Search Results: Baccarat

Carrying on with the Somerton Man Melbourne nitkeeper research thread, here’s a timeline I’ve reconstructed for the (in)famous baccarat school that Christos Paizes (AKA “Harry Carillo”) and Gerald Francis Regan ran on the first floor above the Old Canton Cafe at 158 Swanston Street, Melbourne. (Swanston St runs between Lonsdale St and Little Lonsdale St.)

Note that as of 21 Jun 1943, 158 Swanston St was advertising for a “Pantry Maid” (“over 45; £3 10/ p. wk., no night work“), so presumably the building was still in use as a cafe at that date.

Phase 1 – Baccarat still legal

Because Victoria’s gaming laws had been drafted by listing specific games that were deemed to be illegal (e.g. the Aussie favourite two-up), Melbourne police needed overwhelming physical proof in order to prosecute anyone playing a game not on the prohibited list.

As a result, this first phase of the timeline sees the police very much on the back foot. What’s more, none of the cunning stunts they used to try to gain evidence against the baccarat schools impressed the courts. For example:

16 July 1942: The Truth’s influential 18 Jun 1944 exposé (it was mentioned in Hansard) discussed how police attempts to prosecute Regan & Carello in their baccarat school in Flinders St in 1942 had miserably failed:

[…] a charge at the Petty Sessions of acting in the conduct of a common gaming house at 510 Flinders Street, was withdrawn. On that occasion, police watched a baccarat game through holes in the ceiling, but they obtained no evidence that percentages were deducted from the winnings — an all-important point in law.

By 1943, the police started to find ways of prosecuting individuals involved with these gaming schools. One target was the nitpickers (or “cockatoos”), whose job was to raise the alarm when a police raid was in progress, and who could be charged with ‘hindering’ or ‘obstruction’:

[Gerald Francis Regan] was convicted for obstructing the police, when they entered a gaming house.

By June 1944, the Melbourne baccarat scene was (as per The Truth’s exposé) well and truly flourishing: there seemed almost nothing that the police could do about it. For all The Truth’s thundering, you can’t help but notice that they did helpfully include the exact address to take your money to:

At Stokes’ schools, the game is big, but if it is a bit severe on the pocket, you can be accommodated at Regan and Carello’s school, on the first floor of a building at 158 Swanston St. You won’t like it much here, because you will find a definitely low type crowd, mostly Italians, Greeks and European refugees. In the crowd of 100, there will be about 20 women.

Phase 2 – Baccarat Made Illegal

Perhaps surprisingly, The Truth’s moralistic tabloid ranting against the baccarat schools (which incidentally made the gangsters running them so livid that they offered £500 for the identity of the person who had given the paper the inside story on both Stokes’ school and Paizes’ school) stirred up enough Victorian political indignation to change the law.

Hence from 1st July 1944, baccarat found itself added to the list of games that were illegal to play in Victoria: which meant that the police were able to steam in, door-bashing sledgehammer in hand, confident that the gaming law was (at last) on their side.

The moment this became law (1am on 1 Jul 1944), raid on a Swanston Street baccarat school led (in the Third City Court in August 1944) to a group of baccarat players being fined under the newly extended gaming laws:

When police broke into a baccarat school in Swanston-street with a sledge hammer early this morning, they found a “League of Nations Assembly” around the table.

Among the 40 players— 17 of them women— were Russians, Poles, Italians, Lebanese, Albanians, Syrians and Britons. Three men were fined £3 because they had prior convictions: the remainder £2.

Fety Murat, 33, of Drummond-street, Carlton, waiter, who had charge of the game, was fined £50. It was the first raid since legislation was passed to make baccarat illegal.

(Note that a different report gave the address as “303 Swanston St”, but perhaps 158 was the downstairs address, and 303 the upstairs address.)

Phase 3 – Shutting Down the School

Over the next year, the next phase of the police operation involved building up (what they hoped would be) a sufficiently strong case to convince the courts to close down the Old Canton Cafe baccarat school for good.

On 19 July 1945, Mr Justice Lowe at the Practice Court received the following:

An affidavit by Sub-Inspector Abley, officer in charge of the gaming police, stated that police officers had seen baccarat played on the premises. The police had visited the premises almost every night for approximately six months. The only means of access was a narrow stairway, having doors both at the top and bottom. There was a person always on guard at the top of the stairway to ensure that the police could not enter without warning. For four months, said the affidavit, the premises had been run ostensibly as a club. On many occasions the police entered the premises after a short delay, and saw people scattering from a table suitable for baccarat. After quoting various matters in his affidavit, Sub-Inspector Abley said he had reasonable grounds for suspecting that baccarat was carried on, and that the premises constituted a common gaming house.

According to a different report, the affidavit further asserted that…

[…] the persons having the control and management were Christos Paizes (alias Harry Carillo), William John Elkins, Gerald Francis Regan and Richard Thomas (alias Abishara) and a man known as Balutz.

Christos Paizes responded with his own affidavit:

[…] Christos Paizes, of Mathoura-road; Toorak, stated that, with Gerald Francis Regan, of High-street, St. Kilda, he had been the tenant of part of the first floor of the building in Swanston-street, known as the Old Canton Cafe. Since they had occupied the premises they had never been used as a common gaming house. Until January, 1945, they conducted the premises as a cafe and lounge. Since then they had conducted the premises as a proprietary club. In the club refreshments were supplied to members, who used the premises to play various games of cards and checkers, but no unlawful games were permitted on the premises. With the exception of the addition of one door on the stairway, the premises were in the same condition as when first occupied by them.

Moreover (as you’d expect), Paizes utterly denied having a nitkeeper:

Paizes denied the various allegations made in Sub-Inspector Abley’s affidavit, and said it was not true there was anyone on guard to ensure that police officers did not enter without warning.

However, Mr Justice Lowe judged that what was being run above the Old Canton Cafe was indeed a gaming house:

An order declaring that the premises formerly known as the Old Canton Cafe, Swanston-street, Melbourne, and being that portion of the first floor of the building leased by Christos Paizes were a common gaming house, was made by Mr. Justice Lowe in the Practice Court yesterday. His Honor stated that the order would take effect as from Wednesday, August 1.

And so notice was served on the premises: which effectively marked the end of Melbourne’s Golden Age of baccarat schools. Which is not to say that baccarat suddenly stopped (because it most certainly did not): rather, it was that baccarat’s gilded era had finished, and it became just a low-life activity.

A Dissenting View

Oddly, “Gangland Melbourne” (which, though lively, often seems to me to get stuff wrong) asserts that Harry Stokes (prior to his death in 1945) had (p.81):

“teamed up with Gerald Francis (‘Frank’) Regan and Lou the Lombard running games at the Canton cafe in Swanston Street. Opposed to them were Kim Lenfield, Charlie Carlton, Hymie Bayer and Abe Trunley at the Ace of Clubs, Elizabeth Street. Ralph Pring of the VRC financed the Kim Syndicate, which also ran games at 52 Collins Street. The old-time confidence man Harry ‘Dictionary Harry’ Harrison […] had also returned to Melbourne and become involved in the baccarat schools.”

Lou the Lombard would pop up again in 1951 in “Gangland Australia” (p.131), running a baccarat game “on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Flinders Lane”. But apart from that slightly circular reference, everything else in the above account seems a bit free-floating (as you’ll find if you try searching any of the names in Trove, apart from Dictionary Harry).

So, did The Truth completely misread the baccarat school ‘scene’? Or might the Gangland Melbourne authors have been given dud information? (I suspect the latter, but I thought I ought to mention the former.)

Alternatively, if you know of a book (say, a Melbourne police memoir?) that covers this period of time a little more reliably, please say! (And yes, I’ve read Robert Walker’s serialised memoirs, but thanks for asking.)

Phase 4 – Life After Baccarat

In April 1950, we see Richard Thomas (AKA Abishara, but now manager of the Copacabana Restaurant in Collins Street), Christos Paizes (a shareholder in the Copacabana) and Feti Murat (now a “market gardener”) in a brawl with undercover policemen in Swanston Street. “Murat, who described himself as a market gardener, said he had worked for Paizes some years ago.“

As for William John Elkins, it seems he was born in 1911; in 1938, he was “charged with having had the care and management of a gaming house”; in 1941, we can see him resisting extradition from Fitzroy to Adelaide in connection with a stolen radio; he died in 1964.

So, once again it seems that the only major player we cannot trace beyond 1944 is the mysterious Balutz.

Who Were The Two Gamblers?

If you recall, the Somerton Man was tentatively identified in 1949 as a nitkeeper:

Two promininent Melbourne baccarat players who desire to remain anonymous, believe they knew the unknown man in the “Somerton beach body mystery.”

They saw the man’s picture in a Melbourne newspaper and said they thought they recognised him as a “nitkeeper” who worked at a Lonsdale street baccarat school about four years ago. They could not recall his name.

They said the man talked to few people. He was employed at the baccarat school for about 10 weeks, then left without saying why or where he was going.

But who might these “two prominent Melbourne baccarat players” have been? Trawling through all the stories in Trove (particularly from The Truth) has thrown up various prominent baccarat player names (of course, Christos Paizes himself started as a gambler), such as:

• super-gambler (and super-litigant) Michael Pitt (who hated the press)
• James Coates (‘The Mark Foy’, murdered in 1947 so we can rule him out)

My favourite baccarat gambler news story from the period was from 18 Dec 1946, relating to a loan made on 15 Jun 1945 between two baccarat players (“Charles [Albert] Darley, outdoor salesman, of St. Kilda” [and] “Eric Allen Kermode, assistant manager of a poultry business in Camberwell“) at a baccarat school at the Canton Cafe. (The case was dismissed with costs.)

To be honest, though, unless the descendants of a 1940s baccarat player step forward to recount the hoary old Somerton Man nitkeeper camp-fire tale their (grand-)father used to tell them, this detail is probably lost to history.

Where To Look Now?

There’s no shortage of police activity documented here: six months of active surveillance on a single site would have involved amassing dossiers on every baccarat school principal, so a ton of paperwork must have been generated. But what happened to that? Can all of it simply have been lost?

There is little doubt in my mind that Victoria Police’s Archive Services Centre – dubbed the “Bermuda Triangle of police files” – contains everything we would like to know.

[…] 135,000 boxes packed floor to ceiling in a cop version of a Costco.

More than one-third have not been catalogued, and records are rudimentary at best for many others.

“It’s a rabbit warren. Police keep almost everything and it’s an organisational nightmare down there,” a former senior police commander says.

Hence it seems to me to be a reasonably safe bet that it is in there, right next to the box containing the Ark of the Covenant. Here’s hoping!

As per my last post on the Somerton Man, I think it’s time we invested a little effort into understanding Melbourne’s baccarat schools, because two anonymous baccarat players claimed that the Somerton Man was a nitkeeper at an illegal baccarat school in Lonsdale Street in Melbourne.

Recapping, the following appeared in the Adelaide News (26th January 1949) (and Sydney Daily Telegraph and Geraldton Guardian):

Gamblers believe dead man was “nitkeeper”

Melbourne.- Two promininent Melbourne baccarat players who desire to remain anonymous, believe they knew the unknown man in the “Somerton beach body mystery.”

They saw the man’s picture in a Melbourne newspaper and said they thought they recognised him as a “nitkeeper” who worked at a Lonsdale street baccarat school about four years ago. They could not recall his name.

They said the man talked to few people. He was employed at the baccarat school for about 10 weeks, then left without saying why or where he was going.

OK, I’d agree that doesn’t give us a great deal to work with: but at the same time it is specific enough to help us build up a set of research questions.

Lonsdale Street Baccarat Schools

In Australia, baccarat had been made illegal in 1943. Unsurprisingly, Melbourne quickly found hosting a number of baccarat schools. These were typically located in large, upper-floor office spaces (so that lookouts / cockatoos / nitkeepers could quickly pass word up if there was a police raid) and with heavily barricaded doors (so that any evidence of gambling could be removed before the police managed to force their way in).

According to the Argus 1st May 1947, p.2, there had not long before been schools in “Elizabeth st, Lonsdale st, Russell st, and Bourke st”, but they had been closed down – or rather, the gambling bosses had moved their schools to less obvious locations. The glory days of the early 1940s (when the clubs were “luxuriously” kitted out, some even offering “a whole roast pig” supper) were gone.

One of these schools had been the Rendezvous Club, on the fourth floor of Fink’s Building, also known as Fink’s Club. According to the Herald 23rd July 1947, p.3, “Solo stud poker and any card game was played there, but he [John Francis Gilligan] never saw anyone playing baccarat”. Yeah, right… 😉

By August 1947, an expose in the Herald revealed that there were now three big baccarat schools in Melbourne, in Swanton Street, Lonsdale Street, and Punt Road. One of these had a lift, which was organized never to stay on the ground floor: nits checked the punters at the street level and then again at the top before the barricaded door..

In court, it emerged that Gilligan had been associated with a club in Lonsdale Street for several years. There was definitely a baccarat school in Lonsdale Street in mid-1948, according to this report in the Herald 20th July 1948, p.4:

Recently, according to a police report, a “stand-over” man drew a gun in a baccarat school in Lonsdale Street: when he ”came to” a few minutes later he was looking down the barrels of four other pistols.

Sergeant A. Biddington, the gaming police chief who closed down the Lonsdale St baccarat school in December 1948, had had to go to a tribunal the previous month, accused of drinking on the job:

Biddington said in evidence that gaming constables Buggy and Carter, who were on the Shepparton trip under his command and had given evidence against him, were not to be trusted, and in his opinion were dishonest. He had been given information that they had conspired with baccarat bosses while they should have been catching them. He had to take them off baccarat duty because of this, and they were antagonistic toward him.

Sergeant Biddington carried on trying to shut down the baccarat schools, with the next big raid in February 1949. But of course, nothing much changed, with a court case involving a shooting from April 1949, and another shooting in May 1949. More big raids in August 1949 and November 1949 (now courtesy of a “special baccarat squad led by Inspector R. Prinett”) failed to stem the same basic tide: and so it all went on.

The only other name I found associated in the newspapers with Lonsdale Street baccarat schools was Robert Brewster: but that was in 1950.

So… Where Do We Go From Here?

When someone in January 1949 says “about four years ago”, I am sure that they would definitely mean “after baccarat became illegal” (in August 1943) and before the end of the Second World War (2nd September 1945). Those were the ‘glory days’ of the Melbourne baccarat schools, when all the customers seemed rich and beautiful, and their money dropped into the gambling bosses’ hands like so much manna from heaven. So in some ways we have a tolerably narrow date range to work with.

But where might we look for names of people who might be associated with these baccarat schools? The obvious answer would be in Melbourne police records. Even if the baccarat school owners were paying off Percy Plod (and who saw that coming, eh?), plenty of raids on schools did still happen.

The Public Record Office Victoria has the 1945 Police Gazette, and – wonderfully, I think – Photo Supplements to the Police Gazette for 1944 to 1949, and another one for 1939 to 1948. These are all on open access, though some of the other police gazettes are marked as “s11” closed access.

I have read that much of the supplements was taken up with photos of recently released convicts: but might that be not such a bad place to start?

More generally, what other resources are out there? Trove has nothing much on John Francis Gilligan before 1947 (when he was shot), because in July 1936 he had been sent to jail for seven years for receiving stolen goods:

Found guilty of having received stolen goods valued at £800, Leonard Schiffman, aged 50 years, of Rose-Street, West Coburg, grocer, and John Gilligan alias Forbes, aged 29 years, of Malleson Street, Richmond, clerk, were sentenced by Judge Richardson in General Sessions to imprisonment for terms of seven years each.

The defendants’ case probably wasn’t helped much by the “burglary at the Crown Law Office of the safe and the removal of the file of documents dealing with the case“.

I do also wonder whether researchers should be (somehow) asking Victorian retirees for reminiscences on the Lonsdale Street baccarat school. Whatever wall of silence was there in the 1940s and 1950s should have fallen down long ago.

Finally, I do also wonder whether one or more of Melbourne’s baccarat detectives might have recognized the Somerton Man, but then decided not to say a word? Money is money, after all: and silence can be golden.

In some ways, it feels as though we already (nearly) met Carl Webb several times over the last decade – in Melbourne’s Gilded Age of Baccarat schools, in the interstate car black market, in peering into the working class evidential void in Trove.

Maybe we can now each spin our own tidy yarn tying together personally preferred loose threads: down on his uppers… in Adelaide to see a man about a car… having a pasty in the All Night Cafe… having what look like heart pains… getting misdiagnosed & being given the wrong meds… accidentally overdosing… being dumped on Somerton Beach by those who would rather not be linked to him (dead or alive).

That’s broadly the kind of thing I’ve punted here before, though arguably more to provoke asking better questions than as ‘The One True Narrative’. And I’m sure everyone has their own tweaked version of it that works for them.

But… by doing this, I think we’d be dancing around some sinkhole-sized gaps, not in our preferred story (which will always sound nice to our own ears), but in Carl Webb’s actual story.

What was the American connection? Had Webb travelled to America? Did Doff give Webb the Rubaiyat? Did Webb have a replacement partner lined up? Might he actually have been gay, and married Doff to hide his sexuality? What instruments did he make – odometer, violin, or what? What caused the high level of lead in his hair? Did he have a police record?

And that’s just the easy stuff, alas. (Like Tolkien’s road, the list goes ever on.)

If we’re lucky – i.e. lucky beyond words – there’s a 100-year-old person somewhere out there who still remembers Charlie Webb, and can tell us how he lived (though perhaps not how he died).

Though maybe sending a nice letter to lots of Melbourne nursing homes can wait until we have a photo of him (you don’t want to fire that gun twice).

In the end, though, I don’t honestly believe we’ll ever be able to satisfactorily answer every big question about Webb. History is good, but it’s not that good.

And so I suspect we’ll still – in almost all scenarios – most likely be forever presented with a rolling ‘beauty contest’ of overlapping Charlie Webbs, each variant carefully curated and lovingly tweaked to match each new micro-revelation as it emerges. Look at me, no meeee.

Yet the rarely acknowledged reality is that, as in the film “Cabaret”, life isn’t beautiful: at best, everyone’s life is a work in progress. Carl Webb doubtless thought he had plenty of hands yet to play, but The Great Dealer closed his Baccarat shoe earlier than expected.

And so I think everyone should beware narrative beauty: historical beauty is often a sign of contrived neatness, superficiality, selection bias, over-finessing, voids, deletions, airbrushing.

A good history of the actual Somerton Man would instead present his difficulties and his struggle in a deeply humane and accepting way – true, in other words. But right now that’s not ready to be written, not by a long way.

And I can’t help but wonder if it will ever get written.

Like a constipated true crime podcaster, I’m currently perched on the edge of my seat waiting for something solid to emerge. Now that SAPOL’s forensic finest (surely) have the Somerton Man’s DNA in their sweaty hands, what will it be able to tell us?

One interesting thing about DNA searching is that even if you get basically zero hits, the DNA itself can often still tell you a great deal about a person, such as:

• what part of the world they (probably) come from
• their haplogroup (& will that be the same as the haplogroup Derek Abbott’s group retrieved from the hair root?)
• their genetic predisposition to rare illnesses (e.g. uncombable hair syndrome, etc).

If the part of the world the Somerton Man’s DNA comes from is basically a small region in Ireland, it would seem to be a fairly strong indication that Kean[e] is likely to be his surname. (But with Catholic families being DNA genealogists’ best friends, you’d also expect 20+ decent hits to light up the GEDmatch globe like a Christmas tree.)

Yet if his DNA is solidly Eastern European (and with hardly any matches), you’d expect a quite different person – perhaps something like the mysterious Balutz from the baccarat school I found so hard to track down.

Though it would be nice if the DNA showed he was Charles Mikkelsen (who I think was probably also the “Carl Thompsen” remembered by Keith Mangonoson), I’m not holding out a lot of hope for that.

It also seems likely to me that any link to the Abbotts / Egans would have been trumpeted to the world’s media by now: but given the lack of trumpetry my ears are picking up, this is most probably not to be here.

All in all, it’s perhaps surprising that the list of possible Somerton Man candidates we’ve all managed to accumulate is so short: a list dominated, it has to be said, by implausible Soviet spies, defectors and perhaps even spring-heeled Ballet Russe dancers. (Spare me, O Lord, from having to read any more espionage-related posts.)

So I wonder what the next card to be played in this interminable squeeze will be?

James Robert Walker’s life story, smuggled out of Pentridge Jail just before his suicide, was sensationally serialized in the Argus in September 1954 to October 1954. If you want to read it, I edited it into a single downloadable file here. I found it of particular interest because in the early 1940s Walker ran his own small Melbourne baccarat school.

Walker referred to many of the people involved by their real names, or by their nicknames (such as James Coates, widely known as “The Mark Foy”).

But who were the prominent underworld people Walker used coded names for? I’m thinking specifically of:

• “The Brain”
• “Darkie”
• “The Gambler”
• “The Thing”
• “The Fix”

I decided to go looking…

Not Much Luck So Far..

In my initial mooch around the interwebs, I found very little indeed. 🙁

One of the only hints was in Robert Chuter’s “Funny People of Fitzroy Street“:

A few months ago [written in 2020] there died a man, ex-pug, ex-bookmaker, and ex-school principal who had been a habitue of Fitzroy Street for many years. Drink hastened his end. He was discovered dead sitting upon a cafe toilet, trousers around his ankles. Police knew him as “The Thing” mentioned in the Robert Walker story, published in The Argus after Walker’s suicide in Pentridge Gaol.

I’ve therefore asked Robert if he knows The Thing’s actual name, and will update this page when I hear back. But as to the other code names, I have still basically got nowhere. 🙁

As an aside, Walker’s story mentions “The Brain”‘s (claimed) remorse over the death of Taylor and ‘Snowy’ Cutmore in 1927. Given that Taylor was (according to Gangland Melbourne) connected to Harry Stokes, you might wonder whether Stokes was The Brain. Unfortunately, The Brain was (according to Walker) still alive, which would seem to rule Stokes out.

Who were all these encrypted crims? Can you decode Walker’s code names?

I was recently reminded that, having got sidetracked by Triantafillos & Stelios Balutis, I hadn’t got round to returning to the Balutz line of inquiry. So here are some notes on Balutz-surnamed people to keep you going. 🙂

By the way, even though you might think that “Balutz” came from the slum district of Bałuty in northern Łódź (the one that became a horrific ghetto in WWII), I actually suspect that the two aren’t connected in any useful way. (But please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!)

Balutz to think about

Despite (as previously discussed) Trove offering up only the single (albeit intensely interesting baccarat-school-related) mention of Balutz, American newspapers and archives offer up a fair few Balutzes to work with.

So, whereas my last post here discussed Lithuanian migration to Britain 1868-1905, this post’s focus is mainly on Romanians and Hungarians called Balutz emigrating to the US, mainly via the port of Hamburg.

Typical of this wider narrative are Miklos Balutz (b. ~1881), Avisalom Balutz (b. ~1880), and Samuel Balutz (b. ~1870), all from Keresd in Hungary (well, in that part of Transylvania which is now in Romania). In the 1905 New York State Census, we can see all three living as boarders in Ellicott Place, Lancaster, Erie: the annotation says that they are a “laborer family“.

For Miklos, you can see him departing Hamburg on 11 Dec 1904, travelling on the S.S. Patricia to New York via Dover and Boulogne, arriving 25th Dec 1904. Similarly, Avisalom travelled from Liverpool to New York, arriving on 6 Nov 1904: and appears to have travelled again from Hamburg to New York (via Cuxhaven, Southampton & Cherbourg), arriving on 14 Sep 1912.

In 1917-1918, we can see “non-declarant alien” Avisalom Joan Balutz (born Feb 1880), now a laborer of 212 Plum Alley, Trumbull County, Ohio, enlisting in the US Army. (Note that there are now plenty of people with the surname Balut in Trumbull County.) Avisalom’s next of kin was a John Balutz of 619 Powersdale Avenue, Youngstown, Ohio. Presumably this was the same John Balutz who was a laborer boarding in 40 Tenth in Youngstown, PA in 1915.

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, this was broadly around the same time (according to a Wasilchak/Balutz family tree on ancestry.com) that a John Balutz married Anna Truhan (1896-1974) and begat Peter (?), Helen (1917-1942), Nicholas (1919-), Paul (1920-) and Mary Balutz (1922-2011), many of whom were born in Jessup, PA.

On 28 Feb 1923, we hear of an Anna Balutz having surgical treatment in Ellwood Hospital: but on 09 Mar 1917, we also read of Zack Balutz (of Second Street, Ellwood) also being admitted to hospital.

In 1930-1945, John, Anna and Mary Balutz were resident in 120 Palm St, Olyphant, Lackawanna, PA, yielding a further cluster of Balutz archival sightings. On 17 Aug 1931, we see a Helen Balutz, 14, of the same address being involved in an accident (for which she was awarded damages in Nov 1931): the same Helen Balutz died in October 1942 after a short illness.

Are all these John Balutz and Anna Balutz sightings at both ends of Pennsylvania of the same people? (I guess so, but I don’t know for sure.)

More Balutzes from Keresd

Apart from the above, we also have the Julie Lanke Dudrick family tree on ancestry.com to work with. This flags an Atyim (John) Balutz (1861-), father of Zachary (Zaharia) Băluț (check out my diacritics, all you doubters), (b. 1884 in Malincrav, Romania, d. 21 December 1941, Terre Haute, Indiana).

We first see an Atkime Balutz aged 42 from Keresd travelling from Bremen to Baltimore in 1902, to stay with a “Bath, Joh.”.

Though I can’t make out the rest of the destination, it seems he had already made the trip before in 1899. We then see Atyim Balutz arriving in Baltimore, Maryland from Bremen in 1903, heading for Alliance, Ohio.

After that, we see Zachary arrive in New York from Bremen in 1907 on the Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse. In 1920, he was living at 1913 8th Avenue with his brother-in-law Peter (Petru) Saracin and sister Sophy (Zenovia) Saracin. In Ellwood City in 1922, he saved a fellow worker from being gassed.

And… there are about a further 30 or 40 Balutzes, whose immigrant lives simply don’t seem to hit the suburban newspaper chatterati’s radar.

Do You See The Problem Here?

Despite having tried to trace a fair few Balutzes above, there’s actually very little narrative thread to grab hold of and follow. Rather, what we seem to be seeing here is a broad brush of history being dourly daubed, as a whole generation of European immigrants found itself absorbed into and consumed by America’s circa-1900 capitalist machinery.

Some, like John Balutz, married and raised families: but many, perhaps isolated by language / culture / prejudice / racism / whatever, seem to have struggled to find a place for themselves in America beyond simply their narrowly-allocated role as raw muscle.

Within the sphere of genealogical research, this working class invisibility seems to impose a kind of lower bound, below which almost nothing is visible. It makes the tools of genealogy seem impossibly middle class, as if we are trying to understand bats by dissecting cuttlefish. Honestly? Right now, I’m sorry but it feels like we don’t stand the faintest chance here. 🙁

So… Where Next, Nick?

So I’m still interested by the mysterious baccarat school Balutz: unless anyone knows better, he seems likely to me to have been born to Romanian parents around the turn of the century, perhaps in America.

All the same, I have to say that the archival tides don’t seem to be flowing in our direction here. Really, we need the archives to provide us with a lucky break, which – as I hope you already know – only normally happens in Dan Brown novels.

But… let’s just cross our collective fingers and hope for the best, eh?

The Somerton Man, found dead by the sea wall on Somerton Beach in the early morning of 1st December 1948, has had innumerable speculative theories pinned to his unnamed corpse over the years.

Was he a Soviet spy, an international man of mystery, a former lover, an errant parent, a Third Officer, a gangster, a baccarat school nitkeeper, an interstate car thief, a jockey, an accountant, a ballet dancer, a transvestite, a gold prospector, a homesick Norwegian, or a whatever-happens-to-take-your-fancy-tomorrow-morning kind of guy? The list keeps on growing.

But why so many theories?

John Does & Jane Does

In the wider world of cold cases, plenty of other John / Jane Does are arguably every bit as mysterious as the Somerton Man.

Yet if you’re expecting there to be a (socially-distanced, mask-wearing) queue of people stretching down the high street waiting to bend my weary Cipher Mysteries ear with their tediously touching theories about the Isdal Woman, for example, you’ll be looking in vain. (There’s a nice news story about her teeth here, by the way.)

Oh, and despite Wired’s nice story about the unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless”, I haven’t so far seen a torrent of theories speculating that he was an Anglo-American Douglas Adams fan obsessed by Marvin the Paranoid Android. Or a gold prospector. Or a car thief. Or whatever.

“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

So the issue here is more about why those others don’t seem to attract even a fraction of the theories that he does. What’s the difference that leads people’s minds to conjure up such a glut of (possible) Somerton Men?

Life & Death

Even by the 1949 inquest, a good deal was known about the Somerton Man’s physical condition and the details of his death:

• “[S]mall vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernible with congestion” – I believe this would have taken a considerable time to build up, perhaps years?
• “The spleen was strikingly large and firm about 3 times normal size” – this too would have taken some time to happen, perhaps months?
• “Both lungs were dark with congestion, but otherwise normal.” Like most adults back then, the Somerton Man was a smoker, so this was very probably a long-term consequence of his smoking.
• “The stomach was deeply congested, and there was superficial redness, most marked in the upper half. Small haemorrhages were present beneath the mucosa. There was congestion in the 2nd half of the duodenum continuing through the thin part. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach.” The blood in his stomach showed that he had almost certainly been convulsively sick (though, oddly, there was no vomit by the body or on his clothes or his oddly-shiny shoes);
• “The heart, if anything, was contracted […] I am quite convinced that the death could not have been natural, as there is such a conflict of findings with the normal heart.” A poison or misadministered drug was suggested, though all attempts to detect what that was unfortunately failed.
• “There was a small patch of dried saliva at the right of the mouth. The impression was that it ran out of his mouth some time before death when he was probably unable to swallow it, probably when his head was hanging to the side. It would run vertically. It had run down diagonally down [sic] the right cheek.“
• “The post mortem rigidity was intense, and there was a deep lividity behind particularly above the ears and neck.” Blood pooling at the back of his neck was inconsistent with his having been propped up against the sea wall at the back of the beach prior to his death.
• His body had been carefully posed, but with various key elements of his clothing (like a wallet, id card, money, hat, etc) missing

It was hard to avoid the conclusion that poison (or drugs) had been the cause of death; and also that many of the “difficulties” and apparent inconsistencies would disappear if the man had previously died elsewhere, and had then been carried to the beach by person or persons unknown.

But with nobody stepping forward to (successfully) identify the body, this whole line of reasoning merely raised at least as many questions as it answered: and so the inquest was not able to reach a helpful conclusion.

And that, sad as it may be, is still very largely where we are some 70+ years later. Something bad had happened, sure; but without being able to flag it as murder, misadventure, accident or suicide, what’s a coroner to do, eh?

(Human) Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Aristotle famously wrote about the Horror Vacui, i.e. the idea that Nature abhors a vacuum so much that it causes things to fill the void. (Though even fifteenth century engineers knew that this principle had its limits.)

To my eyes, though, it seems that Human Nature abhors a vacuum far more than poor old Mother Nature does. That is, where there is a causal void – i.e. a lack of explanation as to the cause – the runaway horses in our minds gallop and leap impossible fences to construct explanations.

In the case of the Somerton Man, none of the sudden death tropes of the day so familiar to newspaper readers were present – no gangland execution, no violent lover’s argument, no business betrayal, no drowning, no falling drunk down a set of stairs, no being hit by a car. In short: no smoking gun.

Ultimately, a quiet death on a beach – however posed or artificial the Somerton Man’s mise-en-scene may have seemed to those looking carefully – was a disappointment to those hoping for the theatrics of violence.

And so I think it is not the Somerton Man’s actual death that so inspired the theories so much as the absence of explicit forensic theatre. He died cleanly, with nicely groomed fingernails, and wearing shiny shoes: which is all wrong on some level.

Evidence of Absence

But above all else, I think the most disturbing thing about the Somerton Man’s death lies in none of the details that were noted, but instead in the fact that – barring a little bit of sand at the back of his head – he seems to have had no real forensic contact with his (supposed) place of death.

Really, the scenario where someone undergoes the trauma of convulsive death throes while laying on a beach and yet somehow manages to avoid ending up covered in vomit and sand makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is a direct affront to Locard’s Exchange Principle, right?

So can we please call a halt on the whole “romantic loner suicide” scenario? The whole idea that he somehow travelled to Somerton Beach just to die on his own simply makes no physical sense.

Similarly, calling him “The Unknown Man” makes no sense to me either. Rather, I suspect that he spent his last hours in a nearby house, laid out on his back on someone’s bed before dying there, and then being left there for a few hours with his head tilted backwards over the edge (while the blood pooled in his neck).

It also seems highly likely to me that people from that house tidied him up (even cleaning and shining his shoes), before carrying him to the beach and posing his body against the sea wall there.

Essentially, if the Somerton Man did not die on the beach, we can be sure that the people who knew him – and who brought him there – have carefully airbrushed themselves out of the picture. He was very much known.

The Missing Thread

In many ways, I’m not that interested in all the different people the Somerton Man might have been. The glut of possible Somerton Men we have are only ever hypothetical, a long row of Pepper’s ghosts we summon up to try to work out what happened, like CSI bullet trajectory sticks.

And yet in some ways we know almost too much about the mundane mechanics of it all: perhaps our dead man even had his final pasty at Glenelg’s All Night Cafe.

In the end, all we’re missing is the narrative thread of a single life that binds all these pieces together. It’s like we’re trying to solve an upside-down jigsaw, where all our attempts to be scientific and rigorous have failed to turn any of the pieces the right way up.

But even if – mirabile dictu – exhumed DNA magically hands us a name on a silver dish, will we really be able to completely reconstruct the jigsaw’s picture side?

Having spent so many years on this man’s trail, I can’t help but suspect that we won’t. Perhaps some secrets don’t want to be known: not all Ariadne’s threads are there to be followed.

Let’s start with the original 26th Jan 1949 news story in the Adelaide News, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Geraldton Guardian, and the Age:

Melbourne.- Two prominent Melbourne baccarat players who desire to remain anonymous, believe they knew the unknown man in the “Somerton beach body mystery.”

They saw the man’s picture in a Melbourne newspaper and said they thought they recognised him as a “nitkeeper” who worked at a Lonsdale street baccarat school about four years ago. They could not recall his name.

They said the man talked to few people. He was employed at the baccarat school for about 10 weeks, then left without saying why or where he was going.

From a purely Melbourne-centric angle, the appeal for witnesses had only just appeared in the Herald (25 Jan 1949) and the Argus (25 Jan 1949). So it should be clear that the two baccarat players came forward immediately.

A few days ago, I wondered whether the man they had been thinking of might have been George Henry Newman. It’s true that Newman died in 1986, so could not have been the Somerton Man. However, given that people working at baccarat schools were generally younger than the Somerton Man, might the two baccarat players have mistaken George Henry Newman for the Somerton Man?

On balance, I think this is unlikely. Newman’s specific role in the whole baccarat ‘ecology’ was as a motor driver: that is, he would drive customers to and from the baccarat school. And he did that for years, not just for ten weeks.

So the person we’re looking for is someone quite specific and yet quite unusual (because of his age): a 40-year-old Lonsdale Street baccarat school nitkeeper circa 1945.

The annoying thing is that the Victorian police knew everything there was to know about these baccarat schools, but were unable to shut them down because of two specific factors:

• The police had to catch punters while they were actually playing baccarat (and not other legal card games), which was actually quite a lot trickier than it sounds; and
• The baccarat school principals bribed policemen left, right and centre to avoid the schools being shut down.

In the end, Christos Paizes’ long-running baccarat school got closed down courtesy of some kind of mealy-mouthed legal technicality, largely rustled up by Victorian politicians. And Paizes couldn’t really blame the poh-lice for that: they were too busy taking their brown envelopes to actual get him to court. Why would they ever call a halt on such a good thing?

The Missing Evidence

It seems that our well of Lonsdale Street baccarat school-related articles in Trove has now pretty much run dry. So where could we look next?

There is a ton of interesting stuff in the Victorian police archives – the NAA knows what it is, and wants to curate it, but nobody knows where it is. One day, this will come into the light, and perhaps there will be a sudden feeding frenzy from everybody with an interest in historical Melbourne crime. But… that blessed day still seems a way off just yet.

I wish I had found a list of Australian gamblers’ memoirs: anyone around Melbourne in the mid-1940s would have gone to Lonsdale Street, its baccarat Mecca. The closest I got was a series of brief articles in the Melbourne Argus of 1954, describing the memories of Melbourne baccarat school owner Robert Walker. (Incidentally, there’s a nice chapter on knockabouts in the 1986 book “Disorganized Crime”, which might still be available online.) Maybe there are more Aussie gamblers’ memoirs out there, please shout if you find any.

I therefore wonder whether the best thing to do would be to put an ad in a Melbourne newspaper – perhaps the Age, what do you think? – asking any lovely old people for their memories of Melbourne’s baccarat schools in the 1940s. Sounds like a Banker Bet to me… something to consider, anyway. 🙂

Any other suggestions for routes forward?

I thought my last post had gone through pretty much all the sources available online relating to Triantafillos Balutis, the Melbourne waiter who the PRO Victoria flagged as possibly being the mysterious “Balutz” at Christos Paizes’ Lonsdale Street baccarat club. But, thanks to the almost endless spelling variations of his names, it turns out I was wrong.

Which is good!

1930 Naturalisation Certificate

For a start, the NAA has a file marked “Treantafellous BALUTES – Naturalisation certificate” (NAA A1, 1930/1546), which is the correspondence and certificate (“A.A. 6302”) relating to Triantafillos Balutis’ naturalisation application.

From this, we learn that:

• his address was Victoria Hotel, 404 Bourke Street, Melbourne;
• he had no wife or children;
• he had placed advertisements for his naturalisation application in the Argus and Age, both of the 24 Jan 1930;
• he was 5ft 5in, black hair, brown eyes, small mole on right cheek;
• he was born on 5 Aug 1886, in Cavalla in Greece;
• his father was Dameanos Balutes, and his parents were both Greek;
• he arrived in Melbourne from Greece on the 16 Feb 1923 on the S.S. Ormonde;
• after leaving Greece but before coming to Australia, he lived in the USA for eight years;
• he was a café proprietor, who had been running a café at 426 Bourke Street, Melbourne for four years and five months; and
• he was represented by Messrs. Luke Murphy & Co, Solicitors, 422 Bourke Street, Melbourne.

The general remarks section on the form asserts:

Applicant has been established in business in Bourke St. at the Canberra Café during the past 4½ years. He has opened up a further business at Warrnambool for the manufacture of cheese, which he proposes to export to Egypt & U.S.A. Applicant is of the keen type of business man & gained a good business knowledge during his residence in the U.S.A. for about 8 years. There is nothing known against applicant.

His three referees were two householders and a police officer:

1. Donald Mackintosh, Gun Maker, of 2 Thistle Street, Essendon
2. Horace Govett James, Business Manager, of 3 Sunnyside Grove, Bentleigh
3. Sidney James Kirby, Constable of Police, of Russell Street, Melbourne

From this, we learn that – despite the apparently contradictory evidence presented in the previous post – all the evidential threads tie together, i.e. there was only one Triantafillos Balutis, even though his date of birth seems somewhat uncertain. His full name would therefore have been Triantafillos Dameanou Balutis.

Note that when he was born in Kavala, it was part of the Ottoman Empire (Greece absorbed it in 1912 during the Balkan War). So his nationality at the time of his birth was Turkish, but later became Greek: hence he was both Greek and Turkish, depending on how you asked the question. Nationality can be quite a fluid thing!

George Vrachnas & Jack Lenos

The NAA lists two other documents relating to him. The first, dated 1930, is item NAA: A10075, 1930/21 (item barcode: 3140391) is “BALUTES Treantafellous versus VRACKNAS George; LENOS Jack”, and relates to a cause (complaint) brought by one party against another before a single judge. (Not yet online.)

According to findmypast, George Vrachnas was born in 1890: and had a restaurant in the ground floor of Traynor House, 287 Elizabeth street. Though Vrachnas & Lenos appear in a number of other cases that appear in Trove (e.g. Wolff vs. Vrachnas and Lenos; Boyd vs. Vrachnas and Lenos; Palmer vs Vrachnas and Lenos, etc, while 1932 saw the inevitable Vrachnas vs Lenos), I so far haven’t found anything relating to Balutes vs Vrachnas and Lenos.

We can see a separate case being taken against the pair in 6 Nov 1931:

IN THE COURT OF PETTY SESSIONS, HOLDEN AT WATER POLICE OFFICE, SYDNEY. No. of Writ. 5993 of 1931. No. of Plaint, 5680 of 1931. THE NATIONAL CASH REGISTER CO. OF A/SIA, LTD., Plaintiff; and GEORGE VRACHNAS and JACK LENOS, trading as Vrachnos and Lenos, 215 Oxford-street, Sydney, Defendant. UNLESS the amount of £14/17/11, together with all fees due herein be paid at or before the hour of noon To-day, Friday, the sixth day of November, 1931, the Bailiff will sell by Public Auction, at Water Police Office, the Right, Title, and Interest of the defendants in goods which are the subject of Conditional Bill of Sale dated 16th July, 1930, No. 13779. last renewed 9th September, 1931, between George Vrachnas and John Lenos (Mortgagors) and John Vrachnas (Mortgagee), and the Right, Title, and Interest of the defendant George Vrachnas In goods which are the subject of conditional Bill of Sale dated 11th October, 1930, No. 19858. between George Vrachnas (Mortgagor) and A. A. Marks, Limited (Mortgagees). Dated at the Court of Petty Sessions abovementioned, this twelfth day of October. 1931.

Incidentally, Trove mentions that Gwendoline Vrachnas was charged in June 1932 with being a manager of a common gaming house in Elizabeth-street, Sydney, in relation to “the sale of share tickets in the State Lottery”.

As a final aside, there’s an oral history recording of George Vrachnas online here, reminiscing about his life. In one part he mentions the effect of the Depression upon his business (suddenly none of the businesses renting from him could pay their rents, and the whole setup collapsed), which was the point in his life when his fortunes dramatically changed.

Police Records

The last of the NAA records is simply titled “Treantafellous Balutes” (NAA: B741, V/7104, Item barcode: 1140692, Location: Melbourne), and contains (or, at least, seems to contain) details of his Victoria police record from 1930 to 1949. Even if Balutis wasn’t in the Victoria Police Gazette for 1944 / 1945 / 1946, it would seem that there was still police interest in his activities.

The B741 series:

[…] comprises files relating to the investigation of all criminal offences committed against the Commonwealth, the contravention of Commonwealth Acts or of State Acts committed on Commonwealth property; the pursuit of recalcitrant debtors to the Commonwealth; and inquiry into the whereabouts of persons requested to be traced by government departments, organisations such as the Red Cross, International Tracing Service, Australia House, private persons or by diplomatic or consular representation. Investigations carried out at the request of government departments include areas such as narcotics trafficking, impersonation, bribery, “forge and utter”, ships’ deserters, enemy aliens in wartime, prohibited immigrants, naturalisation, and rape on Commonwealth property. In most instances a separate file was raised for each particular case requested to be investigated.

It therefore may well also be that Balutis appears in Victoria’s B745 series (because, as it says, “No items from the series are on RecordSearch“):

Name (offenders) index cards to: (1) Correspondence files, single number series with “V” (Victoria) prefix, 1924 – 1962 (2) Correspondence files re Police investigations, annual single number series, 1963 –

The series is the name index to all persons committing an offence against the Commonwealth and/or contravening Commonwealth legislation or State legislation on Commonwealth property, persons whose whereabouts have or are being investigated, and up until 1963, recalcitrant debtors to the Commonwealth.

The Shadow of the Depression

The Depression cast a deep, malign shadow over the life of George Vrachnas, and it seems to have had the same effect on Triantafillos Balutis.

Even though he applied for his naturalisation in January 1930, that was right at the end of the good times. Before that, you can see from Trove that Vrachnas’ café had held regular social meetings and dances, often raising money for war veterans: but now the 1920s were gone, and a different kind of economic reality was in place.

For Balutis, I think you can see the same thing via the advertisements in Trove, from the 2 Jan 1930 (just before his naturalisation)…

Waitress, experienced, start at once, no Sunday work. Canberra Cafe, 426 Bourke st.

…to the 10 Feb 1930 (just after his naturalisation)…

WAITRESS, 16 to 18 years, ready to start, permanent. Canberra Cafe, cr. Lonsdale and Swanston sts.

…to, alas, 13 Dec 1930…

THURSDAY, 18th DECEMBER. At Half-past 2 o’Clock. On the Premises, 426 Bourke-street, MELBOURNE. Under Power of Bill of Sale No. 173,535, instructed by Mr. A. H, HILL, 11 Elizabeth-Street, Melbourne. COMPLETE FURNISHINGS AND PLANT OF CANBERRA CAFE. SODA FOUNTAIN, SODA WATER MACHINE, JACKSON BOILER COMPLETE With Pie Heater; NATIONAL CASH REGISTER, TOLEDO SCALES, 2 Ice Chests, Cutlery, Crockery, Glassware, &c. The Whole To Be Offered As a Going Concern. Full Particulars in Future Advertisement. R. RICHARDSON, Auctioneer, 18 Queen-street.

Whatever the relationship between Balutis and Vrachnas & Lenos was, 1930 seems to have been the year everything went wrong both in the macro-economy and in the Melbourne micro-economy. It was not only the year that Balutis became a naturalised Australian, but also the year that the Australian economy – as the phrase goes – went South.

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of dreams died that year.

What Would I Like To See Next?

As always, the archive records accessible online are only the tip of a giant evidential iceberg. So, the (non-online) documents I’d really like to see next are all held in Melbourne archives:

1. “Treantafellous Balutes” B741 V/7104 (barcode 1140692) from NAA Melbourne (99 Shiel St, North Melbourne). All I know about this is that it covers the date range 1930-1949: beyond that, all outcomes are possible.
2. I’d also like to know if any Balutis / Balutes / Balutz is mentioned in the B745 series. This is the set of name / offender index cards maintained by Victoria’s Investigation Branch: so if anyone had any contact with the Victoria police from 1924-1962, their card should be there. Having said that, it’s not entirely clear to me from the NAA online description whether B745 is at North Melbourne at all. Getting some clarity on this would be very good!
3. As an aside: if it turns out that B745 is accessible, I’d also (just in case, you never know, it’s possible that, etc) really like to see the index cards of all the (T or J first initial) Kean / Keane individuals. Because if it were to turn out that any of those had been charged with nitkeeping prior to 1 Dec 1948, we might just have struck gold. 😉
4. Finally, I’d also like to see Stelios Balutes’ death records (he died on 09 Jul 1977). According to PRO Victoria’s website, their archives hold both his will (PROV ref: VPRS 7591/ P4 unit 757, item 836/255) and his probate records (PROV ref: VPRS 28/ P8 unit 494, item 836/255), both of which I’d like to see. I’d guess that they are stored together (because they share the same item number), but you never can tell with archives. These are held at PRO Victoria’s North Melbourne site (also at 99 Shiel St, North Melbourne).