Was Johnny Regan’s suspected first kill over paltry $800 debt?

Police suspected The Magician lured the Kings Cross bouncer to his death, but never charged him for the crime | NEW EPISODE

A colourised mugshot of Stewart John Regan. Picture: supplied

Slain Sydney gangster Stewart John Regan may have made his first kill over a debt of less than $1000, The Australian’s podcast The Gangster’s Ghost has revealed.

Regan is suspected of killing as many as 12 people – including three-year-old Karlos Scott-Huie – but was never formally charged with murder.

His own assassination in a Marrickville backstreet has gone unsolved for more than half a century. Members of Regan’s extended family are collaborating with senior reporter Matthew Condon on the podcast investigation, which has already shed new light on Regan’s movements in Sydney’s underworld in the 1960s and ‘70s.

That includes the possible killing of Barry Flock, a nurse and cleaner who stood at almost two metres tall. He also worked as a bouncer for various Kings Cross establishments.

The 28-year-old was found on the grounds of the shuttered Scottish Hospital in Paddington in mid-January in 1967 with four bullet wounds in his head. Police believed he’d been lured there by his killer.

“A man known as ‘Big Barry’ was found yesterday with four bullet wounds in his head in jungle-like undergrowth in Paddington,” The Sydney Morning Herald reported on January 16.

“Police said the man … had told a friend he had been marked down for execution by the underworld a week ago.”

The Canberra Times reported Flock’s brother, Leonard James Flock, had been fatally shot by police a year earlier “while allegedly in possession of a stolen lawnmower”. The inquest into Leonard Flock’s death began on the same day his brother was murdered.

Barry Leonard Flock, also known as "Big Barry", who was killed in Paddington in 1967.

It appears Regan and Flock were well-acquainted enough for Regan to recommend flock for a role at a Bondi “health studio”, working for Thelma Coyes, who was referred to as Mrs X in contemporaneous newspaper reports. After leaving the Mount Penang Training School for Boys in Gosford, Regan got his start as a pimp and standover man, and it’s believed the so-called “health studio” was linked to Sydney’s massage parlour scene.

Ms Coyes reportedly gave Flock $800 (approximately $12,500 today) for safekeeping, which Regan alleged he spent.

But Flock told his employer he’d passed the funds to Regan, who denied it was in his possession and instructed his associates to intimidate Flock and his family.

When Flock turned up dead just streets way from the home Regan shared with his mother, Clare, detectives investigating the case brought him in for questioning.

“He told detectives that, although he’d arranged to meet Flock at Victoria Barracks [on Oxford Street], he’d ‘been with a bird’ and forgot,” The Sun newspaper reported.

“When he did remember, he has telephoned Flock and called off the meeting.”

The Heritage portion of the Presbyterian Aged Care Scottish Hospital redevelopment site in Paddington, where Barry Flock’s body was found in 1967. Picture: John Appleyard

In Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia, published in 1980, the author Alfred McCoy wrote that Thelma Coyes told an inquest a business associate of Johnny Regan’s confessed to the killing.

“She made a statement alleging that one Ross T. Christie, Regan’s partner in a Bondi Junction dress shop, had admitted to her that he and several other men had killed Flock, saying: ‘Barry had a big mouth, he had to go’,” McCoy wrote.

Despite Regan’s denials, detectives reportedly believed he was guilty of the crime but never charged him for it.

Consorting cards obtained by Johnny Regan’s second cousin, Kelly Slater Regan, show police were keeping tabs on the up-and-coming gangster, and he appeared in court several times following Flock’s murder for less serious crimes like possession of unlicensed firearms.

Kelly Slater Regan has searched for years for documents relating her second cousin’s murder. Picture: Lachlan Clear/ The Australian

He was represented in those proceedings by his solicitor and confidant Michael Seymour, who has broken his silence about his friendship with Johnny Regan in a new episode The Gangster’s Ghost.

In late 1967 – almost a year after Barry Flock was murdered – Regan would welcome his first child, a son, with de facto wife Margaret Yates.

Subscribers get Episode 6 exclusively at gangstersghost.com.au. Or, hear Episode 4 of The Gangster’s Ghost on Apple and Spotify now.