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I can call it Australia's Barbary Coast, and there are a few pirates there for sure. Others call it sidon the city and the summer that around too, if you can believe what you read about it. The inhabitants make their living out of baker our dope, witch grant prostitutions, stripping them selling each other so larly.
It's King's Cross, Sydney in the nineteen sixties. Stuart John Reagan, the good Catholic boy from young in Country, South Wales and fresh from several stints in a boy's correctional home, is about to step out into hedonistic sin city. He's still a teenager. One of the nicknames hand written on his criminal record is the Boy, though he already has a police rap sheet that should belong to someone twice his age, not a lame record of shoplifting or petty scams,
but a Sultan robbery. At no point is he ever a lowly crime boss's dog's body, the Errand kid, or Smoko Fetcher. By eighteen, he's a brothel enforcer in charge of a handful of working girls. The jury is out on whether his own mother, Claire, known to all as the Colonel, set him up with a few working girls
to get his career started. From the outset, Reagan cements a reputation as a violent enforcer with a hair trigger temper, willing to eliminate anyone who gets in the way of his ambition to be the most powerful gangster, not just in Sydney but Australia.
There is a.
Famous police mugshot of Reagan that is still used today whenever his name pops up in the media. We have used it for this podcast. It has become iconic and shorthand for Australian gangster. Reagan is clean shaven. His thick, slightly oiled hair flicks up off his forehead like black cockatoo wings. His expression is sullen, his eyes in deep sockets that are shaded by his brows. Those eyes are seriously intense and offer menace. One glance at this photograph
and you think several things mean, violent, angry, stubborn. His face carries a peculiar and chilling contradiction both movie star good looks and a sense that he could hurt or kill you at will. The picture was taken in June nineteen sixty two, when he was just sixteen years old. It's difficult to reconcile family photographs of Reagan as an innocuous little country schoolboy just a few years earlier, and this teenage embodiment of pure hatred. You can already see
the grown up mobster he is to become. It's as if the gangster was fully formed inside that teenage body. It just needed to be let loose, and it was when he left the Gosford Boys Home and returned to the loving embrace of his mother, The Colonel in Darlinghurst.
A nineteen sixty four documentary called The Glittering Mile from the then Special Project's division of the National Nine Network and narrated by David Lowe, was so successful in capturing the seediness of the Cross at the time that it made the headlines for being rude and lewde.
And that's the way it is that King's cross.
But this is the other face of the cross, not.
So harmless, not so friendly, not so.
Easy to forget.
The night face that it alternately.
Laughing and scowling, seeking comfort or for guest sensation or satisfaction. Only here the search for something, whatever it is, goes on all through the night.
The key to Reagan, to his rage and violence, lies somewhere in those formative years between Cherrytown and when he was released from Mount Penang with its boomerang on the front gate, when he was let off the leash in Big bad Sydney. What happened during that period not only shaped his short life, but also planted the seed of his death. He was always going to die horribly, as his own mother predicted, he was never destined to make
old bones. What he did with just over a decade of adult life, from when he departed Gosford until he ended up on the Morgue slab is still being discussed half a century later. 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 four, Real Wild Child, The Wild One by Johnny O'Keefe. It could have been written with Reagan in mind. As for Sidney's King's Cross, a short walk from the house the Colonel shared with her sister Thelma in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, it was the perfect petri dish for Reagan's hyperkinetic some
would argue psychopathic ambitions. The cross, on a ridge between the cities well to do inner eastern suburbs like Paddington, Edgecliffe and Double and Rose Bays and the gritty wharves on the eastern edge of the CBD, had long been a magnet for artists and poets, for the sort of dope smoking, carefree beatniks whose idealism had drifted across the Pacific from the United States and found a home in the pubs and bars and coffee shops and blocks of
flats that line Darlinghurst and Bayswater Roads, Victoria and McLay Streets. It was no stranger to violence this place. In the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties, the infamous Razor Gangs, led by mobsters Kate Lee and Tilly Devine, slashed away at each other in the back streets and lanes. Their violent lives have been the basis for a virtual cottage industry of books, films and television shows like Channel Nines Underbelly franchise.
Judge says, Kate Lee must be the worst woman in Sydney.
No mention of Tilly Divine.
What do you want to be the worst woman in Sydney?
Do you?
I want to be recognized for what I am?
That era spawned another criminal monster. His name was chow Hays, an utterly ruthless thief, gunman and murderer, and he has been credited as Australia's first true gangster. He came into his own during the brutal Razor Wars in Sydney in the nineteen twenties. He was jailed for murder in the nineteen fifties and was fighting and stealing into old age.
Look at his police mugshot from the nineteen twenties and Reagan's from the nineteen sixties, and you'd swear they were father and son and they had something else in common. This is from journalist Adam Shan's television series is Suburban Gangsters.
Those gangs were the breeding ground for the criminals. And in fact what happened to Hayes was he found himself at age fourteen, after half a husand convictions for shoplifting, being sent to Gosford Boy's Home, where he met at age fourteen and a half murderers. It was the university for criminals, and he learned everything by the time he was seventeen about being a criminal.
By the time young Reagan was finding his way in the underworld in the early nineteen sixties, the Cross, that densely populated suburban patch of artists and freethinkers and troubled scribes was giving way to something else. Vice drugs and illegal gambling and prostitution found a receptive host in King's Cross, and then the virus, along with its enforces, simply took over.
It's a no man's land worth something for everyone he There's no boundaries to its name and no limits to its way of light. In fact, the Cross is not a place but a state of might.
Darlinghurst Road that ventricle from William Street to the El Alaman fountain and its many narrow offshoots was the beating heart of the Cross, and with its flashing neons and dark enclaves, was a landscape made for a gangster like Stuart John Reagan. Reagan embodied its state of mind, no boundaries, no limits to its way of life. If Reagan hadn't, by chance, been born into that time and place, it
would have created him anyhow. With its rich night life, hatering for everything from cabaret to cocaine, supper clubs to prostitution, it attracted suburban punters and overseas visitors, and the men and women who would prey on them and their cash.
From its hut, you can go about half a mile in any direction before you run out of the lights into the darkness of the outside world. A half mile there and back, a glittering mile of dreams, delusions, hopes and headaches.
A glittering mile of dreams. And no other gangster in Sydney at the time had bigger dreams than Reagan. The famous brothel Madame Shirley Brifman, who arrived in Sydney from Brisbane in the early nineteen sixties and built a hugely lucrative Empire had several run ins with Reagan. The run ins is a bit mild. On one occasion, he actually
tried to murder her. We'll hear more about Shirley in future episodes of this podcast, but Briffman said in a police interview that Reagan was not happy just trying to control wece in Sydney. He wanted to run it right across the country. He had a brain for business, both legitimate and illegal. He would go on to orchestrate one of the most successful scams in Australian history, but not yet. As a teen thug, he traded in violence and fear.
Stories of his psychotic behavior, however they may have changed or been exaggerated over time, are still legion.
I remember a story about Reagan being in King's Cross with a friend and he'd come across what he'd had a disagreement with, bashed himtok pulp and as the guy lay on the ground mortally wounded, Reagan turned to his friend who was smoking a cigarette, made him give him the cigarette, and he stubbed that lit cigarette in the person's eye. That's how vicious Reagan was.
That's veteran Sidney crime reporter Norm Lipsyn. In journalist and author Adam Shann's television documentary series Suburban Gangsters.
John Reagan built up a stable of prostitutes. He made quite a lot of money out of that arm, and he controlled them through fear and violence. If he found out that there was a customer who was misbehaving or wasn't paying, they'd be beaten within an inch of their lives.
And this is the late New South Wales detective Roger Rogerson who would die in jail as a convicted murderer, also appearing on the Shan documentary.
He was a pretty solid luck.
He was pretty hard and you could not believe how strong as basket was. If he grabbed you, he had you, you couldn't get away.
I spoke at length to both Norm Lipson and Roger Rogerson before the latter was arrested, charged and ultimately convicted of murder several years ago about Reagan. As a young reporter in Sydney, I looked up to Norm. It was the sort of older crime journalist who had a million contacts and always seemed to get the best scoops. It's
a measure of the power of the Reagan name. Still that Norm expressed some concerns about offering his thoughts on the dead gangster for this podcast and whether there might be repercussions from the Reagan family.
Well, I know what I'm coming after me. I've still got a lot of hard friends. But that's not the point, you know.
In a career filled with underworld characters, he clearly remembers Reagan.
I grew up in the Southeastern suburbs and Reagan used to knock around the Bondai Junction. I knew people who knew him, and they used to tell me stories about him, horrendous stories. And I was in their company and met him a couple of times. He got the nickname the Magician, and it wasn't because of his wizardry. It was because he made people disappear. He used to beat people up
for nothing. A friend of mine who knew him, tell me a story about how he was upset with somebody, a guy once, and he was so upset that he went and bashed this guy, put a dog collar and a chain around his neck and made him walk to a pub on all fours and sat him in the pub with this dog collar and chain like a dog. To humiliating things like that this is a fellow who used to torture and kill animals.
I tell you a funny thing. When he was a kid, he was an only child in young in country New South Wales. We've spoken to people who witnessed this. His mother chained him to a post in the backyard and she would flog him with a stock whip.
Oh no, wonder he turned out the way he did. But he embraced violence. He embraced it. He loved it. As I say, he embraced violence and random violence. It didn't matter. He just loved hurting people.
Norm agreed that Reagan had big plans for his future. I've looked at the record of interview that Briffman did in seventy one when she blew the whistle, and she said that Reagan wanted to be not just the boss of New South Wales but all of Australia. He seemed to be very ambitious.
I think he just wanted to be revered and feared by all, and that's probably what led to his eventual demise. This guy just wanted to take over everything, to be feared by everybody and bowed to and revered, And a lot of people suffered before he.
As for Rogerson, he had no doubt that Reagan was an absolute psychopath. Perhaps it took one to know one. Rogerson argued that there were three uncontrollable criminal maniacs on the loose during the heyday of his policing career in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The first was Brisbane born Raymond Ducky O'Connor, shot dead in a Sydney nightclub in nineteen sixty seven, supposedly by the mob boss Lenny Mister Big McPherson standover man. Ducky had a formidable reputation for
being a loose cannon. Police described him as mad and crazy. The second was another Brisbane criminal, John Andrew Stewart. Stuart, a graduate of yet another notorious boy's home, Westbrook outside to Woomba, west of Brisbane, was also considered by fellow criminals and detectives alike, a complete psychopath who could and did kill at will. Incredibly, Stuart's own short and violent life became significantly entangled with Reagan's, and you'll hear more
about that soon. The third on Rogerson's lunatic list was, of course Reagan. The type of criminals so unhinged, that they became dangerous not just to the public and police, but the underworld itself.
Lenny McPherson said me, watch Matt, he said Roger, he said, you can control a bad man, but you can't control a madn forgotten.
That's a great quotion in it.
That came from Annie McPherson, and I've created a few times, you know, because that's exactly what he said. And it's fucking right, because these blokes are just as dangerous to the criminalal use who is that terminology? They are more sometimes dangerous to them than to the public.
And what a middle year it was when Reagan was trying to make his way to the top. If Australia ever had a Gilded Age of gangsters, then this was it. Michael Duffy is a publisher, broadcaster and the author of several crime novels, as well as two classic works of historical non fiction that lay bare the Reagan era in Sydney World War Noir and Sydney Noir The Golden Years,
both of which he co authored with Nick Horden. Michael explained that there were a number of reasons why Reagan flourished as a mobster, in the nineteen sixties and into the nineteen seventies.
Was that policing was much harder.
Back then, it was much harder to lock people up legally anyway, because police didn't have the resources they have now. If you think about things like modern forensics, DNA, CCTV, phone tapping, none of this was available. I mean there were technological there were scientific limitations, and so really the most powerful weapon in a CoP's armory when he was usually he was trying to solve a crime was an informer.
Because the crooks would blab about what they'd done. The informer would come and tell the detective, and the detective would know because he knew he had a reliable informer, he'd know who did the crime, but he couldn't really prove it.
Really, even if you're an honest cop. Honest maybe in inverted commerce, in order to get convictions, they had the load and they had the verbal, and they loaded evidence onto the criminal they knew had done the crime, or they verbal them they basically signed made them. You know, well, they.
Drew up their own false confessions for these crooks because it was the only way of locking them up.
The police verbal was the bane of being a criminal. Reagan went on about the verbal in his secretly recorded phone calls with other criminals.
Interesting, you're laying in the third flight, where can they picture?
Yeah?
Right, Actually, are you a riad of us? Had they led you?
Duffy went on.
So if even honest cops for doing this thing called noble cause corruption, you can imagine the opportunities that then opened for dishonest cops to come along and yeah, just start doing whatever they like and basically start letting off the crooks they wanted to let off, and loading up the competition of those crooks the other crooks, and that led to these alliances between crooks and cops, such as the famous one between Lenny McPherson and Ray Kelly, who
was the primary leading cop in the early sixties, which did so much to contribute to corruption. So these things are really important.
According to Duffy. Reagan also landed in Sydney's Inner East at a time of social change. From the mid nineteen fifties, suburban clubs in New South Wales were allowed to feature poker machines, effectively transforming them into mini casinos. The money flooded in. With that cash injection, the clubs flew in famous and famously expensive entertainers from around the world. You could see great singers or lavish musicals in your local clubs. King's Cross lost its appeal.
And so the Cross basically repurposed itself, and throughout the sixties and seventies it gradually turned from a bohemian entertainment precinct, you know, into a sleezy place selling sex and later on drugs, and that sort of led to the rise of the Cross as a focal point for crime, especially towards.
The end of the sixties into the seventies.
As for the criminal top dogs who prowled this new sleezy King's Cross as Reagan arrived on the scene, Michael Duffy says one particular mob boss cast a huge shadow over this era, and yet very few people have heard.
Of him, Paddles Anderson.
He had very big feet, or some people say I had big hands, but I think it was big feet.
So Paddles was a somewhat shadowy figure.
But from what we've been able to work out, he was by far the most influential person, probably to the sixties and into the seventies. And it's a mark of his skill that he remains so little know. Abe Saffron is a more interesting figure because I mean he was almost like a real estate figure slash would be entertainment entrepreneur who just happened, who just had to get engaged in a bit of crime, because you had to if you're in that line of business.
But yeah, there's a fascinating photo I have of Reagan cutting a cake at Checkers for his twenty first birthday, which would have been September nineteen sixty six, and sitting opposite him at the table is Frederick Paddles Anderson.
That's a good photo to have, But it's.
Interesting how a twenty one year old just turned twenty one could have this huge crime figure at his little birthday party at Checkers.
It is extraordinary. It suggests that who is very well regarded, doesn't it.
Yeah, you know, there's discussions in the family about Uncle Paddles and they just seem to have been a relationship there that I can't get to the origins of.
But no, and we've been it's been very difficult to find out anything at all about Anderson. I mean, he spent some time in Melbourne, he came back. He was powerful. But it's extraordinary how secretive he was. If you talk to older crooks Carbonat and people like that, a lot of them talk about Anderson has been this very influential figure.
Would that suggest that he's one of the Master's apprentices in that Anderson has in a way taking him under his wing in a sense. Or is it that's stretching too far.
I think that sounds likely because there had to be an implicit agreement amongst all these powerful crooks that they each had their particular area, and if Rogan was, you know, it was making ways and everything, there's no way they would have let him do that without trying to draw him in, as it were. I'm not aware of any you know, any crooks that are operating at a high level that were completely independent. I think at some point they all had to form a sort of working agreement.
By the time Stuart John Reagan was released from Mount Penang around nineteen sixty three, the Swinging sixties were well underway. It was during this time that he secured what may have been the one legitimate job in his short life, as a bouncer at the fabled Whisky You Go Go nightclub in William Street near King's Cross's Magic Mile of
strip clubs and prostitution dens. The Whisky was managed by a man called Ivor Balmaine, the father of Revel Balmain, a sex worker who famously vanished and was presumed murdered in Sydney in the nineteen nineties. Back in the nineteen sixties, Balmain trumpeted the whisky as a beacon of respectability amidst the sodoms and gomorahs of the Cross. The club was popular with American soldiers on R and R from Vietnam, and Balmaine had some very firm ideas about the sort
of women he expected to see in his club. This is from an ABC four Corners report in nineteen sixty eight.
We like the family type of girl, a night type of girl. You know, I don't particularly like these type of girls that people say hang around the Cross. That's a much used term, of course, But a girl that I think I'd be glad to talk to, to screen them at all in a way. Yes, we have two permissionaires. We have two men of the rope down just before they're going to the dining room. Then myself, we like to see a girl that looks pretty wide open, feminine, type.
Nice hair, hasn't got that vindictive block on our face?
How do you actually measure them? What sort of yardstick do you use for a respective ODB?
I don't like these. Sweat has very heavy tan bag makeup. His atrocious looking glass. I like to see a nice way out girl, a good little swinger. It's neatly dressed. I suppose that's about the only thing I'd looked for. Really.
Reagan was one of those men down on the rope near the front doors, as iver Belmaine put it, and it was while working at the Whiskey that he met perhaps his one and only true love, Margaret. The first time he laid eyes on her, he was smitten. She would, he knew, immediately become the gangster's wife. Margaret Reagan's wife
and mother to three of his children. Margaret, the suburban Sydney girl whose life was changed one night when she made the innocent decision to go dancing with a girlfriend at a nightclub, the Whiskey, a go go in King's Cross on Friday night. Margaret, daughter to respectable parents, who went into that famous club for a bit of fun and stumbled almost literally into the arms of Stuart John Reagan. Marg has never talked in public about her relationship with Reagan.
She has never said a word outside the family about being the gangster's wife until now. I sat down with Marg for the first time out at Kelly's sheep farm in Young Deep in Reagan Country. Kel used the opportunity of Marg's visit to bring the entire clan together, her brother Jeff, some of her children, Daniel and Carli, and it had been quite a journey for Marg, who lives on the New South Wales central coast. She hadn't been
too young in years. As we settled down to talk to Marg in the farmhouse kitchen, Kell and the family started drifting out of the room to give us privacy, but Marg extended her arms and called everyone back in. She wanted her family around her when she told her story.
I don't want to keep repeating myself for everybody. It's better to sell everyone here. Okay, that's I want that, Okay, So what do you want to know now?
Marg grew up in a modest house in Arncliffe, southwest of the Sydney CBD and not far from the airport at Mascot.
I was seventeenth and I met this girl that was a hairdresser, and she asked me, Mark, do you want to come to the city, And I can't tell my father, is how am I going to do? I lied, Indeed, I've never been out of ever in the King's cross Wing Street, nothing in my whole life, never been anywhere. I was the shyest person. You wouldn't think that now. I came from an ordinary suburban house that was made of fiber and stinkham hot in summer, cold in winter.
That's how we leave. So anyhow, we decided we go to the city. So we went to the city in the train. So we trotted off to the city and then we decided to go to a place called Whiskey a Go. So Whiskey a Go Go in those days was like a disco. So we get to the front door and there's a glass there like this. As you go down the steps, it was like steps.
Was he like a bouncer or a doormant or a doormanus?
I was very naive, but then very nive. And as I'm going to go, he's come over to me and he's gone.
What's your name?
And I didn't need to and he's gone, I'm coming down I'm going to have a dance with you later.
Oh my god, this is not this is you. Who is this guy? What did he look like to you? Handsome? Handsome, very strong looking.
Man's sort of stubby but strong build, beautiful eyes, very good looking man.
I never I wasn't. I wouldn't know.
Like if you said to me, is that we're good looking? Man who knows says, I wouldn't know what you were talking about. Okay, So I'm gone to my friend. Oh what's that all about?
Sort of thing?
So how goes downstairs, and about half an hour to an hour lady came over again. And because he'd been working there, I didn't think he was supposed to be taking the patrons and dancing on the floor. Okay, well, when I think about it now, he comes up to me again and he leans over and he says to me, I want to see you again.
I'm going to marry you.
This is croop.
I think, what creep, But I've never experienced that. I'm going to marry you. Yep.
And I said to my friend that man just said, and that man I didn't know who was. So we stayed there for a little while and we left and he asked me for the phone number, and I didn't give it to him. But if I remember back then, I think my friend ain't give him the phone number. So weeks went past, weeks went past.
The ponies.
And it was his pursy and he said I want to see you with you and that's how it.
Also, the naive young Mark was nervous, not.
About the type of person reading was. She knew nothing about him, just his brazenness and how her family might react to this nightclub bouncer suddenly on the scene. On the surface, it all appeared entirely respectful. On their first day, a young man called John was coming to take Margu for a pleasant sunday. What could possibly go wrong?
And he used to travel from then Paddington Well down to unc look by train, knock on the door and say on John, eaton lot and drink taking or saying that's okay. He would say, mother, that's okay. Is it's a Sunday today, and so you make sure she's home by five o'clock. That's what's the rules?
Did you stick by the rule?
Yes?
From the train where we traveled to Paddington. At that time he didn't have a car, so he used to come out and get me and we're traveling and we'll go to Paddington.
Marg ended up outside the house in Liverpool Street where Reagan lived with his mother. Marg wasn't invited inside on that first date or many to follow, but she could hear from inside the house the ravings of the woman she would come to know as Reagan's mother. It was the first time marg had encountered the cyclone that was the.
Colonel Haddington had this tree out the front of this house, and he would say, so it won't bear my mother. I'm just going in to change my clothes my mother, and that's here. And I could hear this woman in the house saying, you don't bring any ass lucks in the ear or whatever. You know, you know, she's not allowed to and blah.
Blah blah blah.
I was like, what's going on? And she would say that every time that I would wait out the front. She did it to me about four or five times, and to one day I says.
I don't want to go in your bloody house. It's that day on I was allowed in.
Now, what young Margaret didn't know was that, despite her suitor's youth, he already had a burgeoning criminal record. On January twenty four, nineteen sixty three, aged just seventeen, Reagan was charged with living on the earnings of prostitution charges dismissed. March twenty two, nineteen sixty three. Charged with assault charge dismissed April five, nineteen sixty three. Charged with selling liquor
without a license, fined thirty pounds. April twenty six, nineteen sixty three, Charged with the use of indecent language, fined three pounds. July three, nineteen sixty three, charged with a salt occasion in actual bodily harm. Here he is committed to an institution, which may have been his first stint in the Gostford Boys Home. Then in nineteen sixty four, the year he met Marg, he was charged on April twenty six with speeding in a vehicle, driving without his
ELM plates, and driving unaccompanied by a licensed driver. He was fined a total of thirty four pounds. This might explain why he had to resort to public transport when he was first dating Mark. In July nineteen sixty four, he was also charged with a salt but again the case was dismissed. Meanwhile, he pursued the attractive brunette from Arncliff.
So in the early days of the courtship, what things did you do?
Let's go swim in?
Where'd you go swimming at Bondi Because of the time that we had for me leaving my home to come into the city to go so's we didn't have much time. So it's just more like hanging around time because he really didn't do nothing. It was either him going in and changes go. Once I was allowed in that house, perhaps soul would have something to eat, and that's when I met Thelma and I met his mother. The house it was a very dark house because it was something detached,
true story. It was filled with older type dark furniture. Had a kitchen with a round table that you know in the olden days, and my mother used to do that.
She used to meet the.
Sauce in the paper and salt and sometimes a bother on the middle of the table, and the conuments in the middle of the table would stay there all day with a table cross underneath it. Very small, but I had an upstairs, so John's room was upstairs.
I can't at the front. At the front front.
Very rarely I was allowed to go upstairs to that room, not with erdie, not that I did. I never went there upstairs to that room.
It was at this time that marg finally met the Colonel Regan's domineering and formidable mother face to face. From the outset, their relationship did not bode well for the future.
In the matter.
What did she look like sound like?
Can you describe her? Angry? Always angry?
Was she a big, big, white, small woman.
She's a German Irish background and very solid book, very strong, rookly except woman. So she was a very angry woman, screaming all the time, just screaming at him. What are you doing John or whatever? You're not screaming all the time. But her sister, Delma. It was just like a little person in the corner that had no sale or nothing in even though that was her house. The control was not only to her son, and she controlled John for many many years. I don't think it was the biggest
gangster or whatever she had the control. John was still controlled by his mother. Even at the latest station in his life. He would say, they're pay any attention to him, It's okay.
It's all right.
But she could be quite hurtful. I think she kept for him, but carrying and John and Yer inst too different closes.
And bit.
Reagan in many ways was still just a kid, and Margaret saw that side to him very early in their relationship.
If I wasn't allowed out on a Sunday and my father saying not going next men and derby a ambulance at the front of the house. My father I never ran an ambulance or he would bring a fibrigade there, and all the time he was up in what they call the red phone boxes. Then I knew that he was there, but I couldn't say anything. I didn't tell my parents it's John doing this because I wasn't allowed out. So he used to be up there and he ring the ambulance, he ring the fibrigade, he ring.
The police. I think he didn't want to. My father was like pulling his hair out. What's going on here? He better not be that boy that you're hanging around with.
It.
Better not be that guy well with a big him, you know what I mean. They were fun times. It was funny.
It was funny, and he'd gone, you tell your father you better be out out next week. Well, I'll be doing the same thing. Again, he had that little bit of devil went in him. That was funny and interesting.
You know what I'm saying.
To Mark.
He was an interesting, devilish young man who had not one but two jobs when him he was employed, obviously had the whiskey he goes.
Did he ever talk about his work or no?
He also had a job as a toe jack.
You never heard that.
So he would have been all around.
Those streets in Paddington, across the industreet or whatever.
He would have been all around me.
I didn't meet the monster, Mark says of the young Reagan, but the monster was evolving slowly but surely. In late nineteen sixty five, Reagan was charged with rape. Police alleged that Reagan nineteen, a laborer of Victoria Street, King's Cross, along with two accomplices, had raped a nurse in the Cross Earlier that year. Police said Reagan and his two offsiders had let to scar the seventeen year old woman's male companion with a hot poker if she didn't submit
to intercourse. During a court hearing leading up to the rape trial, Reagan complained that he'd been bashed by police. I'm not a criminal, he told the court. I was asked to go in a lineup. When I refused, I was bashed by five policemen. I didn't do anything to anybody. Reagan was ultimately acquitted of the rape charge, but he was keeping some dangerous company in the mid nineteen sixties.
You might remember corrupt cop Roger Rogerson talking about the handful of certified psychopathic criminals that were around in his day. Reagan was one. The others were John Andrews Stewart and Raymond Ducky O'Connor. Stewart and Ducky were both young Brisbane crooks down in Sydney trying to cut it with the big boys. Stuart, when he wasn't behind bars, was inseparable from his good mate and fellow reformatory boy James Finch.
Ducky O'Connor would not be around for long. He was shot dead in a nightclub in Sydney in nineteen sixty seven in a brazen and totally insane attempt to assassinate underworld heavy Lenny Mister Big McPherson. Ducky was shot in the head. McPherson didn't cop a scratch. The obituaries weren't kind to Ducky. Crime reporter Bill Archigord wrote in The Sun it was as if a mad dog had been
put down in the interests of public safety. He was mean, vicious and crazy, a standover who would sooner threaten you with death than say Giday. John Andrew Stewart and Stuart John. Reagan's lives would, however, become messily and almost fatally entangled. Stuart was also mean, vicious and crazy, committed to Callen Park Asylum in Sydney after bashing a police officer unconscious. The newspapers reported that Stuart had been certified as insane during one of his stints in Longbay Jail. He was,
to put it mildly, an habitual offender. Stuart and Ducky O'Connor, before Ducky had his head partially blown off by McPherson, were charged with raping two prostitutes in the mid nineteen sixties. When the matter came to court, Reagan threatened one of the women with death if she appeared as a witness. She didn't. Here's an assessment of Stuart from people who knew him from the ABC podcast Danny's Inferno by journalist Frank Robson.
John was feared he was very fair mane. He's such a strong, tough bugger and he.
Could fight, you know.
No, he was a pretty intractable prisoner as well.
You know, he was a hard case inside and everyone feed him inside, including the prison officers, just they couldn't manage him.
He was just too handy, you know.
People like Stuart were Reagan's associates. As he was pranking Margaret, circling her as his future wife and clearly steering her clear off his subterranean gangster life. He was also playing the field when it came to women, carousing his way through the cross with thieves and working girls and promising them the world. In the course of my investigations down the years, I was lucky enough to become friends with
a woman called Dorothy Edith Knight. Dorothy was a self confessed knockabout and did time in jail for fraud before starting work as a sex worker in Brisbane and Sydney in the nineteen sixties. She would go on to become the lover of corrupt Queensland detective and member of the so called rat Pack of crooked cops, Glenn Hallahan, ultimately in trapping him in a sting operation, but Before that,
she plied her trade in Sydney. Her best friend back then was a thief called Gloria, And through Gloria, Dorothy met Stuart John Reagan. She used to see him in the saloon bar of the old deco Mayfair Hotel on Bayswater Road in the Cross. Tell me about Stuart John Reagan.
He used to drink occasionally at the Mayfair. And if you knew anything about this Gloria, if you knew what charges she'd been up to, it could be the same person. She was on with him for a lot of years, but as she never lived together and they used to have terrible fights and he'd blacken her eye, and no, she was a petty thief flog. I met her in jail in Bogga Road and they stole it us safe and they put it on the back of the body use and coming down the range they were taking it
into the bush to blow it up. The blood is safe. Couldn't get it open, so they had it in the use and it fell off the frecrant and the bloat behind them ranged the cops and I think they got eighteen months each. She knew every cream, She knew him all don't worry.
She knew what was what?
So you met Reagan in the Mayfair in Sydney.
Yeah, in the Mayfair. Gloria broke up with him eventually, and he used to come in quite often and have a drink. And I knew he liked me, and actually I liked him.
I liked him too.
Anyway. I think I said something to Glory and I said, look, he's invited me out, and she said, well, body go with him. So she said, I'm never going to have anything more to do with him. She said, the thing I'll tell you is that he's mixed up in a lot of stuff. She didn't tell me exactly what, and she said, he's got a very very bad temper and if he gets on the grove heavy look out. If he's in one of his moods, you'd give you a
black eye as quick as a look at you. So I went out with him and I finished up going to the cop with him, and I liked him. He never did the wrong thing by me. I have to say. He used to go to this night club in Sydney and he had a lot to do with the manager there, and he would take me there for drinks and maybe something to eat, and he disappeared for half an hour and in the office with this bloke. So I don't know really what they're up to. I'll tell you it
was caught. There's something cat, the pink pussy Cat.
Yep.
Yeah, I think it was on the corner there near the Mayfair. I'm pretty sure that was the one.
Yeah.
How do you remember how he dressed? It was just like the suits in the sixties.
You know, pretty respectable. Yeah, loved a gamble. I know that he got pretty heavy on the races and used to go to a lot of these nightclubs and there was a room out back and you could play cards the big money.
He was into that a lot.
Do you know if he carried a gun?
Glory told me he did.
He had it in his you know where they put a thing around your leg, down the bottom. He carried a little gun there.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure she did a lot of jobs with him. I'm almost certain, but I can't tell you what because I don't know.
Well, Reagan never mistreated Dorothy. She saw the damage she inflicted on her friend Gloria.
God.
He used to go off. She walked into the Mayfair and she had the biggest black eyron cup of her teeth out and said, oh, bashed the shit out of me last night.
That's the end of it.
But she kept going back.
But in the end, I mean she really had had enough, because she said she was so terrified in the end that in knocker and she hit her head and she died and she lived.
Dorothy said she was aware at the time that Reagan had a partner, Margaret.
Yes, that's right.
Knew about her. Yes, I knew about that.
Did Gloria ever talked about Margaret?
No, she didn't like the idea, of course, because I mean he told her that he loved her more than anyone else, and he more or less told me the same thing, that they were going to separate. She's still alive.
She's still alive. How would she be she'd be a mid to late seventies.
Oh, okay, I'm wonder hash. I hope she got on her in life.
Dear Dorothy passed away last year after an extended illness. For such a petit woman, she lived a big life and took a lot of extraordinary stories of the underworld with her. Around this period when Reagan was playing the field, a strange entry appeared on his police record. On November sixteenth, nineteen sixty six, Reagan was charged at Sydney's Central Police Station with breaching the Wireless Act to wit being in
possession of a radio transceiver. He received a fine. This is interesting because it showed that Reagan was what we might call today an early a doctor of technology, not just because it satisfied his feverish brain, but because it might be useful to further or protect himself and his criminal enterprises. I rang my old mate, former Queensland detective and undercover operative, Jim Slade, and asked him to try and explain the charge. What on earth did you have
to do to contravene the Wireless Act. Jim said that prior to nineteen fifty seven, if you had a radio in your home, you were required to have a license at two pounds per year. After nineteen fifty seven you were required to have a license for your radio and TV. If no license was held, a substantial fine was imposed. From nineteen fifty eight onwards, the fine was fifty pounds. Jim said this was used by police to hurt someone who they wanted to harass. Police were inspectors under the Act,
and to be ourseholes. Jim said they would use this, along with sections of the Vagrants, Gaming and Other Offenses Act to come down on targets and make life difficult. Being charged under the Wireless Act by police would have been to load the bastard up, said Jim. And we now know Reagan was partial to secretly recording phone calls, as well as taking mini recorders into the field and capturing conversations with other people, including his sex workers, criminals, and police.
Season in masur if, I said, John, look, I want you to sign this.
I want you to do that.
Here's the money, here's that he done it. Do you understand, Give.
Me the Simons Civilly and then he can't take criminalation, get the civil summons.
On his official police consorting cards, the very first one carries a warning in capital letters, believe to carry tape recorder concealed under his coat to tape police going to.
Be as loud as that talks. It's recording and what we're saying here and be picked up very it's recording.
Now. While we took three five.
By the time Reagan hooked up with marg he was a whiz with those clandestine recordings. Put in the war high. In some of the tapes, you can actually sense marg or his mother, the Colonel somewhere in the background. Reagan will bark out and aside with his usual scatter gun speed during a phone conversation.
Yeah, I wouldn't wear makeup.
You're pretty well, you're pretty all.
In one instance, it seems he's deciding on what to have for breakfast.
The other thing, I won't belong well, well, watch the radiator, Jesus.
Yeah.
And the constant in all the tapes, the one thing that everything gravitates around is determined by and ruled by money.
He signed and he's brother told him to sign it, and then his brother said, you should have made the document more water to I'd say that he's shyl the diamonds to you. I said, now, I'm going to do it legally. But no, Blue, I've given him a kind period to give him the money back.
He doesn't.
He loses the money, he said, all right, he's brothers.
All right, I'll see he doesn't get I remember once before, when he first insured him, his idea was to have him stolen or get bashed or robbed off him, and then.
He was going to report them. Starle un claiming insurance.
Remember that Reagan's mad brain never stopped cooking up money making schemes. He quickly graduated from the ten Knuckles school of business to scams that teetered on the edge of legitimacy. By the mid to late sixties, he was well and truly on his way to becoming a millionaire gangster. As you will hear in the next episode of The Gangster's Ghosts. That was not before Reagan hit a few snags and
dodged a f few bullets along the way. He'd be involved in an almost Wild West shootout in a major Sydney street in broad daylight with fellows psychopath John Andrew Stewart, and he'd be pursued by police in a high speed car chase.
It's coming back.
I looked Graven Street to my right and what he done? He'd followed me so soon? Yes, So then a chase his shirt. I've chased him in my car and we've had a about the five hundred around Kentington, and he's gone a street called day Avenue and stops one at the top.
And I was screaming up and had to stop me.
When he's turning in a punchl Avenue. So I've fired four shots, Chaddy.
Well, unfortunately I was firing right handed. I'm left handed. So one of them was an air wing and three of them penetrated the back of each car.
Anyway, he got away.
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