r Morgan's bail and his failure in the Wyong pub.
Ernie Judd had been appointed by the New South Wales Labor Council to investigate the whole affair; when be approached Scully, Scully opened up. The case had been framed, and six at least of the Twelve were innocent. From there, Judd went to Davis Goldstein, who said that eight of the Twelve were innocent and provided more details of the frame.
Scully had also told Judd that his friend Detective Surridge was prepared to talk, and Judd actually interviewed Surridge (though without result). It may have been from Surridge that the police learned what was afoot, or they may have had Judd under observation.
They did a deal with Scully, and smuggled him out of the country. But Judd got wind of this, and spilled the story through Brookfield, in the New South Wales Parliament. The Government was caught flat-footed, and agreed to the Opposition demand for an inquiry, but limited its terms to the allegations against the police. They arranged for Scully to be brought back from San Francisco to Sydney.
Meanwhile, the police commissioned Louis Goldstein to find out what his brother was up to. Louis reported that Davis, too, had "sung" to Judd. So Detective Pauling went to work on Davis and, at the last minute, convinced him that he would have to recant. The impression one gets of Davis Goldstein is that he was afraid of the police, and it is likely that he was threatened with a charge of perjury if he did not repudiate his confession. However this may have been, the police pressure was successful. Before the Street Commission, Davis Goldstein repudiated every part of his confession, and swore that he had concocted it out of malice against the detectives and a desire for revenge. Similarly with Scully - Just how and when the detectives prevailed upon him on his return from San Francisco is unknown, but they succeeded. He did not repudiate his confession completely but he qualified it almost out of existence.
Mr Justice Street found himself quite unable to believe that the police would frame a case - or even that they would embroider a good case to make it better. He ruled out completely the confessions of Scully and Davis Goldstein, and side-stepped all the other evidence of police corruption that the defence had so painstakingly amassed. The frame stood. Of the Twelve, three, perhaps four, had been involved in arson or preparations for arson (although the Crown case against the Twelve was largely faked and bore little resemblance to anything that these three or four had done); the other eight or nine had certainly not been involved and probably had no knowledge of what their fellow-workers had been planning and doing. But all twelve remained in gaol. p> There is little more to tell. Davis Goldstein had left Australia before the Ewing Commission; after it, Louis Goldstein dropped quietly (And one imagines gratefully) out of sight. Harry Scully resisted further police pressure to leave the country, and finally succeeded in finding another job as a chemist; he died of meningitis two months before Charlie Reeve was freed. Henry Boote lived a long and honourable life as poet, labour journalist and radical propagandist; he died some years after the Second World War.
The dogmas which had hobbled Ernie Judd as a leader of the Socialist Labor Party, in the days before he was swept up in the great mass campaigns for the One Big Union and the Release of the Twelve, returned in even greater strength; he ended his days as a cantankerous stump orator, preaching the truths of De Leonism to a dwindling handful of the converted. Tom Mutch late in life became interested in history and genealogy; unfortunately, his papers in the Mitchell Library contain few reminders of the days when his world was wide. Jock Garden became a leading propagandist for Jack Lang in the hectic years of the depression and the "Lang Plan"; later, he was discreditably involved (When acting as secretary to a Federal Labor Minister) in a scandal involving timber leases in New Guinea. Tom Barker worked for some time for various Soviet agencies; eventually he settled in London. After World War II he became a Labour councillor in the borough of St Pancras (and, aged 77, still was at the time of writing). He was the only Lord Mayor to refuse to wear the mayoral robes, and on one occasion scandalised the Labor Party by flying the Red Flag over the St Pancras Town Hall. On the morning of March 22, 1921, while King and Reeve were still in gaol, Jack Brookfield stepped off the Broken Hill express at Riverton, where the train had stopped for breakfast. A Russian named Tomayev ran amok on the platform and fired off forty-one shots from a revolver, scattering the crowd. Brookfield and a police constable rushed Tomayev; Brookfield got two bullets in the stomach, and died that evening in Adelaide hospital. Tomayev later said - probably falsely - ...
