No tears shed for Neddy Smith

Murderous career criminal Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith spent more than half his life in jail – and the headlines.

Criminal Arthur ’Neddy’ Smith leaves Central Local Court in Sydney after pleading not guilty to seven murder charges.

Locked up for more than three decades in Sydney’s Long Bay jail, Arthur Stanley “Neddy” Smith was a manipulator to the end. Two years ago the obituaries were ready to be rolled out, with Smith said to be dying in Sydney’s Prince of Wales hospital, only for him to pull through.

When it suited him, Smith would put the word out: he was after someone to work on his memoirs, or he knew where a body was buried, or he was putting his hand up to an unsolved murder. There had to be something in it for Smith, a quid to be made, a score to be settled. Shaking from Parkinson’s disease and unable to brush his teeth without an electric toothbrush, the one-time standover man, heroin dealer, armed robber and murderer was still on the make, as he had been since leaving school at the age of 14.

Smith died this week in the prison hospital, having spent more than half his 76 years behind bars. A giant of a man, 198cm tall in his prime, he was serving two life sentences for the 1983 murder of brothel owner Harvey Jones and the 1987 killing of tow-truck driver Ronnie Flavell. It is probable that he committed several other murders, although not as many as he claimed.

The ABC crime drama, Blue Murder, gave Smith a late-career celebrity he did not deserve, but he could only enjoy it in jail.

Smith and his wife Debra on their wedding day at Long Bay Jail.

Before finding his vocation as a heroin dealer, Smith was just another violent, not-very-successful Sydney crook.

Born in Sydney on November 27, 1944, he began committing crimes while still a teenager. Arrested more than 20 times, he spent long periods in boys homes and juvenile detention centres before graduating to adult jails. The rap sheet from his early years included jail terms for robbery and for the brutal pack rape of a young mother. Released in 1975, Smith and fellow rapist Bobby Chapman became partners in a string of armed robberies.

In October 1976, Smith, Chapman and Chapman’s wife, Gail, tried to steal the Fielders Bakery payroll. When a masked Chapman, waving a loaded pistol, approached the car carrying the $16,000 payroll, the driver tried to accelerate away. The car stalled but, after firing through the window, Chapman lost his nerve and fled empty-handed. Smith drove the getaway car. Hearing they were suspects, Smith contacted a police informer and named Chapman as the shooter.

Family man: Neddy Smith.

Although he liked to say the only people he ratted on were corrupt police, the truth was that Smith was not averse to selling out a mate if the price was right. Sometimes he was paid by the police for his information; more often the information paid for itself, by removing a rival or putting Smith higher up the underworld pecking order.

But treachery cuts both ways. When the police came for her husband, Gail Chapman named Smith as the getaway driver. By his own account, Smith paid the police to obtain bail and paid again to beat most of the charges.

For a reputed $10,000 Detective Roger Rogerson gave evidence for Smith on the remaining charge of possessing an unlicensed pistol. He couldn’t save Smith from a six-month sentence, but within three months the conviction was overturned on appeal.

Chapman took advantage of his bail to commit another armed robbery. He eventually got 13 years, but eyebrows were raised when Rogerson again entered the witness box and spoke about the “valuable assistance” Chapman had given to police. Chapman denied being an snitch, saying it was Smith who had asked Rogerson for help to save himself from a vengeful Chapman. Either way, the Fielders Bakery job triggered a fruitful professional relationship between Smith, an armed robber, and detective Rogerson, a licensor of armed robberies.

In 1977 Smith started working as muscle for cop-turned-trafficker Murray Stewart Riley, another who found the grass greener on the other side of the thin blue line. Having learnt the tricks of the drug trade from Riley, Smith became a trafficker himself, buying his merchandise from a syndicate importing heroin from Thailand.

Smith guarded by correctional officers as they leave Supreme Court in Sydney, after he was acquitted of the 1986 murder of Sallie-Anne Huckstepp.

After Thai police linked an 8.5-kilo heroin bust to Smith’s syndicate, Smith was picked up in Sydney. The case looked weak until Smith’s half-brother, Edwin, agreed to roll over, only to change his mind before the trial.

Smith’s good fortune did not end there. Three kilograms of high-grade heroin – which had been seized by police and was a key piece of evidence for the prosecution – metamorphosed into something less incriminating, mainly glucose powder. Smith was acquitted and later claimed to have paid police $30,000 to have the heroin diluted. The corrupt policeman he identified as the fixer was Rogerson.

“Thank Christ for corruption!” Smith later declared in his book, Neddy, written with journalist Tom Noble. “I couldn’t have survived without it, nor could the majority of crims who earned their living the hard way!”

While awaiting trial on the conspiracy to supply heroin charge, Smith had begun selling for another dealer, Danny Chubb. One of Smith’s apprentices was a young thief he had met in jail, Warren Lanfranchi, who was soon making $10,000 a week selling heroin supplied by Smith to buyers in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. But Lanfranchi and his girlfriend, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, were extravagant spenders, and Huckstepp was a user. By April 1981 Lanfranchi was a quarter of a million dollars in debt to Smith, who owed a similar amount to Chubb.

Lanfranchi tried to boost his income by carrying out drug rip-offs and armed robberies. The latter made him a problem for Rogerson and the armed holdup squad.

During a botched bank robbery Lanfranchi fired shots at a police constable, who identified him a few days later as the shooter. When Lanfranchi was given up by his accomplice in the armed robberies, both Smith and Rogerson were worried: Lanfranchi knew all about Smith’s heroin operation and about his corrupt links with Rogerson. If Lanfranchi was arrested and threatened with a long jail sentence, he might be tempted to tell detectives what he knew about Smith and Rogerson.

Sallie-Anne Huckstepp.

Lanfranchi thought the solution was to bribe Rogerson, and naively trusted Smith to make the arrangements. On a windy Saturday afternoon in June 1981, Smith drove Lanfranchi to Chippendale, in Sydney’s inner west, where Rogerson shot him dead. In Rogerson’s version of the fatal encounter, Lanfranchi had reached for a gun when he realised he was about to be arrested. Other witnesses saw it differently. In 1986 Huckstepp would be found strangled in a pond in Centennial Park – a murder Smith would later claim to have committed.

With the Lanfranchi problem solved, Smith got back to work – he bragged of selling three kilos of Danny Chubb’s heroin every 10 days and spending $10,000 a week on clothes. But Chubb’s murder took out his main supplier and Smith returned to armed robberies, green-lighted by the ever-obliging Rogerson.

The mid-1980s gang war in Sydney strained Smith’s partnership with Rogerson, who accused him on TV of being a police informer. Smith blamed this remark for two unsuccessful attempts on his life, but his relationship with Rogerson survived.

It was after a long drinking session with Rogerson in October 1987 that Smith killed father of four Ronnie Flavell in a road-rage incident. Smith was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in jail.

While in prison Smith tried to get his sentence reduced by naming more than a hundred NSW police officers as corrupt. A 1994 report by the Independent Commission Against Corruption noted that Smith and his partner, “Abo” Henry, were “notorious, professional criminals with a proven tendency to lie when it suits them”. While that statement was certainly true, Smith’s allegations of widespread corruption in the NSW police force were borne out by the Wood royal commission that followed.

Smith with his family.

In 1995 a Sunday newspaper published transcripts of “secret tapes” that showed Smith boasting to a cellmate about his crimes, including murder. The cellmate was a police informant. Smith was charged with another seven killings, including that of Huckstepp, but was convicted only of the shooting murder of Harvey Jones.

In roughly a decade and a half from the mid-1970s, while Smith made millions of dollars dealing in heroin, corruption and violence, more than 40 of his criminal “associates” wound up dead, several of them at his hands.

Smith came through it all alive, if not unscathed, but he still found plenty to moan about. He never forgave his half-brother, Edwin, for turning “dog” on him. He reputedly complained that Tony Martin, the actor who played him in Blue Murder, was too short. In his book he railed against the new breed of criminals, the “weakest lowest” of whom “can make plenty of money through drugs and then they turn into monsters”. Neddy Smith did not need the money he made from trafficking heroin to turn into a monster; as his many victims and their families could attest, he was a monster already.

Tom Gilling is a Sydney-based writer and co-author of Evil Life: The True Story of the Calabrian Mafia in Australia.