Underbelly (2 page)

Michael snapped his head around and saw the bouncers carrying Simon out. ‘I thought I was off,' he would tell the authors later, meaning he expected to be shot. He turned to Gangitano and yelled, ‘You rat, you set me up.'

Gangitano grabbed him and bit his face. Michael gouged the big man's eyes, trying to make him let go. The hoods all grabbed him, and he went down in a blur of savage punches, kicks and bites.

The bouncers were wary because they knew the gangsters were armed but they stopped the beating turning into murder, yelling, ‘He's had enough!'. When they dragged the boxer out of the crush, his nose was under his left eye, his cheek was torn open and he was gouting blood.

But he could still think. ‘Take me to St Vincents,' he said, ‘and let them think they've had a win.' It was a smart move. He knew he would be safe from a follow-up attack in hospital.

Later, a bouncer told Michael he'd kicked a pistol away from one of the hoods. He will never know if they'd planned to kill him – or whether Gangitano was clawing back some face to boost his reputation as a standover man.

Big Al would find out a decade later, after doing it again in another King Street bar, that his psycho routine could be fatal. The legal fallout from that bar room bashing led to his execution by his ally Jason Moran – making Gangitano an early casualty in what would become known as the Gangland War. That war, of course, would be fought in a glare of publicity that reached a crescendo when Moran and a mate were gunned down at a junior football game in 2003.

But in the time between Barry Michael's bashing and Gangitano's murder in 1998, there had been plenty going on, too – it's just that most of it wasn't making it to the front page or the evening news. And it wasn't all in Melbourne.

When it came to money, the biggest rackets were in Sydney, where the lines between the underworld and the everyday world were more blurred. In Sin City the fix was in – not just in the boxing ring and betting ring but at police headquarters and Parliament House.

This was Australia's underbelly. And it didn't get any tougher than in Kings Cross, on the strip they called the Golden Mile.

THE cops who work the Cross have always taken a perverse pride in their beat. For years, Kings Cross detectives have had their own tie and cufflink motif – a crude hybrid of a syringe, dagger and pistol under the letters ‘KX'.

It looks like something knocked up by one of the several tattooists whose parlours do a roaring trade just up the street from the police station.

One thing is sure, if a local tattoo parlour did it, the price would be right. They know how to look after the law at the Cross. It's been that way since the heyday of the razor gangs, sly groggers, two-up schools and SP bookmakers who flourished there between the world wars.

A good place for a cop to get a cold drink or a hot steak in the 1980s and 1990s was the Bourbon and Beefsteak, known as the ‘Bourbon' and still a Kings Cross landmark. The three-storey white wedding cake of a building is part of the scenery, like the giant Coca Cola sign sitting above the intersection of Darlinghurst Road and William Street, the hardened arteries in the heart of the Cross.

The Coca Cola sign, the Bourbon, the Texas Tavern and other garish Americana reflect the Cross's history as
the place US soldiers flocked to spend their pay on R & R leave. Half a lifetime after the Vietnam War ended, the legacy of R & R lives on in the Cross's free-for-all street market in sex and drugs.

The Bourbon might have been redecorated since the fall of Saigon but the decor was never the secret of its drawing power. Sydney criminal lawyer Charles Waterstreet says its main appeal ‘in the old days' was that it was one of few places that stayed open all night.

‘That was what it had going for it. It was all red, with mood lighting and smoky, a sort of Land's End full of people who had kicked on from somewhere else,' says Water-street.

People have flocked to the Cross after dark for decades, like moths to a lamp. Some visit for a few hours. Others return too often or stay too long for their own good. Some die there.

Dirty money has always been milked from the Cross, from the oldest profession and its near relatives. Faces and names change but the rackets don't.

Once, Abe Saffron was called ‘King of the Cross' for good reason. There have been pretenders since, like the Bayehs and the Ibrahims, but the real king is cash: money sucked from the pockets and pay packets of the many who fuel the black economy of sex and drugs, then redistributed to a rich and powerful few.

Cash greases the wheels of corruption and for too long it reached the highest levels in Sydney. It flows uphill, seeping up from the streets to reach premiers, police chiefs and public servants, prosecutors and judges.

None of this could have flourished without people in high places turning a blind eye to police who were conniving, complicit or compromised by bribery, blackmail and protection.

Bent cops profited from protecting rackets in the streets where they were supposed to uphold the law. Others felt powerless to do anything about it.

They could tell themselves it didn't matter – that police were above the law, that the street people were below it and that what the rest of society didn't know wouldn't hurt it.

But they were wrong. Crime and corruption can touch anyone.

SHE was a judge's daughter but that didn't matter on the street. At the Cross, she was just another piece of meat in a market where everything had a price, in cash or powder.

As a teenager, she would stuff her private school uniform in a bag, pull on jeans and tee shirt and hang out in Darlinghurst Road.

It wasn't enough for her to play the tourist, to rubberneck at the needy, the greedy and the desperate in the Golden Mile, to smoke cigarettes and sip cappuccinos in dingy cafes before going home to dawdle through her homework.

This one had the self-destructive gene, the deadly blend of boredom, loneliness and thrill-seeking that the human vultures smell. The street hookers could have warned her to stay away but that wouldn't have stopped her. By the time she left school she'd met people in the clubs who got her into drugs because they ‘liked' her. Soon she was shooting up heroin.

Even before she was really hooked on the gear she was hooked on the sick thrill of it, the guilty secret of chasing, of being a member of the fraternity of users.

When she ran out of ways to stretch her pocket money – to beg, borrow and steal from family and friends – she started hooking to support her habit: blowing gutter crawlers in cars and back streets, shucking up her mini-skirt to score money for the next hit. She worked mostly from a car park behind a service station.

Ask Chris Murphy, the standout criminal lawyer, about the Cross and this is the story he tells. He doesn't dredge up war stories about all the gangsters he's known over the years, although he easily could. He knows most of them and has acted for plenty. He's good at it.

Instead, he talks about the judge's daughter because he knew her and her father and because her story is the real story of the Cross: underneath the night-time glitz it's about as romantic as a road crash and just as dangerous.

For Murphy, hers was a tragedy that sums up the fatal attraction of the street life. He tells how he arranged for the girl to go to a friend's island off the Queensland coast to get her away from the scene, to dry out and start again, far from the sordid seductiveness of the street's predators and scavengers.

‘But when it came to it, she wouldn't go,' he says. ‘Two days later she was back there, in her high heels. The heroin was too good. The life just too exciting. Everything else too boring by comparison. That's why they can't give it up until it's too late.'

If Murphy knows what happened to the judge's daughter later, he doesn't give it away. But if she ended up dead, or wrecked, she would be only one of hundreds of victims washed up on the Golden Mile, addicted to the thing that will kill or crush them.

Just another story from the naked city. There were plenty more – but not many happy endings.

EVEN other bad men didn't like Jimmy Locchi. Some crooks called him the ‘Loch Ness monster' – not because he was tough but because he was a nasty piece of work. ‘Slimy and grubby, a bully and a big noter,' was how a former policeman describes him.

A contemporary of the infamous crim Neddie Smith, Locchi ran street prostitutes in Kings Cross and paid the women in heroin. This was convenient, as he was also a heroin dealer. He was also a sadistic rapist.

‘He would abduct women and gang bang them in motels,' says the former policeman. Abduction and rape was his idea of entertainment. In business he was predictably ruthless – and surprisingly innovative.

He set up a system that became known around the Cross in the 1980s as ‘Locchi's window'. It wasn't always the same window – sometimes he had two going at once – but the same trick.

He would rent a run-down ground floor apartment from a compliant landlord, fit bars on the windows and door and a buzzer intercom system so anyone at the building's entrance could talk to the flat's occupants without seeing them.

A buyer would ring the buzzer, order drugs, go to the barred window, poke the money in and get the drugs out the same way. It was highly secure, centralised marketing – and it made it hard for undercover police (or marauding criminals doing a ‘run through') to get into the flat or identify the people handling the heroin. The iron bars made raids slow, and meant there was enough time for the occupants to get rid of evidence.

Locchi recruited a roster of clapped-out hookers, preferably addicts, to staff the place, earning more cash in relative safety and comfort than they could on the street. Many would work for a regular ‘taste' of heroin and were willing to hide the drug inside their bodies, making them difficult to search. And they were easy for him to stand over, too frightened to steal money or drugs.

The success of ‘Locchi's window' of course, relied partly on Kings Cross police keeping a polite distance. In that time and place, that was almost a foregone conclusion. Even honest cops talked about ‘managing' crime rather than the impossible dream of wiping it out. The upshot was that neither the local police nor the drug squad seemed concerned that Locchi was selling drugs in a street behind the Coca Cola sign, close to the then brand new police station.

This apparent immunity infuriated a task force operating independently of the Kings Cross network. This was Operation Hobby, run by the New South Wales Crime Commission. Their idea was to catch crooks, a novelty in a district where crime had been franchised for decades.

The Hobby investigators set up in a flat about 100 metres from Locchi's window. The idea was to film undercover buyers to gather enough evidence to make arrests.

But there was a problem: a tree in the footpath obscured the view of the window. They either had to move position, which was nearly impossible, or move the tree. A detective called Mick Kennedy volunteered to move the tree. He had a chainsaw and a utility. At dawn one summer morning he swapped number plates on the utility in case someone noted the registration and reported him, parked around the corner and approached the tree with the chainsaw.

It had been a warm night and the street was crawling with people, so there was no chance of doing the deed unseen. So he decided to be as public as possible.

There were plenty of eccentric, drugged or deranged people wandering Kings Cross, ignored or avoided by other pedestrians. He pretended to be one of them.

‘I behaved like a mad bloke and had an argument with the tree,' Kennedy recalls. ‘I shook my fist at the tree and said “I'll show you!” then grabbed the chainsaw and cut it down.'

Being Kings Cross, everyone minded their own business. Not even keen Greens argue with lunatics with chainsaws.

The operation was a success. The investigators were able to film an undercover operative buying drugs at the window, then break into the fortified apartment.

Inside, they found retired prostitutes handling the heroin for Locchi. One was willing to testify against him after being reassured that he would get a hefty jail sentence.

‘He pays well but he's dangerous,' she told the detectives.

She explained why she and others hated the man who supplied her with money and drugs. He carried a cordless electric drill so when he caught a prostitute who owed him money he would drill her knee – or her skull – as a warning.

It was DIY, Kings Cross style. But in the end, a chainsaw beats a cordless drill.

‘He'll end up wearing the bracelets or a bullet.'

 

TO hear John Housain Ibrahim tell it, he's never lost a fight. That's a good thing around Kings Cross because anyone who loses fights there doesn't get much back up. ‘Loyalty' in the Golden Mile is for winners only – and there's usually a price tag attached.

Ibrahim learned to fight early in life – but he also learned something even more valuable. That is, when not to fight.

An example that seems to have slipped his mind is when a tough Melbourne gunman (and ex-boxer) called Tony Brizzi came calling on a club the young Ibrahim was running in Kings Cross in the early 1990s. Brizzi was the ‘muscle' for one Bill A., who wanted to negotiate taking over the club. As soon as they stepped into the room with Ibrahim, Brizzi pistol-whipped him and told him to quit the club,
because Bill was taking it. Even Bill was surprised by this. Ibrahim said he was going to complain about the hostile takeover bid to his friend, a senior police officer he named.

Brizzi knocked him down again for impertinence, took his wallet and emptied the till. He said he was disgusted with both of them for even considering bringing police into a man-on-man confrontation.

But before he left he warned Ibrahim: ‘You come near me and I'll kill you. I'm from Melbourne and we don't shoot below the knee caps.'