Tony Reeves

Starting as a copyboy on The Daily Telegraph, Reeves worked through his grades – no mean feat as he had no respect for authoritarian chiefs-of-staff and editors. He quickly became an investigative journalist and went on to work at the Daily Mirror, The Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Australian, the Nation Review and the ABC. It was his forensic and multi-dimensional reporting that helped to bring about the Moffitt royal commission into organised crime.
In 1975 Reeves joined his close friend and investigative journalist Barry Ward in trying to unravel the apparent murder of Kings Cross newspaper publisher Juanita Nielsen.
They were continually rebuffed in their efforts to have the book published or to force a commission of inquiry to expose the truth behind this sordid tale of police and political corruption, of betrayal and heinous brutality.
Early on in Australia, Reeves also decided that the Labor Party was the best vehicle to implement his radical agenda, particularly his fearless advocacy of public housing, public transport and support of the green bans movement.
His drive and energy led him to spend seven years as a councillor on the Sydney City Council from September 1977.
Reeves fought to preserve Sydney’s historic sites from demolition and worked overtime to save inner-city suburbs, such as Woolloomooloo and The Rocks.
He was prepared to talk any time on urban conservation and his various campaigns saved many inner-urban tenants of low-rental homes from eviction and communities from disruption and dislocation.
In 1992, he moved to Queensland with his partner Kamala and organised a super-leftie branch of the ALP.
He was impressed by a rather left-wing barrister at one meeting saying, “I would far prefer to have a small cadre of left-wing comrades in this branch than a thousand careerist apparatchiks destined to embrace the ministerial leather in some sellout Labor government.”
In Brisbane Reeves returned to his freelance writing and publishing career. His interest was rekindled in investigating the criminal behaviour and corruption he had witnessed first hand as a young reporter in Sydney. His first book Mr Big: Lennie McPherson and His Life of Crime (2007) won the Crime Writers’ Association Ned Kelly Award for true crime. He followed this with Mr Sin: the Abe Saffron Dossier (also 2007) and The Real George Freeman (2011).
His latest project was to uncover the real culprits behind the Whiskey Au Go Go fire in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley in 1973, thereby revealing a web of police and political corruption that inspired the Fitzgerald inquiry.
Tony Reeves is survived by Kamala Shakti, his partner of 30 years, his first wife, Tessa, and three children