Cover

TONY REEVES is an investigative journalist of many years standing. He first became interested in Abe Saffron more than forty years ago and has been following the miasma of corruption that has hung above Sydney ever since.

Tony has worked as a journalist with the ABC, Nation Review, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Australian, all the time peeling away deep layers of truth to expose the real workings of Australia’s underworld. His reporting helped bring about the Moffitt Royal Commission into organised crime. He now enjoys a quieter life in Brisbane.

Meet Lennie McPherson, the man who came to be known as the Mr Big of Australia crime. Brutality punctuated his whole life. Corruption was his mark. He was a standover man, a murderer, a rapist and a thief. He ran crooked police and corrupt politicians. He was involved in drugs and prostitution. And, he did business with the Mafia and the CIA. In this chilling portrait of the godfather of Australian crime, Tony Reeves uncovers a heart of evil and takes us deep into a dark and violent criminal underworld. It is a story that could be told only after Lennie’s death.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

AUTHOR NOTE

Throughout This Book money amounts are shown in the actual amount involved at the time. For events prior to February 1966, before decimalisation, the amounts are shown in £/s/d (pounds, shillings and pence); after that in $ and ¢ (dollars and cents). To provide the reader with some sense of the contemporary value of these amounts, I have used the Reserve Bank of Australia’s on-line inflation calculator <http://www.rba.gov.au/calculator/calc.go> to provide a 2006 value (the latest available in the system), rounded to the nearest dollar where appropriate. For example, early in Chapter 1, we have our subject in 1938 being fined ‘£5 ($343.81)’, the latter figure in brackets reflects the impact of the intervening sixty-eight years of inflation at an average annual rate of 5.3 per cent. There will be some exceptions to this: where the year of the money event is uncertain, it is not dealt with; where items are repeated, they are dealt with on the first mention only, and nothing after the year 1998 is processed as there is little difference in the values. I hope this helps.

I must mainly thank Abraham Gilbert Saffron for making this possible: without his interest in me all those years ago, I might well have spent my life in ignorance of his bad behaviour, and I would never have thought of this book.

I particularly thank Kamala for her patience and support and the 10,000-word ‘reward’ lunches, and Richard, Rebecca and Joanne for their enthusiasm and encouragement.

PROLOGUE

IN MID-1965, SYDNEY tabloid the Daily Mirror published sketchy details of a notorious smoko that had been held for a social club of drinkers from the Phoenix Hotel in Woollahra. A city council community hall in inner-suburban Surry Hills had been booked for the Saturday afternoon and evening event, and more than one hundred men had crammed in, paying their quid ($21) at the door to cover the entire cost of unlimited beer and spirits, prawns in great mounds and entertainment. I know a great deal about this story: I was there. I occasionally had a drink at the Phoenix with a commercial photographer I hired in connection with my job as a public relations officer for an oil company. He was a colourful, knockabout character called Jack Dabinett. ‘Dabbo’ (as we called him) had asked me if I could provide for the smoko a film projector and a couple of movies from the oil company’s extensive library, which at the time was under my control. The movies hardly seemed the stuff of beer-and-prawns events, but I was told they would just be running in the background as warm-up entertainment.

I set the projector and screen up in the hall, threaded the first film through the sprockets, set the focus and got ready to start screening. At that moment a man briskly approached me, pushed me out of the way without a word, ripped my movie out and threaded one of several he’d brought with him, and hit the start button. It was a grainy, black-and-white, hard-core pornographic movie with no soundtrack. In response to my demand: ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I was told curtly to ‘Fuck off!’ Given that he was a few sizes larger than my ten stones, I was inclined to agree. My mate Dabbo shrugged, told me not to worry: who wanted to watch boring old films from BP when they could watch this stuff? He’d known the set-up all along; said he’d forgotten to tell me.

After an hour or so of porno movies, beer and prawns, two attractive women appeared and performed explicit sex acts with each other, with the help of a large white plastic object, the like of which I had not only never seen before, but had never imagined might have existed. One of the women eventually retired and the other invited any ‘worthwhile male’ to come forward and satisfy her. A few volunteered—fit young blades from the Bondi Surf Club, Dabbo said—most of them only slightly embarrassed at having to perform in front of one hundred gawking men. Suffice to say there was about an hour of varied and at times hectic sexual activity under the spotlights.

All of which was pretty well par for the course for your average all-male ‘smoko’, Dabbo assured me. One must live and learn, I thought. Most of the regulars at the Phoenix Hotel fell into one of three categories: petty criminals, an illegal starting price (SP) bookie’s agent and police ‘snouts’; a number of CIB and eastern suburbs detectives who drank in the saloon bar; and a few journalists who mixed with both the other groups. All were well represented at the smoko. Crims, cops and journos: not the usual mix to gather for a Saturday afternoon beer-and-prawns bash.

The next day a Daily Mirror journalist (who had not been present) wrote the brief story, and told his editor about the event and that another journalist, whom he named, knew the whole story. The other scribe steadfastly refused to write it up and eventually lost his job over the issue. But a weekend edition of the paper managed to dig up and publish some more details, specifically the fact that Abe Saffron had supplied the porno movies and the women for the live show, and that he was able to provide similar acts for a large number of smokos on any given night—for a considerable fee, of course (although given the police presence at the Phoenix event, it was probably part of a contra deal). Libel laws prevented the paper from naming Saffron, so there and then it coined the tag ‘Mr Sin’, which was blazed across the front page in massive type. This moniker was to stick to Abe Saffron like a brand for the rest of his life and beyond.

A few weeks after the headlines hit, I was having a quiet ale with Dabbo at the Phoenix and a copper I knew beckoned me aside from our group. ‘Bumper Farrell would like a quick word with you’, he said. ‘Nothing to worry about!’ he said as he indicated to a man—purple-faced, cauliflower-eared with a nose to match—seated alone down the other end of the bar. Detective Sergeant Frank ‘Bumper’ Farrell operated out of Darlinghurst Police Station, which covered the Kings Cross area. His public reputation was as large as his considerable physique: he was a tad under six feet tall and nearly as wide across the shoulders. Bumper had been a first-grade rugby league footballer for Newtown, making headlines when he bit off an opponent’s ear during a particularly rough game. By the mid-1950s he was the high-profile head of the vice squad, which meant he had plenty of contact with Abe Saffron, among others. He was a frequent non-paying guest at Saffron’s clubs over the years and one of the main collectors of contributions by the club operators to what was euphemistically called ‘the police benevolent fund’. Now he wanted to talk to me.

‘Bumper’, I said, ‘I’m Tony Reeves’. A low growl emerged as he turned to me: ‘I’m MISTER Farrell to you’, he snapped. ‘I just want you to sign a quick statement that you showed the movies at the smoko recently’, he said.

‘But I didn’t show them’, I replied. ‘I organised the projector, but my films were taken off and others put on by someone else. I have no idea who he was.’

‘Yes, Tony, we know that, but there’s a big problem with all this. Mr Saffron has been under a lot of pressure over this whole thing and we can’t sort of find the person who did show the movies. So it’d be a great help to us if you could just sign a bit of paper saying you showed the movies. That’s all. There won’t be anything arising from it, and I can assure you Mr Saffron would be most appreciative.’

‘I’m sorry, Mister Farrell, but that would be lying. I didn’t show the movies and so I won’t sign any statements saying I did.’

‘Okay’, growled Bumper. ‘I can’t make you do it. But we’ll remember you!’ It was my one and only meeting with Mr Sin’s good mate and protector, ‘Mister’ Farrell. And what an eye-opener it was for me!

From that moment on I became something of a ‘Saffron-watcher’: I was intrigued that Saffron could have a senior, high-profile policeman like Bumper Farrell approach an innocent private citizen (like me) and try to frame them with an illegal act they did not commit, just so some ‘pressure’ that he was feeling could be alleviated. I read back through the press clippings, made copies of them all and opened my ‘dossier’ on Abraham Gilbert Saffron, to which I continued to add material. If it was okay for him to try to interfere in my life, I thought, it was certainly okay for me to take a close look at his. In retrospect it was a defining moment for me: this book would not have been possible had I not taken that early interest in its main subject. It was also an event which stirred me to take a closer look at some of the other notable characters around town, like Lennie McPherson and the host of unpleasant crims and crooked cops I wrote about in Mr Big. If there is anything at all that I can thank Abe Saffron for, it is drawing my attention to him as a ‘person of interest’ by sooling Bumper on to me.

It would be many years before he began to realise that I was indeed curious about his nefarious doings. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here: there are other matters in the sordid life of Saffron to be discussed first. Let me make one thing clear, though: it’s not my intention to write a biography here. That has already been done—if hagiography can be given membership of that genre. This book is intended to provide an exposé of a highly successful Australian criminal whose tentacles of vice, exploitation, gross abuse of the laws of the land, blackmail and corruption—oh yes, and tax evasion—extended across most of mainland Australia and probably overseas for more than half a century. Abe Saffron, as we will see, was far more than a maligned, successful businessman who the media loved to hate. He was a cunning, calculating manipulator, driven by greed, sex, lust for power, and an ego that constantly required renewal and reassurance to ensure the world would see him as a gentle family man, a benefactor to charities, a man castigated simply because of his success in business.

1 FOR KING AND COUNTRY
. . . AND A QUICK QUID

Having Attended School with Frederick Charles Anderson—later nicknamed ‘Paddles’ and hailed as one of Sydney’s earliest movers and shakers of organised crime—Abe Saffron had a headstart in life. At Fort Street Boys’ High School in Petersham in Sydney’s inner-west, Anderson was a few years ahead of young Abe, and he was possibly Abe’s first—but certainly not last—brush with criminal fame. But let’s start further back than that.

Sam Saffron had married Annie Gilbert in 1912. Of Russian–Jewish heritage, they set up home above their drapery store on Parramatta Road at Annandale in Sydney’s inner-west. Abe, the fourth of five children, was born on Monday, 6 October 1919. Philip, Henry and Beryl were his older siblings; a sister Flora was born later. The business helped the family survive the economic hardships of the First World War and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Later, to help the family cash flow, Sam set up a black-market racket when clothes and popular items like nylon stockings were scarce and rationed during the Second World War. He made a tidy fortune out of it, some of which was later undoubtedly used to fund his son Abe’s activities.

After school Abe always helped out in the shop, and from the age of about eight he operated a lucrative trade in black-market cigarettes. He had arranged a supply of these scarce items with a friendly local shopkeeper, and then resold at a profit to his father’s friends, and later to Fort Street schoolmates. Reselling was a corporate skill he honed over a lifetime, eventually learning how to acquire the stock free of charge. At no stage in his life did he ever have the required permit to sell tobacco products. Another of Abe’s early scams was buying textbooks from boys who no longer needed them, cleaning them up and selling them to those starting a new year. Selling books was another lifelong corporate activity, though the material he traded later in life was definitely unsuitable for young schoolboys. After making a good profit selling used books and black-market cigarettes, Saffron decided that the world of commerce needed his talents. Many years later he was to tell a journalist that he left school early because: ‘. . . I had no other desire than to go into business.’

In the mid-1930s the family drapery business moved into the city to a rented shop on Pitt Street. It was here that a nineteen-year-old Abe Saffron met American Hilton Glanville Kincaid, who had changed his surname by deed poll from Macossa. A twenty-one-year-old, Kincaid operated out of a tiny booth next to the Saffron shop, selling cigarettes and, from ‘under the counter’, any other scarce or rationed commodity he could supply illegally at rip-off prices. It was a similar line of business to Abe’s really, and the two joined forces for many years.

Another venture to which young Saffron applied his ‘corporate skills’ was gambling. It seemed not to matter that his new business was illegal. Details are sketchy now, but on Monday, 19 September 1938, Saffron was summonsed to appear at North Sydney Magistrate’s Court on a charge of using a premises for gambling. ‘Guilty, Your Worship.’ Fine: £5 ($343.81), or ten days’ hard labour at Long Bay. Abe paid up promptly from his illicit profits. He either learned his lesson or learned discretion, or, more likely, invited the local cops into his illegal gambling club for a few free bets, as there are no more breaches of the gaming laws on Abe Saffron’s notably sparse criminal record.

After a while he moved to a potentially more lucrative field: theft. He was twenty when he was hauled before the Central Court of Petty Sessions on Wednesday, 3 January 1940, on a charge of receiving stolen goods, to wit (as the police prosecutor intoned) a car radio worth £20 ($1309). ‘Guilty, Your Worship.’ He was sentenced to six months’ hard labour. But the magistrate suspended the problem of actually sending him to prison by allowing him to enter a good behaviour bond for £10 on the assurance he would behave nicely for the next two years instead. There was also a mention by the magistrate that he might better serve his country by enlisting in the army and going to war rather than by stealing things.

Remarkably, the records show him back in the same court on the same day, facing four counts of receiving stolen goods and one of having stolen goods in custody. Unaccountably, the charges were dismissed under the versatile clause 556A of the Crimes Act, which allowed a magistrate to dismiss proven charges against a ‘first offender’. And that was it for a while: a humble beginning for a man who would go on to make millions from criminal activities.

Years later, in the mid-1970s, when John Little, a reporter for the TV show A Current Affair, interviewed Saffron, Abe suffered that perennial ailment of the criminal classes: a sudden, brief but virulent attack of amnesia. The interview Little pre-recorded included a segment that went something like this:

That recording was never put to air. Saffron’s solicitors contacted the program producers and threatened legal action if there was any reference to his criminal record. So it was dropped.

Abe Saffron was a well-established entrepreneur and he was never going to allow his unsavoury biographical details to sully the public’s mind that he was anything other than a highly successful, sometimes controversial, yet unquestionably charitable businessman. That was a gambit he maintained for the rest of his life. And some people still believe him.

As was the case with many aspiring young entrepreneurs in those days, a little event called the Second World War put the brakes on Abe’s corporate ambitions. Called up for military service, he fronted at the army’s Victoria Barracks in Oxford Street, Paddington, on Monday, 5 August 1940, to enlist in the Citizen Military Forces. He declared he was single, a draper and mercer, of British nationality (as were all Australians in those days), a Hebrew, and his next of kin was his mother, Annie, of 16 Lamrock Avenue, Bondi. He was allocated Army Number N21771 and sent off to be checked by a medical officer, F.E. Barclay, who sized him up as: five feet six inches (1.68 metres) tall, 136 pounds (61.68 kilograms) weight, grey eyes, dark hair and dark complexion. He passed the medical with flying colours, being declared ‘fit for Class 1’. His slightly humped back—almost invisible under clothing—did not affect the medic’s judgement.

Abe signed the pledge that he, Abraham Gilbert Saffron, would ‘. . . well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord, the King, in the military forces of the Commonwealth of Australia until the cessation of the present time of war or until sooner lawfully discharged, dismissed or removed . . .’, and so on. Lieutenant B. Fuller witnessed this solemnly sworn oath. Abe’s reluctance to get involved in the war effort was only shown when he completed his personal details on the opening page of his Record of Service. Under ‘If exemption claimed, reason’ he wrote: ‘My father’s business is wholly dependent on my presence.’ His attempt to opt out obviously did not convince the military brass, who had a war to win.

Abe’s was not an inspiring military career. At the start of 1942 he was moved to the army camp at Liverpool and, within a week, he was in the hospital and out of action for a fortnight with an undisclosed ailment. Two years after he enlisted he was bumped up to the rank of corporal, but again the excitement of all this military action got to him: he was back in hospital and his fitness downgraded to ‘Class B’. On Tuesday, 18 January 1944, after 733 days in the army (102 days of which he was not on active duty) and without medals, decorations or an active service badge, he signed Discharge Certificate 9831, gladly accepting the army’s reason why they were letting him go as: ‘There being no suitable vacancy in which his services could be employed.’ Such a low-key recognition of his service did not prevent him in later years from proudly wearing on his lapel the RSL badge normally worn as an acknowledgement of overseas military service. He packed his bags and headed off to the family home, now at 27 Boonara Avenue, Bondi.

After his discharge, Abe’s military wartime commitment was over, but he did perform a little more war-related activity with a six-month stint in the merchant navy from the end of January 1944, doing administrative chores on troopships on the Australian east coast. While on duty Saffron met up with his old mate Hilton Kincaid—the Pitt Street black marketeer who was still running a brisk trade in illicit booze and cigarettes. They both signed off at the end of a voyage in June 1944—their war was now over—and decided to team up ashore, an ideal business partner, Abe must have thought. For this pair, it was time to make some money out of the war.

2 SLY GROG SALES:
A BOTTLER OF A
MONEY-MAKER

The War May have been over for Saffron in mid-1944, but there was another year to go for those actually fighting in the Pacific. Conveniently for Abe, in that year hordes of cashed-up American troops were either based in Sydney or visiting for leave breaks.

Canadian-born Sammy Lee first visited Australia in 1937 as a drummer in a band and returned for keeps in 1940 when he opened the Roosevelt nightclub at 32 Orwell Street, a block off the main drag in Kings Cross. Although breaking the liquor laws on a nightly basis, he became a highly popular and successful nightclub operator around Sydney for more than twenty years. His business partner for many years was a flamboyant gambler, Reginald Frederick ‘Reg’ Boom, who also operated illegal baccarat games in Double Bay and Kings Cross. Abe met Sammy Lee and Reg Boom at the Roosevelt club, and the pair agreed to pass the business over to Saffron, then aged twenty-three.

Saffron ran the club in partnership with his mate Hilton Kincaid and a much older man, Mendel Brunen. Brunen’s parents, Elias and Rachel, had set up their son in a similar line of business as Abe’s father—mercery and clothing—and Mendel was a neighbour and close Saffron family friend. Kincaid, as an American, helped attract the US soldiers as the club’s main customers. Abe must have realised then that the nightlife of Kings Cross was where his fortune lay. As Mario Puzo wrote in his 1978 novel Fools Die: ‘If you want to get rich in this country, you have to get rich in the dark.’ The money started to roll in—but not for long. Before its first anniversary was celebrated, the club was closed by a court order declaring it a ‘disorderly house’.

It appears certain that Abe’s father Sam had asked Brunen to get involved with Abe’s corporate adventures and to ‘keep an eye’ on how the money was used—much of which had undoubtedly been provided by Saffron senior. Brunen was to remain in that role until his death in 1965. Abe Saffron never spoke of the source of his startup funding; such revelations could have brought discredit to his father, who had made much of his fortune on the illegal wartime black market. But it was clear there was never a shortage of large lumps of cash.

From the early 1940s on, Abe always seemed to get what he wanted, even for his foray north from Sydney to the Hunter Valley. There he and his ever-present and equal partner Kincaid bought into their first hotels: a pub at Kurri Kurri and, about a year later in 1944, another, the Newcastle Hotel. They paid £3000 ($161,421) for the latter, but Abe refused—even years later when giving evidence under oath—to say where he got the money from, mumbling confused replies about ‘saving it’ and ‘from winnings’.

Around this time Abe had a brief stint at being a legal bookmaker, but at this he failed after he made an abortive attempt to take over the local jockey club. Perhaps the sheer legality of these ventures brought about a lack of interest, or perhaps it was the lure of the ‘big smoke’ that drew Saffron and Kincaid back to Sydney early in 1946, where they took over the West End Hotel in Balmain. (Kincaid’s involvement was not revealed because the licensing authorities had taken a dim view of his earlier illicit liquor business.) A few months later they acquired the licence of the Gladstone Hotel, about halfway up William Street, between Sydney’s CBD and Kings Cross.

At the moment the second deal was signed, Saffron broke the law, which limited any individual to just one hotel licence. Abe knew that, of course, and went through a charade of transferring the licence of the West End pub—then worth around £5300 ($284,414)—to his eldest brother Philip to try to conceal the control of the business by himself and Kincaid. Philip moved into the pub for a while with his wife of ten years, Ruth Harriet, to put on a convincing show that he was the owner. It is, in retrospect, implausible that the Licensing Court and the police charged with enforcing the liquor laws would have been ignorant of this blatant breach for long. It was later revealed that from the earliest days of Saffron’s booze business he was systematically and regularly corrupting the very police and officials charged with prosecuting such lawbreakers.

In that postwar period with its newfound sense of freedom and fun, the good citizens of Sydney had probably never heard the term ‘organised crime’ and, if they had, would have attributed it to the fascinating stories of the US Mafia they occasionally heard about. Few would have believed that here, in their own hometown, the building blocks of large-scale organised crime were being established by people like Abe Saffron and his running mates Hilton Kincaid and Mendel Brunen.

WHAT CONSTITUTES ‘ORGANISED CRIME’?

In 1973, an Australian judge provided what was probably the first local definition of ‘organised crime’. Under intense pressure in the parliament, NSW Premier Bob Askin had been forced to do something about mounting allegations of criminal activities under his watch. On Monday, 20 August 1973, Askin appointed respected judge Athol Randolph Moffitt to head a twelve-month royal commission into a range of crime allegations—an event in which Abe Saffron was given more than a passing mention.

Moffitt was to spend many pages of his 1974 report on seeking to define organised crime. It is not intended here to enter that discussion in great depth, replete as it is with the potential for unending academic conflict, but Moffitt suggested that investigation of organised crime should have two threads: one to determine if a crime had been committed and the other to determine whether the crime could be shown to be part of an organised pattern. ‘For example’, wrote the judge, ‘bribery, blackmail or assault, in the course of a legitimate business gaining a monopoly, could be regarded as organised crime . . .’ He wrote that a weapon of organised crime is ‘. . . by planning to avoid generating evidence of its crimes, or if there is evidence, to suppress it by intimidation or corruption . . . of officials, particularly those, such as police, charged with investigating organised crime’.

To avoid confusion, crimes defined in this book as ‘organised’ are those illegal acts that are planned as part of a continuing corporate strategy in which effort is made to conceal the existence of the crime and where officials charged with policing and prosecuting the breaches have, by bribery, blackmail or intimidation, been prevented from—or dissuaded from—carrying out their duties to investigate or prosecute the crimes. And that fits Abe Saffron’s activities to a T.

There has long been police corruption in Australia, of course; that started with the arrival of the first white folk on these shores. In the early 1900s, Sydneysiders in particular were titillated from time to time by fantastic tabloid stories of sly grog shops, illegal SP bookies, vice queens and razor gangs. But organised crime was not considered to be a part of the Australian psyche. And so it would have remained if the organising criminals, their corrupt police and the shonky politicians had had their way. One of the basic tactics of organised crime, said Athol Moffitt (see box), is to try to conceal its existence. That is precisely what Saffron did with his Gladstone deal, and as he did time and again as he added new hotels to his chain.

There was a deafening silence from the liquor authorities when Saffron took over the Mortdale Hotel with his sister Beryl and mate Kincaid; the Cumberland Hotel in Bankstown with Emil ‘Eddie’ Kornhauser (who was to become a long-term close friend); the Albert Hotel in North Sydney with brother Henry Saffron and Kincaid; and the Civic Hotel in Pitt Street, Sydney. The fact that Saffron used his friends and family as ‘dummies’ to front his illegally gained hotel licences came out eventually.

Abe’s sister, by then Mrs Beryl Frack, concealed her relationship with him to the Licensing Court but later admitted that she, ‘thought it was necessary to tell lies to the court’. Kornhauser also broke down and told the truth some time later, admitting that he, too, had misled the Licensing Court by concealing the fact that the real control of the Cumberland Hotel rested with his friend Abe Saffron. Harold Taylour, Abe’s dummy at the Civic Hotel, later admitted that he misled the Licensing Court about Saffron’s interest in the hotel because he had ‘given a promise not to mention his [Saffron’s] name’. Hilton Kincaid’s presence in the thriving chain of pubs was never revealed to the court. And, it seemed, nobody made any inquiries, accepting the information on the licence application forms at face value.

By 1947 Saffron had accumulated this huge chain of hotels and had once again taken over the Roosevelt club in Kings Cross in partnership with Kincaid and Mendel Brunen. In the same year Saffron was fined £5 ($261) and one of his barmaids was fined £15 ($784) for charging ‘an excessive price’ for beer sales at the Gladstone. A year later a waiter was fined £75 ($3657) for illegal wine and beer sales. One of Abe’s doormen at the Roosevelt club was thirty-eight-year-old Richard Gabriel Reilly, who in later years was to help Saffron boost his status from slygrogger to a major player among Sydney’s criminal elites. Among Reilly’s attributes was the fact that his brother Jack was a copper with good contacts.

On Sunday, 23 November 1947, Abe Saffron married Doreen, the hairdresser daughter of Samuel Krantz and Rebecca née Cohen from the Brakpan district of Mpumalanga province in central northern South Africa. Marriage certificate 21664/1947 was signed in the presence of witnesses Henry Edwards and Abraham Toltz to make it legal. The groom was twenty-eight, and the bride, who had been living in Croydon Park in Sydney’s inner-west, was three years his junior. With the exception of a break in the relationship lasting about a year from 1956, Doreen was to stay with Saffron until her death in 1999. That’s what the official records show.

But Duncan McNab in The Usual Suspect says their wedding date was 23 November 1948. McNab told me that Abe Saffron confirmed that to him. Abe’s only son Alan Saffron’s date of birth is 29 March 1949, which means that if McNab is correct, Doreen was five months’ pregnant at the time of their marriage. These days such a ‘shotgun’ wedding would barely raise an eyebrow, but in 1948 it was seen as something of a stigma. So what is to be made of the enigma of the two dates?

One clear implication is that Saffron wanted the official records of his son’s life to appear as pure as the fantasy he would later create about his own, and so he persuaded a clerk at the births, deaths and marriages registry to make a slight alteration to his marriage certificate—it possibly would not have taken a very bulky brown paper bag to achieve that—to show that he and Doreen were married for well over a year before she became pregnant. Then, when telling his story to McNab, his memory of this little lie evaded him and for once he told the truth.

Thorough research at both the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages and Sydney’s Great Synagogue indicate an integrity of their records of the event. According to both sets of records, it was on Sunday, 23 November 1947, that the couple exchanged their vows before fifty-seven-year-old Rabbi Leib Aisack Falk—described in the synagogue’s archives as ‘an ardent, militant Zionist’. It may have been that Abe got the date wrong when he talked to McNab. Sundays are considered auspicious for weddings among Jewish people. The date in 1948 fell on a Tuesday, not known to be a day of good omens.

The gun, on the other hand, did not last anywhere near as long as the marriage. On Wednesday, 29 January 1947, Abe fronted the Central Court of Petty Sessions on a charge of having an unlicensed pistol in his possession. Licences, it seems, were a perpetual source of problems for the twenty-seven-year-old. A friendly magistrate found the matter proved, but generously did not enter a conviction. Saffron was released on another two-year, £10 ($522) good behaviour bond, with the matter to come up for conviction ‘if called upon’, meaning if he broke the bond. The pistol was forfeited.

As with all busy executives, Saffron experienced a few setbacks in the climb up the sometimes slippery corporate ladder. In August 1948, for example, Saffron felt obliged to lay a charge of theft against his former accountant, David Molland Evans. Abe claimed the elderly man had stolen £170/19s ($8336). The Central Court was presented with a charge sheet against Evans, signed by Saffron, who did not front for the hearing. Abe’s barrister uncle, Simon Isaacs (later to become a Supreme Court judge), represented Saffron and the matter was sent to the Quarter Sessions Court to be heard by Judge Joseph Lamaro, then fifty-three, and a jury. A Detective Sergeant Windsor made out the case, telling the court that, when arrested, Evans had been told he had stolen £1300 ($63,389). Not so, said Evans: ‘Only about £900 [$43,885]. I admit to that amount.’ Windsor added that Evans had made arrangements to repay the money.

Told that Saffron had signed the charges brought against him, an outraged Evans said: ‘That’s lovely! But Saffron won’t go on with this case. It’s a matter of a thief catching a thief . . . I’m resigned to my fate. I’ll go to jail, but I’ll take Saffron with me.’

He’d been paid £16/6s ($794) a week as an accountant, said Evans. One of his duties was to fill in cheques to be signed by Saffron. In a statement from the dock Evans said he was not guilty of theft because he had altered cheques at Saffron’s direction:

This could well have become the first time Saffron found himself in trouble with the taxation department, for the spurned accountant had no qualms in explaining his exemployer’s tax dodge—and prosecuting barrister Alf Goran (later to become a judge) gave Saffron a grilling on this aspect of the affair. Saffron told Goran that Evans had changed the amounts on cheques after he (Saffron) had signed them. And he told Goran that no liquor was sold at the Roosevelt. Liquor was obtained for customers only when it was ordered. Charges for Liquor were then entered into a general services account.

‘On rare occasions’, Saffron said, ‘customers might bribe waiters to get liquor for them. Two waiters have been charged with having sold liquor, but the management was never charged’. The court reporters recorded the exchange between the barrister and Saffron:

The Roosevelt club ledgers showed that on Monday, 25 August 1947, seventy people attended the cabaret and 436 people ate the dinner served between 6.30 and 8 p.m. Questioned on this, Saffron said:

In the report of the case in that weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, Goran was reported to have huffed: ‘Sir! Would you charge five shillings for a dish of oysters? I put it to you that you cut down your entries in the taxable section—that is the cabaret—and showed more in the untaxable section?’

‘That is absolutely ridiculous,’ replied a smiling Saffron, and he also denied that he ‘farmed out’ (rented) the men’s and women’s cloakrooms at £1 ($48.76) each a week.

At the end of evidence, Judge Lamaro, who was just completing his first year on the District Court bench, asked the jury of twelve men if they wished the case to be adjourned until the next day rather than be kept late.

‘We won’t take twenty minutes to decide, Your Honour’, replied the foreman. They were back in twenty-three with an acquittal for Evans. But it appeared that nobody from the tax department took any notice of Evans’ testimony about Saffron cheating on his tax. It would not be the last time such strong evidence was ignored, as we shall see.

Another problem for Abe later that year literally came as a shock to the ‘businessman’. He had possibly taken some public relations advice to repair a reputation that was becoming somewhat tarnished—and, for Abe Saffron, reputation was a matter of paramount concern and not infrequent manipulation for the remainder of his days. On Wednesday, 8 December 1948, Saffron launched his persona as a major charity fundraiser with a daytime party at the Roosevelt club for more than 180 children suffering from cerebral palsy. Radio personalities entertained, and a friendly policeman, Detective Inspector A. Wilks, stood in for Santa Claus. Slipping at the edge of the stage, Saffron grabbed two microphones, ripping them off their leads and almost electrocuting himself. It made headlines for nearly two weeks with a stream of media reports on his slow recovery in St Vincent’s Hospital. By then all of Sydney knew what a ‘kindly and benevolent’ man Abe Saffron was.

To keep the partying local imbibers in their place, Saffron employed Australian heavyweight champion boxer Alf Gallagher as a doorman and ‘peacekeeper’. The twelve-stone, twelve-pound (about eighty-two kilograms) cauliflower-eared pugilist was never reluctant to use his few skills to subdue any patrons who became too excitable. Gallagher twice fought champion boxer Dave Sands who, in a fifteen-rounder at Sydney Stadium on 4 September 1950, put Gallagher down for the count.

Not so successful was Douglas William McDonald, a physiotherapist from Greenwich on Sydney’s lower northside. He testified nearly a year later to Gallagher’s energetic efficiency. On the evening of 4 May 1951, McDonald and a couple of his pals, Rex Archibald Grant and Patrick Joseph Duggan, were out on the town for his stag party. They’d had a few drinks at the pleasant St James Hotel and around 11 p.m. found themselves at the Roosevelt, where they decided to have a spot of supper. Gallagher reckoned otherwise and refused them entry into Abe’s respectable establishment. A ‘few punches’ were thrown and the groom-to-be found himself prone in the street outside the club with only a vague memory of a large fist hitting his face. Six months later he got to tell his story to Judge Alan Stredwick Lloyd and a jury at the District Court, when he sued Saffron Enterprises and Gallagher for damages for assault. McDonald reportedly had a small win from the court case and later said that his stag night had been a ‘real knockout’.

Abe’s involvement in the Roosevelt nightclub should not normally have been of interest to the liquor licensing authorities simply because it did not have a licence to sell booze. What should have been of interest, of course, is that it illegally sold a large amount of liquor and clearly did so at a price greater than the maximum fixed by law, making huge profits for the owners. The sly grog trade—always a feature of Sydney life—took off in earnest during the early years of the Second World War. There was a shortage of beer and pubs were provided with a quota of bottles. The 6 p.m. closing time for pubs—dubbed the ‘six o’clock swill’—helped to exacerbate Sydneysiders’ collective thirst. By the late 1940s the Roosevelt was one of the four or five more popular clubs that did a brisk trade in prohibited liquor sales. All the clubs bought their illicit beer from the limited stocks of friendly hotels. In Saffron’s case that was doubly profitable in the postwar period as most of the supplies for the Roosevelt came from his own brewery allocations to the six hotels in which he held an illegal controlling interest. The mark-ups from pub to club, and from club to patron indeed made drinking an expensive pursuit for the punters.

It was a masterful operation of logistics and it gave the young Saffron some early experience in double-entry bookkeeping, which was to become a lifelong practice. From his pubs he was buying for the Roosevelt a bare minimum of 250 dozen bottles of beer a week—that’s three thousand bottles in total, or more than four hundred bottles a day, seven days a week. And he paid—to himself—the then ‘top price’ for black-market beer of £2 ($97.52) a dozen. The patrons at the club, it was finally figured out by someone in authority who had not been corrupted, could not possibly have consumed so much alcohol. What Saffron had managed to do—with only minor competition from the other nightclubs—was to corner the market in illicit grog sales. His competitors had supplies sufficient for their clubs, but Saffron was buying up as much of the surplus as he could. What he did not sell to patrons at the Roosevelt he sold at even greater profit to the dozens of sly grog shops—little rooms in back alleys where a bottle or two would be sold to ‘regulars’. Saffron had created a monopoly in this area and had total command of the price.

That the clubs were allowed to flourish quite brazenly was due solely to the bribery which had corrupted licensing police and bureaucrats, with even Police Commissioner William J. ‘Bill’ MacKay turning a blind eye to the racket. Saffron had been guided in his earlier days by Sammy Lee and Reg Boom on how to ‘open up accounts’ with bribable cops, meeting key senior police and developing a clear understanding of the going rate (which had a direct relationship to rank). He developed a practice of wrapping up the bribe money in paper bundles and handing them over either directly to the police or to their appointed ‘bagman’ every Friday evening at the club. This became an ingrained habit, and over the next thirty years Saffron kept paying a phalanx of bent cops who, every Friday, formed a queue at one or another of his clubs.

When Police Inspector Noonan retired in July 1950, after four-plus years running the metropolitan licensing division, a huge testimonial function was held for him at the swanky Australia Hotel in the city, at which he was presented—quite openly—with a cheque for £1000 ($41,467). Abe Saffron was one of the biggest contributors to the payment, which was the sly grog industry’s way of saying ‘thanks for all you have done for us’. When Police Metropolitan Superintendent Sweeney retired from the force a month later, he was happy to attend a farewell dinner organised by the sly-groggers at Sammy Lee’s club, attended by more than two hundred people. His ‘testimonial’ cheque was valued at £600 ($24,880). He’d been in the superintendent job for just a couple of years. These public displays of camaraderie between the law enforcers and the law breakers—later to be described by a judge as ‘systematic police corruption at the highest levels’—were mere tokenism compared to the back-room arrangements that Abe came to with police, politicians and a widening circle of influential people. And with troubles ahead—for 1951 was to be a year of great challenges—he’d need all the help he could get.

To further his budding reputation as a charity fundraiser, Abe opened up a housie (bingo) game at Bondi, supposedly for the NSW Spastic Centre. On 14 January 1951, the Sunday Sun published an article that said Saffron’s new venture was in breach of the Lotteries and Art Unions Act because it offered cash prizes.

While it started as a fairly innocuous affair, the ‘Housie Scandal’ was to reverberate around the corridors of power and the courts for more than a year before other Saffron headlines eventually pushed it aside. The basic thrust of the newspaper articles was the illegality of the set-up and the claim that the returns to the charity were ‘well below what they should have been’. The paper called on NSW Chief Secretary Clive Evatt to prosecute the offender (Saffron) for a clear breach of the law. The politician initially agreed to take Saffron to court, but ten months later the paper complained in a page-one splash:

Phone:	(61 2) 8425 0100
Fax:	(61 2) 9906 2218
Email:	info@allenandunwin.com
Web:	www.allenandunwin.com

Little:	Do you have a criminal record?
Saffron:	No.
Little:	But our records show that you had a conviction for receiving many years ago. Was this so? Saffron: No.
Little:	Then our records are wrong?
Saffron:	It comes back to me now. Yes, there was something like that.
Little:	Was there anything else?
Saffron:	No.

Goran:	Has bottled beer from the Gladstone Hotel been sold at the Roosevelt for 3s 6d ($8.53) a bottle?
Saffron:	That’s untrue.
Goran:	Did not the brewery investigate that matter because of complaints by customers of the Gladstone Hotel?
Saffron:	No, sir. The brewery discussed the matter at my request. Gladstone Hotel customers get their quota of bottled beer. No customer of any hotel is satisfied with his bottled beer quota.

Goran:	What about £1100 ($53,637) worth of American cigarettes which were found underneath the bandstand of the Roosevelt?
Saffron:	The cigarettes were found and the company was fined £300 ($14,628), but the ownership of the cigarettes was never determined.
Goran:	Did you say to Evans, when he first begged to work for you: ‘You cover up for me, and keep your mouth shut, and you’ll get your cut’?
Saffron:	That’s a gross lie. That’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
Goran:	Your partners knew nothing about that arrangement and when they questioned you, you dumped Evans?
Saffron:	That is a lie.
Goran:	I suggest that you were party to the whole scheme, that it was a way of getting cash for black-market purchases.
Saffron:	That is a terrible lie.
Goran:	Didn’t you allow the cheques to be incompletely filled in, so that they could go through Evans’ bank account?
Saffron:	That’s a terrible lie.

CONTENTS

AUTHOR NOTE

PROLOGUE

1 FOR KING AND COUNTRY. . . AND A QUICK QUID

2 SLY GROG SALES:A BOTTLER OF AMONEY-MAKER

1 FOR KING AND COUNTRY
. . . AND A QUICK QUID

2 SLY GROG SALES:
A BOTTLER OF A
MONEY-MAKER