Andrew Rule: The story behind Patricia Galea’s grotesquely brutal murder

Like the police file on her LA murder, Patricia Galea’s memory was wiped clean from her husband’s funeral in Queensland last week, but the former escort was done away with long before that.

Patricia Galea was brutally murdered in LA after leaving her husband, organised crime chum Bruce Galea, back in Australia.

As a wise man once said of Bruce Galea, good luck isn’t hereditary. Bruce was never in the same league as his father, the legendary gambling man Perce Galea, who put the “colourful” into “Sydney racing identity”.

They called Perce ‘The Prince’ but his kingdom was a shadowy one.

As a bagman who moved between crooks and bent politicians and police, he carried secrets and bribes, and profited greatly from both. He rose from battling Maltese migrant kid to made man in a violent and corrupt era.

By contrast, Bruce Galea seemed to casual observers to be another rich guy’s son.

The Galea empire shrank after Premier ‘Nifty’ Neville Wran whittled back protection for most of the illegal casinos that had backhanded black cash to police and others for decades.

Bruce Galea with a jockey in 1974.

Perce Galea and jockey Jack Thompson in 1978.

Wran’s popular Sports and Racing Minister, the respected star sportsman Mike Cleary, was a friend of Bruce’s since school days. But the Galeas’ glory days of ‘printing’ tax-free cash in illegal gambling clubs ended when Wran switched horses, opting to legalise casinos – ushering in bloated Vegas-style palaces licensed to business barons who could make or break governments.

When Bruce died in Queensland last week, he was more pauper than prince. His funeral in Burleigh Heads last Thursday was a modest affair. But the Galea name still has some clout.

A small but interesting cross-section of racing identities will gather for his wake at Clovelly surf club in Sydney next Thursday afternoon.

Some mourners will know each other better by nicknames than the ones on their birth certificates.

The wake will include survivors from the days when the gambling scene attracted names like ‘Hollywood George’, ‘Paddles’ Anderson, ‘Kiwi John’, ‘Melbourne Mick’, ‘Snapper’ Cornwell and many more, most now dead.

Former NSW premier Neville Wran.

Funerals are full of euphemisms and lies, from white to shades of grey.

Coffins turn thugs into ‘rough diamonds’, rapists into ‘ladies’ men’ and bash artists into ‘men’s men’.

Galea was a betting man. It’s a fair bet that his first wife was barely mentioned in his eulogy. There’s a reason for that apart from the usual delicacy about the early life of anyone who marries three times.

The reason in this case is that those who recall Patricia Galea can’t help wondering if her husband (or his father) had her murdered.

Even on the bare facts, the death of Patricia Galea was a terrible thing.

But the story behind the story, the one that Bruce Galea’s contemporaries talk about quietly, or not at all, is worse.

THE END FOR PATRICIA

The end came for Patricia Galea in West Hollywood just after midnight on April 15, 1974. She was 29 and had arrived in Los Angeles earlier that year with a bundle of cash and plans to open a fashion boutique.

The original idea might have been to set up the business then return to Sydney, where she had left her 10-month-old daughter with Bruce. If so, things changed.

It seems Patricia stayed on, assuming she was out of reach of a jealous and angry husband.

Or a furious father-in-law making harsh judgments of his son’s choice of wife.

By that April, Patricia was living in a luxurious apartment near Sunset Strip with Eugene Synegal, a playboy guitarist and Hendrix lookalike who’d recorded with Sam & The Soul Machine then a psychedelic band named Sage.

Synegal supposedly persuaded his lover to fund a new album and a music publishing business. He was one of a cool group that Patricia liked better than the Sydney gambling scene, where people knew her chequered past.

Bruce and Perce Galea were often whispered to be behind Patricia’s murder.

Patricia Galea was found dead in her apartment in LA.

In LA, a gathering place for beautiful people from everywhere, Patricia could play the Aussie socialite without worrying about her origins. Among Sydney’s racetrack crowd, it was common knowledge that Bruce Galea had fallen for an ‘escort’.

The former Patricia Donohue was in fact from battling Bankstown, where she had fallen pregnant at 15. Her parents raised the child while Patricia used her striking looks and granite resolve to trade her way up in the world’s oldest profession among Sydney’s wealthiest men. Galea was one of them.

In Los Angeles, one of Eugene Synegal’s friends was Mercure Washington, a hip tailor that Patricia aimed to use in the new business. On April 14, she and Washington were due to fly to New Orleans on business. But they missed the flight and returned to the West Hollywood apartment to find it had been invaded by two (or three) masked men.

The robbers trussed up six victims – Patricia and five others, including Synegal and Washington.

The theory is that the robbers had heard gossip that the glamorous Australian woman had some $6400 cash, then the equivalent of $32,000. The sort of sum that would, you’d think, encourage robbers to threaten their victims until they revealed the stash – which was, in fact, in the freezer.

Despite the freezer being a fairly predictable hiding spot, even in 1974, the bandits did not find the money. All they got was $400, a $1400 cigarette lighter, diamond rings and two mink coats.

But they seemed to have murder in mind. Instead of interrogating Patricia, they started slashing the throats of the helpless victims. When Patricia begged for her life, one robber put a .410 shotgun barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

Even in the 1970s Los Angeles of race riots and rampant crime, it was so grotesquely brutal it seemed to come straight from a James Ellroy novel.

Remarkably, the other victims survived having their throats slashed, including one who jumped from a second-storey window.

The story made headlines in both countries. It was the sort of high-profile outrage that, normally, homicide detectives would pursue hard and solve fast. But a strange thing happened to this particular investigation: someone nobbled it so completely that it stalled for 35 years.

It might have been buried forever.

But in 2006 a new owner of the apartment, researching its history, found reports of the murder. Astonished that it was unsolved, he found a retired detective, Larry Brandenburg, who had been brought back with other veterans to review old cases.

George Freeman, a cold-blooded gunman turned race fixer and crime boss was one suspected party in Mrs Galea’s murder.

Brandenburg was amazed to find the Patricia Galea file empty. The fingerprints, blood samples and murder weapons had vanished. So had case notes and medical records.

Two prime suspects had been identified within days. They were a violent youngster, John Threlkeld, and an older man, Leonard Turner.

The pair fled to Michigan, where they were arrested on other serious charges. But when life sentences for those offences were overturned in the early 1980s, they were released without being questioned about the Galea murder.

In 2007, Brandenburg pushed for Threlkeld and Turner to be charged. It took until 2010 to reach court. By then witnesses had died or forgotten details. As defence lawyers pointed out, it was decades too late to prosecute, so they walked.

There’s no doubt Threlkeld and Turner were vicious enough to kill simply to eradicate witnesses. But even more sinister than the crime itself was that someone in Los Angeles law enforcement had gutted the case against them, in exactly the way corrupt officials help organised crime figures.

Almost five decades after the murder, the question is: why would that happen unless organised crime figures arranged it?

Back in Sydney, the word in the gambling scene was that Galea’s runaway wife had been punished with death. The notoriously bent Bill Allen (later made deputy police commissioner by Wran to pander to his SP bookie contacts) told bookmaker Bill Waterhouse the murder had been ordered from Sydney.

Bruce Galea was seen as more mellow than his whatever-it-takes father. But the Galeas had the connections to reach out to Los Angeles. One stands out: the cold-blooded gunman turned race fixer and crime boss George Freeman.

Former Deputy Police Commissioner Bill Allen.

Gangster Joseph Dan Testa.

Freeman’s criminal ally Lennie ‘Mr Big’ McPherson was photographed with California mobsters Joe Dan Testa and Nick Giordano on a shooting trip near Bourke on one of four visits Testa made to stay with Freeman between 1965 and 1973.

Freeman and the American mobsters had interests that organised crime shared worldwide, one of which was sourcing the latest “stings” and “slowers” to cheat the public by nobbling racehorses or by enhancing their performance.

When Freeman was arrested in Los Angeles in the 1970s after arriving with a false passport, his Mafia friends offered $500,000 to buy his way out and told him they could blackmail a judicial figure.

Something worked: to the FBI’S anger, Freeman was bailed and let fly home to Sydney. Clearly, then, his Mafia contacts could fix anything in LA from a horse race to murder.

Bill Casey, a sports writer who knew Perc Galea, called him after hearing of Patricia’s murder, offering condolences.

He was shaken by the ugly response from the usually cheerful Galea.

Bruce Galea is often described as a more amiable figure than his father, but he had a hard side. When the rugged former rugby player was running illegal gambling dens in Chinatown, friends noticed he had a pistol tucked in his belt under his jacket. When he refused to give evidence to the Wood royal commission in 1995 he copped two years and three months in jail rather than break the code of silence.

One well-known form expert, ‘The Brain’, liked Galea enough to advise him on odds.

The form man recalls going to a cinema in George St, Sydney, just after Patricia was killed. He saw Galea in the foyer and stopped to chat.

Galea looked strange.

He said something ‘The Brain’ has never forgotten because it rang so false: He said his wife had just died in Los Angeles “in an accident”.

They saw each other many times afterwards but Galea never mentioned Patricia again.

Like the police records, she’d been wiped.

Originally published as Andrew Rule: The story behind Patricia Galea’s grotesquely brutal murder