The Devil He Knew

Newcastle Herald

Saturday September 13, 2008

JOANNE MCCARTHY

It has been two years tomorrow since Abe Saffron's death, but even beyond the grave Australia's most notorious underworld figure can make his only son cry.

As a seven-year-old Alan Saffron was abandoned by his father in Switzerland for 18 months.

At 22 it was his father who committed him to the notorious Chelmsford psychiatric hospital for electric shock therapy.

Alan Saffron was repeatedly and routinely humiliated by the man known as Mr Sin. He watched helplessly as his mother attempted suicide three times because of her husband's blatant womanising, and two years ago he suffered the ultimate betrayal when Abe Saffron's will was revealed, naming him as only a minor beneficiary in his father's $25 million estate.

But he cried last week when asked if he loved his father despite it all.

"Yes I do. I do love him. I tear up when I think it and say it because I don't understand it. I actually don't understand it but I still love him. He's the only father I've got," he said.

Gentle Satan: My Father, Abe Saffron, is Alan Saffron's break with the past.

While publicity on the book's release focused on its most sensational claim that Abe Saffron's one-time business partner Jimmy "The Boss" Anderson killed Mark Foys heiress and anti-King Cross development campaigner Juanita Nielsen for Alan Saffron there is a broader and more poignant story at its heart.

"The message I've tried to get across is what do you do in your life when you're brought up in a dysfunctional family? What does a child do? When there's emotional, physical or sexual abuse, when there's violence or drink or drugs or any of the awful situations so many children have to live with, how does a child survive that, and how does that child move on as an adult and let the past go?" he said.

Alan Saffron has lived and worked in America since 1979. Leaving Australia was the only way to cope with his controlling father, he said.

Gentle Satan was written over 18 months, after Abe Saffron's death on September 15, 2006.

It could not have been written before. Writing about his father was the most difficult but the most liberating experience of his life, he said.

"This was a most incredible experience; the most incredible experience of anything I've ever done. I'm trying to think of the word to describe it. Wonderful? It isn't the word I'm looking for but it gives you an idea how significant writing the book was.

"It was such a lifting of a lifetime that's just been bottled up in me and never able to get out. Now at the age of nearly 60 years I can start to live my own life. It sounds ridiculous to say that, but it's a fact.

"I couldn't have written this book while he was alive, because then it would have been an angry book directed at him. It still would have been about him.

"There's no question his dying was the cut.

"I don't blame him for the fact that I'm Abe Saffron's son. That's my legacy. I am the son. But I thought in writing the book in some way I'd break the thread. In some way I would separate me from my father's generation."

Abe Saffron was born in 1919, one of five children.

By the age of eight he was selling cigarettes to his father's poker friends at a profit. At 22 he was in the merchant navy making a substantial profit trading in black-market goods during World War II.

By 1944 Saffron was out of the merchant navy and in Kurri Kurri as the owner of the Station Hotel.

"Dad tells the story of how he rode a horse to work every day and was very sociable, knowing all his regulars by their first names," Alan Saffron wrote.

But the quiet life in Kurri Kurri was not to Abe Saffron's liking. He bought the Hotel Newcastle out of boredom, his son said.

"He also tried his hand as a registered bookmaker at the local racetrack and, contrary to many stories, he told me he was very successful at this venture," Alan Saffron wrote.

"It was the first time he was able to pocket large sums of cash.

"He publicly complained about how much money he lost, destroying all betting tickets in disgust, and thereby avoided any need to pay taxes and maintained the convenient illusion that this venture failed."

Abe Saffron sold his pubs, closed his bookmaking business and left the Hunter for Sydney after two years. It was the cash he made in the Hunter that set him up to be a major underworld figure with the immediate purchase of two Sydney pubs, his son said.

Abe Saffron traded outside the "6pm swill", or mandatory shutdown of pubs, paid police to turn a blind eye, and never looked back.

"He began exploring two other appealing vices he could add to booze in Kings Cross: sex and gambling," said his son.

"Ultimately the three together would become the lynchpins of his growing empire."

At the same time, his marriage to a quiet country girl called Doreen Krantz in 1947 set the pattern for family life for nearly six decades. Abe Saffron would spend three nights a week with his wife, and the rest of the week with his mistresses. His new wife was given no choice but to agree.

It was an arrangement that nearly killed her and had a far-reaching impact on their only son, said Alan Saffron.

"The real hero of this book is my mother," he said.

"I'm in the entertainment industry. For people to live in a world where we think rich and powerful men don't have flings is ridiculous, because they do. But the blatant way my father flaunted his mistresses in front of my mother and other people was really embarrassing, and constantly humiliating for my mother.

"The strangest thing of all was that here was a man who treated his wife like dirt but if you said anything about what he was doing to her, she would get angry and reject it. I've seen a lot in the entertainment industry, but I couldn't imagine a woman going through what my mother did."

Alan Saffron was born in 1949.

"My mom believed that my coming into the world would make my father settle down," he wrote.

"No such luck. I became the cheese between two slices of bread, as was my mother's favourite saying."

The book features photographs of a proud Abe Saffron with his baby son, a toddler Alan at his father's club (the Roosevelt), and more poignant photos of Alan Saffron, aged 7, aboard a cruise ship headed for Europe.

It was only when Abe and Doreen Saffron dropped their son at the home of relatives of a former housekeeper who lived in Switzerland that he was told he was to stay there, with no indication when his parents would return.

"I cried every day for a week," he said.

"There was no explanation. My parents must have come to an agreement with these people before hand but I had no idea when, or if, I would see them again. They spoke almost no English."

It beggars belief, he agreed. But it happened, most likely because of an unfolding sex scandal about Abe Saffron being investigated in Sydney.

"Happily, I loved Switzerland. Mimi and Jacques [the former housekeeper's relatives] loved me and it was the most normal time in my childhood."

Gentle Satan is more than 300 pages of Alan Saffron's love/hate relationship with a father who supported his son's business interests, but undermined and humiliated him until the younger Saffron left Australia to live in America in 1979.

"He wanted absolute control until the day he died," he said.

"He relished putting me down. He would make fun of me to his cronies and to the family, and would distract my mother from questioning him about where he was or what he was doing by moaning about me in some way. He always sought to remove any thought that he failed as a father. No one questioned his criticisms or his parenting."

Father and son split after 1999 over Doreen Saffron's estate. Abe Saffron fought his son's legacy. Alan Saffron fought his father for his mother's sake, one last time.

He was relieved several years later when his ailing father made contact. Abe Saffron's time in jail after a tax conviction led Alan Saffron to believe his father was finally able to accept him as a man.

Abe Saffron's will, which listed a relatively small legacy to his son almost as an afterthought, was a final crushing blow from the dead, Alan Saffron said.

"It's got nothing at all to do with money. I never realised how much my father hated me until I read his will.

"If my heart was broken by losing my father, it was broken once more when in death he seemed to betray not only our closeness after reconciling, but my lifetime of love and support.

"What does it say? I was 58. He said, like, 'F - - - you, this is what I think of you'.

"I just thought to myself, 'Dad, I've tried so hard to seek your approval, then you reward me by telling me you don't care'. And that was his final message to me."

Alan Saffron works as a talent agent in America. His clients include Tobin Bell from the cult horror film franchise Saw.

He is pleased that Gentle Satan is still in the top five non-fiction bestsellers in Australia, and is particularly pleased that a Father's Day radio interview about his life will be lodged with the National Library.

He has been married for 28 years, has five children, and is ready to forgive and move on.

Asked what it was that allowed him to overcome his tumultuous childhood and adulthood, he answered: "Escaping from my father. It's like there's a point where you say enough is enough. You have to stop trying to find the love you're looking for when it's hurting you so much. My stop, my saying enough, was leaving Australia but still, the real stop was the death of my father."

Alan Saffron cried when asked if he loved his father, but there were no tears when asked if he believed his father loved him.

"Do I think my father loved me? It's a heck of a question. I don't know. I don't think he was capable of loving."

"I do love him. I tear up when I think it and say it because I don't understand it . . . He's the only father I've got."

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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