Gangster’s Ghost gives up secrets

A new true crime investigation into the violent and sad life of Sydney gangster Stewart John Regan, known as Johnny, who terrorised and murdered as many as 12 people, from other crooks to innocents, is the subject of The Australian’s newest, compelling podcast.

More than half a century after Regan, then 29, was gunned down by eight bullets fired by three or four gunmen in a lane in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west, in September 1974 – a crime for which nobody was arrested – we hope to uncover the truth about his murder, and several others.

Were his assassins other gangsters or even rogue police? Why was nobody charged with the crime? And what was the connection, if any, with the death of a three-year-old toddler, Karlos Scott-Huie, whom Regan possibly murdered, four months earlier?

The podcast, The Gangster’s Ghost, is presented by The Australian’s Matthew Condon, a distinguished crime writer and novelist. It is co-hosted by the subject’s second cousin, Kelly Slater-Regan, a former NSW police officer and now sheep farmer outside Young, in southern NSW, who, for the sake of their family, has researched her relative’s tumultuous life.

She and Condon hope to put questions to rest about his legacy as an uncontrollable psychopath, a serial killer of eight to 12 people, and possibly a child murderer, though he was never charged in connection with any of the deaths. Regan was known as the Magician for the grimmest of reasons. He could seemingly make his victims, and their remains, disappear.

Unlike previous crime podcasts, The Teacher’s Pet and Bronwyn, which sought answers to mystery crimes, The Gangster’s Ghost, over 10 episodes, asks a different question. What made Regan the violent, dangerous man who purportedly had the shortest fuse in the underworld and “a tiger inside him’’, as Condon discovered?

How much was nature, or nurture? Regan, who spent his early childhood near Young, the cherry capital of Australia, came from a family of pioneers and war veterans. As a boy, Johnny Regan was well liked, but his home life was dark. He was stockwhipped and tortured by his tartar of a mother, Clare Regan, whose nickname was “the Colonel’’.

While it has all the suspense and drama of the most gripping television or movie crime thriller, The Gangster’s Ghost has one distinct difference. It is fact, not fiction. Out now and available through our website, it is an engrossing insight into a side of life few Australians encounter or imagine.