lawyers, political friends, police, guns, and more and more money. Bob Bottom called him ‘The Boss’. Crims called him ‘The Little Fella’, to match Lennie McPherson’s ‘The Big Fella’, the two being long-term mates and a contrast in sizes. When crims and police talked of ‘The Team’, they meant George, Lennie, Stan ‘The Man’ Smith and the associates and hangers-on they currently favored or employed. The whiff of the potential for violence lay behind any suggestions these men made.
We do not have the space to discuss whether or not he was involved in the killings of Tony Eustace or Chris Flannery, but a role for him in either or both can’t be ruled out. When standover man Richard Reilly, the baccarat king, was shot and mortally wounded, dying at the wheel of his Maserati back in 1967 Freeman’s name was on a (somewhat longish) list of suspects too, but his complicity is unlikely. He was never charged with anyone’s murder.
He faced charges in the Children’s Court and in his twenties. He published his autobiography in his fifties, and wrote of these charges, saying he ‘robbed choko [the fruit of the desperately hungry] vines and factories, fruit trees and jewelery stores,’ was guilty of ‘driving without a licence, stolen cars…’ His father all-but abandoned his mother, her second husband died young, and George grew up hard up in an inner-west Sydney slum, Annandale, and a lot of his juvenile crime was survival stuff. He hit court at 12 for stealing knives, pens, shirts, a tin of biscuits, fare evasion, swearing, b&e, m.v. … His mother called him ‘a good finder’ when he stole wood to fuel the family’s stove. George admired his mother, for her guts: taking in ironing to pay the rent. For, somehow or other, money scrapped up with love: always having 30 shillings on the three days of the year when a maximum of 30 shillings was allowed to be given to boys in juvie. For how she visited or wrote regularly. He was contemptuous of his aloof, somewhat pompous, stingy tradesman father.
Darcy Dugan was George’s hero in the ‘hood. George wanted to be ‘a crook. Not just any crook, but the crook, the BIGGEST—the man with money, power, influence. Working for a living never crossed my mind.’
He called Tamworth Boys’ Home, ‘the toughest, most damaging institution I ever saw the inside of’, quite a statement for a man who had seen the inside of Grafton Tracts, where NSW’s ‘Intractable’ crims were sent to endure the most vicious cruelty the system could manage under the power of that State. As a young adult in Paramatta Gaol he met Darcy Dugan. But Dugan was no hero. He was an ‘imbecile’ in his usual institutional environment, another ‘loser’ along with the crims who constituted his ‘family’. He met Lennie McPherson there, and did an unofficial Advanced Oxy-acetylene Cutting Theory course with him.
He was again sent inside after getting pinched over a safe cut open in the back of an H G Palmer Electrical Goods store. In Long Bay, he met the founder of the chain, H G Palmer himself, doing two years over the theft of £2 million of shareholders’ funds. George had plenty of time to think after Palmer got out after doing six months. One question was: Why am I doing three years hard labour for stealing £8000?
By the mid-1960s he was 30, married to Marcia Bedford since her divorce, with two children, and doing very well working for illicit bookies, gamers and punters. His last thieving conviction occurred when he was travelling with pro shoplifters in Perth in 1968. He saw ‘an open Jack and Jill’ [cash drawer, till] and the way he told it, swept up $258, a spur-of-the-moment opportunistic move. But he admitted to having been a busy shoplifter at earlier times, and the guys he got to raise distraction had lifted merchandise from shops all over the globe.
The only legal hassles he faced after that involved: travelling on a false passport (hassles in the US including a deportation order, and in Australia, fined $200; refused entry into the UK and sent out of there too); tax demands (he found $23,000 and paid up); a charge of assault on Frank Hing (either a property developer with a major interest in the Goulburn Club, or a 14K Triad boss intent on taking over Chinatown and King Cross illegal gaming establishments, depending on who is talking), charges which failed to proceed in 1983; and illegal betting charges, fined $500 in 1983 and $5000, the maximum, in 1985.
That list is it, the total for the two decades the Little Fella was a gaming czar at the height of his power. That he did not hit more blues, and not more major ones, is said to be due to his excellent relationships with corrupt cops (some named in Justice Stewart’s inquiry), legal figures, politicians, racing figures, other czars (like Joe Taylor, two-up king, vice’s Abe Saffron, gaming’s Perc Galea, entertainment entrepreneur Ronnie Lee, and so on…) and men who knew men of power and influence, the basis of his survival.
This criminal had the luxury of being free to defend his reputation, and he did. He appeared on TV interviews—though the lie detector test was pure showmanship. So were his no-risk challenges to parliamentarians to ‘say that outside the House’ and face defamation action, a time-waster and money black hole which no sane politician would take on. But he did more or less volunteer to enter the witness box and be cross examined to make reply to his accusers. He wrote and self-published his autobiography, albeit on his ‘retirement’, four years before he died. It is routine for adult asthmatics to recognise how very few very old sufferers there are among their number. He found out his arch enemy Bob Bottom had been had up for unlawful carnal knowledge as a young guy (Bob married the girl later) in Broken Hill, and for an old theft. He threatened the writer with public exposure, so Bottom beat him to publication, cheerfully admitting youthful indiscretions. Another bugbear bastard was Professor Alfred McCoy. McCoy’s work on crime’s grip on Sydney had Freeman down as the ‘Mr Big’ of the 1970s and 1980s.
The sources of George’s public grief were articles, broadcasts and mentions in every relevant inquiry, a few court cases, and in parliament mainly. Anything that ‘came out’ about George Freeman was news. He is on the money when he says he suffered being labeled guilty by association. The question always is: what were his associates and him doing? It is easy to assume a criminal subject and purpose, but assumption is never enough.
A Criminal Intelligence Unit report got tabled in Macquarie Street. This was leaked and provoked Questions in the House, grief for Premier Wran (who stood down until investigation of how it got there was complete) and grief for George Freeman.
George stayed with Joe Testa in Chicago. In 1981 in California Testa turned the ignition over in his Lincoln Continental and was blown to smithereens. This is meant to prove Testa was a mafia heavy, but as far as George knew, Testa was an apartment owner, financer, nightclub owner, benefactor of the Illinois and Chicago Police, and involved in insurance. All Testa ever did wrong that George could see was to burn down some properties he had insured. Meeting a man who owns a bock of apartments exclusively occupied by air hostesses is rare enough in a man’s life. Admiring the view of hosties in bikinis drinking by the pool, Joe was going be a good mate of George’s and who, he asks, can blame him for that? ‘Who is taboo, Joe?’ ‘My mother and my sister and they aren’t here, George.’ Any deal he was in that surfaced—a racehorse purchased by a friend of his from Las Vegas, a sale of real estate he held with Testa—saw accusations of organised crime, mafia infiltration and corruption made. ‘ On reflection, the only thing George never got the blame for was the [Newcastle] earthquake,’ a friend remarked.
George’s head turned white early and his tattoos were usually hidden under a good suit. The Little Fella, Mouse when he was in juvie, was short—5 foot 8½ inches [174 cm]—and slight of stature—’10 stone [63 kg] wringing wet’ he reckoned. When he was staying with Testa he got drunk on a liqueur and endured his first hangover; he was a teetotaler otherwise, just didn’t like booze. Even police who hated him would go as far as saying he was ‘hard, smart and charming’. A man with Lennie McPherson or Chris Flannery, his minder for a time, at his elbow does not need more physical menace perhaps, but he was businesslike, respectful, more likely to wear a smile on his lips than a snarl as a rule. He could walk easily among those of any rank, knew his knives and forks at table, dressed well and was always well groomed. He loved women and sex. He was proud that he could give his mum an easy life in her last 15 years. His second wife Georgina was an actress, model and orthopist (eye movement, disease and rehab worker).
He was famously photographed in the Members Stand at Randwick Racecourse with Murray Farquhar and Nick Paltos. The former was NSW’s Chief Stipendiary