From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, May nine, twenty twenty five. The drama just keeps on coming. From Canberra. National Senator Jacinta NumPy in Proprice has defected to the Liberal Party and wants to be deputy leader behind would be Opposition leader Angus Taylor. As the recriminations and blame shifting for the coalition's loss continue and the now Benezi is making a brutal cabinet reshuffle.
Two ministers, Mark Dreyfus and Ed Husick are top of the hit list, and the Greens are looking for a new leader. After a tearful Adam Bandt blamed Liberal and Labor for losing his seat of Melbourne and denied he'd been too vitriolic about Israel. Terrifying gangster Johnny Reagan was assassinated in a Sydney backstreet more than half a century ago. There have always been rumors it was the first kill by corrupt detective and murderer Roger Rogerson, but the murder
has never been solved. Today we go inside The Australian's new cold case investigation, The Gangster's Ghost and a family search for answers.
Nobody coppers will I I will.
This is the real voice of one of Australia's most terrifying gangsters, Stuart John Reagan.
I'll give him plenty of amberdition. I'll that much that many coppers.
Are not funny.
Reagan, known as Shotgun Johnny, was murdered in a Sydney lane way in nineteen seventy four. He was twenty nine. Reagan was a pimp, a rapist, a murderer and a standover man. Raised in the country town of young abused by his mother and brutalized in one of the country's worst boys homes. Reagan believed the cops were out to get him.
It should happen in three of my Cashashtha Kyshire, before the car they find the clown witness.
Of course they were out to get him, but remember this was the era of deep seated police corruption, like crooked Detective Roger Rogerson, who had half of Sydney's crims in his pocket and the other half under his thumb. Even Roger found Reagan scary.
Lenny Macpherson said to me once, Matt, he said, Roger, he said, you can control a bad man, but you can't control a madman. And I've never ever forgotten that's a great qui.
That's Rogerson speaking to The Australians senior writer Matthew Condon before his death in twenty twenty four. That interview is in our newest investigative podcast, The Gangster's Ghost, which launches today, its host by Matt Condon. There's been speculation over the years Johnny Reagan's shooting in nineteen seventy four was Roger Rogerson's first kill. Before Rogerson assassinated crook Warren Land Franchi in nineteen eighty one, and long before he murdered drug
dealer Jamie Gow in twenty fourteen. All those crimes happened in Sydney's Inner West. Rogerson's turf at the scene of Reagan's death, bullets from three separate firearms, including the same kind of thirty eight caliber pistol issued to police at the time, were found. But it's a cold case and for the past five decades New South Wales police haven't seen too interested in finding Reagan's killers. His family wants the truth. Cousin Kelly Slater Reagan and de facto wife
Margaret Yates. Here's Kelly talking to Matt Condon.
You don't you get to a certain age where you just want to you just want to talk like I think he's at that age now where she probably want to and she sees how passionate I am about it.
Do you think she still has a residue of fear?
No, I think she's as tough as old bootstraps.
Now.
The Jenno who's led this investigation, Matthew Condon, spoke to the Front's Kristin Amiot.
I'd been aware of Johnny Reagan and fascinated by him for a very long time. He was one of the most notorious gangsters in Australian history, an extraordinary figure, and it was only twenty nine, so of course his life for me was fascinating. From what I could gather, the amount of damage he reeked in such a short period of time is mind boggling, and I realized over time that I was shocked that there'd been so little done about him in terms of revisiting his for one of
a better term his criminal career. It only lasted from say, when he was twenty one in nineteen sixty six to when he was gunned down in Marrickville in Sydney in September nineteen seventy four. So you're looking at eight years of building a reputation, cementing it and then causing so much havoc that he had to be eliminated. And I thought, why hasn't anyone done a full length book on this or a documentary? And then completely out of nowhere, Reagan's second cousin, Kelly Slater, contacted me.
The family members Reagan left behind all have their own motivations for participating in a podcast investigation about his life and brutal death. Of course, they want to know who killed him, but Kelly also wants to know if he really was as bad as he's been made out.
Well, honestly, I don't know exactly what we'll find. I know we'll find that he probably killed people. I've accepted that fact. Will we find did he kill that little boy? Was he a psychopath? Like they said? Is such stories that they tell about him?
Truth?
Why do you want to know this? She never physically met Reagan, but she was always fascinated by him because she had been a former New South Wales police officer and in fact being a Reagan actually caused her some grief in her early career because the logical question was what the hell is a Reagan doing in the New South Wales Police Service, So that reputation followed her like a long tale, so she wanted to understand him. Then when you speak to Reagan's surviving children, they want to
know more about their father. What was he really like? Was he the sort of hideous gargoyle and monster that's been depicted ever since his death in the press and in snippets in documentaries. And then you speak to Reagan's de facto wife, Margaret, and she questions, still to this day after fifty years, who killed him? Why she was left stranded after his death, His associates didn't come to help her or the family. She was left with three little children suddenly facing this void in the absence of
her notorious husband. So there are many different perspectives and different questions that different people are asking.
Kristin asked Matt what it was like getting to know the Reagans over those past few years.
So I won't say I was trepidacious. I thought I wonder what the Reagan family is actually like now. When I met Kelly, she was an absolute delight. Now runs a sheep farm with her husband Rodney, out near Young in southwestern New South Wales. Very down to earth, straight as a die competent, just one of those people that if something needs to be done, Kelly can do it. And I really liked her instantly because she's just so
honest and her motivations were very pure. Then I met Margaret Yates, Reagan's de facto wife, and what an absolutely wonderful woman too, so solid, honest, one of those great survivors,
if you like. She's been through a hell of a lot and coming away as the mother of three children of one of Australia's worst gangsters is no light burden to carry, and she's done it with great grace and she's been fantastic, as has their oldest child, Helen Reagan, an extraordinary person of high achievement in her own right. It's been a remarkable journey and an unexpected pleasure to now consider these people really good friends. That's been one of the great things.
Coming up. How our team of audio experts resurrected Johnny Reagan's voice using long lost tapes. Johnny Reagan spent his days wheeling and dealing over the phone and in person in King's Cross, the heart of Sydney's Underworld, and he captured some of those conversations on a real to real tape recorder which he'd rigged up to his rotary telephone.
One two, three, four, five.
Seven.
The tapes were hidden away or forgotten about following Reagan's death in nineteen seventy four. In the late eighties, they were unearthed in the home of his auntie. Here's Reagan's oldest daughter, Helen.
Anyway, Data's got me and so can you get up there and get me this stuff? So I brought it down. There was little tapes, and there was a little tape recorder that obviously Dad had had, and there was all these letter and stationery of.
On the old tapes, Reagan can be heard conspiring with criminal associates like Arthur Moore to skirt convictions and exact revenge against the cops.
What they do.
Loud, Yo, put the stuff in your cans?
Would you had it?
Ah?
Anything I want me to do, I will bend out of back.
What you do it for you now, I'm mean it. The recordings are scratchy and muddled in places, so that's where our audio experts Jasper Leik and Lea Samaglue come in. Here's Jasper.
I'm always on the lookout for new software, and I came across this one earlier in the year DX revive. It's called by accenties. Think of it a bit like a pencil sketch that's only been partially completed. Imagine if you could put that drawing into a machine and it would finish the picture for you and make it look better than you could have done yourself. It would add color and shadows and depth. This tool does that, but for old bad audio.
Leah then spent hundreds of hours restoring the tapes with the help of DX revive.
I was astonished by the tapes, over two hours of private, secret conversations Reagan recorded obviously back in the sixties with rustic equipment. For what purpose we can only guess. Was it insurance for himself? Was at leverage? And it is a million to one that you will do a story about a criminal who's been dead for half a century and then actually have the opportunity to hear him speaking. That still blows my mind, the fact that we can do that, and I think too for fans of true
crime podcasts. This is a very rare thing that is available here, and I think they'll be as thrilled as I continue to be. It is just so unique.
So can this fifty year old mystery be solved?
It is a cold case, which means it is in theory, a live and active murder case. I can say that the New South Wales Cold Case Homicide Unit did visit Kelly Reagan and her parents just in the last fortnight to clarify what police had done and what they don't see being resolved into the future. In this sort of instance, because of the passage of time, it would be incredibly
difficult to ever resolve this nineteen seventy four murder. The passage of time unfortunately allows conspiracies and rumors to spread, so you get this gigantic sort of mushroom cloud of falsity and made up yarns that are impossible to delineate the truth out of. Having said that, the beauty of the podcast is that it does throw itself out into the world and there may be just maybe someone out there who has a piece of information that might change the whole game, even after five decades.
Matthew Condon is a senior reporter with The Australian. Subscribers can listen to the first two episodes of our investigative podcast series, The Gangster's Ghost right now at Gangstersghost dot com dot au. And remember, you can access the nation's best journalism anytime at The Australian dot com dot au