At about six on the evening of Sunday 22 September 1974, Stewart John Regan walked into Chapel Street, Marrickville, on his way to an illegal gambling game, and somebody started shooting. He went down in the middle of the road in front of the local primary school. He was twenty-nine, and the most feared man in the Sydney underworld.
He had come without the bulletproof vest he usually wore, and without any of his four armed bodyguards. The detectives could never work out why.
The Magician
When a New South Wales coroner came to the Toe Cutters' story in 2020, she gave Regan a paragraph of his own. "Stewart Regan was a stand over man and a hitman, who specialised in murdering other criminals," she wrote. "He was known as 'the Magician' due to his ability to make people disappear." The bodies, she noted, have never been found. He was never convicted of murder.
He did not look like a gangster. He bought his clothes in second-hand shops, drove old cars, never drank or smoked, and carried a small tape recorder in his pocket. Neddy Smith, who met him as a boy at the Mount Penang training school, remembered "the coldest eyes I have ever seen in any man".
He came from Young, a farming town in the south-west of New South Wales, and grew up on the streets behind Kings Cross. By his early twenties he was running prostitutes on the Strip, where American servicemen on leave from Vietnam came to spend their money.
Regan and the Toe Cutters
Regan knew the men from Guildford. Larry Blair counted him among the crowd who drank in his parents' back room at Coogee. In 1972 Regan was the last man seen with the Toe Cutter Kevin Gore: the two of them left an office in Paddington together on 3 May, and Gore was never seen again. Read about Kevin Gore and Robert Donnelly.
The coroner recorded the police theory: that Regan "was hired to commit the revenge killings or was acting on his own to steal the proceeds from the 'Toe Cutters'". When Linus Driscoll was arrested in Melbourne in 1974, the police found photographs of two Sydney men in his notebook. One of them was Regan.
Reaching for the casinos
Gambling was illegal in New South Wales, and in 1974 a survey put the turnover of Sydney's illegal casinos at more than six hundred million dollars a year. The historian Alfred McCoy wrote that Regan "began making demands" on the family who ran the grandest of them, the 33 Club, in the months before he died. He had also joined a group that wrote letters to the Police Commissioner about payments to police for protection. A gunman who wanted a share of the casinos and was writing letters about police protection was a danger to everybody who kept them open.
Who killed Johnny Regan?
Nobody has ever been charged. The fullest account comes from Graham "Abo" Henry, a Sydney enforcer who knocked Regan out in a Redfern cafe in late 1973 and was in Parramatta jail when Regan died. Henry says Lenny McPherson told him years later that Regan had been invited to join the men who ran Sydney, on one condition: he was to come to the two-up game at Marrickville without his minders. When he walked down the lane, Henry says, McPherson, Stan Smith and a third man were waiting.
It is a story at second hand. But it is the only one that explains why a man who never went anywhere without a vest and four bodyguards walked into Chapel Street alone.
"Whoever it was that killed Johnny Regan deserves a medal in my book," Neddy Smith wrote, naming among Regan's victims "my mate Robert Donnelly". In the jails, the news was greeted with cheers.
The Gangster's Ghost
In 2025 Regan's cousin, Kelly Slater, a former New South Wales police officer, worked with the journalist Matthew Condon on a ten-part podcast for The Australian, The Gangster's Ghost. It used tapes Regan had recorded himself, found in a hatbox in his mother's attic. Slater came away doubting much of what had been written about him. On one tape, recorded without his knowledge, Regan says: "I've never killed anyone in my life." The ninth episode asks the question his family lived with for fifty years, about a three-year-old boy, Karlos, who went missing from Regan's car in May 1974. Regan always denied harming him, and no trace of the boy was ever found.
"His death is still an active cold case," Condon said.
The full story
The Toe Cutters by Ben Scott gives Johnny Regan a full chapter: Mount Penang, the Cross, the night Abo Henry knocked him out, the casinos and the last day of his life.