The dark prince of melbo.., p.2
The Dark Prince of Melbourne, page 2
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If the police raid had piqued the interest of the good people of Bendigo, the trial in the Bendigo Court on 30 November almost electrified the city. Hundreds of people flocked to the courthouse, filling the gallery with the overflow waiting outside. Dolly Gray, charged with vagrancy and defended by barrister Luke Murphy, told the court that she was purchasing the Mundy Street property, and paying for it in instalments. She was also receiving regular payments from her mother in South Melbourne. While the prosecutor described Dolly as ‘a person of bad character’, Magistrate Moore was more sympathetic, saying that she was a young woman who had not previously been in trouble. Therefore, he was prepared to let her off with a fine of ten pounds, or two months’ imprisonment. She was also discharged from the charge of keeping a disorderly house, frequented by thieves and rogues.
Both women were found guilty and fined. Edwards was discharged without conviction and Squizzy followed Edwards into the dock, where his hearing on the vagrancy charge was short and to the point. Squizzy told the court that he was a registered jockey but had most recently been employed as a billiard marker at the Exchange Hotel in Bendigo. Also, he’d had a stroke of luck recently and won 50 pounds on various winners at the Melbourne Cup meeting. Asked by the Prosecutor where he had worked before he came to Bendigo, Squizzy said that he had been living and working in Melbourne, training ponies, and had also recently worked as a jockey in Gippsland. Magistrate Moore listened carefully but still recorded a vagrancy conviction and imposed a fine of ten pounds, or two months’ imprisonment.
Carter was discharged on the vagrancy count, while Vipont’s case was adjourned. The four men and three women were then recalled to face the charge of having housebreaking implements in their possession. The police involved in the 22 November raid gave evidence of what they had found at the Mundy Street address. With no defence beyond their not guilty pleas, the seven accused were found guilty of the charge and sentenced, the men being given 12 months’ imprisonment, at hard labour, and the women to three months’ imprisonment. For the women only, the sentences would be suspended on sureties of 25 pounds each for their future good behaviour. While the women were released upon signing the sureties, the men were released on continuing bail, and all gave notice of appeal.
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Free on bail, but clearly on the police’s radar in Melbourne after the Richard Way assault and still waiting for his appeal against his Bendigo convictions, Squizzy refused to change anything about his lifestyle. On New Year’s Day 1908, Squizzy and another man – never identified but likely his brother Claude – attended the annual race meeting at the Bendigo racecourse. Late in the meeting, they approached a well-dressed punter in the betting ring and engaged in some casual banter about the race meeting. The three men then stood together at the rails waiting for the last race of the meeting to be run. While all eyes were fixed on the start of the race, Squizzy began to pick the punter’s pockets. He removed a gold chain and gold bar, a gold matchbox and a pendant, and was in the process of removing a silver pocket watch when the punter felt a tug on his vest and realised what was happening. He reacted quickly, grabbing and holding Squizzy as the partner brushed past before disappearing into the crowd.
Without releasing his grip, the punter called out for police as the crowd closed in around him and Squizzy, blocking any chance the pickpocket had of escaping. A detective was part of that crowd, and he made his way through and took charge of the scene. He first ordered Squizzy to turn out his pockets, which revealed nothing. Listening to some of the crowd’s comments, Squizzy feared things might be about to turn ugly, and asked to be moved away from the crowd and to the street outside. The detective also sensed the potential for trouble and escorted the thief and victim out through the nearest exit. They had barely reached the street when they were approached by a young woman. ‘That’s my sister,’ said Squizzy when he spotted her. ‘I’m his wife,’ said Dolly Gray when she reached them.13
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Squizzy had given the name Michael McGee when he was arrested and charged with the theft of jewellery, valued at 16 pounds, at the Miners Racecourse in Bendigo. It was also under that name that he was committed to stand trial at the next sitting of the Victorian Supreme Court in Melbourne. However, by then his real identity had been established and, moreover, he was in for a surprise.
When Squizzy faced court in Melbourne in mid-January 1908, it was to answer to another charge – that of having stolen ten shillings from the till of the Cherry Tree Hotel in Balmain Street, Richmond. The licensee of the hotel, John McBrian, claimed that around noon on Thursday, 16 January, Taylor had called in at the hotel and ordered a hot rum. To make the drink, McBrian had to leave the bar to fetch hot water. When he returned, he served another patron and, as he took some change from the till, he mentally noted how much money was in it. Squizzy then ordered another hot rum but didn’t touch his drink. Instead, he turned and left the hotel just as McBrian noticed that several silver coins had disappeared from the till. McBrian followed Taylor out, and Taylor broke into a run. The publican called for help, pointing at Taylor and shouting, ‘Thief!’ A passer-by on a pushbike quickly took the scene in and went after Taylor, overtaking him and catching him in a vacant lot. He was held there until police arrived and took him into custody.
Taylor’s defence, conducted by barrister Percy Ridgeway, was that Taylor had spent the morning collecting money he was owed, and had fled the hotel because he feared he was about to be robbed; that was it. Found guilty, the judge handed down a sentence of a fine of ten pounds, in default three months’ imprisonment; Squizzy made an audible comment along the lines of the Bench thinking they might have given him a belated Christmas present. He should have kept his mouth shut; recalled to the dock, the option of a fine was withdrawn, and bailiffs were directed to lead him away to begin his three-month sentence. Behind him, Percy Ridgeway said that he would be appealing the sentence, another appeal that would fail.14
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Squizzy was never a good prisoner and was always willing to put up a fight when arrested. Squizzy’s three-month sentence for being smart provides a good example of what he was like when incarcerated, whether that be inside a lock-up, watchhouse, gaol or prison. In this instance his behaviour inside was so disruptive that 45 days were added to his original sentence, while he would spend 432 hours of that incarceration in solitary confinement. Prison authorities also suspected, but could never prove, that Dolly smuggled contraband to him during her regular visits, most notably tobacco and writing materials. During this period of imprisonment, too, Squizzy so antagonised his fellow prisoners in Pentridge that he was transferred to Beechworth Prison for the last part of his sentence. Released, without any obvious attempt at irony, on April Fool’s Day, 1909, Squizzy was given enough money to catch a train to Melbourne and buy a cheap suit and an expensive meal, or – perhaps – vice versa.
A young Squizzy Taylor in 1912. Public Records Office Victoria
CHAPTER 2Cometh the Hour
I.
Freed from Beechworth, Squizzy returned to the environment he knew best, the streets and lanes radiating out from Bourke Street, the inner suburbs of Melbourne, their sly-grog shops and brothels, and the racetracks and pony races that were scattered across those suburbs. He would not be alone as he renewed his relationships with people and places; Dolly had sold her house in Bendigo and relocated to Melbourne, looking for a place somewhere in or around the city’s ‘entertainment’ district that she could convert into her own brothel, and a place where she and Squizzy could live some sort of normal life as husband and wife with her two daughters. He, though, would find it difficult to change his ways, in the beginning at least. He had been a boy on the streets, now he was a man of the streets.
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Those streets had changed very little in the many months he had been away gallivanting around the racecourses, billiard halls, sly-grog shops and bordellos of Ballarat and Bendigo. He had tried his hand at just about everything and had finished up just about where he began – a petty thief, a small-time crook who seemed destined to remain one for the rest of his days. If there was one consolation, he had met and fallen in love with a woman who seemed to know how to organise herself and others and genuinely seemed to love him. It is hard to say whether Squizzy had thought too much about the future up to this point in his life, but the same could not be said about Dolly. She knew where she wanted to be, she knew where she wanted her daughters to be, and this angry little man seemed to be the vehicle that could take them to those places.
It would have seemed a very difficult task in their early days. Bourke Street, especially on Friday and Saturday nights, was like a lolly shop for Squizzy and the other Bourke Street Rats. The counterfeit ticket sales, pickpocketing and the Ginger Game continued, and Squizzy dabbled in each. For the latter, Dolly was an able assistant as she looked to staff the brothel she was establishing in a two-storey building in the heart of the red-light district at 122 Little Lonsdale Street. Sometimes, though, Squizzy couldn’t help himself.
In July 1910, for instance, barrister Percy Ridgeway was again required to help Squizzy out of a situation that was completely of his own making. In the middle of the month, Squizzy was required to appear in the City Court to answer charges of using obscene language and assaulting police. In court, and advised by Ridgeway, Taylor admitted the language charge but denied assaulting the police. The primary evidence was provided by a police constable named Neil Olholm who told the court that, late at night on 6 July, he’d heard Taylor swearing loudly and was about to arrest him for his behaviour when a woman named Olley interfered. As he was dealing with the struggling woman, Taylor escaped, but he was able to arrest Olley. Olholm said he was still on the beat, and not far from where the previous fracas had occurred, when Taylor returned with ‘a band of larrikins’, walked up to him and punched him in the face. Fearing for his safety, Olholm drew his revolver and waved it about as the gang scattered.
When it was his turn to give evidence, Taylor completely disputed the policeman’s recollection of events that night. He conceded that he had been swearing loudly when the policeman arrived but took off and did not return to the scene. Therefore, he could not possibly have assaulted Constable Olholm. The magistrate had none of it. Barely pausing for breath, he found Taylor guilty on both counts, fining him one pound for the swearing offence and sentencing him to one month’s imprisonment on the assault charge. Percy Ridgeway dutifully gave notice of appeal.1
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That arrest and court appearance marked a change for Squizzy, who was in danger of being declared a habitual criminal and sentenced to an indeterminate amount of imprisonment. His life to date had been dominated by petty crime, even if those involved liked to pretend they were gangsters. Convictions for pickpocketing 16 pounds worth of jewellery, stealing ten shillings from a hotel till, and rolling a drunk for two pounds in notes and a handful of copper coins were never going to make Taylor – and Dolly – rich or powerful, and would hardly enhance their reputation in Melbourne’s underworld. Even his attempted move into major crime – blowing open a safe in a Bendigo printing works – resulted in a grand total of around 16 pounds to be divided up between the four safebreakers.
Squizzy’s next move might have been prompted by Dolly, who knew something about these matters, but was certainly a first for Taylor. One thing that all criminals knew was that, if they themselves were the victim of a crime, the last thing they wanted to do was go to the police to report it. That would break the unwritten code of silence and would also leave the victim open to retribution for breaking that code.
In August 1910, while his appeal for assault was still pending, Squizzy tried to kill two birds with one stone by passing information to police about the operations of an illegal abortionist named Millicent Decker. Decker and Taylor had something of a past; she owned ponies and had sometimes engaged Squizzy to ride them at race meetings. Now Decker paid an amount to Squizzy on a regular basis to keep quiet about the activities in her South Yarra home. Taylor thought he was worth more, but Decker disagreed, so Squizzy passed on all the relevant details to a police contact.
Decker appeared before the Prahran Court on 12 September 1910, charged with attempting to procure an abortion. She was remanded in custody for a week with bail set at a sum of 100 pounds. When Decker reappeared in court, she was found guilty of the offence and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment – a cruel sentence. When she was released early on 27 December 1913 due to her health, Millicent Decker was a broken woman who would never recover from her experiences.2
That was the new Squizzy, targeting anyone he thought might pay up rather than face a court appearance or bashing. The word out on Bourke Street, and reaching into the inner suburbs, was that if someone came with the message that Squizzy believed you owed him 20, you paid the man 20 pounds for potential trouble to go away. It was also a time when Taylor tried new twists in the Ginger Game. The principle was still the same: get some mug punter drunk while dining with a pretty young woman, have her take him upstairs for sex, and have their encounter interrupted by the door being kicked open by an irate father, brother or husband. Squizzy also utilised ‘jimmers’ or ‘lurkers’. The scenario was the same but the large wardrobe in the room would house a small jimmer who would sneak out when the couple were otherwise engaged and steal anything of value from the clothes scattered around. The door would again be pounded on, and the man would be urged to get dressed and escape via another door or window. When they found they had been robbed, they would think about going back for their valuables – and then think again.
All this was well and good, but the world Squizzy inhabited was changing. The larrikin gangs still existed but they existed to protect their turf from other gangs and to provide recruits for the more organised criminal networks which were emerging in Melbourne. Squizzy could become part of that change, or he could spend the rest of his days as a junior standover man and a petty criminal right up until the time something went awry and he was sentenced as a habitual criminal. Again, it might have been at Dolly’s urging, or perhaps he could clearly see the writing on the wall. Squizzy was picking up far too many charges and convictions for his own good and needed to break the cycle he had created for himself. So Squizzy Taylor walked away from Melbourne and all that was familiar.
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The truth and Squizzy Taylor would always know one another but would never be particularly close. What happened in the next 18 months or so would be revealed by Squizzy to a reporter a decade and a half later.3 The reporter who took it all down recorded that he believed Squizzy was telling the truth and that the few elements that could be verified had been. Squizzy believed that he and another Bourke Street Rat, never named, were becoming too well known in Melbourne and decided to seek greener pastures elsewhere. The men had just 50 pounds between them when they left Melbourne but built that up considerably as they headed north on the train, primarily by cardsharping when games were available and picking pockets when they weren’t. They made their way to Sydney where they stayed in one of the city’s better-known hotels and immediately began moving in the younger sporting circles there. Again, they supported themselves through cards and confidence tricks, plus the occasional discreet picking of pockets. When things inevitably began to heat up in Sydney, the young men decided to move north once more.
The two struggled to make a dishonest living in Brisbane until the annual Royal Show, the Ekka. Their big win came when a group of pastoralists from western Queensland went on a river and Moreton Bay cruise that included card games for high stakes. Dressed in dinner suits, the two young men snuck aboard the riverboat Beaver.4 The gamblers aboard thought they were waiters, and the waiters aboard thought they were gamblers. They were able to circulate freely aboard, picking pockets and filching whatever they could lay their hands on. Inevitably, one of the gamblers realised his wallet had been stolen and called out for assistance. Suspecting they were about to be caught, Squizzy and his companion stripped down, eased themselves and their loot into the water, and swam for 20 minutes to reach Sandgate Beach. The next day the young men left Brisbane, again travelling north.
For several months, they used the trains to visit the major towns in Queensland, again relying on their cardsharking skills until Squizzy grew homesick for Melbourne. There, Squizzy once more fell back on petty crime, pickpocketing in the main, and spending time in prison when he was caught. He would also claim that he sailed to New Zealand after his last release, wanting to see how he could fare there. The answer was not well; caught stealing 75 pounds, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. Back in Melbourne, he did time again in 1913 but also had some sort of epiphany. If he was to succeed as a criminal, he needed to be a lot smarter than he had been, and part of that was working within the underworld that had emerged in recent years, a landscape far different from when he had become a Bourke Street Rat.
II.
The isolated bands of criminals who occasionally erupted onto the Australian landscape during the middle and later years of the 19th century gave way to more sophisticated and primarily urban criminal organisations in the 20th century. In Melbourne, the man who would be the prototype for this evolution, and in many ways the prototype for most of those who followed, was John Wren. Wren was born in April 1871 in the working-class suburb of Collingwood, the third son of Irish migrants struggling to make a living. He left school at 12 years of age, working first as a labourer and then as a bootmaker. In the factory where he worked, Wren also circulated small betting cards and acted as a small-time moneylender to his fellow labourers. At that time, thoroughbred racing in Victoria was dominated by the Victorian Racing Club, the Victorian Amateur Turf Club and the Moonee Valley Racing Club. Similarly, betting on races at the three major racecourses in Melbourne – Flemington, Caulfield and Moonee Valley – was the responsibility of either registered bookmakers or the recently developed totalisator. It had not always been thus, and the development of organised betting foreshadowed the development of organised crime.
