Mitchell Toy: Charming conman and Melbourne gambler James Coates used his talents ruthlessly
International conman James Coates counted half the Melbourne underworld as his enemies and his murder remains a mystery 75 years on.
Victoria
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In early winter, 1947, Mrs Coates started getting strange calls at her South Yarra flat.
The mocking voice on the other end asked to speak to her husband, Constable James Coates.
But her husband wasn’t a police officer. Perish the thought.
James Coates, 46, a well-known Melbourne gambler and crook, had recently felt the eyes of the underworld on his back.
Whispers circulated the gambling houses that the plump, jovial and ever-confident Coates had turned police informer.
It wasn’t clear how much Mrs Coates knew.
She took phone call after phone call, increasingly sinister, accusing her husband all sorts of things, threatening all sorts of violence.
One evening an ambulance showed up looking for a Mr Coates who had been shot.
Another time he came home was bruises on his face.
Despite his wife’s pleas, Coates denied police protection and carried on life as usual.
Then, on July 19, the ambulance couldn’t arrive soon enough.
After telling his long-suffering wife he was heading out to buy an evening paper, James Coates never returned.
His body was found on a vacant lot on Punt Rd in Windsor, just metres from a police station, made Swiss cheese by revolver bullets.
The murder investigation would lift the lid on an extraordinary double life, a false identity and a swindling career that extended from Melbourne to Europe.
As his corpse lay on the grass, hours before police even knew he had been hit, the shutters went up on those seedy gambling houses across Melbourne as the same whispers that encouraged James Coates’ killer, now heralded his death.
AN AUSTRALIAN CONMAN IN PARIS
Of course, James Coates wasn’t his real name.
He was known to many in the Melbourne underworld as Mark Foy, but that wasn’t his real name either.
Born in Perth as James Mann, he was seduced by fraud and theft at the age of 18.
A sharp intellect and charismatic manner led him down the path of pickpocketing and card sharping.
He was the sort of man who could charm his way into anyone’s trust and anyone’s wallet, and he used his talents ruthlessly.
Coates travelled Australia, then the world, practising his sinister craft.
His exploits were on the books in the UK, France, Belgium and Switzerland.
And if anyone wanted to know how successful a fraudster he was, they needed only ask.
Coates bragged of his biggest victims, claiming he once diddled the Prince of Wales out of a huge sum in a bent horse racing venture.
That case was murky, but in another case French police hunted Coates for stealing a whopping 3.7 million Francs from a baronét in Paris.
Upon returning to Australia, Coates was arrested at Randwick racecourse in Sydney over the French affair.
Mysteriously the extradition proceedings failed and the jolly Coates wriggled off the hook and walked free.
There seemed to be no vice or racket in which Coates was unwilling to participate once he settled in Melbourne.
He was suspected over a car theft ring, wartime petrol fraud, dodgy investments and, perhaps his favourite, bent horse racing schemes.
Even in his final days, Coates passed bogus cheques netting more than 300 pounds.
‘HATED BY EVERYONE’
As James Coates’ list of fraud victims and gambling scalps lengthened, so did his time of Earth shorten.
On the surface he was, as ever, confident and cool.
But towards the end he showed signs of paranoia, despite the brave face.
Wire netting was installed over the Coates’ balcony at their home in Walsh St, South Yarra, to fend off invaders.
Even in the moments before his death, he knew it was coming.
An abandoned car and skid marks near the crime scene indicated Coates had been driving along Punt Rd when he was pursued by another vehicle.
He hurriedly pulled over, fled on foot and was shot while running into the vacant lot.
He was hit by several bullets, one of which pierced the back of his neck and exited through his face.
Police officers on duty in the station across Punt Rd heard the loud bangs and went out to investigate, asking a pair of girls who were walking past.
But the girls said it was probably just some boys letting off crackers in the vacant lot, as was known to happen, and the police went back to their post.
When daylight brought the news of Coates’ demise, detectives faced an uphill battle from the outset.
Who had a beef with James Coates? Only half the Melbourne underworld.
A theory that Coates was killed over a gambling debt, or by someone he’d cheated, didn’t narrow down the vast field of suspects.
Senior Detective Donnelly summed it up in a newspaper interview.
“Coates was hated and despised by hundreds,” he said.
“It would be hard to find someone he could call his friend.
“I would not describe him as a pimp but he was thoroughly untrustworthy and had no code of honour.”
It would not have been surprising if every wannabe gangster from here to Ballarat formed an orderly queue on the Windsor paddock to drive a bullet through a man who was widely despised to the point it had become a sport.
James Coates’ murder was never solved.
His funeral, a circus of criminal figures, one of whom might well have been the secret killer, was presided over by his grieving widow, who knew the poison phone calls would never come again.
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