The King of Clubs & The Ghost...

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!