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The Reputable Firm of Crowley and Buckley

When police raided what they thought was a small starting-price betting operation just 100 metres from the New South Wales TAB headquarters in Thomas Street, Ultimo, in inner-Sydney, in September 1979, little did they realise that they had tapped into an illegal enterprise that employed hundreds of people and turned over as much as some of the larger public companies on the stock exchange. What they had stumbled onto would lead them to a massive SP operation that was using the latest in computer technology to take and place bets in every major capital city around the country.

When the police smashed the door down they discovered a projector flashing up-to-the minute TAB odds and betting fluctu-ations onto a huge screen on the wall. A barrage of phones were ringing nonstop and were answered by a small army of women, who took bets in coded names or sent the larger bets through to a man sitting in the middle of the room who was obviously running the show.

Among the weeping phone operators who were rounded up and put into the paddy wagons and taken away were four grandmothers aged from 63 to 74. Some of the ladies said they had been working for the company for decades. They knew little of their employers and all they could tell investigators was that the name of the company that paid their above-award wages – minus tax and with a group certificate supplied at the end of every financial year – was known only by the initials ‘CB’. The women told police that a condition of their employment was that they must never tell anyone what their job really was outside of being a ‘phone operator’.

It didn’t take police long to realise that they had hit the mother lode. It seemed as though Australia’s biggest SP betting network had been operating right under their noses for the best part of 40 years, obviously with the help of crooked cops.

Under the pretext of being a respectable company, CB was using the very latest in computer technology, operated about 10,000 accounts and accepted bets up to $20,000 over the phone. It also seemed as though some of their telephones tapped into the TAB just up the road, from which they listened to the latest prices and betting fluctuations.

CB turned out to be the initials of the legitimate business name of the firm of Crowley and Buckley, who had applied for registration as ‘commission agents’ with the New South Wales Corporate Affairs Commission on 14 September 1971, and gave their head office address as the second floor of 74 Pitt Street, Sydney, in the heart of the CBD. The application said that the firm had begun trading 30 years earlier in September 1941.

The proprietors were listed as Humphrey Michael Crowley of Mosman on Sydney’s north shore, and Rita Mary Buckley, wife of the late James Buckley, of nearby Manly. The business name registration had been renewed in 1975 with the same prop-rietors; in 1977 it had been renewed again, only this time with Crowley listed as the sole proprietor. It had been renewed again in 1980 with the same details. The firm of Crowley and Buckley was a current, registered business. But legitimate? Well, that was another story entirely.

With the bust all over the front pages, the informers came forward at a million miles an hour. It seemed as though C&B – as they were known in the trade – was the biggest SP betting operation in Australia and from humble beginnings was allowed to thrive and grow throughout the Sir Robert Askin Liberal government era in New South Wales in the 1960s and ’70s. An SP bookie in opposition to C&B described them as an ‘absolutely massive operation’ that operated on every TAB meeting – horses, dogs and the trots – and had an annual turnover by the late 1970s of around $100 million a year.

And it wasn’t hard to tell why. The initial bust at Ultimo was just the tip of the iceberg. It led to numerous C&B SP joints throughout Sydney, including massive operations at the registered offices in Pitt Street, as well as at premises in Rushcutter Bay and in the Haymarket area, where they catered for the fanatical Chinese gambling population.

During the 1979 crackdown by police who weren’t on the C&B payroll, more than 150 people, mainly consisting of middle-aged female phone operators, were arrested and charged with taking bets over the phone and processing the accounts that were all in code – usually either a nickname or someone’s initials. It turned out that many members of state parliament, including Premier Askin, had accounts and bet regularly with them.

At C&B headquarters in Pitt Street police found 30 phones; another 40 were in use at the Rushcutter Bay branch. In total they closed down betting houses that collectively had more than 200 phones in operation. Some of the premises were guarded by a small dummy operation in an office in the front of the building, in case of unexpected police raids, while the much larger business went on at the back behind soundproofed steel doors and was accessed only by a secret door.

One woman who worked at a C&B operation in Cowles Road, Mosman, told police that she had got her job through a friend who worked in a telephone exchange. She explained that you had to have an ‘in’ to work there – that is that you have to be recommended by someone who can be held responsible should you talk too much about what you did for a living. She said that the office was in a very inconspicuous old, white office building full of doctors’ surgeries. They had two upstairs offices: one was a dummy with a telephone and a few fake betting slips on the desk. They took turns sitting in this office.

She said that against the wall was a small bookcase with a hidden catch that opened first onto a verandah and then into the air-conditioned real office, which was like a fortress with armour-plated doors on rollers. In the event of the police raiding the smaller office and taking the phone operator away, she would be charged and ultimately fined for operating an SP and be back at work the next day. She would be given a bonus for her heroics.

But for the magnitude of the C&B operation, convictions – apart from all of those arrested at the time of the raids and fined – were nonexistent, though it is believed that the taxation department gave the principals a rough time. Three years after the raids that shut them down, John William Buckley, the son of the original proprietor, the late James Buckley, appeared in court on SP betting charges for operating an SP in the city and was fined $200.

But by 1982 in New South Wales, due to raids led by incorruptible police such as Merv Beck and his squad named Beck’s Raiders, large-scale SP betting establishments turning over multimillions of illegal dollars and making huge profits for their operatives became a thing of the past.