‘He’s extremely cunning, very patient and very, very deadly’
– from Billy Longley’s police file
ON the waterfront they called it the ‘apple cucumber’ but it wasn’t health food. It was gangster slang for a deadly double cross that works like this: a false friend lures the target to a meeting that turns into an ambush when a third party arrives, armed and unannounced. That’s the sneaky way they nearly got Billy ‘The Texan’ Longley in 1971. But he was too smart for them.
Longley got a call from Alfred ‘The Ferret’ Nelson, social secretary of the painters and dockers union, a job description that covered a lot of ground. Nelson asked Longley to meet him in the Webb Dock mess room, where waterfront workers sometimes ate their lunch and always minded their own business, even if they happened to get spattered with blood.
Longley had to sit with his back to the swinging doors because his host was already seated, facing him across the long mess table. Longley gently slid his handgun out of his belt and, as they chatted about union business, aimed it underneath the table at Nelson. In his business, it was insurance.
The small talk stopped when Longley heard the doors swish behind him. He cocked the hidden pistol and turned to see who was coming. It wasn’t good. Jack Twist, famed on the docks for croaking the notorious standover man Freddy ‘The Frog’ Harrison years before, was approaching fast. He had his hands deep in his overalls pockets and a look on his face that said he had a gun in each of them.
This, Longley observed later with studied understatement, was ‘a fairly serious situation.’
But Longley had an advantage: Nelson had heard him cock the gun and realised any hostile move by Twist meant getting shot. ‘When I cocked my piece “The Ferret” went white,’ Longley was to recall. ‘He was a nano-second from death. He said “Bill! Give me a chance – let me talk to him” and he got up and ran up to Twist and threw his arms around him so he couldn’t get his guns out of his pockets. Then he took him outside. I should have shot ’em both then and there,’ he adds in disgust. Time hasn’t dulled some old hatreds.
‘The Ferret’ saved himself that day – but not for long. He disappeared from his Collingwood lodging soon after, just before the painters and dockers union election in December 1971 that erupted into an open gunfight, a public battle in a long-running guerRilla war in which perhaps dozens of ‘dockies’ died and many more were injured.
Police were to winch Nelson’s car from the water near South Wharf but he was not in it. Much later, a detective standing on a new concrete ramp on the dock was told ‘Watch it, you’re standing on “The Ferret”.’ Nelson’s body was never found. But there was no doubt, as Longley deadpanned later, that he had ‘given up smoking and drinking.’ And he wasn’t the only one on the missing list.
‘It was self preservation,’ Longley says, quiet but unrepentant. ‘Get in first, before they get you.’
So much for Longley the gunslinger. What about the man? He is rather more complicated. He has been a pigeon fancier, skilled tradesman, bull-mastiff dog breeder, ballroom dancer, committed unionist, hack golfer and handy tennis player, a patient father to his only daughter and grandfather to her children.
Accused (and later convicted) of shooting a painters and dockers union secretary, he had the cunning and the contacts to hide from his underworld enemies and police for sixteen months before turning himself in. He had the willpower to give up smoking in jail – and to lose 30 kilograms at Weight Watchers after getting out. He had the personality to partner a former policeman to persuade delinquent teenagers to mend their ways and errant debtors to pay their way. He reads military histories, biographies and The Age newspaper and plays Scrabble.
And lately, every morning, he does water aerobics with a group of respectable older women who won’t hear a bad word about their Bill.
Times change. In the 1950s, Longley’s favourite water sport was tossing beer cans in the Murray River and shooting them with a pistol as they floated past. He made himself a good shot – one reason he grew old when so many of his contemporaries didn’t.
‘I’ve had blokes miss me with six shots from two car lengths away,’ he recalls. ‘But I didn’t miss many.’ He almost smiles.
Because of the dockers’ code of silence most such incidents were never made public. But one showdown was later aired in court. It happened on a Saturday night in July 1968 at the Rose and Crown Hotel in Port Melbourne after one John Robert Waymouth made the mistake of abusing Billy’s partner, Barbara, after accidentally bumping her.
Waymouth was grabbed from behind by several willing hands and tossed out of the bar and onto the street. He was given a belting and left in the gutter as a lesson in etiquette. When Waymouth revived, he made another mistake: he wanted revenge. He called his two sons, who turned up with three friends to even the score.
In the ensuing brawl, guns were produced. At least, one gun was – the one that did all the damage. The result was that five men ended up with .45 calibre bullet wounds, mostly in the buttocks. Two of them decided not to press charges.
Longley heard that the police wanted to question him over the shooting of three men. Five days later he presented himself – with his lawyer, the legendary Frank Galbally – at South Melbourne police station. He was charged on three counts apiece of wounding with intent to murder and grievous bodily harm.
The case against him looked strong but it soon sprang leaks. For a start, only Waymouth was willing to claim that Longley had fired the shots. The other witnesses, including the wounded, seemed unsure what had happened. One even said he did not think Longley had fired the shots.
The clincher came from the courtroom genius of ‘The Silver Fox’, Galbally, who smoothly led Waymouth into the trap of admitting that the police had shown him a picture of Longley in their efforts to identify him as the shooter. There was, as Galbally and the judge knew, a legal precedent that unless a witness had selected a picture of the supposed guilty party from several photographs of different people, it was inadmissible. The case was dismissed. And another chapter in the intertwined stories of the legendary lawyer and his valued client, Billy Longley, became lore.
For a long time after that, if Galbally had any problems in his chambers with cranky clients or bad debtors, Longley would drop in and sort it out. ‘If ever I had a hurdle to jump, I always went to Mr Frank,’ he said later. ‘He protected me from the slings and arrows.’
THEY called him ‘The Texan’ because, the story goes, he wore a big Stetson hat and carried a Colt .45 pistol. Longley disputes this. ‘The hat wasn’t that big,’ he growls, face as sombre as a well-kept grave.
In fact, the nickname came from a TV western series, The Texan, made from 1958 to 1960, when Longley was a towering figure on the waterfront, feared nearly as much in Sydney as he was in Melbourne. The show starred a laconic hero coincidentally called Bill Longley, who wouldn’t be pushed around by bad guys and was polite to women folk: an irresistible role model for a well-dressed man about town who liked dancing and shooting.
‘The Texan’ is 80 now, one of few to survive the Melbourne dock wars that, as he points out with a historical flourish, inflicted more casualties than the Eureka Rebellion – around 40 men dead and many more wounded during a decade that spawned the now-notorious saying, ‘We catch and kill our own.’
The Federated Painters and Dockers Union was a closed shop, harder to get into than The Melbourne Stock Exchange. Members joined by invitation based on their reputation. Longley, a wharfie for 17 years, became a ‘dockie’ in 1967. Of around 360 members, 200 had serious criminal records.
It was only natural, he says, that men with criminal records who could not get jobs elsewhere would end up in the few jobs where a record was not held against them. It was self-selection. Longley’s friend, the feared former policeman Brian Murphy, points out that there was a Vagrancy Act in those days, which meant that anyone without a job or visible means of support could be thrown in jail at the whim of police and magistrates. One answer to that was to join a waterside union, therefore getting on the roster for casual work.
Not that it was easy to get a job on the Melbourne wharves. In his book, Longley describes a remarkable scene of working class history:
You went and appeared at the West Melbourne stadium (Festival Hall) where all the fights took place and you walked on the stage under the arc lights in front of all these blokes so that they could take a look at you. You were tested for soundness., and if you were undesirable they might yell out ‘YOU! You bludger – you repossessed my sister’s refrigerator, you rotten bastard!’ They didn’t want undesirables – so if you were a police informer, a child molester or a debt collector you didn’t stand a chance. You’d be booed out of the hall and the union and be lucky, as the saying went, ‘to escape with your ears’. You’d have to come pretty well recommended to get a job on the wharves – they were men’s men, the cream of the crop.
Not that Longley had any trouble with scrutiny under the bright lights at the ‘House of Stoush’. Having passed muster with his peers, he was warned by the chairman of the Stevedoring Industry Board that he was ‘on probation’ because of his police record.
‘Don’t think you’re coming down here to steal, fight or be playing up in any way,’ the chairman warned him on his first day. Longley assured him he was just after a steady job. It is true that in the next three decades he was not always a stranger to stealing and fighting. But along the way he made lifelong friends with many ordinary wharfies who were not criminals, but working-class men supporting their families the best way they could. Such friendships with ‘cleanskins’ would save his life later, when he ‘went into smoke’ to avoid both the police and his enemies in the rival painters and dockers faction.
Longley was invited to be a painter and docker in 1967. It was, he knew, because he had a reputation as a ‘gunnie’ that would be useful to those who sponsored him into the union. Men like him were insurance for union organisers who did not want to be pushed around.
The reality was that there was a quiet but deadly war between rival groups of gangsters intent on controlling the union and, therefore, lucrative rackets such as ‘ghosting’ (picking up pay packets for nonexistent workers), systematic pilfering and smuggling. Some ‘dockies’ also indulged in armed robbery, illegal gambling and standover rackets. Whoever controlled the docks effectively controlled organised crime in Australia.
Later, in 1980, an exposé by The Bulletin magazine led to the Costigan royal commission into waterfront corruption, which exposed rackets that had tentacles reaching into every level of society – from drug running to illegal gambling and, notably, ‘bottom-of-the-harbour’ tax rorts exploited by supposedly legitimate business people.
Longley was no angel, and liked easy money as much as the next gunman, but unlike a lot of career criminals he had been a genuine worker and was proud of it: he had served an apprenticeship as a tradesman and had spent his formative years working in industry, as had his father.
He has never wavered from his claim that when he stood as union president in December 1971 it was on a genuine reform ticket to protect ordinary members. In his view, then and now, the battlers who did the dirty, dangerous work on the docks had been sold out by greedy union leaders willing to enrich themselves by doing corrupt deals with shipping lines.
Longley has always insisted he won the vote – one of the vote counters told him he’d ‘shit it in’ – but, after a gun battle, the ballot box was stolen and voting slips were destroyed. This outrage rankled and almost certainly led to his brave and perhaps foolhardy decision ultimately to brief the journalist who wrote the Bulletin expose and, subsequently, to give evidence to the Costigan commission about the rackets that would eventually lead to the union being deregistered in 1993.
But that was later.
DESPITE the Hollywood nickname, Longley is a reminder of a vanished Australia: the sort of man once seen at RSL clubs and in the betting ring at the races, shaped by 1930s austerity, stern Victorian forebears and a predominantly Ango-Celtic society.
At a glance, he could be any respectable retired grandfather. He would not look out of place at the Lions Club, on a racing club committee, even in church. When he goes out, he wears a dark suit, white shirt and perfectly knotted tie, and gleaming black shoes. Fingernails clean and clipped. Grey hair combed. He always had presence. Dignity, even.
He has none of the stereotype markers of the criminal underclass: no tattoos, little jewellery, no addiction to gambling, alcohol or drugs. He is gruff but not rough, with a courtliness few would mistake for weakness.
If he were ever a swashbuckler, that has long gone; now he looks somewhere between Alfred Hitchcock and the old gunfighter played by John Wayne in his last film, The Shootist, doing what a man has to do before the final ride to Boot Hill. There are a few waiting for him there. It has been said for 30 years that Longley was the last to see several of his waterfront opponents alive; legend suggests as many as 15.
Certainly, his lawyers once told him police threatened to charge him with seven murders. Longley vehemently denies any part of killing painters and dockers union secretary Pat Shannon in 1973 – for which he was later jailed – but is quiet about other deaths. To be fair, he is silent about most things from his past. He speaks only when he has something to say, sticking grimly to a code of silence that, at his age, has all but lost its relevance.
Most of the stories he could tell would be about dead men, as he has virtually outlived his generation of crims and knockabouts, dockies and wharfies, and a group of tough and corrupt police who used fists, handcuffs and guns to extract their dues from the underworld in the name of law and order.
He says his fearsome reputation was ‘like wearing a hair shirt’, though he concedes it had some advantages. For instance, it might have saved his life in jail – though probably put him there in the first place.
Dead men tell no tales and for most of his life, neither has Longley. Once, his idea of a long sentence was 13 years for murder – which is the time he served over the Shannon shooting. But since agreeing to a book about his life – his biography In Your Face was launched in July 2005 – he is warming to the talking business. Sometimes he puts several sentences together. But not often.
‘I get sick of talking about myself,’ he told the authors in a frank moment. ‘It shits me’. In the past, in his line of work, silence suited him. He found Teddy Roosevelt’s injunction – to speak softly and carry a big stick – more effective.
At his 80th birthday dinner at the Royal Hotel in Essendon, the new talkative Billy Longley spoke for at least three minutes. Perhaps two. ‘I look around and see good faces, kind faces,’ he began gravely, as his only daughter Lisa took snaps of the eclectic gathering. ‘I only mix with good people these days.’
He mentioned several guests by name – starting with his biographer, journalist Rochelle Jackson, a policeman’s daughter who first met him while researching a television current affairs story a decade ago, and started on the book in 2003. Another guest was a retired Pentridge prison governor, Jim Armstrong, who later told the crowd that in jail Longley ‘was a straight stick in a pile of debris’ and a man who ‘walked his own line’.
Longley says he has ‘Catholic tastes’ in friends as well as interests, a point underlined by the gathering at his birthday. Playing the violin and leading the singing at the party was a former journalist who advises the Liberal Party on tactics and policy. Singing along was Dean Mighell, hard-nosed leader of the Electrical Trades Union, who grew up in the northern suburbs knowing the Longley legend.
Other guests included Brian Francis Murphy, a renowned former policeman who became friendly with Longley after refusing to give trumped-up evidence against him over the shooting of five men in the Rose and Crown Hotel. After Longley left prison in 1988, Murphy joined him in a trouble-shooting mediation business with the motto ‘everything can be negotiated.’ Their specialty was debt collecting and persuading wayward teenagers to avoid a life of crime. They were considered most persuasive. Often a business card in a letter box was enough to bring a speedy resolution to problems.
Also at the birthday party was one of Billy’s brothers, Reg Longley, looking the respectable retired barber he is in reefer jacket, cardigan and spectacles. Others included the couple who ran the Moonee Ponds coffee shop where Longley sat at the same table for years, greeting a stream of friends most mornings. For a long time the couple knew the polite older man only as ‘Bill’ and didn’t realise his notoriety until his picture was in the newspaper one morning. Then they understood why so many older locals – men and women – came in and shook hands or kissed him. He was the Godfather of Puckle Street.
The café has changed hands recently, and Longley has switched allegiance to another one in Ascot Vale, around the corner from his flat.
Phillip Adams – broadcaster, film-maker, columnist, stirrer – didn’t get to Billy’s birthday party. He now only occasionally corresponds with Longley, but his observations of the man he sometimes visited in prison 25 years ago are still vivid. Adams, then an Age columnist, received thousands of letters a year but he sensed a powerful personality in a note Longley wrote to him from Pentridge in the late 1970s. That – and, he cheerfully admits, Longley’s notoriety – drew him to visit and to write to him and about him. He did, after all, have a column to fill and Longley needed a voice in the world outside jail, so they suited each other’s purposes. Something they both recognise in each other.
Adams was streetwise enough to be wary of being manipulated by ‘a highly intelligent man’. But at his first sight of Longley, in a security cage used for prison visits in Pentridge’s H division, he was struck by ‘this charming, likable avuncular gentleman with all this violence swirling around him like a mist’. Curious, Adams asked barrister friends about Longley’s conviction for Shannon’s murder ‘and the consensus was he didn’t do it but had done plenty of others’.
It was the beginning of an odd friendship between the cultured and affluent intellectual and a middle-aged gunman surviving in a prison system where any one of many younger men might have killed him for reputation or reward. Longley had his ways of surviving. One was to mind his own business, and to let the mystique that had grown around him work its effect. He gave no offence but he gave the impression that anyone who interfered with him was ‘in for seven years bad luck, that’s for sure’.
Often, as a billet trusted to mop floors in Pentridge, he was called on to mop up blood spilt after officers ‘flogged’ a prisoner with batons. A senior officer quietly said to him one day, ‘This won’t happen to you, will it Bill? We know you’d even up.’ It was a case of the reputation that put him inside protecting him while he was there. A double-edged sword.
Reputation wasn’t quite enough. Longley’s strong personality helped him get what he wanted. He once persuaded Phillip Adams to drive to Ararat prison, two hours from Melbourne, to give him a set of golf clubs. When Adams saw him there he was reminded of ‘an old caged lion living carefully’ among younger prisoners. What he didn’t know was that the old lion still had teeth: he had a pistol stashed inside the jail, just in case.
The funny thing was, years later Longley was talking to a retired prison officer who told him the prison staff had known he had a pistol hidden somewhere.
Adams says he has interviewed possibly 20,000 people ‘and I forget most of them before they’re out of the room – but I’ve never forgotten Billy’. He was intrigued by what he calls ‘the cognitive dissonance between what he did … and the sort of rather sweet guy he seemed to be’.
Adams was describing Longley as he was in his 50s. At 80, the dissonance between the dignified old man and his menacing reputation is even more striking. For his birthday, Longley dressed in Sunday best – conservative grey suit, white shirt, muted tie, polished shoes. He is not tall and his stocky figure has ballooned recently because ageing legs no longer allow him to play golf or tennis or follow his lifelong passion for ballroom dancing. His hands are manicured. In dress and manner he could be a retired country bank manager at a family wedding. Almost.
Crocodile tears … John Sharpe pleads for his wife and child to ‘come home’. He’d killed them weeks earlier.
The Sharpes at a family picnic … was he already planning double murder?
Beyond belief … police search for the butchered remains of mother and child.
In Loving Memory of Anna Marie Kemp 1962 – 2004
In Loving Memory of Gracie Louise Sharpe 2002 – 2004
Dressed to kill … Billy Longley deep in thought outside court.
The wrong iron … loner Longley works on his game at the exclusive Bluestone Country Club.
Hits and memories … Billy Longley, the Godfather of Moonee Ponds.
The only hint of his past is a hard streak, like an old army sergeant who has seen battle and is used to command. Which, had things been slightly different, he might have been.
HE was born in 1925, second son and fourth child of eight belonging to Wilfred and Elizabeth Longley, who had arrived in Australia after World War I just in time for the Depression. He says he was christened ‘Billy’ rather than ‘William’ because it was his mother’s pet name for her favourite brother.
Wilfred Longley was a Yorkshireman, a fitter and turner who had served as a Navy petty officer in the war and had married up the social scale when he wed Elizabeth Holbest Roxburgh, a Scottish school teacher from the Isle of Lewis, and daughter of a naval commander. If Elizabeth had hoped Australia promised something better than a bleak Scottish island for her growing family, she was disappointed. Wilfred had to chase work, sometimes interstate, while she coped with a series of mean rented houses in Melbourne’s working-class west.
When Longley says the Depression and poverty pushed him into a life of crime, a listener can tell he’s sung the same song so often he might even believe it himself. As with most beliefs, it must have sprung from a grain of truth. But he admits that his surviving siblings (two sisters died in childhood, an emotional scar he avoids talking about) grew up as respectable ‘square-heads’, embarrassed by his lawlessness. To hear him interpret his own life story, it seems that hardship sharpened a rebellious streak in him that his brothers and sisters did not have. He fought for survival and begged and stole to eat as a boy, then got to like it.
He traces his hatred of authority to the day a conductor kicked him in the face as he clung to the side of the tram for a free ride. ‘My face hit the tram track and I skidded along, finishing in a bloody mess.’ He recalls a passing motorist picking him up, bleeding, from the gutter and taking him home.
There were other turning points. He remembers the day his father got into a brawl with a neighbour and was being badly beaten. ‘I ran to the toolbox and grabbed a hammer and hit him (the other man) in the kidneys as hard as I could,’ says Longley. Then he hit him in the head. Although his father preached ‘tact and diplomacy’ to his sons, his actions sent a different message. He took the boy to a pub, rewarded his loyalty with praise, oysters and porter gaff. And so he learned at an impressionable age that violence paid off – a lesson hard to unlearn.
Longley clearly loved his mother, and inherited her love of reading, but he admits evading her efforts to steer him away from trouble. From the little he says, and much he doesn’t, emerges a picture of a worn-out and homesick woman, disappointed by her lot, heartbroken at the loss of two daughters and the lack of opportunity for her other children. Longley doesn’t criticise his father, but the implication is clear: it wasn’t a happy household.
On Sundays, he says, he would suggest that his mother read in bed while he cooked a roast dinner for the family. She quoted poetry to him that he can still recite a lifetime later and she told him he was ‘fey’ – had the intuition of her Celtic forebears. He believed this sixth sense saved his life, later. But it didn’t keep him out of trouble.
He was expelled from Ascot Vale primary school in sixth grade for punching a teacher who threatened to strap his younger sister, Peggy.
He had already been in trouble for stealing cigarettes from a shop. In early 1937, he got 12 months probation for shoplifting. In late 1938, he was sent to a boys’ home for attempted shop breaking.
By the time he got out, war was looming and employment booming. The Depression was over. His father started work at the ordnance factory at Maribyrnong and got him a fitting and turning apprenticeship. Young Billy liked work. It might have been a stabilising influence but any harmony was shattered when his mother’s father fell ill in Britain; despite the war, Mrs Longley got a passage ‘home’ to nurse the old navy man.
Billy was 15, and scared his mother might not get back. He describes how the family stood on the dock, crying, as her ship steamed away. They watched it until it became a dot and disappeared over the horizon. It was the end of his childhood.
Billy and two of the other children went to board with other families and his father looked after the other three. He was treated well and speaks fondly of the family he stayed with, but adolescence was not a good time to be missing his mother’s influence.
He bought a shotgun from a workmate, took up rabbit shooting and fantasised about what he would do if the ‘Japs’ invaded. Even 65 years on, his face hardens as he relives the fears of that uncertain time. ‘The first one down the hallway was going to get his head blown off, that’s for sure,’ he says.
He did well at work, making anti-aircraft guns, but he was on ‘starvation’ apprentice wages – a sixth of a tradesman’s wage – and dabbled in minor crime to raise spending money. To his joy, his mother returned safely in 1943 with an inheritance from the death of her father the old Naval officer. She bought a house in Essendon and the family was reunited. But by this time her Billy had a bad name with the local police and there was nothing she could do.
When he turned 18, he tried to enlist in the local drill hall but was refused because his work making guns was vital to the war effort. As more of his dance hall and work mates joined up, he tried twice more.
After the third attempt, his boss called him away from his lathe and into his office at the ordnance factory and read the riot act. He warned him that even if he managed to bluff his way into the services and onto a troopship, he would be sent back from the Middle East because his job was worth ‘three or four soldiers’.
He often wondered, later, how his life would have turned out had he got into the army. He fancies that war might have suited him more than most. If there was one thing that stood out about him later, he was cool under fire.
As it was, he worked hard all week but was a weekend tearaway who waged a private war with the local police after making the mistake of beating one constable in a street fight. The inevitable payback for this unpardonable offence was to be thrown in the cells and beaten up by several police, obliged to back up their colleague.
Those were the rules on the streets of Ascot Vale in the 1940s. It was to have lasting effects.
When the war ended and the munitions factory wound down, Longley was a skilled tradesman. He still has his set of framed indentures and is proud of them. But he claims he lost three engineering jobs in quick succession because police warned employers against him. So he retreated into the ‘knockabout’ world. He spent six months working in a rabbit-skinning works then moved up to a job on the wharves. By then he was carrying a pistol. He had been a street fighter – ‘all in, no boxing’ – since he was at primary school. One afternoon in his late teens, he says, ‘I had the good luck to run against three blokes and get over the top (defeat) of all of them. That night I went to the pictures, and I saw one of them. He looked at me and pulled back his jacket so I could see what he had stuck in his belt.’ It was a pistol. There was a lot of Colt .45s around because American servicemen on leave had a habit of losing or selling them.
That moment in the cinema was, he says, when he realised that ‘the stoush was dead and good streetfighters were tuppence a ton’. He walked through the darkened cinema to the emergency exit, unbolted the door and went home. By the following Saturday night he had a pistol, too. And the beginning of a reputation that could almost have destroyed him.
LONGLEY is living back in the streets of Ascot Vale where he grew up, within walking distance of the showgrounds where, as a boy, he climbed grandstands at night and caught roosting pigeons to sell to Chinese restaurants. ‘Amazing how many pigeons you can fit into your shirt,’ he muses.
He is sitting in the living room of the tired cream brick unit he rents. Can’t keep a dog because the yard is too small, he says. He loves dogs. One of his favourite books in jail – besides the British commando fitness manual – was about the history and breeding of the English bull mastiff.
Longley had a favourite bull mastiff once, when he lived in Port Melbourne with his then young daughter Lisa and her mother. He says the dog was intelligent and alert and probably saved his life during the dock war.
‘The dog kept looking up at the roof as he walked around the back yard. He knew something was wrong. I said to my wife “pack a bag – we’re going away for a few days”.’ The Longleys stayed in a friend’s house on the NSW south coast. While they were gone, a next-door neighbour – coincidentally called Bill – had a frightening experience. As he was going through his front gate, his wife called out his name. Immediately, three men with shotguns stood up from behind the parapet on Longley’s roof. They were rival painters and dockers, lying in wait for Longley, and had been ready to shoot when they heard the name ‘Bill’.
Longley was never without a bull mastiff for years after that. But now, he says, he can’t walk a dog enough, though the exercise bike in the hall is helping him get a little fitter. He has always needed exercise to keep his weight down. He has a weakness for strong tea and chocolates.
Family photographs line the walls of his flat and the bookcase is crammed with histories, biographies, dictionaries and a thesaurus. His favourite is Australian correspondent Chester Wilmot’s acclaimed war history The Struggle For Europe. ‘Billy was always the best-read gunman on the docks,’ says an erudite friend.
He goes into town to watch a film now and again with his friend and carer, Frances, who lives next door. His favourite film is On The Waterfront. Always methodical, he knows what he wants to see next. At the time of writing it was Downfall, the European film about Hitler’s last days. ‘It got five stars in The Age,’ he says. And television? Twice a week he watches the The Bill. Of course. He likes realistic dramas that show flawed characters on both sides of the law.
Longley doesn’t rate himself a punter. But he admits he once lost 8000 pounds – then the price of a big house or several small ones – at Canterbury races in the 1960s. He was flying high at the time but soon came back to earth. He reputedly got a share of Australia’s then biggest armed robbery in 1970, when three masked men took $587,890 from an armoured van. Twice he thought he was on the way to being a millionaire, he says, but in the end he found out that his mother was right: Crime didn’t pay. He lost the money – and 13 years ‘buried’ in jail while his only daughter grew up and the world passed him by.
Once, he told his brother Reg he dreamed of flying to England, catching the Concorde supersonic airliner to New York and cruising home on the Queen Mary. He never did get to leave Australia – but, two years later, his brother the suburban barber did his dream trip: Concorde, ocean liner and all. He tells the story against himself. It is his way of obliquely acknowledging that he took the wrong fork in the path.
His trips out of Melbourne in the past were mostly at night, by road. He and unnamed others would drive to Sydney overnight in time to arrive with the morning traffic, ‘do our business’ and then leave again in the afternoon peak. It was safer that way. If they had flown, the police and certain well-informed Sydney gangsters would have known as soon as they got off the plane. The consequences could have been fatal.
One of his signature sayings is ‘Sydney for money, Melbourne for blokes.’ Meaning that you could stay out of sight (‘in smoke’) in Melbourne because loyal people would protect you, but would immediately be sold out in Sydney. In the underworld version of traditional Melbourne-Sydney rivalry, he says, Sydney crime bosses traditionally imported Melbourne hard men to fight their battles when the going got tough.
Now, he lives with his memories – and a lot of regrets. One is the death of his first wife in a shooting incident of which he was acquitted. Another is that he didn’t shoot Jack Twist at Webb Dock back in 1971. Another is that when he was desperate for cash he pawned his grandfather’s gold fob watch in the late 1940s. His mother brought it back from Scotland to give to him in 1943 and he would like it more than anything else. It is engraved with his grandfather’s name: Lieutenant Commander William Roxburgh.
If anyone out there has it, he’d kill to get it back. Figuratively speaking, of course.
