Underbelly (21 page)

Even his international honeymoon with his wife Tanya was Bollywood lavish, incorporating a stopover in Singapore for an $800 dinner at the legendary Raffles Hotel, where a round of pink gin slings costs the average weekly wage.

That was the glittering and glamorous side of Billy's life. The dark side was the dealing of slow death through the drugs he sold to addicts in Kings Cross alleys and nightclubs, bribing police, threatening to kill anyone who got in his way and profiteering from sleaze, lies and thuggery.

A trusted Bayeh lieutenant who rolled over to become a protected Wood Royal Commission witness, code-named KX14 (KX denoted Kings Cross, 14 the number given each witness), gave an insight into King Billy's empire. In six months, the informer said, he had helped cut heroin and cocaine worth $2.5 million. Some shoe shop.

Bill Bayeh and his older brother, the renowned standover man Louie, used intimidation and police protection to get their turn at controlling Kings Cross vice in the 1980s and 1990s.

Billy started small, competing with a dozen or more dealers of equal status. But he had an entrepreneurial flair for using modern corporate methods and violence to get ahead of the pack.

‘What Bayeh did down the track was to try and do what Woolworths did – that is put people out of business,' notes self-confessed crooked cop Trevor Haken in his biography,
Sympathy for the Devil.
‘Not by cutting the prices or anything, just cutting their legs off.'

The Bayeh brothers arrived at the Cross at a pivotal moment in Sydney's drug-dealing scene, where nothing is constant except change. The population, the dealers, the nationalities and police attitudes revolve as predictably as a carousel.

‘One mob moves out and another moves in within minutes, like blow flies to a dead carcass,' Haken explains.

The Lebanese took over from the Romanians, but then an attempted invasion by Vietnamese criminals hoping to replicate their dominance at Cabramatta in Sydney's outer west was quickly squashed by police. A Russian group also pushed into the scene for a while.

The Cross was a no man's land for any sensible member of the public wanting the protection of law and order. The area's shabby chic status as a bohemian hangout for the artistic, literary and musical had long crumbled – invaded by the godless and lawless as drugs and vice took over the ‘night time' economy. A raffish young lady had degenerated into a seedy, broken-down whore.

Senior police had given up and there were no resources to fight crime. While stationed at the Cross, Haken once took $200 out of petty cash to buy a beaten-up Datsun 180B. It needed two milk crates to prop up a broken driver's seat, reducing its capacity to just three people.

For a while, he claimed, the Datsun provided the only transport police had to take arrested people to Kings Cross Station to be charged. It was bizarre that a jalopy was being used as a de facto cop car but it fitted in with the madness of the red light district on the edge of one of the world's great western cities.

‘You got off the train (at Kings Cross Station) and it was wall-to-wall junkies and crooks from all over the place. If someone got out of jail anywhere you knew they'd end up here,' Haken says. By the 1980s, the bohemian days when the Cross featured characters like the white witch Roslyn Norton were long gone.

In their place, accelerated by the arrival of US troops in the 1960s on R & R from Vietnam wanting drugs and sex, came the heavy drug dealers and flesh peddlers. They got a tight grip on Kings Cross that hasn't been loosened in almost 50 years.

Mostly, things were good for the drug sellers. Addicts are permanent customers and corrupt police are compliant. But sometimes, even at the Cross, the black market in sex and drugs got a little tight when the economy dived.

Neil Chenoweth wrote in his book about the 1992 recession,
Packer's Lunch
: ‘The Cross was doing it tough as well, though on the surface little seemed to have changed.

‘As the Wood Royal Commission would reveal, the area was dominated by four major heroin and cocaine distributors, eight major drug outlets, seven strip clubs running prostitution and a solid phalanx of standover men.

‘Victims disappeared, killers beat murder changes, police officers stole drugs and money from dealers, ran protection rackets, made up evidence and threatened witnesses. Business as usual, it seemed.

‘At one point in the early 1990s an axe murderer was thinning out the tourist population at the Cross on a random basis but it rated barely more than a mention in the Press. But behind the happy facade even the Cross was feeling the recession.

‘Bill Bayeh, brother of that well-known friend of the City, Louie, who would feature prominently in the Wood Royal Commission, was said to be so down on his luck in 1991 that his onetime protégé Danny Karam lent him $50.'

Karam was obviously travelling a little better than Bayeh but the money drought hurt everyone, even the sensitive souls who ran protection rackets. Standover man Anton Skoro would later testify that the drug dealer who paid him $2500 a week to operate in the Cosmopolitan cafe regularly resorted to paying him with caps of heroin rather than the folding stuff, Chenoweth wrote.

‘They were always running out of money,' the standover man complained. ‘They were the poorest drug dealers I've ever known.'

Two years after having to snip $50 from Karam to keep body and soul together, Billy Bayeh was back and making a fortune running four heroin and cocaine outlets at the Cross – Laser's fun parlour (reportedly turning over $20,000 a night), the Penthouse billiard room, the Down Under Hostel and the Cosmo.

When Bayeh eventually copped fifteen years jail for drug offences in 1996, Danny Karam was one of the princes in waiting to take over the drug throne. Unfortunately for the callous Karam, he was gunned down by his own gang – called Danny's Boys – before he could steal the crown.

It is not known if Bayeh ever repaid Karam the $50 loan.

MOST people are insulted when they are called an idiot. Not Billy Bayeh, he was delighted. In fact, he went to extraordinary lengths to have sessions with a forensic
psychologist to get official endorsement of his simplicity – and not just verbally. He needed it in writing. He wanted an official diploma ‘proving' his supposed feeble mindedness to hang on his wall, the way graduates hang their degrees.

It was, of course, a ruse to attempt to escape drug charges. It exposed the extent to which the New South Wales legal system could be exploited and manipulated in imaginative and daring ways by various criminals and their associates.

Bayeh was arrested in a Bondi motel room in November 1990, a week after Kingston Rule won the Melbourne Cup for Bart Cummings at 7/1. He was charged with being knowingly involved in the supply of cocaine. At first, he claimed that police stole $2000 of the cash and cocaine they found under his pillow in his room before ‘booking' him for $4640.

He said the money had come from backing Kingston Rule but later he dropped his claim to the missing cash. Police said Bayeh had known cocaine was in the room and that it belonged to Thierry Boetel, who'd been mentioned in evidence as a drug dealer and who had access to the room.

It was a tough situation for Bayeh, one that required great finesse to keep him out of prison. So, with considerable help from unidentified friends, he constructed an elaborate ruse that involved forged letters saying he was of good character but virtually moronic. He manipulated a forensic psychologist into classifying him as ‘borderline intellectually handicapped' with an IQ of 75.

Meanwhile, Boetel conveniently provided a written confession to Bayeh's legal team saying the cocaine was his and went to the Gold Coast to evade a police hunt. If there was one.

It worked. Billy got off with 300 hours of community service on a charge that would usually bring time in jail. The aftermath came two years later when the Wood inquiry started turning over the mulch that had hidden much of the real story.

It turned out Bayeh's solicitors had arranged for him to be psychologically tested before his drug trial in the District Court in March 1994. The report from a forensic psychologist assessed Bayeh as barely smart enough to tie his own shoe laces, stating that his IQ of 75 put him in the lowest five percent of the population.

There were no encouraging points for Billy in the report but that didn't matter: according to it, he was hardly smart enough to read it.

He was assessed as immature – and illiterate in both English and Arabic. Two years later, in the Commission witness box, the psychological expert for hire said he was stunned to hear of Billy's extensive business interests and his criminal history involving drugs and violence dating back to 1975. In fact, the boffin raised a vital question: could he be certain that the man he had examined was the real Billy Bayeh? Accusations were made that the man he examined might well have been a slow-thinking ‘stooge' pretending to be Bayeh.

Asked to identify Bayeh from a photograph and asked if he had met him before, the ‘trick cyclist' was undecided.

‘I don't believe I have but I can't state categorically that I haven't,' he replied. ‘That person (indicating the photograph of Bayeh) doesn't look familiar to me. I have a shocking memory for names but not usually faces.'

Unfortunately, his assessment had been unchallenged as evidence used to support Bayeh's legal battle. The same applied to three references from people attesting to Bayeh's good character. Former detective Charlie Staunton – Bayeh's right hand man – would later go to jail for contempt for refusing to answer questions about corruption, including what he knew about the source of the references.

They were later proved to be forgeries. After a lifetime of working within a judiciary system he strongly supported, Royal Commissioner Justice Wood was visibly shaken by any suggestion it could be manipulated so easily to help criminals dodge jail. As the evidence mounted, he threatened to track down not just corrupt police but also lawyers, expert witnesses and private investigators operating on the shady side of the law.

Wood ended up admitting he had changed his mind and realised systemic corruption could occur in many ways, such as by weakening a prosecution case by withholding evidence or witnesses – or by shrinking the amount of drugs or money allegedly involved.

Both defence and prosecution teams could also be involved with presenting untrue or slanted evidence and withholding criminal antecedents.

None of that especially worried Bayeh, who was free to continue a spending spree that would make most millionaires envious. But trying to follow his mental state was a
trial in itself. On any given day, a little like Alan Bond, he apparently veered from being a village idiot to a financial wizard in control of three profitable businesses. Amazing.

Billy's petite and pretty young wife Tanya told the Royal Commission her husband was so mentally defective, he initially confused the IQ test with contraception. This caused great hilarity among reporters covering the Commission.

Ray Chesterton wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘Wouldn't that have been a honeymoon from hell until order was restored? “No Billy. It's not a balloon. Try again”.'

Tanya held a Bachelor of Arts with a major in psychology. She said she had taken Billy for the test in which her husband's IQ was rated at 75. Presumably, she stayed around to lead him home otherwise he might have had trouble crossing the road.

Despite her own qualifications, Tanya robustly denied that her own knowledge of psychology had led to a few trial runs at home to acquaint Billy with what questions might be asked.

Tanya told the Commission that despite the psychologist's misgivings, she was certain the man she took for the test was her husband. She spent a total of six hours in the Commission witness box but she didn't win many fans. She was repeatedly told she was a liar, a perjurer and had signed legal documents she knew to be false.

‘You've come here today looking as sweet as a picture and told every lie in the world,' said the Police Service's legal representative. ‘Who told you to come here with your cock and bull story, your husband?'

She answered quietly: ‘No'.

Tanya was compromised by application forms she had filled out for bank housing loans listing their annual income as $400,000 plus. Like so much of the paperwork in Billy's life, the income on the application and its sources were false.

Meanwhile, Billy had other big problems of his own. Acknowledged as the drug czar of Kings Cross and turning over an estimated $20,000 a week from just one outlet, he was trying to find an identity that would cover all of his ‘personalities.'

He was acknowledged as smart enough to run a drug empire and launder money through horse racing but stupid enough to be classified as having an IQ of 75. Third, and most importantly, he was also a police informer like his brother Louie. So he was an idiot savant – and a dirty rotten rat.

Billy had rolled under pressure and changed sides to help the Royal Commission by dobbing in every bent copper he could remember bribing. But Slick Willy soon became Silly Billy as he struggled to stay in touch with reality as all his crude cover-ups and masquerades to avoid detection fell apart.

The evidence was overwhelming and included tape recordings made by confessed corrupt detective Haken exposing Bayeh's payoffs to police, often at Birkenhead Point, a retail shopping complex at inner-suburban Drum-moyne. But there were dozens of other places where money changed hands as well.

During one three-day period Haken collected more than $8000 from Bayeh to split with other corrupt police,
then another $8000 a month or so later. Bayeh also gave a former Kings Cross detective called Stephen Pentland $150 towards the cost of his 30th birthday party at The Tunnel nightclub, which happened to be a notorious drug selling outlet.

A former employee of Billy's who turned police informer (codename KX1) during the Royal Commission, organised the party. Pentland said that during the festivities Bayeh shook his hand and gave him $150, saying put it ‘on the bar for your friends.'