Australia’s own Jewish gangster novel
THE seedy underworld of Australia's crims, crooks and gangsters is the subject of Mark Dapin's latest book, King of the Cross.
LORIN BLUMENTHAL
FROM Australia to America, Jews are known to have had a hand in organised crime. In the United States, from the 1920s to the 1940s, the likes of Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and Lepke Buchalter were part of a syndicate dubbed Murder Inc, which allegedly performed hundreds of contract killings on behalf of the American mafia.
In London there was Jack “Spot” Comer, who reportedly ran the East End protection rackets until the early 1950s and profited from illegal bookmaking.
Australia has its own collection of Jewish “gangsters”, one of whom Chopper Read claims as his best friend.
Jewish gangsters also feature in popular culture, including the 1980s epic crime film Once Upon a Time in America, the Coen Brother’s Miller’s Crossing, and El Doctorow’s gangster novel Billy Bathgate, later made into a movie of the same name.
Adding to the collection of fictionalised Jewish criminals, Australia now has its own Jewish gangster novel.
Released earlier this month, Mark Dapin’s King of the Cross is edgy and wildly entertaining, salacious and, at times, downright sordid.
Unsurprisingly, much of the story is set in Kings Cross, where crooks, ­spruikers, bikers and prostitutes swarm the neon-lit streets. The book portrays an underworld where, emerging onto Darlinghurst Road from the train station, the first thing one sees is the needle exchange across the street.
Dapin, who is a features writer and weekly columnist for Fairfax’s Good Weekend magazine, tells the fictional story of the charming and chillingly evil Jacob Mendoza, dubbed King Sin, and King of the Cross.
The book follows Mendoza, who, reaching the end of his criminal career, needs someone to tell his story. An unlikely candidate is Australian Jewish Times journalist Anthony Klein.
Smart-talking, tough and newly arrived from the UK Hampshire town of Aldershot, Klein reveals he is more than a blank canvas upon which Mendoza can record his squalid tales of bent cops, gang war, property development, cold-blooded murder and Filipino brides.
Like his fictional character Klein, Dapin arrived in Sydney from England and lived in an apartment opposite Kings Cross police station. Also like his character, Dapin was determined to start again in Australia, to rise above the chaos clouding his former existence. This is where the similarities end.
“He is the opposite of me — useless at writing but a good boxer. I am a hopeless boxer. Neither of us could do what we wanted to do,” Dapin says.
Mendoza’s speech is a delightful blend of Australian underworld slang and Yiddishisms. Dapin says much of the book is a Jewish in-joke and a wink to the men of his grandfather’s generation.
He adds that when he could not recall a certain word in Yiddish and would look it up, he would nostalgically remember it being used by his maternal grandfather.
“People don’t generally talk about Jews as laconic like they do Aussies, but there is certainly a laconic strain in old Jewish men’s humour,” Dapin muses.
The prose is sharp, engaging and often hilarious. Australian Literary Review editor Stephen Romei describes “brilliant linguistic gymnastics” and prose as colourful as Dapin’s heavily tattooed arms.
Coming after Dapin’s three non-fiction books, including Sex & Money, Fridge Magnets are Bastards and Strange Country, King of the Cross is not a book for the faint-hearted, to the extent that Dapin will not let his own mother read it. Dapin recounts Underbelly author Andrew Rule saying: “Loved your book, mate. And the sex, whew!”
Dapin jokes: “I thought I must have had sex with him and forgotten about it, but he meant the sex scenes in the book. This really surprised me, because I didn’t think there was much sex, just a lot of pornographic imagery.”
Another friend told him he loved the book, despite the violence in it. “I didn’t think there was much actual violence in it, just violent language,” Dapin explains. “So it seems like I didn’t realise what I was writing.”
In writing a novel about a Jewish gangster, whose cohorts are also Jewish and corrupt, Dapin did consider the possibility of this propagating an obvious stereotype.
He recounts that having a strong Jewish upbringing in Leeds, England, he always dreaded negative portrayals of Jews in books, films or theatre, as this was the only information about Jewish people to which his classmates had access.
“I don’t think you can not tell the story because anti-Semites might draw anti-Semitic conclusions,” he quips. “Anti-Semites are going to draw anti-Semitic conclusions from Charlotte’s Web.”
Dapin would go to an Orthodox shul every Saturday with his father, and his mother used to send him to cheder four nights a week.
At 13, after his parents separated, he moved to an area away from the Jewish community. Though he doesn’t consider himself “a believer” as such, he says he is drawn to Jewish themes, which he regularly writes about.
King of the Cross began as a short story, told in a question-and-answer form, inspired by a disastrous interview Dapin had with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, in which Dapin was kicked out of Ramsay’s home after 15-and-a-half minutes.
An unsuccessful interview Dapin had with Chopper Read, which turned into a slanging match, also provided inspiration for the story.
“I thought, ‘what if someone tried to tell their whole life in this [Q and A] form, what if somebody was obnoxious, aggressive, unapologetic and evasive and yet still tried to tell his story’. There was a reflection of my experience as a journalist … I started thinking, ‘what would it be like to interview the worst interviewee over and over again?’. Then I thought I would try and write it as a full narrative.”
The streets of Kings Cross were a natural choice of setting for Dapin, who lived there for six months following his arrival in Sydney in 1989, aged 26.
Walking the streets from Kings Cross to Surry Hills, where he worked as a typesetter, he would see the very earliest of the prostitutes, men cleaning outside nightclubs and the occasional pool of vomit.
“This place formed my mental geography and when I started to write, it all came back to me. There was something about being here, I remember the feeling that you were at the centre of something … it certainly had a seedy kind of drama,” explains Dapin, who later become the editor of Ralph, ushering in uncharted success for the magazine during his tenure. He then had a stint as editor-in-chief of ACP’s men’s magazines.
Dapin is both part of the landscape of the Cross and removed from it. When we meet, he is dressed completely in black, from shoes to cap. His tattoos are visible past the sleeves of his black leather jacket.
While Dapin is a watcher, absorbing microscopic movements as black absorbs light, his characters are immersed in the action. They consort with the showgirls, bikies and wheeler dealers. These men and women are the products of, and servants to, his protagonist’s kingdom of the Cross.
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