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Before I met Kelly Slater Reagan, before I traveled to her and husband Rodney's farm in far Flung Young in southwestern New South Wales, bounced about in the back of a ute through sheep, paddicts and fields of canola, sat down around a huge country homestead kitchen table with the Slater Reagan clan and debated their notorious relative Stuart John Reagan, and realized how digging up the past might upend Lowe as we all knew it, and unleashed dark forces that none of us had anticipated.

There was, in the early days of this investigation, an unspoken truth to the whole saga that we all skirted around, not so much the elephant in the room, but the dead gangster, fair and square in the center of this family's history.

And that truth was the immovable corpse of Stuart John Reagan.

The ghost was already uncomfortably close when the audio team at The Australian resurrected his secret telephone recordings.

He could have been sitting with us at that kitchen table.

Have they tried to steen over you on or put the hard one on it?

So you can't charge you for civil e n gay you?

So if he paid civil action won't be a backsiler.

But given Kelly was a former New South Wales police officer and I investigated crime as a journalist, there was a singular question that two of us could not avoid.

Who killed Reagan exactly fifty years ago?

That was something that has remained steadfastly unresolved.

Why you would think that if a criminal was gunned down in cold blood today, not just by one shooter but three in a Sydney suburban street early on a Sunday evening, then answers would be sought.

You would think, given rumors circulated almost immediately after Reagan's slaying that corrupt police might have been involved, that answers might not only be urgently he sought, but demanded from the top of the New South Wales police hierarchy.

Remember from episode one when Kelly was told by a retired officer that not only were police possibly involved in Reagan's murder, but the infamous killer cop Roger Rogerson himself.

At the same time, I said, if you were there in seventy four, do you remember stut John Ray?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I do.

I said, well, he was my cousin.

He said, all right, I said, do you ever know who killed him?

He said, well, we were told that in the area at the time there was a car with four detectives seen in it.

They were wearing these bowler hats or something, and they had police coats on.

And he said there was always a whisper that it was Rogerson's first hit, Roger Rogerson.

Yet, could anyone reasonably explain how a high profile criminal could be shot dead in broad daylight, just meters from a busy pub and a main without a single witness.

Irrespective of Reagan's infamous deeds, the appalling allegations that still swirl around him, the certainty in some minds that he was in fact a serial killer responsible for up to a dozen murders, and the unthinkable possibility that he may have slaughtered a toddler in cold blood, the assassination of Stuart John Reagan in September nineteen seventy four was and remains to this day a stone cold unsolved homicide case.

Naturally, as a member of Reagan's family, Kelly had dozens of questions she wanted to ask New South Wales police had a review into Reagan's murder ever been conducted, and if so, what were the conclusions.

Why had the family, including Reagan's de facto wife Margaret formerly known as Margaret Yates, never heard a word from police since he was blasted to death on that spring afternoon in nineteen seventy four.

Were detectives still looking into this half century old unsolved case.

So Kelly did what Kelly does.

She wrote an email to Detective Inspector Nigel Warren of the New South Wales Cold Case Homicide Squad based in Paramatta in Western Sydney, to try and satisfy her curiosity and to get the ball rolling.

This is Kelly reading her first email, dated Thursday March twenty four, twenty twenty five two two Detective Inspector Nigel Warren, head of the New South Wales Cold Case Homicide Unit.

While writing these, it occurred to me that This is probably what you discuss with any family while dealing with a relative's death.

I am disappointed this discussion has taken forty eight years, but that is predominantly due to my family's lack of interest or compassion leading to this point.

Also, the lack of police in the seventies to even give a shit helped, I imagine, but I did myself wonder if other relatives two more palatal desks had been asked to do similar questions.

Kelly remains incredulous that after five decades, the family had never been contacted about Reagan's murder.

She discovered that two reviews of his cold case had been conducted without the family's knowledge or cooperation.

Both reviews had come to nothing.

Email went on, I am aware that you and the current crop of police are not responsible for the investigation, if you could call it that, But what both you and I are responsible for now is what happens moving forward.

I will be upfront.

I am disappointed that the two reviews twenty fourteen and twenty nineteen did not involve any family consultation.

I would have thought finding us was not real hard as Dad is the only Reagan in young and has been for some time.

Kelly wanted simple answers to simple questions.

Question one, what was the motives of the killing?

Two?

Who was the first responding police?

If names can't be used in car numbers and stations they were from?

How long did they take to respond?

Who compiled the p seventy nine A?

Was there an official report of a car leaving the scene with four men wearing hats?

And Some of her queries involve some famous names and even more infamous crimes, along with another very big and to date unanswered query.

If Reagan was the so called millionaire gangster of his day, what happened to all his money?

She reeled off more questions.

Have you got a copy of the report to the coroner?

As the coroner's documents have been removed?

What does a review consist of?

Reinterviews, DNA testing if relevant, etc.

Why has no member of the family ever been contacted or Margaret Yates in relation to reviews?

Please provide Margaret with a copy of her statement.

Was John's bank account seized and if so, why was his accountant able to draw dollars out of his account first thing Monday morning?

How much was recovered at the time of his death, where is the evidence retreat.

We will come to the matter of Reagan's millions in cash and property holdings later in this podcast, as we will the question of whether he was a part of the Whiskey Go Go nightclub fire bombing in Brisbane in nineteen seventy three, one of the biggest mass murders in Australian history.

The Whiskey You Go Go was bombed at ten past two on the morning of March the eighth, nineteen seventy three.

It was a mass murder which sent a wave of outraids through a country which is often apathetic about crime.

And the gruesome twist was that two months before the killings, Brian Bolton had warned that a Brisbane nightclub would be bombed.

Bolden got his information from a well known.

But before we could get anywhere near the truth, Kelly and I would become involved in a cat and mouse saga in our search for official documents that would go on for years.

It is still playing out.

We will take you inside this bureaucratic nightmare.

It started with a simple request Stuart John Reagan's criminal history.

So today is the thirtieth of September and it's the day after I received notification from the New South Wales Police in relation to my GIBRA or freedom of information application, where they've told me that I can in fact have John's criminal history, but they can't find it.

So you will see how Kelly told repeatedly that paperwork had been lost, would, through sheer doggedness, be informed that suddenly some fragments of paperwork had been found.

And around and around we went.

But let's return to a curious moment in Reagan's past.

Reagan and his mother, Claire the Colonel, left ruraled Young in the late nineteen fifties.

She set up in Sydney's notorious Darling Past, home to prostitution, illegal gambling, drugs, and other vices.

The Colonel and her only child, Johnny, started their new life in Liverpool Street, a gritty, shadowy, densely populated enclave in inner Sydney that couldn't have been further from the wide streets and rolling hills of rural Young.

And this is where the story gets a little sketchy and mysterious.

We discovered that a teenage Johnny was for some reason swiftly taken out of his new home and incarcerated in a notorious boy's home, a place that equipped him perfectly for the gloriously seedy and lawless streets of Sydney in the nineteen sixties, and, as fate would have it, a place he would step out of as a fully formed, baby faced gangster.

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

In this investigation, we uncover previously unreported facts about the short lived criminal career of Stuart John Reagan, speak to his family, friends and business associates who go on the record for the first time, link him to one of the most notorious mass murders in Australian history, and uncover secret audio recordings that will bring the ghost of Johnny Reagan back to life.

This podcast started out as a clinical look at one of Australia's most reviled gangsters, but when the Reagan family came on board, the project took on another dimension and begged the question how does a family cope with the generational stain of a murderer whose death was celebrated by criminals and police alike.

This is Episode three.

Holy Stony as Reagan's mum the colonel settled into Sydney's Red Light District.

Her only child, little Johnny, was serving his apprenticeship as an inmate of the Gosford Home for Boys, one hundred kilometers north of Sydney on the New South Wales Central Coast.

That home would later be renamed Mount Penang Training School for Boys.

This brief period in Reagan's life remains vague even to his own family.

I talked about this with Kelly Fair to say that the whole Gosford Mount Penang Home for Boys period has always been a bit of a mystery even to the Reagan family.

This little window in his life.

Yeah, it wasn't heavily talked about.

I do recall once that Claire must have come back to young and she went to one of his friend's houses and borrowed their bag that he'd had in World War Two, like his big Duffel bag, and she told them that she needed it because John had to go to the Boy's Home in Gosford.

That's sort of all we know about the Boy's Home, and there's that big gap from when he left, so obviously when he came out the Boy's Home and was a fair bit more notorious.

The missing piece of the Reagan puzzle is how and why he was removed from his controlling mother, the Colonel and incarcerated in one of New South Wales's most infamous boys' homes.

The Colonel had moved into her sister's house in Liverpool Street and soon took over.

But what happened to Johnny?

He goes to Sydney and we're assuming Claire maintained some form of care.

I mean it was her sister's house that she moved to in Liverpool Street, so they had a roof over their head.

Could Reagan have just gone wild like a switch had been flicked once he got to the city, or is it more like the situation whereby somehow the issue of being placed in moral endangerment courtesy of his mother could have been the issue.

We know he went to a school down there, we're just not quite so awhere.

But has he been kicked out of the school or has the school reported in his behavior?

Like at home, he could just walk across the road and he's at home and it doesn't matter if she's at home.

But in Sydney, when she's running the brothels, she's a different kettle of fish.

Isn't it?

And how was the colonel surviving in big, tough Sydney town, a far cry from her simple life in rural Young.

She'd left her former husband alf behind, the extended Reagan family, her work at the Australian Hotel.

She may have accepted the charity of her sister, but how did she really get by?

What did she do when she got to Sydney?

Did she resume being a bar maid like she wasn't the Australian in Young or.

We were always told that when she went to Sydney she went straight into the brothels was running a brothel?

Remember Dad said that it was a brothel that he'd heard that the Aussie had been as a brothel.

Was she running trick then, which would explain really why the Reagans hated her.

You can't just because she's Catholic.

How had schoolboy Reagan ended up in a home for juvenile delinquents, truants and uncontrollable boys.

School records in Young show that one year Reagan was attending classes and appearing in school photographs, and the next year he simply wasn't there.

His mate said, Reagan just seemed to vanish nobody knew why he left or where he'd gone.

In young he defended smaller boys from bullies.

He liked art.

He enjoyed exploring the creek near his home, although some of his mates saw the crouching tiger inside the quiet boy.

Once outside the young town limits, he found himself inside the Nightmare of Gosford.

But why the home catered for boys aged fourteen to eighteen years Reagan turned fourteen on September thirteenth, nineteen fifty nine.

To be placed there, you had to be committed by a court of law or receive what was called a general committal.

Had Reagan made it to Sydney with his mother and failed to go to school, had he stolen something and been caught, had he come to police attention in the show streets of Darlinghurst as a neglected child, Or had police removed him from the Colonel's care after authorities discovered that she was running a house of ill repute, as the family believes, putting young Reagan in that deliciously ambiguous state of moral danger.

Former Sydney detective and best selling author Duncan McNabb wrote The Definitive Biography of Roger Rogerson and is an expert on the era.

As chance would have it, he actually lives in the heart of Darlinghurst, not far from the Liverpool Street Terrace where Claire and Reagan settled when they left young.

He has his own theory on why Reagan ended up in Mount Penang.

He says it would have been a similar path to that of killer Neddie Smith.

Experience.

Why would a boy of say thirteen or fourteen, how would he end up in Mount Penang?

Oh?

Easily?

The Netdie Smith is pretty much the blueprint.

Uncontrollable.

Back in those days there was a you could send kids off because they are uncontrollable.

Their parents couldn't run them.

They were getting into all sorts of strife.

The coppers were also having troubles controlling.

Rather than charge them that they substantiate offense like breaking, entering, that sort of stuff, they just happened declared uncontrollable by the children's could, which in those days was done in Albion, straight dreadful fucking place.

And then they'd head off to a boys home.

If they were really really problematic, they go to Mount Penang.

Neddie for example, was doing breaking edits all around the place, stealing, anything was not nailed down bashing people that he decided was appropriate to stab his brother Henry, I think from them, so that's why he went to Mount Penang, and the Mount Penang was probably the roughest of the rough.

In the wake of Reagan's murder in nineteen seventy four, the Sydney tabloids, particularly The Sun newspaper, ran a series of articles about the life and times of Reagan.

One carried the single word headline gangster and summarized Reagan he was a punk at fifteen, a pimp at seventeen, and standover bully boy at nineteen, a suspected killer at twenty one.

An article by journalist Cyril Greet also provided a possible clue into the trigger for Reagan's trip to the Gosford Boys Home.

He's a voice actor reading a section of Greet's story.

When he was thirteen, he came to live with an aunt in East Sydney.

Within a couple of years, the solidly built youth was well known for painting swastikas on cars and hitting the people who objected.

It was after one of these assaults that he made his first appearance in the children's court and thereafter in the Gosford Boys' Home and Mount Penang Training Center.

The earliest entry in his official criminal history was dated August thirty one, nineteen sixty two, when Reagan was still seventeen.

He was charged with assault and robbery.

The case was later dismissed.

Was this assault related to the swastika incident?

As alleged by reporter Cyril Greet.

At the time Reagan was held at Gosford, several children's correctional institutions up and down the East coast of Australia were already notorious.

In Queensland, there was Westbrook, the boy's farm outside to Woomba, west of Brisbane.

It was a crucible of sexual abuse and torture.

I should know.

My great uncle was an inmate of Westbrook in the late nineteen thirties, and when he left at eighteen, he stepped straight into a life of crime and sexual deviancy.

New Southwell's juvenile institutions had their own hierarchy of horrors to the general public.

Boys homes or farms, as many of them were innocuously described, were places where wayward young men were sent to learn the basic requirements for model citizenry.

They were given the discipline that was lacking in their young lives.

They were to the outside observer, taught manners and responsibility, and work ethics, and even the skills for a future trade.

Upon graduation, these floored youths came out like shiny new pennies, ready for seamless integration into the community.

Time and again, government ministers of the day were photographed visiting the homes alongside smiling, healthy boys fallen angels on the path to redemption.

The old newsreel's advertised picture perfect institutions.

Mount Fenang Training cor for Boys is situated fifty miles north of Sydney, up seven hundred acres of farm and bushland, high on the hills above Brisbane Waters and the town of Gosford.

This is a school without fences, where boys are taught that standards of life which are built on an understanding of solid responsibility make life richer and more meaningful than the irresponsible conduct which brought them here.

Most of them are restless, insecure lads.

The training program has therefore been designed to condition them to living in an organized community, so that they experienced the personal satisfactions which come from acceptance in a communal group and through recognition of their achievement.

This is from a nineteen fifty nine documentary about the Mount Penang Boys Home called New Horizons.

It was nade by the Child Welfare Department of New South Wales just before Reagan became an inmate.

The twelve minute film praises the boys Home to the skies and depicts it as a rival to any of the best private boarding schools in Sydney.

The ceremonial march and outings from Mount Penang are part of the training plan.

Parties of up to fifty boys go to theaters and concerts in Sydney who visit Newcastle Steelworks, to a motor show to serve beaches.

One optor, who regularly takes boys to symphony concerts has frequently been asked what college do these boys come from?

The boys dressed immaculately a scene happily working with farm animals, fixing machinery, enjoying sport, reading, studying, and warmly welcoming visiting parents.

Everyone the film shows is living in blissful harmony.

The standards of living and physical well being are no lower and sometimes higher than those in a first class boarding school.

The assured routine and order of a well run school helped to calm and reassure children who have usually been insecure for a long while because they've felt that nobody cared for them.

The new vision of an orderly, cheerful, well organized life in beautiful surroundings is the first step towards rehabilitation.

Only decades later would the truth about these boys' homes come to light through journalistic investigations and various royal commissions.

The conclusions were the same across the board.

The homes were vile centers of abuse and sexual assault, and nurseries for future criminals, including some of the most notorious murderers in Australian criminal history.

In New South Wales, the number one house of Horrors was in Tamworth, west of Sydney.

Dammouth Boys Hoim was known as the toughest institution probably in the whole of Australia.

When you got in the Tamworth you're beaten, he said.

You got in the door, you were starved, you were tortured, and you just degraded.

Kill will be killed.

Everyone come out there the same.

That's why there's so many buddies murders.

But if Tamworth was the criminal High School.

There were dangerous primary schools churning out students as well.

One was the Dearreck Home for Boys in Winter in western Sydney.

Respected journalist Ross coulthardt reported on Darrek for sixty minutes Australia, this institution, similar to Mount Penang, was a hotbed of abuse.

Its horrors were only exposed thanks to a new South Wales police investigation headed up by Detective Sergeant Ben Hallam.

He is Ross Coulthard reporting on Derek for sixty minutes.

Heeded by Detective Sergeant Ben Hallam.

When you sit down with them and listen to them tell their story about what happened at Derek and then they break down and cry, it's very confronted.

He told them to strip me down.

I think they were trying to break me.

These were vulnerable kids from broken families.

The tragedy of this is that the people that were entrusted to care for them and help them were alleged to have abused them.

And the other infamous school was, of course Mount Penang in Gosford.

In nineteen fifty nine, on the eve of Reagan's arrival at the home, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that child crime in New South Wales was out of control.

Sexual offenses by youths had increased by three hundred percent through the nineteen fifties.

Institutions for boys and girls were bursting at the seams.

The Gosford Home, built to house two hundred and eighty children, had four hundred inmates at the end of nineteen fifty nine.

For decades it was run like a military academy, but one where sexual abuse and torture were the norm.

Fred was a young Indigenous man from western New South Wales in the early to mid nineteen sixties when he started hanging with the wrong crowd.

One night, he was caught by police in a car stolen by some of his mates.

Fred was a passenger, but it was enough to get him removed from his family and installed in Darreck and then Mount Penang.

Fred remembers to this day the atrocities of Mount Penang.

When it rained, the boys were ordered to get on their hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and clean the floors until they shone on work projects in bushlands surrounding the home.

Young innocent kids new to Mount Penang were sexually assaulted by older boys out of sight of the guards.

Some staff sexually abused the boys.

And then there was the practice of holy stoning, a form of torture unique to Mount Penang that went back to the nineteen forties.

Fred is today a respected Indigenous elder, but holy stoning scarred him for life.

Well, I used to stand as had in front of the deck, especially when we did the barking.

They think you were sucking it was.

We had to stand there and a lot of the lads were clapsy.

And then on the on the other side of it, when individuals got into trouble, they used to put them on the holy stone.

Tell me about the holy stone.

I haven't heard about that.

The Holy star was up the back in the dairy there was were there's a lot of the sandstones and they bring about two or three and then down to the deck.

They put them in front of the deck and if.

You fucked up, they'd take his shoes and socks off here to roll your trousers up, say your knees and the and your toes supposed to the to the board and and then you got to get on your knees and pushed this rock back and forward Jesus.

And by the time you got up from them, your knees were all cut and plastiated your toes and then for days after your knees or where the skin sprake and could even infected.

Or they put you out in the in the dot of the little dormitory where we used to watch the pictures, and they'd give you a dry brush.

An arling stone was well, what's the one that really made the boys set up?

And they didn't didn't like the holy stone.

There were three types of holy stoning.

The one Fred described where you pushed the stone back and forth, another where you moved it from side to side.

The third was called a holly off, where a guard would use chalk to mark two places on the deck and you carried the rock repeatedly from one mark to the other.

In twenty twenty, doctor Wayne Appleby, now a distinguished academic at the University of Canberra, submitted his PhD thesis on the impact of social media on Indigenous people.

In the manuscript, however, he included some autobiographical material, including a harrowing account of his time as a young man spent in Mount Penang in the nineteen sixties.

He recalled getting into a fight with seasoned inmates, the storeboys when he first arrived at the Gosford home, and the practice of holy stoning.

Here are some extracts from doctor Appleby's thesis titled from Homo's Saca to Subalton Becoming Aboriginal Online.

These are his words read by A.

Nunnawohl Man.

I had the misfortune of meeting the storeboys on the first day at Mount Penang.

I had arrived by train and was driven to Mount Penang.

Then upon arrival, I was ushered into the store by the storeboys.

I was aft to hand over my tobacco, which in the language of institutions is called grass, and over your grouse, as store boys said.

I refused, resulting in an altercation with the store boys.

I held my own for a time, but I was bashed and kicked by the three store boys and then paraded for starting to fight.

After that, I was physically tortured through a process called holy stoning.

Dr Appleby's recollection was identical to Fred's.

Holly stoning is where a person squats on their knees with a piece of sandstone measuring between four hundred and fifty mili by three hundred and two hundred deep, and it entails moving the block from side to side across the wooden boards for up to three hours.

After just a few minutes my knees were bleeding.

It would be weeks before my knees healed.

Each night they would weep enough to cause the sheets to stick to them.

Was a young Johnny Reagan there at some point, gen reflecting with bloodied knees before the Holy Stone, with each painful push and shove, consolidating his hatred for authority.

Mount Penang had its fair share of illustrious criminal graduates, and one of those was the bank robber Bernie Matthews.

Here is Bernie being interviewed about the art of bank robbing on the ABC's Four Corners back in two thousand and four.

I selected the bank.

I parked the car up the shide lane and I had a short off twenty two twenty two automatic, a gloves balaclava.

I was physicianed on a main road on Victoria Road.

I selected the bank simply because it was on a main road and people didn't rob banks on the main road, and it had the side street so I could get to to getaway car.

Write it down.

I went in, I jumped on the counter, forced everybody onto the floor, customers and bank and staff.

I got one teller and I threw the bags and made him go along to each individual telescage and fill the bag.

In all of my robberies, I use the voice, I mean mannerism as the threat, and the gun becomes an extension on the threat that.

I interviewed Bernie just a couple of months before he died in twenty twenty two.

He sounded unwell on the end of the phone.

Sometimes I felt he was reading from prepared notes, perhaps from articles he'd written in the past.

After his life of crime, Bernie reinvented himself as a respected journalist.

His work was even nominated for a Distinguished Award.

But on the day we spoke, and when he went off script, his memories were excruciatingly clear.

Bernie was born in nineteen forty nine, just four years after Reagan, and the reason I tracked him down was because in his teenage years, he too spent some time at the Mount Penang Training School for boys.

He doesn't recall being there at the same time as Reagan, but of course knew of him.

If he was in Mount penajuvenile offense jish.

Mount Penang was the boy's arm and like a lot of the kids went through Ronnie Ferni just a hell of a lot, George Freeman, and they all went through a Mount Pane.

At some stage.

So what was like, where do we start?

They called it the Mount Penang Training School for boys at goslein or utilized to accommodate aspiring juvenile incarceration rate.

Now, in those days.

Magistrates were institutionalized juvenile offenders for truancy, running away from home, bringing an executed child of Berne and Charlie's, both from mal dangers.

It was for this reason, being a child exposed to moral dangers that Kelly and I presumed Reagan had been ordered to Mount Panang.

Bernie went on, when did you first go into Mount Penang.

Last Stary sixty five?

What was that for?

I was for arsenal and breaking head her?

How old were you?

I was sixteen when I got arrested.

I was sixteen when I went to Gospin in nineteen sixty five.

The new superintendent with a boat called Fowler, and they used to call him Chicken, and he was an autocratic disciplinarian, so inexplicable reason.

You just love to see the kids suffer.

At the drop of a hat.

That was his bag.

He was a public service.

The progress through the show offered apartment.

What sort of physical work were you required to do when you were there?

I had what I call work gangs.

You had two different types.

You had school groups.

There were kids that could go to school and learned to read and write and all the rest of it.

And you had work gangs where you worked out in the field and you dug up and.

Acres and acres of the property.

All you went.

You went down to the oval and you cut rock like fish and rocks.

The benefit there was this, if you're on work gangs, you've got a better relotment of points, so therefore you moved up the sections quicker.

If you're in school groups.

And your point a lotment wasn't as high, and you just travel through the system at a slow place.

That allads the philosophy areas.

We don't want you to study and learn school work.

We're wanting to get out there and dig paddic.

The one strange thing at Mount Nanga I found when you go in the front gate, they've got a front gate there that comes off the highway and it leads up a driveway, flooding the main quarter deck.

And the strangest thing I ever saw was the entrance is a boomerang.

I couldn't work out why they had this boomerang over the entrance.

It was really quite simple, You're going to come back.

That was that.

That was the message you carry now you come here, You're going to come back.

Obviously someone in a higher bureaucratic thought of a numerous touch to the boys Zone.

And if it was anything like Westbrook too, I mean these places were sort of nurseries for future criminals.

Actually exactly what they were high school of all criminality who taught the art of resourcefulness, how to lie, how to treat, how to get what you want by manipulation.

And of course that carried into the world outside.

Yeah, and I guess friendships made inside too, I certainly did.

I did an article at a paramount at Jaile.

It was ninety seventy nine.

I went through the whole jail to find out how many men had come up through the Boys' Aims and ended up in jail.

I worked out about eighty eighty five percent.

Wow, it's incredible.

I was mind by room, but it didn't surprise me.

That's the whole philosophy behind the juvenile justice system, Matthew.

The whole philosophy is the treatment come went back, treat the jile cells full.

I ran Kelly and talked to her about the practice of holy stoning.

She was horrified to think that Johnny Reagan most likely went through that ordeal.

Poor bloody git.

He couldn't pull a brake.

Could if there's evidence that he was really good with his friends and everything, and then his mother, he goes home and his mother whips him at the clothesline, and then he sent away to Mount Penang and then that's virtually paw torture stuff.

And you wonder, you wonder if people say, oh, he was a psychopath, what did you think was going to happen when you treat people like that, when you treat people and their little boys like at this stage, what we don't even know what he was in there for.

But let's just say he's in there for a style of motor vehicle or an assault, which a lot of them were just in there for first offenses.

Imagine if that's what he's done and then you do this to him in his formative years.

What did you think was going to happen?

You know?

And I just think it's I just look at my family sometimes and I just think, why didn't anyone step in?

Yeah, I mean, as Bernie Matthews said, in the boys' homes, there was a hierarchy.

So Mount Penang was like a primary school for criminals, and then you graduated to Tamworth, which was the high school, and then they were unleashed into the world.

Absolutely absolutely no respect for authority, high paying thresholds.

Violence is the way to get people to do what you want them to do.

They're the lessons, that's what you're learning.

Violence one A one.

One of Reagan's childhood friends from Young Brian English, who we heard from in the last episode, was working in Sydney in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies when the matter of Reagan's incarceration in Gosford came up over drinks in a pub with police and government officials.

Brian, who had witnessed first hand the brutality Reagan suffered at the hands of his own mother when they were living in Young Now, by chance, became Privy to another brutal phase in Reagan's life, his time at Mount Penang.

Brian told Kelly about the moment in the Sydney pub when Reagan was brought up in conversation.

While I was working at Newt Wow Jenny.

I was also lecturing police officers in Newtown Police Station on sociology and these to do with crime.

And we used to have drinks.

We do the electors I have have elected our brid we'd all go out for a drink at a hotel in Yuta.

And one of the people at the hotel they would come for drinks was the head of the child welfare office in that area.

This is before John died.

And something came up in that in one of those conversations about John Reagan for some reason, and he said, I was in charge of the boys home, the Gospet boys when Reagan was there, and John had told me that he was quite running the boy's home.

John laws, that's how prisons and things work.

But this guy said, ah, he used to run you.

And I said, they did him up.

We got him.

We made sure we dressed the little bastard.

I mean, that was the nature of the times that at that date.

The Premier View.

Deel Wales was corrupt, the end of the President's department.

The Police commissioner was corrupt, well, the chiefs of famiary magistrate and we used to visit the Prisidon's was corrupt.

Minister for Police was corrupt.

And it's all come out and I'm not making us out.

A handful of television crime documentaries have tried to understand Reagan's psychosis and in particular, to get to the heart of his rage.

Exactly what was it to turn this once innocent boy into Australia's most beard killer.

Historians, journalists and psychologists have grappled with Reagan's reign of terror and his flame out.

How to explain the enigma that was Reagan.

The passage of fifty years has reduced that understanding to a couple of factors.

The damage inflicted at the Gosford Boy's home and the certainty of his psychopathy when he allegedly murdered a toddler for no explicable reason a few months before he was assassinated in nineteen seventy four.

Reagan has been distilled into this a child killer and a psychopath.

One of the few full length television documentaries focusing on Reagan was Tough Nuts Australia's Toughest Criminals, hosted by respected writer Tara Moss and first air on the Nine Network in twoenty ten.

This is Tara summarizing Reagan's childhood and hinting at the reasons behind his clearly damaged mind.

Reagan's parents divorced when he was young, and he moved to Sydney with his mother.

Here he progressed from hurting animals to inflicting pain on people.

By his early teens, he was attacking strangers in the street, and aged just fourteen, he was sent to the brutal Gosford Reformatory.

There he met other up and coming criminals, including future murderer Arthur Nettie Smith, who described Reagan as having the coldest eyes he'd ever seen.

Psychologists agree that children incarcerated so young inevitably have their development affected by the experience.

And here are the psychologists trying to work out Reagan.

So in psychology we talk about how people learn to be the people they are, and so we learned through modeling is copying others.

The other way we learn is in response to our environment or what happens to us.

So if somebody's been.

Abused and violated punished, they learned that perhaps that's something that makes you feel bad, but it gives you a sense of power to inflict it on somebody else.

Especially in places like Gosford Boys Home, not only were they not being given the pro social kinds of skills that they needed, but they're also being exposed to really anti social influences, not just from their peers, but also from the people who are in authority, the people who should have been providing the deterrence or the correction that was hopefully gained by placing them there in the first place.

And this is former Sydney Morning Herald editor and true crime author David Hickey.

Amazingly, at seventeen, Reagan hurts up his first conviction for living off the earnings of prostitution.

He's a person who, because he's not very smart but he is so violent and unpredictable, is immediately feared by madams who run suburban brothels in Sydney.

He literally arrived at the door of some of these places and demands standover money, and the madams, who are already paying standover money elsewhere, quickly find that the protection they thought they had doesn't exist because a lot of the criminals who are in the world supposedly providing standover do not want to deal with Reagan.

Tara again returns to Reagan's past to try and explain his state of mind.

Reagan was a man who inspired fear wherever he went, as Nettie Smith, who was incarcerated with Reagan at Gosford, would later rate, Reagan had always wanted to join the army so we could kill people with no questions asked, but he had been rejected.

Unable to satisfy his bloodlust through legal means, Reagan unleashed his own personal war on the streets of Sydney and on the prostitutes to seventeen year old Pemp Controlled.

The Psychologists and commentators would go on to describe the characteristics of a psychopath like Reagan, that he was a pimp because disempowering women empowered him, that he got what he wanted through violence and fear, and the final assessment.

Reagan was dangerous man.

Reagan had always been a dangerous man.

He ended associations asuit himself.

He killed his peers, he killed his rivals, he killed anyone and heard anyone who got in his way.

Reagan was a significantly unattractive man in gangster terms.

Let's think about Mount Penang, Gosford had many illustrious graduates.

Lenny, mister big, McPherson.

Let's say that mister big, mister big, now Dancy, now mister big enough.

All these things, George Freeman.

All my crimes are association.

People know me, knowing me, And if you want me to stop taking the people, I'm not going to do that.

A man called Anthony Zizza, who would go on to be one of Reagan's closest friends and personal bodyguard right up until the day the magician was murdered.

You'll be hearing more about Tony Zizza later in this podcast.

And one of the underworld's most beard psychopaths, Arthur Lennie Smith, who was also a Mount Penang graduate.

I wasn't surprised to learn that long before Kelly Slater, Reagan contacted me to help her investigate her cousin.

She had tried to get in touch with me Neddie Smith in Long Bay Jail in Sydney before he passed away in September twenty twenty one.

This was the funny thing about Reagan for his outsized reputation.

Close to nothing had been written about his complicated life.

He had become the cliche of a gangster.

Kelly wanted more, so she wrote to Neddie and she asked him what parts of the story that we know about him are true?

How big a monster was he?

Neddie Smith never wrote back for years.

He'd been suffering from advanced dementia.

It's not known if he ever got Kelly's letter in the first place.

I talked to Kell about why she reached out to this killer.

So, Kell, you learned that one of Johnnie Reagan's little cohorts in the Gosford Boys' Home was a young boy called Arthur Smith who would go on to evolve as the notorious killer Neddie Smith.

And you read well Neddie's autobiography.

Do you remember what he had to say about Reagan and Mount Penang in that book?

I think with Mount Panang he just said that he met him there, but he really bagged him out along the same lines of psychopath blah blah blah blah blah.

But then he goes on.

Then he flips and he says when he was in solitary confinement in Long Bay, jail.

John was the only one that brought in books and helped him out and did stuff for him.

And one of the kids, I think it was Helen, actually was asked to visit Nettie Smith in jail when he still had his marbles, and he said, I always promised your father I'd look after you.

Is there anything you need me to do before I can't function anymore?

And gave her a little house or something made out of well, what do you call it?

Bollipop?

Yes, bizarre.

I think his book was pretty rubbish.

I write him a letter to get some clarification, but Neddie never wrote back.

And what did you want to know from Neddie?

I just I asked him what his relationship with was John.

I said, I've read your book and what you said in there, and I find it contradicts itself.

So when did you first meet him?

You said he was good to you in jail.

Can we talk?

Can you tell me what your recollection of it is it?

And do you know who killed him?

Earlier in this episode, you heard about Kelly's attempts to try and get some answers from the New South Wales Police Unsolved Homicide Team about the murder of her gangster cousin.

She eventually heard back from Detective Inspector Nigel Warren on March twenty nine, twenty twenty two.

These are his written words, but not his voice.

Dear Kelly, thank you for your email.

Your request is comprehensive and has raised several issues.

The Unsolved Homicide Team does not, as a matter of course, discuss with members of the family or senior next of kin detailed information about unsolved homicide investigations, investigative processes, or the unsolved homicide review process.

We have an ongoing unsolved homicide review process that continually assesses information that comes to light.

If the information leads to something substantial which significantly progresses the matter, then we would look to contact and consult with the senior next of kin at an appropriate time.

Detective Inspector Warren wanted to set the record straight with Kelly about cold case murders and the police responsibilities in speaking with the relatives of the dead over the years.

At this stage, whilst if I am happy to meet, I will be unable to answer your detailed questions during any meeting.

If you are unsatisfied with this response, you may seek a response through the appropriate channels, such as the Government Information Privacy Act GIPA.

Kelly saw this as a hiccup, not an obstacle, so she pushed for an actual in person meeting with the cold case unit, and she got it.

The Unsolved Homicide team agreed to meet Kelly and Reagan's de facto wife, Margaret, in their offices in Parramatta in Western Sydney, almost fifty years after Reagan was gunned down in the streets of Marrickville.

Kel, as far as I could tell, was happy with this development, but also frustrated.

For Kell, out on the farm in young problem's surface and obstacles present themselves on the land, you solve the issue and move on.

Farmers like Kel, even as a former cop, are not used to modern double talk or the hidden complications of bureaucracy.

But she wouldn't miss the appointment for quins.

Here was a chance, finally to talk to law enforcement about Reagan.

Marg had never spoken with police since Reagan's murder.

Her partner was killed with eight bullets.

He went to the morgue, he was cremated.

There was a brief inquest, killer or killers unknown.

Marg was never even called to give evidence.

Then life went on.

The meeting with the Cold Case team was a big moment for Marg.

She risked having to relieve a time she wanted to forget, or learning something she'd rather not know.

This was another lifetime ago.

She was now a grandmother, in her seventies and living quietly on the New South Wales central Coast.

Why risk derailing everything now?

Even Kel was unsure what Marg wanted out of the meeting with the Cold Case team, out of this podcast investigation itself.

What if the whole situation was the reverse that it was Marg who was holding onto information that might have helped police solve Reagan's murder decades ago.

What if she possessed the key the identity of her husband's killers.

What if the loyal gangster's wife actually knew all that and was never going to tell Ever, she'll be fully cooperative.

Do you think by her nature she might, like most people, hold something back.

What do you reckon the skills she's been taught by him is to say nothing, to keep your mouth shut, Just keep your mouth shut.

So I think she really wants to open and tell all that she knows.

Imagine if Ani Mah did know something and then she tells the family like that's the backlash to that that she would perceive would be huge.

I think she wants to tell us, but I don't know if she'll get over the line.

Why do you think, after all these decade she has agreed to talk to us now?

I think partly because she loves us.

She loves us the reaganside.

I know she does.

She's the one when we had all the fallout.

She was the one who said to me, I want you to do this.

I want you to do this.

Marg is a huge part of this story.

She lived with the man, was inside the gangster's life, yet she has never spoken publicly about him or their relationship.

Ever, in over fifty years, she knows a lot.

Not even Call and I were confident we'd ever get to the bottom of what Marg actually knew.

But the meeting with police was set.

Was it a genuine sit down?

Did the cold case team really want to progress Reagan's case after it had gathered dust for decades?

Would they listen to Kelly and Marg or would this be an exercise in satisfying Kelly with a face to face than expecting her to go away?

Were police hoping to get the Reagans off their backs once and for all.

Kell and I molded over the idea of what will happen, what's the setup.

I had to submit a list of questions, but he wanted to know what I wanted to know about.

I'll send him those And so now he's come back and said that he can't answer those, but he's willing to meet both Margaret and I, which that's very kind of him.

It's what forty eight years later and you're going to, well, what do you do next?

Of kin chat?

What does the family think of the meeting arranged after as you said, forty eight long years, There's never been anything remotely like this as there in the Fast and its relationship with the police in terms of Reagan's murder.

And what they say is they probably didn't know Dad was the next of King John comes from young back then you could look it up in a phone book.

There was only two Reagans, Uncle, Ron and Dad.

You're going to get a hit either way, So why wouldn't anybody just contact us and ask They don't even know what the family knows.

And then Arnie Mark they knew because they interviewed her.

They took a statement of her, so they knew she was his partner.

She didn't even get called to the coronial inquiry.

Nobody.

Forty eight years later and you've virtually got a beg for a chat.

I'm going to I'm going to be the devil's advocate here and say, okay, say there's hundreds of cold case murders on their books, A family member of those hundreds and hundreds of cold cases to be contacted on rotation.

I guess it would take thousands of manails to do that.

But having said that, all murders are shocking.

But this, this is a murder that is still captivating the public after forty eight plus years.

And I get this how people say, oh, he was a shit bag, you know, is a crook, He was this, he was that.

Okay, well, let's still find out why he was killed because the reasons we're being told is wrong.

There's still a little boy that was murdered in relation to him.

Nothing's been done there.

And there's more things that contribute around this.

And I agree with you because being an ex police officer, you can't keep up with everything.

But when you do a review, it's one courtesy call.

You know, you could say that we didn't know who his relations were.

Well, I'm pretty sure people did know who his relations were.

They certainly knew at my interview who I was and who he was.

You know, it wouldn't be hard to go up during a review.

We're going to look for his background.

Let's look up and see if there's any reagans in young.

Let me ask you this, and it's no criticism of Marg, but do you have any sense that marg actually wants to see this resolve?

You could argue from the other side of the coin that if she was that interested in resolving the murder of her partner, she might have contacted them, the police.

I think Mark is doing it more for me and for her children.

I don't We don't know what Mark knows.

And I think when John died, and I would not blame Annie Mark if she just felt released.

The night he was killed, he brings his lover into her house and shares his like and she lived in fear, and she left and names were changed and things like that happened.

So I think she she'd have to be curious.

Yeah, I mean his death released her, absolutely, let her free, really so absolutely?

Could you know she could cut her hair?

She could wear makeup, she could go out when she wanted to go out.

We till take that for granted.

You sit in judgment of you.

You've got to wear shoes, haven't you.

In the next episode of The Gangster's Ghost, we'll take you inside the smoky nightclubs, go go bars and shadowy saloons of Sydney's King's Cross in the swinging sixties, and you'll meet the woman who captured Johnny Reagan's heart the moment he saw her and would become the Gangster's wife.

He comes up to me again and he leans over and he says to me, I'm going to marry you.

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 editor Oryeals director Claire Harvey.

Special thanks to Lara Kamenos, Erica Rutlidge, Kristin Amiot, Jasper Leek, Stephanie Coombs, Sean Callanan Lachland, Clear Ryan Osland, Amanda Winn Williams, Christine Keller, Tarn Blackhurst, Magdalena Zajak, Gisel Boetti, Genevieve Rammel, Lauren Bruce, Sus Rolf and Yaquina 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 a you.

Or reading.

Mount Penang is a school in which the emphasis is not on formal school education, but on the art of living with others and being an acceptable member of our society.

It is a place in which a new spirit is engendered in wayward boys, so that they leave Mount Penang with a new horizon to steer by.

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