TONY REEVES is an investigative journalist of many years standing. He first became interested in Lennie McPherson more than thirty 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.
Also by Tony Reeves
MRSIN[The ABE SAFFRON Dossier]
Tony Reeves began gathering information on Abe Saffron over forty years ago, an activity that did not go unnoticed by Saffron—on a number of occasions Saffron tried to entrap Reeves in a bribery/blackmail sting. With Saffron’s death in September 2006, Reeves can finally, and safely, reveal all. And what a story it is—far from being the innocent businessman he claimed to be, Abe Saffron led a life that reads like that of a real-life Godfather.
Copyright © Tony Reeves 2005
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Reeves, Tony, 1940–.
Mr. Big: Lennie McPherson and his life of crime.
Includes index.
ISBN 978 1 74175 290 8 (pbk.).
1. McPherson, Leonard Arthur, 1921–1996. 2. Criminals –
New South Wales – Sydney – Biography. 3. Organised crime –
New South Wales – Sydney. 4. Sydney (N.S.W.) – Biography.
I. Title.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Prologue
1 The early years: fines and iron bars
2 The fix of the fifties
3 Staying on top: it’s murder out there!
4 Friends in the right places
5 The murders go on: death in the Latin Quarter
6 Funniest standover man in the business
7 Sex, drugs, the CIA and a US free trade agreement
8 The Moffitt Royal Commission
9 The good judge reports
10 Life after Moffitt
11 Never-ending chores
12 Changing the guard
Epilogue: the morning after
Notes
Index
To Kamala, for her untiring support, encouragement and much-needed patience; to Ian for decades of support and help; and to Richard for making it all happen.
WHEN NELL MCPHERSON reached her three-score years and ten her clan got together to give the sprightly old dame of Balmain a great birthday bash. And what a clan: she’d brought ten children into the world, most of them now married, and with their numerous offspring they came in droves to give ‘old Nellie’ a good old knees-up.
A grandson—a stockily built, quietly spoken union organiser—came to her flat, gave her a hug and a kiss, pinned a corsage on her collar, handed her the crutches she’d been using since she lost a leg two years earlier in an operation, and drove her off to a local sports club for luncheon, a few drinks and a few yarns. At around four in the afternoon, Nell was feeling a little weary (some thought she might even be a tad woozy), so she said her thanks and farewells and the grandson drove her back to her little pensioner’s flat nearby, and saw her and a pile of presents and gift-wrapping safely indoors.
Moments later there was a rapping at the door. Nell was surprised to see her youngest son standing there—and even more surprised to see him holding what looked, to her, like a small white rabbit. She hoped he wasn’t going to offer it to her as a present—how could she look after a rabbit?
‘I came around to wish you a happy birthday, Mum. Did you have a nice party?’ asked the man, now in his late thirties.
‘Yes, it was very nice, what with all the family getting together . . .’
‘Not quite all the family, Mum,’ he interrupted. ‘I wasn’t invited!’
‘Well, you know how it is, son, what with the criminal stuff and all . . .’
At that he put one large hand around the neck of the rabbit, grasped its head with the other hand, twisted and pulled and, in a splash of blood, ripped off the poor animal’s head. He then threw the twitching remains on his horrified mother’s front doormat, shot an angry glare at her, turned on his heel and stormed off. Before this he hadn’t seen his mother since she was in hospital having the leg amputation, a circumstance he tried to use as an alibi for a murder. After this, he never saw her alive again. Meet Leonard Arthur McPherson.
That story says more to me about the man who became known as the Mr Big of Sydney crime than all the remaining words in this book on his life and times. It conveys the sense of brutality that punctuates almost every anecdote I’ve been able to gather about Lennie McPherson.
When he died in 1996, the Australian newspaper asked me to write an obituary. I accepted the commission on condition I was not required to say anything nice about him, the generally accepted function of obituaries. They agreed. The obituary began with these words:
Leonard Arthur McPherson, who died in prison yesterday (August 29), will be glorified by some over the coming months. But for this unofficial biographer, his passing has made it a better world. McPherson was a thug. He was described in an official NSW Police document in 1974 as a murderer, rapist, thief and standover man.
As I write this it’s about 30 years since I first took an interest in this man. I had been working as a journalist for the ABC in the mid-1960s and later News Limited, and I’d long been trying to understand what really made Sydney tick. I had begun peeling away layers of concealment as one might take an onion apart.
As a youngster I was advised by friends to fold a banknote into my driver’s licence. If I were pulled over the cop would probably take it and let me off with a warning. It really worked, they assured me. I found it offensive in the extreme that corruption could be tolerated and encouraged at such lowly levels. If this ‘tip of the iceberg’ example was commonplace around our suburbs, what on earth, I thought, could be happening higher up the food chain?
Good stories often cause embarrassment to governments. I was told at the ABC (by a man who bore the censoriously lofty title of Controller of News) that a series of stories I was writing on foreign students overstaying their visas was ‘upsetting the [Immigration] Department and embarrassing to the [Gorton] Federal Government’. This was not to compliment me on my good journalism: I was ordered to desist. (So much for left-wing bias at the ABC!)
In the late 1960s, like so many of my colleagues who could not get their mainstream media employers to publish their ‘good’ reports—stories that could rattle the foundations (or at least ‘tremble the partitions’ as reporters used to quip) of our social and political structures—I regularly contributed articles to the somewhat rebellious Melbourne-based weekly Nation Review. It was that paper which published a series (not mine) on the arrival of the Bally poker machine company into Australia, a company, the paper reported, that had clear links to the US Mafia. The stories whetted my appetite.
I talked with people I knew in the clubs and entertainment industry—managers, union officials and workers. Many were very scared by what they were seeing, scared that a young entertainment agent had been savagely beaten, scared that club secretaries were being corrupted by huge secret commissions to install Bally machines. Frightened people would meet me secretly, on park benches or in little out-of-town cafes.
I spent three months putting together a report that I took to Sunday Telegraph news editor Chris Forsyth. It detailed the arrival of US Mafia-linked people in Australia, and meetings they held with local criminals. I had drawn a managerial flow chart, showing the linkages between the US mobsters and prominent members of our own underworld milieu. At no stage in my investigation did I talk to any police, although I became aware that both the federal and NSW state police were making inquiries similar to mine.
Forsyth put a team of top crime reporters on the job: himself, Bob Bottom and Phil Cornford, to work with me, and as you’ll see later, we came up with a story titled ‘The night the Mafia came to Sydney’ which went into print in July 1972, later described by noted crime journalist Evan Whitton as ‘another seminal piece’.
For journalists who’d been trying for years to expose corruption and criminal activity at high levels among police and politicians, this was an exciting time. Stories were popping up all over the place. Politicians who’d been shouting across the State Legislature for years, threatening to expose each other’s closeted skeletons, were pushed into action by a rare outbreak of media revelations of serious allegations of high-level crime and corruption.
In 1973 the Askin government, under pressure from the flurry of media stories, finally announced a royal commission into allegations of crime in clubs, to be headed by Supreme Court Judge Athol Moffitt. Bottom, Cornford and myself were among the few journalists to volunteer statements and evidence to the inquiry. Others were compelled to appear on subpoena and were somewhat less helpful. A number of the journalist witnesses (including me) ran into problems with the inquiry over the industry-standard refusal to identify sources of material.
The experience enhanced my own reputation as an investigative journalist and soon people who had knowledge about criminal activities but who had virtually given up trying to get exposure started making contact with me. Plain brown paper envelopes (literally!) began to appear under my front door, containing interesting documents. A state ministerial press secretary passed on valuable (and to his minister, damaging) information. A newspaper executive, displeased at his own publication’s lack of action on this front, produced a bundle of highly incriminating documents about Lennie McPherson and his associations with allegedly corrupt police.
Working for a while at the Sunday Telegraph, I became something of a magnet for stories about crime and corruption. And information came to me from diverse sources. Well-known private eye Tim Bristow, for example, regularly contacted me to tell me stories about crooked goings-on, and even discussed with me a number of boat excursions he’d made at McPherson’s behest to get rid of troublesome characters. He explained that a person thrown overboard about 60 miles out to sea doesn’t have to be injured in any way: they’ll never make it back to shore.
This all helped shape my view that a great miasma of corruption hung over much of the public and private sector in Sydney, and that a book (or two) should be written to tell some of the real—and terrifying—stories of crime and corruption in a city that created its first police force from a band of criminals.
Having started with the transcript and final report of the Moffitt inquiry, my area of interest was expanded and then refocused onto Lennie McPherson. Through his remarkable story, I believe, can be shown a depth of corruption that plagued a series of NSW governments of all persuasions and their police administrations and, to some extent, allowed the public to be inured against caring about the social and moral cost this was having.
By 1975 another story distracted me: the murder of Kings Cross heiress Juanita Nielsen was to occupy much of my time (and that of another dedicated journalist, Barry Ward) for more than three years. Even in that incredible story of police and political duplicity, McPherson’s name kept popping up. But that’s another story.
Being aware of high levels of corruption and feeling powerless to do anything about it can be frustrating and tiring. When I quit Sydney in the early 1980s to live in the tranquillity of the NSW Central Coast, I was quoted in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying I had to leave the city to get rid of the stench out of my nostrils ‘ . . . and I’m not talking about air pollution’.
My first draft of the story in this book started gathering dust through the 1980s and ’90s. Meantime I had to earn a living. While I maintained my interest and collected every scrap of information I could lay my hands on, it took an event like the beginning of a new century to start the long process of getting it into print. That first resulted in a flurry of rejection slips, so it was back to the drawing board.
That it is now in your hands is a direct result of the energy that publishing consultant Richard Walsh has generated in me to get it reshaped and finished. For me it was never acceptable to try to foist a book onto the market that was simply a rehash of old press clippings. I have tried in this enterprise to bring to the reader a great deal of original information, as thoroughly fact-checked as is possible as to its veracity, to provide the most detailed portrait I could of the man who was a major force in Australian criminal activity for more than 50 years.
As my interest in this project became reactivated, considerable new information has been uncovered. Some people who might have been reluctant to talk earlier have now come forward with their stories, adding significant detail to our knowledge of a man and his times which rightfully commands a place in the dark side of our history.
Finally I would like to make it plain that this book is not intended as a dissertation on police corruption: there are many erudite studies of this problem available. But for readers not familiar with the nature of police corruption, let me simply say this: when this author complained personally in 1976 to newly elected NSW Premier and Police Minister Neville Wran about the urgent need to deal with corruption in the state’s police force, he suggested the problem was one of a ‘few rotten apples’. Identifying and removing them would ensure the problem did not spread throughout the barrel of apples, he said.
I am not the only person to reject this simplistic view. In April 1981 Mr Justice Edwin Lusher reported on his Royal Commission into NSW Police Administration. Pointing out that his terms had not required him to inquire into corruption, he nonetheless offered this generalised summation:
In an organisation such as a police force, where signs of corruption are perceived, the ‘rotten apple’ theory as a control measure should be firmly rejected by management.
While it is accepted as a control no real progress is likely to be made with the removal of corruption.
Corruption . . . is not individual, not spasmodic, but a continuing organised process, functioning because the type of service being given has become an objective of a sufficiently significant power group able to impose and enforce such an objective on the organisation or the relevant part, to the extent that it becomes acceptable.
In the pages that follow we shall see how well Justice Lusher’s words describe the State of New South Wales when Lennie McPherson reigned supreme.
ON THE HOT, humid morning of Thursday 19 May 1921, a dozen or so young bruisers were nursing the bumps and cuts they had received the previous night at the opening of the big boxing tournament at the Sydney Hippodrome. Old age pensioner Walter Alexander Sparrow would be at the second night of the fights, enjoying the freedom which had so nearly been taken away from him when a magistrate found him guilty of stealing cattle at suburban Botany, sentenced him to nine months’ jail and then suspended the sentence in deference to ‘his considerable age’.
Miss Maude Maddocks could do little for the battered boxers, but was making her contribution to the good looks and well-being of Australian women by offering cures for sunburn, freckles and the removal of 125 superfluous hairs for one guinea in her George Street salon, while the Chamber of Manufacturers was complaining that taxation in New South Wales had reached ‘oppressive levels’ (does nothing change?). Australia’s population had reached 5 435 734; Billy Hughes was in his fourth term as Australian prime minister and the newly formed Communist Party of Australia was celebrating its first six months of existence. Overseas, Sinn Fein members were exploding bombs in England and Northern Ireland and talks in London hoped to find a way to peace in the Shamrock Isle.
The closest thing to a crime wave in Sydney on 19 May 1921 was a warning by police that men were jumping onto trams, snatching ladies’ handbags and jumping off while the tram was in motion. Tom Mix was fighting the good fight against evil, starring in The Texan at the Strand cinema in Pitt Street, and Sydneysiders were at peace with the world as they eased towards the end of an autumn that had been only marginally cooler than the preceding months of a long, hot summer.
On that humid, thundery morning, with a hot breeze puffing in from the north-west, little Leonard Arthur McPherson came into the world as the tenth child of his metalworker father William and long-suffering mother Nellie. The event didn’t quite make headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald. In fact, Lennie’s arrival didn’t even rate a birth notice in that paper of record: the four lines for three shillings, extra lines a shilling each, would have been more than the hard-stretched budget of the McPherson household could run to. It would be some years before this Taurean baby of the family would get his name in printers’ ink.
Life was tough indeed in those lean, between-the-wars years in which were sowed the seeds of the so-called Great Depression. It wasn’t only the McPhersons in the harbourside suburb of Balmain, but families all over Australia, who were on bread and dripping and whatever they could beg, borrow or steal. Little wonder then that Leonard Arthur McPherson’s life of crime started just before the end of his brief schooling at the local Birchgrove State Primary School. On 7 December 1932, at the age of eleven and a half, he was put on probation—a good behaviour bond—in the Children’s Court on a charge of stealing. If he reoffended during that probationary period, he’d be in serious trouble.
Nell McPherson would have taken her son to the court that warm, dry Wednesday morning. Located in a stern two-storey brick building with barred windows that contained two courtrooms, a boys’ shelter and cells below the street-level offices, its imposing sandstone entrance still bears the words ‘Children’s Court’ carved into the lintel. It was handy to police CIB headquarters, not in the centre of the city but in a sort of no-man’s-land at 66 Albion Street, Surry Hills, a few blocks away from Central railway station.
Nell would have listened while the magistrate warned the lad that he would be ‘sent away to the boys’ home’ if he committed any wrong-doing during the probation period. The brief details were entered in the records by a policeman who would also have warned him of the perils of a life of crime. Later mother and son would have headed off towards George Street, to the Balmain tram stop.
It should be mentioned here that there’s actually a paucity of detail available about Lennie’s brushes with the law, from these early encounters on. In the late 1950s Lennie developed useful contacts in the police, prisons and justice records departments and ‘bought’ his files—the originals—thinking they could then not be used against him in later court appearances. An alert staffer in Justice made a photocopy of the main records held there and filed the bundle away obscurely under ‘Z’. Years later those records came into my hands by courtesy of a long-serving ministerial adviser who told me what he knew of the whole sorry saga.
Six months later Lennie quit Birchgrove Primary, leaving behind him what one relative, a cousin called Vic, years later described as: ‘an undistinguished school career—it’s rather touchy to talk about it though, with Lennie being the way he is’. On 13 June 1934, 18 months after his first appearance, he was back in court on another apparently minor stealing charge. His probation was renewed for a year and then, on 18 July, he was convicted on two stealing charges. Again his mother Nell would have been his only supporter in the Children’s Court: lawyers did not trawl for business in this lowly end of the justice system, and would in any case have been beyond the McPherson household budget.
This time—as my copies of the rather cryptic court records show—there was no clemency: he’d broken the terms of his earlier probation and was committed to an institution. No detail of his crime remains: what he stole and who he stole it from are not known. His mother Nell probably wept silently as the police took him away to the ‘naughty boys’ home’ at Mount Penang, overlooking Gosford on the NSW Central Coast, today an hour’s drive north of Sydney.
Initially Lennie must have been pleasantly surprised by his first glimpse of his new home. He would have been expecting a prison, with high walls and sentry towers, but Mount Penang looked like a holiday resort. A row of timber cottages resembled the main street of a small country town. There was a central hall where films were shown once a week, and an administrative building. There were no high fences, just a few strands of wire to keep in the cattle that roamed across the gently undulating fields surrounding the ‘village’. But its rustic charm was misleading, for life here was tough, with some youngsters who were destined to spend most of their lives behind bars treating the young Lennie as they did all newcomers: despite his heavy build and strength, he was frequently bashed and sexually assaulted during the six months of his sentence, and found the warders didn’t want to hear his complaints.
In the mid-1980s, by sheer coincidence, I met an ex-warder from Mount Penang at a social gathering. We got talking and, when I found out his background, I quizzed him about Lennie’s stay at the infamous boys’ home. This gentle old retiree told me: ‘They didn’t single out McPherson: he was an unknown at the time. Every newcomer went through a brutalising bastardisation initiation ceremony. A number of the staff looked on and a few even participated. It’s the way things were there, in those days.’
Lennie returned home tougher and smarter from the Mount Penang experience. He’d established himself as a thief: now he would need to develop skills that would enable him to avoid capture—the dream of all law-breakers.
It was nearly four years before he again stood, cloth cap in hand, before a magistrate of the Children’s Court. On 3 March 1938, Lennie was arraigned on the trifling charge of having evaded a one penny tram fare. In a humiliating experience for a ‘gang leader’ (as he probably would have seen himself by then) he was fined one shilling and ordered to pay five shillings and sixpence in court costs. If he was to be a regular at the courts, he wanted it to be for something better than this. His debut into the world of crime had hardly been an impressive one.
Petty theft at this time earned him enough money to be able to buy a motorbike as soon as he was old enough to get his rider’s licence. After the bike came a series of cars that, in their day, would have been considered ‘fast’. He liked to impress mates in the gang he knocked around with in Balmain and the inner suburbs with his driving skills, and his name littered the records of the traffic police for years to come. In September and October of 1939, for example, at the age of eighteen, he paid out a total of fifty shillings in fines in lieu of six days’ hard labour for exceeding the speed limit and driving without headlights. His cousin later told me that a magistrate during that period appropriately described him as a ‘mug lair’. He frequently got drunk, gambled on horses, and followed the fate of Balmain rugby league club, which that year won the first grade Sydney premiership for the first time in 15 years. It was a lavish lifestyle for a lad who had no steady job and few visible means of support. Lennie, at a time when the minimum weekly wage was set at £4/15/-($9.50) was often paying out more in traffic fines alone than most men were earning.
Australia followed England into war with Germany on 3 September 1939 and the following month the federal government introduced military conscription. While other 19-year-olds were going off to war, Lennie McPherson found a way to stay at home. His father helped him get a job as a driller at Morts Dock, near his Balmain home. As a repair yard for Australian naval sloops, the dock’s employees were exempt from military call-up. Lennie stayed there just long enough to avoid going to fight for his country, then left. He liked the idea of going to war only slightly less than a 44-hour-a-week job. His preferred lifestyle involved running around in fast cars, from which he amassed seven traffic fines in the first four months of 1940 to the value of £19.1.6d or 17 days in lieu. It was all petty stuff and this pattern persisted through to 1945, when he registered eight offences in the year. He had, it seems, a penchant for driving unregistered vehicles, parking too close to corners, driving in a manner police describe as ‘negligently’ and a host of other bad road manners.
The end of World War II had little impact on Lennie: he had managed to stay away from the fighting, and unlike some older men he was getting to know, he hadn’t found a way to make any fast cash on the black market out of the event. He got busy honing his skills as a thief, as well as exercising his libido. He dated a young schoolgirl a couple of times, and she became pregnant and bore his child. (That daughter, now living in northern Victoria, still refers to Lennie reverentially as ‘Dad’). In 1940 he had also met, courted and married at Rozelle an attractive girl three years his junior, 16-year-old Dawn Joy Allan, signing Marriage Certificate 26250/1940 to make it official.
His debut into serious crime came in 1946 and was to earn him his first adult jail sentence. On 22 January, with the city sweltering under a fortnight of near-century temperatures, Lennie started the year in court, copping a fine of £7 or 14 days for having stolen goods in his custody. He’d been arrested and held in a police lock-up pending the Magistrates Court hearing, but was released on bail. A new defiance entered Lennie’s relationship with the legal system: he appealed against the stolen goods sentence. The appeal was dismissed and he was ordered to pay a further three guineas in costs. He appealed again (perhaps he really was innocent?) but the conviction, and the fine, were affirmed.
Then, on Friday, 15 February 1946, he was again found guilty of receiving stolen goods, having been arrested at Circular Quay. Nearly 25, Leonard Arthur McPherson was sentenced to his first stint in jail as a grown man: 12 months’ hard labour at Long Bay. He was photographed and fingerprinted and had his details entered on a prison description card. The photograph showed a double-chinned young man with a high forehead. He weighed in at 15 stone (95 kilograms) and was measured as five feet 11 inches (180 centimetres), with black hair, brown eyes and a dark complexion. His religion was listed as ‘CE’ and education as ‘R&W’, probably meaning ‘can read and write’. His occupation was listed as ‘ironworker’ but the space for ‘particulars of last employment’ remained tantalis-ingly blank.
The prison authorities—among whom he would make lasting and trusted friendships over the years, particularly with the officer nicknamed ‘the Major’—were, at this early stage in his prison career, impressed with him. They began the routine assessment of whether he was an appropriate candidate for transfer to a prison farm or camp. The supervisor of the motor shop reported that he was quiet, a good worker and that his conduct was ‘satisfactory’. The prison doctor described him as ‘sensible’.
But there was a hitch in proceedings. HR Vagg, State Superintendent at Long Bay jail, signed a form on 21 February 1946, the ‘Report on Transfer of a Prisoner to a Camp or Farm’, pointing out that Lennie faced further charges and arguing that a decision on his transfer should be deferred pending the outcome. This and other forms and memos are among the swag of papers that subsequently came to me from the justice department source.
A week later they bundled him—Prisoner Number 98—into the Black Maria and back to the sitting of the Sydney Quarter Sessions Court to face a similar charge, on which he was found guilty and sentenced to another 18 months, to be served concurrently with the first sentence. Again, the available records don’t give details of the crime. The case was not deemed important enough to report in the daily press, and outside his gang of mates in the inner western suburbs, Lennie remained unknown. The records show that during his first week in jail he wrote to his wife, Dawn Joy, no doubt telling her of his labours on behalf of King George VI.
He quickly ran into trouble when his fellow inmate, the notorious standover man and murderer John Frederick ‘Chow’ Hayes, started stirring things up. They didn’t have a physical fight but Lennie later admitted that he’d been a ‘cheeky bloke’. He told a friend: ‘They couldn’t stand over me, so he wanted to get me fucking belted.’ Lennie threatened that if anyone hurt him he’d ‘split their fucking heads open when they’ve got their back to me’. Later on, Lennie said, he ended up good friends with Hayes.
From March to May 1946 there was a flurry of departmental memos about the possibility of transferring him to a prison farm. Superintendent Vagg noted on 12 March that the attorney-general had decided ‘not to proceed with the outstanding charges against this prisoner’ (although gave no hint as to why that was so). ‘However he [Lennie] signed a notice of appeal on 11th instant against a conviction and sentence of 20 days h.l. so perhaps consideration of his transfer to a Prison Camp could be deferred until this appeal is disposed of’, wrote Vagg. Within a month, with the appeal dismissed, Vagg wrote that: ‘McPherson appears to be suitable for transfer to a prison camp’. At the end of May Lennie was moved to a much lower security prison farm at Glen Innes, an afforestation camp in north-western New South Wales, 624 kilometres from Sydney.
He was not to stay long at Glen Innes. On 10 July, about six weeks after he arrived there, he was transferred again, this time to the tough security of Grafton jail, as a result of what the prison authorities ambiguously and enigmatically described as ‘an outbreak of poor behaviour’. When news of Lennie’s transfer to Grafton reached his wife, Dawn Joy penned a letter to the officer in charge of the Glen Innes camp seeking information. She wrote:
Could you give me any information concerning my husband’s (L. A. McPherson) removal to Grafton Jail. I would be very grateful if you could.
I don’t suppose it would be much good me asking you if it would be possible to have Len sent to Long Bay. He is only 25 years and sometimes doesn’t act his age, he isn’t really bad, it’s only he’s hot-headed sometimes and is always sorry when it is too late.
Len is the youngest often children and has never been given the opportunities other children have. If he had have had I’m sure he’d be a very different man. Please sir, give him another chance, I don’t want him made a criminal.
Yours sincerely, Dawn McPherson.
Please sir, give him another chance. I don’t want him made a criminal. How this young mother of a pretty little girl laid her heart out before the harsh prison authorities. Her letter arrived at Glen Innes on 18 July and was sent to Sydney. Within a few days the Deputy Comptroller of Prisons responded: ‘In reply to your letter to the officer in charge, Glen Innes Afforestation Camp, I have to inform you that your husband was removed from the camp because his conduct was unsatisfactory. It is not proposed to transfer him from Grafton Gaol at present.’
Within a couple of weeks of that rejection, an extraordinary submission was made on Lennie’s behalf: a member of federal parliament wrote to the state minister of justice urging Lennie’s release from custody. Tom Sheehan was the Labor member for the federal electorate of Cook, which was then centred on Redfern, an inner working class suburb, and spread out to West Sydney and Lennie’s birthplace suburb of Balmain; but it did not cover Gladesville, where Lennie now lived. First elected in October 1937, at the age of 46, Sheehan held the seat until his death in March 1955. Who persuaded the federal MP to act on behalf of a jailed man who was not even a constituent is not known. In his appeal for Lennie’s freedom Sheehan wrote (totally erroneously): ‘it is his first offence and his record is excellent. The prisoner’s wife and child are in destitute circumstances . . .’ It was the first but not the last time that prominent members of the right-wing faction of the New South Wales branch of the Australian Labor Party would show such supportive friendship to Leonard Arthur McPherson.
This letter hit the desk of the justice minister in the NSW McKell Labor government among a pile of waiting paperwork on 13 August 1946. It clearly failed to impress him. Even the most cursory scan of Lennie’s record would have convinced him that he knew more about this man’s history than the Hon. Tom Sheehan, MHR. He passed the federal MP’s submission on to the secretary of the prisons department, Mr CR Hughes, marked ‘No Recommendation’. Three days later Hughes sent a memo to the officer in charge at Grafton jail with the minister’s decision. On the form memo under ‘Special Remarks’ appeared ‘Please note, and place with papers’ but the words ‘and inform prisoner’ had been crossed out. Lennie was not to learn through official channels that an application for his release had been made and rejected. It is paradoxical that the minister of justice, who on this occasion was so unyielding towards the 25-year-old thug, was one Mr RR (Reg) Downing, a man who in later years, as we shall see, was persuaded—allegedly with the help of a bulky brown paper bag—to take a much more lenient attitude towards LA McPherson.
Within a couple of months the prison authorities had a change of heart and transferred him to Long Bay for the rest of his sentence. The officer in charge at Grafton wrote to Sydney head office in November 1946 in response to a request for information on Lennie’s ‘conduct and industry’ while at Grafton. The memo said:
During the period that McPherson was at Grafton Gaol his conduct and industry were very good. He was employed at boot repairing and although [he had] no previous experience at the trade, he carried out the work in a very creditable manner. He was transferred to the State Penitentiary on 3rd October 1946 on his own application.
Although I would have liked to have retained his services as a boot-repairer at Grafton I formed the opinion that his future interests would be better served by removal to a principal gaol.
Lennie was paroled on 24 December 1946, home with Dawn and baby Janelle for Sydney’s hottest Christmas for a decade. He’d served ten months of his sentence. He found it difficult to settle down, and took to bouts of heavy drinking, after which he would shout and swear at Dawn Joy and, at times, beat her up. The marriage would last for many years yet, but the love seems to have vanished from the relationship around this time.
As often occurs when marriages start to crumble, Lennie sought liaisons elsewhere. Sadly for the women involved, the associations were marred by the violence that characterised most of his human relationships. One woman, heavily pregnant to Lennie, was viciously assaulted by a group of criminals with whom he’d got off-side. Lennie and John Henry Hutchinson had been ganging around through the 1940s with Redfern-based SP bookie Joey Hollibone and one Martin Goode. Then came a falling out. Hutchinson had become pally with some of Lennie’s sworn enemies, and although they hadn’t fought over the issue, Lennie had put his former mate in the category of‘not to be trusted’. Then, in 1947, Hutchinson had ‘gone into smoke’ because of a robbery he’d done. When police caught up with him, Hutchinson, Goode and Hollibone not unfairly accused McPherson of having tipped off police with details of Hutchinson’s whereabouts. In a monstrous attempt to ‘get back at’ McPherson for fizzing to the cops, they pack-raped the pregnant woman. Nothing is known of her subsequent life.
After the rape Martin Goode began to knock around with Chicka Reeves and his dad, Ted Reeves [not relatives of mine!], and a group that Lennie was ‘crooked’ on. Chicka Reeves frequently threatened to ‘knock’ McPherson. The threats between Chicka and Lennie got so bad that the old man (Ted) once got the police to pull them both in to warn them to cool things off. Lennie and Chicka acted like long-lost buddies in front of the cops, but the enmity remained. In the early 1970s Chicka Reeves would occasionally call in to pubs that journalists were known to frequent. I chatted with him a few times at one such hostelry. Most of his yarns were barely credible, but through them all ran a deep hatred and contempt for Lennie McPherson.
Lennie had learned much from his association with the hardened criminals he met behind bars at Grafton and Long Bay. One skill in which he graduated with honours was the fine art of snitching. In jail he formed special relationships with the prison ‘screws’ by ratting on what other inmates were up to. This didn’t earn him any brownie points among his fellow inmates, but it did earn him a few favours and creature comforts granted by the prison staff. Back in civilian life, Lennie used his developing association with a few of the police to become a fully-fledged stool pigeon. He would fizz on anyone—even people who thought Lennie was a close friend—to ingratiate himself with a growing circle of copper mates. One older, retired criminal recalled in a chat with the author that the young McPherson was known for some years as ‘Lennie the Pig’ and ‘Lennie the Squealer’, so loudly did he fizz to the cops. The name didn’t stick, somehow, despite Lennie’s lifelong history of informing.
In the earlier years the people he betrayed were mostly petty criminals who annoyed him. Many were sent to jail on information Lennie provided to police. It worried Lennie not a shred that his fizzing was the cause of mounting anger among Sydney’s low-life milieu. Those who raised any concern about his treachery would be haughtily threatened with the same treatment.
When he put his competitors behind bars, new opportunities opened up for Lennie and he was never slow to move in on them. His growing success at this time relied heavily on the fact that no irate opponent managed to kill him during these years. Later the likelihood of this happening became increasingly remote as he sucked up to a growing number of corrupt policemen and surrounded himself with a considerable number of protective and loyal muscle men. He found he was in a position to grant favours to petty crims for their loyalty: a word in the ear of a friendly cop would ensure the law turned a blind eye to the activities of those Lennie promised to ‘look after’. He would also ‘go bail’ for miscreants if they committed themselves to be on his team.
Lennie was out of jail for six months before he was brought before a magistrate again—this time in Balmain Court on 24 June 1947 on the trivial charge of using indecent language, for which he was fined £2 or four days in the slammer. On that chilly winter Tuesday—Sydney’s driest stretch since 1883: 19 days without rain—Lennie paid the fine and repaired to his favourite pub. That night he and some mates were at the Sydney Stadium to watch the popular Aussie lightweight boxer Vic Patrick outpoint American Eddie Hudson. Patrick never looked like losing, and even at short odds, Lennie picked up a bundle from his wagers.
Lennie’s thirtieth birthday marked a turning point in his career: he was becoming bored with his life of petty crime, and even though he’d made some powerful contacts among police, politicians and prison authorities, he was still a relative unknown to the general public in Sydney and was considered a bit of a nuisance by some of the better-established criminals around town who had Charles ‘Paddles’ Anderson as their champion and leader.
Despite his brusque, self-indulgent manner, Lennie was a man with a dream: he read every word he could about the American gangster Al Capone. He idolised the Chicago-based thug, and tried to emulate him in every possible way. (This was a dream destined to remain unfulfilled; among the significant differences in the way the two men operated was Lennie’s personal rejection of the ‘code of silence’, any breach of which would have meant certain death among the American Mafiosi.) On turning 30, then, and seeing little real progress in his chosen career, Lennie set out on a study tour of the United States—the fatherland of what he saw as great criminal triumphs. On this trip he made initial contact with US Mafia-involved people—but not Capone—in Chicago. They were down-the-scale thugs rather than the Mafia dons Lennie idolised, but first contact is rarely made at the top.