Razor gang

Razor gangs were criminal gangs that dominated the Sydney crime scene in the 1920s. With the passage of the Pistol Licensing Act (NSW) 1927, the New South Wales State Parliament imposed severe penalties for carrying concealed firearms and handguns. Sydney gangland figures then chose razors as preferred weapons, for their capacity to inflict disfiguring scars.

The upsurge in organised crime was caused by the prohibition of sale of cocaine by chemists (under the Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act 1927), the prohibition of street prostitution (under the Vagrancy Act NSW 1905), the criminalisation of off-course race track betting (under the Betting and Gaming Act 1906) and the introduction of six o'clock closing for public bars after passage of the Licensing Act 1916 (NSW).

By the early 1920s, almost sixty years had passed since German chemists Friedrich Gaedcke and Friedrich Wohler and Wohler's doctoral chemistry student Albert Niemann had isolated the first pure cocaine in 1855 and 1859, and since Italian doctor Paolo Mantegazza had discovered its euphoriant and stimulant effects as a recreational drug.

Initially, cocaine was incorporated into consumer products and beverages, until concern grew about its addictive properties. Manual working-class consumers used its stimulant effects to harden their physical prowess and work longer hours amidst the economic instability of the twenties and thirties. The United States was the first jurisdiction to enact cocaine prohibition legislation. In 1914, the United States Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which imposed ten-year prison sentences for production, distribution or ownership of cocaine.

Illegal drug distribution became a serious social problem due to the existing concentration of addicts in Kings Cross, Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo, estimated at five thousand. Marijuana, opium, morphine, heroin, paraldehyde and cocaine were all heavily consumed. Cocaine was particularly remunerative for criminal entrepreneurs like Kate Leigh and others, due to its ephemeral 'highs' and the need for recurrent supplies to users. As in Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Brussels and Rome, Sydney sex workers were a sizeable market for the cocaine trade, which was supplied from corrupt chemists, doctors, dentists and sailors (given that Peru, Bolivia and Colombia were all accessible through transpacific merchant shipping routes).

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