Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron dossier

312 Pages·2007·1.26 MB·English

by  Tony Reeves

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TONY REEVESis 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.
Also by Tony Reeves
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 prostitu-
tion. 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.
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MR SIN
The Abe Saffron dossier
Tony Reeves
Allen & Unwin
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First published in 2007
Copyright © Tony Reeves 2007
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.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Reeves, Tony, 1940– .
Mr Sin: the Abe Saffron dossier.
Includes index.
ISBN 978 1 74175 220 5 (pbk.).
1. Saffron, Abe, 1919-2006. 2. Criminals - New South Wales
- Sydney - Biography. 3. Gangsters - New South Wales -
Sydney - Biography. 4. Businessmen - New South Wales -
Sydney - Biography. 5. Organized crime - New South Wales -
Sydney. 6. Sydney (N.S.W.) - Biography. I. Title.
364.106092
Set in 11/14 pt Baskerville by Bookhouse, Sydney.
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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CONTENTS
Contents
Author note vii
Prologue 1
1 For king and country...and a quick quid 7
2 Sly grog sales: a bottler of a money-maker 14
3 In and out of court and courting crims 48
4 New players join the team: Abe moves into
the big time 69
5 Another war, another fortune: Vietnam blue
puts crims in the black 98
6 Pictures to die for: blackmail dossiers get
out of hand 112
7 Burning issues: murder and arson become
the hot topics 136
8 Snorting at drug slur: some customs are not
so hard to break 154
9 Murder most foul: Abe buys his cover 168
10 Tax break comes Abe’s way: whistleblower
goes to jail 184
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VI] MR SIN
11 Troubles in the south: truth drug may
be the answer 192
12 Rid me of these meddlesome attorneys:
Abe plays Henry too 208
13 Takeover bid: top cop seeks monopoly on
graft payments 223
14 Taxing times: Abe does a ‘Capone’ with little
black books 245
15 Courting a new persona: writs say the past
is all a lie 265
Epilogue: and then he died 286
Notes 292
Index 297
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AUTHOR NOTE
Author note
THROUGHOUTTHISBOOKmoney 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 appro-
priate. 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
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VIII] MR SIN
processed as there is little difference in the values. I hope
this helps.
With thanks
I must mainly thank Abraham Gilbert Saffron for making
this possible: without his interest in meall 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.
Tony Reeves
The most important step in the war against
organised crime is the unmasking of the facade
of honesty and respectability that is maintained
by the principal crime figures. All too often only
the small-time crooks or the bottom line opera-
tives of the major crime syndicates are caught and
punished. In Australia we have seldom come close
to unmasking the identity of the godfathers of
organised crime.
Frank Walker, NSW Attorney-General
(speech in NSW Parliament, September 1980)
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PROLOGUE
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, knock-
about 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-
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2] MR SIN
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