bullets into him and then rode away on a bicycle. At the inquest into his death the coroner was told that Slater had been shot by a poulterer, Christopher Ransome, who had stood by the body and said, ‘You won’t worry me or anyone else again.’ Ransome had allegedly shot him because, over the years, Slater had been calling him a pervert. By the time of the inquest Ransome had been committed to an insane asylum. Appearances are deceptive, though, and not everyone was convinced by the official account.
Another survivor of the Razor Wars went down around the same time. In July 1940 the body of 39-year-old William Smiley (sometimes Smillie), gunman, razorman and SP bookmaker with convictions going back to 1910, was found in a lane off Butt Street, Surry Hills, lying next to a dead cat. In 1928, at the height of the wars, he had received five years for slashing, and was acquitted of the attempted murder of Thomas O’Brien, shot in Surry Hills, when O’Brien refused to identify him. Undeterred, in 1935 Smiley had slashed a man at a party held by Kate Leigh and as a reprisal was shot through both feet a few days later. Harry Barker (also known as Harry James) was charged with that shooting and acquitted. That was a bad period for Smiley’s legs: in September 1935 Kathleen McLennan was charged with shooting them and indeed wrote out a confession that she had borrowed a repeating rifle from a neighbour to do so. But if the police thought this would be sufficient to obtain a conviction they were wrong. She was acquitted after telling the court that she only made the confession after she had spilled Lysol, which she had intended to drink, over her body. She had, she now said, been at her mother’s when Smiley was shot and witnesses were called to support her. Smiley behaved like a proper gentleman, telling the court he had been shot by a ‘big man’ and that McLennan had not been there. The next year, when he was found in Elizabeth Street shot in the thigh, he refused to help the police, saying, ‘If I had the Town Hall clock in my pocket. I wouldn’t tell you the time.’
Now John McIvor, regarded as one of the city’s top safecrackers, and George Dempsey were charged with his murder. On the day of his death Smiley had come into a shop, run by a Mrs Sadie Pinn in Devonshire Street, and fired at Dempsey. Pinn ran upstairs and later heard another shot. Smiley had been shot four times with a .32 and his body had been carried to the lane. It would seem that he had attacked Dempsey in the past and had been standing over him. On 7 September the police prosecutor entered a nolle prosequi against both men.
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As World War II went on, the demand for after-hours drinking establishments increased. They had, of course, maintained a regular trade before the war but now there was much more money around to meet the increased prices. Breweries were required to provide beer for the troops and for four years from March 1942 a quota system was imposed. The importation of Scotch whisky was also prohibited from the beginning of the war and both beer rationing and this ban created a ready black market. In 1943 the licensee of the Wentworth Hotel was charged with selling whisky at a price ranging between four and six pounds a bottle, yielding him an overall annual profit in the region of 30 000 pounds.
There was also the opportunity for a certain amount of freelance pimping. In August 1943, 46-year-old Westbrook Walter Turnbull, described as an invalid pensioner, and his younger brother, the 43-year-old John Alexander, pleaded not guilty to charges of procuring girls for the purposes of prostitution. They met many of the women at the Ziegfeld Club, but toured other clubs and amusement arcades for suitable women. Their girls worked in a house in Bondi and were paid three pounds per customer, half of which went to the brothers. Two months later, found guilty, the Turnbulls each received three years and three months’ imprisonment. Then, in December, their convictions were quashed and a retrial ordered. The trial judge had ruled that it was immaterial whether the brothers knew or believed the girls were under eighteen. The Court of Appeal, however, said it was a material fact. It did them no good whatsoever. At the retrial they were again convicted and this time sentenced to four years.
Considerable attention was paid to morals, with clergymen in disguise investigating Sydney nightclubs, hotel lounges and dark doorways. In November 1943 the president of the New South Wales Temperance Alliance claimed that the police were prevented from cleaning up Sydney because the state government was controlled by liquor traffickers.
During the war racing was reduced to one afternoon a week but this did nothing to curtail gambling; more money was wagered on a Saturday afternoon. Bets of 1000 pounds by Americans in Thommo’s Two-up School were not uncommon. The SP business still boomed and operators still paid for protection—if they complained they could expect visits from heavies. Mechanics installed gadgets to kill a telephone in the event of a police raid. When the prime minister, John Curtin, asked for a telephone call to be put through one Saturday afternoon to discuss the situation in Japan he was told there were sixty bookmakers ahead of him in the queue for connection.
With sly-grog, doctored spirits and prostitution, and taxi drivers cheating and robbing servicemen on leave, there was work and money for everyone. American servicemen roamed the city looking for recreation and the city roamed looking for the soldiers. There was a special brothel, the Tradesman’s Arms Hotel in Palmer Street, for the black servicemen. Police officer Lilian Armfield wrote in her memoirs: ‘We found it necessary to not only turn a blind eye, but to give tacit approval, to the existence of a brothel which catered exclusively to American Negro Servicemen.’ This was putting it a little delicately. The military police were employed to keep the queues in the street in order and moving along, as if the patrons were buying tickets for the cinema.
When the Booker T. Washington club was formed for black servicemen in Sydney, there were not enough working girls to entertain the members. A screening test was established to check all women who wished to become members and they were required to provide their particulars and a photograph. Many of the women preferred the black servicemen, who paid better, and it was shameful to the white folk that they went with the black servicemen voluntarily. And worse, that some of them were married women or young girls. Armfield commented: ‘It was like a knife through the heart when we found that one Sydney girl, only twelve years old, was in the bed of a Negro serviceman.’ In January 1944, Truth was seriously unhappy: ‘Not much has been said, outside the courts, of the spreading depravity involving our white women and visiting coloured men.’
There was mayhem in the other brothels too. Some servicemen did not seem to recognise the time limits imposed and, when one refused to get off a girl in one of Tilly Devine’s houses, the girl began to scream and Tilly, to the rescue, hit him over the head with a bottle and fractured his skull. She was charged with grievous bodily harm and duly acquitted. Devine was an early casualty when she was ordered to leave Sydney and remain away for a period, under penalty of forfeiting 250 pounds. It did not seriously trouble her. This was her heyday and by the end of the war she was a rich woman.
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During World War II Bondi was the place for the back-street abortionist, there to deal with women pregnant by visiting servicemen. The police targeted abortionists who did not pay them protection money and the women were arrested as they left the clinics. Often there was a police photographer in attendance to complete their humiliation. Obtaining co-operation from the police was therefore a must for the clinic operators.
A man who had no troubles in that area, and who had been on the fringes of the underworld from the 1930s, now emerged as a leading figure during the war. Last heard of being thrown out of his own club, the 400 in Phillip Street, he was the very dubious Dr Reginald Stuart-Jones. Born in London as plain Jones, he had arrived in Australia with his parents at the age of nine. A fine sportsman, Stuart-Jones played for Sydney University at cricket, football, tennis, athletics and rifle shooting. Once he graduated he returned to England where he married his first wife, Sheena, heiress to a chain of cinemas. He then returned to Sydney where he set up practice in Macquarie Street as a gynaecologist.
There appears to have been a louche streak in him for his constant companions were criminals. He carried a revolver, which he liked to fire into the ceilings of bars in Surry Hills, and in 1939 he was arrested for drunken driving. For a time he held interests in several nightclubs of varying degrees of quality. At the one end was the Lido at Bondi Beach and at the better end, certainly financially, was the 400 Club.
An interest in a nightclub or two can provide an endless stream of patients for an abortionist and he went into partnership with the former bouncer Richard Gabriel Reilly, the man who in 1937 had shot Clarrie Thomas. With the proceeds Stuart-Jones became a great racing man, owning, quite successfully, thoroughbreds, trotters and greyhounds. One of the horses, the grey Blue Baron, won sixteen races for him and Stuart-Jones was, at one time, president of the New South Wales Coursing Association.
His decline began when he appeared before the courts charged with ‘unlawfully using an instrument for a certain purpose’ in 1944. When the police raided the second floor of 229 Macquarie Street they found Stuart-Jones gowned up, preparing to operate on a girl who had paid his secretary forty pounds. He was duly acquitted.
That year he married his second wife, Mary Kathleen Ryan, having divorced Sheena in 1936. His second marriage was not a happy one either, particularly when he found her in a flat in Leichhardt wearing the pyjamas of the welterweight Cliffie Thompson (who boxed as Cliffie Thomas). He sued for divorce but before the decree was made absolute they were together again.
Then came one of the stranger episodes in Stuart-Jones’s fairly extraordinary career. Just before midnight on 31 October 1944 he was kidnapped from outside his house, Casa Grande, in Bellevue Hill. He was asked by two criminals he knew to look at a man they had in their car. When he reached it there was his old sparring partner Cliffie Thompson along with a man he didn’t know, Alexander ‘Scotty’ Jowett. He was taken at gunpoint to Maroubra and told he would be shot and his body thrown over the cliffs. Indeed just after midnight Jowett shot Stuart-Jones in the chest, hitting him in the lung. The doctor then, amazingly, seems to have talked his captors into dropping him off at the Vassilia Private Hospital in Randwick. He survived.
The resulting trial was all the press and public could reasonably hope for. There were details of Stuart-Jones’s drink, drug and abortion dealings. There was the story of Cliffie Thompson’s love for Stuart-Jones’s wife and Thompson’s wife’s love for Jowett. Both men were convicted of the attack on Stuart-Jones and sentenced to death but the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. In the end they each served a relatively short period.
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Before, and in the early part of the war, furs from Canada were favoured smuggled goods, along with silks from Japan and China; silk stockings from America, England and Europe; and miniature radio sets from various countries. Since the duty on furs was 70 per cent and on stockings and perfume between 50 and 60 per cent, the potential profits for the underworld were enormous. Before National Security Regulations stopped people from boarding ships, two or three women would visit ‘a friend’ on board and come off wearing furs and several sets of underwear. Some would come off re-dressed from head to toe. Asian seamen donned ladies’ underwear as they left the boat. Silk stockings and lingerie were hidden in boiler tubes, coal bunkers, false bottoms of cabin lockers and in lifeboats. Once on the black market at seven shillings and sixpence a pair, stockings fetched two pounds ten shillings at the end of the war.
In 1945 the black market in cigarettes and liquor was regarded by the underworld as more profitable than robberies. When a shortage of cigarettes followed the exodus of American servicemen, the prices rocketed. There was a black market in vegetables and there were premiums on potatoes, carrots and onions as well as on car tyres, often taken from vehicles stolen for the purpose. In nine months in 1944 more than a million smuggled cigarettes were seized. There was also a revolving market in liquor, with whisky bought at three to five pounds and sold in battle areas at up to twenty pounds. The profit was then invested in cigarettes bought at three shillings and fourpence a carton and resold at up to thirty shillings, which was again reinvested in liquor. There was a black market in homemade cigarette papers and one enterprising outfit began manufacturing the papers using toilet paper soaked in starch. The trade broke down when a newspaper kindly published the recipe.
It was now that opium began to arrive in 10- and 12-pound lots. By the end of the war it came generally from India and was smuggled in the heart of packs of butter, inside sausage skins and in the carcasses of sheep. Cooks took the drug from their ships in kerosene tins purporting to contain dripping.
Towards the end of the war, a figure emerged in black-market circles who in later years would have a devastating effect on crime and politicians alike. The 35-year-old Richard Gabriel Reilly, now euphemistically described as an electrician and still a friend of Stuart-Jones, was supplementing his income as a standover man and abortionist by running a forged clothing coupon ring from Roslyn Road, Elizabeth Bay. When it was broken up and nine people were arrested in February 1945 the police seized 250 clothing coupons and Reilly’s wallet. It held 632 pounds—approximately two years’ wages for a working electrician. He had built up a substantial operation collecting forged, stolen and otherwise illegally obtained coupons and selling them on to retailers. It was only part of his expanding empire.
By the end of 1944 there was a good clear-up rate in Sydney for murders generally, with only sixteen killings (down from thirty-two in 1940), and the authorities were quietly congratulating themselves on keeping crime under control. In 1944 there had been a total of forty murders in New South Wales; sixteen murderers committed suicide and only two cases remained unsolved by the end of the year. The first was a rather curious affair. On 8 February Joyce Pattison from Bourke Street, Darlinghurst, had gone with another girl and two black American servicemen to Centennial Park, where she was found dead on the bank of a lake the next morning. There was at least one witness who said she saw Pattison being kicked to death but the coroner returned an open verdict. Bernard Shaw, who was arrested in Victoria on a charge of abducting a fifteen-year-old girl, falsely confessed to the Pattison murder to get himself out of the clutches of the Melbourne police. In the wash-up he was never charged with the murder but received two years for bigamy.
The second murder, on 29 March 1944, was that of an old friend from the Canberra and Mudgee train robberies, George Morris. He was found shot dead in his car, which was parked by a block of flats at Millers Point, almost directly above where Reginald Holmes had been shot a decade earlier in the shark-arm case. Six bullets had been fired into his head. Morris had, the papers said, ‘been put on the spot’. A man had apparently telephoned him and asked him to be at Miller’s Point at 9 p.m. At first it was thought he had been killed in a dispute over crime proceeds—Morris was on bail at the time, along with Cyril Humby and Arthur Jordan (both of whom had convictions going back twenty years), awaiting trial on a charge of stealing a safe containing about 2500 pounds in jewellery, coins and cash.
Nevertheless the person in the frame for the killing was none other than Joe Ryan, whom Morris had dobbed in over the train robberies. In fact, so far as the police were concerned, his was the only name in the frame. Ryan was charged and, at the inquest, Jean Evans, a girlfriend of Morris, alleged that Ryan had wanted him to help out in bailing up a baccarat game that Siddy Kelly was holding to raise funds for the defence of the financier John Walcott Forbes, then awaiting trial on fraud charges. Kelly had put a good amount into Forbes’s companies and realised the only way he might possibly get it back was if Forbes was acquitted.
By this time, however, Ryan was associated with the waterfront and he produced an alibi to say he had been on a night shift on the docks when Morris was shot. Although Ryan was committed for trial, the Attorney-General issued a nolle prosequi. Afterwards Ryan claimed that Kelly had sooled Evans to give evidence against him, and he was most probably right. Given his reputation as a dobber there were plenty of people who would have been happy to see Morris dead. In due course Humby and Jordan were acquitted of the charge of stealing the safe.
Veteran of the Razor Wars, Siddy Kelly had by now emerged from the shadows to establish himself as one of the great crime bosses of this, and indeed many another, period until his death in 1948. With his 100-pounds-a-night profits from his baccarat clubs, he was, from an early stage, able to secure the assistance of the police, and his clubs were rarely prosecuted. Apart from raids early in 1944 there seem to have been none until an abortive one in 1947. Then there had been a tip-off and all the police discovered was a game of gin rummy.
The year 1945 began on a positive note with an announcement by Vice Squad Inspector Thompson that ‘Sydney is freer of vice and illegal gambling than any other city of its size in the world.’ In 1944, 851 women were charged with vagrancy in the city compared with 885 the previous year. An explanation for this might, however, have been that 258 had been arrested in the suburbs compared with 100 in 1943. There were 6225 arrests of men and 336 women under the Gaming Act.
The police may have had great success clearing up run-of-the-mill murders but what they could not clear up were the gangland murders and the weekly shootings. They may have known full well who was responsible, but proving it was a wholly different thing. Witnesses were there to be threatened and bribed by the friends of the suspect. Even on the rare occasions when a man was seen almost literally standing over a corpse with a smoking gun and there was a witness prepared to say so, then, as now, juries were happy to find self-defence.
One reason for the proliferation of gun crime in the period was the number of thefts from the army. As a result a .38 could be purchased for twenty-five pounds, Berettas and Lügers for thirty pounds, and ammunition was five pounds for 100 rounds. Every criminal—from the bosses of a baccarat game to (much more dangerously) the back lane sneak thief—carried a gun. By 1947 prices had fallen further. A .38 or a Beretta now cost ten pounds and a Lüger five pounds more.
There was also a fresh outbreak of the Basher Gangs, the equivalent of the old-time pushes. In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Basher Gangs were said to be Communist-organised gangs who randomly beat up men in work, but now they were youths operating in small gangs in Paddington and Darlinghurst, committing street robberies and molesting young women. Others were used as muscle by black marketeers to intimidate trade members trying to restrict their practices.
One man died when, running away from them outside a cinema, he tripped and hit his head on the paving stones. Now Commissioner William Mackay seconded young police officers to chase and deal with the youths at street level rather than take them through the courts. It was not a tactic that appealed to everybody, but ultimately it proved effective.
When it came to it, however, 1945 was something of a vintage year for gangland murders and deaths in Sydney. The first to go had actually been on New Year’s Eve 1944, when Chow Hayes shot and killed Eddie Weyman. There had been bad blood between them after Weyman kept 1200 pounds for himself in a deal over stolen cigarettes. Later Hayes stole 3800 pounds from Weyman’s safebox, which was kept in the cistern of his outside lavatory, but he still did not regard this as adequate compensation. On Christmas Eve, Hayes met Weyman in the London Hotel and demanded repayment of the 1200 pounds. Weyman promised it but that afternoon Hayes shot him at his home, hitting him in the shoulder. When he was released from hospital Weyman repaid the money but, according to Hayes, Weyman would not shake hands and had been saying there would be reprisals.
On New Year’s Eve, racketeer and standover man Donny ‘The Duck’ Day threw a party at the Paddington Town Hall but Weyman went to another in Newtown and then home to Surry Hills. Hayes had put in an appearance at the Day party and then was driven to Weyman’s home, where he shot him before returning to the Town Hall.
Hayes was acquitted after witnesses said he had been at the Day party all night. His costs were paid for him by his old friend Kate Leigh.
The Duck did not last the month. In the early hours of 29 January a woman telephoned Darlinghurst Police Station to say the black marketeer, who had recently purchased a car from Stuart-Jones, had been shot in a house behind a shop at the corner of Crown and Foveaux streets. By the time the police arrived they found indeed he had—a bullet hole through his cheeks and nose and two wounds in his chest. The witness claimed that earlier there had been a fight in the house when a man was kicked in the groin. Two stolen revolvers were found.
Day was another who had been a jockey but had been disqualified for life. At the time of his death he was on bail for unlawful possession of tyres and was appealing his conviction. He was also awaiting trial on a charge of conspiracy over black market liquor. The Duck’s wife, Renée, and salesman Keith Kitchener Hull were arrested and charged with his murder. The case against Renée was dropped and the 27-year-old Hull was acquitted after telling the jury that he had fired in self-defence. Stuart-Jones’s wife took the opportunity to drive another nail into the good doctor’s reputation, telling the press in some detail just how close he and The Duck had been and just what they had got up to together. The cause of
Day’s death was probably his association with Dulcie Markham.
The day the Duck died Stuart-Jones’s attacker, Cliffie Thompson, was found slumped in his cell at Long Bay jail. A warder heard a shot at around 1 p.m. and there was Thompson with a chest wound. He would not say how the gun came to be in his possession but it had probably been smuggled in at the instigation of Scotty Jowett.
Shortly before that, on 9 January, Cyril Norman (also known as Thomas Couldrey) held up a gunsmith’s in King Street. He invited the manager, Maurice Hannigan, to show him some guns. Norman loaded one and shot him dead before he escaped with a total of six guns, ammunition and 164 pounds in cash. For a time the police thought that Hannigan’s killer was Stephen Henry Cunningham, who later shot himself after a siege with the police when they went to arrest him over an assault; they were wrong.
The day after killing Hannigan, Norman returned to his more usual trade of stealing passengers’ luggage at the city’s stations. It would be his undoing. He picked up two suitcases at Woolloomooloo and found they contained American army officer uniforms. He had them altered and, now posing as the American, went to the country town of Blayney where he booked a room in the Exchange Hotel. He was caught on 12 January by pure mischance. While he was showering, a maid looked in his room and saw the guns on the bed. She reported this to the manager, who said that it was perfectly all right as they belonged to an American officer; nevertheless, she told the police.
Constable Eric Bailey and another officer went to investigate and at first they were convinced by the story Norman told them. They said, however, they would take him to the station to check it out. Norman panicked and ran. Bailey tackled him and cuffed him to his own wrist but, as he did so, Norman shot him. Bailey collapsed on Norman, pinning him to the ground. When reinforcements arrived, Bailey was sitting on the kerb. ‘He has shot me, don’t let him get away,’ he told the officers. ‘I had a go. I didn’t squib it.’ Sadly, Bailey died and was awarded a posthumous George Cross. Norman was sentenced to death but then reprieved. One version of Bailey’s killing is that it was a contract killing gone wrong, and that Norman had shot the officer mistaking him for another who had been closing down sly-groggers and SP bookmakers.
Joe Taylor, the proprietor of Thommo’s Two-up School, was more fortunate. In February that year at Hawkesbury Races he quarrelled with the bludger and drug addict Joe Prendergast, brother of John who had been shot dead fifteen years earlier by Kate Leigh. The evening after the quarrel Prendergast shot Taylor as he was standing in Reservoir Street outside his school. It seems that Taylor would not allow revenge to be taken because he feared that if Prendergast was murdered the police would use it as an excuse to close The Game. It would have been enormously expensive for him if they had; the house rake-off in two-up games in Sydney after the war was four shillings in the pound and it was thought the turnover of the big game was 40 000 pounds a week. To divert attention from his school, the report was that Taylor had been shot at his home by an unidentified man. Prendergast prudently absented himself to Melbourne for some years.
Tilly Devine had long divorced Jim and her last major criminal case came later that month. The previous year she had been acquitted of threatening a butcher with his own knife—she claimed he had sold her bad meat. Now, on 18 February, she was charged with shooting Eric Parsons with intent to murder him. She said that she was in bed at the time that he had been shot on the street. Four days later, when he failed to recognise her as his assailant, she was acquitted and, to show there was no ill feeling on either side, the pair married. The papers described her as a ‘plump thin-lipped blonde with marble-hard features and an expensive perm’.