How Kings Cross repurposed itself into benign non-existence
The Cross today doesn’t even carry the ghost of its own past depravity. Just a lonely strip club and sex shop or two that sit like decorative baubles on Darlinghurst Road, barely hinting at this place’s ribald, and often deadly, history.
Sixty years ago gangster Johnny “Shotgun” Regan and his fellow mobsters prowled the streets of Kings Cross, that crowded precinct of sin and sleaze just east of the Sydney CBD.
They owned it. Controlled it. Built vice empires on the back of crooked cops.
Twenty-five years ago, with Regan long dead and the majority of his mob boss contemporaries six feet under, you could still walk the Glittering Mile and spot little broken heroin balloons littering Darlinghurst Road like confetti.
A new generation of gangsters had moved in, the Cross was as busy as the Royal Easter Show with lights and attractions, albeit strip clubs, illegal casinos and a constant passing parade of drug addicts. It was all sideshow.
Last week, a friend who lives in the modern Cross saw from his apartment window in the early morning three young men crossing Fitzroy Gardens with its famous El Alamein fountain. The men were carrying expensive golf bags on their way to a round of 18 holes somewhere in greater Sydney.
The Cross today doesn’t even carry the ghost of its own past depravity. Just a lonely strip club and sex shop or two that sit like decorative baubles on Darlinghurst Road, barely hinting at this place’s ribald, and often deadly, history.
The Australian’s new investigative podcast – The Gangster’s Ghost – examines the life and times of Regan, perhaps Australia’s last old-style gangster, and his criminal playground, the Cross of the 1960s and 70s, is brought to life.
The Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar, Les Girls, the Red Baron, the Groovy Room, Surf City, the Pink Panther, the Carousel Club, the Venus Room, the Whisky A Go Go – all formed the greater fabric of Kings Cross as the entertainment hub of Sydney during this era.
Thousands of American GIs on R&R from the Vietnam War filled the strip, as did curious onlookers from the suburbs and interstate and international visitors drawn by its wild reputation.
Huge volumes of people out for a good time meant cash, and Regan and his cohorts took full advantage of that.
For those who never experienced the Cross’ dubious heyday, its sleazy substrata and its dangerous edge, that history may as well be an urban fairytale.
Its future was foretold in a controversial 1960s documentary about Kings Cross called The Glittering Mile.
The narrator says: “But you can’t invent anything about the place that isn’t partly true. The Cross is something that Sydney bears with a mixture of disapproval and delight. But you won’t find it on any map. And there’s no street sign that says Kings Cross. It’s a no man’s land with something for everyone. It has no boundaries to its name and no limits to its way of life. In fact, the Cross is not a place but a state of mind.”
Today that place is less a state of mind than a distant memory.
In his day, though, Regan’s short but pyrotechnic life embodied the dark side of the suburb. He too had no boundaries. No limits to his way of life.
The Cross, like Regan, came alive at night, catering for everything from cabaret to cocaine, supper clubs to prostitution. Punters flirted at the edge of this danger. Some got caught up in it.
Writer, publisher and broadcaster Michael Duffy, the author of several crime novels as well as two classic works of historical nonfiction that lay bare the Regan era in Sydney – World War Noir and Sydney Noir: The Golden Years, both of which he co-authored with Nick Hordern – said gangsters like Regan flourished in the 60s and 70s for a number of reasons.
“It was much harder to lock people up legally anyway because police (back then) didn’t have the resources they have now,” he told the podcast.
“If you think about things like modern forensics, DNA, CCTV, phone tapping, none of this was available … the most powerful weapon in a cop’s armoury, when he … was trying to solve a crime, was an informer, because the crooks would blab about what they’d done.
“Informers would come and tell the detective, and the detective would know because he knew he had a reliable informer. He’d know who did the crime, but he couldn’t really prove it. There were fingerprints, but there wasn’t a lot else to help them. And really, even if you’re an honest cop, honest maybe in inverted commas, in order to get convictions, you had to, they had the load and they had the verbal, they, they loaded evidence onto the criminal they knew had done the crime.
“They verballed them … they drew up their own false confessions for these crooks because it was the only way of locking them up.
“So if even honest cops were doing this, this thing called ‘noble cause’ corruption, you can imagine the opportunities that then opened up for dishonest cops to come along and, you know, just start doing whatever they like, basically start letting off the crooks they wanted to let off and loading up the competition of … the other crooks.”
According to Duffy, Regan also landed in Sydney’s sin precinct at a time of social upheaval.
“Another factor in all this mix was the way the Cross was changing,” he said. “Poker machines were allowed into clubs in New South Wales, I think from 1956 on. And this basically turned every or not every but most registered clubs into casinos and brought in a flood of money, which the clubs then used – like RSLs and Leagues Clubs and so on – they used to put on these extraordinary shows, amazing shows.
“They would buy musicals from overseas and bring in entertainers from around the world, and they’d be at St George or Maroubra Juniors, whatever, and people stopped going to the Cross. The Cross used to be the entertainment centre of Sydney, both for entertainment theatres, but also restaurants and so on. And they just stopped going there. They started going to their suburban RSL, their suburban club, because the shows there were just as good and they were closer and the parking was better.”
This demographic shift, in turn, led to “a great transformation” at the Cross.
“The Cross became more and more sleazy,” Duffy added. “It started with Abe Saffron and his strip clubs, the reason being that this was something the suburban clubs couldn’t do, it wasn’t family entertainment … so the Cross basically repurposed itself. And throughout the 60s and 70s it gradually turned from a Bohemian entertainment precinct into a sleazy place selling sex and later on drugs. And that sort of led to the rise of the Cross as a focal point for crime, especially towards the end of the 60s and into the 70s.”
As recently as the late 1990s and early 2000s, the precinct’s next great shift – gentrification – had barely got a foothold.
I lived on the northeastern edge of the Cross. In one six-month period I recall my car being broken into, the passenger windows smashed, seven times, the thieves’ booty just some old CDs and even a pair of well-used running shoes.
I remember stumbling home late one night only to be king hit by three young men in Elizabeth Bay Road. They issued one demand: “Money.”
Once I handed it over, I was kicked in the ribs for good measure.
On a recent visit I stood in Darlinghurst Road staring a little shocked at the Kings Cross Library, formerly off Fitzroy Gardens but reopened on the Golden Mile in 2004 and reimagined, right in the heart of what had been a vibrant flesh market. Books instead of bouncers and bare breasts. Wisdom. Quiet reflection. The knowledge of the world.
Maybe the old Kings Cross was just a dream after all.
Subscribers hear new episodes first. Hear Episode 3 of The Gangster’s Ghost on Apple and Spotify now. Subscribers get Episodes 5 exclusively at gangstersghost.com.au
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