Underbelly 4 Read online

  THESE days, there’s hardly a taxi driver who’d know who Nappy Ollington is, let alone where to find him. He lives a quiet life with his second wife, Doreen, in an apartment in one of West St Kilda’s old bayside buildings.

  The old two-up king is now more than seventy but looks a decade younger. The boxer’s biceps still swell under his tee-shirt, and he has the impatient tread of the all-round sportsman he used to be. His eyes are striking: blue-grey, like gun metal, and piercing under bushy dark brows and a full head of hair. For a man who is supposedly retired, he’s bursting with energy and ideas. And stories. He can spin them as well as he used to spin the pair of century-old pennies he keeps in a drawer.

  As colourful identities go, Nappy Ollington takes some tossing. If his life story were a film the script writer would be accused of going over the top. It reads like a collaboration between Damon Runyon, Frank Hardy and C.J. Dennis after a long and liquid lunch. But it’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

  Nappy is the classic cheeky battler who survived childhood on the wrong side of the tracks and had a crack at the high life. What he heard and saw along the way is a chapter of Melbourne’s unwritten history, a tale that stretches back to the days of John Wren and Squizzy Taylor.

  You had to be tough to get by, and he was. His parents made sure of that by giving him nothing much but a pair of names that would make a West Indian cricketer blush. Anyone called Lionel Vivian Ollington in working class Melbourne in the Depression was guaranteed two things: he’d learn to defend himself, and he’d get a nickname.

  But why ‘Nappy’? His explanation is that he was a happy little boy whose disposition reminded a neighbour of a popular Aboriginal everyone in the neighbourhood called Nappy. But Ollington’s good humour didn’t extend to people poking fun at him. A natural athlete with fast hands, he wasn’t just a tough proposition in a street fight. As a youngster he beat a string of pro boxers in the ring at Festival Hall until his grandmother made him promise to hang up the gloves.

  He worked on the waterfront as a young man. Shovelling coal in and out of the holds of ships made him strong, and he ran every day to overcome the painful rheumatic joints that plagued him as a teenager. He overcame it so well that he won the Wharfies’ Gift foot race at the annual Wharfies’ Picnic, running barefoot. He never touched alcohol and it gave him an edge.

  He played League football for Footscray in 1953, the year before the club won the flag, but is just as proud of starring in three local football premiership sides in one week — a record he reckons only the late, great Ted Whitten equalled. Not bad for a little bloke (‘nine stone, dripping wet’) who carried a lot of injuries. But that’s all just incidental stuff, really. What he wants to be remembered for is the part he played in the game he loves even more than football.

  It’s more than sixty years ago, but he still remembers the moment that two-up hooked him.

  FLASHBACK to South Melbourne, late 1930s. There was a regular two-up game outside the Golden Fleece Hotel. Nappy and his brother Billy were usually hungry, and the drinkers and punters would often shout them a sausage roll or a pie.

  The boys were mesmerised by the money tossed down by the gambling men. Kids who never handled more than copper coins could hardly believe it when they saw a ‘ten-bob’ note thrown in the ring by some hardened gambler.

  One evening the police raided the game. ‘Everybody ran,’ he laughs, reliving the scene. ‘A bloke called George Bryce was running the game. He ran off down Montague Street — and kept going even when the police fired two shots after him. I thought to myself: “Gawd, this must be some good game if people are prepared to die for it”.’

  Gambling attracted young Ollington, like others in that time and place, because he had little to lose. The family had landed in Port Melbourne from Smithton in Tasmania when he was seven, in about 1934. The only thing his parents had plenty of was children. Nappy was youngest of five.

  His father, an axeman, went to Gippsland in search of timber work and rarely returned; their mother did the best she could in the slums of South Melbourne.

  His three older sisters left home as soon as they could, his mother took up with a man he hated, and he and his brother mostly fended for themselves, apart from their grandmother’s help. Memories of his mother are jarring. ‘She was a cruel woman. She had this little red whip and chased us with it, on her bike. Other times she would make us chew dry epsom salts or take castor oil as punishment. It was barbaric.’

  He and his brother were often reduced to begging for food, but he always hoped for something better. ‘Nobody had nothing, but nothing was plenty for us,’ he says cheerfully.

  When war broke out in 1939, jobs were plentiful. He left school after seventh grade and started at the Kraft factory, nailing the tops on wooden crates. One day he ran into a favorite teacher. ‘He asked what I was doing and I told him, working at the cheese factory. He said I was one boy who should have gone to university.’

  Which, in a way, Nappy did, though not the one the kindly teacher meant. Young Ollington had no chance of going to a bricks-and-mortar university to be lectured and tutored into a profession. All he had, apart from a few shillings a week in wages, was a head for figures, plenty of nerve and a reputation for defending himself on and off the football field, where he was the local champion.

  It gave him early entry to a different university … running his own little two-up game as a teenager. Sometimes it was on the footpath outside the local pubs. On Sunday mornings, the needy and the greedy would gather in the park near the Rising Sun hotel until the local policemen broke up the game.

  It was an education that made him a keen student of human nature, the mathematical laws of chance, the criminal law governing gambling, and the primitive law of the jungle. He was just sixteen the first time someone tried to stand over him for his money. It was his first examination, and he passed.

  As the aggressor moved towards him, Ollington glanced down and said: ‘Wait until I take off me watch.’ He chuckles at the memory. ‘The silly boy, he did. And he went to sleep.’ In the split-second that the would-be standover man hesitated, it was over. Nappy got in first and won the takeover battle by knockout.

  His reputation grew. By the time the war was over he was eighteen and ambitious. There were three big two-up games in Melbourne at the time: ‘Chungy’s’ in Prahran, ‘Daley’s’ in Carlton and ‘The Sniper’s’ in North Melbourne and Footscray. The Prahran game was closest to South Melbourne, and Nappy knew a boxer called Young Jocka who helped ‘mind’ the game.

  ‘They liked strong people working for them, so I went there,’ he says casually of his first venture into the bigtime. ‘After a couple of years Charlie Daley split with his partner over at Carlton. He asked me to form some sort of partnership between him and another bloke called “Tommy”. He said we would put in 200 pounds each, equal shares.’

  He scraped up the money and became a partner in the game, based in a room behind a nightclub opposite Queen Victoria market. Ollington later found out neither of his partners had actually put up their share of the money. Now, he relishes the joke against himself. ‘Here I am sweeping up every night while they count the take — and I’m the only one who put in my share. I’m supposed to be the strong bloke, and I’m the patsy!’

  The police gaming branch ran occasional raids on two-up schools, more as a gesture than as a real attempt to stamp them out. The only way to stop them would be to raid them every week and, in those days, neither State Government nor police wanted to waste time doing that. But the police command took a prudent interest in who was connected with the games.

  In 1957, Nappy got his lucky break. His version is that while one of the partners, Charlie Daley, was in hospital, a senior figure in the police gaming branch called himself and Tommy’ into his office for a meeting.

  He recalls the interview this way. ‘The policeman guy said: “Tommy, you are not the right character to be involved in the game but you, Ollington, you work on the w
aterfront and I haven’t heard any bad reports about you”.’

  That’s how Nappy Ollington got a green light to run his game, on the tacit understanding it had to be well run. It didn’t mean he was protected from the letter of the law, just tolerated.

  ‘By the time Charlie Daley came out of hospital and says “Where do I stand?” it was too late. I told him I knew he hadn’t put his share of the money in, so he had no comeback. That was the end of Charlie’s involvement.’

  The police still ran raids and Ollington had to pay the price of prosecution — another fine, another minor conviction, another frantic search for another empty warehouse, which he would paint out ‘really smick’, as he puts it. Laurie Bull, an artistic wharfy, painted a huge picture of the great racehorse Peter Pan, and it went wherever the game did, a signature touch.

  Nappy’s game flourished. First he got ‘the overflow’ from the two other games on busy nights, then his game started to grow. The other proprietors weren’t happy, as he found out when two notorious heavies, Harold Nugent and Joey Turner, visited one day, but not to play.

  ‘They said I was starting to be a bit of a nuisance. So I got my cousin Kevin Watterson to come down. Kevin was the boxing trainer, trained Rocky Mattioli later, and a better bloke never trod shoeleather. He was a handsome man, Kevin, but he was frightened of no-one. They threatened him with a bomb through his window and he said just said to them: “Don’t miss”.’

  The showdown never came because, he says, a mutual acquaintance got out of jail around that time and had a word to Nugent and Turner ‘and the pressure was taken off.’

  ‘So now Nappy’s flying,’ he says, leaning forward on his couch. ‘To run a top game at that time you had to be a psychologist. You had to handle the police and you had to handle these parasites.’ By ‘parasites’ he means standover men.

  There were a few of them over the years. ‘Even before Charlie Daley got out of hospital I was approached by a bloke called “Frogmouth” and one called Johnny Johansen, who wanted to be sort of partners in the game. But they weren’t cut out for two-up. Johansen frightened the clients and, in the end, I told them it was no good. They weren’t partners any more. One Sunday morning Johansen comes running into the game, roaring like a big gorilla, scaring people. So I send for Kevin, my cousin, and he has words with Johansen. I put Kevin in as my partner after that.

  ‘One night afterwards I get pulled out of the game to say there’s someone outside who wants to see me. There’s a car in a lane off Cobden Street. A guy in the passenger seat has a rifle levelled at me. I didn’t know him but I knew the one in the driver’s seat. I’m terrified of guns, but I said to them “We’ll see who’s going to win” and walked away, expecting to be shot in the back.

  ‘Later, we moved the game to Brunswick Street in Fitzroy. One night I’d been at the fights and when I got back there’d been trouble at the game. Johansen had arrived with a bloke called Johnny Morrison, who’d king hit Kevin and broken his nose, but that didn’t stop Kevin and he soon got on top of him. When I saw Kevin was hurt, I was livid.

  ‘Johansen was big, but God’s fair — he gives big men big hearts and little men bigger hearts. A pool cue fell on the floor and I knew Johansen would try to get it. But one of my staff was quick and alert, he stood on it so Johansen couldn’t pick it up. I put together probably the best two punches of my life. He fell so hard he broke his leg. I never saw either of them again after that.

  ‘The thing is, if you can’t defend your game and your clients, you might as well close down.’

  Police raids were annoying, but didn’t affect business in the early days. Ollington’s funniest memories are of the times he persuaded every player booked in a raid to insist on being taken to the watchhouse, because he knew the police hated doing paperwork for sixty people who would be released within hours. As soon as they got inside the holding cell at the watchhouse out would come a ‘kip’ and pennies and the game would resume.

  The game attracted what he calls a ‘cross section’. Even now, he won’t reveal the well-known people who dropped in to spin the pennies or to bet on the side. But the regular crowd included footballers, jockeys, trammies, taxi drivers, and detectives who came to see who was cashed up, and stayed to play. When the American heavyweight boxer Jimmy Ellis came to Melbourne to fight Joe Frazier in 1975 he dropped into the game and threw heads three times running. (Legend has it Ellis also attended a party run by a well-known socialite who persuaded him to break the boxer’s cardinal rule of abstaining from pleasures of the flesh before a fight, but that is another story.)

  Regular players had nicknames. There was Scratchy Stan, Pizza Mick, Footscray Bill, Taxi Tom, and Eric The Red, a Steptoe-lookalike who spent his days busking with a mouth organ in the city so that he could play two-up at night. Losers were shouted a taxi fare home. Winners paid their ten per cent premium to ‘the shop’ after three winning bets. Nappy paid for the funerals of several of his regulars. ‘My grandmother once told me it was better to give than receive,’ he says.

  ‘We ran the game strictly. We wouldn’t allow any alcohol, and made sure there was never any trouble. No loutish behavior.’

  After the TAB started operations in the 1960s the game that diggers had played in two world wars was a casualty of the State’s push to monopolise gambling profits.

  The police raids intensified. The other big games closed, which concentrated police pressure on Nappy’s. He had to move more often, playing an exhausting game of hide and seek. One night, he says, at the time of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Melbourne in 1981, a partner was running the game for the night when word reached Ollington at home that a raid was on. He arrived in time to see armed police in boiler suits and jack boots with police dogs, as if they were confronting terrorists. It seemed to him a heavy-handed way to treat the national game old soldiers play every Anzac Day.

  By 1984 Ollington was a grandfather in his fifties. With his sons, Steven and Robbie, he was looking at ways of exporting the game he believed legalised gambling had ruined.

  The family was keen to concentrate on joint ventures in the United States and elsewhere, modifying the game to suit casinos. At home, meanwhile, ‘I could smell change, and I didn’t like it,’ says Nappy. Police pressure had driven two-up so far underground that few legitimate people wanted to play. By criminalising it, the authorities had ensured only criminals risked playing.

  He sold his interest in the game, and it moved a step closer to extinction. He reckons he got a rough spin from the authorities and the big end of town. For twenty-five years the standover men didn’t put him off his game but, in the end, the men in suits did. As he sees it, politicians and bureaucrats protected the long-term business interests of the Government and its favoured operators to set up other forms of gambling.

  Nappy shakes his head sadly, and says that casinos have choked the life out of the great Australian game. If two-up had been set up properly in casinos it would now be a genuine tourist attraction — unlike the homogenised standard gambling games played in every casino in the world.

  ‘The police brought representatives of the Wrest Point casino to sit in on my game for a week to get the feel of how to run the game — and they learnt nothing. The casinos have destroyed the best game in the world. They took it and created Bay Thirteen, with drunks screaming and singing so no-one can hear and get a bet on. That’s not the way to run our national game.’

  But he hasn’t given up hope. The Ollingtons have proprietary games approved and operating overseas and have developed a new casino version of the traditional game that Nappy firmly believes will be Australia’s greatest gaming attraction, and a huge money spinner. ‘Bigger than the atom bomb’ is the way he puts it. But that’s not really what motivates a grandfather in his seventies.

  It’s more a matter of pride. If it all works out and the Ollingtons make a comeback with legal two-up, he reckons someone might just make a film about his life and times.

  They
could call it Don’t Get Mad, Get Evens.

  CHAPTER 13

  No More Cops and Robbers

  A group of criminals began to believe that some detectives in the squad were just as keen to kill a crook as catch one.

  RAY WATSON had been a policeman for just eight hours when he had his first run-in with higher-ranking colleagues.

  He had been out to celebrate his graduation and was driving down the Maroondah Highway on Melbourne’s eastern outskirts well over the limits, both in speed and alcohol.

  He was driving a friend’s white E Type Jaguar, in his own words, ‘at speed’, when he saw a blue flicker in the rear view mirror grow into an ominous flashing light.

  Two stern-faced policemen hopped from a divisional van, but the newest copper in Victoria was unfazed. ‘It’s all right, boys,’ he yelled, ‘I’m in The Job.’

  He well could have been out of it if the two police had not been quite so tolerant.

  ‘They were very irate and told me in no uncertain terms that my behaviour was unacceptable,’ Watson was to recall of that roadside encounter.

  ‘It taught me a lesson about motor-vehicles and sobriety.’

  Recruits to the Police Academy come from a wide range of backgrounds, but even then the lanky Watson stood out. He was the only known trainee who was a failed rock star – and 188 cm tall.

  He had been the bass guitarist in a band – appropriately called The Fix. ‘I started as a lead guitarist and devolved from there,’ was the way he described a shortlived musical career.

  Watson was a scholarship student at Strathmore High until he fell out with the principal. ‘We decided that we should part company and as he was comfortable in his position we agreed that perhaps I would move on.’

  Essendon Grammar was the next stop, although his attention was shifting from schoolwork to nightclubs.