Before we begin. This podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. This is a production by The Australian and our subscribers here episodes first and get full access to photos, video, news stories and features plus all Australia's best journalism twenty four to seven. Join us at Gangstersghost dot com dot a U. This is episode two of The Gangster's Ghost. To really get into this story here episode one first at Gangstersghost dot com dot AU.
When I went on this venture with Matt, I knew that I would find a monster, and I wasn't really sure. I just knew I wanted to find the truth. And so far in John's childhood, I think I have found
a monster, but that monster was certainly not John. What I'm finding is a little boy that was brought up in horrific circumstances, flogged by his grandfather, flogged by his mother, and then goes on to go to the Gosford's Boys' Home, where the head of the boy's home says to one of John's friends later in life, oh, we flogged it out of him too, Like everywhere this little boy turned, he got flogged. What does people expect or is that
what was expected of him. You know, he goes down to his mother.
This is Kelly Slater Reagan, former New South Wales copper, sheep farmer, wheat grower, and also the cousin to Johnny Reagan, one of the toughest, most feared and hated gangsters in Australian history. For years now, Kelly and I have been on the trail of the true story behind Reagan. In myth they called him the Magician, the man who could make people disappear. They say he murdered between eight and twelve people, including a child, But who was he really?
Almost fifty years after he was gunned down in a Sydney suburban street by three assassins, aged just twenty nine, Kelly and her family want to know the truth about him and given his murder is one of New South Wales' most enduring cold cases. Who killed Reagan and why? From the beginning of our investigation, I asked Kelly to keep an audio diary to freely express what was going on in her mind and her heart as we sifted through the fact and fiction surrounding her notorious relative. So she did.
He goes down to his mother.
At school with a bloody nurse she wants.
Don't come home to your bloody No hugs, no cuddles, no genuine affection or kindness. What sort of damage does that do to a little boy? Is what I'm thinking today. And the other thing I'm thinking is where was his father's family, my family? Where were they?
You know, I've been fascinated by Stuart John Reagan for decades. He was the last of the old school gangsters. A pimp and standover man in his teens, a rapist and murderer by his mid twenties, A man so unpredictably violent that just the mention of his name struck fear into Sydney's criminal miliere, and not just a few police officers. Reagan wore a bulletproof vest and was always accompanied by
a bodyguard. According to all reports, he was a bona fide psychopath with all the cliched traits, cruelty to animals, no empathy, cold and violent and brutal. When Kelly joined me on this journey into the world of her long dead cousin, we both knew there had to be more to him than a couple of brief television documentaries and the occasional cameo in true crime books, where he was invariably described as a man so heenous he thought nothing of killing and disposing of a toddler, the child of
one of his lovers, because the infant annoyed him. Stuart John Reagan was the worst of the worst. Take this from Suburban Gangsters, a Channel nine true crime documentary series hosted by journalist Adam Shand that went to air in two thousand and nineteen.
This is the story of the magician Stuart John Reagan. Reagan was a pimp, rapist, standover man, and child murderer who enjoyed inflicting pain.
Stuart John Reagan was a malicious, vicious, violent criminal whom I would raid among one of, if not the worst criminal I ever came across during my retire police career.
Of all the criminals I ever knew were dealt with as a crime reporter, Reagan would probably have been the most vicious and deadly of the lot, the most heartless.
Stuart John Reagan was born in the quiet country town of Young New South Wales in nineteen forty five. Not much is known about his early life, apart from his love of violence.
Well, if you're ever looking for a psychopath.
Reagan ticks all the boxes.
No one was surprised to learn that as a child he killed animals. He harmed animals. There was a story that he used to pitchfork to kill a possum. He killed kittens and dogs, and he just had no empathy for any living being whatsoever.
These are the types of stories repeated over and over about Reagan. Kelly has heard them all, but she wanted to dig deeper, so we started at the beginning. Who were his parents, Claire Mary Raul and Alfred Frederick Reagan. Was Reagan like a chemical compound, the amalgam of two evil forces? Was he a natural born killer? Or did something happen to him in his formative years? What occurred in his childhood that might betray a future of violence and a complete lack of respect for human life? This
was the puzzle Kelly and I were faced with. She'd also need to take a long, hard look at herself, So we started our search in the tiny township of Young, the cherry capital of Australia on the southwestern slopes of New South Wales, where Reagan was born and where this whole story began. Young is a small country town the Reagans were one of the pioneering families in this part of Australia, and there are still Reagans in the phone book.
We needed to go back to his school, find schoolmates, if any were still alive, go to his childhood homes and discover what his life was like as a kid. We had to piece together the birth of a gangster, and crucially, we had to uncover that monster that has haunted this story for decades, Reagan's mother, Claire, the woman they called the Colonel. I'm journalist Matthew Condon and This
is the Gangster's Ghost, a podcast from The Australian. In this investigation, we uncover previously unreported facts about the short lived criminal career of Stuart John Reagan, speak to his family, friends and business associates who go on the record for the first time, link him to one of the most notorious mass murders in Australian history, and uncover secret audio recordings that will bring the ghost of Johnny Reagan back
to life. This podcast started out as a clinical look at one of Australia's most reviled gangsters, but when the Reagan family came on board, the project took on another dimension and begged the question, how does a family cope with the generational stain of a murderer whose death was celebrated by criminals and police alike. This is episode two
the Colonel. In the early days of this investigation, I took it for granted that Kel, a strong and uncompromising woman, loyal to family and with an unwavering moral compass, would take this plunge into her family history in her stride. But as time went on, I understood how deeply the whole thing affected her. The more we learned, the more it went straight to the heart. This is another entry in Kelly's personal audio diary.
Years later. I'm sitting in a police recruitment interview, being grilled on a boy that turned into a monster and a man. And now I'm starting to think, well, the monster was created, and then the myth was created to fit the monster, and it's just wrong. It's so wrong.
You know.
I'm open and prepared to see that John was a murderer and that he committed atrocious crimes. I understand that, But I'm finding a little boy that's stuck up for the underdog, didn't allow the big kids to bully the little kids. I'm saying that a murderer was created, but I'm not saying a child murderer, So I guess we continue to dig.
That digging took us to the small town of muham Borough, only about thirty kilometers south of Young Claire. Mary Raoul was born there in nineteen thirteen. Her father, John Patrick, was a farmer. From the outset, it appears Claire wasn't backwards in coming forward. In her twenties, she was training and racing greyhounds at the murham Borough Coursing Club and
was regularly in the winner's circle. In nineteen thirty eight in the Kurrawong Stakes, she came second with her dog Jim's Lass, and at some point she met sheepsharer Alfred Frederick Reagan from Young Kelly has vague memories of her great uncle.
Alf Uncle alf used to be a shearer and he used to travel around like all the western areas back in those days.
Ready for the first run. Each man bring homes and cutters for the hand piece. The rest of the machinery belongs to the owner of the ship. There were flanel shirts.
Of travel out and you'd cheer four weeks and ended at shearing sheds all around this place, like Hillstone and Griffith and everywhere else.
In this game, more hayes means less speed and damaged seap as well.
So I've been told he was a very good sharer.
But the problem with Uncle Alf was that once he finished hearing, he'd come home and then he would drink. But I can remember him being down the main street. He used to sit outside the old Tafe building which is just up from the Australian Hotel, which is where he drank. And he used to sit out there on a bench and wait for us kids to come and we run across the road because Dad's shop was over the other side, and he'd give us too.
Bob to go and get some lollies.
He used to always tip his hat to ask the ladies as they walked past. He was a very very old gentlemanly person like he was always.
How Alf and Claire actually met is lost to history. Was he shearing in her neck of the woods? Did they meet in a pub? The Regans don't know. Perhaps Alf and Claire took the steam train, a short thirty kilometer ride between Young and mum Burro when they were courting, But courting maybe the wrong word to use in this case. That would imply a conventional romance, the thrill of falling in love. Nothing was conventional about this relationship. It was
odd from the start and quickly became peculiar. Alf and Claire were married in nineteen forty four at Hillston, a small town three hundred kilometers west of both Young and Murramborough. The family can only speculate why they married so far from their respective homes. Perhaps Alf was shearing in the region at the time. There's a theory that Claire was working as a bar maid at a hotel there. Still, it was an odd start to a marriage that very
quickly proved to be a mistake. In every family, there is an outlier, a person whose life becomes a satellite to the main family game, a curio not worthy of consideration or even basic respect, just as sick pigeons are rejected by the flock. Alf's life upon marrying Claire seemed to have been jettisoned from the normal functioning of the Greater Reagan family. In fact, Claire's existence was completely ignored. This is Kelly talking to her dad Lindsey about this strange affair.
I never knew that Uncle alf Ever got married. I didn't know that Uncle alf Ever was involved with the woman because I'd never ever seen him with the lady.
Tell me what this seems extraordinary? Given the size of young in the nineteen forties and the influence of the Reagans, how could they not know about the Colonel Kelly suspects the family may have rejected Claire Raoul outright, given the families deep and some might say pedigreed roots going right back to the foundations of the town. Claire, as they say, did not come from the right side of the tracks. Here's Kelly with her dad again.
I'm down?
And what about the comparisons? Like the three Reagan boys all married Carwell girls. Now back in the thirties, the call Walls were quite a well to do family, you could call them land a gentry.
They were both pioneering families.
I would imagine that those three weddings would have been quite celebrated and compared to the Carbel girls, Claire would have been fair to say if she felt intimidated when she's coming into a family of that dynamics, do you reckon?
Certainly would just from my experience, once again, I didn't know her or in their girls, but I don't think that she ever was in the family setting.
So never come for Christmas, never family gathering, never.
Ever, never ever, I would say she was never asked, never even spoken of, because I know they well as I saying it was fifteen or something, and I never even knew he existed? Was John Reagan?
Claire and Alf settled in young not long after their marriage, or did they. Some family members say now that Alf never stopped living with his mother, even when Claire was residing in town as his new wife. Still, there were very early signs that this was a fatally mismatched couple. Alf disappeared for weeks at a time on the Shearing circuit. Claire took a job as a barmaid at the Australian
Hotel in the main drag Burrower Street. This pub, formerly the Shamrock Inn back in the gold rush days, would inevitably become the sinking ship of the Reagan marriage. When he was in town, Alf had his favorite stool there while the Colonel captained the bar. Today, the Australian Hotel is a vibrant family pub with fantastic food at very
reasonable prices. We paid a visit and had lunch, and quickly learned from the new owners that it, like almost everyone and everything in this story, had its ghosts, Claire and Alf included.
My grandmother used to work here, and my mom did so work upstairs, jens and cleaning, and I.
Used to drink here all the time. But it needs to be a brothel in the early early days.
This is what I've.
Been informed of late eighteen hundred.
Where did your mum wear?
Oh my god, your grandmother would have worked here, Claire raw, Claire.
And you're over lunch In the noisy pub, we discussed Claire and ELF's doomed marriage. So why does a couple not get married in the town as they have to go somewhere else to actually get married? In the pub, like everywhere else in Young it felt as if you could almost reach out and touch the past. It didn't require a great stretch of an intimation to see Claire here behind the bar pulling beers, and her still the husband, Alf,
drinking away his wages across the counter. They must have glanced at each other over the damp via mets and wondered about their future together. Perhaps they sensed it was finished before it had even started. Then Claire fell pregnant.
A short time ago, an American aeroplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima. It is an atomic bomb.
The Japanese have accepted our terms fully. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the Second Worldwide.
It's August nineteen forty five, and the world rejoiced when Japan formally surrendered on September two. Even in rural Young in western New South Wales, with its statues in the main street commemorating the sacrifice of local men in the First World War, they would have been celebrated too, blowing the froth off a cold one at the Australian Hotel. Less than two weeks later, on September thirteenth, nineteen forty five, Stuart John Reagan, the only child of Claien Alf, was
born in Young. It should have been a happy moment for the extended Reagan family in the immediate wake of peace across the world, but it appears nobody in the wider Reagan clan even you of the birth, just as very few were aware that Alf was even married. Alf built a ramshackle house for his new family by the Creek in smythe Lane a couple of minutes walked from his mother's house near the corner of Thornhill and Spring Streets. But there's a curious dispute in the family as to
whether alf Ever domiciled with his wife and son. I talked to Kelly about it and asked the question where was alf living when baby Johnny came home from the hospital.
Alf would have been with his mother. I don't think he ever moved out, to be honest.
So he might have still been living with his mother while five hundred meters away his wife and son are living by the creek.
Correct.
She does mention in and there's documents that he dropped in and out when he felt like it.
Maybe at the very beginning he might have lived with them when he built that, But I think he built the house for Aaron john Yeah. Dad certainly doesn't remember Uncle ELpH being anywhere but with his mother or away hearing.
So this was little Johnny Reagan's strangulated world in a small country town, his father coming and going, and his mother the colonel ruling the roost. Reagan attended the local Catholic school, Saint Joseph's, not far from his home, by the Creek from kindergarten to grade three. He then went on to the Christian Brothers College. We went and saw Father Alan Crowe at Reagan's old college. You could almost see the site of the former Reagan home from a
corner of the school playground. Father Crow had gone to the school himself. He explained how Reagan would have started kindergarten in nineteen fifty at Saint Joseph's and by year three transitioned to the nearby Christian Brothers College. In preparation for our visit, Father Crow had retrieved some old yearbooks from the library we set up in his office.
So he would have started king year nine fifty, wouldn't it.
Yes, you were behind John.
Worne fifty four, more than the year he started at Christian Brothers.
Reagan appeared sporadically in the yearbooks, a serious young boy. In his black and white class photographs, he did not smile in a single picture. Kelly tracked down several of Reagan's old schoolmates. Some remembered him fondly, others had a harsher assessment. However, all of them, bar none, recalled with horror, even after seventy years.
The Colonel.
One of those schoolmates was Brian English.
John was a slightly lonely, sort of angry kid, not many friends, and kids were a bit frightened of it. I'm not saying he was a bully, but you wouldn't cross it, and the teachers in the school were afraid of Claire. I remember on one occasion we used to play cricket in the schoolyard and kids would take its turn to be in the bat and John was not playing. He was just standing in the yard and Suddody belted a cricket ball right up in the air, came down and hit John right on the top of his head,
knocked him out there. He went down like a kind of bricks. I was standing about two meters away from when that happened, and one of the Christian brothers came over and another kid and I sat John up and we said, you know, his mother lives over there, and the teacher said, I'm not going there. Other kid and I took John hame to Claire and explained what had happened. And John was a bit adult, but we took him home. So the teachers didn't want to get involved with Claire.
The colonel still haunts Brian.
On another occasion, there's a bit of a gully that runs down behind the old house into the tree, and my brother, sister and I were there with him, playing around there, and Claire apparently had been calling for John to come out, and I can honestly say not one of us heard it, but we literally did not hear Claire. But the next thing, she came down the lane with a stockwhip and she felted him home. She drove him home like he was being so he had a tough mother, a tough tough lady.
David Pattinson, who sadly passed away shortly after speaking to us during the making of this podcast, was in the same primary school class as Reagan. He too heard about the monster that was the Colonel.
I remember.
He god.
He actually had a fight at school with Paul Gibson, who all gave him my bloody nose. Then another took him down to his mother and she's worked with the behind the bar and she came out with it with the cloth of the bar wiped his face, said you get out of him and get back there and give him a bleating nose.
Another of Reagan's school friends, Michael Rule used to have a sleepover at Reagan's place. When Johnny and the Colonel stated her parents farm just outside town. During Alf's drinking belts, Michael said if he and Johnny did anything wrong, Claire's father, Johnny's grandfather would chase them with a stock whip. Real confirmed that the Colonel also whipped Johnny. That violence, it seemed, had rubbed off on Stuart John Reagan, who told his
friend about his inner tiger. Michael explained it to Kelly.
Jarley, I don't think you played.
He used to take people because he.
Is to fly.
He liked people, and then again you don't know what city want and they have become a bisiness.
He wasn't that good dad either.
Short pees I said to me one day, I said, you had the shortest fo years to go a buy her, he said, he said, I've learned to control. When you control, Beena Tiger, you have got a lot of control.
Brian had pitiful memories of Reagan's father Alf.
The other thing you had with John was that Alf was apparently a good worker when he wasn't drinking. But Alf was a fiendish drinker. Other kids than I used to see Alf in the city in the gutter outside the Australia drinking lass flagans stuff. It wasn't there, it was there was a fortified wine and I saw in the one city in his own Europe in the gutter.
Another schoolmate, John Woods, or Woodsy as he was known as a kid, had fond memories of Reagan.
Were any Mass once and there were some kids talking in Mass and I sort of just turned around and said, hey, hey, stop it, we're in Mass and they jumped on my black told me I'm not the bloody bullied them or something like that.
Norlady was just so quiet.
Anyway.
Johnny came across and grab the bloke and I said, you're him alone. He's you know, he's not caught in any trouble, and he's just at different times.
He was always not protective of me, but courteous, plot whatever whatever.
Word you want to use.
He was just always just a nice bloke.
Kelly asked Woodsy about the allegations of animal cruelty against Reagan, pitchforking possums to death, killing kittens and dogs.
Now, when you were growing up with John, like at the school, did you ever see him hurt any animals?
Animals that's one.
Of the things they've portrayed him as that he as a child he was a psychopath and he used to kill animals, which I can find no proof of. He put a stake through a possum, is the allegation. It's not out of up and I would have murdered.
Look awesome.
I think it'd be more quite the opposite.
Of local Kevy. Powdery also had no recollection of Reagan and his so called psychopathic streak. He debunked the often repeated myth that Reagan, as a boy, had run a pitchfork through a possum. Kevy it was a class below Reagan at school and set up an ingenious lunchtime scam. When the marble craze hit Saint Joseph's in the nineteen fifties.
We were getting all the marbles in the school by having a game with all the holes in the board, and people used to fire their hole their marbles at it, and if they got it through the hole, you got paid the amount of marbles and whatever the number was on them and at the mess and it didn't go through, I got the marble, and after about two days I'd taken every marble out of the school and in the finish when I was taking the last of them and no one had any marbles, And then the bigger kids
in the classes above came in and was going to take the board and the marbles off me. Then Johnny came along and told them to piss off, that there was nothing wrong with what I was doing. You know, if you don't want to play, don't play. They all left. No one was going to come and stand it to me because Johnny said piss off. He was bigger than all the other kids. He just stood up for the littler kids.
So what does all this say about Reagan as a child, That he disliked bullies and defended smaller children, that nobody could recall his cruelty towards animals. As per the myth about him that has continued to this day, the Colonel we heard struck fear into adults and children alike, and alf was a booze sodden ghost. As for Johnny Reagan, his upbringing had been unstable from the outset. He was subjected to cruelty at the hand of his own mother.
She was physically aggressive towards him and encouraged him to be aggressive towards others. Her answer to a problem, it appeared, was violence. One serious byproduct of all this, as Michael Rule witnessed and others would experience firsthand through Reagan's brief but explosive career as an underworld figure, was his notorious short fuse, deadly force could seemingly come out of nowhere.
What's heartbreaking about this story is that on many occasions a young Reagan actually snuck out of the family home and young and went around to his paternal grandmother's house, that's Alf's mum. He would see his father there and be a part of a family, his family when his mother was working behind the bar at the Australian Hotel.
Kelly and I discussed this. So the picture we're getting here, from when he was a little boy to even leading up to his death in his late twenties is that you have a child sneaking around trying to connect with an actual family, but doing so and trying to conceal that connection from his own mother. What is that saying about the Colonel.
Well, it's not saying much about her, but it's also not saying much about some of the Reagans either, that they let that little boy stay with her when they knew what she was like?
Do you think they would have known or are we giving them the benefit of the doubt.
I think giving them the benefit of the doubt would be a bit rich because they would have had to have known. Pop and Uncle Jack were certainly pillars. They were well known in the community. They would have been around the pubs. They would have known what Claire was like. Talk would have come back to them for sure. Like It's only a small town. Population would have been around two or three thousand, I'd imagine.
So how do you hide a sister in law and a nephew in a town of that size.
I don't think you would have hidden. It was kind of they knew, but they didn't know, do you know what I mean?
Like wasn't talked about, or they probably didn't even know that it was a secret and Dad was at a different school.
Yeah, it's very weird.
But it's safe to say from the stories with her thus far, that the common element at the heart of this fractured family is Claire Reagan. Everyone's tiptoeing around the.
Colonel, absolutely tiptoeing or completely shutting her out. That marriage never had a chance.
The true depth of misery that was going on behind closed doors in Reagan's various childhood homes, and what we would say now were factors that contributed to a future life of violence would soon be made public. By the time Reagan was in his teens, the profession awaiting him was almost inevitable gangster. In April nineteen forty six, less than two years after they were married, Claire Reagan took out what was called a prohibition order against her husband
Alf in the New South Wales Supreme Court. We don't know the precise contents of the order, but given his problem with alcohol, it may have contained directions that he not be permitted inside a licensed premises purchase alcohol, or even that he stay away from his wife and nineteen month old son. Alf's drinking by this time was out
of control. According to court documents, Claire said that whenever he was in town, he would head to the pub on Saturday morning and returned home at night already drunk and with more alcohol supplies, including a bottle of rum and four bottles of wine, which he would drink throughout the night. If he ran out of supplies, he would head into town for more. We have used a voice actor to read some excerpts from actual documents in Claire
Reagan's divorce court case. She said of the prohibition order, according to those court documents.
One of his brothers approached me and informed me that he and the other brother had lodged an appeal and pleaded to me to stand down from the appeal, which I did. They said if he continued with the drinking bouts, they would take out a prohibition order themselves against him, to give him a chance. I did not turn up to the appeal.
Nothing changed, so on February five, nineteen forty nine, she petitioned for a divorce. They had been married for just over four and a half years and little Johnny was three and a half years old. The petition also asked that she be given custody of the child and weekly maintenance payments. During the hearing before Judge Byrne, the Colonel painted a scathing picture of husband alf as a habitual drunk who had been hospitalized several times for alcohol abuse.
She said he had lost jobs because of his drinking and that he regularly suffered the horrors.
I was going to work one morning and he came out and he asked me if he could see the child he was standing out in the rain, and I said yes, And he came in and he was scared out of his wits. He said there were men chasing him. I was a bit doubtful myself, and I did not know what he was talking about. He said, chaps with tortoise were chasing him. My father informed me he was in the horrors.
Her legal counsel, Mister Clements, then asked about Alf's temperament when he was drunk, when he was in these bouts.
What was his attitude towards you? Was he treatment kind? No?
It was not. If I said the wrong thing, I was likely to have a blow come at me. Would it be with a closed fist, yes, closed fist.
Did you receive them regularly.
Oh, yes, quite frequently.
Claire was also asked about a specific visit by Alf in October nineteen forty six.
What was his condition when he came to see you?
He was practically drunk the whole time I was there. He came home and he was very drunk and he hit me and as a result I had to bring Constable Bagnol to my assistance. He hit me with his fist on the face.
Did he do anything to the baby On that occasion.
He pulled the baby and me both out of bed. He pulled the tick right off the bed.
Claire told the court that Alf had struck her or attempted to pull out her hair more than twenty times during their short marriage. For the bulk of it, Claire and the baby lived with her parents on their farm on the edge of young On Boxing Day nineteen forty eight, there was another major drama. Claire told the court.
He came out on Sunday and had a bottle of beer and insisted on me having a drink. But I had never drink at all. I'm a non drinker. I did not mind him having a bottle, seeing it was Christmas time. With a result, I only thought he had a beer, and then I went to a neighbor's place. I was away about three quarters of an hour when it came back. A bottle of OPI rum was nearly empty on the table.
She said.
Alf was splayed across her bed, unable to speak. She got him off the bed and out of the house. Alf then roused, went to the back door and kicked it in. Claire went on.
My father interfered then and said you'll have to pay for that door.
Alf.
With a result, he pulled my father out of the door and put the boot in his head. I stood between them and he hit me again. My father had to go to the hospital. Needless to say, I hit my husband two on that particular occasion.
What did you hit him with with a bottle?
In the end, Judge Byrne decided unanimously in Claire Reagan's favor.
I accept the petitioner's evidence and all the other evidence in this case. She appears to me to be a particularly good type of woman, and I have no hesitation at all in accepting her evidence. I find the three issues in the affirmative.
The colonel's recollection of Alf in her evidence as some wife bashing, hair pulling, door destroying maniac while under the influence, didn't match the Reagan family's memory of him. He is Kelly talking to her father, Lindsey, who was Alf's nephew.
Now, Dad, can you tell me what you remember about Uncle Alf.
To anybody to say that Uncle Alf was violent, he is absolutely a joke. I knew him very well. I never ever saw him get upset, cranky, or even nasty because Uncle Alf never had a violent bone in his body. I used to see him on a very regular basis, because he would come in the office when he was in young and when he was saber, he would come in and say. One day he came in, he said to me something about I hadn't done the right thing,
or I'd done something wrong. He wasn't cranky, he wasn't nasty, and he walked out, and quarter of an hour later he came back in tears, apologizing to me that he went cook on me. Now, that was the sort of person he was. I don't think he ever swore at anybody in his life. I don't think he ever raised his voice to anybody. I certainly never heard him do it anyhow.
So what was true? There is ample evidence that Alf was a hopeless alcoholic, also that he had an endearing side to him, and this is the phrase often used by family and friends when he was sober. But Claire Reagan's court testimony about his alleged violence is excruciatingly emotive, detailed, and on the written page, even after seventy five years, difficult to dismiss. This was not the end of the affair.
For years in the.
Town of Young As Johnny Reagan got hit on the head by cricket balls at school and defended small children from bullies and got horsewhipped in public by his mother. His father Alf passed out in the town gutters, and the Colonel pulled biers at the Australian. As Alf lived with his parents and Claire lived with hers, their matrimonial
war continued to play out. When Johnny was six years old in nineteen fifty one, his father was sent to a mental institution in Morrissett, south of Newcastle for twelve months. The Colonel relentlessly pursued Alf for alimony payments. This went on for several years. Very few people in town by this stage would not have heard of the ongoing saga that was Reagan versus Reagan. Then came a major turning
point in the late nineteen fifties. Alf, hopelessly behind on his alimony payments, was sentenced to a short stint in Long Bay Jail in Sydney, and Claire and Johnny would
disappear from Young. The Colonel went from her parents strawberry farm outside a country town to a narrow townhouse in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, in the heart of Sydney's Red Light district, and Johnny would serve time in one of New South Wales's most fertile schools for future criminals, the Mount Penang Home for Boys in Gosford on the New South Wales
Central Coast. There he would meet boys who would become in just a few short years the toughest gangsters and most ruthless killers in the Sydney Underworld, men Reagan would mix with and do business with on the outside, and ad men who may have played a role in Reagan's
actual murder in distant nineteen seventy four. Families have their fair share of secrets, But when your clan has featured not just one of Australia's most notorious crook's killers in Stuart John Reagan, but a man whose murder has remained unsolved for fifty years, unexpected facts, hidden or forgotten can rise to the surface over time. For the Reagans, one story has never gone away. After Reagan's stretch at Mount Penang, he would return to the Colonel in Liverpool Street, primed
and ready for a criminal career. History shows he quickly went to work as a standover man in Darlinghurst and King's Cross, a teenage pimp and protector known for his explosive temper and extreme violence. He would soon come to the attention of Sydney's underworld boss Frederick Paddles Anderson meet his future de facto wife marg In a go go bar, and bash and bludgeon his way up the criminal ladder.
But exactly how did this boy straight out of a reformatory school almost instantly find himself a fixture in Sydney's shadowy criminal world. Kelly remembers a shocking family anecdote about the Colonel, a story that may explain, after half a century, how this country kid Cherrytown transformed overnight into a budding gangster.
So we've worked out with John it looks like he left young after year five because we can't find a year six photo of him, so he's obviously gone to Sydney. Then, it's just feels strange that if she's petitioning for prohibition and divorce in nineteen forty six, it's just two years after they've been married. Obviously they have stayed in town
for reasons unknown, and then they've gone to Sydney. It just seems a bit strange like we know that during her time in young she worked at the Australian Hotel, which to my mind was always just a local pub in town. But we've been told by the current owners of the Aussie Hotel now that grandmother worked back in the day and that it was actually a brothel, which I had not known, but had tied in with the things that the family had always talked about that when
she'd gone to Sydney, she'd set up a brothel. When John comes out of Nang the Boys Home, he's got a ready made job there.
His mother's got a brock a running.
She's already got girls working and that's where he got his start.
In the next episode of The Gangster's Ghost, the.
One strange thing at Mount Ernanga like thel, when you go in the front gate is a boomerang. I couldn't work out why they had this boomerang over the entrance. It was really quite simple and you come here, you're going to come back.
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