Nano the Magician and the Clown Price of Drugs: The underworld’s most unlikely pair

Stewart John Regan’s association with John Edward Milligan was an unlikely link-up that ended up in a spectacular falling out.

John Edward Milligan.

Criminal history has had its fair share of odd couples – Ronnie and Reggie Kray, Bonnie and Clyde, Fred and Rose West. But few were more peculiar than Australia’s own Nano the Magician and the Clown Prince of Drugs.

In the early 1970s brutal Sydney gangster Stewart John Regan, known for making people disappear without a trace, formed a business relationship with John Edward Milligan, a balding, brilliant young drug dealer who was partial to wearing capes, dressing up as a priest or flashing a cane and dancing through the streets of Kings Cross in old-fashioned shoe spats, a la Fred Astaire.

Regan and Milligan’s brief but pyrotechnic partnership, revealed in the latest episode of The Australian’s podcast The Gangster’s Ghost, remains one of the strangest criminal couplings in our underworld history.

While comedic on the outside, Milligan was in fact a ruthless drug dealer who would introduce Regan to the heroin trade and its lucrative profits, while Regan learned from Milligan’s intelligence and organisational skills. Until they fell out over a failed drug deal.

John Edward Milligan was born in Coraki in far northern New South Wales in March 1944. His father Kenneth was a schoolteacher. Milligan appeared in the Northern Star newspaper, aged 9, as the winner of the fancy dress competition at a local ball. He was attired as “a duke”.

As a law student he became an associate to Brisbane District Court Judge, George Seaman. Milligan was sacked after he was caught selling stolen law library textbooks to other students.

Former Federal Bureau of Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook wrote of Milligan in his part-memoir Operation Jungle: “By the time he (Milligan) had reached his thirties, he was known to the Narcotics Bureau and many police agencies. One of the characteristics that gave Milligan a degree of notoriety in police circles was his ability to get virtually any charge against him eventually dismissed, including a charge of selling heroin in 1972 and a short time later another charge of armed robbery. As the saying went, Milligan had ‘contacts’.”

John Edward Milligan. Picture: supplied

Milligan split his time between Brisbane and Sydney.

Shobbrook described him as “a well-spoken man of average size and weight, slim and with sandy thinning hair … well-educated and almost always neatly dressed … flamboyant and hyperactive individual, apparently with an IQ approaching genius level.” He said Milligan “saw himself as the reincarnation of Julius Caesar – and from busts which I have seen of Caesar, there was a bit of a resemblance.”

Shobbrook was sure Milligan wasn’t a heroin user himself, but was “an entrepreneur, a puppet master, a wheeler-dealer”. Milligan was described in the Woodward Royal Commission into drug trafficking (1977-79) as “a major figure in the importation of heroin into Australia.”

Milligan was trafficking drugs locally and internationally well before the bigger players entered the fray. He was Mr Asia before Mr Asia, moving drugs in suitcases and using light aircraft.

Milligan hooked up with Regan in Sydney sometime in the early 1970s and they formed a business relationship. Milligan told Shobbrook: “I had a partnership with Regan at one stage until we fell out … Regan recruited me in a way in the sense that he used my expertise … also used me up.”

Stewart John Regan. Picture: supplied

Shobbrook still scratches his head over this curious criminal relationship: “We’ve got to ask ourselves, what did he (Milligan) offer him (Regan)? Maybe it was his intelligence. I don’t know how intelligent Stewart John Regan was, but maybe it was Milligan’s intelligence. Maybe on a one-to-one basis, when you’re speaking to the man, you think – he’s pretty astute, you know? Perhaps he impressed them.”

When Shobbrook arrested Milligan in Sydney in 1979 over a brazen heroin importation operation that involved dropping parcels of heroin out of an aircraft over Jane Table Mountain on the eastern side of The Cape York Peninsula, Milligan subsequently unloaded in a series of formal interviews. He offered one of the most comprehensive and detailed insights into the drug trade in Australia up to that point.

Milligan also exposed institutionalised corruption in both Queensland and NSW. He named names.

In the history of the drug trade Milligan has often been dismissed as a lightweight and a joker, but he was a major player who had deep connection with corrupt police, particularly in Queensland.

Former NSW drug squad detective Michael Drury, who survived an assassination attempt in 1984 after he refused to take a bribe to drop charges against a major drug dealer, once arrested Milligan in the early 1970s.

“He was a bad criminal,” Drury remembered. “I was told that he was an ex-judge’s associate (for) a judge in Queensland and I couldn’t believe it. He pleaded guilty to our charge. I think our charge was in relation to possession of heroin.

“He had a very, very good head on his shoulders. And I remember speaking to him in the cells at Central Police Station … a day or two after we charged him because he was still in custody. I thought to myself at the time … this man was a judge’s associate from Brisbane. And look at him now. Look at him now.”

John Milligan was sentenced to a minimum nine years for importing heroin into Far North Queensland. Picture: supplied

Queensland and NSW police were convinced Regan had partnered with Milligan in the drug trade, though Regan always publicly stated his personal opposition to drugs.

When he ultimately fell out with Milligan, he tried to rat him out to both Queensland detectives and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Narcotics officer Brian Bennett, who briefly met Regan in Brisbane, believed Milligan had so much dirt on Regan that the Sydney gunman couldn’t kill him.

Regan, of course, was murdered by three unknown gunmen in Sydney in 1974.

Milligan would do prison time in the early 1980s for drugs.

On his release a few years later he simply vanished, turning up in the Tweed Heads Memorial Gardens and Crematorium – just a 90-minute drive from his childhood home of Coraki – upon his death in December 1993.

Subscribers get Episode 7 exclusively at gangstersghost.com.au. Or, hear Episode 5 of The Gangster’s Ghost on Apple and Spotify now.