The
third of the trio of kingpins who held Razorhurst in their grasp was a nasty
piece of work known as Phil ‘The Jew’ Jeffs who clawed his way to the top
through sheer malevolence and who successfully made the switch from street thug
to wheeling, dealing, raconteur. Cocaine and gambling was the tent pole of his unsavoury
kingdom and he oiled his way adroitly through the deadly political minefield of
the City’s underworld.
Another
powerful figure of a different sort in the City’s murky underbelly was Joe ‘The
Grey Shadow’ Ryan. It’s possible that he could have risen to successfully challenge
the kingpins of Razorhurst (unlike the hapless Norm Bruhn) but he chose to play
a hidden hand and vanished into the ether like his namesake.
Phil
‘The Jew’ Jeffs (1896-1945)
Phil ‘The Jew’ Jeffs started life about
as far down the ladder as one could get. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1896, his
family emigrated to London where they abandoned him on the streets. He survived
by stealing clothes from drunks and eating out of garbage cans, before signing
on as a cook’s assistant on a tramp steamer heading for South Africa. He worked
his way from there to Sydney, arriving in 1912. Phil Jeffs was not much to look
at: thin and unprepossessing, with the large bulbous nose which earned him his
nickname. Nevertheless, he was determined to amount to something and his chosen
area of expertise was crime.
He started out in the Darlinghurst push,
working as a cockatoo for two-up joints and mugging drunks. He soon moved to
drug-running and the easy life of a bludger, which he spiced up with a bit of
gingering and playing the ‘badger game’, in which he would break in upon his accomplice
prostitute and her client, pretending to be the outraged husband: the victim
would usually pay their way out of an imminent beating from Jeffs, who could
summon a savage potentiality when required.
He dressed as a flashy spiv and carried a
pistol and a knife with him at all times. He spent a lot of time toadying to
crime figures more powerful than himself and was always quick to look for
potential opportunities. He was also more than willing to enter a fight and his
reputation for being completely careless of his or anyone else’s safety in
these matters made others very wary of him. He started up sly grog shops
throughout Razorhurst and peddled vice and cocaine like it was going out of
style: all the while he took note of his customers – especially those whom he
felt could be of value to his career – and consolidated his earnings. He was in
and out of police custody throughout the 1920s, a known rapist, standover man,
drug runner and all-round thug. His criminal dreams were becoming a reality –
until he was shot in his home in 1929.
Jeffs’ wounds were serious. He was forced
to retire from his activities and moved north of Sydney to the town of Woy Woy,
where he lived as a recluse. His operations in Sydney were run by proxies and
the cash kept rolling in. While he lay low, Jeffs had time to reconsider his
approach and underwent a complete transformation: when he returned to the
Sydney scene in 1932, he had turned from a razor-gang thug, into a suave,
worldly-wise entrepreneur, in finely-tailored suits and with dazzling society
women hanging from his arms. He had finished with the streets and had moved
things to another level...
With his connexions and cash he opened up
his own night spot – the Fifty-Fifty Club in the Chard Building on the corner
of William and Forbes Streets. He paid bent cops to keep the raids to a minimum
and to let him know when those they couldn’t prevent were about to happen;
Frank Green and other gunmen were on his payroll as enforcers and his clientele
included the bright stars of every social strata, from politics to crime. The
Fifty-Fifty Club throbbed every night with jazz and dancing, fuelled by illegal
alcohol and drugs; all of the windows were fitted with loops of twine so that
champagne bottles could be hung outside during police raids and the staff were
skilled in switching booze for ginger beer and instantly setting up bogus
bridge hands to hide cocaine-sprinkled tables.
In time, Jeffs moved to larger digs in
his new Ziegfield Club on George Street. This was an even larger affair with a
greater degree of legitimacy. Even so, it was the scene of ‘Chow’ Hayes’ attack
on a hated foe which saw him gaoled for life. Eventually, Jeffs sold off his
string of night clubs, the last one – the 400 Club – closing its doors in 1942.
Thereafter, he retired to Ettalong in Sydney’s north to enjoy his fabulous
wealth. In 1945, the unremoved bullets still lodged in his body turned septic
and he died of the poison at the age of 49.
Joseph
‘The Grey Shadow’ Ryan (dates unknown)
“Always impeccably dressed, very quiet
... but if you told anyone that Joe Ryan was looking for them, they’d go
bush...”
-Greg
Brown, ex-policeman and criminal records expert.
Also known as “Mudgee Joe” after his most
famous heist, Joseph Ryan was the thinking man’s villain in the world of
Razorhurst. Taking his line from bushranger legends and the wild-west cowboy
traditions that were coming into vogue at the time, he graduated from the
pushes with a record of break-ins and burglaries that netted him four months on
the reform-school farm out at Emu Plains, west of Sydney. That time gave him
pause to think about where his career would take him.
In the early 30s a series of attacks and
hold-ups took place, the assailants brandishing guns and hiding their
identities behind bandanas which obscured the lower halves of their faces.
Later still, a mail train en route to
Mudgee across the Blue Mountains was attacked and the masked attackers made off
with a huge sum of cash and jewellery - £18,000, or about $1,350,000 in today’s
money. Later still, the Canberra Mail had its mailbags containing £10,000
swapped for identical, sealed bags filled with old telephone books, with no-one
the wiser until the mail was delivered. Although a gang of men was often
involved with these crimes, they were directed by an imposing figure, masked
and impeccably dressed – a figure the Police would come to know as “the Grey
Shadow”.
Although arrested a number of times on
suspicion regarding these events, Joseph Ryan was not convicted, either for
lack of evidence or due to the charges being summarily dropped. On one
occasion, he avoided a police dragnet for a number of months and was later
apprehended for his involvement in a gold heist – in Birmingham, England. He
was returned to Australia, arrested on the docks, and again, walked free.
It took the random discovery of part of
the Mudgee Mail cash hidden in a farm outbuilding to turn the focus of police
attention towards Ryan. The farm owner, Morris, confessed to being the getaway
driver and to holding the cash for the robbers; he also identified Ryan as the
‘Shadow.
Eventually, Ryan went to trial for the
train robberies. In court he was well-dressed, precise and commanding; by
contrast, those of his old gang who turned snitch and gave evidence against him
were slovenly and ingenuous – the judge discounted their testimony, calling
them wretches and liars, “soiled in their characters”. The trial ended with a
hung jury result; a second hearing exonerated Ryan; in later years, all those
who gave evidence against him were attacked, beaten and slashed, one surviving
on the sheer luck of a jammed pistol. Morris was gunned down, two full
magazines of ammunition pumped into his body, in the Rocks at the south end of
the Bridge. Although Ryan went to trial for his murder, during which the judge
ruled that Ryan and an accomplice had performed the killing, lack of evidence
and testimonies from eyewitnesses placing Joe elsewhere at the time, saw the
case dismissed. Police of the day had no doubt that the Grey Shadow had filled
Morris with lead for his treachery.
Afterwards, Ryan simply fell off the
radar, and vanished from out of the police spotlight. Whether he was still
criminally-active or turned over a new leaf, none can say. What remains is a
criminal record showing only a four-month stay in a remand centre, and some
inferences drawn from the courts over evidence which vanished – like a ghost!
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