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.

I think his life changed, He changed completely.

Sometimes in life greed and money and to be powerful came me into his world.

I think that he loved it.

He loved what he was doing.

He loved the sense that he was mixing at those people.

So biggest SMIs stata you have made in his life.

This is Margaret Reagan, the gangster's widow.

In the fifty years since Stuart John Reagan was murdered by three, possibly four gunmen in the back streets of Marrickville in Sydney, Mark has never spoken publicly about Johnny, about the gangster life, about Reagan's association with some of the most dangerous criminals of his era.

She was with him for more than ten years, through the most volatile period of his career, to an hour or so before his death.

She had three children with him, and she has never in her own words spoken out of school.

Today, she still finds it difficult to understand why he changed from a decent young man to thug and petty crook to a violent mobster.

She still wrestles with it.

She saw the monster coming in the late nineteen sixties.

It all started at home, behind closed doors.

And it's still incredibly painful for marg.

Yeah, a good person when it was good.

But if he was angry and things like that, which I've seen several occasions, I can honestly say that I had not experiencing one occasion that he beat me.

To forgive me when he hit me.

Beating me beat me was that early on, but that time ran about that time.

What happened when he struck you in that incident?

What happened?

You're not listening to me.

I want you to do this.

I can't remember what was about.

I can't even remember.

And he struck me across the first Yeah, and I ended up needing.

Anything broken.

No, and I'll have him at my bed betting mean to fitness.

And I also had a policeman come and say, you told you now I know who did this to you.

I don't know what you're talking about.

We had to need to survive.

That was my life.

I was taught you've got nothing to say and look at number plates in the back of my revision.

Just to go out on an ordinary day out, that was my life.

But you didn't grow up in a criminal lawn.

Did you have to just adapt to that life?

Yes, and you know the reason why.

I'll probably put up with it for so long.

You can't walk away from people like this.

I want you to say that I know the real truth.

I know what.

I love him, and he wasn't by someone like it.

He wasn't he became that person.

Power and money does a lot of things to tchange people's lives.

So in that Paddington house, how long did you stay there?

Not long?

I've always stood my peace.

I learned to speak up.

I knew my limits because I won't pass the limits.

He could have done anything, you know what I mean.

But I knew my limits and I thought, I'm God, I got nothing to do it.

He would chase me, he would please, please please.

I'm sorry I didn't turn up.

I'm sorry I didn't do this.

I'm sorry I didn't do it.

And when this went on for so I really didn't have a real time because.

You are bright.

Yeah.

I'm journalist Matthew Condon and This is the Gangster's Ghost, a podcast from The Australian.

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 six heat.

A man known as Big Barry was found yesterday with four bullet wounds in his head in jungle like undergrowth in Paddington.

Police said the man, Barry Leonard Flock, twenty eight, had told a friend he had been marked down for execution by the underworld a week ago.

His body was discovered yesterday just before noon by a woman she was exercising her dog in an extensive area of undergrowth part of the Scottish Hospital.

Police believe Flock was lured or forced to march at gunpoint by his killer or killers into the thick undergrowth.

Flock apparently put up his hands as the bullet smashed into him.

It's Monday, January sixteenth, nineteen sixty seven, and Sydney has woken to what appears to be another ruthless gangland killing.

The city is getting used to this sort of carnage.

One newspaper at the time asked why the city had turned into Chicago with its open display of gangster carnage, and how come Sydney's mobsters were suddenly qualified for honorary citizenship of the Windy City in the United States.

On that Monday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Barry Flock was a nurse cleaner and minor King's Cross identity who, at one hundred and eighty eight centimeters tall and one hundred and one kilograms in wait, worked as a bouncer for various gambling dens and nightclubs.

He had somehow been lured into the undergrowth near the hospital and murdered.

The report went on, baller entered his head, including one that first passed through his left hand near the right index finger.

Detectives described the murder as a typically callous underworld execution.

Stuart John Reagan was quickly suspected of the killing.

The public record shows that this may have been his first murder.

It was just four months since his twenty first birthday at Chequer's nightclub with mob boss Paddles Anderson.

There were several good reasons for police to think Reagan was the shooter.

Firstly, Flock was murdered just a couple of streets away from Reagan's mother's place at fifty one Liverpool Street on a still night.

The colonel and auntie Thelma could have virtually heard the shots from their modest terrace, two blocks southwest of the murder scene.

Secondly, newspaper reports said Reagan was well acquainted with the dense scrub land near the old hospital.

This was from the Sun newspaper.

When John Reagan was a little boy, he had a favorite hideout where the shrubs grew thick and the grass long, a tiny jungle in the heart of Sydney.

His private world was a wasteland in the grounds of the Scottish Hospital.

Given Reagan spent his childhood in young New South Wales.

Seen beside the point.

What was factual was that Flock had, in the weeks leading up to his death, gotten caught up in a business deal gone wrong with Reagan.

Flock had been working at a health studio in Bondai on the recommendation of Reagan.

The owner, Missus X, as the newspapers called her, had employed him with reservations.

She did it as a favor to Reagan.

At one point, Missus X had given Flock eight hundred dollars to look after.

Reagan would later say Flock spent the money.

Flock would tell Missus X he had given it to Reagan.

Someone was lying.

Reagan denied Flock's assertions.

Reagan's heavies started harassing him.

Flock lived with his wife and daughter in London Street, Enmore in Sydney's in a West, and at one point the family temporarily fled to the safety of a friend's house after being threatened.

But what was the big deal over a paltry eight hundred dollars here's the sun again.

Naturally, Reagan was pulled in for questioning over Flock's death.

He told detectives that although he had arranged to meet Flock at Victoria Barracks, he'd been with a bird and forgot.

When he did remember, he had telephone Flock and called off the meeting.

It was all very suspicious, and detectives are now sure Reagan killed Big.

Barry Mark remembers Flock, thank you John of murdering Barry flap Ye what do you think.

Of that you knew Arry?

What?

Yes?

I did just now new Thocott.

And John's relationship with him.

Oh, I could see you, as I say, Nothing was ever discussing me.

Nothing I could not see to you, and so honestly dont to you all I would as I heard any conversations about what he was doing or whatever.

Obviously he's out there doing it, that wouldn't relate to me.

Reagan was not charged with the murder, but according to Reagan's official consorting records, he was being watched very closely by police.

The heat was on.

Police noted he'd been seen driving around in a sky blue nineteen sixty six Jaguar registration EDZ double four to three.

Two months later, police observed him getting about town in a gun metal gray nineteen sixty three Jaguar registration e k F nine seven six Business.

It seemed was good for Reagan.

In the months after Flock's murder, Reagan was in and out of court for various matters, including consorting and possession of an unlicensed pistol, and always by his side was his dutyful lawyer Michael Seymour.

As marg told us, no one was closer to John than Seymour.

Seymour was one of a handful of people who Reagan trusted, but who was he.

With the police heat intensifying on Reagan, he needed virtually a lawyer on tap.

He found one by proxy in the mid nineteen sixties.

Michael Thomas Seymour was a young solicitor doing his articles for the Sydney law firm Lang and Anderson.

When that practice dissolved, Seymour inherited one of their more colorful clients, Stuart John Reagan.

They got on instantly.

As far as Seymour knew Reagan had tow truck and panel beating businesses.

He thought Reagan, despite having little education, was intelligent, enterprising, and ambitious.

Seymour remained Reagan's confidante and legal counsel until his client's murder in nineteen seventy four.

Seymour was struck off in the early nineteen eighties and worked in later years as a migration agent.

We'll come to that later.

Whichever way you looked at it, Seymour would be a treasure trove of information about Reagan and his life and times.

Given Reagan's numerous prosecutions, Seymour had the inside rail on how Reagan's mind worked, especially under pressure.

More importantly, he might even have a good idea about who murdered his gangster client, if only we could get even a fraction of what he knew held inside that legal safety deposit box known as lawyer client privilege.

Kelly and I wondered if Seymour was even still alive.

If so, he'd have to be in his late seventies or possibly nudging his eighties.

So Kelly set out to find him, and a few months later she phoned in, Okay.

So I've got a bit of exciting news.

I've just got an email come up on my phone that says Michael Seymour has sent me a message.

So I'm just going to go into it now.

And have a look at what that message is and see if I have actually found Michael Seymour that was John's solicitor.

How exciting if it is, Like, how cool would that be?

Kelly had sent an initial message to a Michael Seymour explaining that she was Reagan's cousin and that she and Mark wanted to reach out to him.

Was he, in fact, the Michael Seymour who was Reagan's solicitor in the namenineteen sixties and seventies.

And he's just replied to me and said, wow, that well that is a blaster in the past.

Yes, I was John Reagan's lawyer and would be interested in talking to marg And then gave all these contact details let me know where he's resided and said thanks for the message.

So how exciting.

I mean, great if my auntie mag gets to speak to Michael.

But I'd just love to speak to him.

Like for me, that's as close as I'm going to get to speaking to John, Like he would.

Know so much.

Whether he wants to talk or not, I'm not sure, but you know, just finding him was pretty is pretty cool.

So I found him.

By Seymour is mentioned numerous times in Reagan's secret tapes.

The gangster clearly held him in high regard, so much so that Reagan didn't hesitate to wreck amend him to friends in trouble with the law.

You know you've got a good defense for this down make a statement of SayMore and say that's the reason why you're fined.

Get that Ora Worseley.

But everything worsely says then and say more statement And that's the India case.

You know that Dadger he down to discussed it all right, if you can tie that day on, even if the Copple just says it to you from him's way after your mat if he just says it to you and you make a statement about it, the same work and down take steps.

You gotta get a barrister.

They are going to give you a sea.

Get it by called dayson w kill oh barrister my days he killed?

And whatever?

Mate?

What's his lying?

You keep saying More a solicitor man because he's the best solicit in Australia.

I'm not kidding me.

After many weeks of negotiation, see More agreed to meet me, Kelly and marg for lunch at his favorite Chinese restaurant in Castle Hill in outer northwestern Sydney.

Kelly and I discussed the lunch meeting and tried to work out a strategy.

So Simour says, and it's interesting because the second time he's mentioned this.

But he says at the end of the email, let's see what the podcast can flush out.

He says, it's a dangerous exercise.

He's used that exact phrase twice in the last month.

Then he says, but at my age of eighty years, nothing bothers me anymore.

So I think we've hit a sweet spot with him, thankfully.

Yeah, it's going to be incredible.

I love the one above it where he says, I don't know if any of the police involved in the matters are still on this planet or not, but if alive, would be in their eighties and on the home run, carrying the ailment of aging along with possible type two diabetes and a guilty conscience, praying their sins of the past will.

Never catch up them, at least on this earth.

It's interesting, is it?

Because but this is exactly what my father said to me at the very beginning when I first said I was going to contact you, and Dad's like, oh, just be really careful, like and I said, tongue in cheek, Oh, Dad, anybody around it?

We chasing us on scooters Like I reckon.

I can outrun a scooter.

It's interesting that Michael has probably said to me in texts, probably four or five times, it's dangerous.

I'm not seeing the danger probably from the same level as he is.

I'm probably thinking he's paranoid, but his car was shot up.

He lived in there.

He got run through the mill like he stood up to them, and the constant dialogue of fear is relevant.

Don't you reckon like these people wielded an unyielding knife like it's just.

The Chinese restaurant was the type you find right across suburban Australia.

The round tables, white tablecloths, the lazy Susan, the center packed to the rafters and busy with chatter and the clinking of plates and cutlery.

Seymour was there before we arrived.

He was the opposite of what I expected.

I had somehow frozen him in time and thought we'd be met by a youngish man in a good suit, a loyally type, perhaps, with dark hair and horn rimmed glasses.

Instead we were met by an old man in a short sleeved shirt, shorts and long socks, with disheveled gray hair.

He looked like any pensioner out for some spring rolls and a bowl of sweet and sour pork.

One thing I wasn't disappointed with he talked a big game.

His language was slightly formal and jam packed with legal ease.

Though he hadn't just in New South Wales for forty years.

He was a little bit haughty.

He had with him a shopping bag containing some documents.

The restaurant was incredibly noisy, but for a while Seymour delved back into the past.

I asked him how he first came to legally represent Reagan a warning.

When we talked, we were surrounded by dozens of other eager dynas John first became a pie.

I think I read briefly in here that the company you were working for dissolved and Reagan was on their books.

But I was like the law clerk who Langy did commercial work.

Anderson came into the last year that I was there.

Anderson work with Phil Roach got good experience in Pimmelwell, so.

This is nineteen sixty five.

Four.

How old were you then?

I was a minute to practice February sixty five?

How old were you more than forty two?

So your early twenties.

So I was a young feller.

Now Anderson was leaving the firm to go to the bar.

Anderson was a bit slippery in my view when he talked to you.

It's bent over and Phil correct harshires free quiet Reagan wanted to follow me.

But how did you become acquainted legally?

Initially?

Was it through the law Phil.

The FIV firm was pg le FEV and I agreed to act for John on the right case in which Tony Boleno and dars Anderson appeared.

It was a trial the dowling Hurst and not not killed him.

Uh after that?

Yeah?

When about that time John was charged with being a possession of und licensed pistol?

Did you appear for John from the unlicensed pistol charge?

He was arrested take the Downinghurst.

I went up there he was arrested and I said, no, he's upstairs being interviewed.

I wait downstairs?

Whe hours?

Do I know who I was?

And so you know I am, for quite sake, my client's upstairs.

So then after they leave John wasn't but upstairs they had taken him somewhere else.

I think there was an unsigned regular interview with the verbal yeah whatever.

So we were able to show that the police officer's diaries and their notebooks didn't correspond in like two the four detectives who picked him up from two interviewed him.

Who had the running of the case.

That was before one of the few motor strikes that understood reasonable doubt.

One document in Evers shot doing a fortune, so he was acquitted on that.

Seymour clearly recalled that Reagan would often wear bulletproof vests.

He remembered the assassination attempt on Reagan by Stuart and Finch outside Barrick Motors in Paddington in late nineteen sixty five.

There were no love lies between Finch John.

Because at Barrack Motors one day in broad daylight, since she called a revolver on John badly shared him.

I just missed the bullet record showed off.

Uh.

Finch took off.

John took off another rocky drying put in finding.

Later Finch was chart with the Cptain murder ncamuson be the ACRA.

I said I can't, I said, yeah, Sharp and client to kill Tyne.

Yeah.

We wanted to know what Reagan was like when, as Mark observed, his personality changed when the monster stepped out of the shadows, when he was in and out of police stations like well, a dish on a lazy Susan in a suburb in Chinese restaurant.

And how was how did he strike you?

In those early years as.

A like he was a likable fellow.

Uh.

He regali intelligence.

Ever on his guard, seeful of being loaded up by the police.

He didn't keep the best of company in the underworld.

But in reputations, what.

Was his reputation?

Firstim to be feared physical violence?

Yeah, I suppose, but he was only convicted of one fun of song, which was interesting case.

How the pencil self defense.

The beginning of that was that.

Reagan was I think of bouncing in a nightclub with King's Christian and the closing time came, people asked to leave.

There was a bunch of Google slabs who refused to go.

They went, and I think Regan obviously made some remarks about them.

And then the place is closing down and back come about up.

A dozen Yugoslavs were the belting.

He tells, well, he's on the stage up there with a chair.

Kevino was bay And then whilst that if you all was occurring, someone finds the police and the police arrived.

That's it.

So Reagan thought, I'll get.

One of these guys one day.

So a few years later he was in a restaurant and he tells me that he saw one of those blogs that assaulted him and threatened him.

So his defense was, I walked up to the tables to excuse me.

I think you were the person who threatened assaulted me some time go.

Where upon the Yugoslas get stuffed and sap John John retaliate the Crown's case was up.

Came John, grab a lot of scup of the neck and said you are so and who tried to belt me with six other Ligoslavs whacked.

There was a difference in the evidence.

By the time I didn't got up the trial, John was a bit bigger, he flying up a bit.

He looked pretty tough.

Basically before a jury over against yugoslav The jury convicted him.

He got tour bucks.

Hyeah and.

Seymour had other amusing but relatively innocuous anecdotes about Reagan.

He was more preoccupied with his own legal difficulties.

In the wake of Reagan's death, which saw him struck off.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported the following.

On Thursday April fifteenth, nineteen eighty.

Two, a solicitor alleged to have been involved in check forgery, bail offenses and land fraud was struck from the role of solicitors yesterday for professional misconduct.

The Court of Appeal made the order against Michael Thomas Seymour.

Seymour did not defend the action, and the joint application by the Law Society and the Prothonotory of the Supreme Court to have him struck off was heard exparte.

The President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Moffatt, said evidence against Seymour on any one of four matters in the summons would have been sufficient to warrant his being struck off.

One of these matters reached way back to nineteen seventy three seventy four and his client Johnny Reagan.

The Paper wrote.

In the fourth matter, it was alleged that Seymour was an active particip and knowingly participated in a scheme set up by John Stuart Reagan, then a well known criminal for whom Seymour acted and with whom it was alleged he was associated in another company.

In the end, the three presiding Justices unanimously ordered that Seymour be struck off over our lunch.

I was keen to quiz Seymour on Reagan's famous so called land scams, the subject of the fourth matter.

In his hearing before the Court of Appeal forty years earlier.

The scam involved buying up cheap blocks of land in country areas and falsely advertising them as fully sewered and electrified parcels with astonishing views and access to great facilities.

Will examine Reagan's scam in detail in an upcoming episode of the podcast.

But as far as Michael Seymour was concerned, it was legit.

It admit real estate business.

Luckily, I.

Invested wisely in real estate and to build luck and the gay mugs.

But the pressure on all these things that builds up in terms of your own legal votes.

But the land, the land hers themselves, that was a scam, right.

No, no, no, they were legitimate transactions.

He got titled and he conveyed titland.

Now detective too.

He just running my notes again this morning, Sill he come to seemly, uh said, I want to interview about Brigand's land transactions.

And so I've had to talk you such a use lad of professional privilege.

Oh we'll just fraud here.

Yeah, I see.

If you charge you with a fraud, I can tell you now you'll fail and I'll be shoving you for malicious prosecution.

He then said oh, but I discovered here that he said, I have no a bit about the law.

I'm starting law of just about finish the bab He said he's sold some blocks of land before he had title.

I said, well, you don't understand what the law is.

He'd taken the contract to buy before he'd settled on the purchase.

He has a legal right to convey that right to someone else.

I've interviewed a couple of people in Queensland who were involved in this sales adventure up around Harvey Bay and around regions like that, and I've spoken to one of the head salesman essentially contracted out by John to sell blocks of land that they'd acquired of council.

And there were advertisements placed in Sydney newspapers in relation to this is a phenomenal purchase, the use of the beach major shopping center going up next year.

All of it false.

As he admitted to.

Me, if you enter into a.

Contract of sale to buy a property, he could either as sign your interest in that or sell to a third party pending completion of the title that you're in the process of acquiring.

There's done a lot when people are moving home and they were to buy and sell at the same time, and.

That was that.

Besides, he had another matter he wanted to discuss.

This is what stunned the table in that Chinese restaurant that day.

Seymour claimed that a on Reagan's death, his client owed him about seven thousand dollars in outstanding legal bills.

Given the amount of research and effort he'd acquitted prior to our lunch meeting, and as recompense for his future involvement in The Gangster's Ghost, he thought it only fair that he be paid ten thousand dollars that at the very least would square Reagan's ledger, even though the debt had allegedly been outstanding for half a century.

We set our farewells to Michael Seymour and left the restaurant and then Castle Hill on the plane back home North.

I thought this should not be surprising, because we have ventured into the world of Stuart John Reagan.

No matter how many years have passed, was still outstanding monetary debts, moral debts, debts to historical accuracy, debts to the truth.

Kell and I discussed the extraordinary meeting with mister Seymour.

I mean, from my point of view, and probably both of ours, because we've been researching this for so long.

The name Michael Seymour became almost mythical in that we knew he was very close to John right up to his death, had legally represented him for about nine years from about nineteen sixty five sixty six.

So we were highly excited to meet a man who we thought would have all this incredible knowledge in his head right, and.

I thought he'd be keeper of the gate, like you know.

He told Arnie Margie had documents, and then he tells us he's got nothing.

Yeah, So then Mark and I showed up and absolutely not what I expected.

And he did produce some Manila folders of some scattered documents.

A lot of them were to do with him defending himself having been struck off in about nineteen eighty two and then losing a defamation action against the ABC in the early to mid eighties.

So a lot of the documents were how he had been hardly done by and decisions were incorrect and it had essentially ruined his life.

But he couldn't even get our names right, Like he was giving me Marg's documents.

Here you go, Marg, And she wasn't even there and I'm like, no, no, I'm Kelly.

Marg's the old girl.

Like I think.

When we got down to wanting to actually talk about why we were there, and that was to get the inside rail on Johnny Reagan, everything seemed to be a little bit blurry.

Well it was just weird.

Like you spot on, his recollection of himself was on point.

But what strun me was, you know, John and I were close and yeah, you know, we had a working relationship, but we were close, and you know, he had no father, so you know, I tried to guide him and get him into legitimate businesses and everything.

But all he did was call him Reagan.

The whole time.

He called him Reagan Reagan, and there was no he was blaming.

There was.

It was like he was talking about someone he'd met for five minutes.

Yeah, whether he was intentionally just being on his guard with us.

It was our first meeting with him, Yeah, but not Mark.

You know, Marg said that they'd had a real terrific relationship from when he was Reagan's solicitor up until Reagan's death.

When Seymour simply and totally disappeared from the scene, Off the Reagan scene, he didn't go to the funeral.

Didn't go the inquest, didn't talk.

To marg until only a few months ago.

I mean, you know, listeners to this podcast have heard people we've interviewed who were involved in the selling of those properties.

So it was exactly what it was.

But Seymour is standing his ground on that.

But also what came out of the meeting and has persisted now for some weeks is incredibly Michael Seymour is asking for restitution of Johnny Reagan's unpaid legal bills dating from the late nineteen sixties.

Yes, E would produced the invoice.

The invoice and has imposed upon us what he considers not an unreasonable demand, and that is ten thousand dollars to settle the Reagan account.

Yes, and then photocopying in binders, and with that money in his account, he'll then assist us.

Yes, bless Yes.

In the wake of the Flock murder in early nineteen sixty seven, Reagan had a phenomenally busy year engaging with police and the courts.

He was a marked man, shadowed relentlessly by detectives.

Month after month.

He faced a string of charges which included possession of an unlicensed pistol, consorting obtaining property by forged instrument, false pretenses, stealing, driving in a dangerous manner, negligent driving, assault and robbery, uninsured vehicle conspiracy, intimidating a witness, assault, and conspiracy to pervert and defeat the course of justice.

Then a milestone occurred in Reagan's life.

On December sixth, nineteen sixty seven, his partner marg gave birth to their first child, John Patrick Reagan.

He would become known within the family as JP.

At this precise time, however, new father Johnny was in and out of jail for the first time in his career.

You'll remember back in episode one when he introduced you to Reagan's secretly recorded telephone conversations and how the tapes were hidden for years in a suitcase.

Well, not only did that suitcase contain the clandestine recordings, it also held several documents.

One of those was a handwritten letter Reagan sent to his mother from jail.

It was dated September seven, nineteen sixty eight.

Little JP was just nine months old.

The letter provides an incredible insight into not just his interests and preoccupations, but his manic state of mind.

Here's some extracts from that two page letter.

Dear Mum, sorry no male.

Recently, could Arnie and yourself please send me out two books for my birthday, A self Hypnosis by Joan Bradden and b Raji Yoga.

These books could be attained from Dimmick's Bookstore, George Street City or Graham's Bookstore.

I suggest you ring these bookstores and give the authors et cetera, and they will inquire et cetera and set aside for you, et cetera.

Reagan then immediately pivots to business matters.

Tell solicitor Tom to give your diamonds to you.

Also ask solicitor how much for woodwood QC.

So far please, m'am, this is important.

Also, get solicitor to come out and see me about four hundred pounds off a friend of mine.

This is important, and he hasn't visited me yet.

If he doesn't come soon, I will lose the four hundred pounds priority.

Another sudden shift of focus, this time from urgent business to personal issues involving some mysterious woman not is to facto Margaret.

I hope you don't think for a minute I'll marry Joe or anyone else.

I don't intend to get married till I am at least twenty six or twenty seven and a lot more experienced.

Please Mum, when you write, don't keep writing your opinions.

I know them more.

I will do what I want to do.

You, Mum, have to be the diplomat neutral.

You're involved in the middle, so bear with it for my sake.

But it's back to business this time.

That inner tiger asserts itself.

Would appreciate some correspondence from my hotel brokers as soon as possible.

That was a good investment.

How much return till I get from the above twenty old ones it should be they have to see more and save the rest for rainy day.

Don't let that money go to waste.

Order one more book, please, mum, Yoga Uniting East and West.

If you can also acquire a book of any nature on psychokinesis, I would be glad.

In a single letter, he is wheeling and dealing, demanding books on yoga and psychokinesis or the ability to move objects with the power of thought and confiding intimate relationship information about a woman who was not his long term partner and the mother of his first child.

Who was Joe and why would Reagan be confessing this to his mother, given his infant child, and Margaret were waiting for him to get out of jail.

As we already know, there was nothing even remotely normal about the colonel, and a situation soon arose that would defy belief even by her standards.

The colonel took possession of little JP.

Yes you heard that right.

Reagan gave his firstborn son to his own mother.

It was the colonel who raised JP.

He and a distraught marg was helpless to fight back.

There JP.

He loved j P.

He was good to JOP.

He would always put him on his shoulders.

And this is when I was told it might not taking your son from my mother's house.

Obviously, relationship went on and on and on because I had two other children like him.

But in that time when that happened, Michael Seman was John Solister for many many years.

I went to him and said, she will not be met that JP.

When this happened.

Oh yeah, like a todd lare no older two, so I can't remember.

Really, No, they really had one.

Child and that child went to Claire.

Yeah, she loved JP.

Clear I could see, just wanted to have this child, to have that this is a strong reason, son.

It will stay in my house, It'll be brought up by me and whatever.

That's what happened to me.

So Johnny told you this, our child is going to my mother's.

Don't go into any solicitors or anything, because it won't be happeny.

That's true.

I had difficulty comprehending what marg was telling me that the colonel literally stole her baby.

Boy.

I mean, you're a young mother as your first child, and now the child.

Is going to clare Reagon.

So I was like a visitor my son.

Did you talk to Michael Seymour about the situation?

You spoke, Yeah, he's got very angry, very angry about him.

Why do you think the mother wanted that baby?

Because this is John Stuart Ruthing's son.

Even though there was probably more sons out there somewhere, this is John Ruthen's son.

Everybody knew that.

I was supposedly is a woman.

I don't know why.

So it was really hard for me.

Yep, the person can take control to that extent.

The loss of her child still perplexes Marg.

She was left in the unenviable position of having to get permission from the colonel to see little JP.

So how often would you go and visit your son?

Quite often visit my son, good presence, birthdays, whatever.

I know for a fact that when she did pass, a lot of the things that I had given to him over the years, even though we had that connection, was just popped.

Anything that his mother would want it would be there.

Different to her to me, because we've god remember from here.

She had the control of him from when he was a child.

That's why I look at it all to be wrong.

It's a CONTROLSI.

This is a grown man that hung around with crims and whatever, but was still controlled both his word.

To add to Marg's confusion, she says Reagan told her nothing about his business dealings.

She sensed he was involved in criminal activity, no question, but she had no idea about how deeply he was involved in the Sydney underworld until he started taking her out to dinner to the homes of some of his special new friends.

Up to that moment, she had been kept oblivious of this dark world.

He hadn't anice question it it.

It sounds like it's something that you would I Okay, needs to clean all better leaves.

It don't work out way.

But he knew at some point.

Was there any specific thing that happened that it when?

I guess now I understand.

Or I just felt it, just new it.

No, he would not involve me in any of that.

He would not tell me what he was doing.

I know that he makes sweets, damn Psmith.

And then my first, how did you know that?

Because I met them?

I'm under what circumstances?

Do he took me to their houses like for dinner or meetings?

Or do you not?

Really?

So tell me about lending me first?

Well, that's I leading him at first?

And was they trade of old Chase?

And his house was a Ford terrace and things like that, which is correct.

I can't even remember where it was.

Did you know who he was before he went there?

No?

I didn't know what his connection was, but later on I did, certainly him Saint Smith.

I went to San Smith's house.

He taught me to all those places.

So socializing with these George Freeman, who do you think John was more close to of all of those men?

Battle mans?

He kept popping up.

He was an older man and he he was lurged by this man into this world.

Do you think he wanted to be him.

Yes, he wanted to have the power that this man had.

Definitely, what do you think it is about Johnny and power?

I mean, do you think that might even come somehow from Claire?

Yeah, I think so.

Power.

There's a different thing between power and greed and selfishness, And it's a terrible thing that, you know, to hurt someone, to hurt anybody, to acquire that he's just not quite normal all life is about.

I didn't know I was going out with a so called monsa in which they had said several times until later on, and most of it was kept the secret, like of course, what's I went to let my first in thousands Smith's house and things like that.

I was quite aware who they were.

I was at that age.

I knew who they were.

But to me, there was no occasions that I could, honestly if they did anything happen.

They're not.

Do you remember what they talked about?

You don't talk about, you don't never talk about in front of your female the woman gets in our room.

I don't mind what they do with their wise, but I know what he did with me.

Yeah, it wasn't that way.

To understand Reagan's criminal miliere, you have to know about the other side of the grubby underworld game.

The corrupt Sydney police of the day, there were a couple that stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Although he retired in nineteen sixty, Ray Gunner Kelly set the gold standard for a murderous and crooked cop.

He killed in the line of judy, arranged bank robberies and extorted abortionists.

It was said he was the master to a young apprentice by the name of Roger Rogerson.

Frederick Claude Cray or Freddie Cray joined the New South Wales Police in nineteen forty and, like Kelly, was early in his career a respected detective.

But by the nineteen sixties Cray, seemingly taking Kelly's mantle, had devolved into a violent, drunk and criminal.

With a badge.

As head of the Breaking Squad, he was getting kickbacks across the criminal spectrum and was heavily involved with the city's sex workers, particularly Vice Queen Shirley Briffman, who operated brothels out of Point and King's Cross.

Briffman had come down from Queensland in the early nineteen sixties after she became notorious during the National Hotel role Commission in nineteen sixty three.

The inquiry was probing police corruption and prostitution out of the National Hotel in Brisbane.

Briffman was closely associated with the corrupt trio of Brisbane officers known as the rat Pack, Terence Murray Lewis, who would go on to be Commissioner before he was jailed for corruption, Tony Murphy and Glendon Patrick Hallahan.

In Sydney.

Briffman built an empire.

The operation, facilitated by graft paid regularly to crooked New South Wales and Queensland police until she blew the whistle on all of them, including Cray and Hallahan.

In doing so, Brifman signed her own death warrant and it put Stuart John Reagan onto her tale.

When Britman's loose lips blew up the underworld, Reagan was sent in to shut her mouth.

Cray was rotten through and through.

Years ago before his death, I spoke to former detective and convicted murderer Roger Rogerson about his association with Cray in the nineteen sixties and into the early nineteen seventies.

Well Fred, It was a tragedy about Fred.

Fred was one of the smartest bunks you'd ever met in your life.

He was a cadet when the war was on, the Second World War, and he was a bloody a very very clever bloke, a great organizer and you know, did some bloody great investigations here in Sydney, a lot of the thallium cases.

And yet you know later on in life now he and Neil more in my work day they both worked together on the safe Arson squat.

Fred was a little bit saying and Il a bit older.

But Fred was.

He become an alcoholic in here, you know, he drank a bottle Scotch and his opposite day, you know, God that he was just cranky as all shit.

You know, you could never you could never hold a conversation with him.

He was just lost it, you know.

And I don't know, I mean, there's no excuse for it.

But as I said, I the Brisbane thing that was all to do with prostitution, wasn't it.

Someone who also didn't think much of Cray was the former ratpacker Queensland Police Commissioner, a Knight of the Realm, Terry Lewis.

Lewis had been Commissioner from nineteen seventy six to nineteen eighty seven until he was brought down by the Fitzgerald Royal Commission into Police and political corruption in Queensland.

He was ultimately convicted of several counts of official corruption and jailed.

It was by any count a spectacular fall from In two thy ten I met Lewis and he expressed his desire to have me write his memoir.

So every fortnight for three years I went to his place in Brisbane's Inner North and interviewed him as research for my Three Crooked Kings trilogy of books about his life and times and the history of police corruption in Queensland from the end of the Second World War until Lewis's downfall.

Lewis passed away in twenty twenty three.

In our talks, Lewis had a lot of time for Gunner Kelly, whom he met several times as a young detective in Brisbane, but not Fred Froggy Cray.

The recording is a little scratchy given the equipment I used back in the day, but Lewis's memories are sharp as attack.

We were talking about the importance of police having a good, solid criminal informant in the nineteen fifties and sixties, and how crooks like George Freeman and Lenny McPherson could be invaluable to a top flight detective.

I think that was renowned in Sydney, if you might remember the days he was a bloody good detective to ray Kelly, Ray Kelly and cray and all those fellows.

Was renowned that they had Freeman and others would kept their information as long as they fed you with somebody there on the line.

Although Kelly and Crayon are now notorious, aren't they.

I didn't like cray not at all, but I like Kelly.

Kelly was he was a tough man and he joined the police, so they got twenty six years of age or something.

Been a country or a really tough man.

And I can still remember part of it.

He was in uniform by himself, I think Surry Hillson somewhere one night and he came across four crim steel in the car or something, and they all attacked him.

So he shot one, wounded the other three, and naturally that probably got him into the c ib on.

But then the funny mote of it later on he said he really liked ray Kelly.

Said ray Kelly only shot people who deserved to be shot coming from a jail, I said.

As part of the investigation and research for my books, I became obsessed with the life and ultimate death of Shirley Briffman.

Shirley had paid corrupt police for her entire career as a sex worker and later a brotheloner.

She counted many of them as lovers.

One of those lovers was Fred Cray.

In the late nineteen sixties, it was proposed to Shirley that she trained her teenage daughter, mary Anne Brifman to go into the sex trade.

Shirley refused.

As a result, she was literally tortured by Fred Cray.

I was lucky enough to have lengthy conversations with Mary Anne.

She was gracious, frank and honest.

She remembered detectives using the Briffman household in Sydney as a storehouse for stolen goods and Cray turning on her mother.

Yes, Oh, he was very violent.

You know the guy that followed him, Roger Rogerson or whatever you know, for naughty detectives.

He was boring it to shoot people.

These people did this very colorfully, you know, there was a lot of They tortured them and tormented them and mentally tortured them before.

They may have killed them because he was involved in quite a lot of torture and it already hurt my mother physically as well.

So the thing is, nobody asked us about what happened.

Surely had made another major mistake.

She'd been talking to the press.

Suddenly stories were appearing about Shirley Brifman, Sydney's glamorous vice queen.

The last thing the police on her payroll wanted was media attention.

She was also toying with writing a memoir, The Housewife's Best Friend.

She was going to call it.

And if this wasn't enough, she'd hosted a party at her apartment in the Reef Complex in Elizabeth Bay and invited several corrupt police, including Fred Cray.

Somehow the story of the party made it into the newspapers.

It was getting dangerous.

One day, Mary Anne Riffman returned to the family's Thornleigh home after school and saw a man trying to strangle her mother to death.

She's convinced it was Johnny Reagan.

My mother was home and when you walked in the door of the hallway in that lounge room to that house, it had two sliding doors that would joined together, you know, to sline up, and it was really odd.

I'd never seen that the two doors were closed, you know, something that the housekeeper would never have had done.

And we'd never seen the lounge room closed off from that little bit of the hallway.

But anyway, so what do you do?

Straight away?

Me?

When I come in, I opened the door, just opened the two doors.

And then my mother standing between the lounge and the dining room where we did the ironing, where the television you know you could best see it.

And there's this guy that's got.

The wire coat hanger undone, well it was already undone, and he was he was trying to strangle her, right, he was in the middle of strangling her with iron undone coat hanger.

And you think it'd be a rope or something, wouldn't you, But no, the code hanger or maybe he got in closed the door.

He must have come in on a pretense that she let him in, yes, because you just don't come in and close two.

Doors like that.

No one else was home by then, and then of course when I just walked in, he's thinking he's waiting to hear the car or the kids come or something else.

So I get in that and then this guy gets such a shock he doesn't He takes bang out through the dining room, through that kitchen to the back door and gone.

Not that I looked where he went, you know, but he fleed out the back door that seemed to be open to my knowledge, because he didn't nearly filling with the door.

And there's my mother and you know, all the things that we all had to take in our stride.

But it was very fortunate that I came home.

I never asked her.

Who did that?

You know, sometimes you just there's some question and you didn't ask.

But there's just so many things that are just so I think that was worry, maybe a threat because of all the wealthy people that were involved, do you know what I mean?

But that's very powerful to come down like that.

That could be if that looked more than a scare, that guy was doing it.

Shortly after this, Shirley Briffman was charged with an offense for the first time ever, and her corrupt copper mates in both Sydney and Brisbane refused to help her out.

It was the last straw she decided to blow the whistle on the lot of them.

On National TV.

In the fallout from her expose, a brifman fled north, convinced by ratpacker Tony Murphy that she'd be safer in Brisbane than in Sydney, with the likes of Cray and Reagan out for her blood.

In Brisbane, living in a series of supposed safe houses, she gave several formal police interviews and not only tipped in a lot of her former copper mates, but had a lot to say about Johnny Reagan.

She said Reagan wasn't satisfied with being the big boss of Sydney.

He had ambitions to become the biggest gangster in Australia.

Just prior to fleeing to Brisbane, she'd hidden out in King's Cross again in a supposed safe house.

That's when the magician came calling.

She later told police what happened.

For a start, I was protected.

Now I am not protected.

I paid all these years for protection.

I was in fear for my life.

Do you remember the night you two called to see me.

Johnny Reagan came there at four o'clock.

He was one out.

Reagan said, don't talk.

If you talk, you are dead.

Shirley made it to Brisbane with her family.

As it happened, Reagan wasn't far behind.

He decided to open, for want of a better phrase, a branch office of the Reagan Empire north of the border.

He was off to Queensland.

Reagan would have been fully aware of the criminal scene and its main players in the Deep North, but he was the big Sydney gangster, and according to sources, he was ready to introduce Chicago style mobster tactics to Australia's East Coast.

As usual, he reaped havoc and he just may have gotten away with not one murder but fifteen when the Whiskey a Go go nightclub in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley was firebombed in March nineteen seventy three.

That inferno still smolders today, and while he didn't strike the match, the magician just may have been a driving force behind one of the worst mass murders in Australian history.

He hooked up with drug dealers, He did business with a local group called the Clockwork Orange Gang.

He invested in property, and he freely displayed brutish behavior, living up to his now well known reputation as a killer, scaring some of the locals half to death.

In the next episode of The Gangster's Ghost, matt I was scared.

I'm no hero.

I've never been tough.

This was something I hadn't come into contact with before.

Genuinely scary.

He uttered a threat along the lines of if you don't do this, I'm going to shoot.

You in the kneecaps.

Now I remember vividly it was in the kneecaps.

Having seen the other guy with the gun, I thought, these guys aren't kid.

You put all that together and that's a pretty convincing argument that you should not be there.

The Gangster's Ghost is a production of The Australian.

It's written and presented by senior writer Matthew Condon and produced and edited by multimedia editor Leat samaglu Our, Executive producer is Me, Editorial director Claire Harvey.

Special thanks to Lara Kamenos, Erica Rutlidge, Kristin Amiot, Jasper Leek, Stephanie Coombs, Sean Callanan Laughlin, Clear Ryan Osland, Amanda Willim Williams, Christine Keller, Tarn Blackhurst, Magdalena Zajak, Gisel Boetti, Genevieve Brammel, Lauren Bruce, sus Rolf and Jokina Carlson.

We can only do journalism like this with the support of US subscribers, who hear 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 au