Gangland Queensland

Gangland

QUEENSLAND

Gangland

QUEENSLAND

James Morton

Susanna Lobez

Contents

Introduction

1 The Good Old Days

2 Southern Raiders

3 Girls for Sale

4 The Italians in North Queensland

5 The War in Queensland

6 Killers

7 The Whiskey Au Go Go Fire

8 Disappearances

9 The Rat Pack and Phil Dickie on the Road to Fitzgerald

10 The Fitzgerald Inquiry and After

11 Robbers

12 The Drug Trade

13 Queensland’s Bikers

14 Inside and Out

15 Sex Can Be Bad for Your Health

16 Queensland Today and Tomorrow

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Introduction

On 6 November 1867 police officers Patrick W Cahill and John F Power were shot and killed by conman and gold commissioner Thomas Griffin, while escorting between Clermont and Rockhampton gold and currency valued at £8000.

On 29 May 2011 Detective Senior Constable Damian Leeding was shot in the face at close range after he attended a triple-0 call to a robbery and hostage that were taking place at the Pacific Pines Tavern on Queensland’s Gold Coast. Later his family agreed that his life support machine be turned off. The police then launched Operation Seymour, a month-long crackdown on violent crime on the glitter strip.

This, then, is an account of what happened in Queensland between Griffin murdering Cahill and Power, and Leeding’s death.

Worldwide, authorities are keen to claim there is no criminal Mr Big or Number One on their patches but, if pressed, will reluctantly agree there are a few Mr Big Enoughs. Quite what you have to do to graduate from being Mr Big Enough to Mr Big is difficult to establish. Import more than $5 million worth of heroin? Steal jewellery worth more than $20 million? Kill more than five rivals a year or be downgraded?

This is the story of the Mr Bigs and the Mr (and sometimes Ms) Big Enoughs; a story of murders, robberies, betrayals and sex. In fact, the story of, as a character in the musical Irma la Douce remarked, everything that makes life in the underworld worth living. It is the story of 1920s standover men such as Curley O’Dea, and his wife Lizzie, and the English-born George ‘Tich’ Brett; of such safecrackers as James Short ‘The Mastermind of the Northern Gangs’, whose offsiders tried to blow up his prosecutor to avoid a trial; of sly-groggers and brothel keepers, such as Mavis Cooke; of the girls, like Pretty Dulcie Markham and the multi-talented Vera Purdy, who worked for them; and of such white-slavers and Italian Black Handers as Francisco Femio and Vincenzo D’Agostino.

Criminals in general—and many others, for that matter—will claim that the most organised criminals are crooked police and politicians. This is the story about their corruption: of the Police Commissioner and bludger Frank Bischof, of the English-born bagman Jack Herbert and the so-called Rat Pack. This is also the story of those journalists, like Phil Dickie and Chris Masters, who struggled to expose their control over the SP bookmakers and brothel keepers of the post-World War II years. And then there are the bikers who are alleged to control the sale of methamphetamines, and the drug importers, such as Snapper Cornwell, who flooded the state and the rest of Australia with heroin and cocaine. As well, there are such killers as the Angry Gang, a group of prisoners who murdered their fellow inmates towards the end of the twentieth century; and the great escapers, like Brendan Abbott.

We have restricted ourselves to organised, rather than domestic, crime and so can only make brief mention here of Frederick William Everest, the returned soldier and bread delivery man who was convicted of the Brisbane murders of two American servicemen: Lieutenant Allan C Middleton, on 11 January 1945, and Chief Petty Officer John Daniel McCollum, fourteen days after the fact. Middleton was shot in a public lavatory and McCollum was shot when he opened the door of a house he was renting in Alderley. He managed to tell the police of a ‘red bread van’, which was traced to a few streets away. When questioned, Everest claimed to believe he was to be poisoned by Americans and his were pre-emptive strikes. ‘Yes, I shot him. The Yanks have been after me for some time.’ He was sent to a mental asylum.

Or, indeed, in a similar vein, there is German-born Siegfried Karl Kast, who, on 1 December 1955, rampaged through Wickham Terrace in Brisbane, killing and maiming, before blowing himself up. He had arrived in Australia after jumping ship two months before the outbreak of World War II. He claimed to be a refugee and a member of the illegal German Social Democratic Party. He escaped four times from an internment camp in Gaythorne, Queensland, before, in 1944, he was allowed to join the Aliens labour party. He was described as a malingerer and someone who seemed to want to cause as much disruption as possible. There were suggestions that Kast may have been a German spy during the war. After it ended, he became variously a prospector, mine worker and salesman.

In the early 1950s, he tried to get a doctor’s certificate in order to obtain government payment for a back injury but none of the nine he approached would sign it. He then spent some time making bombs out of water-piping and gelignite. By the time he went to Wickham Terrace, he had with him over a hundred rounds of ammunition and a satchel of home-made pipe-bombs. He first shot Dr Michael Gallagher, who survived. He then killed Arthur Meehan and Andrew Russell before going after John Lahz, who escaped. A racehorse trainer, George Boland, lost several fingers trying to smother a bomb. Finally, Kast blew himself up.

Readers may wonder why the Whisky Au Go Go fire has a chapter devoted to it when the fire at Palace Backpackers Hostel in Childers, 54 kilometres south of Bundaberg, that killed fifteen does not. The answer is that the man responsible, Robert Paul Long, was a fantasist and alcoholic, who claimed that, rather than being a figure in organised crime, he was dying of lung cancer, and that his non-existent, wife and children had died in fires or accidents. Around 12.30 a.m. on 23 June 2000, 38-year-old Long, who had been staying at the hostel but had left owing money for drink, torched it. The fire started in a downstairs television room and quickly spread. Seventy survived. Almost immediately, Long was named the culprit by his former de facto Christine Campbell, who claimed he had tried to burn her and her children in a Darwin caravan park three years earlier. This matter had been reported but Long had not been charged. He was caught five days after the fire, after a struggle with the police in which he tried to stab one of their dogs, and received a twenty-year sentence.

In 2003 Long’s appeal against the conviction was dismissed, as was the attorney-general’s appeal that his twenty-year minimum sentence be extended to twenty-five-years.

On the basis that blood is more interesting than paper trails, we have not included such white-collar criminals as Christopher Skase, but one of the great rorts of the Australian turf cannot go unmentioned. In 1984 the well-known Gold Coast conman John ‘The Phantom’ Gillespie, who in his lifetime racked up over 300 convictions, bought Dashing Solitaire as a ring-in for the poor plater—or slow horse—Fine Cotton at Eagle Farm. Unfortunately, shortly before the race, Solitaire went lame and, rather than abort the coup, the smart Bold Personality was substituted. It was a hare-brained scheme. Bold Personality’s colouring was in no way similar to that of Fine Cotton—one was almost black and the other red—and a bad dye and paint job did not help. Running as Fine Cotton, and backed down from 33/1 to 7/2, he won by a short, short head from Harbour Gold but, by the time he walked to the unsaddling enclosure, the crowd was already shouting ‘ring-in’. The race was awarded to Harbour Gold but the stewards ordered the bets to stand, causing the backing syndicate substantial losses. In the wash-up, Gillespie, who claimed to have made $1.8 million from the rort, received four years and the trainer, New Zealander Haydon Haitana, got twelve months, of which he served six. Seven people—including two prominent bookmakers, Robbie and Bill Waterhouse from the well-known racing family, and Roman Catholic priest Father Edward O’Dwyer, who had plunged on the horse while he was at Kempsey dogs—were warned off. Haitana later wrote of himself, ‘Some have a weakness for drink, some for women, some for the punt and some for the con—but I’m lucky. I got the lot’. He also said that he had gone ahead with the rort because he was afraid he or his brother Pat would be beaten up, or even killed, as trainer George Brown had been the previous year. The man behind the Fine Cotton ring-in was said to have been the Sydney identity and drug dealer Michael Sayers, who was himself shot dead in February 1985.

At least Fine Cotton went on to have a happy life. The film producer John Stainton bought the animal, with a view to the gelding playing himself in a movie about the ring-in. There were, however, contractual problems and it was never made. Fine Cotton lived out his days at Stainton’s Brookfield property, dying at the age of thirty-one, having been used as a hack until the age of nineteen.

Some may feel that they, their friends or relations have been un-fairly omitted from this pantheon and that lesser lights have been included at their expense. If they care to send us details of their exploits, we will be happy to consider their inclusion in any future edition.

By the time of publication a number of cases referred to may have been resolved, sentences varied, appeals dismissed or allowed. We will endeavour to deal with these developments in any future edition.

1 The Good Old Days

There are street workers, mob men, gangsters, broad rorters, dips, urgers, conmen, hooks, crooks, rooks, toughs, gunmen, tankbusters, choke artists, garrotters, sandbag slingers, speilers, murderers, housebreakers, shoddy droppers, boarding house barbers, perverts, bots, bites and hoboes.

Truth, 12 April 1925

Overall, perceived wisdom has it that a population of 800 000 is the minimum required for organised crime to be interested in establishing itself in a town or city. Until after World War II, Brisbane was therefore considered too small to be troubled by professional criminals, and what crime there was, was thought to be handled by very second-division men. As is quite often the case, perceived wisdom has it wrong. Brisbane and the state of Queensland had some seriously good players.

Until the arrival of electricity and the consequent urban expansion at the beginning of the 1880s, the state’s most prevalent crime was stock theft, and it was estimated that between 10 000 and 20 000 head went missing annually. Naturally, Queenslanders would not stoop to such a thing, so ‘the scum of New South Wales’ were said to be the culprits, particularly in the Hughenden area.

Curiously, Queensland only had two homegrown bushrangers of consequence: John Wright, who was active in Rockhampton and accidentally killed in July 1864; and James Macpherson, who received twenty-five years in 1866. They never quite became the heroes their southern counterparts did.

If the crimes committed against and by convicts, and those of Wright and Macpherson are excluded, Queensland’s first major crime committed for profit probably occurred on 6 November 1867. Gold commissioner and magistrate Thomas Griffin, born in Sligo, had gambled away £252 worth of gold given to him by Chinese miners and, to retrieve his losses, he joined a party, including police officers Patrick W Cahill and John F Power, escorting gold and currency valued at £8000. At the Mackenzie River, during the journey between Clermont and Rockhampton, Griffin shot and killed Cahill and Power, and escaped with £4000 worth of the gold.

Griffin was a thorough rogue. He had been a store clerk in Dublin before serving in the Crimean War. On his way out to Melbourne in 1857, he had met and charmed the widow Crosby, who had children who were his age. He squandered her money and on their separation took half of what was left. He went to Sydney and became a clerk, and then acting sergeant, in the constabulary office. He undoubtedly had charm because he endeared himself to Governor Brown and was eventually appointed gold commissioner.

Caught and convicted, and after an unsuccessful appeal, Griffin continued to deny his guilt to the bitter end, even on the scaffold, when, after a breakfast of eggs, toast and tea, he was hanged at Rockhampton on 1 June 1868. No one doubted his guilt. The Queenslander thought he had died as he had lived, ‘hard, callous and impenitent’.

The day after his death, a warder, Alfred Grant, wrote to The Queenslander that Griffin had tried to bribe him to help him escape. In return, he would tell the man where he had buried the stolen money. If escape was impossible, Grant should bring him either strychnine or a knife and Griffin would make sure the man’s sister in Ireland received £500. Grant had reported this to the principal turnkey, John Lee, and it was agreed Grant should play along with Griffin. Eventually Griffin told him the whole story of the killings and, after a search, Grant and Lee found the missing money, which was returned to the Australian Joint Stock Bank. For their efforts, the pair were given £200 and dismissed.

Eight days after his death, Griffin’s grave was dug out and his head severed from his body. At the time, there was considerable interest in the phrenology of criminals—the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso believed that the shape of the skull determined a man’s propensity for crime—and there was a suggestion the theft was for scientific purposes. Despite a £20 reward, the skull was never retrieved.

Cahill and Power are believed to have been the first Queensland officers to be killed on duty. Griffin was the first man to be legally executed in the town. A number of other such executions followed in relatively quick succession, including those of George Palmer and John Williams, hanged for the murder of Patrick Halligan, who had been in charge of gold being sent in from the Morinsh field.

During the 1870s, there had been considerable improvements to the port of Brisbane, allowing larger vessels to reach the town’s wharves. Brisbane now assumed greater and greater commercial dominance over Ipswich, the oldest provincial city in Australia, which, until 1859, had sought to be the state capital.

With the docks, electricity and a tram system came criminal pushes basing themselves in Spring Hill, Paddington, Fortitude Valley, South Brisbane and West End. In May 1893, ‘Respectable’ wrote to the Brisbane Courier that he thought the gangs congregated at one end of Brunswick and Ann streets, and the police maintained their distance at the other. A recent visitor had told him ‘for its size Brisbane was worse for larrikins than Sydney and goodness knows that place is noted enough. Surely something can be done’.

Mostly, the pushes, which included the Warrigals and the Mohawks as well as the Mvalls of Coorparoo, insulted passers-by, ran young prostitutes, engaged in a spot of theft or fought each other. Now came an inexorable rise in theft and standovers, so that by 1900, the crime rate was said to have reached a peak. In November 1903, the pushes joined and, said to be 300 strong, got into a pitched battle with the police near the Woolloongabba Hotel.

In 1905, John Hall, said to be the leader of one of the city’s most dangerous pushes, received ten years’ penal servitude for robbery with violence. No longer could crime be blamed on intruders from New South Wales; Mr Justice Beal said that what had pained him about the sessions was the number of Queenslanders involved. Despite this, overall the peak was followed by a rapid fall of one third in the crime rate but then it increased again until, shortly before World War I, it had doubled.

In 1921, despite the establishment at Longreach, a year earlier, of Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, later known as Qantas, most people arrived in Queensland from southern states by steamer or train. What the new arrivals found was still something of a frontier state. It had a fast-growing population of just over 750 000, in which men outnumbered women; distances were vast and police thinly spread. Demand for illegal or restricted goods and services, such as alcohol, prostitution, gambling and drugs, was high. The climate was kind, and Queensland’s vastness provided plenty of places where, when necessary, a man could disappear for a while or, indeed, forever. Major local and visiting criminals began to emerge.

•••

Sometime early in October 1928, Brisbane receiver Joshua Rappeport, whose family, conveniently for a fence (receiver), ran a pawnbroker’s in Cardong Buildings in Stanley Street, decided to spare the life of Judge Woodcock, who was about to hear his case. At least, that is the version of events given by the muckraking but highly entertaining tabloid Truth, which never let a good story interfere with its masthead. If Truth was correct, Rappeport’s decision was probably a sensible one. The death of a judge, police officer or even a journo tended to bring down the wrath if not of God, at least of the establishment, on the underworld.

Rappeport, described by Truth as a master criminal, was due to be sentenced following a theft from the London Watch Depot in George Street, in which the building had been torched. Woodcock had already sentenced two of the team, Albert Orchard and James Fitzgerald, to seven and eight years respectively, and Rappeport was up the next week.

It was not really surprising that Woodcock had given Orchard and Fitzgerald long terms. Fitzgerald, also known as Warren, Wilson and Skelton, was regarded as a master cracksman who would not hesitate to shoot if cornered, and Orchard was not far behind him in status. After they had been caught for the burglary, they thought their cause would be better served by getting rid of the exhibits in the case, and so they or their offsiders simply blew up the Criminal Investigation Branch, where they were being stored.

Rappeport, said to run a school for young thieves, took the view that ‘seven was better than seventeen’ years, and his thinking was amply rewarded when Woodcock stood down and his replacement, Judge McNaughton, handed down a mere four years. Within six months, Rappeport’s mother and sister closed the pawnbroker’s and moved away. However, once he was released, in 1933 Rappeport was granted two collectors licences, and reopened pawnbroker’s shops in South Brisbane, Dutton Park and Fortitude Valley. At least the police knew where to look for stolen goods.

Much of Brisbane crime was centred around Spring Hill, which the police made regular, if unavailing, efforts to clean up. One of the problems was that while a witness may have made a complaint, he was almost inevitably ‘got at’ and suffered a memory lapse about his identification of the accused, or ‘went into smoke’ before the case came to court. It was certainly so in the case of Alexander Bliss, when seven men and two women—including May [Marie] Arundell and John Campbell Morrison—together described as the aristocracy of Spring Hill, were charged with robbing him of £50 using violence, following a fracas in Bowen Street. The problem was that, despite the efforts of the police, Bliss was nowhere to be found when it came to giving evidence, and he and his girlfriend, Josephine Vera Duffield, also known as Gaby Lewis, were finally arrested in Tully and taken back to Brisbane. In February the next year, he told the court, ‘I can’t talk’ and collapsed. Josephine stood her ground but, with convictions for both prostitution and bigamy in Western Australia, she was always open to cross-examination. She told the court she wanted to leave Brisbane because she feared the Spring Hill mob would get her. All the defendants were found not guilty, to general applause from the public gallery, which was much to the annoyance of the judge, who ordered them cleared out of the court.

The defendants, a collection of sly-groggers, fortune tellers, racecourse pickpockets, robbers and standover men, may not have quite been the aristocracy of Spring Hill, but they regularly featured in the courts. Shortly before the Bliss case, May Arundell had won £15 from Truth in a defamation case following an article published on 18 January 1925. She had asked for £200. As far back as 1913, she had been involved in a sly-grog case. The same month she was acquitted in the Bliss case, she was fined £10 for posing as Madame de Grachey from Sydney and telling fortunes, including that of a policewoman whose husband, Arundell said, would soon leave her. He had been dead for ten years.

A cut above the others was John Campbell Morrison, who for years led something of a charmed life in the courts. The year after the Bliss case, he was again acquitted, this time of theft. A series of minor convictions followed until, in 1934, he was charged, along with Charles Faulastrom, with blowing the safe at Patterson’s Sawmill at Toowong.

Faulastrom was a major criminal who, in 1925, received ten years for the attempted murder of Detective Burns. Around midnight on 18 June, he and another serious player, Jeremiah Denehy, blew the safe of jeweller Walter Coles, hoping to get £5000. Unfortunately, they not only picked the wrong safe but the explosion was so loud that men in a nearby hotel called the police. Denehy gave himself up but Faulastrom fired a number of times at Burns until another officer knocked him down. Faulastrom later said he could have blown the whole town apart but he did not know his way around and that he should never have done the job at midnight but waited till 4 a.m.

There was no question of Faulastrom getting bail but the barrister, McLaughlin, who appeared on behalf of the men, asked for bail for Denehy, saying, ‘They are charged with an offence for which men are often let out on bail’.

Superintendent Head: What! Safe robbing?’

McLaughlin: Yes, safe robbing is quite common in Brisbane.

He was right in that. The same day, Thomas Hood, who later escaped with another boxman (or safecracker) Charles Watson, and Henry Alfred Kendall appeared in court, charged with blowing the safe at McCartney Bros warehouse in Woolloongabba.

In fact, Denehy then absconded his bail when his case was called in October, and was found hiding with a suitcase and a change of clothes in a tunnel near the engine room of the steamer Levuka, which was about to sail for Sydney.

When he appeared at the trial, Faulastrom, who had first been charged in Sydney in 1920, and had served three years on a breaking charge and another three months for receiving, refused to plead and remained mute. The prison doctor thought that he would be able to understand things perfectly if he pulled himself together. The jury, however, decided he was not capable of understanding the proceedings and he was remanded in custody until he was. The prosecution claimed it was a put-up job so that Denehy would get a separate trial. In the wash-up, Denehy, said to have been a member of an interstate gang for the previous twelve months, received four years. He returned to Sydney, where, in September 1932, then aged fifty, he was acquitted of breaking and entering.

Faulastrom had been out of prison barely six months when he and Morrison were accused of this new breaking. When Faulastrom was found in Spring Hill, he had with him three jemmies, two plugs of dynamite, three pieces of fuse, and some of the property taken from Patterson’s safe, including ninety-eight penny postage stamps. He pleaded guilty and gave evidence for Morrison, whose defence was that it was quite by chance that Faulastrom was in his room in Spring Hill with the stolen property.

Faulastrom told the court that, in the 1925 case, he had been knocked on the skull by the police and so now could not really remember things. He did not garner the sympathy he had hoped.

Judge Macrossan: You mean the police stopped you firing any more shots by applying the baton?

Both were convicted of receiving. Faulastrom went down for five years and Morrison eighteen months.

The real royalty in the Spring Hill community included the stand-over man Joseph ‘Curley’ O’Dea and his wife, the diminutive, grey-eyed Lizzie. Their wedding was conducted at the Joyful News Mission, and the wedding breakfast, which took place at a pie stall, consisted of sausage rolls. The only cloud on their happy day was when someone stood on Lizzie’s hat.

Marriage did not keep her out of court for long. In December 1924 she and another denizen, Thelma Grant, who had convictions for theft and forgery, were charged with shooting Dolly Franks in Heraud Street, Hermit Park, Townsville. Franks, they said, had stolen £10 from Grant, who wanted to take responsibility for the whole affair. By the time the case came to trial the following February, the story had changed and it was said the revolver had gone off when it had been accidentally dropped. In the wash-up, Grant was acquitted and O’Dea received a year in Stewart’s Creek gaol.

She continued her life as a prostitute, racking up conviction after conviction, and in April 1927 she was committed for trial on a charge of arson—it was said she had set fire to a neighbour’s house—but the jury found her not guilty

Regional North Queensland agreed with the O’Deas and many of their ilk. The further north, the more anarchic the frontier towns became. At the end of 1927, Curley O’Dea, along with George Williams and James McLaughlin, went on trial, charged with the murder of a Chinese storekeeper and maize dealer, Lee Gum See, at Rising Sun, Townsville. Lee Gum See’s body was found in the early morning of 29 July after apparently having been dragged behind the counter. The store’s safe had been broken into and the premises cleaned out of anything worthwhile. The victim had only moved to the premises some four months earlier. The constable who found the body said that, from the amount of blood, one would think a bullock had been slaughtered in the shop. It was clear that Lee Gum See had been struck on the back of the head sometime the previous evening because the light switch was on but the lamps in the front of the shop had been smashed. O’Dea and the others were arrested in Townsville that evening.

The evidence against Williams and McLaughlin was thin. Blood-stained clothing had been found in a hole in Robert Street, some 20 yards (18 metres) from the house where they were arrested. So far as O’Dea was concerned, money and rings were found in the yard of his house. There was no fingerprint evidence; nor were casts made of tracks from the shop. The case really rested on a dubious identification—at first only one man was put in the parade as a foil and then a second was added.

All the men gave