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Published by Kerr Publishing Pty Ltd
ABN 64 124 219 638
www.kerrpublishing.com.au
Copyright © 2019 John Kerr
All rights reserved.
This ebook was first published as a 96-page Wilkinson Publishing paperback in 2010. That book has been updated here, but is otherwise the same text.
ISBN 978-1-875703-30-2 (eBook)
BIC Category: Biography & Autobiography
BISAC Category 1: TRU000000 TRUE CRIME/General
BISAC Category 2: TRU003000 TRUE CRIME/Organized Crime
Cover and eBook design: Xigrafix Media and Design
Distribution: ebookalchemy.com.au
National Library of Australia PrePublication Data Service:
Introduction
The authority of an Australian crime boss usually rests on his reputation. Some Italo-Australian and perhaps some Chinese-Australian criminal networks appoint their bosses, but most criminals simply acknowledge the personal authority of some others.
He—for Australia has been short of female crime bosses since Sydney’s 1920s—may have charisma and personal charm: many are cheerful men, generous hosts, good listeners and helpful in solving the problems of others. He may have been favoured by nature for such a role: cold commanding eyes or a body like a Mack truck for two examples. Stories told about him help him get what he wants from others, stories of his power, of his ruthlessness, victories as a street-fighting man, connections, or the ill fortune that befalls his enemies. If the boss is a man of influence, his word can influence others to stay off his back, or to ride the backs of his enemies. Such men, particularly if they have deep pockets, have the potential to harm the interests of others from a distance. All are, by one means or another, ‘heavies’. Softies do not run criminal enterprises, or not for long anyway. The potential for violence is part of the executive package, whether he is the boss of six blocks or Il Principale.
I can find no criminal masterminds, no evil geniuses, no Mr Bigs, no puppet-masters with a bevy of the city’s politicians, judges, police and other figures who suit the story, dancing on the end of his strings; outside myth, art and the imagination, I have found none. The big question is: why do so many of us cherish the illusion such men exist?
The bosses this book are Mr Big-Enoughs. Prick them, they bleed. Imprison them, they endure or they go mad. Impoverish them, they pick themselves up again or they grow old in poverty. Change the world around them, they change and cope, or they become irrelevant. Just like you.
1
George, the Team Player
In 1990 George David Freeman’s heart failed after he ran out of puff. Freeman’s lungs were always odds-on to be what would take him off, if—as proved to be the case—the men who wanted to kill him didn’t. Jackie Muller came very close.
On Anzac Day 1979 Freeman ate at the home of his doctor and mate Dr Nick Paltos, a heavy gambler and, with Danny Chubb and Graham ‘Croc’ Palmer, an importer of not-very-good Lebanese hashish by the tonne in the 1980s. After dinner, travelling solo, Freeman swung by an illegal casino for a little while, but decided on an early night. Punter, SP bookie, commission agent for other punters, he had had a busy day; there’s a lot of race meetings on Anzac Days. He drove through the gates of Dallas, his spacious well-treed Yowie Bay mansion, and pulled up before the front door. Punch, a Labrador named after NSW politician Leon Punch, and Bottom, a Lab named after journalist Bob Bottom, both men pains in Freeman’s arse, men who publicly linked his name to criminality and corruption, didn’t greet him with their usual excitement, but he didn’t notice that then. Later, he guessed Muller must have given the dogs a kicking to subdue them. Freeman poked at the lock with his key. A .22 bullet smacked into his mandible. He said he let out a yell, turned, sprinted in a zigzag pattern 100 metres and over a 2-metre fence to his neighbour’s house in one long adrenalin-fuelled blood-soaked rush of fear.
Thus (he said) he did not see the shooter and told the cops who asked him who did it, ‘I don’t know.’ In his neck, up into his mouth, grazing the optic nerve while still going up, the bullet left George’s head from the corner of his eye like a teardrop. Pain relief, antibiotics and a five-day spell in hospital under observation, had him seeing things OK again. He had learned to use his one good eye. There was no brain or other nerve damage, and, after some rural living, away from media pests and police asking stupid questions, he was right as rain.
John Marcus Muller was shot three times in the head at close range in his much humbler driveway six weeks later. Muller died. Freeman declined to answer police questions about the matter, but it was established he was in Noosa Queensland at the time.
After a man called Chris Flannery disappeared six years later, a Melbourne hit team had two goes at killing Freeman. But he had a suspect for putting the Melbourne hit team on him: Chris’s widow, Kathleen Flannery, for revenge.
Both times, the hit team was thwarted. First by the vagaries of foot traffic (people everywhere), and then by the unexpected (a child in Freeman’s car). In the second go, Freeman saw the shooters hooded up in the last seconds. Driving at them in his Merc, he survived without a shot being fired when they fled. A group of men the would-be assassins feared might be Freeman’s goons minding Freeman’s back, were in fact police doing surveillance on Freeman, police who had no idea they were at a planned execution site, saw no hooded men, and were understandably scratching their heads at Freeman’s inexplicable road jockeying. The Melbourne team was well informed: they knew their quarry attended Dr Nick Paltos’ medical clinic once a week, the site of their laying in wait, on the right day, at the right time. Dr Paltos dulled George’s chronic pain with morphine shots. Freeman was almost certainly addicted to pethidine and morphine, but living the life of a chronic asthmatic on aspirin or herbal tea is a poor life. Freeman was a man who made a lot of phone calls before he went out at night to see men about a dog or a horse, and keep his finger on the pulse. Weekends often saw him with travel commitments, to Flemington, Doomben, Morphettville, Devonport… wherever a fair bet, a book, a sting, a bloke to see, or a race to fix took him.
He is suspected of murders, Muller’s for one. The general consensus is that Michael ‘Mikel’ Hurley asked Freeman to look after the welfare of his wife Lena, Muller’s stepdaughter, while Mikel served up to 4 years in prison. George and Lena had a fling-length affair, and in some versions, she became addicted to heroin and worked in a knocking shop in which George had some interest and Mickel got a fright when he went into the place ‘for an empty’ and found her there, or she simply, independently, went off to run the shop. The first story is told by Neddy Smith, who wrote Mikel off as a gutless bugger and clearly does not like him; the second is the view of Clive Small, an ex-NSW detective.
No-one believed Freeman when he said he used to be an SP bookie, but had given it up. He had a hand in the racket until two years before his death, when he said he ‘retired’. He protested he was just ‘a professional punter’ (requiring him to pay income tax on his wins) and a commission agent, charged with getting the best odds for other punters, that’s all. Most people were skeptical, Justice Don Stewart as royal commissioner for one. The waterfront mansion Dallas, the big Hilton wedding breakfast, and the affluence that clearly surrounded him suggested black money, not luck at the track. A crime boss doesn’t have to be wealthy, but it helps. There was a widespread feeling, as crime student Professor Alfred McCoy, Punch and Bottom (the Parliamentarian and his advisor-journalist, not the canines), and others said very loudly, that the ‘colorful racing identity’ was very influential. Gaming racketeers didn’t spin a wheel or deal a card or open a substantial book without Freeman’s say so, not without paying tribute in some form, usually banknotes. Police watched ‘parcels’ carried by illegal casino employees loaded into the boot of his car, for example.
Some