From The Front: Roger Rogerson’s first kill? The mystery of ‘Shotgun Johnny’ Regan

The 1974 murder of ‘Shotgun Johnny’ Regan has never been solved. Now, his family wants answers. That’s where The Australian’s new cold case investigation The Gangster’s Ghost comes in. 

Subscribers can listen to Episodes 1 and 2 now at gangstersghost.com.au.

This episode of The Australian's daily news podcast The Front is presented by Claire Harvey, produced by Kristen Amiet and edited by Tiffany Dimmack. Our team includes Lia Tsamoglou, Joshua Burton, Stephanie Coombes and Jasper Leak, who also composed our music. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
It's Friday, May nine, twenty twenty five. The drama just
keeps on coming. From Canberra. National Senator Jacinta NumPy in
Proprice has defected to the Liberal Party and wants to
be deputy leader behind would be Opposition leader Angus Taylor.

(00:24):
As the recriminations and blame shifting for the coalition's loss
continue and the now Benezi is making a brutal cabinet reshuffle.
Two ministers, Mark Dreyfus and Ed Husick are top of
the hit list, and the Greens are looking for a
new leader. After a tearful Adam Bandt blamed Liberal and

(00:46):
Labor for losing his seat of Melbourne and denied he'd
been too vitriolic about Israel. Terrifying gangster Johnny Reagan was
assassinated in a Sydney backstreet more than half a century ago.
There have always been rumors it was the first kill

(01:09):
by corrupt detective and murderer Roger Rogerson, but the murder
has never been solved. Today we go inside The Australian's
new cold case investigation, The Gangster's Ghost and a family
search for answers.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Nobody coppers will I I will.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
This is the real voice of one of Australia's most
terrifying gangsters, Stuart John Reagan.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I'll give him plenty of amberdition. I'll that much that many coppers.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Are not funny.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Reagan, known as Shotgun Johnny, was murdered in a Sydney
lane way in nineteen seventy four. He was twenty nine.
Reagan was a pimp, a rapist, a murderer and a
standover man. Raised in the country town of young abused
by his mother and brutalized in one of the country's
worst boys homes. Reagan believed the cops were out to

(02:04):
get him.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
It should happen in three of my Cashashtha Kyshire, before
the car they find the clown witness.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Of course they were out to get him, but remember
this was the era of deep seated police corruption, like
crooked Detective Roger Rogerson, who had half of Sydney's crims
in his pocket and the other half under his thumb.
Even Roger found Reagan scary.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Lenny Macpherson said to me once, Matt, he said, Roger,
he said, you can control a bad man, but you
can't control a madman. And I've never ever forgotten that's
a great qui.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
That's Rogerson speaking to The Australians senior writer Matthew Condon
before his death in twenty twenty four. That interview is
in our newest investigative podcast, The Gangster's Ghost, which launches today,
its host by Matt Condon. There's been speculation over the
years Johnny Reagan's shooting in nineteen seventy four was Roger

(03:07):
Rogerson's first kill. Before Rogerson assassinated crook Warren Land Franchi
in nineteen eighty one, and long before he murdered drug
dealer Jamie Gow in twenty fourteen. All those crimes happened
in Sydney's Inner West. Rogerson's turf at the scene of
Reagan's death, bullets from three separate firearms, including the same

(03:28):
kind of thirty eight caliber pistol issued to police at
the time, were found. But it's a cold case and
for the past five decades New South Wales police haven't
seen too interested in finding Reagan's killers. His family wants
the truth. Cousin Kelly Slater Reagan and de facto wife
Margaret Yates. Here's Kelly talking to Matt Condon.

Speaker 4 (03:51):
You don't you get to a certain age where you
just want to you just want to talk like I
think he's at that age now where she probably want
to and she sees how passionate I am about it.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Do you think she still has a residue of fear?

Speaker 4 (04:08):
No, I think she's as tough as old bootstraps.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Now.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
The Jenno who's led this investigation, Matthew Condon, spoke to
the Front's Kristin Amiot.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
I'd been aware of Johnny Reagan and fascinated by him
for a very long time. He was one of the
most notorious gangsters in Australian history, an extraordinary figure, and
it was only twenty nine, so of course his life
for me was fascinating. From what I could gather, the
amount of damage he reeked in such a short period

(04:42):
of time is mind boggling, and I realized over time
that I was shocked that there'd been so little done
about him in terms of revisiting his for one of
a better term his criminal career. It only lasted from say,
when he was twenty one in nineteen sixty six to
when he was gunned down in Marrickville in Sydney in

(05:04):
September nineteen seventy four. So you're looking at eight years
of building a reputation, cementing it and then causing so
much havoc that he had to be eliminated. And I thought,
why hasn't anyone done a full length book on this
or a documentary? And then completely out of nowhere, Reagan's

(05:25):
second cousin, Kelly Slater, contacted me.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
The family members Reagan left behind all have their own
motivations for participating in a podcast investigation about his life
and brutal death. Of course, they want to know who
killed him, but Kelly also wants to know if he
really was as bad as he's been made out.

Speaker 5 (05:49):
Well, honestly, I don't know exactly what we'll find. I
know we'll find that he probably killed people. I've accepted
that fact. Will we find did he kill that little boy?
Was he a psychopath? Like they said? Is such stories
that they tell about him?

Speaker 3 (06:05):
Truth?

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Why do you want to know this? She never physically
met Reagan, but she was always fascinated by him because
she had been a former New South Wales police officer
and in fact being a Reagan actually caused her some
grief in her early career because the logical question was
what the hell is a Reagan doing in the New
South Wales Police Service, So that reputation followed her like

(06:31):
a long tale, so she wanted to understand him. Then
when you speak to Reagan's surviving children, they want to
know more about their father. What was he really like?
Was he the sort of hideous gargoyle and monster that's
been depicted ever since his death in the press and

(06:51):
in snippets in documentaries. And then you speak to Reagan's
de facto wife, Margaret, and she questions, still to this
day after fifty years, who killed him? Why she was
left stranded after his death, His associates didn't come to
help her or the family. She was left with three

(07:12):
little children suddenly facing this void in the absence of
her notorious husband. So there are many different perspectives and
different questions that different people are asking.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Kristin asked Matt what it was like getting to know
the Reagans over those past few years.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
So I won't say I was trepidacious. I thought I
wonder what the Reagan family is actually like now. When
I met Kelly, she was an absolute delight. Now runs
a sheep farm with her husband Rodney, out near Young
in southwestern New South Wales. Very down to earth, straight
as a die competent, just one of those people that

(07:52):
if something needs to be done, Kelly can do it.
And I really liked her instantly because she's just so
honest and her motivations were very pure. Then I met
Margaret Yates, Reagan's de facto wife, and what an absolutely
wonderful woman too, so solid, honest, one of those great survivors,

(08:12):
if you like. She's been through a hell of a
lot and coming away as the mother of three children
of one of Australia's worst gangsters is no light burden
to carry, and she's done it with great grace and
she's been fantastic, as has their oldest child, Helen Reagan,

(08:33):
an extraordinary person of high achievement in her own right.
It's been a remarkable journey and an unexpected pleasure to
now consider these people really good friends. That's been one
of the great things.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Coming up. How our team of audio experts resurrected Johnny
Reagan's voice using long lost tapes. Johnny Reagan spent his

(09:09):
days wheeling and dealing over the phone and in person
in King's Cross, the heart of Sydney's Underworld, and he
captured some of those conversations on a real to real
tape recorder which he'd rigged up to his rotary telephone.

Speaker 5 (09:22):
One two, three, four, five.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
Seven.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
The tapes were hidden away or forgotten about following Reagan's
death in nineteen seventy four. In the late eighties, they
were unearthed in the home of his auntie. Here's Reagan's
oldest daughter, Helen.

Speaker 6 (09:41):
Anyway, Data's got me and so can you get up
there and get me this stuff? So I brought it down.
There was little tapes, and there was a little tape
recorder that obviously Dad had had, and there was all
these letter and stationery of.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
On the old tapes, Reagan can be heard conspiring with
criminal associates like Arthur Moore to skirt convictions and exact
revenge against the cops.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
What they do.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Loud, Yo, put the stuff in your cans?

Speaker 3 (10:12):
Would you had it?

Speaker 4 (10:14):
Ah?

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Anything I want me to do, I will bend out
of back.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
What you do it for you now, I'm mean it.
The recordings are scratchy and muddled in places, so that's
where our audio experts Jasper Leik and Lea Samaglue come in.
Here's Jasper.

Speaker 7 (10:28):
I'm always on the lookout for new software, and I
came across this one earlier in the year DX revive.
It's called by accenties. Think of it a bit like
a pencil sketch that's only been partially completed. Imagine if
you could put that drawing into a machine and it
would finish the picture for you and make it look
better than you could have done yourself. It would add
color and shadows and depth. This tool does that, but

(10:49):
for old bad audio.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Leah then spent hundreds of hours restoring the tapes with
the help of DX revive.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
I was astonished by the tapes, over two hours of private,
secret conversations Reagan recorded obviously back in the sixties with
rustic equipment. For what purpose we can only guess. Was
it insurance for himself? Was at leverage? And it is
a million to one that you will do a story

(11:23):
about a criminal who's been dead for half a century
and then actually have the opportunity to hear him speaking.
That still blows my mind, the fact that we can
do that, and I think too for fans of true
crime podcasts. This is a very rare thing that is

(11:45):
available here, and I think they'll be as thrilled as
I continue to be. It is just so unique.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
So can this fifty year old mystery be solved?

Speaker 2 (11:59):
It is a cold case, which means it is in theory,
a live and active murder case. I can say that
the New South Wales Cold Case Homicide Unit did visit
Kelly Reagan and her parents just in the last fortnight
to clarify what police had done and what they don't

(12:20):
see being resolved into the future. In this sort of instance,
because of the passage of time, it would be incredibly
difficult to ever resolve this nineteen seventy four murder. The
passage of time unfortunately allows conspiracies and rumors to spread,

(12:41):
so you get this gigantic sort of mushroom cloud of
falsity and made up yarns that are impossible to delineate
the truth out of. Having said that, the beauty of
the podcast is that it does throw itself out into
the world and there may be just maybe someone out

(13:03):
there who has a piece of information that might change
the whole game, even after five decades.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Matthew Condon is a senior reporter with The Australian. Subscribers
can listen to the first two episodes of our investigative
podcast series, The Gangster's Ghost right now at Gangstersghost dot
com dot au. And remember, you can access the nation's
best journalism anytime at The Australian dot com dot au