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Organised Crime - page 8

Bushrangers

Bushrangers were criminals who lived in the bush in the nineteenth century and survived by robbing travellers and other settlers. Keep Reading

Abe Saffron

Abraham Saffron was one of the most powerful and successful of Sydney’s crime bosses, and also the most unusual. Most of his money came not from standing over other illegal businesses, but from owning and running his own entertainment venues. It just so happened that much of the entertainment he… Keep Reading

Lennie McPherson

McPherson was a standover man who probably committed or commissioned more murders than any other major organised figure. He did less than other crime bosses to avoid publicity, and was referred to in the media as Mr Big and less often as “Mr Ten Percent”. Born in 1921, McPherson was… Keep Reading

The 1920s

Sydney is the birthplace of organized crime in Australia. It has had all the requisite elements for the formation of a professional milieu: a colonial legacy of strong anti-police sentiment, a weak port economy producing prolonged periods of insufficient employment, impoverished slum dwellers for whom crime was an economic necessity,… Keep Reading

In the Beginning

By all accounts early N.S.W. police constables were corrupt, brutal and despised. Historian Russel Ward argues that, from the colony’s founding until the 1850s, its police force was comprised of ex-convicts who ‘were not the best prisoners but the worst’. By joining the despised police, constables broke the cardinal rule… Keep Reading

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