QUEEN OF THE UNDERWORLD
CRIMINAL MASTERMIND MAY SMITH CONTROLLED SYDNEY’S RAZOR GANGS IN THE 1920S
Long before the notorious Ibrahim family or Pasquale Barbaro came along, one woman ruled the mean streets of inner city Sydney in 1920, earning the title of ‘Cocaine Queen’.
May Smith earned her felonious nickname thanks to her lucrative drug deals and secret brothel, which she ran in the heart of the city’s Surry Hills area.
Operating during the same period as bitter rivals Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, May illegally trafficked cocaine and alcohol during her short but fabled reign as the queen of Sydney’s underworld.
Also known as ‘Botany May’, at her peak, the welldressed brothel madam was supplying drugs to some of the most violent criminals in the razor gang period.
A part-time dressmaker who reportedly kept a revolver by her side when she worked at her sewing machine, May was described by many as “clever, cunning and violent”.
When cocaine was made illegal in Australia in 1925, May cashed in on the insatiable demand until she was busted in 1929. She was sentenced to 10 months’ hard labour at the State Reformatory for Women at Long Bay Gaol.
May’s arrest came after months of surveillance at her Terry Street terrace home in Surry Hills by pioneering female detective Lillian May Armfield, who was one of the first women to serve in the role in NSW.
May’s capture was not the first time the two women had crossed paths. Once before, the drug queen had chased the policewoman with a red-hot iron to avoid arrest, but Lillian’s police prowess eventually came up trumps, even earning her the respect from underbelly figures such as Tilly and Kate.
Despite May’s unparalleled rap sheet as a cocaine kingpin, she has been all but forgotten from the pages of Sydney’s storied crime history.
With Tilly and Kate’s notorious feud being depicted on-screen in Underbelly: Razor, they normally take centre-stage when remembering Australia’s razor gangs.
“May may not have been as prominent as Tilly and Kate, but she was just as active and just as infamous as them in their time,” true crime historian Elliot Lindsay told News Corp. “But after she went to jail in January 1929, she just disappeared.”
Following jail time there is no record of May being arrested or charged ever again. Still, of what little detail is known, her career as the Cocaine Queen lives on in quiet infamy.
‘MAY WAS DESCRIBED AS CLEVER, CUNNING AND VIOLENT’