Underbelly Read Free

in cars and back streets, shucking up her mini-skirt to score money for the next hit. She worked mostly from a car park behind a service station.
    Ask Chris Murphy, the standout criminal lawyer, about the Cross and this is the story he tells. He doesn’t dredge up war stories about all the gangsters he’s known over the years, although he easily could. He knows most of them and has acted for plenty. He’s good at it.
    Instead, he talks about the judge’s daughter because he knew her and her father and because her story is the real story of the Cross: underneath the night-time glitz it’s about as romantic as a road crash and just as dangerous.
    For Murphy, hers was a tragedy that sums up the fatal attraction of the street life. He tells how he arranged for the girl to go to a friend’s island off the Queensland coast to get her away from the scene, to dry out and start again, far from the sordid seductiveness of the street’s predators and scavengers.
    â€˜But when it came to it, she wouldn’t go,’ he says. ‘Two days later she was back there, in her high heels. The heroin was too good. The life just too exciting. Everything else too boring by comparison. That’s why they can’t give it up until it’s too late.’
    If Murphy knows what happened to the judge’s daughter later, he doesn’t give it away. But if she ended up dead, or wrecked, she would be only one of hundreds of victims washed up on the Golden Mile, addicted to the thing that will kill or crush them.
    Just another story from the naked city. There were plenty more – but not many happy endings.
    EVEN other bad men didn’t like Jimmy Locchi. Some crooks called him the ‘Loch Ness monster’ – not because he was tough but because he was a nasty piece of work. ‘Slimy and grubby, a bully and a big noter,’ was how a former policeman describes him.
    A contemporary of the infamous crim Neddie Smith, Locchi ran street prostitutes in Kings Cross and paid the women in heroin. This was convenient, as he was also a heroin dealer. He was also a sadistic rapist.
    â€˜He would abduct women and gang bang them in motels,’ says the former policeman. Abduction and rape was his idea of entertainment. In business he was predictably ruthless – and surprisingly innovative.
    He set up a system that became known around the Cross in the 1980s as ‘Locchi’s window’. It wasn’t always the same window – sometimes he had two going at once – but the same trick.
    He would rent a run-down ground floor apartment from a compliant landlord, fit bars on the windows and door and a buzzer intercom system so anyone at the building’s entrance could talk to the flat’s occupants without seeing them.
    A buyer would ring the buzzer, order drugs, go to the barred window, poke the money in and get the drugs out the same way. It was highly secure, centralised marketing – and it made it hard for undercover police (or marauding criminals doing a ‘run through’) to get into the flat or identify the people handling the heroin. The iron bars made raids slow, and meant there was enough time for the occupants to get rid of evidence.
    Locchi recruited a roster of clapped-out hookers, preferably addicts, to staff the place, earning more cash in relative safety and comfort than they could on the street. Many would work for a regular ‘taste’ of heroin and were willing to hide the drug inside their bodies, making them difficult to search. And they were easy for him to stand over, too frightened to steal money or drugs.
    The success of ‘Locchi’s window’ of course, relied partly on Kings Cross police keeping a polite distance. In that time and place, that was almost a foregone conclusion. Even honest cops talked about ‘managing’ crime rather than the impossible dream of wiping it out. The upshot was that neither the local police nor