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According to a big story in today’s (24 Jan Apr 2021) Adelaide Advertiser (a huge thanks to all the people who passed it my way, very much appreciated!), an application by South Australian Police last month to exhume the Somerton Man has just been approved by Attorney-General Vickie Chapman. The plan is to extract a full DNA profile, use familial DNA matches to determine his identity, and to determine his exact cause of death.

SAPOL are funding the whole process, which will be run by its Major Crimes detectives “as part of Operation Persevere” (identifying human remains in SA) and “in tandem with Operation Persist” (cold cases in SA). The exhumation itself “will be conducted using Forensic Science SA (FSSA) scientific staff and the Adelaide Cemeteries Authority”, so doubtless we will be hearing more from FSSA director Dr Linzi Wilson-Wilde along the way.

Pros and Cons

OK: on the one hand, the whole familial DNA aspect of the Somerton Man case is fascinating, and there can be few people who wouldn’t be at least a little interested to know how it plays out. Perhaps investigators will also be able to conclusively determine both his cause of death and even (say, from his hair) much of what he was doing in his final weeks and months.

But on the other hand, even though the Somerton Man (almost certainly) died from a (probably ingested) poison, was he murdered, was it suicide, was it misadventure, or just an accident? We really don’t know: I can’t help but feel that past proposals for this exhumation have looked more like DNA fishing trips than anything else.

Either way, given that tens of documentary teams are doubtless already speaking to SAPOL (if they can manage to make themselves understood through all their pitching drool), we can probably expect this next phase to be well-documented and publicly visible.

All the same, even though some may think this whole enterprise will prove to be “Bloodlines Detectives” territory (please don’t say “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, *sigh*), I personally can’t help but suspect the overwhelming bulk of the work will prove to be closer to “Long Lost Family”. Put Davina and Nicky on a plane now, you know it makes sense. 😉

Not Yet An Endgame

Having spent several years looking at so many unclear, uncertain and occasionally paradoxical aspects of the evidence (and claims) swirling around the Somerton Man case, my strong suspicion is that this is not yet the endgame phase. Even if our mysterious man’s DNA does yield an identity (and of course it may well stubbornly hold on to its secrets for a while longer), it may well take a great amount of effort to reconstruct the man’s life.

People hate to admit it, but the nice neat records which genealogists rely so heavily upon are skewed towards the middle classes. For example, documentation about the early years of Jo Thomson (the nurse whose Glenelg phone number was connected to the Somerton Man) isn’t absent because she was a woman of mystery, but rather because she was born to a poor family.

To my eyes, the suitcase clothes linked to the Somerton Man seem like a charity shop ragtag bag, as if he was down on his uppers. Hence it would be utterly unsurprising to me if he had been living in hostels, picking up only occasional work, flying under every institutional radar: which, as far as genealogical evidence goes, would be roughly the worst case scenario for making any progress.

But however this all plays out, it’s an interesting new chapter in a long-running story. We’ll have to be patient while all the machinery turns, sure – but the cogs and gears are now moving.

I’ve spent some time this week working on Alexander d’Agapeyeff’s 1939 challenge cipher, which seems (to me) to be a tricky combination of substitution cipher and transposition cipher. It’s also not clear to me what language the plaintext will turn out to be in: English, Russian (d’Agapeyeff was born in Russia), French, or perhaps even a Saharan language (d’Agapeyeff spent some time working as a cartographer in Lake Chad).

In practice, this meant I needed a metric reflecting how well a given piece of (transposed) text resembles language (but without knowing the language, alphabet or the substitutions): its generic “languageness”, for want of a better term.

I started by using H2 measures of entropy, but quickly became dissatisfied with the results. Rather, what I really wanted was a metric that was much ‘spikier’, i.e. that would sharply spike up the more language-like a given transposition was. But what could I use?

Calculating Suffixity

I devised the idea of using (what I call) “suffixity” as a metric, i.e.:

• Build a suffix array (an ordered table containing the strings in each position in the text)
• Sum up the matching length of every adjacent entry in the ordered table
• Finally, normalise this value against the length of the ciphertext.

So for the (industry-standard) text string BANANA* (where * is the EOF character), start by listing all the strings in the order they appear in the text string:

• BANANA*
• ANANA*B
• NANA*BA
• ANA*BAN
• NA*BANA
• A*BANAN

Then sort these strings alphabetically:

• A*BANAN
• ANA*BAN
• ANANA*B
• BANANA*
• NA*BANA
• NANA*BA

Then sum up the matching lengths of adjacent entries in your ordered array:

• strmatch(A*BANAN, ANA*BAN) = 1 —> total = 1
• strmatch(ANA*BAN, ANANA*B) = 3 —> total = 4
• strmatch(ANANA*B, BANANA*) = 0
• strmatch(BANANA*, NA*BANA) = 0
• strmatch(NA*BANA, NANA*BA) = 2 —> total = 6

Finally, normalise this raw total value (6) against the length of the text (6) to get a normalised suffixity of (6/6) = 1.0

The higher the suffixity value, the more language-like the text.

C Implementation of Suffixity

Because suffix arrays are used in the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (as a data compression guy, this is one of my favourite compression algorithms), clever computer scientists have worked out various ways to generate suffix arrays in essentially O(n) time. And so I used Yuta Mori’s sais-lite library, which implements the induced sorting algorithm (there are many others, but I was specifically looking for a simple C implementation).

My C function to calculate the matching length looks like this (no big surprises here):

static inline int strmatch(const uint8_t * a, const uint8_t * b)
{
	const uint8_t * base = &a[1];

	while (*a++ == *b++)
		;

	return (int) (a - base);
}

My C function to calculate suffixity has one extra trick (which you may or may not agree with), in that it tries to avoid rewarding tripled letters (e.g. SEPIA AARDVARK). This is not a final implementation, but I think it’s reasonably close to capturing the core idea:

#include "sais.h"

int calc_suffixity(const uint8_t * pau8Text, int * suffix_array, int len)
{
	sais(pau8Text, suffix_array, len); // Construct a suffix array

	int suffixity = 0;
	for (int i = 0; i < len - 1; i++)
	{
		const uint8_t *a = &pau8Text[suffix_array[i+0]];
		const uint8_t *b = &pau8Text[suffix_array[i+1]];
		int s = strmatch(a, b);
		if ((s >= 3) && (a[0] == a[1]) && (a[0] == a[2]))
		{
			s = 0;	// Don't reward triple letters!
		}
		suffixity += s;
	}

	return suffixity;
}

You then normalise the returned suffixity value by dividing it by the length of the text. (It could be argued that you should divide it by (length – 1), but that’s an issue for another day.)

In summary, I believe that suffixity should be an effective metric to use with hill-climbing algorithms when tackling transpositions of unknown substitutions; but, as always, there may well be many other cryptological applications for suffixity that I haven’t yet thought of. 😉

Is Suffixity Already Known By Another Name?

Of course, it’s entirely possible that suffixity is nothing new. Given that my crypto bookshelves are focused more on cryptography (code-making) than on cryptology (code-breaking), I would be very happy to hear from crypto people who know the literature well.

All the same, O(n) algorithms for building suffix arrays are fairly new, so it would not surprise me if suffix arrays had played no real part in practical code-breaking to date. We shall see!

Future posts will try applying suffixity to various codebreaking challenges. I’m already able to say much more about d’Agapeyeff’s challenge cipher than I was before, so I’m expecting that that will be a post (or two) all on its own.

In a recent post, I briefly mentioned an unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless” who had been found dead in a tent in Florida in the summer of 2018. He had a fat wodge of cash in his pocket, a very distinctive scar, and some kind of connection to an online game called Screeps.

As I posted, it seemed highly likely to me that he had been a programmer (Screeps is that kind of a thing), and I fleetingly wondered if his online identity could be worked out via a digital forensic analysis of posts to the r/screeps Reddit channel. In fact, a fair few other people had had exactly the same idea, and they soon narrowed him down to a user called ‘vaejor‘.

Anyway, Mostly Harmless has now been identified as Vance John Rodriguez (who was indeed a programmer), and the – not very happy – details of his life have been put together by Nicholas Thompson in a Wired article.

As closure goes, I have to say it makes for pretty miserable reading: but perhaps that inevitably goes with the territory. Just so you know! :-/

On board the S.S. Ormonde (at the same time as both Triantafillos Balutis and Stelios Balutis) in February 1923, there was a very special passenger: Her Royal Highness the Grand Duchess, Princess Ivanovich.

Let’s just say I probably won’t ever get the chance to write another blog post with even half as many references to smoking as this. On with the story!

The Duchess in Australia

The Perth Daily News of 8 Feb 1923 launched the story:

A RUSSIAN PRINCESS PASSES THROUGH ON WORLD TOUR.
Her Royal Highness the Grand Duchess, Princess Ivanovich, is aboard the liner Ormonde, which arrived at Fremantle this morning. Her Highness is an Englishwoman by birth, and is proceeding to Sydney, where she will be joined by His Highness the Grand Duke. Afterwards they will go to America on a tour round the world. It is stated that her Highness was formerly married to an Englis[h]man and inherited considerable money. Her present marriage took place, it is stated, only a few months ago.

The story then became more elaborate, as per the Melbourne Herald (17 Feb 1923):

If any one woman more than another is entitled to a place in the pages of a novel, she is the Princess Ivanovitch, who is at present on a tour of Australia. She has visited practically every place worth seeing in the world. She has been engaged to one of the richest men in the world, and she has married royalty. These are few of the things that have been crammed into the life of this remarkable woman. Cutting a unique figure in her quaint dress, shoes and hat — things that would being envy to the heart of a Brittany girl — and puffing smoke from a delicately-rolled cigarette, in true Bohemian style, the Princess, an elderly woman, strolled unaccompanied around Melbourne all day yesterday until late In the evening, admiring, or criticising the outstanding points of interest. Only eighteen months ago the Princess, who is an Englishwoman, having been born in Lancashire, married the Grand Duke Prince Ivanovitch, of Russia, a second cousin to the late Czar. The wedding was celebrated at San Diego. California. They had been intimately acquainted for many years.
Yearning for Travel
According to the story the Princess related to a Herald representative, the only two countries of any which she has not visited are Russia and New Zealand. She admitted that she had an unquenchable yearning for travel, and could hardly bear to remain in the one place for long. Most of her life has been taken up in travelling. The longest spell in one country she had experienced for more than 20 years was her stay in England, during the war period, when the existing regulations compelled women to remain in the country. Before marrying: Prince Ivanovitch, she was Mrs Brewster-Fuller. She has only one child living, a daughter, who is married to the Dutch Ambassador at Pekin. Prior to meeting her late husband, the Duchess was engaged to one of the wealthiest men in the world — Mr Vercker-Vercloyle-Cloy, who was on his way to New York, where the marriage was to be celebrated, when he died from double pneumonia. He contracted the illness after having jumped overboard from a ship on the South American coast in an attempt to rescue a drowning sailor.
Marie Antoinette Pearls
The entire estate of Mr Vercker-Vercloyle-Cloy was willed to the Princess. Included in the personalty left by the deceased millionaire were celebrated pearls — a three string necklace originally the possession of Marie Antoinette. “I’m terrified to wear them,” the Princess admitted. She stated that they are safely deposited in a Paris bank.
Speaking of the opinions she had already formed of Melbourne, the Princess grew enthusiastic regarding the Botanical Gardens and St. Kilda road. She said the gardens were beautiful, one of the best she has seen. While loth to draw comparisons, she couldn’t name another road in the world which excels our highway in beauty. Nevertheless she is, generally speaking. disappointed with Melbourne, particularly with the buildings and shop window- displays. “They are comparatively poor,” she remarked, citing those of Valparaiso and Buenos Ayres and other large cities south of the equator, as being a long way ahead in this respect. Princess Ivanovitch was at Oberammergau when the famous Passion play was enacted. She describes the efforts of Anton Bang and his followers as simply wonderful. Throughout her travels the Princess has kept a minute diary, and contemplates writing the history of her career.

By the time she reached Sydney, her story had expanded yet further (Brisbane Telegraph, 20 Feb 1923):

Mystery surrounds an Englishwoman described as the Grand Duchess the Princess Ivanovitch, who arrived in Sydney yesterday, aboard the Ormonde. When it was objected that that name was not to be found on the rolls of the Russian nobility she admitted that it was an assumed one. She said her husband had never told her his real name, because if it became known the Bolsheviks would confiscate his estates. She thought he was a Romanoff. “Nevertheless,” she said, “he commands what once was the Czar’s special regiment. He wears a uniform of white cloth, covered with gold […] gold helmet, with rare white plume The visitor told an extraordinary story of romance, millions, and marriage. “The Grand Duke,” she said, “is coming to Australia in the most gorgeous yacht in the world, valued at £250,000, to join me, preparatory to our sailing for New Zealand, Samoa, Honolulu, and Japan, where he resides.” Her only daughter, she said, was the wife of the ambassador for Holland. She was a widow until 18 months ago, when, she said, she married the Grand Duke in America. She was in her sixties at the time.

The Warwick Daily News (also 20 Feb 1923) named her late husband as instead “Bereker Perhoyle Clay”, and said that she had inherited twenty two million dollars, but her Russian husband “would not allow her to touch a penny of it”, la-la-la.

Inevitably, the Perth Daily News (20 Feb 1923) was starting to smell a rat:

A SHABBY “ROYALTY” – IS SHE A PRINCESS? – SYDNEY SUSPECTS HER.
SYDNEY, Tuesday.
Mystery surrounds the woman who claims to be the Russian Grand Duchess, Princess Ivanovich. Doubt has been thrown on her story. She appeared in the lounge of a fashionable hotel to-day clad in a huge white fur coat, torn in many places, and covering apparently a dilapidated blue dress. Her hands were swathed in dull jewellery ware, consisting, it seemed, of something like moonstones. She wore two huge bracelets on her arm, looking like replicas of handcuff chains. When she was told that there is no record in Russian royalty of the name of Ivanovich she admitted that this was an assumed name, and that it was used to mislead the Bolsheviks. “My husband is a Duke,” she says. “He will be here soon.” In the meantime Sydney is wondering what will be the next move of the unique visitor.

By the 21 Feb 1923, the Brisbane Daily Standard was rather enjoying the whole show:

Meanwhile Sydney is wondering what she will say next. At any rate, she is having the time of her life, even if she does smoke Capstan cigarettes.

Before she left Australia, she went up to the Jenolan Caves, travelling in the second class smoking compartment. And then, finally, she left Sydney aboard the steamer Manuka, according to the Melbourne Herald (23 Feb 1923):

SHOOK HER FISTS
Russian Duchess Angered
THREATENS TO DUCK REPORTERS
SYDNEY, Friday.
“If my husband the Duke was here he would pitch you into the sea. And if reporters or photographers dare to board my yacht, the Henriette, when she arrives here. I shall recommend that they be thrown overboard.” So sick of Sydney reporters and photographers is the woman who protests that she is the Grand Duchess of Ivanovitch that she shook her fists at pressmen who tried to bid her au revoir on her departure for New Zealand by the steamer Manuka today. The Duchess, although she had only been on board 30 minutes, was extremely popular with fellow travellers. She was found sitting forward on the main saloon deck as usual, puffing away at a cigarette.
A group of young men and several ladies was standing about her, and she was telling them a wonderful story of mansions and yachts. All seemed interested.
“Photograph Me in Bed?”
The duchess refused to be interviewed and continued to speak to her group of listeners. “Since my arrival in Sydney on Monday,” she said, “no fewer than 98 reporters have visited me. When the Ormonde reached Sydney, nine reporters came into my little cabin, and I remonstrated with them for I was not fully dressed.”
The Duchess began to cry. As she wiped her eyes, she continued: “One photographer was extremely persistent. He wanted to photograph me, and I said ‘What! Photograph me in bed? Certainly not!” “I have had a most unpleasant stay in Sydney, and I am sure my husband will protest when he gets here in his yacht. Perhaps he will not come to Sydney now.”
When the Manuka left the wharf the Duchess was leaning over the rails and smiling wistfully.

The Melbourne Herald ran a picture of her in its story the next day:

The Duchess in New Zealand

In Wellington, she stayed in the Midland Hotel, where the New Zealand Herald (3 March 1923) noted:

The titled visitor was an elderly woman and her clothes were hardly in keeping with her name, for she was dressed in a stained skirt and a much-travelled fur coat. Neither did her method of lighting a match upon her shoe suggest the grand ducal manner.

The Newcastle Sun (14 Mar 1923) continued the story:

GUEST OF HIS MAJESTY
RUSSIAN “PRINCESS”
Overstepping the Mark
WELLINGTON (N.Z.), Wednesday.
From her grand palaces at Moscow and Petrograd, and her “lovely little villa at Monte Carlo,” the “Grand Duchess Prince Ivanovich,” or, to use her numerous English names, Harriet Rushford Henrietta Southall Fuller, paid an involuntary visit to Ashburton, and as a first offending inebriate was a guest at His Majesty’s local lock-up. Fuller arrived at Ashburton on Tuesday by the Christchurch-Dunedin [ex]press, in a state of drunkenness, according to the evidence at the court, when a charge in accordance with her condition at the time of her arrival was preferred against her. It was stated that on leaving Christchurch, the ‘princess’ indulged in liquid refreshment, whisky, and so generously did she treat herself that she rapidly became a source of great annoyance to lady travellers. At Rakala, the guard decided that the “princess” had overstepped the mark, and relieved her of the rest of her whisky. Her indignation knew no bounds. Muddled with drink, and seething with temper, she achieved a remarkable state of untidiness. Her clothing was terribly disarranged. Her boots were found in another part of the car, and her stockings flapped about her ankles.
“QUITE NICE”
Fuller became altogether too unladylike in every action for her fellow passengers, and when the train reached Ashburton a constable invited the “princess” to come along. Fortunately she was under the impression that she was to be motored to Timaru, which she thought “quite nice” on the part of her Ashburton friends. The journey, however, ended abruptly at the lock-up. When she sobered up she also woke up the entire community. For a lady of 63 summers her voice possessed remarkable volume. She told the senior sergeant that who would tell Lord Jellicoe of the “frightful insult.” The sergeant, however, told the “Princess” that Lord Jellicoe had instructed him to put her in the cells. This calmed the “Princess”, strange to say. At nine o’clock the sergeant read the Riot Act, for the atmosphere was being rudely disturbed, and the neighbors were afforded little rest. Fuller had the modest sum of £8 in her possession, but she also possesses an elaborate looking passport, and much correspondence which certainly indicated that she was “somebody,” somewhere. The senior sergeant allowed her out on bail, in the sum of £3, and there was no appearance of the “Princess” in court. A constable described the appearance of the accused. “She was a disreputable sight, and in a beastly state of drunkenness,” he said. “It’s a very bad case,” observed the bench, and inflicted a fine of £3.

The NZ Truth (which I didn’t know about before) was quite taken with her, publishing this rather flattering drawing:

From Dunedin (where she had some difficulty find a hotel room), she moved onwards “by the southern express on her way to Queenstown”. She also caused a minor commotion at Timaru station, where she grabbed a refill of whisky and cigarettes in a local hotel, before legging it back yelling loudly just as the train was about to depart.

And then it was time for the journey to end, as per the Otago Daily Times of 29 March 1923:

The “Grand Duchess Princess Ivanovitch,” or Mrs Brewster Fuller, as she is otherwise known, returned to the North Island last week, and, after visiting Rotorua, will leave Auckland on April 15 for Honolulu and China, to pay a visit to her daughter, who, she says, is “Lady” Oudenyk, wife of the Ambassador for the Netherlands at Peking. The lady persists in the statement that she is the wife of the Grand Duke, whom she expects to meet in Auckland next week. They have houses, she asserts, at Rome, Venice, Paris, Monte Carlo, Lake Como (Switzerland), London, Folkestone, and Sicily, besides three homes in Russia, where her husband has lost £150,000 a year through the depreciation of the rouble. She is alleged to have recently received a letter from her agent in England, giving her news of her tenants, and stating that, as things were improving, her income would be in the region of £1200 a year from now on.

Home Again

By 19 October 1923, Mrs Fuller had arrived back in the UK, telling yet another tall tale that the Brisbane Daily Standard picked up on:

The first prize in the Best Lie About Russia competition is awarded to the London newspaper that published the following:
“STARVING RUSSIA.
The Grand Duchess Ivanovitch, cousin to the late Czar, travelling incognito as Mrs. Fuller, arrived at Southampton from Canada recently. She said that the Grand Duke recently sent 35 ship-loads of grain to his peasants, but the Bolsheviks became aware of its arrival and burned all the vessels to the water’s edge.
The starving people, who had gathered in the hope of obtaining some of the grain, rushed into the sea up to their necks, seized the burning corn and extinguishing the flames, swallowed it greedily.”
This is on such a magnificent scale that comment is difficult; but I must say that I especially like the expression, “his peasants.” – From the London “Daily Herald.”

No doubt assiduous researchers will be able to find countless other news articles documenting the Duchess’ haphazard (and smoke-filled) travels through Hawaii, America and Canada: but this is where I’ve drawn the line.

Oh, And One Last Thing…

Before all the above happened, the Manawatu Standard published this tiny news snippet on 8 Feb 1923:

The Grand Duke and Grand Duchess Duorak Ivanovitch have reached Sicily in their yacht, from Venice, en route for New Zealand.

Similarly, the Feilding Star (8 Feb 1923) noted:

The Grand Duke and Grand Duchess Dvorak Ivanovitch, left Sicily in their yacht en route for New Zealand last month.

In fact, the same story appeared in Brisbane’s Daily Standard as far back as 27 Dec 1922, which I suspect was when the original set of cables was sent, warning New Zealand of the approach of Typhoon Brewster-Fuller:

We Breathe Again.
The cable man says that the Grand Duke and Duchess Bvorak [sic] Ivanovitch are yachting to New Zealand. It’s a comfort, anyway, to know that all the grand dukes were not thrown into the bread line when the Soviets took over.

OK, stripping the Somerton Man’s story back, I’m still minded to believe that the Somerton Man was some kind of crim: and that the most credible piece of external evidence we have as to his identity is that in early 1949 two Melbourne baccarat players recalled he had been a nitkeeper at a Lonsdale Street baccarat school for about ten weeks some four years before (so around the start of 1945).

The next piece of relevant information is that Victoria’s state laws against nitkeeping were very strong: a first offence meant a fine of £20, a second offence a fine of £250, while a third offence meant six months in prison. Because the school principal paid the nitkeeper’s fines, what this meant was that a nitkeeper who had been fined once was effectively unemployable: no betting principal would hire a nitkeeper who had previously been fined, the fine for the second offence was just too high.

Hence the “Previously Fined Nitkeeper” Somerton Man hypothesis is simply that the reason the nitkeeper disappeared after about ten weeks was because he had been fined, and had thus become unemployable as a nitkeeper. So all we would have to do is find Victoria archive records of nitkeepers being fined in, say, 1944-1946, and we would have a reasonable shortlist of people who might – if everything aligned just perfectly – be the Somerton Man.

Victoria Police Gazette

Simple, eh? Well… in principle, yes. But as with just about everything, the Devil sits firmly in the details.

The #1 place we would like to look is the Victoria Police Gazette, where all court activity is helpfully summarized. However, for the specific years we are interested in here (1944-1946), there is only a physical copy that can be accessed at the Victoria State Library (the microform version runs only to 1939).

Moreover, I believe that the Compendium (that indexes this properly) is only available up until 1924, so searching it would be a painstaking process. One that I’d be more than happy to do, mind you, if I didn’t just happen to be on the far side of the planet.

So until someone decides to bite this particular monster-sized bullet, the Victoria Police Gazette avenue seems to be closed to us.

Baccarat in Victoria

As normal, we can look to the indexed wonder that is Trove for assistance in our search: and having already trawled through the Geelong Petty Sessions Register for 1945 (which is another story entirely), the charge we’re most interested in is “acting in conduct of [a] common gaming house”.

Prior to 1944, this charge almost always related to two-up (an Australian form of coin gambling), fan-tan and hazard. But as far as card schools go, the move to make baccarat illegal in Victoria started only in June 1944:

It was announced today that a bill declaring baccarat and certain other games unlawful games would be the first measure introduced when State Parliament reassembled next week. Baccarat and certain other games, said the Chief Secretary (Mr Hyland) had become a public menace and would be prohibited by law. Police reports showed that wagering on these games was stupendous, particularly on baccarat. At present, prosecutions in regard to baccarat could not be obtained as It was necessary to prove that the promoters were receiving a percentage of the wagers and this it was difficult to do.
Under the amended law, baccarat and the other games would be declared unlawful and it would be necessary only for the police to prove that the game was being played for the promoters to be dealt with and the place declared a gaming house.

By July 1944, there was also suggestion that the police were being bribed to take no action against Melbourne’s “palatial baccarat schools“, though of course senior police denied all knowledge (ho ho ho, right):

No complaint implying an accusation of bribery against any member of the gaming branch had come to his knowledge, said the Chief Commissioner of Police (Mr Duncan) today, when asked about the request by the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Cain) in the Legislative Assembly on Tuesday for an inquiry “into allegations that police had been paid large sums not to take action against palatial baccarat schools” in Melbourne. Mr Duncan said he was unaware of any such allegations. Mr Cain also said that advice he had received from an eminent King’s Counsel was that baccarat schools could be closed by the proprietors being charged with keeping a common gaming house. He was assured, Mr Duncan replied. that every possible endeavour had been made, and was still being made, by the gaming branch to detect and prosecute persons who took part in all forms of illicit gambling. In one prosecution recently, a court ruled that the playing of baccarat did not constitute a common gaming house.

The case where this had been tested in court was that of Christos Paizes, of View street, Hawthorn, relating to the card school he had run in Swanston-street in the city. Police had “watched the playing for money of ‘Ricketty Kate’, poker, solo and rummy” back in February 1944, but the case against Paizes had been dismissed. (More here.)

The bill was introduced to the Legislative Assembly on 4th July 1944, with Mr Hyland describing in some detail the opulent and expensive houses where the games of baccarat, dinah-minah and skillball were played. Having said that, there was immediate concern that the new legislation may not have given the police any genuine new powers that they didn’t already have. Even so, the bill passed all stages in the Assembly on 12th July 1944.

The police’s powers were then discussed here, with a very specific discussion of exactly how baccarat and dinah-minah were played in those “sumptuously furnished and luxuriously carpeted throughout” locations in the Gippsland Times of 20 July 1944.

The key article seems to have appeared in The Truth (24th June 1944), because Mr Hyland (and indeed the Crown Solicitor) responded directly to it here, discussing the baccarat schools at 158 Swanston Street (Paizas), and 7-9 Elizabeth Street (Stokes). Unfortunately, I don’t believe that this particular item is yet in Trove. 🙁

Hence: because baccarat schools were legal up to July 1944, the person whom the two baccarat players identified as a nitkeeper could not have been prosecuted (because even though they did have nitkeepers, baccarat schools were still legal). So we can fast forward past the first half of 1944.

Victoria: Baccarat Prosecutions

It immediately became a point of intense public interest as to whether any of the (now illegal) baccarat schools would be closed down.

On 30th July 1944, the police indeed went to premises in Swanston-street, city, and arrested a 26-year-old- Albanian called Fete Murit of Drummond-street, Carlton (plus 23 men and 17 women). They also raided premises in Drummond-street, Carlton, bringing in 14 more men. Murit was subsequently fined £50: somewhat quaintly, the article lists the occupations of the players brought in.

A similar case against Cyril Lloyd of Glenhuntly Road, Caulfield and Henry Clyde Jenkin of Balfour Street, East Brighton of running a baccarat school at the former’s address on 31 July 1944 was dismissed.

14 Sep 1944: one woman was charged with having permitted the premises (in Barkly Street, Elwood) to be used as a common gaming house, plus 13 men and 10 women who were found there. The article also notes that the charges against the 23 people arrested in Drummond-street, Carlton and the 19 found in a house in Munro Avenue, Carnegie were still awaiting hearing. It was believed that police had managed to close down all Melbourne’s big baccarat schools.

15 Sep 1944: Isaac Cooper-Smith, a fruiterer of Drummond-Street, was fined £20 for running a baccarat school at that same address (the raid was on 04 Sep 1944). 22 others were arrested, of which 13 were fined £1, seven £2, one £3, and one £4. However, Cooper-Smith’s conviction was subsequently quashed because he wasn’t actually on the premises when the police arrived.

03 Oct 1944: Stanley Paul Bonser, of Elbeena Grove, Murrumbeena, was fined £30, after a raid on a house in Munro Street, Carnegie on 30 Aug 1944: 17 others were fined £1.

16 Nov 1944: charges against Basil Koutsoukis relating to a baccarat school he was alleged to have been running in Lonsdale Street were dropped.

17 Nov 1944: only two of 19 men caught in a baccarat raid on premises in Park Street, Parkville on 02 Oct 1944 were fined (having admitted to playing baccarat), others saying that they were there “reading the paper”, “came to buy a car and stayed to supper”, or were “just waiting for a friend”.

29 Nov 1944: Mr Hyland said that baccarat schools had moved to private homes. “In the last five weeks a number of private homes had been visited, and 84 persons charged with gaming offences. Of these 75 had been convicted and nine cases held over“.

23 Mar 1945: Frank Gall was charges with permitting a house in Williamstown to be used as a common gaming house on 05 Feb 1945: Raymond A. Barrett and Albert Chandler were charged with aiding and abetting him. In court, all were fined £1, except Stewart Kerison and Joseph Picone who were fined £2 (“because of previous contacts with the police”). This was then appealed and overturned.

09 Apr 1945: three raids, two on Burnley and one Port Melbourne, 29 men held (no women, so probably two-up?).

14 Apr 1945: 48 men were caught in a raid on upstairs rooms in Russell Street, city “in the block next to police headquarters”. 35 men were also caught in another club in Lonsdale Street, “opposite the Old Royal Melbourne Hospital”, not 200 yards away.

22 Jun 1945: Christos Paizes suffered sudden back pains just before coming to court in relation to proceedings against his alleged baccarat school at 158-160 Swanston Street, City, had been instituted on 18 May 1945. Adjourned until 16 July. When this came to court on 19 July 1945, the affidavit submitted that Paizes was running a baccarat club at the old Canton Café in Swanston Street. The persons having control and management (none of whom were known by police to have a lawful occupation) of the club were:

• Christos Paizes (alias Harry Carillo)
• William John Elkins
• Gerald Francis Regan (of High-street, St Kilda)
• Richard Thomas (alias Abishara)
• “and a man known as Balutz”

The club was declared to be a common gaming-house as from 01 Aug 1945, even though Christos Paizes (of Mathoura-road, Toorak) denied it.

06 Sep 1946: police claimed the Melbourne baccarat boom was busted:

Not more than half a dozen small baccarat schools were now operating in Melbourne so far as they knew, gaming police said today.
They were commenting on the Sydney report that the New South Wales Police Department was concerned about the growth of large scale baccarat activities in Sydney.
Baccarat flourished in Melbourne until amendment of the law declared It an unlawful game two years ago. That smashed it here as an organised gambling racket. Then the death of Melbourne’s “baccarat baron,” Harry Stokes, brought to an end schools that were still trying to carry on.
Most recent blow at city gambling centres was a Supreme Court declaration at the request of the police which “quarantined” a social club in Swanston Street as a common gaming house. This meant that any persons entering the premises was liable to arrest.
To escape the punitive effect of this order, the owner sold the premises to a buyer approved by the Crown Law authorities.
POLICE FIND OUT
Places where baccarat was played now, the gaming police said today, were private homes and one or two suburban halls, and they were not able to carry on for long undiscovered. Clients were picked up in cars, chiefly at foreign clubs and solo and bridge schools to evade detection, but the police soon found out.
Whenever the playing of baccarat was discovered, the occupier of the premises was arrested for conducting a gaming house, and everyone there was charged with being found in a gaming house.
Constant police action had put an end to baccarat In Melbourne as a reliable business venture.

07 Oct 1946: “twelve fashionably dressed women and 25 men” were brought in by police after a raid on an alleged baccarat school in Lavender Bay. They were playing a game called “chuck-a-chuck”, similar to baccarat but more profitable for the house.

20 Dec 1946: Dennis Greelish of 578 Melbourne Road, Spotswood was fined £10 for what was clearly baccarat, even though the bench accepted it was probably a game “between friends”.

After The Golden Age

I think it is a reasonably safe bet that the period the two baccarat players were referring to was after July 1944 (when the legislation making baccarat illegal was introduced into Victoria), but before September 1946 (when baccarat was clearly at the end of its life there). The Golden Age – of swank socialites playing baccarat in luxuriously carpeted surroundings – had come to an end with the legislation: in July 1944, it was not a question of whether baccarat would fall, it was simply one of when – or rather, how long bribery could keep the baccarat balls hanging impossibly in the air.

Even though gambling at Christos Paizes’ Lonsdale Street baccarat school had attracted intense (and sustained) attention from the police in early 1944, they had been unable to find any way to shut its (still legal) activities down. Moreover, even once the new legislation had been passed, Paizes continued his baccarat activities through the rest of 1944 and into 1945. Finally, his club was closed down in August 1945: the golden age may already have passed, but that (along with the death of Harry Stokes) was the end of the Melbourne baccarat era.

As far as William John Elkins, Richard Thomas (alias Abishara), and the man known as “Balutz” go:

• William John Elkins had been arrested for running a Melbourne gaming house in January 1938, and attempts to extradite him to Adelaide in August 1941 on a separate charge had failed. But he seems to have still been alive (and living in Wilgah street, East St Kilda) in October 1950.
• Deeb John Abishara (who was living at 9 Robe street, St Kilda in June 1941, when he applied for naturalization) was also known as Richard Thomas. Dick Thomas was still “one of the biggest baccarat barons in Melbourne” in September 1953 (and, from the article, would seem to have clearly been deeply feared).
• Might Balutz be the Somerton Man?Of “Balutz”, there is no sign at all.

Balutz the Romanian?

Might Balutz be the Somerton Man? He was certainly closely associated with Christos Paizes’ Lonsdale Street baccarat school (though without being an obvious principal), at almost exactly the right time flagged by the two anonymous baccarat players. He was certainly mysterious enough: anyone searching for his name will find precious little to work with. Even though I could find nothing about him being a fined nitkeeper, I think he was closely associated with the Lonsdale Street baccarat school in the right kind of way.

Balutz is a Romanian surname: trawling through various databases, I can find evidence of Balutz family members emigrating to the US, but can find nothing in Australia or New Zealand. (Nothing in NAA, billiongraves etc.) No Balutz family trees jumped out at me, but perhaps you’ll have more luck.

I previously blogged about the Melbourne baccarat schools that briefly flourished in 1947-1948: there, I mentioned the 1944-1949 photo supplement to the Police Gazette, plus the similar one for 1939-1948 held in North Melbourne. Might there be a picture of Balutz in there?

Or… if he was the Somerton Man, might his surname be in the employee list at Broken Hill? I’ve previously asked the Broken Hill Historical Society to look for Keanes for me, but it would be a surprise if anyone had asked them to search for Balutz. Who knows what they might find?

If anyone can find anything at all about Mr Balutz, please say!

A nice message from “Milite Ignoto” (‘Unknown Soldier’, if your Italian is a little rusty) at a French email address points us all to an interesting postcard cipher sent from Palermo that is currently on display at the Vittoriano Museum in Rome.

The twist here is that, rather than the normal enciphered-note-to-a-lover so typical of the turn of the 20th century, this one was sent by an Italian soldier, and where the (as-yet-undecrypted) cipher itself was further concealed beneath the stamp. Yes, it is indeed a proper cipher mystery. 🙂

Our Unknown Soldier informant kindly sent us through two images, one of a larger section of postcard showing where the cipher sits beneath the (removed) stamp, and the other a slightly blurred image of the cipher:

When I put this page up earlier today, commenter Peter Moesli immediately pointed out that it looked to be the wrong way up (straight right edge, ragged left edge, etc). Which meant my initial transcription was completely back to front. *sigh*

Rotating the image around by 180 degrees gives a more sensible-looking block of ciphertext, where the first set of shapes appears to be “10:01”, whatever that means (the date on the postcard is quite different):

The start of this now looks as though it reads “10:01”, so I have transcribed that on a separate line. Hence my (revised) transcription is as follows:

10:01\

T.-.-

GTIT+G.VVI

/WIGXGP.AJJ.

/A+..A//LTA

MIPI/GJL+.

GTQPGTT.GL

VG-I.X.JGJA

SARGRA//.MA-

XA+A.

I (of course) tried putting this into CryptoCrack:
unsurprisingly, it yielded an Italian plaintext. Tweaked slightly (CryptoCrack swapped L and V, and I’ve added spaces to make it clearer):
10:01\ sono n
esiste oggi
chiedero avvo
cato accusa
mi ricevuto
espresso eu
genio doveva
farer accom
andatao

It turns out that the reason for concealment and secrecy was almost certainly legal (“avvocato” means lawyer). Can any Cipher Mysteries reader with good Italian (or, at least, better Italian than me) fix this up and translate it properly?

Incidentally, Joe Nickell (famous for his writing on the Beale Ciphers) once wrote about finding a series of postcards with tiny (though unenciphered) writing concealed in much the same way. Yet…

The hidden-under-the-stamp messages were simply miniscule love notes. One consisted of rows of little X’s (a popular shorthand for kisses), while another asked, “Do you you still love this bad boy?” The cards, postmarked between 1911 and 1913 were addressed to a young lady at a Virginia girls’ school (Nickell 1990, 177). Charming!

I’ve also read that Agatha Christie wrote a story where a cipher key was microwritten beneath a postage stamp (though I don’t know which one that was). The set of six postage stamps released in 2016 to commemorate Christie include numerous steganographic tricks, which is a lot of fun.

Having said that, there is also a long history of false stories (helpfully debunked here by snopes.com) dating back at least to the American Civil War where tales of atrocities carried out on prisoners of war are supposedly carried home in microwriting under stamps. So anyone looking for historical messages hidden beneath stamps should be more than wary of what they read and believe. 😮

Postscript:

Here’s a (small) picture of the postcard on display in the museum:

The text below says:

Nel quadratino dove era incollato il francobollo è ancora chiaramente leggibile un messaggio criptato scritto con lettere piccolissime, a matita. La cartolina è indirizzata al Maggiore Polizzi della 2a Divisione Ragioneria al Ministero della Guerra – Roma Spedita il 25-3-1918

“In the square where the stamp was stuck (and still clearly readable) is an encrypted message written in tiny letters in pencil. The postcard is addressed to Major Polizzi c/o the 2th Accounting Division at the Ministry of War in Rome, and was sent on 25-3-1918.”

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many good films I’ve seen in the last year that have been based on true stories. (And yes, I am quite aware that “true” and “Hollywood” are uneasy bedfellows at the best of times.) So I thought I’d list them here (along with where I saw them), though in no particular order.

#1 Untouchable (in the UK, “Intouchables” in French) – Google Play

IMDB link This is basically a buddy film between a French quadriplegic and a Senegalese crim, that manages not only to tell an essentially true (though slightly altered) story, but also be challenging and entertaining from start to finish. Definitely the most surprising film of my year.

As an aside, it seems that this is now being remade by Hollywood as “The Upside”. But given that the performances in the (subtitled) French original are all fantastic, I’m not entirely sure what this remake will achieve. Put that little cucumber away!

#2 Torvill and Dean – ITV

IMDB link This was a lot of fun, and built up to their Ravel’s-Bolero-powered 1984 Olympic ice skating triumph. I followed this by immediately watching the BBC2 documentary on the twinkle-toed pair (this may still be on BBC iPlayer), which showed (I think) that the film-makers had basically done a pretty good job of telling the story.

OK, it’s not “I, Tonya”, criticisms of schmaltz aren’t entirely unjustified, and it’s definitely a TV-movie rather than a movie-movie: but I actually enjoyed it from start to finish. So ner. I just wish I had a YouTube trailer I could embed here. :-/

#3 Mark Felt – The Man Who Brought Down The White House (Netflix)

IMDB link Liam Neeson (sans stunts) is cast oddly well as “The G-Man’s G-Man”, who was also the famous “Deep Throat” whistleblower who pulled the walls down around President Nixon.

Everyone (surely) knows a little bit about this slice of relatively recent history, but the film (based on the books by Felt himself) gives a much broader (and dare I even say timely?) feel of the kind of interference with the FBI that the White House tried to carry out. Ultimately that failed, but only because of a single man – Mark Felt.

#4 Bohemian Rhapsody – (Odeon Cinema)

IMDB link I must admit that I wasn’t looking forward to watching this: the movie trailer made it seem a lot like “Queen – The Panto”, and that it was going to whitewash Freddie Mercury out of the picture.

But I was delighted (and, yes, pleasantly surprised) that the film-makers didn’t hold back on any of Mercury’s complicated sides. Much like the Torvill and Dean film, this built up to Queen’s 1985 Live Aid set: again, even though everyone knows a little about this story, seeing the broader picture was a proper blast. And it was cool eating pizza in a slouchy chair at the Odeon in Kingston. 🙂

Haikus?
“People waiting for the toilet on planes”?
And that’s poetic?