Before Eddie Obeid there was Mr Ley, the most dishonourable minister for murder, crime and political corruption

EDDIE Obeid may have been crooked, but he looks like a choirboy compared to the minister for murder, the dishonourable Thomas Ley

The former NSW politician Thomas Ley who was convicted of murder.

EDDIE Obeid is not the only NSW politician to have run foul of the law. The career of the former Labor powerbroker, found guilty on Monday of misconduct in public office, pales in comparison with that of Thomas Ley, a politician who became known as the “Minister for Murder”.

Ley, a state and later federal politician, served as NSW minister for justice, but was often evading justice. His career was a murky trail of shady business dealings, bribery and violence.

Dogged by stories of his nefarious activities, he was eventually voted out but his paranoia led him to commit a crime that finally saw justice catch up with him.

Ley was born in Bath, England, in 1880, the son of a butler. His father died in 1882 and in 1886 Ley’s mother, Elizabeth, took her four children to Australia to seek a better life.

Settling in Sydney, Ley went to Crown St Public School but left at 10 to work in his mother’s grocery store and then on a dairy farm. Later he sold newspapers and ran messages, but he had loftier ambitions. He was interested in politics from an early age, reading verbatim accounts of Hansard in the paper and even sitting in the gallery at parliament house to hear politicians speak, dreaming of power. Knowing law was a key to political success, he took a job as a clerk at a stenographer’s office in Pitt St, studying law at night.

Thomas Ley with wife Emily Louisa and son Clive circa 1900.

In 1898 he married Emily Louisa Vernon, daughter of a wealthy doctor.

In 1907 he dipped his toe into politics by moving to Hurstville and getting elected as a councillor. In 1914 he was admitted as a solicitor, but had trouble moving up the political ladder, failing to gain election as mayor of Hurstville.

Realising he couldn’t move in a straight line upwards, he found a crooked path instead. Aligning himself with the Temperance League, earning the nickname “Lemonade Ley”, the anti-alcohol campaigners helped get him elected to state parliament in 1917 as a National Party member for Hurstville. However, he had no intentions of passing legislation to ban alcohol, as he was taking bribes from brewing lobbyists.

He joined the Progressive Party in 1919, when it split from the Nationals and in 1920 was elected Progressive member for St George. In 1921 when Progressive leader George Fuller passed a no-confidence motion against premier James Dooley and formed a government, Ley had his first very brief taste of a ministry. It only lasted seven hours before Dooley won a no-confidence motion to oust Fuller.

When the Progressives rejoined the Nationals in 1922 Ley became minister of justice. He showed a fondness for the death penalty and notoriously rejected the 1924 appeal of Edward Williams, a poor music teacher condemned to death for murdering his three daughters, despite pleas from the public and evidence that Williams was insane.

The case damaged his political career in NSW but Ley still harboured a desire to become prime minister and resigned his state seat to stand for the federal seat of Barton in 1925.

During the campaign Ley’s opponent Fred MacDonald alleged Ley had tried to bribe him to throw the election. Ley won the election but MacDonald was disputing the result when he disappeared in 1926. His body was never found, but a forged suicide note suggested he had been murdered.

Few believed Ley to be innocent in the matter. He was also reviled as a shonky operator in private business dealings, such as when his company, which manufactured a poison to destroy prickly pear, collapsed leaving investors out of pocket. In 1928, one of Ley’s business partners, Hyman Goldstein, criticised Ley’s businesses and was later found dead at the bottom of a cliff in Coogee.

Rumours about Ley’s dishonesty saw him ejected from office at the 1928 election. He went back to England with his mistress Maggie Brook (who he had met in 1922 and whose husband had died mysteriously shortly thereafter).

There Ley picked up where he left off, with suspect ventures including a fake £1 million sweepstakes and black marketeering during WWII.

However, like a modern-day Macbeth his crimes began to weigh on his conscience and he became increasingly paranoid. Convinced that Maggie was having an affair with barman John Mudie, Ley told two of his associates that Mudie was blackmailing him and they helped abduct, torture and murder Mudie in 1946, dumping his body in a chalkpit.

Ley was found guilty of the “Chalkpit Murder,” but successfully appealed his death sentence. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Berkshire in 1947.

Originally published as Before Eddie Obeid there was Mr Ley, the most dishonourable minister for murder, crime and political corruption