As "Abo" Henry's autobiography confirms, he and
the notorious Neddy Smith were quite a duo, in bars and on the mean streets,
writes Stephen Gibbs.
Neddy Smith liked his beer in middies - at least 30 of them a day. When he
moved from VB onto Jack Daniels it could make for a quite a lively evening if
Abo Henry had shifted up to rum.
A doctor told Smith he was alcoholic after he had stabbed a man dead on the
drink. Smith could not believe it - to his mind, Henry was far worse.
"Abo's the worst drunk in the world, barring no one," he has said.
Sydney's so-called gang wars of the mid-1980s were in some
ways as much about Smith and Henry's drinking as they ever were about drugs.
Their best asset was the green light; their greatest liability: amber fluid.
From the Lord Nelson in The Rocks to Alexandria's Iron Duke, Smith and Henry
and their cohorts laid out the most dangerous pub crawl Sydney has ever known.
Henry, who first shared a beer with Smith in 1977 at the Governor Burke at
Camperdown, last month launched his memoir ABO: A Treacherous Life - The Graham
Henry Story (Mayhem in the Green Light Days with Neddy Smith and Christopher
Dale Flannery) at the Unity Hall Hotel in Balmain.
As with Smith's autobiography Neddy, published in 1993, it's
also one long drinking tale. In the television drama Blue Murder some of the
most colourful scenes take place in pubs. As none of the hotels is named,
here's a guide to some Roger Rogerson baring his arse from a bar table was at
the Covent Garden in Chinatown, as was the fight between Henry and Smith, won
by Smith. The Anzac Day pub brawl, with Warren Lanfranchi riding his motorbike
around the bar, was at the Broadway Hotel.
There is no physical evidence of Smith, Henry, Rogerson and Chris Flannery
lighting up a pub cellar with automatic rifle fire - but if that did happen it
was at the Iron Duke. Smith bit a chunk out of a drinker's face at the White
Horse in Surry Hills.
As most of Smith and Henry's income was from distributing heroin that seaman
Danny Chubb brought in off the wharves, they were regulars at his local - the
Captain Cook at Millers Point. They had been drinking with him there only
minutes before Chubb was shot dead around the corner, outside his mother's home
one morning in November 1984.
Even closer to the Captain Cook than Mrs Chubb's home is the Lord Nelson -
scene of countless massive Smith-Henry drinks, and one act of stupid gunplay by
a hanger-on called Harvey Jones. The would-be gangster once leapt the bar at
the Lord Nelson and held a cocked revolver to a barman's head, then let a few
rounds go into the room.
Management's response was to require Smith and his companions from that day
forth to leave their guns visible on the bar.
Sometimes you don't want to go where everybody knows your name. And in the mid-1980s
Smith's team was at loggerheads with a crew run by Barry McCann, who owned the
Lansdowne on Broadway. Bad blood between the two grew worse the night Smith
knocked out McCann's eldest son inside the hotel.
Once outside, Smith's companion lined up five or six of McCann's bouncers at
gunpoint against a wall, while Smith took a baseball bat from his car and
flogged each one till he fell.
A fortnight later, Smith was leaving the Quarryman's at Pyrmont when one of
three men in a parked car opened up with a shotgun on him, Jimmy Traynor and
Tex Moran. Traynor was seriously wounded by two blasts.
Henry backed up for this outrage by shooting McCann gang member Terry Ball in
the head. Ball survived and in April 1986 ran down Smith outside the Iron Duke.
Much of Smith and Henry's heroin operation was run from the Star Hotel in
Alexandria, a pub no more. Every Saturday, Smith and Henry met their 10
full-time runners at the Star and fronted each a pound or half a pound of
heroin. The Star was the last licensed premises on which Harvey Jones was seen.
His body was found buried at Botany in 1995, off Foreshore Road, 12 years after
he disappeared. Smith is serving life for taking Jones from the hotel and
putting two slugs into his chest.
It was from the Cauliflower in Waterloo that heroin dealer Barry Croft was
summoned by telephone in August 1987, intercepted on City Road near the
Lansdowne and shot dead in his car.
The last known sighting of South Australian drug dealer Bruce Sandery was at
the Zetland Hotel in April 1988. His body was found six months later in sand
dunes 500 metres from where Jones would one day be found.
Smith and Henry survived the decade but their criminal
careers did not. Henry's ended first. On December 15, 1988, he started drinking
over lunch and boxed on at the Epping instead of going home. He was then off to
the Five Dock to get properly on the drink. After a trip to Surry Hills for
more Christmas drinks, he found police prosecutor Mal Spence in the Lord
Wolseley in Ultimo. Accusing Spence of telling other crooks he was a dog, Henry
drove a knife into his stomach, then sank it into his neck. Spence survived the
frenzy but Henry got six years.
One week later, on December 22, Smith was arrested outside Botany Council
premises preparing to hit its Christmas payroll drop. His bail was revoked on a
murder charge from October 30 the previous year.
Smith's itinerary on that day included, in order, the Lord Wolseley, Covent
Garden, Chinese lunch, Covent Garden and the Australian Youth hotel in Glebe.
On his way to the Coogee Sports Club he fought with another motorist and in
Sydney's first well-documented road rage, stabbed tow-truck driver Ronald
Flavell to death.
